There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and fbi Counterintelligence

Abstract

As nearly everyone now knows, from 1956 to 1971 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) carried out thousands of covert operations known as cointelpro (Counterintelligence Programs) intended to demoralize, discredit, disrupt, and destroy the Communist party, the Socialist Workers party, the Ku Klux Klan, “Black Nationalist/Hate Groups” (p. 32, particularly the Black Panther party), and the New Left (especially the Students for a Democratic Society). The country began to learn of such operations after a break-in at the fbi's resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, when files containing documentary evidence of bureau efforts to disrupt the antiwar movement on college campuses were released to the movement press by the burglars. Attorney General William Saxbe released an edited version of an internal Justice Department probe of cointelpro on November 18, 1974. Then in 1975 Frank Church led a Senate investigation and subtitled its report on cointelpro “The fbi's War against American Liberty.” In the end, cointelpro turned the fbi from one of the most revered institutions in America into the conspiracy theorist's ultimate symbol of government as a plot against the public.