The FBI's Greatest Hits

Anthony Lappé of Guerrilla News Network has interviewed Jim Vander Wall, co-author of The COINTELPRO Papers and Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Here are some relevant excerpts:

Lappé: What was COINTELPRO?

Vander Wall: COINTELPRO was an acronym that the FBI had for its counter intelligence programs. Now normal counter intelligence is something carried out by most intelligence organizations and it basically means looking for spies in your own organization or looking for spies in the populace as a whole. So counter intelligence in its normal parlance would mean activities designed to detect and combat espionage. Within the FBI, it was actually a code word for their programs to infiltrate and disrupt legitimate legal organizations engaged in activities that the government found objectionable.

Lappé: So when you say disrupt, give me some examples of that.

Vander Wall: It can range simply from sowing dissent within the organization to, at the other extreme, assassination of the leadership of the organization or the framing of key personnel in the organization on bogus criminal charges and supporting those with fabricated evidence to obtain convictions.

Lappé: I often point out to people the story of what the FBI did to Martin Luther King, who now has a national holiday named after him as well as many major boulevards in cities. I mean he is a national hero. But many people don't believe me when I tell them what the FBI were up to in terms of trying to take him down. What did they do to MLK and then maybe tell me a little bit more about COINTELPRO and the civil rights movement in general.

Vander Wall: Hoover had a particular vendetta against Martin Luther King, whom he referred to in the most derogatory and racist terms, at least privately. One of the early attacks on King was that they had evidence of him having an extramarital affair. So they then fabricated a letter which was sent to King, threatening to soon reveal this, and the letter in part states, and I'll quote here from it, "King, there is just one thing left for you to do and you know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to." and they put a note here: "This exact number has been calculated for a specific reason… it is definitely significant. You are done. There is but one way out. You better take it before your filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." So in this particular program, they were attempting to get King to commit suicide by threatening to reveal that he had had an affair...

Lappé: So to wrap up, as someone who has been looking into the history of the federal government's investigations of leftist and other groups, what can you do as someone who might be under the watch of the government?

Vander Wall: I think probably the most damaging thing is paranoia. If you are a political activist and are at all successful at doing it in this country, then you are definitely going to be in the files and possibly surveilled. You have to put things in proportion in terms of what sort of information you need to keep secret and what sort of information you don't, OK? In a lot of cases, paranoia has done more damage to organizations - and of course then leveraged by the FBI - to disrupt the organization than the actual activity of the agents themselves. So I would say there are a couple of things. One is to understand and be aware of the techniques used by the intelligence agencies to surveil and disrupt organizations. The second thing is if you suspect you have a problem with somebody in the organization, confront them with it and talk to them about it… But I think education and awareness is probably one of the key things to be considered right now. Generally it is proven to be the case that when the activities of the FBI surface - when the mask of legitimacy is sort of ripped away to reveal the sleazy criminal activities that go on underneath it - the American public will react to that with horror and disaffection from the FBI. And there have been a number of large legal settlements against the FBI - two of them fairly recently - resulting from this kind of activity.