COINTELPRO and what it did right
A surprising look at the history of the FBI's most notorious program
Some common-sense approaches can get out of control if not properly supervised, and even well-run operations can get discredited once the information war ratchets up.
A good example is the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO. It was started officially under President Eisenhower in 1956 after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. Its purpose was wreck the Soviets’ primary covert operation against the United States: the Communist Party USA. COINTELPRO ran as a unitary FBI program – an operation, not an investigation – for fifteen years.
The modern FBI exhumed the COINTELPRO ghost for partisan political purposes. It waged fake, malicious, illegal operations like CROSSFIRE HURRICANE. In so doing, it willfully subverted elections, undermined a sitting president, committed systematic criminal behavior, and did incalculable damage to the integrity of counterintelligence.
Recovery attempts have barely scratched the surface. Meanwhile, the legacy of COINTELPRO from 1951-71 uniformly has a bad name. It should not. It struck the heart of the Soviet covert political network across the US.
It properly ran counterintelligence ops against foreign-inspired and -funded New Left movements. Its only non-legitimate and patently illegal function, in pure counterintelligence terms, was one of the most noble: COINTELPRO broke the Ku Klux Klan.
This article is an excerpt from my book, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains (Regency, 2024).
COINTELPRO was a legitimate counterintelligence program
Most of what we hear about COINTELPRO is terrible denunciation of the trampling of American civil liberties and rights. That is a simplistic view. As John F. Kennedy had warned for years as a senator and as president, Soviet-sponsored subversion against the United States at home, and its interests worldwide, was very real and arguably more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Over its long existence, COINTELPRO implemented 2,370 proposals, 56 percent of which were against the CPUSA.[1] Any operation against the Communist Party USA was rightly a counterintelligence effort because the CPUSA was a foreign Soviet active measures operation.
The purpose of COINTELPRO in 1956 was to infiltrate, penetrate, disorganize, and disrupt the CPUSA, according to Herman O. Bly, the special agent who ran COINTELPRO for the first five years. It was never intended as a law enforcement operation.[2]
After Bly was forced out in a bureaucratic battle, the ambitious William C. Sullivan, the initiator of COINTELPRO who had his eye on succeeding Hoover as director, broadened the program beyond its counterintelligence mission and outside the law.
Seven COINTELPRO operations
There were seven COINTELPRO operations. The main one, begun under Eisenhower and had no special name, was the largest and was aimed solely at the Communist Party USA. Among others it targeted Stanley Levison of the New School in New York City a lawyer and CPUSA money man who aided the defense of convicted Soviet atom bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.[3]
The FBI’s brilliant spy duo of Jack and Morris Childs identified Levison, a businessman, as a vital money conduit for the CPUSA at least in the early 1950s. COINTELPRO also targeted Jack Hunter Pitts O’Dell, for two generations a Soviet asset within the CPUSA who would remain a fixture in active measures campaign into the 1980s. Another longtime FBI target was CPUSA operative David Carr, who had direct ties to Soviet intelligence since the 1930s when he was with the Daily Worker.
President Kennedy and his attorney general brother, both committed civil rights supporters, recognized that the Soviets were exploiting America’s internal tensions and attempting to radicalize the civil rights movement led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Kennedys continued COINTELPRO to monitor and disrupt the Communist Party’s infiltration of the movement. This was a proper use of counterintelligence if aimed at suspected foreign agents and assets. Part of taking down a hostile covert operation is to exploit divisions within their cadres, and cause them to fight one another and even to break away and help the FBI. These are necessary and ordinary measures to break apart foreign active measures in one’s own country.
But they are not law enforcement. As CPUSA operatives expanded operational work with a new generation of non-party members in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, the line began to blur. This was good for the enemy but difficult for the FBI. In the early years of the Cold War, the CPUSA resumed exploiting American racial tensions to channel certain civil rights activists and stoke racial tensions in ways that would not seek reconciliation or solutions, but to provoke further polarization and chaos.
King had at least three known Communist Party agents in his inner circle who had been on the FBI radar for years: Levison, O’Dell, and Carr. That operation, which Sullivan personally ran, got out of hand. King said he would cut ties with Levinson but did not. Wiretapping King became a full-time operation to spy on the civil rights leader’s private life and threaten him.[4] Sullivan himself is held responsible for a letter encouraging King to kill himself.
Second COINTELPRO op: To destroy the Ku Klux Klan
The second operation was COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, begun under President Lyndon Johnson’s instruction to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. The FBI launched it in September 1964. Hoover had been reluctant to go after the Klan because it was violating no federal laws under FBI purview, and because he sought to avoid the risk of having FBI assets within the Klan become responsible for racist violence.
Johnson directed Hoover to move against the Klan as part of his recent epiphany on civil rights. “Now I don’t want these Klansmen to open their mouths without your knowing what they’re sayin,’” former segregationist Johnson told Hoover. “I think you oughta have the best intelligence system, better than you got on the communists.”[5]
Hoover complied. COINTELPRO moved hard against the Klan, splintering it for good as a cohesive, influential, national organization. The FBI had infiltrated the Klan so deeply that between 6 and 20 percent of all Klansmen in 1965 were FBI informants.[6] But it did not infiltrate the Klan leadership to any significant degree. OPERATION WHITE HATE ran for seven years until the KKK was broken. By that time, new federal civil rights legislation had given the FBI more legal mandates and tools.
The FBI did not consider the KKK to be an instrument of hostile foreign intelligence services. No evidence suggested that it was. Therefore, the COINTELPRO approach to defeating the Klan and some of the other extremists was improper in the counterintelligence sense. It had crossed the line from legitimate counterintelligence work into law enforcement work, or more properly, work in a gray area where few federal laws gave clear mandate. This paved the way for future abuses decades after COINTELPRO was made public.
“These were internal security cases, not criminal investigations,” Weiner noted in his exhaustive history of the FBI. “They depended on the infiltration, surveillance, and sabotage of the embers of the Klan and their murderous leaders. . . . The gung-ho mood of the FBI agents who ran WHITE HATE was remarkable, given the fact that their colleagues were fighting Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement with equal intensity.”[7]
COINTELPRO 3: Against militant, foreign-backed Black Power networks
A third operation, COINTELPRPO-BLACK HATE, was run against militant Black Power networks that opposed the mainstream civil rights movement that King led, and instead embraced, threatened, or committed political violence, including murder, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare.
Targets included the Black Liberation Army and the Nation of Islam. Because of foreign influence or possible control from Algeria, Cuba, or the USSR, a counterintelligence operation would have been proper.
Other COINTELPRO ops against foreign-backed New Left elements
Separate COINTELPRO operations were run against Cuban-backed Puerto Rican terrorists or violent extremists; the Socialist Workers Party, a small but effective Trotskyist extremist group which had foreign ties and sought the overthrow of the United States Constitution; and elements of the New Left, particularly as they were being courted or run by Cuba’s revolutionary regime and its Soviet-surrogate intelligence services, or were tied to the North Vietnamese regime and its Vietcong proxies that were fighting American and allied forces.
Johnson saw the FBI as essential to defense against the foreign-sponsored Communist threat domestically. This included the New Left’s waves of violence which it characterized as “bringing the war home,” and which the North Vietnamese called their “third current of revolution.”[8] This fact, plus the foreign origins of the New Left’s progenitors and ideologues, made the New Left a legitimate target of COINTELPRO.
FBI recognized Frankfurt School techniques as a counterintelligence threat
The FBI agents in COINTELPRO understood the Frankfurt School’s promotion of cultural Marxism and critical race theory. It knew more than anyone how the Soviets were exploiting other fissures in American society, including radical feminism, Puerto Rican socialist independence, and secession movements in the Deep South to establish a segregated black socialist regime.
Separately, investigation of Puerto Rican extremist groups was normal. Not only were the Soviets and later their Cuban proxy exploiting them, but just a few years earlier, in 1954, a group of Puerto Rican extremists invaded the U.S. Capitol with firearms, shot up the House of Representatives, and wounded four congressmen. Shortly before, members of the same movement tried to assassinate President Harry S Truman and killed one of his guards.
While COINTELPRO was heavily underway, Hoover still ranked as one of the most popular and trusted figures in America. He shut down COINTELPRO in 1971 after militants burglarized an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and revealed the program’s existence.
There was reason for concern about abuses under COINTELPRO. Following the Watergate scandal and Nixon resignation, a deep and broad Senate investigation of intelligence, led by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), reached this conclusion:
“The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens.
The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the ‘national security’ the law did not apply.
While intelligence offices on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity [sic], but COINTELPRO went far beyond that.”
The Church Committee continued: “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”
Postscript
The FBI had conducted degrees of domestic political spying for decades, but never systematically and almost always at the behest or with the approval of the sitting president. J. Edgar Hoover oversaw it all, dating back to FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, under President Warren G. Harding. It doesn’t make it right. That’s just how it was.
COINTELPRO was different. It targeted foreign-controlled or foreign-inspired extremists committed to subversion and violence to overthrow our Constitution. It wasn’t to suppress civil rights. Its only non-counterintelligence operation was to break the KKK.
Personal character in these things matters. The first FBI man to run COINTELPRO, Herman Bly, had excellent character. His successors, perhaps not so much.
By the FBI’s centennial, character within the Bureau had degenerated so severely that that people like Robert Hanssen, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Charles McGonigal rose to the top of FBI counterintelligence ranks.
And with no real congressional oversight investigations since the Pike Committee almost 50 years ago, which probed the FBI as the Church Committee probed CIA in the Senate, we got what we have.
Big Intel is available on Amazon in hardcover, Audible, and Kindle editions, plus CD.
Footnotes
[1] Herman O. Bly, Communism, the Cold War and the FBI Connection: Time to Set the Record Straight (Huntington House, 1998), p. 146. Before Bly wrote the book, the author interviewed him in the early 1990s.
[2] Bly, p. 141.
[3] The FBI released 109 heavily redacted pages of material on Levison. See “FBI Records: The Vault, Stanley Levison Part 01 of 109,” https://vault.fbi.gov/Stanley%20Levison/Stanley%20Levison%20Part%2001%20of%20109/view
[4] We won’t know for years what was really in the wiretaps until they are fully declassified and released, with no redactions.
[5] Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (Random House, 2012), pp. 243-244.
[6] “Excerpts of Remarks Made by Assistant to the Director – Deputy Associate Director James B. Adams, Testifying before the Senate Select Committee Pertaining to the Ku Klux Klan, Gary Rowe, Former FBI Informant, and Previous Attempts of the FBI to Prevent Violence,” December 2, 1975. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/dec/08/fbi-kkk/ [[FIND ORIGINAL LINK]]
[7] Weiner, pp. 247-248.
[8] See J. Michael Waller, The ‘Third Current’ of Revolution (University Press of America, 1987).