H onoring D r . M artin L utHer K ing , J r .
Revisiting the FBI’s Dirty
war on Black America
earl ofari Hutchinson,
new America media
T
hanks to a CNN documentary airing this
week, the tale of FBI informant Ernest
Withers is now well known. The black pho-
tographer spent years busily documenting the civil
rights movement and capturing candid images of
its leaders, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whether through flattery or the naiveté of his
subjects, Withers and his camera were able to get
close— very close— to the movement’s inner cir-
cles. He got so close that King and others trusted
him to record their most intimate moments—ones
that Withers would dutifully report back to his FBI
handlers.
Withers’s case was not exceptional. At that time, the woods were full informants, both
men and women. Their existence was possible not only because of a corrupt, paranoid FBI
that was intent on making life hell for civil rights leaders and others during the turbulent
1960s, but because they had the tacit blessing of three U.S. presidents: John F. Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. All three men firmly believed that the battle against
domestic subversives—that is, communists, socialists, black nationalists, Black Panthers
and civil rights leaders, most notably King—justified bending and ultimately breaking the
law, civil liberties be damned.
There is also ample evidence in the correspondence, internal memos and discussions
made public by historians and former White House staffers, to suggest that Kennedy,
Johnson and Nixon never believed moderate civil rights leaders like King posed any real
threat to the established order. Yet they still winked and nodded as John Edgar Hoover, the
director of the FBI, launched a top secret and blatantly illegal counterintelligence program,
COINTELPRO. It targeted not only the civil rights movement but other more radical lead-
ers and organizations as well.
The mandate of that program, spelled out in the stacks of secret documents released by
Senate investigators in 1976, was to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups
and individuals the FBI considered politically objectionable. Yet in nearly all of the cases,
those targeted by COINTELPRO were neither foreign spies, terrorists nor criminals.
The FBI patterned COINTELPRO on the methods used by its counterintelligence divi-
sion and internal security sections during the 1940s and ‘50s. The arsenal of dirty tactics
they used included unauthorized wiretaps, agents provocateur, poison-pen letters, “black-
bag jobs” (breaking and entering to obtain intelligence) and the compiling of secret
dossiers.
Driven by a grotesque mix of personal racism and paranoia, Hoover kicked the program
into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI recruited thousands of “ghetto informants,” such as
Withers for their relentless campaign of harassment and intimidation against African
American groups. The bureau even organized its targets into Orwellian categories agents
gave such labels as “Rabble Rouser Index,” “Agitator Index” and “Security Index.”
The impact of COINTELPRO on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements was
immediate and devastating. Thousands lost their jobs, were expelled from schools, evicted
from homes and publicly slandered.
Only a few of those would ever be indicted, convicted or
even accused of committing a crime. In fact, FBI docu-
ments released in 1976 revealed that the bureau devoted
less than 20 percent of its spy activities to infiltrating actu-
al crime syndicates or to solving bank robberies, murders,
rapes and interstate theft. By contrast, more than half of all
FBI targets were political organizations
Following the death of Hoover in 1972 and subsequent
congressional disclosure of his illegal program, the Justice
Department assured the public that operations like COIN-
TELPRO were a thing of the past. The department had
clamped down on all illegal FBI activities.
That was not the case.
In the 1980s, the FBI waged a five-year covert spy cam-
paign against dozens of religious and pacifist groups and
leaders that opposed American foreign policy in Central
America.
In the 1990s, the agency mounted yet another series of
covert campaigns against civil rights, environmental and
anti-nuclear weapon groups, as well as against Native
American and Arab-American political figures and organi-
zations.
Read the rest of this story online at www.theskanner.com
Caldwell’s, Hennessey, Goetsch
& McGee Funeral Home
Von D. Bailey
Funeral Director
20 NE 14th Avenue
Portland, OR 97232
503-232-4111
Fax 503-231-1586
von.bailey@sci-us.com
Page 14 The Portland Skanner January 11, 2012