Understanding The FBI's Counter Intelligence Program

The FBI's COINTELPRO is synonymous with government abuse of power. Thanks to a little noticed 2018 declassification, we have a better understanding of the 12 separate counter intelligence programs.

The Counter Intelligence Program, better known as COINTELPRO, remains one of the most notorious governmental abuses of power.

COINTELPRO has found its way out of the niche world of scholars of the security state and into the popular culture. Often when I give talks about the history of the FBI, I ask for a show of hands of who in the audience has heard of COINTELPRO. While it is hardly a representative sample (my audiences tend to be leftwing activists who have voluntarily elected to come to a talk on FBI surveillance), it is worth noting that a majority of audience members raise their hands. Other Cold War FBI programs for the suppression of dissent, like the Security Index, are hardly known at all, even amongst activists.

So it is unsurprising that whenever revelations arise about the FBI’s monitoring of domestic advocacy groups, the legacy of COINTELPRO is invoked. The FBI’s spying on opponents of Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy, Bush-era expansions of FBI powers, and the FBI’s Black Identity Extremism assessment are just a few of the incidents that have raised allegations of “a new COINTELPRO” or “COINTELPRO 2.0.”

COINTELPRO has entered our vernacular as a synonym for FBI surveillance. Nearly any or all FBI spying from the Hoover-era is assumed to be COINTELPRO. But as an FBI term of art, COINTELPRO applied to just one subset of repressive conduct carried out under the guise of the FBI’s domestic intelligence (frequently called in the parlance of the day “internal security”) operations.

I bring this up not to be a pendant, but because I wanted to put together a guide to COINTELPRO for anyone who is interested.

I am currently working on a book The Imperial Bureau, which is a political history of the FBI’s domestic surveillance and its role in the emergence of the US national security state. In the process I put together a map of COINTELPRO. I’ve shared it with other FBI researchers, but I thought it might be of interest to a wider audience.

I have previously written about COINTELPRO for Jacobin:

COINTELPRO stands for “Counter Intelligence Program.” “Counter intelligence” typically refers to the neutralization of a hostile foreign agent and — generally entails looser adherence to basic constitutional principles than a domestic criminal prosecution. As the Church Committee, a landmark Senate investigation in the abuses of the intelligence agencies triggered in part by the revelations of the Media break-in, stated, these were wartime techniques.

Yet, the committee noted that the full truth was even worse than that. The use of “counter intelligence” was a misnomer. COINTELPRO was in fact a series of domestic covert actions designed to neutralize or disrupt political movements. As the Church Committee put it, the FBI had carried out a “sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.”

To prevent the free exercise of disfavored speech, the FBI used tactics that ranged from nuisances, like falsely publicizing that an event had been cancelled, to deadly, like trying to incite violence between the Black Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers. The intent was to sow discord and disunity among the Left.

FBI agents drafted pamphlets attacking one group falsely claiming them to be written by another. Informants frequently and purposefully accused other activists of being informants in order to create an atmosphere of paranoia. “Friendly” media outlets were exploited to see if they would try to undermine claims of police brutality against demonstrators and spread embarrassing stories about activist’s personal “immorality.”

Activists’ personal lives were fair game. The FBI had the Boy Scout chapter of a spouse of a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) member disbanded. This program not only destroyed lives — it took them, as seen in the FBI’s role in Fred Hampton’s assassination.

The Church Committee concluded that COINTELPRO had three primary purposes. The first two, protecting national security and preventing violence, were the FBI’s official explanation. While the committee partially accepted this, it also noted that the mission of preventing violence was in contrast to a number of COINTELPRO operations that were clearly designed to incite violence. The committee found that a number of COINTELPRO actions could not rationally be tied to either of the FBI’s two justifications. They argued that the “unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”

If you have time, I strongly recommend checking out the entire piece. I think it holds up as a good introduction to COINTELPRO. But since publishing it, it has come to my attention the FBI’s original correspondence with the Church Committee on COINTELPRO was released in its entirety. This includes the primary source material the Church Committee based its findings on in the form of the originating documents for each of 12 counter intelligence programs. Only 7 of these programs were identified by name during the time of the Church Committee.

In many cases, these documents have long been in the public domain. But their curation by the FBI gives insight into how the FBI understood COINTELPRO. And in one case, I am unaware of the document or program being previously publicly acknowledged. Prior to their release, all these correspondence were marked secret, because they identify “Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Yugoslav programs by country name.”

These files were released on April 26, 2018 under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

These documents are all from a much larger FBI file captioned HQ 62-116395, which was identified by the late FOIA researched Ernie Lazar as the FBI’s “Church Committee File.” There are many parts of HQ 62-116395 that have been released that include documents that go way beyond COINTELPRO. It is not immediately clear to me if the entire file, which numbers in the tens of thousands of pages, has been released. Although these files have been sought after by FOIA requesters, very little attention has been given to their release.

At the end of this document, I have included a chronological list of the known COINTELRPOs, the dates of their origins and termination, and the caption file number. I have also linked to the originating document, all of which are available in the JFK Assassination Records Collection at NARA Record Number: 124-10273- 10050.

This information will be of useful to researchers, who may wish to skip to the end.

For those less familiar with COINTELPRO, I am including some (very condensed, very board) history of the FBI’s counter subversive efforts, how COINTELPRO fit in, and an explanation of what we’ve known about the different COINTELPROs before then.

The Origins of the FBI’s Counter Subversive Apparatus

The FBI was formed as the Bureau of Investigation in 1908. It was created over the objection of Congress and to this day exists without a Congressional charter. The FBI was created as a law enforcement agency within the Department of Justice. In 1919, the FBI created its first intelligence division. Initially, it had the more honest name of the Radical Division, but it was later renamed to the more innocuous sounding General Intelligence Division. The division was headed by Hoover. Hoover was like many ruling class men of his time—a counter-subversive fanatic and abject racist. He believed it was appropriate for law enforcement agencies to act as the guardians of the social order, defending the status quo at all costs. The FBI saw the red menace behind everything from labor strikes to civil rights demands.

Hoover dreamed of heading up a global intelligence compiling evidence of disfavored movements the world over, but his dreams were quickly cut short. The legal basis for Hoover’s intelligence apparatus was sketchy at best (the General Intelligence Division at one point claimed it was gathering evidence that could be used to prosecute people under unspecified laws that might be passed at a later date). Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone limited the FBI to enforcing laws, ended its intelligence collection, and put Hoover in charge of the entire bureau.

During the turbulent 1930s, Hoover citing the influence of Nazism and Communism, was able to have the FBI’s intelligence powers restored (although it must be stressed, official pretenses aside, Hoover’s focus during this time was disproportionately on the left and initially very focused on the labor movement). And through bureaucratic jockeying, Hoover was able to eventually edge out competitors in military intelligence, the State Department, or private vigilante organizations, in making the FBI the chief vehicle for domestic intelligence collection in the US.

Hoover’s FBI claimed its restored intelligence powers gave it the mandate to collect intelligence on “subversive activities.” By 1939, it had begun carrying out what it dubbed “security investigations” against individuals and organizations. The basis for this authority is murky and contested, but the FBI chiefly cited two justifications for it. The first, was a 1939 directive from President Roosevelt. The second, was that the FBI was engaged in compiling a list of dangerous individuals who would need to be detained in the event of national emergency. The authority for such a list is also extremely fraught, but that is a subject for another day.

Initial targets of the FBI’s counter subversive hunts were Nazi sympathizers and Communists (with the latter occupying much of the FBI’s time). The list of enemies was almost instantly expanded to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.

In addition to targeting “subversives” themselves, the FBI operated under subversive influence theory. This posited that “subversive” groups can infiltrate and influence “legitimate” groups, making the legitimate groups targets for the FBI as well (whether it was the FBI’s role to determine subversive movements versus legitimate ones is another question). As noted by later Congressional investigations, curiously the FBI never tried to help those being supposedly infiltrated by malign forces, but sought to destroy them instead. Sometimes, as was the case with Civil Rights Movement, the FBI showed greater intensity in targeting them than the alleged infiltrators. Coincidently, causes ripe for subversive infiltration—civil rights, peace and disarmament, labor advocacy—all ran afoul of the reactionary political orthodoxies of the FBI.

At the end of World War II, Nazis and Italian Fascists were removed from the FBI’s list of chief concerns. But the FBI continued security investigations into the Communist Party, Socialist Workers, Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, and a variety of small Marxists groups. The FBI expanded its war on Communism dramatically. In 1946, the FBI decided that the US people were too willing to treat the Communist Party as a normal political party, causing the Communists to obtain outsized influence in liberal causes and the trade union movement. Communist influence had caused the 1930s to be a “red” or “pink” decade and would present a problem in the event of a mass round up and detention of Communists. The only solution was for the FBI to embark on an “educational” campaign informing the American people about the true nature of the Communist Party.

In addition to subversive infiltration theory, the FBI also developed the idea of a “Communist Line.” According to FBI thinking, while it may be difficult to prove one’s membership in the Party, proving one adhered to the Communist Line was easy. The FBI kept copious volumes detailing the Communist Line. The Communist position on everything from esoteric foreign policy debates to positions about women’s rights was chronicled, so that other writings and utterances could be compared for similarities to the Communist Line. Any dissent from Cold War orthodoxy was evidence of the Communist Line, with criticisms of the FBI and its counter subversive programs being especially suspicious in the eyes of the Bureau.

Counter Intelligence Programs

To Hoover and the FBI, the ultimate success of its “education” campaign about the Communist Party could be gained through the successful prosecution of the Party’s leaders and members under the Smith Act. A criminal conviction of Communists based on the teachings of the party as interpreted by the FBI would prove that the Communists were not just another political party. Initially, when it came to the conviction of the Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act, the Supreme Court ratified these theories by upholding the convictions. As prosecutors moved on from the Party’s leadership to its members, the Supreme Court’s membership became more skeptical of the prosecutions. Although the Supreme Court technically did not throw out the Smith Act, they raised the barrier for prosecutions high enough that the FBI felt like in fact prosecutions were precluded.

FBI officials told the Church Committee that this was the origins of the FBI’s first COINTELPRO. However, as noted in a footnote, the Supreme Court’s decision limiting the Smith Act would come several years later. Nonetheless, the important takeaway is the FBI lacked the means to prosecute its political enemy, so it resorted to a campaign of dirty tricks.

And thus in 1956, the FBI launched its first COINTELPRO against the Communist Party. The originating documents of COINTELPRO don’t make any mention of this context. They state that in the past the FBI had engaged in “harassment” of the Communist Party and now was escalating to “disruption.” The Communist Party and its members were already targets of FBI surveillance. COINTELPRO operations were specific plots designed to disrupt the Party, not gather information. Targets of COINTELPRO were almost always under FBI surveillance. The plots were proposed by agents and approved by higher ups. This pattern would follow all of the FBI’s COINTELPROs.

As if often the case with the FBI, the programs that were initially designed to target the Communists were quickly extended to its other two favor enemies—the Puerto Rican independence movement and the Socialist Workers Party.

In justifying its COINTELPRO agains the Socialist Workers Party, the FBI stated that the Party had “been openly espousing its line on a local and national basis through running candidates for public office and strongly directing and/or supporting such causes as Castro’s Cuba and integration problems arising in the South.” Much like with the Communist Party, the FBI feared that many Americans did not realize that Socialist Workers Party’s true nature. Alerting the public to it was a major goal of the FBI’s anti-Socialist Workers Party COINTELPRO.

With both the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party, the FBI believed their role in wider social movements tainted them. Just as the FBI used this to justify a wide surveillance net, it also used this to justify broad covert actions. The surveillance against Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was largely carried under COMINFIL (“Communist Infiltration”). Many of the COINTELPRO operations carried out against King, were carried under COINTELPRO-CPUSA.

As the 1960s progressed, the FBI developed a Racial Intelligence Unit (later renamed “Extremist Intelligence Unit”). This unit investigated white supremacist violence in the South and also gave the FBI an oppuruntity to go after Black activists absent a communist pretext. The FBI began a COINTELPRO against white hate groups in 1964 and Black Extremists in 1967. King would also be be targeted under COINTELPRO-Black Extremists.

Although the FBI saw the Communists and the Socialist Workers Party as playing a part in the social movements of the late 1960s, in 1968 it created a new COINTELPRO targeting the “New Left.” The New Left, like subversives and extremists, was vaguely defined. The New Left program was the broadest of all the COINTELPROs. The truly deranged orginating document not only blames “New Left” for “violence and disruption,” it accuses them of fabricating charges of police brutality and for having “viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director and the Bureau.” There was, of course, no greater offense against the internal security of the United States than criticism of the FBI.

In addition to these programs, the FBI in 1961 began a COINTELPRO aimed at “Cuban Affairs.” This program has been of particular interest to JFK assassination researchers, given that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in contact with both pro and anti Castro groups. Oswald started a New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, one of the targets of COINTEPRO-Cuban Affairs.

That same year the FBI also started a “border coverage” COINTELPRO, which has gone understudied. The origins of the Border Coverage COINTELPRO is rooted in yet another FBI domestic intelligence operation, Coverage of Communists Along the Mexican Border or BOCOV. BOCOV was operated by the FBI from 1948 to 1971 on the belief that the CIA and the INS were providing inadequate coverage to the area 25 miles south of the border. Of the 1.7 million people who lived there , the FBI identified 2,400 of them as “either members of sympathizers of major Mexican subversive groups.” In 1961, the FBI pleased with the success of COINTELPRO operations against the Communist Party decided to create BOCOV counter intelligence program.

The Church Committee mentions there were “ seven actions between 1961 and 1968 against members, leaders, and factions of ‘a foreign communist party.’" Although both the Cuba and the BOCOV COINTELPROs were started in 1961, the last declassifed documents in the Cuba-case file are dated 1970. The Cuba program was initially targeting pro-Cuban groups operating in the US. It is likely that aforementioned description was of the BOCOV COINTELRPO. The Church Committee’s mention of a separate “1961 program targeted against ‘a foreign-dominated group’” corresponds more closely with the Cuban-Affairs COINTELPRO.

In 1964, citing the success of applying counter intelligence techniques to the Communist Party, the FBI decided to apply them to actual agents of espionage. In 1969, the FBI also initiated a COINTELPRO against Serbian nationalists. Like the Border Coverage program, this appears to have gone understudied.

In 1966, the FBI started a insidious COINTELRPO dedicated to inciting mafia violence against the Communist Party. The FBI’s truly bizarre methods aimed at achieving this failed.

What Has been Revealed?

The two definitive sources on COINTELPRO are The Church Committee report, mainly books II and III, and a 1975 GAO report on FBI Domestic Intelligence Operations.

The Church Committee identified what it called “five domestic COINTELRPO operations”--Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party White Hate Groups, Black Nationalist-Hate Groups, and the New Left. In a footnote, the Church Committee noted five additional subsets of COINTELPRO operations. These included a COINTELPRO "aimed at militant groups which sought Puerto Rican independence” and “Operation Hoodwink” a scheme to incite mafia violence against the Communist Party. The Church Committee also made cryptic references to “a 1961 program targeted against "a foreign-dominated group;" “two actions taken between January 1969 and March 1971 against "a foreign nationality group in the United States;" and “seven actions between 1961 and 1968 against members, leaders, and factions of "a foreign communist party."

The 1975 GAO report put the total number of distinctive COINTELPROs at 12:

The FBI has acknowledged the existence of 12 counterintelligence programs. Five were targeted against foreign subjects as part of FBI counterespionage operations ; seven were directed against domestic groups. Targets of these programs were : the Communist Party, USA ; the Socialist Workers Party ; white hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan ; black extremists, such as the Black Panther Party ; new left groups, such as the Students for a Democratic Society ; militant Puerto Rican nationalist groups ; and a program which attempted to pit organized crime against the Communist Party , USA, called "Operation Hoodwink ."

In addition to the Church Committee and GAO reports, there are those COINTELPRO documents that had been released. This included an April 28, 1971 document ordering all open COINTELPRO be terminated. It listed open COINTELPROs as:

• COINTELPRO-Espionage

• COINTELPRO-New Left

• COINTELPRO-Disruption of White Hate Groups

• Counter Intelligence and Special Operations

• COINTELPRO-Black Extremists

• Socialist Workers-Disruption Program
  

Frank Donner in his 1980 opus The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System referred to Counter Intelligence and Special Operations program as a “super-secret support program.” Although he stated it was aimed at hostile foreign agencies, he mentioned it was used to target the Black Panthers.

This bring us to the 2018 release of COINTELPRO originating documents under the JFK Records Act. The documents released in the FBI’s Church Committee file correspond to the GAO’s depiction of 12 COINTELPROs. The lines between domestic political dissent and foreign counter intelligence are, as is always the case with FBI, extremely blurred. That being said, based on the FBI’s own descriptions it would appear the five programs targeting “foreign subjects” were likely the Border Coverage (Mexico) program, Cuba program, Soviet Satellite programs, Yugoslav program, and the mysterious Counter Intelligence and Special Operations file. The FBI also clearly considered its actions against Puerto Rican independence activists to be foreign-focused counter intelligence, something the GAO clearly rejected.

The Counter Intelligence and Special Operations remains of great mystery. According to the FBI’s letters to the Church Committee, this was not a formal counter intelligence program, but a clearinghouse that included COINTELRPO like activities. Two “originating documents” were given as an example of such activities. They depicted the plot against the Black Panthers (likely refered to by Donner and previously released by the successor to HUAC) and an operation targeting the Revolutionary Union and Progressive Labor Party (labeled by the FBI as “Chicom” groups). The operations against Maoist were labeled “ Counter Intelligence and Special Operations (Nationalities Intelligence)”

Although the FBI treated the Yugoslav program as a separate COINTELPRO, the originating document reads Counter Intelligence and Special Operation (Nationalities Intelligence-Yugoslav Matters). The case caption number is the same as the originating documents of the Counter Intelligence and Special Operation file. That is also one of the file numbers listed on the FBI’ order to close all COINTELPROs. Clearly, the Yugoslav program was part of Counter Intelligence and Special Operations. Why the FBI treated it as a separate program is unclear.

Although we have more information on the Counter Intelligence and Special Operation program, it remains “super secret.”

List of Known Counter Intelligence Programs

Here is a list of known Counter Intelligence Programs arranged in chronological order. Included is their name, the case file caption of the headquarters file, date of creation, and if possible date of termination. Each date of creation links to their originating document.

All FBI case captions start with a two to three digit number that indicates the type of file or investigation Of the 11 case captions given, six of them start with the number 100, indicating they are domestic security investigations. Three of them start with 105, which in theory means they should deal with foreign counter intelligence. One file is captioned with 157, which indicated racial matters (later extremist matters) and one file is captioned with 65, a caption used for espionage.

Although the Yugoslav program was treated as separate COINTELPRO by the FBI (and likely the GAO), because it has the case caption and file name of the Counter Intelligence and Special Operations this list does not treat it as a separate counter intelligence program.

Counter Intelligence Program, Communist Party United States of America
Date created: August 28, 1956
Date Terminated: April 28, 1971
Case Caption: 100-3-104.

Groups Seeking Independence from Puerto Rico (Counter Intelligence Program) Subversive Control
Date Created: Either August 22, 1960, August 24, 1960, or September 13, 1960
Date Terminated: Unknown, last publicly available file dated May 13, 1971
Case Caption: 105-93124

Counter Intelligence Border Coverage, also referred to as BOCOV
Date Created: January 9, 1961
Date Terminated: Unknown, wider BOCOV program ended September 11, 1972
Case Caption: Possibly 100-4344450

Cuba Matters-Counter Intelligence Program Internal Security Cuba
Date Created: August 3, 1961
Date Terminated: Unknown, last publicly available file dated October 5, 1970
Case Caption: 105-99938

Socialist Workers Party IS-SWP Disruption Program
Date Created: October 12, 1961
Date Terminated: April 28, 1971
Case Caption: FBI HQ FIle 100-436291

Counter Intelligence Program Internal Security (Soviet Satellite Intelligence, also refered to internally as COINTELPRO-Espionage
Date Created: July 14, 1964
Date Terminated: April 28, 1971
Case Caption: Likely 65-69260

Counter Intelligence Program Internal Security-Disruption of Hate Groups, also referred to internally as Counter Intelligence Program Disruption of White Hate Groups
Date Created: August 27, 1964
Date Terminated: April 28, 1971
Case Caption: FBI HQ File 157-9

Hoodwink (Internal Security)
Date Created: October 4, 1966
Date Terminated: July 31, 1968
File Caption: FBI HQ File 100-446533

Counter Intelligence Program Black Nationalist Hate-Groups Internal Security, also referred to internally by FBI as Counter Intelligence Program Black Extremists
Date Created: August 25, 1967
Date Terminated: April 28, 1971
File Caption: FBI HQ File 100-448006

Counter Intelligence Program Internal Security Disruption of New Left
Date Created: May 9, 1968
Date Terminated: April 28, 1971
File Caption: FBI HQ File 100-449696

Counter Intelligence and Special Operations
Date Created: Unknown, available files dated February 3, 1969,April 2, 1969, and May 11, 1970
Date Terminated: April 28, 1971
File Caption: FBI HQ File 105-174254