Cointelpro (1956-1971), short for “Counter Intelligence Program”, was a secret FBI operation where the American government destroyed the New Left and Black Power movements in the 1960s and early 1970s.
As the FBI put it, it sought to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” certain political movements thereby “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order.” To do this it lied, robbed and even murdered.
At first it was directed just against the Communist Party USA but later others were added to the list, among them:
- Black Panther Party
- Socialist Workers Party
- American Indian Movement (AIM)
- Nation of Islam
- CORE
- SNCC
- SCLC
- SDS
- El Comite-MINP
- Weather Underground
- Young Lords
- American Nazi Party
- Gay Liberation Front
Some who were on its watch list:
- Martin Luther King, Jr
- Malcolm X
- Angela Davis
- Elijah Muhammad
- Russel Means
- Richard Aoki
- Bill Ayers
- Stokely Carmichael
- Eldridge Cleaver
- Fred Hampton
- Bunchy Carter
- Geronimo Pratt
- Mario Savio
- Assata Shakur
- John Lennon
- Yoko Ono
- Muhammad Ali
Some of what the FBI did:
- Planted false stories in the press.
- Planted false witnesses in court trials.
- Sent false letters to create distrust and division among leaders.
- Planted informers everywhere – and then falsely named others as informers.
- Got people fired at work.
- Broke up marriages.
- Broke into people’s houses to search them.
- Arrested leaders for minor traffic violations.
- Framed people for murder and other false charges – to lock them up or at least keep them tied up in court till something stuck.
- Committed murder.
We do not know if Cointelpro was behind the murder of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. There is no proof of it, but it is something they wanted to do. We do know they killed Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader in Chicago. That was proved in court. They had the Chicago police break down his door in the middle of the night and gun him down. The FBI had been keeping a file on him even before he joined the Panthers.
The Panthers were shocked by the scale and thoroughness of the FBI. It was more than just planting a few informers and listening in on telephone calls:
- They framed Geronimo Pratt for murder – and then made sure one of his defence lawyers was an FBI informer!
- Panthers secretly working for the FBI talked about blowing up department stores – giving the police an excuse to arrest top Panthers and throw them in prison.
The press and the police did the FBI’s bidding. The Panthers found much of its leadership killed, sent to prison or driven out of the country. Those who remained did not know who to trust.
The truth came out in 1971 when left-wing activists robbed an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. More came out in 1976 at the Pike and the Church Committee hearings in Congress and later in different court trials. But there are still millions of pages that the FBI has never made public, so even now we do not know the full truth.
See also:
A government that is successfully carrying on a war against his very own citizens in plain sight and nobody seemingly picking it on.
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This is part of US history that should be exposed troughly. They used the same tricks they had cultivated after WW2 in Italy, Greece, Far East ect. Really scary stuff. As for Malcolm X, they propably knew that he had real enemies among his own and most importantly among organizede crime and let, so of speak, the events fold.
Douglas Valentine quotes one CIA veteran in his book about operation Phoenix in Vietnam (which relsulted circa 20 000 murdered civilians) who says: Anywhere where the goverment is collecting huge database of its citizens, there is an operation Phoenix going on. That is all it was. Datacollection programme for the goverment to be used on case they need to.
Sounds famliar, doesn’t it?
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I did my senior thesis on COINTELPRO. It was a VERY serious program of systematic human rights violations and most Americans haven’t even heard of it.
Excellent post.
The Revolutionary Communist Party was also targeted by them, IIRC, or at least Bob “Baba” Avakian was.
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This is a shameful but important chapter in US history. Government should not be conducted in secret. This is an example of why, and it should remind us that the efforts of current politicians — most notably the Bush43 cabal — to centralize authority in a “strong executive,” where it can be wielded in secret, should vigorously be opposed.
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This sounds like the Gestapo.
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Great post.
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Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam were expansively documented by the FBI, as were also Malcolm’s two independent organizations, the Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Muslim Mosque Inc. The FBI kept a central or headquarters file, which was the distillation of many field office files across the country. Next to the FBI, the most sophisticated surveillance program hounding Malcolm X was the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) of the New York City police department; there is some evidence that BOSS provided information to the FBI about Malcolm X, whom the latter had been watching since the 1950s when he was still incarcerated in Massachusetts.
The idea that the FBI were directly responsible for Malcolm’s assassination is more urban legend than fact. Of course, the FBI knew that Malcolm’s assassination was plotted, given the extensive surveillance (telephone included) placed upon Elijah Muhammad. Of course, the FBI did not intervene to help Malcolm, just as they did not help Martin Luther King Jr. So in the passive sense, they shared the blame for Malcolm’s assassination, as did the New York City Police Department of that era. Both the FBI and the NYC Police Department had Malcolm’s organization well infiltrated.
Yet unlike the case of Dr. King, Malcolm was assassinated by the Nation of Islam under orders of the “Black Muslim” leadership, and this goes back to Elijah Muhammad. The idea that the FBI used the Nation of Islam to kill Malcolm does not accurately portray the real picture, which entailed the real determination of the “Black Muslims” to kill Malcolm. It is understandable that many people may want to blame the FBI or the government primarily, but in reality, Malcolm was killed by the Nation of Islam, and not by agents pretending to be “Black Muslims,” but killers acting on orders from the highest echelon of that movement.
People have overlooked the extent of hatred and malice that “Black Muslims” felt for Malcolm; he was hated and despised by some of the very people he had helped and supported, including the Captain (Joseph) in his Harlem mosque. People may be hesitant to accept this, but Peter Goldman’s book, The Death and Life of Malcolm X is still the best book on the subject, and Goldman, a great Newsweek journalist from back in the day, called it right while many of us were looking for some conspiracy. The only actual murder conspiracy emanated from the Nation of Islam. This same organization killed other people perceived as threats and rivals to Elijah Muhammad, so it wasn’t just Malcolm. Of course, all these victims were black and affiliated with the Muslim movement. The Nation of Islam never acted boldly on behalf of black people, especially after Malcolm was removed.
As one who has had the great honor of studying Malcolm, the strange thing about the FBI aspect is that for historians, the FBI files provide an insight into his life and work that we would not have today otherwise. The meticulous and detailed, almost obsessive, extent to which the FBI’s agents went to gather information about Malcolm is stunning. Now that these documents are declassified and accessible (they are redacted–which is to say, they are edited by the FBI so as to blot out some information), they are very important historical records containing informant interviews and reports, newspaper clippings, transcripts from telephone surveillance, and other records and sources of information.
The FBI files contain evidence that Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm’s assassination and that these orders were conveyed down the chain of command. A number of attempts were made on Malcolm’s life, including an attempt to knife him in front of his Queens home in the summer of 1964, an attempt from which he escaped. The man who tried to kill him is a Muslim “leader” in the black community today. Other attempts were made but Malcolm escaped them; he did not escape the assassination squad sent from the Newark, N.J. mosque in February 1965.
Before his death, Malcolm observed that the Nation of Islam had become a “criminal organization.” It was infiltrated in part by the criminal element. I cannot prove it, but the late Charles 37X Kenyatta told me that by that time the organization was laundering money for criminals, so the strict, sometimes abusive movement that Malcolm groomed (which sometimes used corporal punishment for bad behavior) became an extremely dangerous organization–killing and assaulting dissenters, critics, and “hypocrites” (which was the Nation of Islam’s term for those considered traitors, as Malcolm was labeled).
The problem with blaming the FBI for killing Malcolm is that it tends to let the murderers off the hook. The man who murdered Malcolm is elderly and living in Newark, N.J. today. He has been “hidden in plain sight” and has been coddled by many in the black community in that city, as I’ve been informed, including Muslims. You can’t blame the FBI for Malcolm’s murder, although they did do everything they could to exacerbate and incite hostility, playing on the jealousy and resentment of the Muhammad family and vindictive people like Louis X Farrakhan.
It’s a crying shame.
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Be prepared to be called a white racist scumbag now, Louis.
Excellent analysis, by the way.
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Good comment, thanks.
including an attempt to knife him in front of his Queens home in the summer of 1964, an attempt from which he escaped. The man who tried to kill him is a Muslim “leader” in the black community today
Who is that? A sunni muslim leader or a NOI leader?
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Louis DeCaro Jr:
Why did the FBI start watching Malcolm X in the 1950s when he was in prison in Massachusetts? You are not the first person I have heard say that.
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Black Panther infiltration see a book by Earl Anthony entitled Spitting In The Wind. He wrote a book prior befoe he admitted to being an FBI informant.
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i didn’t know any of this, i think i remember hearing that some government organization sent MLK a note telling him to kill himself…or saying something like “you know what you must do…” I didn’t know any of this though, good post.
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The law says, at least since 1980’s it has had, that FBI must warn potential victims if they learn that there is a real threat to ones life. Example is mafia boss John Gotti whom FBI warned about the murder plot against him by the Genovese and Lucchese families. The law does not say that FBI must tell where from the hit is coming or by whom, only that they must warn the subject that it is for real.
By not telling about these things to a victim is a method used by intelligence services around the globe. They know that a difficult person is going to be killed but do nothing, so they don’t have to do anything themselves. Plus, they are not responsible at all.
I have no idea how much manipulation there was in Malcolm X case but I would not be surprised if there was. Like I said before, they just let it happen which is very handy.
In the murky waters of organised crime things get very stranges indeed: who is who and what is what. Cointelpro was, by its definition and actions, organized crime too. Check the RICO law and find out it yourself. This whole conspiracy is within the definition of organized crime.
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War Churchill’s excellent “Agents of Repression” and “The COINTELPRO Papers” are required reading for anyone interested in this. the second book contains reproductions of the actual documents.
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well done.
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abagond, how about the MKULTRA and those deeds? FBN and CIA connections with international crime syndicates and co-operation to bring in tons of drugs for the consumption of inner city poors and blacks?
That started way back in 1940’s and devastated whole cities eventually. Excellent book about that and the whole war on drugs by Doublas Valentine: The Strenght of the Wolf: The secret history of America’s war on drugs. Check it out.
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“Planted informers everywhere, Got people fired at work, Broke up marriages, Broke into people’s houses, Framed people for false charges – to lock them up, Committed murder.”
Sounds very familiar to me.
There is a video online where an agent was in an interview saying that they got people into smoking weed as well as a way to dumb down the black community, look it up.
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@ Happiness,
a UK sister in the house…so refreshing!
Menelik Charles
London England
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Great post! You should do posts project, MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, CIA cocaine smuggling, and human radiation experiments as well, if you haven’t already.
Sometimes it’s insane to contemplate what the United States government is capable of executing against its own citizens. Lot’s of this stuff is insane straight out of the movies, but it’s fairly well documented in the historical record.
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Hi Menelik,
It’s not often you see someone from the UK on these blogs.
How are you doing?
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Hi Happiness,
we’re a rare breed around these parts, unfortunately. Don’t always feel welcome so I keep popping along to make a nuisance of myself!
Anyway, I’m doing just fine, thank you, sister. Hope to see you around these parts again.
Peace
Menelik Charles
London England
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Here is something I found by chance. Havent watched it trough so dont know if it is any good though.
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Kind of funny that when the subject is this political and “dangerous”, the discussion tends to become short here. 😀
But if the subject is about the looks of an individual and/or liking this or that, we get some real debate going on!! 😀
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@ Sam,
great point, Bro! They turn the personal into the political, and the political into nothing of significance!
What ladies, eh?
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I was a counterintelligence tortured on drugs under cointelpro. See my web site agentcounterspy.com
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Psychic Counterintelligence Agent Going Public:
Cointelpro linked with organized crime
It was at MIT, they set me up with a job and a dorm room for the summer in 1971. I never found out who arranged this, but they obviously wanted a murder solved. Karen and I are telepathic, and she had me get in the habit of riding my bike around the esplanade, starting at the stairs leading down from the Boston University bridge. On a Saturday night around midnight in early June, I met some people at the stairs, they were also investigating the murder; they said someone had a gun and I should go find a cop. That took me fifteen minutes, and he wouldn’t investigate. I decided to forget the whole thing and went home. The next morning at six I found the body, she was sitting up with a stocking tied around her neck to a bench. I called the police, and told them I didn’t want to be involved any further. The cop said he thought I was much more involved.
That summer I had been sent to the Russian recruiter to see if I could become a KGB agent. He asked about my political affiliation to the international democracy movement, and said I couldn’t. Then I was sent to meet the FBI by two organized crime linked professors, at two on July 27. It was about if I had been raped and was resisting hypnosis. They used scopolamine and a polygraph to break down my resistance, and I and all my girlfriends got raped and knew it. I’m demanding damages. I think these cointelpro agents were liquidated for treason by military intelligence. And they had me investigate the communists. In 1977, the communists at MIT and Harvard did what they called the split brain experiment on me; my boss pushed a pressure point on my spinal column, which lowered my resistance to their hypnosis. I thought they’d get caught doing this. By February 1979, I completely lost control of my mind and spent the next 24 years living on the street. And finally, in 1985, I was reading the Boston Globe about a murderer who had gotten out of prison for a murder in 1971 at the Boston University boat house. See http://www.masscases.com/cases/sjc/385/385mass497.html
In 1969 I had been recruited to be a shadow telepathic agent of the NSA. To read about these people see http://www.acsa.net/paranormal_agents_at_the_nsa_by.htm; my web site on this is http://www.agentcounterspy.com. They sent me on a mission to MIT to solve this case. The news article said that the body had been found with a lot of blood under the Boston University boat house, and that the “murderer” had been caught on an anonymous tip leading to a bloody diner jacket found in a church. I think this “murderer” was the guy who told me to go find a cop. The body I found was probably an investigator for the murder. Lark Elaine Turner might have been there also, investigating. As I understand it, decades later, the motive was to blow the cover of the counterintelligence agents to the criminals taking over the government by mass hypnosis, after the Kennedy assassination. But this played into our strong suit, who are they anyhow if they’re blowing the cover of counterintelligence; they’de have to be the spies.
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Reblogged this on USA COINTELPRO VICTIM OF 'POGs' PATRIOT & SPACE PRESERVATION ACTS.
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Interesting implications, if you have the time…
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^ m’I gnihctaw uoy yddub!
LOL! 😀
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LOL!
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^Note my simple palindrome.
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still probably goes on today under another name.
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Under many other names.
PRISM
Boundless Informant
Project Chess
Tempura
Shell Trumpet
Transient Thurible
Stellar Wind
Five Eyes
just to name a few… But nobody knows them all.
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^ Oops! And how could I have forgotten to mention “Echelon?”
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“The truth came out in 1971 when left-wing activists robbed an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.”
They were “The Camden 28”. What makes their story interesting was even though they were “guilty” a jury found then not guilty through jury nullification.
Jury nullification is something that communities who are terrorized by the police should look into.
http://fija.org/2014/05/20/anniversary-of-jury-nullification-in-camden-28-trial/
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[…] Cointelpro […]
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