by Jay Feldman
One man, William Albertson, a dedicated longtime party member and high-ranking officer, spent the better part of a decade trying to restore his name, to no avail, as his and his family members’ lives were effectively ruined. According to an FBI internal report, this “crippled the activities of the New York State communist organization and the turmoil within the party continues to this date.”10
COINTELPRO-CPUSA gained steam after a series of June 1957 Supreme Court decisions essentially struck down the Smith Act, which had prohibited advocating or belonging to any organization that advocated the overthrow of the government. According to one FBI unit chief, the Court rulings had rendered the Smith Act “technically unenforceable,” making it “impossible to prosecute Communist Party members.”11 Deprived of this weapon in the war against “subversion,” Hoover stepped up the FBI’s extralegal efforts to persecute radicals.
In 1958, using the same convoluted logic applied by the Bureau of Investigation chief William Burns to radicals in the early 1920s and by General John DeWitt and Colonel Karl Bendetsen to the Japanese in the early 1940s, Hoover argued that the very lack of Communist activity and influence was proof positive that the CP was still dangerously powerful. “The Communist Party of the United States,” he told HUAC, “is not out of business; it is not dead; it is not even dormant. It is, however, well on its way to achieving its current objective, which is to make you believe that it is shattered, ineffective, and dying.”12
Fueled by Hoover’s paranoia, demagoguery, and megalomania, the FBI had, by the end of the 1950s, as the political scientist Robert Goldstein notes, “achieved a position as a virtually autonomous, unsupervised and untouchable organization only marginally compatible with the requirements of a democratic society.” From that invulnerable position, the bureau initiated a rash of new programs modeled on COINTELPRO-CPUSA. Employing actions and methods similar to those undertaken against the CP and its members, these programs were directed at a wide range of individuals, organizations, and movements, until, as Sanford J. Ungar wrote in his comprehensive study of the FBI, “the Bureau was—as if in a wartime crisis—monitoring almost all forms of political dissent.” As Hoover’s biographer Curt Gentry observed, “The COINTELPROs began slowly and then, like a virus feeding upon itself, grew rapidly and monstrously. Each new perceived threat … brought forth a new COINTELPRO.”13 In the process, the FBI forsook its law-enforcement mission and focused instead on intelligence gathering, becoming once again the secret police force that Harlan Fiske Stone had warned against in 1924, when he reined in the bureau’s precursor.
A 1970s Senate investigating committee labeled the COINTELPROs “a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association [and] the propagation of dangerous ideas … Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that … In essence, the Bureau took the law into its own hands, conducting a sophisticated vigilante operation against domestic enemies.”14
With the COINTELPRO operations, the FBI’s intelligence gathering took on a far wider purpose than simply preventing the commission of crimes. As David Wise points out in The American Police State, the bureau, “by infiltrating and spying on selected groups in American society, arrogated to itself the role of a thought police. It decided which groups were legitimate, and which were a danger—by FBI standards—to the Republic … In short, the FBI filled the classic role of a secret political police.”15
Until early 1960, the FBI’s counterintelligence program was directed against the CP. In March of that year, however, field offices received instructions to step up COMINFIL—“Communist infiltration”—investigations of other organizations, ranging in scope from the NAACP to the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy to the Boy Scouts of America. By the time the decade was out, the FBI had files on more than 430,000 law-abiding individuals and organizations, as investigations reached into every area of American political activity.
At first, the targets of these operations were individual Communists. The most common action was to inform the leader of a labor union or other organization that a certain member of the group belonged to the CP, with the expectation that the person would then be drummed out.
But the priority quickly shifted. “Although,” said the Senate committee’s report, “COMINFIL investigations were supposed to focus on the Communist Party’s alleged efforts to penetrate domestic groups, in practice the target often became the domestic groups themselves.”16
This approach was used to perfection against the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. SANE, as it was commonly known, was at the forefront of the antinuclear peace movement. With twenty-five thousand members in 1958, the organization rapidly gained momentum, and by 1960 it appeared that SANE could become a significant force in American politics.
To undermine the group’s growing influence, the FBI supplied a reporter with information about Communists taking part in a SANE demonstration, which succeeded in turning up the media spotlight on the organization. After an enormous rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in May—at which Eleanor Roosevelt, the union leader Walter Reuther, Michigan’s governor G. Mennen Williams, and other notables spoke—the chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, claimed that “the Communists were responsible for a very substantial percentage of the overflow turnout” and called for SANE “to purge their ranks ruthlessly” of CP members.17
SANE offered a defiant reply, saying, “As a matter of democratic principle and practice we resent the intrusion of a Congressional Committee into the affairs of an organization which during its entire life has acted only in accordance with its declared principles … [SANE] itself is entirely capable of carrying out its principles and guaranteeing that it will not permit their betrayal or subversion under any pressure.”18
Unfortunately, the group’s actions did not meet its lofty words, and SANE undertook a purge of its membership, expelling Communists and fellow travelers. Three members of the national board, including Linus Pauling, resigned in protest. “SANE could have responded,” wrote Robert Gilmore of the American Friends Service Committee in his letter of resignation, “with a ringing challenge to the cold war stratagem of discredit and divide, with a clear affirmation of the right of everyone to debate and dissent … The fact that SANE turned down this opportunity is, to my mind, a great tragedy.”19 A large number of members across the country also left the organization.
The FBI’s release of information to a newsman had its desired effect. SANE was never again as effective or powerful.
A few months after the bureau’s COMINFIL action against SANE, Hoover launched a second COINTELPRO operation. The triumph of the Cuban revolution at the beginning of 1959 had radicalized the left throughout much of Latin America, and the possibility of the spread of Communism in the hemisphere alarmed the U.S. government. In August, concerned over the newly invigorated Puerto Rican independence movement, Hoover wrote to the special agent in charge in San Juan to tell him, “The Bureau is considering the feasibility of instituting a program of disruption” aimed at Puerto Rican nationalist groups. Hoover emphasized, “In considering this matter, you should bear in mind the Bureau desires to disrupt the activities of these organizations and is not interested in mere harassment.”20
It was against the law for the FBI to conduct foreign intelligence operations, but Hoover justified the bureau’s involvement in Puerto Rico’s internal affairs by arguing that the Caribbean island was unique because of its relationships with both the United States and Latin America. Three months later, Hoover proposed subjecting Puerto Rican nationalists to types of dirty tricks similar to those employed in COINTELPRO-CPUSA, including anonymous mailings and inciting factionalism within the groups.
In addition to those techniques, the San Juan FBI office committed criminal acts. Bureau agents, for
example, read and confiscated mail addressed to independence movement leaders, as the former office employee Gloria Teresa Caldas de Blanco testified in a sworn affidavit.21
The Puerto Rican operation, which continued for over a decade, was supposedly “directed against organizations which seek independence for Puerto Rico through other than lawful peaceful means,” but at least two of the targeted groups—the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and the Federation of Pro-Independence University Students—were avowedly nonviolent.22 The Puerto Rican Independence Movement leader, Juan Mari Brás, was singled out for intense persecution, which almost unquestionably contributed to the severe heart attack he suffered in August 1964, after the San Juan office sent anonymous letters charging that he was incompetent and had close ties to the Castro government in Cuba. Citing the heart attack as one of the successes of its campaign against him and the movement, the office bragged to Hoover that these “letters did nothing to ease his tensions, and … he felt the effects of them deeply.” Another activist, Delfin Ramos, spent close to two years in jail after the FBI arrested him for possession of explosives. The charges were finally dropped and he was released when the San Juan office admitted in court that there was no evidence against him and that there never had been. The federal district court judge Juan R. Torruella was so outraged he declared, “In all my years as a judge, I have never seen anything as incredible and scandalous.”23
A year after the operation in Puerto Rico began, the FBI instituted a third COINTELPRO, this one aimed at the Socialist Workers Party, a splinter group of about five hundred members that espoused Leon Trotsky’s program of worldwide revolution (in contrast to the CP, which embraced the Stalinist model of concentrating on strengthening socialism in the Soviet Union). As with COINTELPRO-CPUSA, COINTELPRO-SWP was a formalization of the investigation and harassment the bureau had been carrying out against the SWP for decades.
On October 12, 1961, Hoover sent a memo to the SACs of field offices already participating in COINTELPRO-CPUSA, instructing them to initiate a similar disruption program against the SWP. Hoover was particularly concerned that the SWP was running candidates for public office, as well as supporting Cuba and the budding civil rights movement. Nothing in Hoover’s memo indicated that the SWP was engaged in anything remotely illegal—on the contrary, running candidates for public office can only be considered one of the most fundamental forms of participation in the American democratic process.
For the next ten years, the FBI concentrated on sabotaging the SWP’s electoral efforts, provoking internal disputes, exacerbating animosity between the SWP and the CP, exposing and hounding individual SWP members through anonymous letters, and undermining the party’s active participation in the civil rights and antiwar movements.
In Orange, New Jersey, for just one example, the bureau went after Walter Elliott, an automobile salesman and the scoutmaster of a local Boy Scout troop, for no other reason than that his wife was a member of the SWP. “Individuals who have subversive backgrounds,” said an internal FBI memo, “especially those as Elliott who remain in the scouting movement for the expressed purpose of influencing young minds, represent a distinct threat to the goal of the scouting movement and should be removed or neutralized.”24 Unable to locate any derogatory material by which the bureau could anonymously discredit him, an FBI agent finally called the national headquarters of the Boy Scouts and extracted an assurance that Elliott’s tenure as a scoutmaster would not be extended past his current term.
COINTELPRO-SWP was a prime example of what one former intelligence expert called “J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with the unimportant,” as the bureau overlooked the real danger of espionage posed by actual Soviet spies, in favor of harassing a minuscule, law-abiding organization. Following one Smith Act prosecution in 1941, the FBI did not bring another federal prosecution against the SWP in thirty-five more years of investigation, yet it squandered untold agent hours and agency resources on “a party whose membership, by F.B.I. count, wouldn’t fill a high school football stadium,” as a 1975 New York Times article put it. “In the same decade that crime rates in American cities escalated and organized crime expanded its interests … the men of the Newark F.B.I. field office were working at fever pitch to drive a scoutmaster … from his job.”25
One of the most malicious operations undertaken by the FBI in the 1960s was the relentless crusade conducted for years against Martin Luther King Jr. Beginning in October 1962, with a COMINFIL investigation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its head, Dr. King, the program rapidly escalated into an all-out, no-holds-barred attempt to shame and discredit King.
The investigation was originally based on highly dubious allegations that two of King’s advisers were Communists, a charge the Senate investigating committee found “inconclusive,” reporting that there was nothing to link the two men with the CP and “no evidence that either of those Advisers attempted to exploit the civil rights movement to carry out the plans of the Communist Party.” Terming the FBI’s scrutiny of King and its efforts to destroy him “a shameful chapter in the nation’s history,” the committee report stated that despite FBI investigators’ conclusions that there was no Communist influence among King and his advisers, the bureau’s investigations and attempted discrediting of him continued.26
The FBI had maintained a file on Martin Luther King since 1958, and the agency began its infiltration of the SCLC in 1961. In February 1962, Hoover wrote, “King is no good,” and despite the Atlanta office’s determination, in November 1961, that there was no reason to initiate a national security investigation of the civil rights activist, Hoover informed the Atlanta SAC in May 1962 that King’s name “should be placed in Section A of the Reserve Index and tabbed Communist,” that is, someone to be arrested and detained in the event of a national emergency.27
A month after the FBI’s COMINFIL investigation of the SCLC and Dr. King began in October 1962, King criticized the bureau publicly. In agreeing with a report by the Southern Regional Council that censured the FBI for standing by as civil rights demonstrators were beaten in Albany, Georgia, King said, “One of the great problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force.”28
The reaction of the FBI brain trust to King’s remarks was that they “dovetail with information … indicating that King’s advisors are Communist Party (CP) members and he is under the domination of the CP.”29 The bureau decided to contact the civil rights leader and “set him straight,” but King failed to return a phone call from the director of the FBI’s Crime Records Division, Cartha D. DeLoach.30 Hoover, still enraged over King’s criticism of the bureau, took the failure to return DeLoach’s call as a declaration of war. In August 1963, with the March on Washington in the planning, Hoover wrote in the Yale Political Magazine, “Extremists [who] have gone so far as to accuse the FBI of racism … are no less bigoted in their thinking than those who parade around in white sheets.”31
As the August 28 March on Washington approached, Hoover instructed field offices to be “extremely alert” for indications that the CP was behind the upcoming mass demonstration.32 After reviewing a mountain of testimony from the field offices, however, the bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division reported six days before the march that there was no evidence of its being initiated or controlled by the CP. The following day, the division submitted a sixty-seven-page paper to Hoover, stating that the Communist Party—whose membership was down to 4,453—had been spectacularly unsuccessful in its attempts to influence African-Americans in general and the civil rights movement and March on Washington in particular.33
Hoover went ballistic. “This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” he wrote furiously on the memo that accompanied the report
. “You contended then that Castro & his cohorts were not Communists & not influenced by Communists. Time alone has proved you wrong. I for one can’t ignore the memos … re King … et al. as having only an infinitesimal effect on the efforts to exploit the American Negro by the Communists.”34
William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, was now in Hoover’s doghouse, and he knew there was only one way out. After King delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the March, Sullivan wrote to Hoover, saying, “The Director is correct. We were completely wrong,” and calling King “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security.”35*
On October 1, Hoover sent out a letter to the SACs, ordering them to enlarge investigations of Communist influence among African-Americans, using all the proven techniques to “neutralize or disrupt the Party’s activities in the Negro field.”36 That month, after a number of previously unsuccessful attempts, Hoover was finally able to persuade Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to approve wiretaps of Dr. King’s home telephone and the phones at the SCLC’s Atlanta and New York offices.
All the while, as King’s standing, influence, and reputation continued to grow, Hoover’s loathing for him increased in equal measure. Across the December memo informing him that King had been selected as Time magazine’s “Man of the Year,” Hoover scribbled, “They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one.”37