Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  In Chicago, the FBI played a direct role in the assassination of the Panther leader Fred Hampton, a gifted and charismatic organizer, whose talents and achievements earned him a spot on the FBI’s Rabble Rouser Index. As chairman of the Chicago chapter of the party, Hampton had been responsible for initiating a number of successful community programs in Chicago’s South Side ghetto, as well as for forging an alliance with the white-dominated Students for a Democratic Society, one of the main groups targeted by a separate FBI operation called COINTELPRO–New Left.

  In 1968, the bureau recruited nineteen-year-old William O’Neal, who was under indictment on felony charges, offering to pay him and drop the charges against him if he would infiltrate Hampton’s group. O’Neal agreed and rapidly rose to become Hampton’s personal bodyguard and the Chicago chapter’s chief of security, in charge of members’ weapons.

  The Chicago police had hounded the local Panthers relentlessly, carrying out repeated raids on Panther offices, and tensions exploded into a couple of shoot-outs in July and October 1969. On November 13, there was a third gun battle in which two policemen died.

  At about the same time, O’Neal told the FBI that “if David Hilliard, national BPP chief of staff, goes to jail [in connection with the April 6, 1968, Oakland shoot-out], Hampton will be appointed to fill Hilliard’s position.”12 O’Neal also supplied the bureau with a floor plan of the Panther apartment where the Panthers’ arsenal of weapons was stored, and where Fred Hampton often slept. The drawing included the location of Hampton’s bed.

  The FBI gave the information to local law-enforcement officials, and on December 4 Chicago police carried out a predawn raid on the apartment. The twenty-one-year-old Hampton, who never awoke and had very likely been drugged (phenobarbital was found in the apartment), was shot four times—including twice in the head at point-blank range—and killed, along with another Panther, Mark Clark. Police initially described the ensuing firefight as a “fierce gun battle,” but federal ballistics experts established that police officers had fired more than eighty rounds, while only one bullet was fired in return—by Clark, as he was falling after being shot.13 A federal grand jury brought no indictments against any government officials or police officers, and attempted murder charges against the seven Panthers who survived the raid were later dropped.

  With its leadership decimated, the Black Panther Party was on the ropes. The final blow in the systematic destruction of the organization was the FBI-induced rift between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, engineered through a series of forged letters to both men, beginning in August 1970, that succeeded in driving a permanent wedge between them. While their personal differences may have made such a fracture inevitable, Cleaver believed the bureau was at least partially responsible. “The FBI was very instrumental in the split,” he said. “They very skillfully fed our egos and our paranoia.”14

  By the end of 1970, the Black Panthers were all but finished as a force to be reckoned with. In 1968 and 1969, there had been more than thirty police raids on Panther offices in eleven states, and over four hundred confrontations between police and party members. The harassment was constant. Panthers were arrested for a panoply of crimes that included illegal use of a bullhorn, illegal placement of a table outside an office, incorrectly crossing the street, putting up posters, selling newspapers on a highway, spitting on the sidewalk, and using profanity.

  As always, Hoover called the shots. When the agents of the bureau’s special Black Panther unit in San Francisco informed him that they considered it unlikely that the Panthers would mount a violent revolution, he sent a blistering response, telling them—as he had told William Sullivan when the latter had had the poor judgment to find no Communist influence in the civil rights movement—“Your reasoning is not in line with Bureau objectives.”15 When they offered the opinion that no matter what else was done against the Panthers, the Breakfast for Children program should be left in place, Hoover fired back, “You have obviously missed the point. The BPP is not engaged in the ‘Breakfast for Children’ program for humanitarian reasons. The program was formed by the BPP for obvious reasons, including their effort to create an image of civility, assume control of Negroes, and to fill adolescent children with their insidious poison.”16

  In the end, the war on the Black Panthers was successful. About thirty Panthers were dead—some, like Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and Bobby Hutton, at the hands of government agents, others as a result of FBI-assisted internecine warfare with other black militant groups. Imprisonment and exile took care of dozens, perhaps hundreds more. With the Panthers’ defeat, the wider militant black power movement, which had been gaining momentum for a decade until the FBI stepped in with COINTELPRO-BNHG, was broken.

  In May 1966, Hoover wrote to the special agents in charge of the field offices to say, “We are an intelligence agency, and as such are expected to know what is going on or is likely to happen.” As the 1975 report of the Senate investigating committee observed, Hoover’s characterization of the bureau summed up the approach that “the FBI could and should know everything that might someday be useful in some undefined manner.”17 Such an approach is, in fact, the mind-set and raison d’être of the secret police force of an authoritarian state—and what Hoover had envisioned for the FBI since his earliest days in the agency.

  Nowhere was this approach more discernible than in COINTELPRO–New Left, beginning in May 1968. In the words of Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., the Senate committee’s chief counsel, FBI surveillance of the New Left movement was tantamount to “a comprehensive listing of everything those people thought or did on any subject you can imagine their having a concern with.”18 Perhaps most alarming of all, this staggeringly broad-based surveillance was conducted without any formal delineation of what the New Left comprised. In his testimony before the Senate committee, the supervisor of the operation said, “I cannot recall any document that was written defining New Left as such … It has never been strictly defined, as far as I know … It is more or less an attitude, I would think.” In other words, anybody who was perceived to have this nebulous “attitude” was a candidate for investigation. Frank Donner called COINTELPRO–New Left “an undisguised assault by the self-appointed defenders of the American way of life against an entire milieu.”19

  The chief catalyst in the rise of the New Left was the Vietnam War. Opposition to the war began slowly, with minimal support, yet in March 1965, Hoover told the House Appropriations Committee that the protests were proof of “how unified, organized and powerful an element the Communist movement is in the United States today.”20

  On April 17, 1965, a march on Washington attracted between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand protesters. A week and a half later, LBJ and Hoover met to discuss the protests and Johnson’s conviction that they were encouraging America’s enemies. Hoover immediately ordered up the preparation of a bureau report emphasizing the “communist influence” in the Students for a Democratic Society, so that Johnson would know “exactly what the picture is.”†

  In Hoover’s mind, as Sanford Ungar points out in FBI, there were “clear and automatic links running from protest to violence, to anarchist agitation to an actual revolution.”21

  The resulting report, “Communist Activities Relative to United States Policy on Vietnam,” indicated just the opposite of what Hoover and Johnson wanted and expected to hear. The report found, for example, that the April 17 demonstration had not been “communist instituted, dominated or controlled,” and that while the CP would have liked to influence the New Left and the antiwar movement, its efforts had not been successful.22 Johnson and Hoover refused to accept such conclusions, and the FBI director instructed the SACs to step up their investigations of student organizations. Johnson, in turn, asked Hoover to run “name checks” on dozens of individuals who had signed telegrams protesting the war.23

  The antiwar movement now began gaining traction. On May 20–21, a thirty-six-hour marathon teach-in on the Vietnam War was held on the
campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where the previous December a semester of Free Speech Movement protests had culminated in the arrest of some eight hundred students during the occupation of the campus administration building. The May 1965 teach-in at UC Berkeley attracted more than twenty thousand people.

  The following October, a Senate subcommittee reported that the control of the anti-Vietnam movement had been taken over by “Communists and extremist elements” who were anti-American and pro-Vietcong and were planning massive civil disobedience, including “the burning of draft cards and the stopping of troop trains.”24 The same month, Johnson let it be known that he fully endorsed the Justice Department’s investigation of possible Communist infiltration of the antiwar movement.

  The assault on the character, integrity, and patriotism of antiwar demonstrators increased. On November 1, Hoover publicly quoted a letter he had written to a Vietnam veteran in which he had said, “Anti-Vietnam demonstrators in the U.S. represent a minority for the most part composed of halfway citizens who are neither morally, mentally or emotionally mature.”25 Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned that there were Communists in SDS, and Senator Thomas Dodd’s Internal Security Subcommittee issued a 235-page report claiming that the antiwar movement was largely controlled by Communists. On Meet the Press, Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared that “the worldwide Communist apparatus is working very hard” in support of antiwar demonstrations, and “the net effect of these demonstrations will be to prolong the war, not shorten it.”26

  As the war escalated, antiwar sentiment at home grew correspondingly. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered his landmark address “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” a ringing indictment of the Vietnam War, at New York City’s Riverside Church near Columbia University. In the speech, King rebuked “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”27 On both April 27, 1967, and October 21, 1967, a million people took to the streets all across America to protest the war.

  COINTELPRO–New Left was initially a response to the unrest on college campuses, which were strongholds of the antiwar movement. The possibility of such a program was first suggested by Hoover in an April 2, 1968, memo to the SACs. In a typical example of Hoover hyperbole, he wrote, “The emergence of the new left movement as a subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of the traditional values of our democratic society presents us with an unprecedented challenge in the security field.”28

  On April 4, a year to the day that he delivered “Beyond Vietnam,” Martin Luther King was shot to death. Less than three weeks later, on the campus near where he had given the speech, Columbia University students occupied five buildings, including the office of President Grayson Kirk, and held the buildings for six days before university officials called in the police. More than seven hundred students were arrested, and there were over a hundred injuries to police and protesters.

  Within days of the Columbia uprising, an internal memo recommended the institution of a new COINTELPRO:

  Our Nation is undergoing an era of disruption and violence caused to a large extent by various individuals generally connected with the New Left. Some of these activists urge revolution in America and call for the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. They continually and falsely allege police brutality and do not hesitate to utilize unlawful acts to further their so-called causes. The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses. With this in mind, it is our recommendation that a new Counterintelligence Program be designed to neutralize the New Left and the Key Activists.29

  The program was authorized on May 9, and instructions to field offices were issued by the end of the month. Again, the suggested techniques were the customary array employed in the existing COINTELPROs.

  Two weeks later, Hoover sent a directive to the SACs, instructing them to document three areas vis-à-vis the New Left: (1) false allegations of police brutality, for the purpose of countering widespread student accusations; (2) immorality, in order to demonstrate “the scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents”; and (3) actions of college administrators, to illustrate the necessity of “taking a firm stand” and establishing what “aid and encouragement” may have been offered to student protesters by faculty members.30

  The freewheeling lifestyles of many of the New Left’s young adults were particularly galling to the puritanical Hoover. Their “immorality” was confirmed by reports received from the field offices. The Boston office, for example, sent along an account from one informant who related that members of an urban commune changed sexual partners frequently, held antiwar meetings sitting around their apartment “completely in the nude,” neglected personal hygiene, and had poor eating habits.31 The report offered no indication of how these individuals’ sexual, hygienic, and eating tendencies made them a threat to national security.

  “Immorality” notwithstanding, student unrest and protests continued to spread. In the first six months of 1968, there were over 220 anti-war demonstrations at more than a hundred American colleges and universities. Going into the summer, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam organized a massive protest for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. As thousands of protesters poured into the city, close to twelve thousand Chicago police officers and seventy-five hundred Illinois National Guardsmen were on hand, as well as a thousand FBI agents, many of them undercover.

  On the night of August 28, after several days of peaceful, albeit tense, demonstrations, the forces of law and order unleashed a full-scale riot, as Chicago police beat and clubbed protesters mercilessly for more than fifteen minutes in a fearsome abuse of power that was telecast live across the nation, and the American public witnessed what Theodore White called “a scene … from the Russian Revolution.”32 More than 660 individuals were arrested, and over a thousand were injured, including sixty-five journalists and close to two hundred police officers.

  With the evidence overwhelmingly indicating police brutality and use of unwarranted force, Hoover ordered the Chicago office to collect evidence disproving such charges and to use the news media to convince the public. On September 9, he followed up with a letter to all offices that had sent agents to the convention, instructing them to question those agents for evidence that militants had provoked police and had staged incidents to make it appear that police reacted with undue force.

  Despite Hoover’s efforts to whitewash events, the Walker Report, written for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence and issued three months after the convention, found that “to read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events … is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot.”33

  The events at the Democratic National Convention undoubtedly contributed to Richard Nixon’s triumph in the November presidential election. When Nixon assumed office at the beginning of 1969, he inherited the enormously expanded surveillance apparatus developed by the Johnson administration. Nixon would take the structure to new and greater heights, establishing what the political scientist Robert Goldstein in 1978 called “a mind-set more hostile to basic concepts of civil liberty than any administration in American history.”34

  The violence at the Democratic National Convention and the subsequent failure to convict any police officers of assault triggered a split in the already fractured Students for a Democratic Society, which by 1968 had grown to eighty thousand members and was beset with internal strife. The most radical faction split off to form the Weather Underground, spawning a violent fringe element that began carrying out bombings and arson on campuses and against government facilities. In the FBI’s infiltration of the Weather Underground and other ultramilitant groups, agents provocateurs were used repeatedly, a
nd they were responsible for inciting and even carrying out many violent incidents.

  Examples of FBI agents or informants acting as agents provocateurs in COINTELPRO–New Left include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • The FBI informant Larry D. Grathwohl, one of the most radical members of the Weather Underground, taught his companions to build bombs, took part in the bombing of a Cincinnati public school, and planned the bombing of a Detroit police facility while in constant contact with the FBI.35

  • In May 1970, during demonstrations at the University of Alabama to commemorate the deaths of four Kent State University students killed by National Guardsmen, the Tuscaloosa police undercover narcotics agent and FBI informant Charles R. Grimm Jr. engaged in arson and threw missiles at police.36

  • Between September 1971 and May 1972, William W. Lemmer, a regional coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and an FBI informer, was responsible for a bomb threat, an attempted bombing, and an illegal protest at an Air Force base, all of which led to arrests.37

  • In New York, the FBI informant George Demerle, a former member of the John Birch Society, helped assemble a duffel bag full of time bombs that were planted on an Army truck.38

  • In Seattle, the FBI hired the disillusioned SDS member Horace L. Parker to spy on the organization’s University of Washington chapter. Instructed by the FBI to “do anything necessary” to protect his credibility, Parker supplied drugs, weapons, and explosives to the group.39

  • The FBI informer Robert W. Hardy provided “90 percent of the burglary tools and much of the expertise” used when twenty-eight people broke into the Federal Building in Camden, New Jersey, in August 1971 to destroy draft files.40 “I taught them everything they knew,” said Hardy, “how to cut glass and open windows without making any noise … how to open file cabinets without a key.”41 The group was acquitted on the grounds that the government had used an informer as an agent provocateur.