Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  • One of the most notorious agents provocateurs, Thomas Tongyai, alias “Tommy the Traveler,” was on the payroll of both the FBI and local police departments. Tongyai traveled from campus to campus in New York state, offering students “bombs, guns and instruction in guerilla tactics.”42 In the spring of 1970, he posed as an SDS organizer at Hobart College, a nine-hundred-student liberal arts campus in the Finger Lakes region. “The best cover for an undercover agent who wanted to get on to the campus was portraying the part of a radical extremist, which I did,” he explained. According to Hobart students, Tongyai “provided materials for the fire-bombing of an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps office,” and two freshmen were arrested after carrying out the project.43

  In the final analysis, despite FBI investigations of 500,000 “subversives” between 1960 and 1974, not one individual was prosecuted for planning, advocating, or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government—which was the alleged reason for those half-million investigations.

  In all, more than 2,350 separate COINTELPRO actions were carried out. When George Moore, head of the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Section, appeared before the Senate committee in November 1975, he was asked if anybody in the bureau had ever raised the issue of the constitutionality or legal authority of COINTELPRO programs. “No,” Moore replied, “we never gave it a thought.” Similarly, Mark Felt, assistant director of the Bureau’s Inspection Division, acknowledged to the committee in February 1976 that his job was to “determine whether the program was being pursued effectively as opposed to whether it was proper … There was no instruction in the Inspector’s manual that the Inspector should be on the alert to see that constitutional values are being protected.”44‡

  As noted, the FBI was not the only government agency investigating domestic “subversives” during this period. In all, more than a dozen other federal agencies, including the CIA, Army Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, were engaged in widespread domestic intelligence work under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and they all shared information.

  The CIA had at least four programs going, including the aforementioned mail-opening operation. The largest CIA program was Operation CHAOS, instituted by LBJ in 1967, and later continued by Nixon. The program was aimed at determining the extent of foreign involvement in the antiwar movement, and despite several reports that such influence was negligible, both presidents continued to ask for the operation’s expansion. In its assessment of the program, the Rockefeller Commission Report concluded that parts of Operation CHAOS were illegal, and the Senate investigating committee found that a major purpose of CHAOS was to support the FBI’s internal security work.

  Army Intelligence compiled files on some hundred thousand Americans and virtually every group working for peaceful change in America. The investigations focused on all the usual suspects on the left, but also included right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom, as well as such middle-of-the-road groups as the Urban League, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and Business Executives to End the War in Vietnam. The quality of this intelligence was on a par with the FBI’s; in a 1972 report titled Army Surveillance of Civilians, the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights found that the files were notable only for “their utter uselessness … [T]he Army … was merely wasting time, money and manpower, and infringing on the rights of the citizens it was supposed to be safeguarding.”45 The NSA’s Project MINARET, begun in 1967, compiled “watch lists” of names, ranging “from members of radical political groups, to celebrities, to ordinary citizens involved in protests against their Government.”46

  In March 1970, in order to coordinate all the intelligence efforts and facilitate better surveillance of the dissident movements sweeping the country, the presidential assistant Tom Huston suggested that Nixon order an overarching review of intelligence gathering. The president agreed, and on June 5 he convened a White House meeting of top intelligence officials, where he appointed a committee to improve the quality of intelligence, particularly vis-à-vis the New Left. In less than three weeks, the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc)—consisting of Hoover; the CIA’s director, Richard Helms; the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Donald V. Bennett; and the NSA’s director, Vice Admiral Noel Gayler—produced a report dealing with how to close intelligence gaps and enhance coordination among the intelligence agencies. What the report kept secret, however, were what the Senate investigating committee called “the improper domestic activities of the CIA and FBI,” including the mail-opening program, Operation CHAOS, and various COINTELPROs that were unknown outside the bureau.47

  Huston summarized the report and recommended that Nixon implement the recommendations for relaxing the restrictions on domestic intelligence collection. These included giving intelligence and counterintelligence agents the authority to “(1) monitor the international communications of U.S. citizens; (2) intensify the electronic surveillance of domestic dissenters and selected establishments; (3) read the international mail of American citizens; (4) break into specified establishments and into homes of domestic dissenters; and, (5) intensify the surveillance of American college students.”48

  On July 14, Nixon approved the proposals, a decision that later provided the basis for Article II of the House of Representatives’ impeachment charges against him. On July 23, Huston wrote to Hoover, Helms, Bennett, and Gayler, giving them the green light to remove the indicated restrictions on intelligence gathering. Four days later, however, Nixon had a change of mind and retracted his approval.

  Despite Nixon’s rescinding his endorsement of the Huston Plan, as it has come to be known, the intelligence agencies implemented several of its provisions on their own, including the expansion of the NSA’s watch lists and the CIA’s mail-opening and CHAOS operations. The FBI lowered its minimum age for informers to eighteen, in order to increase its surveillance activities on college campuses. The agencies also formed a permanent interagency committee, as suggested in the Huston Plan.

  The Huston Plan was not an aberration. The 1970s Senate investigating committee found that, “placed in perspective, the Huston Plan must be viewed as but a single example of a continuous effort by counterintelligence specialists to expand collection capabilities at home and abroad often without the knowledge or approval of the President or the Attorney General, and certainly without the knowledge of Congress or the people.” The committee also discovered that the intelligence agencies hid illegal programs from one another. At its most profound level, “the Huston Plan episode is a story of lawlessness and impropriety at the highest levels of government.”49

  After Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974, the syndicated Washington columnist Joseph Kraft, who had been the subject of an intense eavesdropping effort beginning in 1969—including occasions when he was out of the country—looked back on the Nixon years and reflected, “We came a hell of a lot closer to a police state than I thought possible.”50

  The series of events that reversed the movement toward such a state began on March 8, 1971. As most of America watched the heavy-weight title fight between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali that evening, three or four individuals broke into the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI and made off with more than a thousand documents from the office’s unlocked file cabinets. The raiders were part of a twenty-person team that called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.§

  After waiting two weeks, during which time the mystery of the break-in deepened, the group began mailing small batches of select documents to legislators and reporters, and also sent some papers to the individual groups that were the subject of them. The Washington Post and The New York Times began to cover the story and even publish some of the papers, rejecting Attorney General John Mitchell’s argument that divulging the documents “could endanger the lives or cause other serious harm to persons engaged in investigative activit
ies on behalf of the United States.”51 The slow release of the purloined papers guaranteed maximum exposure, as the tactic kept the story in the news for months.

  Even before the NBC reporter Carl Stern noticed the cryptic word “COINTELPRO” at the top of a relatively unimportant memo on the New Left and began investigating its meaning, the dissemination of the Media documents was a devastating blow to the credibility of the FBI. They revealed the bureau to be a secret police force that had its tentacles around every aspect of American life. As Mark Felt later wrote, the Media break-in was “a watershed event. The selective and sustained publication of the stolen documents changed the FBI’s image, possibly forever in the minds of many Americans.”52

  As a result of the disclosures made by the documents stolen in the Media break-in and the subsequent furor, Hoover ordered the end of all existing COINTELPROs on April 28. But the memo to the SACs also left the door open for future COINTELPRO-like operations by saying, “In exceptional instances where counterintelligence action is warranted, it will be considered on a highly selective individual basis with tight procedures to insure absolute security.”53 In fact, as late as July 1976, The New York Times reported that FBI agents had been involved in assaults, wiretapping, and the burning of automobiles as they carried out security investigations in the preceding five years. Agents beat up antiwar leaders to intimidate them and kidnapped at least one individual for the same reason. The bureau also conducted COINTELPRO-like operations against the women’s movement and the American Indian Movement, and any number of agents continued to engage in COINTELPRO-like actions on their own, with or without official bureau approval. “The full extent,” observes Nancy Chang in Silencing Political Dissent, “to which COINTELPRO shifted the trajectory of political life in the United States will never be known.”54

  With the Media break-in, Hoover and the bureau came under heavy fire. On the floor of the House of Representatives on March 31, Majority Leader Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana, demanded that Hoover resign. At the beginning of April, Life featured a cover story suggesting that his forty-seven-year reign as “Emperor of the FBI” should end. Days later, in the Dow Jones weekly, The National Observer, a story titled “The Life and Times of a 76-Year-Old Cop” described how, while “pursuing a hot case, Mr. Hoover was seen holding onto the corridor wall for strength.” Enraged, Hoover unsuccessfully tried to get the author of the story, Nina Totenberg, fired. In early May, a Newsweek cover story, “Hoover’s FBI: Time for a Change?” cited a Gallup poll in which 51 percent of people interviewed believed it was time for the director to retire.55

  At seventy-six, Hoover was six years past the mandatory retirement age for government employees, and clearly in decline. His already tenuous hold on reality was slipping even further. William Sullivan, who was once considered his heir apparent, and whose falling-out with Hoover has been documented in detail, later remarked that Hoover had seemed “stark, raving mad” and “not of sound mind” from 1969 on. “He became extremely erratic,” recalled Sullivan. “If you crossed him, he’d go into a rage.”56

  At the beginning of 1972, Sullivan spoke publicly for the first time since having been forced into retirement by Hoover three months earlier, following an exchange of letters in which Sullivan had had the audacity to criticize the director and provide him with an unsolicited assessment of the bureau’s shortcomings. Now, on January 10, in accepting a job with an insurance investigative agency, Sullivan said he was pleased to be “associated with a new enterprise which does not suffer from fossilized bureaucratic traditions and obsolete policies.”57

  The following month, Win magazine, a publication of the War Resisters League, printed a nearly complete collection of the documents stolen in the Media break-in.

  On May 1, Jack Anderson’s syndicated column, which appeared in about a thousand newspapers, contained a scorching attack on Hoover and the FBI. Hoover hated Anderson, having referred to him on various occasions as a “flea ridden dog,” an “odious garbage collector,” “lower than dog shit,” and “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.”58

  In the piece, Anderson ripped the director for indulging his prurient interest in innocent people’s private lives while neglecting the job of fighting crime. “FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, the old curmudgeon of law enforcement,” wrote Anderson, “fiercely resisted a White House suggestion that he spare a few hundred agents to crack down on drug abuses. But he can spare agents to snoop into the sex habits, business affairs and political pursuits of individuals who aren’t even remotely involved in illegal activity.” Anderson named Ralph Abernathy, Muhammad Ali, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Joe Louis, and Joe Namath as being among the “diverse figures” whose files contained “titillating tidbits.” “Hoover … appears to have a hang-up on sex. His gumshoes go out of their way to find out who’s sleeping with whom in Washington and Hollywood.” The column also stated that “no American who speaks his mind is altogether safe from the all-seeing FBI” and observed, “The FBI keeps a particularly hostile eye on newsmen who are critical of government policies,” citing the “indefatigable muckraker I. F. Stone” as an example. Noting that “it’s no secret that the FBI hounded the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the apostle of racial brotherhood and nonviolent protest,” Anderson further revealed “Now the FBI is watching his widow, Coretta King.”59 All in all, it was as scathing a public attack as had ever been leveled at Hoover.

  The following morning, the director was found dead at his home. The official cause of death was high blood pressure, and some in the bureau said it was Anderson’s May Day column that killed him. Hoover was eight days shy of his forty-eighth anniversary as head of the FBI.

  The series of events that reversed the drift toward authoritarianism in America gained added momentum during the Watergate scandal, which was triggered by the arrest of five men for breaking and entering Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972. The scandal brought down Nixon’s presidency, revealing the methods and tactics used by the administration against the Democratic Party—the same types of methods and tactics employed by the FBI in its COINTELPRO operations—and leading to Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974.

  By then, the NBC reporter Carl Stern had managed, after repeated refusals by the Justice Department, to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act several of the FBI’s COINTELPRO documents, including the May 1968 memo authorizing COINTELPRO–New Left and the April 1971 communication canceling all existing COINTELPROs. Additional requests for COINTELPRO documents came pouring in from a number of sources, including other journalists, the Senate committee investigating Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

  The growing furor prompted Attorney General William Saxbe to form an internal Justice Department committee to investigate COINTELPRO operations. The committee’s report, issued in November 1974, was essentially a whitewash that attempted to justify the programs by placing them in “the context and climate” in which they had been established. The report disingenuously insisted that while some COINTELPRO activities involved “isolated instances of practices that can only be considered abhorrent in a free society, … these improper activities were not the[ir] purpose or indeed even the[ir] major characteristic.”60

  The following month, The New York Times published a front-page story by Seymour Hersh that blew open the CIA’s extensive, illegal involvement in domestic surveillance of the antiwar movement and other dissident groups, going back to the 1950s. Hersh’s piece listed dozens of illegal actions, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the interception of mail.

  On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted to establish the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by the Idaho Democrat Frank Church. Assisted by a 150-member support staff, the panel of six Democrats and five Republicans met for nine months, issuing fourteen reports in 1975 and 1976 that consisted of over fifty thousand pages, the bulk of which has been made p
ublic. The reports documented the full story of the COINTELPRO operations, as well as offering a wide-ranging account of the activities of the CIA and other civilian and military intelligence agencies going back decades, all of which pointed to the propensity of intelligence operatives to regard themselves as above the law.

  The Church Committee summarized its findings as follows:

  Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone “bugs,” surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous—and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations—have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths …