COINTELPRO: The Legacy

Initiated this week in 1956 via J. Edgar Hoover deputy Alan Belmont, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) began as a domestic political dirty tricks operation aimed at American communists but in time expanded to target key civil rights leaders and groups, as well as the KKK and a white supremacist political party. Its tactics are still in use today.

When FBI assistant director Alan Belmont testified before the Warren Commission a year after President Kennedy's assassination, he expressed a view about government power and individual rights that seemingly struck all the right notes.

"We have been asked many times why we don't pick up and jail all Communists," Belmont told the Commission. "The very people who ask those questions don't realize that if action, unrestrained action, is taken against a particular group of people, a precedent is set which can be seized on in the future by power‐hungry or unscrupulous authorities as a precedent, and which inevitably will gnaw away at this free society we have, and sooner or later will be applied to the very individuals who are seeking this action.

In reality, for over eight years Belmont and other FBI officials at its Washington, D.C. headquarters and in its dozens of field office across the country had been engaged in a secret program designed to undermine, if not destroy, individuals and groups deemed a threat to the government. Those individuals and groups only crime was in challenging the prevailing political, economic, or social paradigms of the day. The so-called Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, was first proposed by Belmont in an August 28, 1956, memo to Leland V. Boardman and was aimed at the Communist Party-USA (CP USA).

The various public investigations of the CP USA by the Justice Department and the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) in the 1950s had damaged the organization from the outside, and the enactment in 1954 of the Communist Control Act had banned the party outright--an ominous first in American history. But Belmont was concerned that further external attacks by the federal government would only unite the various CP USA factions against the common enemy.

Instead, Belmont proposed a new program dedicated to "feeding and fostering from within the internal fight currently raging" among CP USA leaders and factions. Informants within the CP USA and the rival Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were directed to "embark on a disruptive program within their own clubs, sections, districts, or even on a national level."

It was a secret, and unconstitutional, assault on the First Amendment protected activities of the persons and entities involved, a state-sponsored form of "divide and conquer" aimed not at the Soviet Union, but a segment of the far left public in America.

 The country would subsequently learn through the efforts of citizen whistleblowers and later the Church Committee, of the COINTELPRO activities targeting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Black Panthers. Interestingly, the Bureau, under pressure from the Johnson administration, would undertake COINTELPRO actions against the Ku Klux Klan and the National States Rights Party as well.

These and related FBI actions came to light only after Hoover's death in 1972, and during the Ford and Carter administrations, the Bureau was generally far more circumspect in its domestic intelligence and surveillance activities than it had been in the four decades prior.

But Ronald Reagan's ascendance to the presidency in 1981 resulted in a loosening of many of the DoJ-imposed restraints on FBI domestic activities that could potentially violate the constitutional rights of Americans. As a result, opponents of Reagan's policies in Central America became the subject of FBI investigation, absent any criminal predicate. The subsequent Senate investigation of the FBI's targeting of the Committee In Solidarity With the People Of El Salvador (CISPES) became the first large scale, post-Hoover era domestic surveillance and investigative scandal for the Bureau. It would not be the last.

Indeed, it was just over a year ago that the Colorado chapter of the ACLU, along with the law firm of Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP, filed suit in federal court against the FBI and the Colorado Springs city government for engaging in COINTELPRO-style tactics against local housing rights activists, including informant penetration and targeting of activists associated with the Chinook Center, the civil society organization at the center of the case. .

The episode has received coverage in The Intercept in the past but it did not report on the suit being dismissed earlier this year on the basis of the infamous court-created doctrine of "qualified immunity" (QI), a concept that provides a nearly impenetrable legal shield for police even in situations were officers may have or clearly did violate the law in the performance of their duties.

District Judge S. Kato Crews granted all of the defendant officers QI on the basis that the warrants they obtained for digital information and device searches in connection with an alleged assault on an officer by an activist were both narrow in scope and approved by a judge. 

Crews also dismissed officer statements of bias against the activists and their organizations as irrelevant to the question of whether or not the search and seizure operations were lawful. The Chinook Center case is currently on appeal at the 10th Circuit.

It's worth noting that bias against an earlier generation of politically disfavored civil society groups was the very genesis of and rationale for the original COINTELPRO endeavor, a fact that was clearly ignored by Judge Crews. Whether the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals will pay that dark history any mind remains to be seen. 

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