-Caveat Lector-
http://mediafilter.org/MFF/USDCO.PsyWar.html
US Domestic Covert Operations
>From the Archive: WAR AT HOME
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Gary Lee)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 14:21:22 GMT
Organization: The Gloons of Tharf
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy
/** pn.publiceye: 23.5 **/ ** Written 7:12 pm Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in
cdp:pn.publiceye **
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rich Winkel)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: From the Archive: WAR AT HOME (4/5)
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Date: 11 Mar 1995 19:09:20 GMT
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Harassment Through
Psychological Warfare
While boring from within, the FBI and police also attack dissident movements
from the outside. They openly mount propaganda campaigns through public
addresses, news releases, books, pamphlets, magazine articles, radio, and
television. They also use covert deception and manipulation. Documented
tactics of this kind include:
False Media Stories: COINTELPRO documents expose frequent collusion between
news media personnel and the FBI to publish false and distorted material at
the Bureau's behest. The FBI routinely leaked derogatory information to its
collaborators in the news media. It also created newspaper and magazine
articles and television "documentaries" which the media knowingly or
unknowingly carried as their own. Copies were sent anonymously or under bogus
letterhead to activists' financial backers, employers, business associates,
families, neighbors, church officials, school administrators, landlords, and
whomever else might cause them trouble.
One FBI media fabrication claimed that Jean Seberg, a white film star active
in anti-racist causes, was pregnant by a prominent Black leader. The Bureau
leaked the story anonymously to columnist Joyce Haber and also had it passed
to her by a "friendly" source in the Los Angeles Times editorial staff. The
item appeared without attribution in Haber's nationally syndicated column of
May 19, 1970. Seberg's husband has sued the FBI as responsible for her
resulting stillbirth, nervous breakdown, and suicide.
Bogus Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Other Publications: COINTELPRO documents show
that the FBI routinely put out phony leaflets, posters, pamphlets,
newspapers, and other publications in the name of movement groups. The
purpose was to discredit the groups and turn them against one another.
FBI cartoon leaflets were used to divide and disrupt the main national
anti-war coalition of the late 1960s. Similar fliers were circulated in 1968
and 1969 in the name of the Black Panthers and the United Slaves (US), a
rival Black nationalist group based in Southern California. The phony
Panther/US leaflets, together with other covert operations, were credited
with subverting a fragile truce between the two groups and igniting an
explosion of internecine violence that left four Panthers dead, many more
wounded, and a once-flourishing regional Black movement decimated.
Another major COINTELPRO operation involved a children's coloring book which
the Black Panther Party had rejected as anti-white and gratuitously violent.
The FBI revised the coloring book to make it even more offensive. Its field
offices then distributed thousands of copies anonymously or under phony
organizational letterheads. Many backers of the Party's program of free
breakfasts for children withdrew their support after the FBI conned them into
believing that the bogus coloring book was being used in the program.
Forged Correspondence: Former employees have confirmed that the FBI has the
capacity to produce state-of-the-art forgery. This capacity was used under
COINTELPRO to create snitch jackets and bogus communications that exacerbated
differences among activists and disrupted their work.
One such forgery intimidated civil rights worker Muhammed Kenyatta (Donald
Jackson), causing him to abandon promising projects in Jackson, Mississippi.
Kenyatta had foundation grants to form Black economic cooperatives and open a
"Black and Proud School" for dropouts. He was also a student organizer at
nearby Tougaloo College. In the winter of 1969, after an extended campaign of
FBI and police harassment, Kenyatta received a letter, purportedly from the
Tougaloo College Defense Committee, which "directed" that he cease his
political activities immediately. If he did not "heed our diplomatic and
well-thought-out warning," the committee would consider taking measures
"which would have a more direct effect and which would not be as cordial as
this note." Kenyatta and his wife left. Only years later did they learn it
was not Tougaloo students, but FBI covert operators who had driven them out.
Later in 1969, FBI agents fabricated a letter to the mainly white organizers
of a proposed Washington, D.C. anti-war rally demanding that they pay the
local Black community a $20,000 "security bond." This attempted extortion was
composed in the name of the local Black United Front (BUF) and signed with
the forged signature of its leader. FBI informers inside the BUF then tried
to get the group to back such a demand, and Bureau contacts in the media made
sure the story received wide publicity.
The Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered a series of FBI letters sent to
top Panther leaders throughout 1970 in the name of Connie Mathews, an
intermediary between the Black Panther Party's national office and Panther
leader Eldridge Cleaver, in exile in Algeria. These exquisite forgeries were
prepared on pilfered stationery in Panther vernacular expertly simulated by
the FBI's Washington, D.C. laboratory. Each was forwarded to an FBI Legal
Attache at a U.S. Embassy in a foreign country that Mathews was due to travel
through and then posted at just the right time "in such a manner that it
cannot be traced to the Bureau." The FBI enhanced the eerie authenticity of
these fabrications by lacing them with esoteric personal tidbits culled from
electronic surveillance of Panther homes and offices. Combined with other
forgeries, anonymous letters and phone calls, and the covert intervention of
FBI and police infiltrators, the Mathews correspondence succeeded in
inflaming intra-party mistrust and rivalry until it erupted into the bitter
public split that shattered the organization in the winter of 1971.
Anonymous Letters and Telephone Calls: During the 1960s, activists received a
steady flow of anonymous letters and phone calls which turn out to have been
from the FBI. Some were unsigned, while others bore bogus names or purported
to come from unidentified activists in phony or actual organizations.
Many of these bogus communications promoted racial divisions and fears, often
by exploiting and exacerbating tensions between Jewish and Black activists.
One such FBI-concocted letter went to SDS members who had joined Black
students protesting New York University's discharge of a Black teacher in
1969. The supposed author, an unnamed "SDS member," urged whites to break
ranks and abandon the Black students because of alleged anti-Semitic slurs by
the fired teacher and his supporters.
Other anonymous letters and phone calls falsely accused movement leaders of
collaboration with the authorities, corruption, or sexual affairs with other
activists' mates. The letter on the next page was used to provoke "a lasting
distrust" between a Black civil rights leader and his wife. Its FBI authors
hoped that his "concern over what to do about it" would "detract from his
time spent in the plots and plans of his organization." As in the Seberg
incident, inter-racial sex was a persistent theme. The husband of one white
woman active in civil rights and anti-war work filed for divorce soon after
receiving the FBI-authored letter reproduced on page 50.
Still other anonymous FBI communications were designed to intimidate
dissidents, disrupt coalitions, and provoke violence. Calls to Stokely
Carmichael's mother warning of a fictitious Black Panther murder plot drove
him to leave the country in September 1968. Similar anonymous FBI telephone
threats to SNCC leader James Forman were instrumental in thwarting efforts to
bring the two groups together.
The Chicago FBI made effective use of anonymous letters to sabotage the
Panthers efforts to build alliances with previously apolitical Black street
gangs. The most extensive of these operations involved the Black P. Stone
Nation, or "Blackstone Rangers," a powerful confederation of several thousand
local Black youth. Early in 1969, as FBI and police infiltrators in the
Rangers spread rumors of an impending Panther attack, the Bureau sent Ranger
chief Jeff Fort an incendiary note signed "a black brother you don't know."
Fort's supposed friend warned that "The brothers that run the Panthers blame
you for blocking their thing and there's supposed to be a hit out for you."
Another FBI-concocted anonymous "black man" then informed Chicago Panther
leader Fred Hampton of a Ranger plot "to get you out of the way." These
fabrications squelched promising talks between the two groups and enabled
Chicago Panther security chief William O'Neal, an FBI-paid provocateur, to
instigate a series of armed confrontations from which the Panthers barely
managed to escape without serious casualties.
Pressure Through Employers, Landlords, and Others: FBI records reveal
repeated maneuvers to generate pressure on dissidents from their parents,
children, spouses, landlords, employers, college administrators, church
superiors, welfare agencies, credit bureaus, and the like. Anonymous letters
and telephone calls were often used to this end. Confidential official
communications were effective in bringing to bear the Bureau's immense power
and authority.
Agents' reports indicate that such FBI intervention denied Martin Luther
King, Jr., and other 1960s activists any number of foundation grants and
public speaking engagements. It also deprived alternative newspapers of their
printers, suppliers, and distributors and cost them crucial advertising
revenues when major record companies were persuaded to take their business
elsewhere. Similar government manipulation may underlie steps recently taken
by some insurance companies to cancel policies held by churches giving
sanctuary to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala.
Tampering With Mail and Telephone Service: The FBI and CIA routinely used
mail covers (the recording of names and addresses) and electronic
surveillance in order to spy on 1960s movements. The CIA alone admitted to
photographing the outside of 2.7 million pieces of first-class mail during
the 1960s and to opening almost 215,000. Government agencies also tampered
with mail, altering, delaying, or "disappearing" it. Activists were quick to
blame one another, and infiltrators easily exploited the situation to
exacerbate their tensions.
Dissidents' telephone communications often were similarly obstructed. The SDS
Regional Office in Washington, D.C., for instance, mysteriously lost its
phone service the week preceding virtually every national anti-war
demonstration in the late 1960s.
Disinformation to Prevent or Disrupt Movement Meetings and Activities: A
favorite COINTELPRO tactic uncovered by Senate investigators was to advertise
a non-existent political event, or to misinform people of the time and place
of an actual one. They reported a variety of disruptive FBI "dirty tricks"
designed to cast blame on the organizers of movement events.
In one "disinformation" case, the [FBI's] Chicago Field Office duplicated
blank forms prepared by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in
Vietnam ("NMC") soliciting housing for demonstrators at the Democratic
National Convention. Chicago filled out 217 of these forms with fictitious
names and addresses and sent them to the NMC, which provided them to
demonstrators who made "long and useless journeys to locate these addresses."
The NMC then decided to discard all replies received on the housing forms
rather than have out-of-town demonstrators try to locate nonexistent
addresses. (The same program was carried out when the Washington Mobilization
Committee distributed housing forms for demonstrators coming to Washington
for the 1969 Presidential inaugural ceremonies.)
In another case, during the demonstrations accompanying inauguration
ceremonies, the Washington Field Office discovered that NMC marshals were
using walkie-talkies to coordinate their movements and activities. WFO used
the same citizen band to supply the marshals with misinformation and,
pretending to be an NMC unit, countermanded NMC orders.
In a third case, a [Bureau] midwest field office disrupted arrangements for
state university students to attend the 1969 inaugural demonstrations by
making a series of anonymous telephone calls to the transportation company.
The calls were designed to confuse both the transportation company and the
SDS leaders as to the cost of transportation and the time and place for
leaving and returning. This office also placed confusing leaflets around the
campus to show different times and places for demonstration-planning
meetings, as well as conflicting times and dates for traveling to Washington.
** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **
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