From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program surveilled, infiltrated, discredited, and disrupted domestic political organizations. Under Director J. Edgar Hoover and assistant director William C. Sullivan, agents targeted the Communist Party USA, antiwar organizers, feminist and student groups, civil-rights and Black Power organizations, the American Indian Movement, labor and independence movements, and even nonviolent groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Tactics included wiretaps, informants, forged documents, anonymous harassment, IRS audits, media smears, witness intimidation, and efforts to provoke internal conflict. In 1967, the FBI expanded its Black Nationalist program to 23 field offices and explicitly sought to prevent coalitions and the emergence of a unifying leader.
The program became public after the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, and supplied stolen files to news organizations. The Senate Church Committee’s 1976 investigation found that intelligence agencies violated statutory limits and First Amendment rights, describing COINTELPRO as a “sophisticated vigilante operation.” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had authorized limited wiretapping of King in 1963, while later FBI actions sought to discredit him. Congress and federal courts condemned the conduct; the Socialist Workers Party won a landmark settlement against the FBI in 1988. The FBI ended centralized COINTELPRO in 1971, though the Church Committee warned that similar abuses could continue under ordinary investigations.
