From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: WAR AT HOME: POLITICAL REPRESSION IN THE US (4/8)
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 08:15:22 GMT

/** pn.publiceye: 23.13 **/
** Written  7:15 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **

Domestic Covert Action Has Become a Permanent Feature of U.S. Government

So long as conservative Republicans remain in power, there is no reason
to expect this threat to subside.  But what if liberal Democrats were in
control?  Recent U.S. history indicates that so far as covert operations
are concerned, the difference would be marginal at best.

The record of the past 50 years reveals a pattern of continuous domestic
covert action.  Its use has been documented in each of the last nine
administrations, Democratic as well as Republican.  FBI testimony shows
"COINTELPRO tactics" already in full swing during the presidencies of
Democrats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.[f-76> COINTELPRO
itself, while initiated under Eisenhower, grew from one program to six
under the Democratic administrations of Kennedy and Johnson.  It
flourished when an outspoken liberal, Ramsey Clark, was Attorney General
(1966-1968).  After COINTELPRO was exposed, similar programs continued
under other names during the Carter years as well as under Nixon, Ford,
and Reagan.  They have outlived J. Edgar Hoover and remained in place
under all of his successors.

Covert police methods have been used against progressive social
movements since the founding of the country.  Undercover operatives
disrupted the historic efforts of rebel slaves and Native American,
Mexican, and Puerto Rican resistance.  Dissident journalists, insurgent
workers, and rebellious farmers were arrested on false charges and
jailed or hung after rigged trials.[f-77>

Through most of U.S. history, progressive activists faced the blatant
brutality of hired thugs and right-wing vigilantes backed by government
troops.  As the country grew more urban and industrial, newly formed
municipal police forces came to play a greater role.  By the turn of
this century, local police departments were running massive anti-union
operations in collaboration with the Pinkertons and other private
detective agencies.[f-78>

With World War I and the increasing national integration of the U.S.
political economy, the federal government began to take more
responsibility for control of domestic dissent.  From 1917 on, the
Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI,
coordinated its work closely with a 250,000 member right-wing vigilante
group, the American Protective League.  Together they mounted nationwide
raids, arrests, and prosecutions which jailed thousands of draft
resisters and labor activists and destroyed the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW, or "Wobblies").[f-79> Following the Russian Revolution,
the Bureau helped foment the Red Scare of 1919-20.  J. Edgar Hoover took
personal responsibility for deporting "Red Emma" Goldman and directing
the Palmer Raids in which thousands of progressive immigrants were
rounded up, jailed, and brutalized, and hundreds were deported.[f-80>

Stung by public criticism of these raids, Hoover switched to more covert
methods in the early 1920s.  His men infiltrated the ranks of striking
railway workers and penetrated the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee to
steal funds raised to support the indicted anarchists.[f-81> In an
operation that prefigured COINTELPRO, Hoover masterminded the
destruction of the main Black movement of the post-World War I period,
Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).  His
agents penetrated the multi-million member UNIA and set up the federal
mail fraud conviction that discredited its charismatic leader, leading
to Garvey's deportation and the group's collapse.[f-82>

Through the rest of the 1920s, the Bureau kept a low profile as domestic
insurgency subsided.  In the early years of the Depression, primary
responsibility for policing dissent remained in the hands of local law
enforcement agencies, private detectives, and right-wing groups such as
the American Legion.  Meanwhile, Hoover and the FBI rose to national
prominence by leading a widely heralded "War on Crime."  Their capture
of John Dillinger and other notorious desperados made headlines across
the country.  The Bureau was glorified in Hollywood films and an
immensely popular radio series.  The media portrayed the FBI as
invincible and proclaimed J. Edgar Hoover "Public Hero Number
One."[f-83>

This new stature positioned the Bureau to regain its status as the
nation's political police.  In 1936, it won secret authorization to once
again target "subversive activities in the United States."  In a memo to
his subordinates, Hoover attributed this coup to confidential
"information" he had presented to President Roosevelt showing that "the
Communists...practically controlled" at least one key industrial union
and were moving to "get control of" others.[f-84>

The FBI vastly expanded its operations during World War II and acquired
new covert technology, including the capacity for expert forgery.  In
the aftermath of the war, as the United States began to exercise
hegemonic world power and to identify the Soviet Union as its main
enemy, the Bureau firmly established its political role as an accepted
institutional reality.  The Senate Intelligence Committee later found
that it was in this period, well before the start of COINTELPRO, that
"the domestic intelligence programs of the FBI...became permanent
features of government."[f-85>

The Committee attributes the Bureau's ability to consolidate political
police powers to the "Cold War fears" which swept the country during the
late 1940s and the 1950s, but it skips over the Bureau's central role in
fomenting those fears.  FBI Director Hoover openly threw his enormous
public prestige behind the postwar witchhunts mounted by the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Joseph McCarthy's Senate
Internal Security Sub-Committee.  Directed by law to investigate the
loyalty of federal employees, the FBI secretly passed confidential raw
files to its congressional allies, especially McCarthy and the rising
young star of HUAC, Richard Nixon.[f-86>

Above all, Hoover and his men set up and orchestrated the pivotal spy
trials that made the witchhunts credible.

In 1950, former high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss,
President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was found
guilty of perjury for denying that he had copied confidential government
papers for the Soviet Union in the late 1930s.  In 1951, U.S. communists
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell were convicted, and the
Rosenbergs executed, for allegedly passing to the Soviet Union "atomic
secrets" that were already general scientific knowledge.  In each case,
the star witness was an informer whose initial contradictory accounts
were meshed into semi-coherent testimony only after months of careful
FBI coaching.  In each, the supposedly incorruptible FBI vouched for the
authenticity of key documentary evidence which activists later learned
could easily have been forged.[f-87>

Subsequent investigation and analysis suggest that both cases may well
have been fabricated.  At the time, however, their impact was
devastating.  By appearing to validate the witchhunts, they paved the
way for the purge of an entire generation of radicals from U.S.
political and cultural life.

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **

/** pn.publiceye: 23.14 **/
** Written  7:16 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **

FBI Actions Aimed at Destroying Dissent

In this atmosphere of anti-communist hysteria, as in the preceding years
of wartime fear of espionage, the FBI was free to move against a broad
range of domestic political movements.  It took an occasional swipe at
the right wing and managed to arrest a few outright Nazi saboteurs.  As
always, however, the brunt of its attack was directed against those who
sought progressive social change.

The Senate Intelligence Committee documented long-standing,
pre-COINTELPRO FBI infiltration of industrial unions, major Black
organizations (including the NAACP and the Nation of Islam), the
unemployed movement, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, and at least
one group of reform Democrats (the Independent Voters of
Illinois).[f-88> Documents later obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act reveal FBI undercover operations in the late 1940s
against the third party presidential candidacy of former Vice President
Henry Wallace, the pro-Wallace American Labor Party (ALP), and U.S.
Congressman Vito Marcantonio (D/ALP-NY).[f-89> Other Bureau memoranda
show the collaboration of Ronald Reagan, "Confidential Informant T-10,"
in FBI maneuvers to oust leftists from the Screen Actors Guild and the
Hollywood film industry.[f-90> Bureau targets during the late 1940s and
early 1950s also included the National Lawyers Guild and the American
Friends Service Committee, as well as the Mattachine Society, the
Daughters of Bilitis, and other early gay and lesbian rights
groups.[f-91>

>From the outset, these groups faced far more than mere surveillance.
>From 1936-56, the FBI took advantage of wartime fears and postwar
hysteria to slip into place the domestic covert operations later
consolidated under COINTELPRO.  Ex-agents' report that activists' homes
and offices were routinely burglarized during these years.[f-92> As
early as 1939, the Bureau began to compile a secret "Security Index"
listing subversives to be detained in the event of a "national
emergency."[f-93> William Sullivan, former head of the FBI Intelligence
Division, testified that, "We were engaged in COINTELPRO tactics, to
divide, confuse, weaken, in diverse ways, an organization.  We were
engaged in that when I entered the Bureau in 1941."[f-94> The Senate
Intelligence Committee found that by 1946 the Bureau had a "policy" of
preparing and disseminating "propaganda" to "discredit" its
targets.[f-95>

Thus, COINTELPRO was not a radical departure.  It merely centralized and
intensified long-standing FBI policy and practice.  The 1956 directive
setting up the new program took as its starting point the historic
record of Bureau work "to foster factionalism, bring the Communist Party
and its leaders into disrepute before the American public, and cause
confusion and dissatisfaction among rank-and-file members."  It called
for a better coordinated, more focused, "all-out disruptive attack" to
make up for new judicial restrictions on political prosecutions and to
eliminate once and for all a U.S. left already in disarray.[f-96>

Conceived as a mid-1950s <coup de grace> against a failing Old Left,
COINTELPRO became the cutting edge of the Bureau's attack on the rising
struggles of the 1960s.  It provided the framework for operations
against the resurgent Black movement whose first audible rumblings, in
the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, may explain the urgency of the
Bureau's drive to do away with what remained of an organized radical
presence in the United States.  It also formed the FBI's primary
response to the student and anti-war protests which swept the country
during the 1960s.

COINTELPRO grew increasingly important as the traditional modes of
repression failed.  An undaunted new generation of activists made a
laughing stock of HUAC and turned criminal trials into political forums.
Although brute force ultimately did contribute to their demise, for most
of the decade police beatings served only to stiffen resistance and to
help win over the millions who watched on television.

Reviewing the Bureau's experience with domestic covert action as of
1964, J. Edgar Hoover concluded that:

"These ideas will not be increased in number or improved upon from the
standpoint of accomplishments merely through the institution of a
program such as COINTELPRO which is given another name, and which, in
fact, only encompasses everything that has been done in the past or will
be done in the future."[f-97>

True to his words, Hoover did continue domestic covert action under
"another name" when he eventually had to shut down COINTELPRO.  Fearing
public exposure, the FBI reverted to the less centralized, more secure
procedures of the previous era, but the basic approach persisted.

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **

/** pn.publiceye: 23.15 **/
** Written  7:17 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **

The National Security State

Over the past 50 years, clandestine work has become an essential part of
the Bureau's mode of operation.  Many of its senior agents are now
specialists whose professional advancement requires that the government
continue to rely on covert action.  A similar group of "old hands" has
emerged from the covert operations that the United States and its
European allies developed in an effort to maintain control of their
colonies and neo-colonies in countries such as Algeria, the Congo,
India, Northern Ireland, Chile, and Vietnam.  With Hoover's death and
Webster's ascendancy at the FBI and then the CIA, the two sets of spies
came gradually to coordinate and integrate their work.

The combined experience of these veteran covert operatives has given
rise to a growing literature and theory of counter-insurgency.  Their
widely circulated texts and manuals restate the basic precepts of
COINTELPRO and pound home the necessity for continuous covert
operations.  The leading treatise, <Low-Intensity Operations:
Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping,> by Frank Kitson, British
commander in Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland, insists that
infiltration and "psychological operations" be mounted against dissident
groups in "normal times," before any mass movement can develop.[f-98>

Careerism, old boy networks, theories, and treatises help to perpetuate
domestic covert action.  The persistence of such operations can be fully
explained, however, only in terms of their value to economic and
political elites.  Any social order based on inequality of wealth and
power depends, to some degree, on political repression to control the
disadvantaged majority.  Modern U.S. elites have particular need for
covert measures because the war at home is primarily the responsibility
of the federal government, a government which is under intense pressure
to appear to be democratic.

The federal government has become the main arm of domestic repression
through a series of historic developments.  First, internal political
conflict has come to focus increasingly on issues of public policy.
Second, business and industry, which once played a major role, now rely
on the public sector for unprofitable support services--from post
offices, airports, roads, and job training to the pacification of
workers and markets at home and abroad.  They are no longer willing to
maintain a large-scale in-house apparatus for repressing societal
political dissent or to purchase such services from private agencies.
Finally, state and local governments lack the funds and personnel to
cope with countrywide dissident movements.  Federal coordination and
direction is demanded by the national integration of the U.S. economy
and culture, with its geographically mobile population and instant
communication.

For all these reasons, U.S. domestic political repression is now
effectively nationalized.  Local police may still be the foot soldiers
for many arrests, raids, beatings, and infiltrations; college
administrators, corporate security forces, and private right-wing groups
may also help out.  But when it comes to full-scale strategic,
coordinated domestic counter-insurgency, only "the Feds" can do the job.

But the federal government has other imperatives.  It strives to
maintain U.S. control over world markets and resources in an era when
most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been legally decolonized.
It competes internationally with the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan.
At the same time, it needs patriotic support, or at least passive
acquiescence, at home.  For all these purposes, it must effectively
promote the image of the United States as leader of the "free world,"
complete with free speech and the rule of law.

If the U.S. government is seen as unduly repressive within its own
borders, however, it will have trouble maintaining the allegiance of its
citizenry and competing effectively for world influence.  It can sustain
its legitimacy, while effectively marginalizing or eliminating domestic
dissent, if it makes the victims of official violence appear to be the
aggressors and provokes dissident movements to tear themselves apart
through factionalism and other modes of self-destruction.  No wonder
covert action is here to stay.

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **

/** pn.publiceye: 23.16 **/
** Written  7:19 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **
PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE

 What We Can Do About Domestic Covert Action

We obviously cannot stop domestic covert action simply by electing
better public officials, passing stronger laws, or winning court cases.
Clandestine repression will end only with the elimination of the race,
gender, class, and international domination it serves to uphold.
Meanwhile, it severely undermines our ability to build the broad-based
movements needed to win fundamental change.  To organize and sustain
such movements, we have to learn how to deal with domestic covert action
in a way that minimizes its interference with our work.

There are two complementary means to this end.  The first approach
requires work within our movements.  It is essential that we learn to
recognize the methods of covert action and take steps to reduce their
impact on our work.  The second approach involves organizing publicly to
expose and oppose the government's continued reliance on those methods.
Though domestic covert action cannot be eliminated without more systemic
change, we do have the capacity to substantially limit and weaken it.


Learning the Methods of COINTELPRO
and How to Protect Ourselves Against Them

Though the details of future covert action will be adapted to changing
social and technological conditions, only a limited number of basic
methods and approaches exist.  Like chess masters and military
strategists who hone their skills by replaying old contests, we can
improve our ability to defend against these modes of attack through
close study of recent history.  If we understand how the FBI and police
moved in the past, we will be better able to recognize and avoid their
future tricks and traps.  If we grasp the mistakes of earlier movements,
we can take essential precautions now without encouraging paranoia or
diverting attention from our main goals.

The specific methods of covert action which we know the FBI and police
used in the 1960s are described below, under the categories of:  (1)
infiltration by agents and informers; (2) psychological warfare from the
outside; (3) harassment through the legal system; and (4) extralegal
force and violence.  The following recommendations for protecting
against each type of attack are meant to provide starting points for
discussion.  They are based on the author's 25 years of experience as an
activist and lawyer, and on talks with long-time organizers from a broad
range of movements.  By adapting these guidelines to particular
conditions and experimenting with new approaches, we can determine
together how best to protect our movements and ourselves.

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **

/** pn.publiceye: 23.17 **/
** Written  7:20 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **
A CHECKLIST OF ESSENTIAL PRECAUTIONS

1. Check out the authenticity of any disturbing letter, rumor, phone
call, or other communication before acting on it.  Ask the supposed
source if she or he is responsible.

2. Keep records of incidents which appear to reflect COINTELPRO-type
activity.  Evaluate your response and report your experiences to the
Movement Support Network and other groups that document repression and
resistance around the country.

3. Deal openly and honestly with the differences within our movements
(race, gender, class, age, religion, national origin, sexual
orientation, personality, experience, physical and intellectual
capacities, etc.) before the FBI and police can exploit them.

4. Don't try to expose a suspected agent or informer without solid
proof.  Purges based on mere suspicion only help the FBI and police
create distrust and paranoia.  It generally works better to criticize
what a disruptive person says and does, without speculating as to why.

5. Support all movement activists who come under government attack.
Don't be put off by political slander, such as recent attempts to smear
some militant opponents of government policy as "terrorists."  Organize
public opposition to all FBI witchhunts, grand jury subpoenas, political
trials, and other forms of government and right-wing harassment.

6. Cultivate relationships with sympathetic journalists who seem willing
to investigate and publicize domestic covert operations.  Let them know
when you are harassed.  Since the FBI and police thrive on secrecy,
public exposure can undermine their ability to subvert our work.

7. Don't try to tough it out alone.  Don't let others fret and suffer by
themselves.  Make sure that activists who are under extreme stress get
the help they need (someone to talk with, rest, therapy, etc.).  It is
crucial that we build support networks and take care of one another.

8. Above all, do not let our movements be diverted from their main
goals.  Our most powerful weapon against political repression is
effective organizing around the needs and issues which directly affect
people's lives.

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **


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