You do forget

Reading a review by Aryeh Neier of a book about the burglary of an FBI office by protesters in 1971 reminded me of some of the un-American activities of the FBI under Hoover. Here are some of the activities Neier lists: 

• In November 1969, for example, a New York City–based organization, the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, chartered hundreds of buses to take opponents of the war to a large demonstration in Washington, D.C. A clerk in the bank where the committee kept its account revealed that the FBI came to the bank to photograph the checks of those who reserved places on the buses so as to identify participants in the demonstration. 
• One way that protesters were punished in that era was that young men who took part in antiwar demonstrations were reclassified by their draft boards to accelerate their call-up to perform military service. 
• It was also a period in which Americans found out that other agencies of the federal government were engaged in political surveillance. More than a year before the burglary in Media, Pennsylvania, Captain Christopher Pyle revealed that the United States Army had deployed more than a thousand soldiers full-time to conduct domestic political surveillance, focusing on opponents of the war.

The following were discovered in the burglary:

• An FBI newsletter advised agents to “enhance the paranoia” and “get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” 
• A directive by J. Edgar Hoover ordered that “all BSUs [Black Student Unions] and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students” were to be targets of surveillance; another ordered the creation of a dossier on every black student at nearby Swarthmore College, where the bureau’s informants included a campus security officer, the local chief of police, the postmaster, the secretary to the college registrar, and a college switchboard operator. 
• A student at the college who was the daughter of Henry Reuss, a representative from Wisconsin who spoke out against the Vietnam War, was targeted for surveillance; and 
• a routing slip in the files used the then-unfamiliar term “COINTELPRO,” with no explanation of its meaning.

We learned that COINTELPRO was a program launched by the FBI in 1956 to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” a large number of organizations—old and new left, anti-war, black activist, American Indian, and others—by such means as creating and fostering personal conflicts and arousing suspicions about sexual misconduct and financial irregularities. 

• As part of the program, the FBI sent “poison pen” letters to break up marriages; there were incitements by the FBI to gang warfare; and members of a violent group were falsely labeled as police informers. 
• The bureau attempted to persuade the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.—the target of what seems to have been COINTELPRO’s most sustained campaign—to commit suicide just before he traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 
• Some COINTELPRO activities were carried out by the FBI through burglaries, the method the antiwar activists used to expose the bureau’s practices.