FBI Dirty Tricks

52,648 pages of bad news

COINTELPRO. The name itself sounds Orwellian. The late J. Edgar Hoover's aides invented the acronym in 1956. It stood for Counterintelligence Program, a secret, often illegal FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage against a wide variety of right-and left-wing groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Not until 1971, a year before his death, did Hoover, alarmed by the threat of exposure, suspend the program. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence exposed the full scope of COINTELPRO'S partly unconstitutional mission in 1975, but only last week did the full extent of the FBI's dirty tricks become public. Reporters from eight news organizations, who had demanded to see the files under the Freedom of Information Act, forced the release of 52,648 pages of material. Among the FBI actions revealed in the hitherto secret files:

> Prostitutes were recruited in 1961 to bait sex traps for the leaders of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro group. The FBI's New York office sent a memo to Hoover suggesting a scheme to have a committee leader "picked up on local charges in the event he places himself in a compromising position."

> The infiltration of an informant into the top post of the United Klans of America, then largest of several major Ku Klux Klan organizations, was seriously considered in 1967. The plan was to organize a revolt against Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton at a Klonvocation and replace him with an FBI informant. The bureau finally decided it already had sufficiently penetrated the Klan.

> The FBI tried to disrupt the Students for a Democratic Society at the height of the Viet Nam War by printing anti-SDS newsletters in the names of fictitious radical and right-wing groups and distributing them on college campuses. One leaflet circulated in 1967 showed the faces of four Princeton SDS leaders over sketches of monkeys' bodies, with the caption: "Princeton is not 'The Planet of the Apes.' "

While there was plenty of sordid reading matter in the huge archives that were opened to the public, an additional 16,000 pages of COINTELPRO files have been withheld on the ground that their release would jeopardize FBI investigative techniques or informants. That material, too, contains some highly incriminating documents concerning bureau activities.

For example, TIME has learned that the FBI used a convicted holdup man as an informant to penetrate the Ku Klux Klan and investigate the 1963 murder of Black Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers. The informant kidnaped a suspected Klan leader, bound him hand and foot, and then interrogated him at pistol point at a lonely farm to extract an account of the crime. But largely because such evidence was obtained under duress, and therefore is inadmissible in court, the Government was never able to get a conviction in the Evers case.

Another still suppressed section of the files reveals that in the early 1970s the leadership of the Black Panthers wa so riddled with FBI informants that the bureau virtually ran the organization Some of the informants viewed their association with the FBI as a license to plunder Black Panther funds and stash away small fortunes before the treasury was drained.

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