# The FBI wrote the news and did not sign it Case studies The FBI wrote the news and did not sign it Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Case studies - The FBI wrote the news and did not sign it At a glance From 1956 to 1971 the Bureau ran formal programs to disrupt American political groups, including by handing stories to reporters it trusted. The Church When1956ActorFederal Bureau of Investigation…Full record at propagandaarchive.org ## What it said The programs did not speak in the Bureau's name. They spoke in the names of news columns, anonymous letters, and forged notes between members. The directives were plainer than the clippings. to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize Directive of 2 September 1964 opening the "White Hate Groups" program, as quoted by the Senate Select Committee (Church Committee) and recorded on the FRAME case study. The Black Nationalist program, begun 25 August 1967, used a longer verb list: "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize." Offices were told to "use news media contacts to disrupt, ridicule, or discredit" the targets. A March 1960 widening of the Communist Party program, the Committee found, was increasingly done "by planting a news article about Communists active in the organization." ## Who made it and why Director Hoover approved the first formal counterintelligence program in August 1956, against the Communist Party USA. The Church Committee later found that Bureau officials traced that decision in part to Supreme Court rulings they said had made Smith Act prosecutions impractical. The CPUSA caption accounted for 1,388 of 2,370 approved actions. The Socialist Workers Party program began 12 October 1961 and ran to 1969, with 45 approved actions. The Committee records that the Bureau conceded the SWP had not engaged in organizational violence. The Klan program went to 17 field offices. The Black Nationalist program began in 23 offices and on 4 March 1968 expanded to 41. One stated goal was to prevent a "messiah" who could "unify, and electrify" the movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which practiced nonviolence, was among the first targets. Separately from those captions, the FBI mailed Martin Luther King Jr. a tape from hotel-room microphones and an unsigned letter. An agent flew to Miami on 21 November 1964 and posted the package there. Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy told the Committee they read the letter as an invitation for King to kill himself. ## What it got right or wrong The Ku Klux Klan bombed and murdered. Watching violent conspiracies is a police job, and saying so is not an apology for the Klan. What was wrong does not depend on liking the target. A secret program to "neutralize" a domestic political group, by lying to newspapers and to the group's own members, is not an investigation. It is a propaganda operation run against Americans. The Committee called the Klan effort "very precisely targeted." Precision is not lawfulness. The CPUSA was directed from Moscow and did recruit inside other groups. A newsman given material on Communist participation in a SANE march "with the express purpose being to discredit SANE as well as the participants" was not being handed a finished fact for the public. He was being used to stain a peace organization. Purpose is part of the record the Committee wrote down. The King letter is not a hard case. Secret microphones and a letter meant to destroy a citizen are wrong. Full stop. ## Off-the-books attacks on speech, press, assembly, and petition The First Amendment protects speech, press, assembly, and petition against the government. COINTELPRO aimed at all four, and it did it off the books so the target could not answer the real speaker. Due process is the right to know the accusation and face the accuser. An anonymous clipping has neither. The Smith Act's trouble in court is not a reason to switch to forgery. If a crime was committed, charge it. If a group is awful and legal, the government's tool is sunlight under its own name, or nothing. The libertarian line is the same for the Klan and for a pacifist league. The Bureau does not get a secret press because the ideology is vicious, and it does not get one because the ideology is fashionable. Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the Media, Pennsylvania, office in 1971 and the documents started to surface. Carl Stern's reporting and then the Church Committee's Book III (1976) made the programs a public fact. That exposure is the system working late: a stolen file, a reporter, a Senate, not a bureau that policed itself. ## Its legacy Later arguments about "jawboning" and disinformation offices are arguments about pressure that is at least partly visible. COINTELPRO is the case where the author was hidden on purpose. Any modern program that plants stories, rates reporters "friendly," or writes in a target's voice has to answer to this file, not to a memo that says the targets were extreme. They often were. The method was still incompatible with a free press and with equal protection of the law. ## Sources - U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book III (1976), as cited on the FRAME case study, including the action counts, the SANE example, the directive language, and the King letter. - FRAME case study "COINTELPRO: the FBI's covert media and information operations against U.S. groups, 1956-1971," for the chronology and the Media, Pennsylvania, break-in. Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/cointelpro-media-operations/