Excerpt
from Freedom Under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War by Michael
Linfield (South End Press, 1990)
The era from 1960 through the late 1970s is generally viewed as one during which U.S. activists fought for, and achieved, an expansion of our civil rights and civil liberties: millions marched for the realization of constitutional rights, the courts overturned restrictive precedents, legislatures passed civil rights statutes, and the federal government seemed to put its weight behind the cause of freedom.
Great advances certainly were made
during the 1960s in abolishing the framework of Jim Crow laws that formed the
legal buttress of U.S. apartheid. Those who remember President Lyndon Johnson’s
repression of anti-war demonstrations might be surprised to learn that he
greeted civil rights protestors at the White House as "fellow
revolutionaries" and urged them to 'go out into the hinterland and rouse
the masses and blow the bugles and tell them that ... we are on the march
against the ancient enemies and we are going to be successful."'
During this era--175 years after the
passage of Rights--many of its most important provisions were finally applied
to activities of the states. Prior to the 1960s, defendants in trials were not
protected by the fourth amendment prohibit warrantless searches and seizures;
were not protected by the fifth amendment prohibition against compulsory
self-incrimination and double jeopardy; were not protected by the sixth
amendment right to a speedy trial,' a trial by jury,' the assistance of
counsel,' the right to confront adverse witnesses.' or the right to compulsory
process; and were not protected by the eighth amendment prohibition against
cruel and unusual punishment.
Repressive or unconstitutional actions of
the federal government—the murder of four students by the National Guard at
Kent State, the
attempted censorship of the New York Times over the Pentagon Papers, Nixon’s
enemies list of Watergate fame--are considered infamous and glaring, but
nonetheless isolated, examples. The brutal behavior of many Southern whites in
beating, terrorizing and murdering civil rights workers is considered a
shameful episode-but one confined to rural towns and local racist police.
Unfortunately, this standard view of
the Vietnam War era is not accurate. While the civil rights movement did
make great strides and the Supreme Court did extend the legal framework of
civil liberties, this era was one of a massive, continual and conscious program
of wartime repression by the federal, state and local governments.
When the
target of federal repression was a major establishment institution, the
repression was condemned. Thus, when the government tried to censor the New
York Times in 1971, almost the entire media establishment rose to defend
freedom of the press. And the Nixon administrations attempt to burgle the
national headquarters of the Democratic Party-and the ensuing cover-up-brought
virtually unanimous condemnation and ultimately the President’s resignation.
But when the federal government targeted
minority and progressive organizations, the repression-although much more
severe than that against establishment institutions--went unnoticed and
unprotested by mainstream institutions. During this era:
• The U.S. government launched a comprehensive
program to silence the underground papers; anti-war editors were jailed,
presses were bombed, reporters were harassed, news vendors were arrested for
distributing newspapers, newsrooms were infiltrated by government spies and
businesses were intimidated from advertising in the opposition papers
•
Police illegally broke into the headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party on
the average of once every three weeks during the early-1960s;
• National
Guard and local police shot and killed unarmed, innocent and non-violent
protestors;
•
Conspiracy trial &--often no more than kangaroo courts-were organized to
remove the leaders of anti-war and minority peoples' movements;
•
Agents provocateur&--undercover police-infiltrated peaceful organizations
and then encouraged and led anti-war and civil rights protestors in bombings
and other violent activities;
• The FBI engaged in a concerted program to destroy
the New Left and the black movement, a program that included infiltrations,
agents provocateurs, disinformation, manipulation of the media, bombings and
assassinations;
• local police spied on churches, unions and
organizations engaged in peaceful protest activity;
• Every federal intelligence agency-the FBI, CIA,
NSA, and military intelligence united--spied on U.S. citizens. ………..
Repression
Against Minority Groups
Governmental repression during the Vietnam War era
against minority leaders was even greater than that against the predominantly
middle-class and white anti-war protestors.
During the first half of the 1960s, southern police
and vigilantes harassed, attacked, tortured and murdered both white and black
civil rights workers. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwemer, James Chaney, and
Medger Evers were only the most noted of the several dozen political murders of
civil rights workers in the South during the early 1960s.' Those who survived
were generally convicted by southern juries who ignored basic due process
guarantees in their effort to enforce segregation. In a throwback to the governmental
practices of the World War I era, civil rights demonstrators of the 1960s
were at tunes arrested and charged with criminal syndicalism, criminal anarchy
and insurrection.'
J. Edgar
Hoover had a long-standing vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr. After King
criticized the FBI for not being more vigorous in protecting the civil rights
of black citizens, the Bureau began putting a 'trash cover' on the SCLC office,
investigating King's bank and charge accounts, instituting electronic
surveillance on an Atlanta hideaway apartment often used by King; installing a
bug in King's office; looking for personal weaknesses among SCLC employees that
could be used to win their cooperation with the Bureau; sending a forged letter
in King's name to SCLC contributors warning them that an IRS investigation was
about to begin; and attempting to intensify a well-known mutual dislike of King
and NAACP head Roy Wilkins.'
At the urging
of J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach approved the illegal
bugging of King's Washington, D.C. hotel room in July 1965. Highlights of these
tapes, purportedly evidence of King consorting with prostitutes, were sent by
the FBI to his wife, Coretta Scott King Another letter, along with edited audio
tapes, was sent to Dr. King thirty-four days before he was to receive the Nobel
Peace Prize. The letter urged King to commit suicide as the only method of
preventing the release of the tapes. Had the FBI's crude attempt to convince King to
commit suicide been successful, Hoover was ready to replace him with another
black "leader who had the approval of the FBI." * The Bureau also
sent copies of these tapes to reporters at Newsweek, the New York Times,
the Los Angeles nnws, the Atlanta Constitution and other papers.
The FBI smear campaign failed, and these papers refused to print the FBI
story.' [*This
more malleable and less troublesome' black 'leader' was Samuel R. Pierce, Jr.
Pierce was later appointed by President Reagan as Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development. After serving longer than any other member of Reagan's
Cabinet, Pierce became embroiled in the corruption and influence-peddling
scandals at HUD. (See, e.g., Ostrow and Frantz, 'FBI Once Planned to Push
Pierce as Rival to King," LA. times, August 29, 1989, p. 4.)]
Racial tensions flared during 'the
long, hot summers" of the 1960s. There were twenty riots in 1964 and
eighty-two during the summer of 1967." During the week of July 12th,
twenty-six people were killed and over 1,000 arrested in Newark, New Jersey.
During the week of July 23rd, 4,700 paratroopers and 8,000 National Guard
occupied a smoldering Detroit.'
Probably the largest single instance of
the use of martial law in the 1960s was during the riots following the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4,1968. Riots occurred in
110 cities.' Twenty thousand army troops and 34,000 National Guard were called
out to reinforce tens of thousands of local police in scores of cities; 15,000
people were arrested, thirty-eight were killed, and 2,500 injured.' As a result
of these riots, Congress passed an amendment, sponsored by Senator Strom
Thurmond, which made it a felony to cross state lines with the intent" to
cause a riot." The only people ever indicted under the law were the
Chicago Eight.'
By the
summer of 1969, over 200 black people had died in urban riots and uprisings,
more than seventy cities had been occupied by the National Guard and major
demonstrations had taken place on over 200 college campuses.
Between January 1968 and
May 1970, the National Guard was mobilized to suppress civil disorders on 324
different occasions.' Curfews were often imposed in conjunction with the
deployment of the National Guard.' Most were night-time curfews, but at least
one, in Milwaukee in 1967, was a continuous twenty-six-hour curfew. The Supreme
Court never ruled on the constitutionality of riot curfews, state courts
differed on their validity
In at least one instance, an emergency municipal
ordinance banning peaceful demonstrations was upheld.
The
Campaign to Eliminate the Black Panthers
As
the decade progressed, the optimism that 'We Shall Overcome" gave way to a
realization that equality for blacks in this country was a long way off. Many
in the black community turned to more militant black nationalist organizations
to lead the struggle for freedom.
During the latter half of the 1960s, the Black Panthers and
other Black Power advocates some of whom openly carried rifles as a means of
showing their opposition to the government and defending themselves--bore the
brunt of governmental repression.
J. Edgar Hoover urged his Special Agents
in Charge to:
prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist
groups ... prevent militant black national groups and leaders from gaining
respectability ... Prevent the rise of a black "messiah' who would
unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcomb X
[sic] might have been such a "messiah;he is a martyr of the movement
today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed
all aspire to his position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of
his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon
his supposed 'obedience' to "white, liberal doctrines" (nonviolence)
and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a
real threat in this way. [original emphasis]
Ehjah Muhanimed and Stokely Carmichael were the victims
of assorted FBI COINTELPRO(Counter-Intelligence Program) dirty tricks; Malcolm
X and Dr. King were eventually assassinated.
The FBI considered the Black Panther
Party (BPP) the most dangerous of the black nationalist movements in the 1960s,
even though the BPP had less than 2,000 members nationwide.
One effort ofthe FBI's COINTELPRO was to turn one segment of
the black community against the other. This is detailed in the congressional
report, The FBIs Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party,
under a sub-heading, "The Effort to Promote Violence Between the Black
Panther Party and Other, Well-Armed, Potentially Violent Organizations."
The FBI used all of its 'black propaganda arts.-including fabricated evidence,
bogus letters sent to the leadership of various organizations and
'bad-jacketing (the leaking of false rumors that an organizations leader was an
FBI undercover agent) to create dissension and division between the various
black nationalist organizations. Of the 295 authorized FBI COINTELPRO
operations against black groups, 233 were directed against the Black Panthers.
A rift between the Black Panther Party and Ron Karenga's US
Organization was created and exacerbated by the FBI, in part by the use of
phony cartoons and caricatures purporting to be from the Panthers attacking US,
or from US attacking the BPP. On January 17, 1969, two Los Angeles Black
Panther leaders, Jon Huggins and Alprentice 'Bunchy' Carter, were gunned down
by US members on the UCLA campus. In internal memoranda, the FBI took credit
for this incident. Seven months later, when two Black Panthers were wounded and
a third, Sylvester Bell, was killed by US members in San Diego, the FBI again
congratulated itself for its 'success," and stated, 'In view of the recent
killing of BPP member Sylvester Bell, a new cartoon is being considered in
hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between the BPP and
US." '
Other Black Panther Party leaders were
murdered, with the apparent involvement of the FBI. In 1968, the FBI gave
William O’Neal the assignment to infiltrate the Chicago BPP. ONeal quickly rose
through the ranks, becoming head of Panther security in Chicago and the
personal bodyguard for Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago chapter and one of
the Panthers most promising national leaders."'
As an agent provocateur, ONeal urged that the Black Panther
headquarters be equipped with nerve gas and wired to electrocute interlopers,
that they construct an 'electric chair" for informers, that they acquire mortars to bomb
city hall and that the Panthers engage in armed robbery to raise funds. All of
these 'suggestions" were rejected by Fred Hampton and the Black Panther
Party.'
O'Neal
supplied the Chicago police with a detailed floor diagram of Hampton’s
apartment, used by the police in the 4 a.m. December 4, 1969 raid in which
Hampton and another Black Panther were murdered. The police burst into Hamptons
apartment and fired at least eighty rounds of ammunition, almost all directed
at the head of Hampton’s bed as marked on O’Neal's diagram. Only one bullet was
fired in the direction of the police. The Panthers that survived the
police raid were arraigned the next day and held on $100,000 bail. Five months
later, after a grand jury concluded that the police investigation into the
killings was 'so seriously deficient that it suggests purposeful
malfeasance," the charges against the surviving Panthers were
dropped.
The
FBI, again in internal memoranda, took partial credit for the 'success" of
the raid. Cook County District Attorney Edward Hanhrahan announced that the
police had shown 'good judgement, considerable restraint [and] professional
discipline." '
Shortly
after the assassinations, the survivors and families of the deceased filed a
$47.7 million suit against the Chicago Police and the FBI. Fourteen years
later, in 1983, after numerous trials and appeals, the police and the FBI
defendants were found guilty of conspiracy to deny Fred Hampton and the other
Black Panthers their civil rights. Sanctions were imposed on the FBI for their
role in the cover-up and the survivors of the raid and the families of the
deceased recovered $1.85 million in damages."
Twenty-eight Panthers were killed during an eighteen-month period during
the late-1960s, 'some direct victims of aggressive intelligence actions and
others traceable to [FBI]-assisted feuds.'
Other
Black Panther leaders, although not targeted for elimination, were victims of continual
harassment and arrest. . . .
“A Cancer on
Our Body Politic”
By 1968,
at the height of the anti-war movement, every intelligence agency in the United
States was spying on non-violent domestic protest by U.S. citizens.
Even
before the exposure of Nixon’s burglars, it had already become clear that the
Army itself had been engaged in a 'massive and comprehensive" surveillance
of civilians for the past thirty years involving 1,000 investigators and 300
officers." The Army spied on such organizations as the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, by means which included
"staking out teams of agents, infilrating undercover agents, creating
command posts inside meetings, posing as press photographers and newsmen,
posing as TV newsmen, posing as students and shadowing public figures." '
Army agents posed as newspaper reporters to interview leaders of the demonstration
at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention; infiltrated the anti-war Moratorium
marches in October and November 1969; and posed as students to monitor Black
Studies classes at New York University." The Army's 'subversive file"
contained more than 210,000 dossiers on organizations and 80,000 biographical
files. "' In 1968 more Army Counter-Intelligence Analysis Branch personnel
monitored domestic protests than were assigned to any other counterintelligence
operation including that of Southeast Asia and Vietnam."'
The
Supreme Court refused to declare that domestic political spying by the Army
violated the First Amendment. The majority side-stepped the legality of the
Army's surveillance program, holding that 'respondents have not presented a
case for resolution by the courts. The two dissenting justices, however, noted
that this was not the first time that army intelligence had been maintaining an
unauthorized watch over civilian political activity" and termed such
surveillance 'a cancer in our body politic." "'
The
National Security Agency (NSA) electronically intercepted messages of anti-war
activists and other people opposed to United States government policies. During
World War II all electronic and cable communications
had been censored in compliance with wartime restrictions. However,
government spying on domestic cable and radio transmission continued after the war. Under
Project SHAMROCK, initiated in l945,
the NSA intercepted messages sent overseas by U.S. citizens. As part of SHAMROCK
Western Union, RCA and ITT continued to give NSA and other intelligence
personnel unrestricted access to the
private communications of U.S. citizens. RCA, for instance, allowed Army
intelligence officers
to set up an office in RCA facilities, requiring only that the soldiers wear
civilian clothing.
With
the advent of computers, "watch lists” could be automated. A computer
could be instructed to pick out every Communication that mentioned a particular
word, or a particular person’s name. By 1967, under instructions from President
Johnson, NSA had developed a sophisticated watch list of prominent people in
the anti-war movement. Every communication almost 1,200 prominent opponents of
the administration was read. This project became known as MINARET. As part of
Project MINARET NSA maintained files on some 75,000 U.S. citizens, including
members of Congress.
In the
late 1960s and early-1970s, the National Security Agency intercepted over
150,000 messages a month, dwarfing the CIA’s mail-opening program. No links to foreign agents
were ever found; nonetheless
some 2,000 reports containing personal information were disseminated by the NSA to various intelligence agencies.
An attempt to challenge the
constitutionality of these warrantless intercepts failed when the court ruled
that national security prevented the subpoenaing of information to prove
whether or not such communications had in fact been intercepted.
While the NSA and the Army intelligence
programs escaped Court sanction, the CIA’s illegal activities came under fire
from Congress. By the mid 1960s, it became known that the CIA had covertly
funded and infiltrated many organizations, including the National Student
Association, the American Newspaper Guild, and the National Council of
Churches. In an attempt to head off the broad-based congressional investigation
of the CIA, President Ford appointed the Commission on CIA Activities in
January 1975. The Commission’s report" documented massive illegal domestic
spying activities by the CIA including:
• A
letter opening program, began at the end of the Korean War in 1953, under which
the CIA opened and read letters being sent to and from the Soviet Union. By 1973, when the
program was halted, some 2,300,000 letters had been photographed by the CIA,
including letters to Senators Church and Kennedy-,'
• Operation CHAOS, started in 1967, to gather
information on political protestors. CHAOS compiled some 13,000 different
files, spied on over 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations, and entered
into a computerized index the names of more than 300,000 persons and
organizations;"
• Operation RESISTANCE, originally developed to
protect CIA recruiters on college campuses, maintained files on some 500- 800
dissenters, indexed thousands of names of campus radicals, and spied on the
student press;'
• Project MERRIMAC, which infiltrated CIA agents
into at least ten major peace and civil rights organizations, including the
Black Panthers, the Congress of Racial Equality, the War Resisters League and
Women Strike for Peace;' and
•
Project MUDHEN, which used seventeen CIA operatives to spy on syndicated
columnist Jack Anderson.'
In 1973, the Washington Star-News
reported that the CIA had placed thirty-six journalists on its payroll. The
U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Church discovered that some 200
newspapers, magazines, wire services and publishing companies were owned out-
right by the CIA.
The Church Committee
also learned that the CIA had several hundred professors and academics to front
for them on university campuses around the country. As late as 1985, Nadav
Safran director of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, resigned after
it was reported that the CIA had secretly funded a conference he had arranged
on Islamic fundamentalism.'
FBI
Spying
The most infamous domestic spying program, begun in
1956 and continuing into the early 1970s, was known as COINTELPRO (Counter
Intelligence Program). The purpose of this FBI program, in the words of one court, was
to 'expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the
activities' of New Left and other progressive organizations, 'including those
involved in legitimate, non-violent activities." " Under the guise of
preventing national and civil disorder:
the FBI planted stories about 'subversives" in the media, wrote scurrilous letters from fictional sources, opened mail, forged public documents, pressured universities and employers to dismiss targeted workers, encouraged 'friendly" organizations and local police to harass dissidents, exploited IRS tax records, and infiltrated legal organizations."
COINTELPRO consisted of numerous illegal tactics by
the FBI, including.
•
Eavesdropping: illegally bugging a person's home or office;
• Bogus mail: forging and sending (usually)
anonymous letters, ranging from letters to the editor to death threats;
·
"Black
propaganda": creating false documents, purporting to come from the target
organization;
•
Infiltration: sending undercover spies into an organization, some of
whom rose to positions of power and helped set policy for the organization;
• Agents
provocateurs: undercover agents who urged others to violent activity, trained
others in violent methods, and consciously provoked violence;
• Bad-jacketing: creating the impression,
through false documents, rumors, bogus mail, etc., that the leader of an
organization was actually a police informer;
as well as disinformation, harassment arrests,
fabrication of evidence, and complicity in assassinations.'
The FBI
was fully aware that COINTELPRO was highly illegal. COINTELPRO documents were
marked 'do not file," and were prepared without the FBI's sequential
filing system serial numbers. Thus, anyone looking through the files would find
documents in perfect sequential order. Since there would be no missing serial
numbers, the investigator would not be aware that documents had not been filed.
In addition, this system allowed an FBI official to honestly testify that a
thorough review of the files had yielded no COINTELPRO documents.'
In
1959, 400 agents in the New York FBI office were assigned to communism,"
while only four were assigned to organized crime. This preoccupation with political dissidents continued for at least
the next fifteen years. In 1976, the FBI allocated $7,401,000 for its political
informers, more than twice that allocated for organized crime informers….
The
FBI proposed 3,247 illegal, repressive and disruptive actions throughout the
course of COINTELPRO; 2,370 were carried out:" false documents were
planted on movement leaders to make it appear as if they were FBI informers;'
FBI agents established dummy chapters of the Communist Party which then
deviated from the party line; undercover agents blew up cars with molotov
cocktails to make it appear as if one faction of the Left were attacking
another; at least one FBI agent provocateur organized and led a draft board
raid that resulted in arrest and prosecution by the FBI of the participants; and
agents beat up anti-war activists to frighten them and disrupt political rallies.
In the
1960s, the FBI established a Security Index and a Rabble Rouser Index. Every
sixty days, the persons file was supposed to be updated, so that the Bureau
would be in a position to round up the person in the event of an emergency. The
FBI's Security Index---containing the names of people to be summarily arrested
and detained in the event of a war-listed 200,000 persons, including writer
Norman Mailer and Democratic Senator Paul Douglas.' In 1965, the same year that
both Cuba and Czechoslovakia expelled poet Allen Ginsberg for chanting slogans
against the communist police, Ginsberg was put on the Dangerous Subversive
Internal Security List by the FBI.'
The FBI was not alone in developing a
list of people to be summarily arrested and incarcerated in the event of a
national emergency. The CIA and the National Security Agency had their own
Watch Lists of dissident Americans.
In 1970, Tom Huston, advisor to
President Nixon, developed the infamous Huston Plan which advocated
surreptitious opening of mail, electronic surveillance, illegal break-ms and
campus infiltrations. ' As late as 1975, the FBI was conducting surveillance on
1,100 political organizations.'
A July 5, 1968 memo from J. Edgar Hoover
to the Albany field office detailed a twelve-point program for disrupting the
New Left. Among the recommendations were:
2. The instigation ... of personal conflicts or
animosities existing between New Left leaders...
3.
The creating of the impression that certain New Left leaders are informants...
6.
The drawing up of anonymous letters regarding individuals active in the New
Left...[to} be sent to their parents, neighbors and the parents' employers...
7.
Anonymous letters or leaflets describing faculty members and graduate
assistants ... Anonymous mailings should be made to university officials,
members of the state legislature, Board of regents, and to the press. Such
letters could be signed a Concerned Alumni or or A Concerned Taxpayer"...
11.
Consider the use of cartoons, photographs, and anonymous letter which will have
the effect of ridiculing the New Left...
12.
Be alert for opportunities to confuse and disrupt New Left activities by
misinformation..."'
Over 500,000 secret investigations of
'subversives" were conducted The Bureau maintained informants at virtually
every major newspaper and media outlet.' The Chicago Field Office of the FBI,
for instance, had sources at the Chicago 7ribune, Chicago American, Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago
Defender, Joliet Herald, Rockford Register Republic, Rockford Morning Star, and the Waukegan News Star; at the local
affiliates of ABC, CBS and NBC; at radio station WGN; and at the City News Bureau.
While undercover
agents were illegally and surreptitiously making policy for the
Socialist Workers Party, the FBI was openly helping to make policy for the
entire United States. Seventy former FBI agents were elected to Congress during
these two decades."
Numerous incidents of provocation were reported throughout
the decade. One of the most militant members of the Weather Underground,
“widely known for his skill in making bombs and fuses,' had often criticized
his comrades for limiting their bombing to property. He berated them,
stating that 'true revolutionaries had to be ready and anxious to kill
people." It turned out that he was a paid informer and agent provocateur
for the FBI. -
During the final ten years of
COINTELPRO, the FBI spent $80 million annually on domestic spying. Yet despite
this massive expenditure, there has not been a single prosecution since 1957
under laws which prevent the overthrow of the U.S. government."
The information gleaned from spying on citizens
was used not only by the FBI to harass, disrupt, discredit and control
left-leaning political groups, but was also transmitted to administration
officials for their own political use. Information from illegal FBI break-ms
and spying was continually fed to both the Dies Committee and the House
Un-Americam Activities Committee. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover kept dossiers on
politically prominent individuals, including members of Congress. Presidents
used FBI-obtained information against their political opponents: President
Johnson, for instance, received FBI political intelligence reports on the
strategies that members of Congress, Robert F. Kennedy and various civil rights
leaders planned to use at the 1964 Democratic National Convention;' Vice-President
Hubert Humphrey was given access to similar FBI reports on anti-war advocates
at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.'
During this era, the FBI used its power both to influence the
sympathetic media and harass journalists critical of the FBI. The FBI helped
produce several television shows. For instance, the 1960s series 'The
FBI," although nominally produced by Quinn Martin (selected by the FBI for
this job), was practically an FBI propaganda series. All scripts for the show were submitted for FBI approval before the
episode was filmed.
……..The
CIAs Operation CHAOS developed out of an investigation of Ramparts Magazine in
1967. Upon learning that Ramparts was preparing an expos6 of the ties between
the CIA and the National Student Association, the CIA pressured the IRS to
begin an investigation of the magazine." Again at the CIA’s request, the
IRS audited Victor Marchetti in 1972, while he was writing a critique of the
CIA
Based on information compiled by another
CIA operation known as Project Resistance, the FBI began to pressure businesses
not to advertise in the underground press. In January 1969, the San Francisco
FBI office sent a memo to Washington, D.C. noting that Columbia Records was a
major advertiser in many underground papers. The memo 'suggested that the FBI
should use its contacts to persuade Columbia Records to stop advertising in the
-underground press.'
CBS, which at the time owned Columbia Records, had many ties to
the U.S. government and intelligence agencies. CBS President Frank Stanton
headed a committee that had oversight responsibilities for the CIA-funded
United States Information Agency; CBS Board Chairman William S. Paley had used
his own foundation to help funnel CIA money to research scholarships in the
1950s; until 1961, the CIA had from time to time debriefed correspondents and
screened CBS news broadcasts.
Four months after the FBI Columbia
Records memo, CBS ceased advertising in the underground papers." Several
alternative newspapers folded when this source of revenue dried up." The FBI conducted similar campaigns against
businesses advertising in the South End, Wayne State University's paper;
the State News, the Michigan State University alternative paper; and the
Tech, the student paper at MIT.
Because of FBI and local police
harassment, many underground papers could not hire printers to print their
papers. One of the few printers in the Midwest who resisted such intimidation
was William Schanen
of Port Washington, Wisconsin. Schanen had been publishing the local Ozauka Press since 1940. In 1970, he
also published kaleidoscope, the main Milwaukee underground paper, with
a circulation of 15,000, as well as other alternative papers from as far away
as Omaha, Nebraska. In fact, Schanen’s was the only shop between Iowa and
Michigan that would print underground papers. Because of his association with Kaleidoscope,
the FBI urged local businesses to boycott the Ozaukee Press. In June
1970, the very week that the Ozaukee Press was awarded first prize for
general excellence by the National Newspaper Association twenty-five businesses
canceled their ads. Although Schanen
refused to cave in to this political pressure, he lost over $200,000 in 1970
due to the boycott. The next year Schanen died of a heart attack.
The FBI
pressured landlords to evict people who wrote or worked for underground papers.
In 1968, the FBI convinced the landlord of the New York Rat to double the
paper's rent, forcing the newspaper to relocate. The same year, the Bureau got
two New Left papers in Los Angeles evicted.
After
being visited by the FBI, the regular printer of the Los Angeles Free Press refused
to continue printing the paper and the distributer of the Rat refused to do any
more business with that newspaper.
The
FBI proposed a plan to disrupt the distribution of the Black Panther Party
paper by spraying the paper with Skatole, an offensive- smelling chemical. The
Detroit FBI office made a similar request for "a solution capable of
duplicating the scent of the most foul-smelling feces available.' "'
Although these two plans were not implemented, the FBI carried out a program to
forge and send anonymous letters to school officials protesting the fact that
the Black Panther paper was in the school library.'
The
Army was also involved in domestic surveillance and harassment of the press. On
January 14, 1969, shortly before Nixon’s inauguration, Army intelligence participated
with the FBI in a break- in of the offices of the Free Press, a
Washington, D.C. underground newspaper.
In many
instances, it did not become known until years after the fact that the troubles
encountered by underground papers were caused by police or FBI tactics. The
sudden refusal of a printer to continue printing
a paper, an overnight doubling of a journal's office rent, advertising
cancellations, or shipping losses" ' were often attributed to bad luck or
poor planning, rather than the results of a concerted governmental effort to
silence the opposition press.
In addition to harassment, arrests,
jailings and beatings, local police and government intelligence agencies engaged
in a covert effort to infiltrate the legitimate underground press and to
establish bogus "opposition” papers.
The editorial offices of many local
papers were infiltrated by undercover police agents; in 1968, the FBI had
assigned three agents to infiltrate the Liberation News Service, one of the two
major news services serving the underground presses.'
When the editor of the Spectator,
Bloomington, Indiana's first underground paper, was being tried for draft
evasion, a second 'alter- native" paper appeared on newstands. Unbeknownst
to its readers, the entire staff of Armegeddon News consisted of FBI
agents, operating out of their Indianapolis Bureau office.' At least two other
phony underground papers were published by the FBI: the Longhorn Tale at
the University of Texas at Austin, and the Rational Observer at American
University in Washington, D.C.'
In addition to creating bogus
"underground papers, the FBI established three phony news services, the
Pacific International News Service in San Francisco, the Northwest News in
Chicago, and the New York Press Service on the East Coast. The New York Press
Service advertised its services to left-wing publications and organizations in
a letter stating-
The next time your organization schedules a demonstration, march,
picket or office party, let us know in advance. We'll cover it like a blanket
and deliver a cost-free sample of our work to your office ... We will
photograph any single individual during any type of demonstration...[!]...
Looking
back on this era, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post said in 1974:
The
underground press was largely right about government sabotage, but the country
didn't get upset because it was the left that was being sabotaged. The country
got upset when
the broad political center, with its established political institutions, came
under attack."'