SNAFU with Ed HelmsJournalist Carl Stern stumbles upon a single, curious codeword in the burglarized documents: COINTELPRO. As shocking revelations about the FBI come to fruition, Congress forms the Church Committee to investigate.
Previously on snafu.
The FBI arrested twenty persons in Camden, New Jersey, early today and charge them.
With trying to steal draft records from the federal building there.
What we wanted was to persuade the jury that the war was wrong and that it had to be stopped, and that our action was an attempt to find a jury who would set us free and end the war.
Why should these lives be cut down for ten rubber and oil?
And the judge says to the four person, do you have any other verdicts on any of the other defendants that are different on any of these counts? And the foreman said, no, your honor.
And Senator Dole, the Republican chairman to accuse the Democrats of trying to make the FBI look like an American gestapo.
I'm the defin chairman of the City of Illinois Black campin party.
Free Hampton.
We said, we work with.
Anybody from police, with anybody that has revolutions.
On their nine.
In the late nineteen sixties, a lot of people had revolution on their minds, So when Fred Hampton spoke, they listened.
He really was a great organizer and can relate to people quite well and had that charism where people were followed.
That's Omar Barbour who joined the Black Panther Party in nineteen sixty seven.
And you have to have integrity and people have to feel you have integrity. And you can fill that with Fred that he had integrity because understand that racism is an excuse you of capitalism, and we know that racism is just is a bad product capitalism.
Hampton opposed to the War in Vietnam as another byproduct of capitalism. He empathized with the people of Vietnam. In his view, they're suffering at the hands of the US military was inextricably linked to the oppression that Americans of color faced at home.
In response to that oppression.
And the poverty around them, Hampton and the Black Panthers offered simple, effective solutions, free breakfast programs for kids, free healthcare clinics, the kinds of things the US government wasn't providing. Yes, people say, people, if you are fight of.
You a fight, it'll feel.
Hampton mobilized real working Americans, particularly people of color, which made him a threat to the wealthy white establishment. Hampton knew he was on Jay Edgar Hoover's radar.
We know they have half, we.
Know they're looking for us, we know they have had us.
And then he simmits fourth nineteen sixty nine data. We all wrote out wield and testaments.
Police arrived at Fred Hampton's West Side apartment the four forty five this morning. They had a search war and authorizing them to look for illegal weapons.
That morning, America woke up to the news that Hampton had been killed, ostensibly in a shootout with police.
Stints Attorney's office says that Hampton and another man were killed in the fifteen minute gun battle which followed.
The official story was the police were investigating a tip about an illegal weapons stash at Hampton's home. When the cops arrived, the story went the panthers unleashed a hail of gunfire on the police, setting off a shootout that killed Hampton. But that story did not hold up to scrutiny. Looking at the crime scene, it was immediately apparent that there hadn't been a shootout at all. At least one hundred shots had been fired, but the bullet holes clearly showed that ninety nine of them had come from police guns. Outside. Hampton didn't pick up a gun. He hadn't even gotten out of bed. The police had murdered him in cold blood.
When we found out that of all the shots that were fired in the apartment, only one was fired out and everything is fire in then it became much more clearer than there was a shooting. And now the shootout never.
Said a word.
You never got.
About the bed.
Akua and Jerry was Fred Hampton's girlfriend at the time of the shooting. She was eight months pregnant. In this interview, she's holding their new infant son.
The person was in the room. They kept going out, stop shooting, stop shooting. We have a pregnant woman or pregnant sister in here.
Piggs kept on shooting.
Heard Pigs say he's barely alive, he'll barely make it. As soon they were talking about shevving fled. Then they started shooting Pig. They started shooting up, shooting again. I heard the screen. They stopped shooting. Pig said he was good and dead.
Now the whole thing was fabricated and was disproved, And that really got to understand that there was definitely much more involved than just them coming to Servi a Warren or whatever. The justification was.
In nineteen seventy one, the Illinois States Attorney who ordered the raid was charged with obstructing justice. In the Hampton case, the illusion that Hampton died in a gunfight with police evaporated, leaving the public to wonder who wanted him dead and why they thought they could murder him with impunity. The answers took years to come out, but when they finally did, America would learn the truth behind Hampton's murder and the truth about Jaedgar Hoover's secret FBI. I'm Ed Helms and This is Snaffo, a show about history's greatest screw ups. On season two, medburg the story of a daring heist that exposed Jaedgar Hoover's epic FBI snaffo. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI had pulled off an incredibly risky heist. They'd leaked the stolen documents to the press and successfully evaded j Edgar Hoover's dragnet. As you might recall, buried within those documents was a single word, a code name co intel pro. To the burglars. At the time, it meant nothing, just some bureau jargon. Soon an even splashier scandal, Watergate was dominating the headlines the media. Burglary could have become a historical footnote, but it.
Wasn't over yet.
I had gone to the Senate Judiciary Committee to pick up a very mundane item, and people were using the photo copy of the machine, and I had to wait to get a copy of this report.
Carl Stern was a young reporter covering the Justice Department for NBC. One day in nineteen seventy two, he was in a government office, just waiting for a copy machine when an offhand comment piqued his interest.
While I was waiting, my friend said, here, ever seen these papers? And he had a couple of dozen pages that had been provided courtesy of the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. While you're wasting time here, why don't you take a look. And flipping through the pages, I noticed one It said Cohen telpro new Left.
The FBI file contained an article from Baron's magazine criticizing left wing student activism at Columbia. The file also contained a memo to agents of the media FBI office instructing them to anonymously mail this article to local college administrators.
It was you know, a little handwriting below the notice to the field office that said Tom or for the agent in charge there, Tom Lewis, Tom, can you handle swarththor Haverford and Villanova. I mean, they had this thing really quite explicitly described.
That's what caught my eye.
The implication was clear the FBI was covertly trying to sway colleges into cracking down on anti war students. Co Intel pro New Left appeared to be the name of this operation. But what the hell kind of operation was this?
Mailed anonymously? Do FBI agents mail andi leftwik literature anonymously? Is that what FBI agents do?
And that's what bothered me.
Carl asked his usual government sources.
A series of Justice Department and FBI employees.
When I raised the you know, we can't talk.
About that, which is FED speak for keep your nose out of this, Carl.
Well, nothing is going to get a reporter's interest more quickly than SAGA can't talk about it.
So Carl turned to FOYA, the Good Old Freedom of Information Act, although at this time it was actually the Good New Freedom of Information Act. It had only passed a few years earlier in nineteen sixty eight, Of course, the FBI denied his initial request, citing national security concerns, but Carl was a dog with a co intel pro bone, so he sued the government. Now, a judge would read a batch of documents explaining co intel pro and rule on whether or not they could be released to Carl, but he.
Didn't want to read all those pages, so.
He gave it to his clerk, one of his clerks, to read over the weekend. The clerk lived in one of these housing to elements over in Virginia. It was summertime, quite hot. He went to the swimming pool to take a tip and took a handful of the documents with him to read at the pool.
Northern Virginia, where even the pool side reading is highly classified.
Okay, well, unfortunately, after his swimming went back to his apartment, the doorbell rang and it was some sweet young thing holding the documents, saying, sir, you left me. He's under your chair, your lounge. So here were these highly important documents which were in court litigating the sea, and they were under his chair at the swimming pool.
There's probably an alternate universe in which the aforementioned sweet young thing was a Soviet spy who picked up these documents, leaked them all and brought down the US government.
But instead that sweet young thing who found retrieved these documents save the Republic as she became the Clerk's wife.
Yep, it was.
The first meet cute in the history of the Freedom of Information Act. A victory for love and soon maybe a victory for Carl. But just as Carl started digging for its deepest, darkest secrets, the Bureau suffered the greatest loss of its sixty four year history. I'll let Walter Cronkite break the news to you.
Good evening. Jay Edgar Hoover has died at the age of seventy seven. For almost every living American generation, Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, stood as a symbol of incorruptible law enforcement and untouchable who liked to boast that his men could not be bought.
In May second, nineteen seventy two, j Edgar Hoover died suddenly at his home in Washington, DC. The official cause of death cardiovascular disease.
We like to think that maybe we hastened that a little bit.
Okay, so Bonnie Rains and the other burglars might not have been too upset, but mainstream America was in mourning. President Nixon ordered flags flown at half staff. Hoover's body lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda, the first unelected civil servant given that honor. After thousands of people streamed through the Capitol to pay their respects, the only director the FBI had ever known was laid to rest at Congressional Cemetery. It is eulogy for Hoover. President Nixon didn't just praise the late FBI director. He also lashed out at the FBI's haters.
The FBI will carry on in the future true to its finest traditions in the past, because, regardless of what the snipers and detractors would have us believe, the fact is a director Hoover built the bureau totally on principle.
Hoover died a hero to mainstream America, having blackmailed, imprisoned, buried, or otherwise outlasted generations of enemies and detractors. I'll be honest, I wish Hoover had lived just a little bit longer, because the following year, the judge in Carl Stearn's Secret Document case ruled in his favor and ordered the release of a few crucial documents explaining that mysterious phrase co intel pro.
What I got was four pages of paper.
Okay, so not a lot of pages, but turns out a lot of revelations even then.
The first of the four pages reference eighth co and tailpro programs dealing with things as the Black Extreamist Socialist Workers Party, disruption of white hate crubs, they got New Left, of course, so on and on.
It had been more than two and a half years since the Burglars first uncovered that word co intel pro. Now finally the world would know what it meant. This was the umbrella term for no fewer than eight FBI programs, all using patently unconstitutional counterintelligence tactics against American citizens, and, according to Carl sources, all happening without the knowledge of any Attorneys general. It was an explosive story. On December sixth, nineteen seventy three, a dapper and confident young Carl Stern appeared on the NBC Nightly News and introduced America to the dark sides of j Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
The documents proved for the first time with the FBI undertook a program to harris and destroy new Left political organizations whose views the federal police agency disagreed with. Wrote FBI Director Hoover, the purpose of the program would be to expose and disrupt the new Left. We must frustrate every effort of these groups and individuals to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents.
Carl's referencing memos from nineteen sixty eight here, But to be clear, Cointel pro began all the way back in nineteen fifty six. The FBI had kept it a secret for the better part of two decades, but now Carl was reading the bureau's secrets out loud on national television.
One former agent who participated in the program has described how burglaries, forged blackmail letters, and threats of violence were used to try to stop anti war marches. Many of the techniques were clearly illegal, but justified in the interest of national security. Today, the Justice Departments said no Attorney General authorized or knew of the program.
Almost immediately the calls for congressional hearings began, but in classic Congress fashion, Congress dragged its feet. It took several more shocking revelations, including the news that Hoover had illegally spied on members of Congress, for the legislative branch to officially establish a committee to start looking into all this shit. Leading that committee was Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho.
He once said to me and others that he would be the last Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Idaho, and in fact, that's exactly what happened.
That's Locke Johnson.
He was special assistant to Frank Church during what came to be known as the Church Committee hearings. Locke and his team of investigators conducted an exhaustive review of intelligence practices at the FBI, CIA, NSSAY, and a bunch of other spooky acronyms. By the way, for more on that, I hope you'll check out our bonus interview with Locke. Anyway, it took more than a year before the committee was ready to make its findings public.
We were slow rolled and stonewalled, and we used a couple of Washington expressions. We had to fight them tooth and nail.
Despite the slow rolling and stonewalling, Church's team eventually pried mountains of co intel pro documents away from the FBI, they conducted interviews with agents and with victims of the bureau's misbehavior. On November eighteenth, nineteen seventy five, Frank Church sat in a crowded, high columned chamber in the Russell Senate Office building and called to order a momentous hearing.
There has never been a full public accounting of FBI domestic intelligence operations. Therefore this committee has undertaken such an investigation.
It was packed with people. Very ornate took place and in the front of the people there are five hundred people or so, citizens and tourists in many cases, and no doubt some KGB people, and they're trying to learn about American intelligence. In the front row television cameras and reporters senators all the eleven senators, and behind the senators were we staffer is sitting to help them if they needed help.
You can actually see a young Lock Johnson just behind Frank Church in the old C span footage of the hearings.
The proceedings began with a thank you.
Frank Church voiced his appreciation for the anonymous burglars whose courageous actions had precipitated these hearings. From there, the focus turned to two government lawyers, Fritz Schwartz and Curtis Smothers. They were there to lay out the facts of Hoover's secret FBI. Here's Schwartz now turning to Cohen Tailpro coen.
Telpro is a abbreviation of the words counter intelligence program. Telpro is the name for the effort by the Bureau to destroy people and to destroy organizations, or, as they used the words disrupt, to neutralize.
All the horrible operations by the intelligence agency is, particularly the FBI against American citizens, had their origins in this false belief that communism was going to destroy US.
Counterintelligence activities are by definition conducted to counter the activities of foreign intelligence agents, but for years the FBI had operated under the assumption that anyone speaking out against the government could be a foreign agent, or at least could be investigated as if they were.
Here's Curtis Smothers.
Part of the problem as they attempted to translate the tactics used first against the Communist Party against virtually every perceived enemy. As the Bureau looked across the landscape and decided whose be neutralized, discredited, or destroyed, take.
For example, the Socialist Workers Party. They had been the target of what the FBI called quote black bag jobs, acute euphemism for when the FBI just straight up committed burglary. Between nineteen sixty and sixty six, FBI agents broke into the party's New York City offices no fewer than ninety two times. You know what they say, If at first you don't succeed in finding evidence of Soviet espionage, try try again ninety one more times. More than four hundred black bag jobs would eventually come to light. Many of them involved photographing private homes and offices and or leaving behind listening devices to gather information on their targets. This kind of thing is legal if you have a warrant, but the FBI never bothered with that pesky formality, which meant none of what they learned from these break ins would be admissible in court. Hoover and his men were well aware of this. They didn't intend to build criminal cases against co intel pros targets. Rather, the goal of these operations was simply to gather information that could be used against.
Them, all information on activities in connection with demonstrations aimed at social reform, whatever that may be.
Basically, if your politics didn't meet with the FBI's approval, the bureau felt entitled to gather information on every aspect of your life.
Information which extended to their personal lives and died down to when including sex activities.
Hoover kept these black bag jobs under wraps with an almost unbelievably simplistic bureaucratic trick. Any files related to the break ins went into a specially designated file called I swear I'm not making this up, the do not file file. Presumably Hoover kept that file locked in his this is not a filing cabinet filing cabinet and whatever he needed to threaten, embarrass, or just confuse his targets, he knew exactly where to look that do not file file.
Bureau agents were told to attack the new Left by disinformation and misinformation, and I.
Will give you.
Schwartz recounted a story from the first inauguration of Richard Nixon. He told the committee how a protest group called the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam had cooperated with police and their efforts to keep demonstrations calm and organized, but the FBI didn't want an orderly protest, they wanted chaos, so they resorted to counterintelligence tactics.
Now what did the FBI do. They found out what Citizen Band was being used for walkie talkies, and they used that Citizen Band to supply the marshals with misinformation and pretending to be a unit of the National Mobilization to end the war in Vietnam, countermanded the orders issued by the movement.
The bureau had targeted a lot of people that went way beyond even spying. These documents made it clear that the FBI was attacking these individuals, attempting to destroy their reputations.
As it turned out, investigating actual criminals took a back seat to petty, vindictive harassment, like trying to get people fired. They'd even contacted a bank in Wisconsin and urged them not to give a home loan to a cub Scout leader with Communist sympathies.
And I'll never forget going to visit Anatole Rappaport. He wrote some of the pioneer work in game theory, so he was one of America's finest intellectuals.
Rapaport was a Russian immigrant US Air Force veteran and professor at the University of Michigan. He'd been at the forefront of the teaching movement, inviting students to drop what they were doing and join open discussions of what was going on in Vietnam.
Jego Hoover went after him like you wouldn't leave, through anonymous letter, writing in particular, why well, First of all, Rappaport had been born in Russia. Ooh, scary. So the FBI began to send out these anonymous letters claiming that Rappaport was a communist, that he was in control of Moscow and KGB. The letters went to legislators in the state of Michigan, went to university administrators, and to the great shame of all of them involved, they believed these stories and finally hounded Rappaport out of the University of Michigan.
By the time Locke learned that Rapaport had been a target of co intel pro, Rapaport was living in Canada, and.
He sat down and leafed through these documents. As I sat there, and he would shake his head and he just couldn't believe that his own government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had been the one behind all of these attacks against him. And at the end of going a couple of hours through these documents, he began to weep so very sad spectacle. And that's just, you know, one of probably two thousand ors so cases like throughout the country.
This was one of co intel Pro's favorite tactics, the poison pen letter, usually sent anonymously or forged to employers, colleagues, or even loved ones. At the hearings, Curtis Smothers was visibly uncomfortable as he read aloud from a particularly disgusting example, an anonymous letter sent by the FBI to the husband of a white woman who was involved with a black activist group.
Look, man, I guess your old lady doesn't get enough at home. Oh, she wouldn't be shucking and jibing with all black men in action, you did, Like, all she wants to integrate is the bedroom.
Remember, the FBI was overwhelmingly white at this time. It was almost certainly a white male FBI agent who wrote these lines.
And us black sisters ain't gonna take no second best for all men. It's signed a soul system.
The FBI used this same tactic against white actress Jean Seberg, who was known for supporting groups like the NAACP and the Black Panthers. When Sieberg became pregnant in nineteen seventy, the Los Angeles office of the FBI saw an opportunity to neutralize her. With Hoover's approval, agents furnished fake letters to a gossip columnist who reported in the La Times that an anonymous actress matching Sieberg's description had cheated on her husband with a Black Panther and was carrying his child. Overwhelmed with stress from these public smears, Seeberg went into premature labor, and the baby did not survive. Sieberg never recovered, though she lived long enough to see the FBI's role in the affair come to light. She died by suicide in nineteen seventy nine, and then came the bureau's most infamous poison pen letter of all. It would emerge as part of the FBI's sweeping and relentless effort to disrupt the civil rights movement. Co Intel profiles on doctor Martin Luther King Junior revealed that Hoover had become paranoid to the point of delusion.
By January of sixty two. Mister Hoover has already typed doctor King as no good. Hoover is particularly disturbed after in nineteen sixty three it became clear that the concept of nonviolence was gaining adherents. Quoting from a memorandum, the plan here is to completely discredit doctor King by quote, taking him off his pedestal, and to reduce him completely in influence.
In the wake of the nineteen sixty three March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech, Hoover had his men conduct an exhaustive investigation and to ties between King and Soviet intelligence. The connection between them, his agents reported back was quote infinitesimal.
This was not accepted by the director of the FBI. He found that thinking wrong, unacceptable and said that it must be changed, And it was changed.
Think about that for a second. When his own well oiled investigative machine presented Hoover with facts that didn't line up with his assumptions, he ordered his agents to ignore those facts, and he launched an effort to destroy King anyway.
The lower level people in the FBI apologized for having misunderstood matters, and on they go with this effort to discredit and start they do the bugs on doctor King.
Eventually, an illegal bug picked up evidence that King was having an affair. As he prepared to travel to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI sent him the ultimate poison pen letter.
The Bureau went so far as to mail anonymous letters to doctor King and his wife, which were mailed shortly before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and finishes with this suggestion, King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just thirty four days in which to do it. This exact number has been selected for a specific reason. It has definite practical significance. It was thirty four days before the award.
You were done.
That was taken by doctor King to mean a suggestion for suicide. Was it not understand, Senator who wrote the letter? Well, that's a matter of dispute. It was found in the files of mister Sullivan.
Schwartz was referring to FBI Director Bill Sullivan. Sullivan's name was all over the co Intel pro documents. He'd helped Hoover design the first co Intel pro operations back in nineteen fifty six.
He claims that it's a plant in his files and that someone else in the Bureau in.
Fact wrote the document.
The document which was found is a draft of the letter, which was the anonymous letter which was actually sent.
Is there right to dispute that the letter did in fact come from the FBI.
We've heard no dispute of that.
As the Church Committee hearings went on, it became clear that the FBI had strayed light years away from its mandate. The Bureau was supposed to enforce America's laws and prevent criminal activity, but even when the targets were actual criminals, co intel pro didn't appear at all interested in enforcing the law.
We had one FBI informant who had infiltrated the Klan.
Shortly before he was set to testify. This informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, told the Church Committee staff he didn't want his face on camera. He had been a mole in the Birmingham, Alabama KKK and if anyone recognized them, his life might be in danger.
So we had him wear a mask with eye holes and a mouth hole so he could.
Speak locks under selling it.
Roe basically testified before Congress with what looked kind of like a diaper on his head. Just google Gary Rowe Church Committee you'll see what I mean.
He told us that the FBI had told him, Look, what we want you to do is go down there and have affairs with clan members wives. And so the word gets well this is going on and the Klan members' families will be dissolved and disrupted.
Okay, now that's a weird government assignment. But Roe was also gathering some very valuable intel. He discovered that the Birmingham chapter of the Klan was planning to assault the Freedom Writers as they came through town. He even learned that the local police were going to assist them by looking the other way. So Roe did what an informant is supposed to do. He informed his handlers that a violent crime was about to happen.
Did you inform the FBI about planned violence prior to that incident?
Sir I gave the FBI information pertanning to the Freedom Writers, so approximately three weeks before the girth.
But the FBI did nothing.
On Mother's Day nineteen sixty one, the Freedom Writers reached Birmingham and were brutally assaulted by the KKK.
They were big more badly Yes, there were a thousand men at least almost day of the morning of the Freedom Writers, just roaming up and down right in front of city Hall. We had baseball bets, we had clubs, we had chains, we had pistol sticking in our belts. It was just unbelievable.
Later Rowe asked his handler why the g men hadn't stepped in.
He said, we our investigating agency, not an enforcement agency. All we do is gather information, That was my answer.
Tens of thousands of quote subversives surveiled over the course of decades, hundreds of illegal break ins, thousands of informants and wiretaps. You think that casting a net this wide the FBI would have prevented some crime or another, even if it was by accident. Hadn't the GMN caught at least one actual bad guy in all of this? Apparently not. Just as blanket surveillance had failed to catch the media burglars, a decade and a half of co intel pro operations also failed to catch a single Communist agent or any other criminal, Hoover's FBI had gotten people fired, broken up marriages, destabilized law abiding political groups, and sown a general sense of paranoia throughout the American left. But years later, when historian and FBI expert Athan Theoharis conducted an exhaustive analysis of everything that had come to light, he reached a devastating conclusion quote, I can think of no crime that was stopped by information gained during co intel pro. Co Intel pro hadn't saved a single American life. In fact, as the Church Committee was about to learn, the opposite was true, the FBI had American blood on its hands. In nineteen sixty eight, j Edgar Hoover wrote a memo. In it he urged his g men to quote prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and elect the militant black nationalist movement. That movement and its leaders became co intel pros chief targets, and.
Black Panthers, by the way, were the arch victims among all the array of other victims from Anatole Rappertport to doctor King to klueclickt Plan, you name it. The Black Panthers and other black kind of extremist groups but non violent and were the major targets that Hoover wanted to destroy it.
He declares the Black Panther Party the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States in nineteen sixty eight.
That's Donna Merch, a scholar of the Black Panther Party.
And does it it precisely the moment that the party is turning away from its use of police patrols and explicit arm self defense imagery.
These police patrols were organized groups of Black Panthers who patrolled their neighborhood are in accordance with the Second Amendment as a deterrent against police violence. They saw this as an essential way to defend their communities against ongoing, unchecked and widely accepted abuse from police. But Donna says the Panthers were turning away from their focus on guns in favor of social programs just as the FBI stepped up its efforts against the Panthers. She told us the FBI's interest in the Panthers was never really about the threat of violence, but about their ideas.
And so I think there was a real sense of fright about the strength of their ideas and the depth of support that they had within the black community, but also among Mother Country radicals, among white college students, also white artists and writers. Because the Panthers were an intellectual movement.
It was just awakening, if you will, as what it was to be a young black Afnan American.
This is Omar Barber again, whom you heard from at the top of this episode on a party.
One of the things we had to do was to read and not only the autobioer Malcolm X, but James Baldwins of various books as well as France Banon.
I reatch you out earth.
If this is different from the image you have in your mind when you hear Black Panthers, that's probably because the FBI was so successful in smearing them. The Panthers were committed socialists. Fred Hampton's socialist principles compelled him to feed the poor, educate kids, and reach out across racial lines. In sixty eight, Hampton formed the Rainbow Coalition, a collection of groups that were not natural allies. In fact, some of them had actively fought against each other. They ranged from street charities to street gangs, and from Chinese and Puerto Rican revolutionaries to the Young Patriots Organization, a group of poor white Appalachians who'd moved to Chicago to find work. Through the Rainbow Coalition, Fred demonstrated that these disparate movements had a lot in common.
But then he would articulate what that stand up living was, that children's educations, the ability to feed themselves, and he would say, look, that's the same problem we have down in Bronsville in Chicago. He wasn't coming to those Appellachian whites and saying, you know, your guys should come with us, because we the better ones. And now he was saying, you know, if you really look at your condition and you understand it is because of capitalism.
The Black Panther newspaper, which they distributed in cities all over the country, was a visible reminder of their presence and their political agenda. So were the Panthers food distribution programs. Both became targets of the FBI.
They sprayed scatole, which is a foul smelling basically chemical agent on the newspaper.
We used to get the paper shipped in from Oakland and to Kenney Airport. We go pick up the papers. They would be destroyed what and we would get a call from not to the workers say, man, you guys been to go to papers. In fact, some of the workers used to hide out papers for us to we come get them, and stuff like.
That the breakfast programs had to constantly be moved, that they were really trying to destroy the breakfast programs because they meaning the FBI and local on state law enforcement, they saw those as such a danger because of the ways that they would influence parents and children and families.
Omar and a fellow Panthers knew they were being targeted by the government, but it was never really clear exactly who was behind it.
The core strategy is to criminalize and kill the leadership of the party and the rank and file. At the very least a third of the party was agen provocateurs and informers.
Omar says, it's now clear that many of the people around him were working to undermine the Black Panther Party.
We had members who were doing stick ups, robbing people, and doing other things, and we call them agent provocate tools.
These provocateurs would commit flagrant crimes like robberies and muggings, and they would make sure that their actions implicated the Panther organization, giving law enforcement an excuse to move in.
And subsequently we learned to find a lot of those people where in fact, not only agent provocate tools, but undercover officers, and.
You're inserting people into organizations to increase that level of anger and to increase that level of violence, and often inserting violence because that was a way to have people arrested and then locked away in prison.
The FBI strategy worked. The bureau successfully created deep rifts within the party, using forged letters and agent provocateurs to encourage violence and foster grievances. The same was true for the Black Panthers' relationships to other black organizations.
A special agent in San Diego wrote a classified letter back to Jagger, who were saying, we've managed to convince one black group in San Diego that the real enemies are another black group, and we've got them into an argument, and there have been some shootings and some killings between these two groups. And we prevented them from concentrating on civil rights by getting them involved in gang warfare against each other. And that was a co Intel pro goal.
In nineteen sixty eight, co Intel Pro successfully framed a Panther named Geronimo Pratt, who was arrested and convicted of murdering a woman in Los Angeles. He spent twenty seven years in prison before it was finally proven that Pratt had been in Oakland, four hundred miles away.
At the time of the crime.
The FBI had known Pratt was innocent the entire time, but they allowed him to spend nearly three decades in prison. And then there was the case of Fred Hampton. The Black Panthers, and many of had long been convinced that Jay Edgar Hoover had assassinated Hampton. Now that Hoover was dead and his secrets were out, the nation finally learned the full story. In nineteen sixty seven, a young black man named William O'Neil stole a car in Chicago, drove it to Indiana, and abandoned it. Since he'd crossed state lines, his crime was a federal one, so the FBI investigated.
Eventually, an agent caught.
Up with O'Neil.
He told him that even though he was caught red handed, there was no need to worry. They could work something out. He then asked O'Neill to infiltrate the Illinois Black Panther party. O'Neill excelled as an informant. He ingratiated himself with the Panthers and became head of security to their charismatic young leader, Fred Hampton. In late nineteen sixty nine, O'Neill provided the FBI with the address of the house where Hampton was staying. He told them there were guns there, and he drew a map of the house, even marking the location of Fred Hampton's bed. On the night of December third, nineteen sixty nine, O'Neil slipped a sedative into a glass of kool aid and gave it to Chairman Fred and then departed. A few hours later, the police arrived and shot their way into the apartment using the map. They went straight to the bedroom and killed Fred Hampton in cold blood as he lay drugged and knocked out in his bed. O'Neil was not the last informant and Hampton was not the last Panther to die.
Not only was it the organizations that were targeted Cointelpro, but the greater Black community. There was a criminalation of a people, a race of people, not just the organization that may be and represented those people. That's the angle that we still have to look at. There were a lot of panthers that were killed in very unusual circumstances that a lot of pants in that won in jail. If the committee's invest atic guy had not uncovered those files, I think we would have seen more desks.
As part of his research before the hearings, Locke Johnson traveled to Boston to interview former FBI Assistant Director Bill Sullivan, one of the chief architects of co Intel pro Now. He was sitting directly across from Locke in a private room at Logan Airport.
And I asked him, how could you have done these things? How could you have tried to destroy anatole, rappaport and doctor King and the hundreds upon hundreds of other people in the civil rights movement and in the anti war protest movement. How could you have done that to these people who weren't breaking any laws, that they were expressing their views. And he said, that's what Hoover wanted me to do. And I had a mortgage on my house and I had three kids in college. I reminded me of Hannah Urant's banality of evil. Help people do the most awful things for the most mundane reasons. It was really quite shocking. You know the old cliche about you could hear a pin drop, That's exactly what it was. In the Russell.
Auditorium after hearing the facts of Cotel pro laid out before the Church Committee. Michigan Senator Philip Hart spoke up.
I've been told for years by, among others, some of my own family that this is exactly what the Bureau was doing all the time, And in my great wisdom in high office, I assured them they were on pot.
This just wasn't true, couldn't happen. They wouldn't do it.
Heart was nearing the end of his third and final term in the Senate. His health was declining. In fact, according to Locke, Heart had to miss some of the hearings for medical reasons, but he had heard enough.
What you've described is a series of illegal actions intended squarely to deny First Amendment rights to some Americans. The trick, now, as I say it, Miss Chairman, is for this committee to be able to figure out how to persuade the people of this country that indeed it did go on, and how shall we ensure that it never happened again.
And it was kind of a turning point in which even the three conservative Republicans sort of had an epiphany that the FBI had really gone way too far. They had no accountability, and the anchor of democracy is accountability.
As he filled the questions from the Church committee, visibly sweaty and red as a phone tapping Tomato. FBI Deputy Associate Director James Adams acknowledged that the Bureau had strayed from its mission. He encouraged Congress to give them some quote guidelines, at which point Frank Church reminded him that he already had some you know, laws.
You shouldn't have ever had to have had guidelines to tell you that the federal government's chief law enforcement agency ought not to disobey the law. And really, you don't need explicit guidelines to.
Tell you that, or you shouldn't have.
Wouldn't you agree?
I would say that, looking at it today, we should have looked at it that way yesterday.
Hindsight's twenty twenty Congress wasn't going to accept that old chestnut and leave it at that. In the wake of the Church hearings, it passed a new law limiting future FBI directors to a term of ten years.
Finally, seventy five, we began to do something in the United States of America about secret power, the most dangerous power of all, and we tried to tame secret power by creating a House and sidate Intelligence Committee.
It sounds crazy now, but the Church Committee really was the first time that Congress ever held the FBI to account. In the wake of these revelations, both Houses of Congress eventually voted to keep permanent standing committees to review what intelligence agencies were doing, which they still do today. The media burglars watched the hearings unfold, unable to discuss them with each other or take any credit for the crucial role they'd played.
It was very exciting when the Church Committee decided to take us on.
This is fabulous.
I wasn't sure it was going to rise to that level, but I thought it was amazing. And you know, we had raised the coniousness in the whole country about the FBI.
I had sort of a feeling of, well, finally, you know, not that I expected a whole lot out of it, but at least it was, you know, the Congress is acknowledging the you know, the anti democratic stuff that had been going on.
Our hope was that there would be serious oversight of the FBI and the CIA.
Long overdue in this so called democracy.
If you look at the history of Jaegar Hoover, it was the most damaging act against him in that long history. In my view, there were more heroes and burglars because it brought to light the fact that cointelpro and the counter intelligence program of the FBI existed.
Next on SNAFU, the fallout from the Church Committee revelations, What are.
We going to do about this? Easy as We're going to get?
The time of Goodbye, the final chapters of our burglar stories.
I Changed, Sinning and Sorry, My Underground Life.
And a Return to the Scene of the Crime.
Snapoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This season of Snapfoo is based on the book The Burglary The Discovery of Jay Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger.
It's executive produced by.
Me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Walbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer is Stephen Wood. This episode was written by Albert Chen, Sarah Joyner, and Stephen Wood, with additional writing and story editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Nevin Calla poly is our production assistant. Facts checking by char ARLs Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Sensitivity consult from Oloa Kemi Ala de Sui, editing, sound design and original music by Ben Chugg, Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny and Jimma Castelli. Foley theme music by Dan Rosatto. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Riizak. Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary nineteen seventy one. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy fine Gold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Rains, Sarah Schumer and Bob Williamson.
