The Radical Agenda may utilize affiliate links for recommended books and resources. This means we may earn a small commission from clicks or purchases through those links at no cost to you. We only recommend products and services we believe in. All opinions shared are entirely our own. Thank you for supporting The Radical Agenda!

What was COINTELPRO?

Have you heard of COINTELPRO? The full name is  “Counter Intelligence Program,” and was a project under the Federal Bureau of Investigations, or FBI. The project lasted between 1956-1971, when it was discovered after the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and stole files.

The FBI itself was created in 1908 and was originally directed by J. Edgar Hoover, the future president who tasked the FBI to investigate the Osage murders in the 1920s that were the focus of the book Killers of the Flower Moon. The FBI also closely watched peace activist and “mother of social work” Jane Addams because of her involvement in the founding of the International League of Peace and Freedom.

COINTELPRO was founded in 1956 during the Red Scare, as a way to monitor anyone who the government thought might be involved in the Communist Party of the United States. It soon shifted its focus onto the Black Panther Party (233 of the 295 reports from COINTELPRO were about the Black Panther Party), Freedom Riders, and Martin Luther King. One of the memos discovered described their goal was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the movements.

The agents used tactics like repeated arrests and jail time to convince the public that the activists were “bad” and to drain their finances – one memo said that their goal was to continue putting them in jail “until they can no longer make bail.” The FBI sent members of the groups anonymous death threats and accusations of infidelity to the spouses of activists. They also utilized paid infiltrators for information, including William O’Neal, who helped facilitate the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in his home. Reports indicate that many of their informants were members of the KKK.

In all, “roughly 20,000 people all investigated solely on the basis of their political views” according to the report COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story presented in 2001 to the World Conference Against Racism.

After the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke in and stole the files, they provided the information to news outlets, and the story was broken by the Washington Post. It took until 1975 for a Congressional Committee to complete the investigation and determine that the program was in violation of first amendment rights of citizens.