COINTELPRO

That the FBI systematically infiltrated lawful domestic political organisations, forged correspondence to provoke violence between rival groups, planted stories with cooperative journalists, and worked to destroy the personal lives of activists — all without any predicate crime, and with the explicit purpose of preventing the rise of movements it disapproved of.

COINTELPRO began in August 1956 as an operation against the Communist Party USA, then expanded outward: the Socialist Workers Party in 1961, white supremacist groups in 1964, 'Black Nationalist–Hate Groups' in 1967, and the New Left in 1968. The expansion followed a pattern. Each time a court restricted what the Bureau could do overtly, the covert programme absorbed the work. The public learned of it because on 8 March 1971, while the country was watching the Ali–Frazier fight, eight activists broke into a small FBI resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania and took every file in the office. They mailed the documents to newspapers. One folder was labelled COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO produced the Attorney General's Guidelines on domestic investigations in 1976, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, and permanent congressional intelligence oversight committees. It also permanently changed what Americans were willing to believe about their government, and with cause: for fifteen years the most paranoid available description of the FBI was closer to the truth than the official one.