CONTACT: Email: paranaughtica@gmail.com Twitter: @paranaughtica Facebook: The Paranaughtica Podcast **The following comes directly from FBI Records: The Vault — COINTELPRO ** COINTELPRO The FBI began COINTELPRO—short for Counterintelligence Program—in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.***If you’d like to help out with a donation and you’re currently listening on Spotify, you can simply scroll down on my page and you’ll see a button to help me out with either a one-time donation or you can set up a monthly recurring donation. You can also go to the Facebook page where I have a link to Ko-Fi and Pay-Pal if you'd like to help out the show. I would greatly appreciate it! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Today, we are going to be covering the operation that was once known as COINTELPRO, or Counterintelligence Program, but has long since been renamed, splintered, and made more powerful.
It was a massive program that was highly illegal and excessively broad in its very nature.
Like many of the government programs that started out in the early days of modern intelligence services, COINTELPRO was nothing short of being disastrous and deadly.
This operation's intent was to do nothing more than create more of a division between the American citizen and the American government and to get rid of anyone who had or has any amount of influence on the general public's thinking that is contrary to what the government wants us to think and believe.
Now, before we get into this, I wanted to bring up an important issue that has been in the headlines.
Pfizer. Yes, that bill that the government has recently passed which made it legal for the FBI, the CIA, and pretty much any government official to literally spy on any American citizen.
If you don't understand the implications, I urge you to read the US Constitution and to do even the most basic level of research into government corruption.
So... If you follow the news, then you know that just recently, it has been uncovered that Alex Jones was specifically spied on, gang-stalked, and pushed into frivolous lawsuits by the FBI and the CIA.
A contracting officer for the CIA, a man named Gavin O'Blennis, was caught on hidden camera by an undercover journalist claiming that the FBI could imprison anyone by setting them up, a method he referred to as a nudge.
He singled out right-wing journalists, specifically Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, as being problematic.
And Oblenis also discussed the presence of undercover FBI agents at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, suggesting a widespread federal involvement in key national events, which we all know.
Like, this is not a secret.
We know the FBI and the CIA do these undercover operations and flip it and blame the citizens.
Like, it's maddening.
But he mentioned the use of embellished news and fake social media as tools to incite public anger and manipulate public perception.
And if you haven't listened to last week's episode on Project Mockingbird that I did, I suggest you just go back and listen to that after this.
But last week, Alex Jones has mentioned that he is thinking of suing the agencies after some attorneys said that they would back him up in pursuing those cases.
He also said that Elon Musk is ready to assist him.
And if that's true, then the CIA and the FBI won't have such an easy job considering that they heavily rely on the fact that most American citizens are poor as fuck and cannot afford adequate legal representation to protect against their illegal operations.
where they fabricate evidence and
It's a fact.
So... Why is it that we seem to not be able to organize ourselves anymore?
You know what I mean?
In the late 60s and early 70s, there was a group called the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI.
This group was tired of the FBI's bullshit operations, which included mass spying on American citizens.
And what did they do?
They broke into an FBI building.
Well, first, they organized themselves.
And then they broke into an FBI building, stole a bunch of documents, and exposed the agency, which prompted Congress to investigate.
Now, the number one step here, ladies and gentlemen, is we need to organize.
The Citizens Committee actually accomplished a lot, but since the people have such a hard time organizing in this country and standing up against this government corruption, we've become complacent and have lost sight of what is truly important.
That's to protect the U.S. Constitution and keep the government accountable.
I mean, this was a government that was originally established by the people, for the people.
And the second thing I wanted to mention before we get into today's episode is the issue that was addressed by American journalist and correspondent Cheryl Ackeson.
First, she reported on the Obama administration's illegal operation, which was a total disaster, the 2009-2011 Fast and Furious operation, which was a gun-running operation where they claimed they were trying to track these guns to high-profile targeted individuals in Mexico.
They allowed legal gun sellers in the U.S. to sell.
Two people who were not qualified to purchase guns, called straw buyers.
In the end, not a single target was arrested.
Most of the weapons were never recovered, and they arrested a number of the gun sellers that they originally set up to sell the guns.
What was even worse was that, at the very least, 150 Mexican civilians were murdered and or injured by those same guns that the U.S. government was illegally running.
After Cheryl Atkinson ran the investigative report, the Obama administration, with the help of the criminal organizations, the FBI and the CIA, they started to target her.
And that was when they started remotely hacking her electronic devices, multiple devices, home and work computers, phones, etc., everything.
But they were even planning on planting child pornography on her husband's computer.
Yeah. In 2022, Cheryl was able to bring a case to the government about the misconduct of these three-letter mafias and eventually won.
During the case, the FBI would actually give testimony that the FBI has indeed planted child pornography on American citizens' computers in the past.
And, obviously, anyone with half of a functioning brain can deduce without effort that they carry out these type of fabricated cases constantly against anyone who their pathetic...
Handlers want them to.
It's tyranny, ladies and gentlemen.
It's fucking tyranny.
Deep state tyranny, 1984.
So, how and why would the government want to create that division I was talking about among the people?
It's called divide and conquer, or...
The divide and rule policy that is used in politics and sociology as well as the military to gain and maintain power divisively.
This includes the exploitation of existing divisions within a political group by its political opponents and also the deliberate creation or strengthening of such divisions.
In politics, the concept refers to a strategy that breaks up existing power structures and especially prevents smaller power groups from linking up, causing rivalries and fomenting discord among the people to prevent a rebellion against the elites
or the people implementing the strategy.
The goal is either to pit the lower classes against themselves to prevent a revolution, or to provide a desired solution to a growing discord that strengthens the power of the elites.
This is why it is so, so, so, so important that we realize that it is our duty, in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, to organize ourselves and to prepare for such a situation as a tyrannical government.
*Cough* *Cough*
And if it is an actual revolution that the U.S. government and all of their crony billionaire friends want to so desperately prevent, in other words, the eradication of the Second Amendment, Then that exact thing is exactly what we need to prepare for.
The writing is everywhere, including the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
So, associate professor of Anglia Ruskin University, a guy named Clive R. Buddy, in his research for the Corporate Psychopaths Research Association...
found that the divide and conquer strategy was a common strategy used by corporate psychopaths as a smokescreen to help consolidate and advance the grip on power in the corporate hierarchy.
This stratagem is no different in the rotting bowels of the political structure of Washington, D.C.
British journalist Nafiz Ahmed Cited a 2008 RAND Corporation study for the U.S. Armed Forces, which recommended divide and rule as a possible strategy against the Muslim world in the long war.
Yes, the RAND Corporation, which is arguably one of the biggest threats to our quality of life, or what is left of it.
So with that said, let's get into this.
COINTELPRO, again just an abbreviation for Counterintelligence Program, was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, aimed at surveilling, infiltrating,
discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive.
Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party, Anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists, and the civil rights and black power movements.
You know, Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party.
Also environmentalists and animal rights groups.
The American Indian Movement, the Chicano and Mexican American groups like the Brown Berets, the United Farm Workers.
independence movements, including Puerto Rican independence groups such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, as well as a variety of other organizations that were part of the broader New Left movement who campaigned for a broad
range of social issues, such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reform, statism, neo-Marxism, and the rejection of
Of course, there are many others.
These just being a few of the groups that the FBI was caught surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting.
The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its very inception and carries on into today with no signs of slowing down.
Many of the tactics used in Cointelpro are alleged to have seen continued use, including discrediting targets through psychological warfare, And according to a Senate report,
the FBI's motivation was to protect national security, to prevent violence, and to maintain the existing social and political order.
Bullshit. Beginning in 1969, leaders of the Black Panther Party were targeted by the COINTELPRO and neutralized by being assassinated, imprisoned, publicly humiliated, or falsely charged with crimes.
Other common tactics used by COINTELPRO were perjury, witness harassment, witness intimidation, and withholding of exculpatory evidence, as well as planting evidence.
And FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, while donning his favorite bra and panties, Under Hoover,
the official in charge of COINTELPRO was the assistant director William C. Sullivan.
William Sullivan was in charge of the agency's domestic intelligence operations from 1961 to 1971, but was forced out of the FBI at the end of September in 1971 due to disagreements with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
I wonder what those could have been.
The following year, Sullivan was appointed as the head of the Justice Department's new Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, which he led from June 1972 to July 1973, until it became the Drug Enforcement Administration later that year.
Sullivan died in a hunting accident four years later in 1977.
And as the story goes, he had met a friend, Robert D. Novak, in Maryland in June of 1972, to have lunch and talk about Robert's plans on a biography that he was thinking about writing about Hoover.
And when Sullivan left, he told Robert that he, Robert, would probably read about his death in the papers where they describe it as an accident, but not to believe it because it would be a murder.
You know how these things go.
So on November 9th, 1977, days before he was to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 20 minutes before sunrise, 65-year-old Sullivan was walking through the woods near his retirement home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on the way to meet hunting companions.
In the woods was another hunter, Robert Daniels Jr., who was a 22-year-old son of a state policeman.
And he was using a telescopic sight on a.30 caliber rifle.
Somehow, just somehow, being the experienced hunter that he was with a telescopic sight, he allegedly mistook Sullivan, wearing orange, for a deer and shot him in the neck, which killed him instantly.
The authorities called it an accident and fined Daniels $500.
And took away his hunting license for 10 years, man.
Poor fella.
God damn.
You know, it's eerily similar to when Dick Cheney shot one of his close friends, you know, one of his close elite hunting buddies during that quote-unquote hunting party.
So, yeah.
It's really interesting, too, because whenever you see these sorts of incidents where these, like, you know, accidental shootings or weird shootings or these deep state operations where there's a patsy such as Robert Daniels, They're always connected to police forces somehow.
Somehow there's always a police connection to these things.
Just so weird.
So weird how that works.
But let's get into a little bit about the history of COINTELPRO.
The FBI initiated COINTELPRO in 1956 with the aim of undermining the operations of the Communist Party of the United States.
In the 1960s, the scope of the organization was broadened to encompass various additional domestic factions, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers' Party, and the Black Panther Party.
Tactics included anonymous harassing phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American Communist Organization internally.
An October 1956 memo from Hoover reclassified the FBI's ongoing surveillance of black leaders, including it with COINTELPRO.
In 1956, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T.R.M.
Howard, a civil rights leader, a surgeon, and a wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other African Americans in the South.
When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an African American civil rights organization, was founded in 1957, The FBI began to monitor and target the group almost immediately, focusing particularly on Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison,
and eventually Martin Luther King Jr.
After the 1963 march on Washington for jobs and freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for Cointelpro, calling him the Black Messiah.
Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote, quote, End quote.
And we know that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs, giving written approval for limited wiretapping, quote-unquote limited wiretapping, of Martin Luther King's phones.
As we all know, that is not what occurred.
Soon after that, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms as they were now aware that King was growing in stature daily as the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement.
In the mid-1960s, King began to publicly criticize the FBI for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists, and Hoover responded by publicly calling King The most notorious liar in the United States.
Fucking hate that guy.
It is known that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide.
And along with the letter was a tape recording of Mr. King's extramarital affairs, which in the 1960s was like the worst blackmail you could get on someone.
And the tape consisted of audio recordings obtained through tapping King's phone and placing bugs throughout various hotel rooms over a period of the last, I don't know, two years?
King was subsequently informed that the audio from the tape recording would be released to the media if he did not acquiesce and commit suicide prior to accepting his Nobel Peace Prize.
And it's just ridiculous, because here's a great human being doing really great things for society, and he's getting a Nobel Peace Prize, as he should.
Yes, great, I love that.
But then you have people like Obama, who gets a Nobel Peace Prize, and he literally was behind murdering thousands of people.
He was the guy directing the murder of thousands of people in the Middle East.
And he gets a peace prize.
He gets a Nobel Peace Prize for that.
It's fucking mind-blowing.
This is why people need to wake up and they see these things, speak out about these things.
Because that shit's bullshit.
That is fucking bullshit.
Anyway. When King refused to satisfy their tactics, FBI Associate Director...
Cartha D. Delaroche began a media smear campaign offering the surveillance transcript to various news organizations, including Newsweek and Newsday.
Even by 1969, as has been noted elsewhere, FBI efforts to expose Martin Luther King Jr. had not slackened even though King had been dead for a year.
The FBI furnished ammunition to opponents that enabled attacks on King's memory and tried to block efforts to honor the slain leader.
End quote.
He would be murdered by members of the Nation of Islam with the direct assistance from the FBI.
While the FBI has denied that they were directly involved in Malcolm's murder, The FBI...
led to Malcolm's assassination on February 21st, 1965, right as he was getting ready to give a speech in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom.
The FBI said,
Also heavily infiltrated Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity in the final months of his life.
Amidst the urban unrest of July through August of 1967, the FBI began COINTELPRO-BLACK HATE which focused on King and his group as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
the Revolutionary Action Movement, Black Hate established the Ghetto Informant Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to completely disrupt,
discredit, and neutralize the activities of the black nationalist hate-type organizations.
A March 1968 memo stated that the group's goal was to, quote, prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups, to prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify the militant black nationalist movement, to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence against authorities,
and to prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them.
To both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy and to prevent the long-range growth of militant black organizations, especially among youth.
End quote.
Now, that's like Minority Report to the point in 1960s, bro.
It's crazy.
So Dr. King was said to have potential to be the Messiah figure should he abandon nonviolence and integrationalism.
I mean, the guy was never violent.
Another man, Kwame Tour, a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement, was noted to have the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way, as he was portrayed as someone who espoused a much more militant vision of black power,
according to the FBI.
And while the FBI was particularly concerned with the leaders and organizers, they did not limit their scope to them.
COINTELPRO Black Hate coincided with a broader federal effort to prepare military responses for urban riots and began increased collaboration between the FBI, the Counterintelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense.
The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1967 called Operation Chaos, sometimes referred to as MH Chaos, the MH signifying that the program had Global Area of Operations.
It was yet another domestic espionage project targeting American citizens that operated from 1967 to 1974.
And would go almost 400% over budget with their activities compared to what they were telling Congress that they were spending.
And remember, in theory, the CIA's power is very limited, and they're prohibited from U.S. operations, and aren't legally allowed to surveil anyone considered to be a U.S. persons, which includes legal immigrants,
resident aliens, corporations, and citizens.
Which we all know.
They don't follow that at all.
At all.
The program was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson and expanded under President Richard Nixon, and its quote-unquote mission was to uncover possible foreign intelligence on racial movements, anti-war movements,
and other protest movements.
It would be launched and headed by the Chief of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, under the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, and headed by Richard Ober, three very horrible and deplorable men.
Some of their activities included the CIA training and equipping Cuban exiles in bases in southern Florida, Panama, and Guatemala.
At the time, however, the State Department claimed to know absolutely nothing about the training bases.
Over the course of seven years, information was gathered on over 300,000 people.
However, The CIA would never be able to prove communist involvement in the demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
So let's bring it back to COINTELPRO because Operation Chaos is an entire episode in itself.
So a particular target of COINTELPRO was the Poor People's Campaign, a national effort organized by Martin Luther King and the SCLC to occupy Washington, D.C. The FBI heavily monitored and disrupted the campaign.
while using targeted smear tactics to undermine support for the movement.
And after the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Hoover, while fully adorned in his wife's 1960s lace garter belt, continued to rave about the, quote, rise of a new black messiah, end quote.
Fuck that guy.
God. As for Martin Luther King Jr., the official story goes that he was shot by lone gunman James Earl Ray at 6.01pm Thursday, April 4th, 1968 as he stood on the second floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
It was all very similar to the official story of Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone gunman who killed JFK roughly five years earlier.
I mean, it sure has all the hallmarks.
But as we all know, that version of the story is complete bullshit, and it is certain that without a doubt, the American government was involved directly in MLK's murder.
This is clear as day to anyone who looks at the evidence, but the smoking gun is a fact that in 1997, Martin King's son, Dexter Scott King, actually met with James Ray and publicly supported James' efforts to obtain a new trial.
Two years later...
King's widow Coretta Scott King and the couple's children represented by William F. Pepper won a wrongful death claim against Lloyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators.
Lloyd Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination and paid a Memphis Lieutenant Earl Clark to fire the shot.
The jury found Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy and that government agencies were involved in his murder.
No surprise there.
And then, just three months later, on June 4th, 1968, JFK's younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King's phones, among other things, was murdered while he was about to give a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
His alleged shooter is said to be Sirhan Sirhan, who has maintained his innocence over the past 56 years.
Sirhan Sirhan has been denied parole 17 times, but his next try at it is in 2026.
I mean, there's a lot of speculation that Sirhan Sirhan had been programmed through MKUltra and was sent to kill Robert Kennedy.
James Earl Ray never got to walk a free man again.
He passed away at the age of 70 in Columbia's Nashville Memorial Hospital due to kidney disease, liver failure, and hepatitis C. But some of the other Black Panthers that were targeted included Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Zayed Shakur,
the godmother of Tupac Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Marshall Conway, and Geronimo Pratt, who we'll get into in a moment.
And the COINTELPRO operators targeted multiple groups at once and encouraged the splintering of these groups from within.
That's how they operate.
And in letter-writing campaigns, wherein false letters were sent on behalf of members of parties, the FBI ensured that groups would not unite in their causes.
This is why we can't organize today.
But we as citizens need to get above that and, like, figure this shit out, seriously.
Anyway, these racially diverse groups had been building alliances, in part due to charismatic leaders such as Fred Hampton and his attempts to create a Rainbow Coalition.
The FBI was concerned with ensuring that these groups could not gain traction through the unity, specifically across racial lines, and one of the many ways of targeting these groups was to arouse suspicion between the different parties and causes, and in this way, the FBI took on a divide-and-conquer offensive.
I mean, they literally infiltrated groups, and over time, they became more agents than actual members, and then they started infiltrating themselves without realizing it.
Actually, that's almost exactly what happened with that Michigan governor kidnapping case.
Because firstly, the entire thing was exactly what we are talking about here today.
COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program set up by the FBI.
There was nothing grassroots about it.
FBI was behind the entire thing.
But anyway, COINTELPRO would remain secret until March of 1971.
That is when the leftist organization...
Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI, made up of ordinary people who were well past being fed up with all of the bullshit.
They broke in an FBI building in Pennsylvania, seized over a thousand documents, and distributed them to media outlets, giving the public its first official glimpse at Cointelpro.
The organization took almost every document that they found in the office and they, quote, subjected the FBI to what the FBI has been habitually subjecting political dissidents to throughout the course of its history, end quote.
Fair enough, and I believe we as citizens need to follow those footsteps.
And the Citizens Commission sent copies of the documents to a congressman, a senator, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.
Ironically, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times didn't publish the documents, but instead informed the FBI.
So, fuck those newspapers.
Well, fuck all these mainstream media newspapers, but fuck those two specifically.
Ultimately, the Washington Post decided to publish the documents despite the efforts of the Nixon administration to strong-arm the newspaper into foregoing publication, and a ballsy woman named Betty Metzger is accredited to have broken the story, so I love that woman.
The documents revealed at least 34 cases of infiltration, and in 60% of the cases, quote, And despite Hoover's dedication of at least 200 agents toward finding the perpetrators of the break-in,
They were never able to find the eight anti-war activists.
In 2014, with the statute of limitations expiring, or having expired, five of the people who were part of the document revelation came forward.
The burglary would be planned by William Davidin, who was a physics professor at Haverford College and was a leader in Philadelphia's anti-war movement.
He recruited John Raines, who was a religious professor at Temple University and Raines' wife, Bonnie.
And also Keith Forsyth, who would be the amateur locksmith, and Paul Coates, who was a former member and defense captain of the Black Panther Party in Baltimore, as well as Bob Williamson, Ralph Daniel, and Judy Feingold.
The group decided to use the night of the boxing match known as the Fight of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in March of 1971 to provide cover as they pulled off the burglary.
Many news organizations initially refused to immediately publish the information, with the notable exception of the Washington Post.
After affirming the reliability of the documents, it published them on the front page despite the Attorney General's request not to, which caused other organizations to follow suit.
Within the year, High Heeled Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled case by case, which means nothing.
The project, COINTELPRO, may have been over, but the programs that were carried out under the umbrella term have obviously continued unabated in the decades since.
The final report of the select committee reprimanded the conduct of the intelligence community in its domestic operations.
But to what effect?
Seriously, though.
But this is what they said.
Quote, On other occasions,
they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the program served the national security, the law did not apply.
While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society The FBI conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of the First Amendment rights of speech and association on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security
and deter violence.
End quote.
Man. So that's very damning.
That's incredibly damning.
And to think that that does not go on today is mind-boggling because we all know that this shit does go on today.
So if we can find that these generals who were responsible for these programs were responsible for those programs, why can't we do that today?
Why don't we do that today?
Who is bought and sold here?
In an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr in February of 1996, Noam Chomsky, a political activist and MIT professor of linguistics, spoke about the purpose and the targets of COINTELPRO, saying the following, Quote, COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks,
but by the National Political Police, the FBI, under four administrations.
By the time it got through, I won't run through the whole story, It was aimed at the entire New Left, at the women's movement, at the whole black movement.
It was extremely broad.
Its actions went as far as political assassination.
And according to the Church Committee, While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the national security or prevent violence, FBI witnesses admit that many of the targets were non-violent and most had no connections with a foreign power.
Indeed, Nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the FBI believed they represented a potential for violence, and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave aid and comfort to nonviolent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.
The imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the FBI to define the subjects of the programs.
The Black Nationalist Program, according to its supervisor, included a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as Black Nationalists, but which were in fact primarily Black.
Thus, the non-violent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist Hate Group.
End quote.
The Church Committee would actually go on to document a long, detailed history of the FBI exercising a wide range of political repression as far back as World War I, which went through the 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up anarchists,
communists, socialists, reformists, and revolutionaries for deportation.
From 1936 to 1976, the domestic operations were increased against political and anti-war groups.
And human rights laws were constantly being violated, much like today because this machine never stops.
And it's just like, why are anti-war people looked as being the enemy?
Why? Why?
And obviously, COINTELPRO was not kept in the US.
Besides Central America, Cuba, and elsewhere nearby, it also spread globally, just like Operation Mockingbird, which was an operation under the COINTELPRO name, for instance.
When the British National Party, under the leadership of John Tyndall, began making inroads in local elections during the early 1990s, a parallel and initially friendly organization, Combat 18, or C-18 as it became known as, emerged around the same time.
C-18 was founded by a man named Charlie Sargent, with help from an American dude named Harold Covington.
Initially, Tyndall enjoyed the enthusiasm of C-18 members who promised to help defend against Antifa groups that were attacking BNP events.
The relationship quickly soured when C-18 began attacking the BNP for its paramilitary approach, which they saw as inferior to their own, which they called direct action, which was to achieve political ends.
Later, C18 members launched a campaign of ruthless beatings of any BNP members who were caught alone and became a source of gossip and slander against other nationalist leaders in the British scene.
In 1995, Tyndall wrote an editorial in the BNP's newspaper, Spearhead, outlining C18's irrational and violent war to destroy the BNP, despite both sharing similar goals and enemies.
In it, he stated his belief that C-18 was being influenced by MI5 and the Special Branch, which was a British counter-terrorism agency, with help from the FBI in America, in a ploy to disrupt and discredit the British nationalist movement.
About a year and a half later, C-18 leader Charlie Sargent, along with Wilf Browning, murdered fellow C-18 member Christopher Castle during a power struggle of control for the group.
According to an investigative piece on the incident, Sergeant and Browning told police that they had friends in high places and wanted to speak to the special branch, attempting to use their service as a way to get out of trouble.
Turns out that Tyndall's suspicions were correct, because Sergeant and Browning were indeed state assets and had a special license to commit crimes.
Sound familiar?
A chapter in researcher Larry O'Hara's 1994 book, Turning Up the Heat, MI5, After the Cold War, suggests that Combat 18 was partially organic, but then was taken over by MI5 agents and informants as both
a counterintelligence project to undermine and divide the BNP, as well as to use as a honeypot to peel away the most violent outliers in the National Front and BNP, with the intention of later entrapping them in bogus terror
plots to justify
Sound familiar?
As for C18's other founder, Harold Covington.
He was suspected of being an FBI asset and agent provocateur himself.
He was known for spewing lies about high-profile nationalists in America and loudly broadcasting them, including that they were police informants, thieves, homosexuals, pedophiles, secret Jews, among many other labels he kept for a special occasion.
The FBI specifically developed tactics intended to heighten tension and hostility between various factions in the Black Power movement.
For example, between the Black Panthers and the U.S. organization.
For instance, the FBI sent a fake letter to the U.S. organization exposing a supposed Black Panther plot to murder the head of the U.S. organization, Ron Karenga.
They then intensified this by spreading falsely attributed cartoons in the Black communities, pitting the Black Panther Party against the group.
Out of roughly 295 quintile pro-operations that were aimed at the Black Liberation Movement, 233...
We're aimed at the Black Panther Party between 1967 and 1971.
This resulted in numerous deaths, and at least 29 Black Panther members are known to have been murdered by COINTELPRO between 1968 and 1971, including Bobby Hutton, George Jackson, Arthur Morris, and Bebba Tunde, ex Omar Valle.
Not to mention the nearly 750 Black Panthers that were imprisoned, and according to The Guardian, at least 19 people associated with Black liberation remained imprisoned in the United States as of 2018.
In order to eliminate Black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is known to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence, and then falsely incarcerate them.
Elmer Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther Party leader, was incarcerated for 27 years before a California Superior Court vacated his murder conviction, ultimately freeing him.
Appearing before the court, an FBI agent testified that he believed Pratt had been framed because both the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department knew that he had not been in the area at the time that the murder occurred.
The FBI is also known to have conspired with the police departments of San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Chicago, among others, but namely to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes, often with little or no evidence of violations of any federal or state or local laws.
And obviously this resulted in the police killing many members of the Black Panther Party, most notably Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, on December 4th, 1969.
In the case of the death of Hampton, a longtime infiltrator, William O'Neill, shared floor plans of the apartment that he shared with Hampton with the COINTELPRO team.
He then gave Hampton a dose of secobarbital that rendered Hampton unconscious on his bed during the raid on his home, in which officers fired more than enough rounds to kill him.
In 1982, the city of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government agreed to a settlement in which they would pay Roughly $2 million today to a group of nine plaintiffs, including the mothers of Hampton and Clark.
And the total settlement, which would be about $6 million today, was believed to be the largest ever in a civil rights case.
G. Flint Taylor, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, said, quote, The settlement is an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the FBI and Hanaran's men to murder Fred Hampton, end quote.
But back in San Francisco, 1969, amid the free love movement, the FBI special agent in San Fran wrote to Hardy Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party had concluded in his city.
At least, the Panthers were primarily engaged in feeding breakfast to children.
Hardy Hoover fired back a memo implying the agent's career goals would be directly affected by his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view.
That the Black Panther Party was, quote, a violent-prone organization seeking to overthrow the government by revolutionary means, end quote.
Hoover supported using false claims to attack his political enemies.
In one memo, he wrote, quote, the purpose of a counterintelligence action is to disrupt the Black Panther Party and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge, end quote.
Fucking hate that guy.
In one particularly controversial 1965 incident, white civil rights worker Viola Liozzo was murdered by Ku Klux Klansman, who gave chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a young black man.
One of the Klansmen was FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, who was involved in a lot of the Quintel Pro operations, such as the deadly attacks on the Freedom Riders and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
The FBI then got to work spreading rumors that Leozo was a member of the Communist Party, of course, and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement.
With none of that being factual.
None whatsoever.
FBI records show that J. Edgar Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Johnson.
I hate that guy.
The ACLU has claimed that the FBI has supported an extreme right-wing group of former Minutemen, transforming it into a group called the Secret Army Organization.
In 1971 and 72, the Secret Army Organization engaged in a variety of criminal and provocative behavior.
They firebombed cars burglarized the homes of anti-war protesters and ransacked places of employment Hip sway Hoover would order preemptive action quote to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they
exercise their potential for violence and
The final report of the Church Committee in the Church hearings concluded, Even when those beliefs pose no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.
The government, operating primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone bugs, surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives,
views, and associations of American citizens.
Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity.
Groups of individuals have been assaulted, repressed, harassed, and disrupted because of their political views, social beliefs, and their lifestyles.
Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable.
Unsavory, harmful, and vicious tactics have been employed, including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.
Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.
While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the executive branch in Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform.
Government officials, including those whose principal duty it is to enforce a law, have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended the right to break the law.
The constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities.
Until recently, the executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies.
Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put.
Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, And in those cases, when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them.
End quote.
We need more of these church committee type hearings.
I say this all of the time on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it.
So let's talk about the method.
Let's talk about the COINTELPRO method a little bit here.
According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home, the FBI used five main methods during Cointelpro.
1. Infiltration.
Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists.
Their main purpose was to discredit, disrupt, and negatively redirect action.
Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters.
The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.
2. Psychological warfare.
The FBI and police used a myriad of dirty tricks to undermine movements.
They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups.
They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls.
They spread misinformation about meetings and events.
Set up PSEF movement groups run by government agents and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials, and others to cause trouble for activists.
They used bad jacketing, which is a term for planting doubt on the authenticity of an individual's character or identity.
An example would be creating suspicion through spreading false rumors.
Manufacturing evidence, etc.
that falsely portrays someone in a community organization as an informant or member of law enforcement or guilty of malfeasance such as skimming organization funds.
Many murders were the result of this.
3. Harassment via the legal system.
The FBI and police abuse the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals.
Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrest and wrongful imprisonment.
They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, investigative-type interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.
4. Illegal Force The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents into doing illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes, as well as to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings, and even assassinations.
5. Undermine Public Opinion One of the primary ways the FBI targeted organizations was by challenging their reputations in the community and denying them a platform to gain legitimacy.
However, the organization created the controlled negative media meant to undermine black power organizations.
For instance, they oversaw the creation of documentaries skillfully edited to paint the Black Panther Party as aggressive and false newspapers that spread misinformation about party members.
The ability of the FBI to create distrust within and between revolutionary organizations tainted their public image and weakened chances to unify and gain public support.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this entire episode is extremely important, super relevant to what is happening right now.
This is what's going on right now.
This has always been going on.
This has never stopped.
It's only becoming more known now.
It's in the media now.
It's being publicly talked about now.
This is what FISA is.
Like, this is what is going on.
This is what has always been going on.
And this Alex Jones thing is this finally coming out, and I'm so happy, I'm so happy that more people are waking up.
While Cointelpro was officially terminated in April of 1971, domestic espionage continued.
Obviously, how could it not?
Between 1972 and 1974, it is documented that the FBI planted over 500 bugs without a warrant and opened over 2,000 pieces of personal mail.
More recent targets of covert action include the American Indian Movement, or AIM, Earth First, and committees in solidarity with the people of El Salvador.
Documents released under the FOIA show that the FBI tracked the late David Halbertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, for more than two decades.
Counterterrorism guidelines implemented during the Reagan administration have been described as allowing a return to COINTELPRO tactics.
Some radical groups accuse factional opponents of being FBI informants or assume the FBI is infiltrating the movement, which they are.
Quantalpro survivor Filberto Ojeda Rios was killed by the FBI's hostage rescue team in 2005, his death described by a United Nations special committee as an assassination.
Environmentalist Eric McDavid, convicted on arson charges, was later released after documents emerged demonstrating that the FBI informant in his Earth Liberation Front Group was actually the one to provide crucial leadership and information and material without which the crime could not have been committed.
And it has been claimed that these sorts of practices have become widespread in FBI counterterrorism cases targeting Muslims in the 2009 Bronx terrorism plot and others.
Authors such as Ward Churchill, Rex Weiler, and Peter Mathewson allege that the federal government intended to acquire uranium deposits on the Lakota tribe's reservation land and that this motivated a larger government conspiracy against AIM activists on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Caroline Wydat says that, with respect to Native Americans, Quantile Pro should be understood within a historical context in which, quote, Native Americans have been viewed and have viewed the world themselves through the lens of conspiracy theory, end quote.
Furthermore, FBI agent Richard G. Held is known to have increased FBI support for the guardians of the Oglala Nation squads, or goon.
The American Indian movement actually accused goons of being involved in 300 assaults and 64 homicides of political opponents.
Despite this, the FBI rarely investigated them and instead used its resources overwhelmingly to prosecute AIM.
In 2000, the FBI released a report regarding these alleged unsolved violent deaths on Pine Ridge Reservation.
And accounted for most of the deaths and disputed the claims of unsolved murders.
Just, nah, we're not really going to look into that.
Not a big deal.
But the report stated that only four deaths were unsolved and that some deaths were not murders at all.
In April of 2018, the Atlanta Black Star characterized the FBI as still engaging in cointelpro behavior by surveilling the Black Lives Matter movement.
Internal documents dated as late as 2017 Show that the FBI had surveilled the movement.
In 2014, the FBI tracked a Black Lives Matter activist using surveillance tactics which were, quote, reminiscent of a rich American history of targeted Black Americans, end quote, including Cointelpro.
This practice, along with the imprisonment of Black activists for their views, has been associated with the new FBI designation of, quote, Black identity extremists, end quote.
Black Identity Extremist was a designation used by the FBI from August 2017 to July 2019.
It first appeared in a counterterrorism report dated August 3, 2017, sent to thousands of American police departments, and described safety concerns about allegedly violent African American activists.
The term was discontinued when the FBI merged several classifications under the umbrella term of, quote, racially motivated violent extremism, end quote.
Defending Rights and Dissent, a civil rights liberty group, cataloged known instances of First Amendment abuses and political surveillance by the FBI since 2017.
The organization found that the FBI devoted disproportionate resources to spy on peaceful, left-leaning civil society groups, including Occupy Wall Street, In December of 2012,
the FBI released redacted documents in response to a FOIA request from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.
Mara Verheiden Hilliard, the executive director of Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, said the documents showed that the FBI counterterrorism agents had monitored the Occupy movement from its inception So
that's cool.
The FBI also communicated with the New York Stock Exchange, banks, private businesses, and state and local police forces about the movement.
In October of 2020, Katie Reiter, Chief of Staff to Michigan State Senator Rosemary Beyer, had an FBI task force come to her house and aggressively question her about a draft bill she had recently discussed which would have limited the use of tear gas against protesters.
Reiter had discussed the proposed ban on tear gas on a private 90-minute Zoom call with Beyer and a handful of other staffers.
Reuters says the two officers refused to answer any questions about how they even became aware of her private meeting.
Now let's look at some other examples of surveillance which spanned all presidents from at least FDR to Milhouse Nixon, which we know of, which are contained in the Church Committee report.
President Roosevelt, from 1933 to 1945, asked the FBI to put in his files the names of citizens sending telegrams to the White House opposing his national defense policy and supporting Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who was against his policies.
President Truman, 1945 to 1953, received inside information on a former Roosevelt aide's efforts to influence his appointments, labor union negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists.
President Eisenhower, 1953 to 1961, received reports on purely political and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
The Kennedy administration, 1961 to 1963, had the FBI wiretap a congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a Washington law firm.
U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received the details of the FBI wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr., and he also had an electronic listening device targeting a congressman.
President Johnson, 1963-1969, asked the FBI to conduct name checks of his critics and members of the staff of his 1964 opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater.
He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the 1964 Democratic Convention from FBI electronic surveillance.
President Nixon, 1969 to 1974, authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to any national security, including information about a Supreme Court
justice.
He also requested Every president has violated the U.S. Constitution in one way or the other, you know?
I'm sure all of them, from George Washington to Joe Biden, have illegally surveilled citizens for political purposes.
I can guarantee that.
I think we all can agree on that at least, right?
I mean, let's just go up to George Bush, the Patriot Act, which was written far in advance of 9-11, guys.
Far in advance of 9-11.
And then they touted it as being, The result of 9-11, which it wasn't.
It was not.
It was written far in advance.
And they just waited for the right time, which they knew when this was going to happen, which 9-11 they knew because they did it.
And then they put in, they just slid in this Patriot Act because these Arabs hijacked planes and flew them into towers.
All that's bullshit.
We all know that official story is bullshit.
But they use these events to slip in these policies like the Patriot Act.
We cannot trust our government, people.
We cannot trust them.
We need to hold them accountable.
We told them in the beginning, we're going to create a government by the people for the people of the people.
And we are going to give the responsibility to the people to make sure the government does their job.
And when the government does not do their job, it is our responsibility to remove them from their position.
That is our duty.
Why do we sit around watching this country crumble and watching all of our rights,
Be taken away through policy.
They have destroyed the Constitution.
Destroyed it.
Within closing here, ladies and gentlemen, the Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded, quote, only a combination of legislative prohibition and departmental control can guarantee that COINTELPRO will not happen again, end quote.
But the Ford administration derailed those legislative reforms, and then in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft threw out many of those reforms as part of a, quote, End quote.
Fuck that guy.
Those restrictions were specifically imposed after their prior abuses.
That's why they were there.
Ashcroft declared, quote, So if that's not a little bullshit, I don't know what is.
I mean, the FBI has been the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans?
Holy shit, man.
Like, these people, do they believe themselves?
Or is it just a big game?
Because I'm led to believe this is all just a big game.
You know what I mean?
But there you have it, folks.
And like I said in last week's show, Operation Walking Bird, this government does not like you.
They do not like any of us at all.
It's true.
You just have to realize that.
Stand up to this bullshit tyranny.
We have to organize.
How can we do that?
Think about it.
Let's do something, right?
But I hope you enjoy the show and come back next week for a new episode.
Not sure what it'll be yet, but we'll see.
And if you haven't, go ahead, like, share, and subscribe.
