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Domestic Covert Action Did Not End in the 1970's
Director Webster's highly touted reforms did not create a "new FBI."
They served mainly to modernize the existing Bureau and to make it
even more dangerous. In place of the backbiting competition with other
law enforcement and intelligence agencies which had previously impeded
coordination of domestic counter-insurgency, Webster promoted
inter-agency cooperation. Adopting the mantle of an "equal opportunity
employer," his FBI hired women and people of color to more effectively
penetrate a broader range of political targets. By cultivating a
low-visibility image and discreetly avoiding public attack on
prominent liberals, Webster gradually restored the Bureau's
respectability and won over a number ofits former critics.
State and local police similarly upgraded their repressive
capabilities in the 1970s while learning to present a more friendly
public face. The "red squads" that had harassed 1960s activists were
quietly resurrected under other names. Paramilitary SWAT teams and
tactical squads were formed, along with highly politicized "community
relations" and "beat rep" programs featuring conspicuous Black, Latin,
and female officers. Generous federal funding and sophisticated
technology became available through the Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration, while FBI-led "joint anti-terrorist task forces"
introduced a new level of inter-agency coordination.
Meanwhile, the CIA continued to use university professors,
journalists, labor leaders, publishing houses, cultural organizations,
and philanthropic fronts to mold U.S. public opinion.[f-41> At the
same time, Army Special Forces and other elite military units began to
train local police for counter-insurgency and to intensify their own
preparations, following the guidelines of the secret Pentagon
contingency plans, "Garden Plot" and "Cable Splicer." They drew
increasingly on manuals based on the British colonial experience in
Kenya and Northern Ireland, which teach the essential methodology of
COINTELPRO under the rubric of "low-intensity warfare," and stress
early intervention to neutralize potential opposition before it can
take hold.
While domestic covert operations were scaled down once the 1960s
upsurge had subsided (thanks in part to the success of COINTELPRO),
they did notstop. In its April 27, 1971 directives disbanding
COINTELPRO, the FBI provided for future covert action to continue
"with tight procedures to ensure absolute security." The results are
apparent in the record of 1970s covert operations which have so far
come to light:
The Native American Movement: 1970s FBI attacks on resurgent Native
American resistance have been well documented by Ward Churchill and
others.[f-44> In 1973, the Bureau led a paramilitary invasion of the
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as American Indian Movement
(AIM) activists gathered there for symbolic protests at Wounded Knee,
the site of an earlier U.S. massacre of Native Americans. The FBI
directed the entire 71-day siege, deploying federal marshals, U.S.
Army personnel, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, local GOONs
(Guardians of the Oglala Nation, an armed tribal vigilante force), and
a vast array of heavy weaponry.
In the following years, the FBI and its allies waged all-out war on
AIM and the Native people. From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of
the tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political murder comparable
to the first years of the Pinochet regime in Chile.[f-45> To justify
such a reign of terror and undercut public protest against it, the
Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological warfare.
Central to this effort was a carefully orchestrated campaign to
reinforce the already deeply ingrained myth of the "Indian savage." In
one operation, the FBI fabricated reports that AIM "Dog Soldiers"
planned widespread "sniping at tourists" and "burning of farmers" in
South Dakota. The son of liberal U.S. Senator (and Arab-American
activist) James Abourezk, was named as a "gunrunner," and the Bureau
issued a nationwide alert picked up by media across the country.
To the same end, FBI undercover operatives framed AIM members Paul
"Skyhorse" Durant and Richard "Mohawk" Billings for the brutal murder
of a Los Angeles taxi driver. A bogus AIM note taking credit for the
killing was found pinned to a signpost near the murder site, along
with a bundle of hair said to be the victim's "scalp." Newspaper
headlines screamed of "ritual murder" by "radical Indians." By the
time the defendants were finally cleared of the spurious charges, many
of AIM's main financial backers had been scared away and its work
among a major urban concentration of Native people was in ruin.
In March 1975, a central perpetrator of this hoax, AIM's national
security chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an undercover operative
for the FBI. As AIM's liaison with the Wounded Knee Legal
Defense/Offense Committee during the trials of Dennis Banks and other
Native American leaders, Durham had routinely participated in
confidential strategy sessions. He confessed to stealing
organizational funds during his two years with AIM, and to setting up
the arrest of AIM militants for actions he had organized. It was
Durham who authored the AIM documents that the FBI consistently cited
to demonstrate the group's supposed violent tendencies.
Prompted by Durham's revelations, the Senate Intelligence Committee
announced on June 23, 1975 that it would hold public hearings on FBI
operations against AIM. Three days later, armed FBI agents assaulted
an AIM house on the Pine Ridge reservation. When the smoke cleared,
AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright and two FBI agents lay dead. The
media, barred from the scene "to preserve the evidence," broadcast the
Bureau's false accounts of a bloody "Indian ambush," and the
congressional hearings were quietly cancelled.
The FBI was then free to crush AIM and clear out the last pockets of
resistance at Pine Ridge. It launched what the Chairman of the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission described as "a full-scale military-type
invasion of the reservation"[f-46> complete with M-16s, Huey
helicopters, tracking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. Eventually
AIM leader Leonard Peltier was tried for the agents' deaths before a
right-wing judge who met secretly with the FBI. AIM member Anna Mae
Aquash was found murdered after FBI agents threatened to kill her
unless she helped them to frame Peltier. Peltier's conviction, based
on perjured testimony and falsified FBI ballistics evidence, was
upheld on appeal. (The panel of federal judges included William
Webster until the very day of his official appointment as Director of
the FBI.) Despite mounting evidence of impropriety in Peltier's trial,
and Amnesty International's call for a review of his case, the Native
American leader remains in maximum security prison.
The Black Movement: Government covert action against Black activists
also continued in the 1970s. Targets ranged from community-based
groups to the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and
the surviving remnants of the Black Panther Party.
In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit and
disrupt the United League of Marshall County, a broad-based grassroots
civil rights group struggling to stop Klan violence. In California, a
notorious paid operative for the FBI, Darthard Perry, code-named
"Othello," infiltrated and disrupted local Black groups and took
personal credit for the fire that razed the Watts Writers Workshop's
multi-million dollar cultural center in Los Angeles in 1973. The Los
Angeles Police Department later admitted infiltrating at least seven
1970s community groups, including the Black-led Coalition Against
Police Abuse.
In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(ATF) conspired with the Wilmington, North Carolina police to frame
nine local civil rights workers and the Rev. Ben Chavis, field
organizer for the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church
of Christ. Chavis had been sent to North Carolina to help Black
communities respondto escalating racist violence against school
desegregation. Instead of arresting Klansmen, the ATF and police
coerced three young Black prisoners into falsely accusing Chavis and
the others of burning white-owned property. Although all three
prisoners later admitted they had lied in response to official threats
and bribes, the FBI found no impropriety. The courts repeatedly
refused to reopen the case and the Wilmington Ten served many years in
prison before pressure from international religious and human rights
groups won their release.
As the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) began to build autonomous Black
economic and political institutions in the deep South, the Bureau
repeatedly disrupted its meetings and blocked its attempts to buy
land. On August 18, 1971, four months after the supposed end of
COINTELPRO, the FBI and police launched an armed pre-dawn assault on
national RNA offices in Jackson, Mississippi. Carrying a warrant for a
fugitive who had been brought to RNA Headquarters by FBI informer
Thomas Spells, the attackers concentrated their fire where the
informer's floor plan indicated that RNA President Imari Obadele
slept. Though Obadele was away at the time of the raid, the Bureau had
him arrested and imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to assault a
government agent.
The COINTELPRO-triggered collapse of the Black Panthers' organization
and support in the winter of 1971 left them defenseless as the
government moved to prevent them from regrouping. On August 21, 1971,
national Party officer George Jackson, world-renowned author of the
political autobiography [Soledad Brother,] was murdered by San Quentin
prison authorities on the pretext of an attempted jailbreak. In July
1972, Southern California Panther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was
successfully framed for a senseless $70 robbery-murder committed while
he was hundreds of miles away in Oakland, California, attending Black
Panther meetings for which the FBI managed to "lose" all of its
surveillance records. Documents obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act later revealed that at least two FBI agents had
infiltrated Pratt's defense committee. They also indicated that the
state's main witness, Julio Butler, was a paid informer who had worked
in the Party under the direction of the FBI and the Los Angeles Police
Department. For many years, FBI Director Webster publicly denied that
Pratt had ever been a COINTELPRO target, despite the documentary proof
in his own agency's records.
Also targeted well into the 1970s were former Panthers assigned to
form an underground to defend against armed government attack on the
Party. It was they who had regrouped as the Black Liberation Army
(BLA) when the Party was destroyed. FBI files show that, within a
month of the close of COINTELPRO, further Bureau operations against
the BLA were mapped out in secret meetings convened by presidential
aide John Ehrlichman and attended by President Nixon and Attorney
General Mitchell. In the following years, many former Panther leaders
were murdered by the police in supposed "shoot-outs" with the BLA.
Others, such as Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid Bin
Wahad (formerly Richard Moore), and the New York 3 (Herman Bell,
Anthony "Jalil" Bottom, and Albert "Nuh" Washington) were sentenced to
long prison terms after rigged trials.
In the case of the New York 3, FBI ballistics reports withheld during
their mid-1970s trials show that bullets from an alleged murder weapon
did not match those found at the site of the killings for which they
are still serving life terms. The star witness against them has
publicly recanted his testimony, swearing that he lied after being
tortured by police (who repeatedly jammed an electric cattleprod into
his testicles) and secretly threatened by the prosecutor and judge.
The same judge later dismissed petitions to reopen the case, refusing
to hold any hearing or to disqualify himself, even though his
misconduct is a major issue. As the NY3 continued to press for a new
trial, their evidence was ignored by the news media while their former
prosecutor's one-sided, racist "docudrama" on the case, (Badge of the
Assassin,) aired on national television.
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