As President Bill Clinton presses for broader powers for the FBI, working people will find it worthwhile to examine the real history of this secret police outfit. Below are excerpts from Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom, a book that documents one of the most notorious programs of FBI spying and harassment. Much of the material for the book was pryed out of the government as a result of a successful suit filed by the Socialist Workers Party against the FBI and other spy agencies that had engaged in decades of illegal disruption activities against the party. The excerpts are reprinted with the permission of Pathfinder. Subheads are provided by the Militant.

From the evidence now available, it appears that the first FBI disruption program (apart from the Communist Party) was launched in August 1960 against groups advocating independence for Puerto Rico. In October 1961, the "SWP Disruption Program" was put into operation against the Socialist Workers Party. The grounds offered, in a secret FBI memorandum, were the following: the party had been "openly espousing its line on a local and national basis through running candidates for public office and strongly directing and/or supporting such causes as Castro's Cuba and integration problems-in the South."

The SWP Disruption Program, put into operation during the Kennedy administration, reveals very clearly the FBI's understanding of its function: to block legal political activity that departs from orthodoxy, to disrupt opposition to state policy, to undermine the civil rights movement.
 

BY NELSON BLACKSTOCK 
The Cointelpro plot to disrupt socialist election campaigns was concocted not because of any illegal activities by the SWP, but because, as J. Edgar Hoover said, socialist candidates were "openly" talking to people about their ideas.

One Cointelpro operation that has come to light through the socialists' suit concerns the 1966 campaign of Judy White for governor of New York. This was during the period when the antiwar movement was beginning to have a major impact on the thinking of the American people. White was a leader of the antiwar movement. A broad layer of opponents of the war - including many radicals who were not particularly close to the SWP-had endorsed White as the only antiwar candidate in the race.

Campaign supporters worked hard to get the signatures necessary to obtain ballot status, which brought significant amount of attention from the media.

The FBI looked for a way to sabotage this campaign. They noticed that according to New York law, White was formally not old enough to hold the office of governor. The FBI tried to get this fact reported in the media in an attempt to discredit the campaign.

According to the documents, the FBI decided to rely on the Daily News to do the job for them, but the New York City CBS television affiliate did it instead.

As the documents show the state legislature soon passed a law altering the election code to require that a candidate be old enough to assume an office in order to run for it.

FBI murder of Fred Hampton
Perhaps the most shocking story concerns the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police directed by the state's attorney's office in December 1969, in a predawn raid on a Chicago apartment. Hampton, one of the most promising leaders of the Black Panther party-particularly dangerous because of his opposition to violent acts or rhetoric and his success in community organizing-was killed in bed, perhaps drugged. Depositions in a civil suit in Chicago reveal that the chief of Panther security and Hampton's personal bodyguard, William O'Neal, was an FBI infiltrator. O'Neal gave his FBI "contacting agent," Roy Mitchell, a detailed floor plan of the apartment, which Mitchell turned over to the state's attorney's office shortly before the attack, along with "information" - of dubious veracity - that there were two illegal shotguns in the apartment. For his services, O'Neal was paid over $10,000 from January 1969 through July 1970, according to Mitchell's affidavit.

O'Neal, incidentally, continued to report to Mitchell after the raid. He was taking part in meetings with the Hampton family and discussions between lawyers and clients, one of many such examples of violation of the lawyer-client relation.

The Starsky Case
Prominent in the ranks of teachers victimized by the FBI is Morris Starsky. In 1970 the FBI encouraged Starsky's dismissal from his job as a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University. The Phoenix office of the FBI sent an anonymous letter slandering him to a faculty committee reviewing his teaching contract.

In a memo dated May 31, 1968, the Phoenix FBI noted that local targets for Cointelpro were "pretty obvious. It is apparent that New Left organizations and activities in the Phoenix metropolitan area have received their inspiration and leadership almost exclusively from the members of the faculty in the Department of Philosophy at Arizona State University (ASU), chiefly Assistant Professor MORRIS J. STARSKY."

To that description of himself, Starsky adds that he helped organize the first antiwar teach-in at ASU; he led a campus free-speech fight; he helped lead a successful campaign to win campus recognition for SDS; he participated in campus activities to support striking Tucson sanitation workers and a union organizing drive by Chicano laundry workers; he served as a presidential elector for the Socialist Workers party in 1968; he helped to reestablish the ASU chapter of the American Federation of Teachers; and he was the faculty adviser of the Young Socialist Alliance and the Student Mobilization Committee.

All that provoked quite a furor among right-wing state legislators and university regents. The Faculty Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (whose members received the FBI's slanderous letters) held a hundred hours of public hearings on whether Starsky was entitled to teach at ASU. Three thousand students and over 250 professors signed petitions supporting Starsky's right to academic freedom.

The committee's members were not duped by the FBI's anonymous slanders, although they expressed surprise five years later when they learned that "A Concerned Alumnus" was really J. Edgar Hoover. The committee voted unanimously against dismissing Starsky. But the regents refused to renew his contract and he lost his job in June 1970. Starsky says that "it's sort of like being found innocent and executed anyway." Since ASU he has lost two teaching jobs in California for political reasons.

Targeting a Black candidate
"A review is being conducted of Clifton DeBerry's file to determine if there is anything derogatory in his background which might cause embarrassment to the SWP if publicly exposed."

Those words appear in a secret FBI memorandum dated October 17, 1963. Of the nearly 1,000 pages of Cointelpro files released in response to the SWP suit, more concern Clifton DeBerry than any other single individual. In 1964 DeBerry became the first Black person ever to run for president of the United States, when he was nominated by the SWP.

In the early 1960s a Black nationalist mood was becoming visible in the ghettos of the North, and no one better articulated this new consciousness than Malcolm X.

"We began to make contact with Malcolm when he was still the main spokesman for the Nation of Islam," DeBerry said. "In late 1963 I went on a speaking tour. Malcolm was touring at the same time, and I would go to see him whenever I could."

It was during a tour stop in Chicago that the FBI arranged to have DeBerry arrested in order to create a scandal they hoped to use to discredit him. Just as DeBerry was about to address a socialist meeting, the Chicago police stormed into the building, hauled him to the station, and booked him on charges of nonsupport of his ex-wife.

The FBI followed up this arrest by devoting enormous attention to trying to get the news media to report both this incident and DeBerry's earlier arrests for "labor trouble."

'Send troops to South not Vietnam'
"We of the Socialist Workers party say get all the U.S. troops, planes, and warships out of Vietnam-North and South," DeBerry demanded. "If as Johnson claims their purpose is to `protect democracy,' then send them to Mississippi and let them do some protecting of Black Americans there."

While the FBI was secretly plotting against the Black presidential candidate, he was publicly blasting the FBI. After the disappearance of three civil rights workers slain by racists in Mississippi, DeBerry exposed the bureau's complicity.

Local cops, who were involved in the murders, had held the three in jail before they were killed. "While the three kidnapped youths were in jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, their co-workers became fearful for their safety, and telephoned the FBI in Jackson. The FBI agent-refused to help and told the rights fighters that he wouldn't have any more dealings with them," DeBerry said.

During this period DeBerry's relationship with Malcolm continued to develop. "After his break with the Nation of Islam, I used to meet with him almost every Saturday when he was in the country. We would have discussions about politics-often comparing notes and checking up on what each other had been hearing about the developing nationalist response among Blacks," DeBerry recalled.

At the suggestion of Malcolm and his collaborator, James Shabazz, DeBerry spoke at a couple of classes at the Muslim Mosque, Inc., which Malcolm headed.

"We were again touring at the same time, and our paths would often crisscross. Whenever I could I would attend his speeches. While he was too busy to make it to mine, he would send someone over," DeBerry remembered. "We had that kind of relationship."

A few months later Malcolm would be assassinated. The FBI's role in that event is a story that is yet to be told.  
 
 
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