COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Five Domestic Programs

COINTELPRO, short for “counterintelligence program,” was the FBI’s name for a series of covert operations it ran against American political groups between 1956 and 1971. The Senate’s Church Committee, which studied more than 20,000 pages of Bureau files, concluded in 1976 that the label was a misnomer. The programs went beyond collecting intelligence to secret action meant to “disrupt” and “neutralize” their targets, using techniques the Bureau had developed against foreign spies (Church Committee, Book III, pp. 3-4).

Two government accounts document the programs in detail. The first is a Justice Department study ordered by Attorney General William B. Saxbe and released on Nov. 18, 1974. The second is the Church Committee’s staff report, published in April 1976 as part of Book III of its final report. They agree on the overall totals. They differ on two dates and one count, and the FBI’s own files settle at least one of those differences.

Origins in the Communist Party investigation, 1956

The first program targeted the Communist Party, USA. According to Book III, it was started in August 1956 with Director J. Edgar Hoover’s approval, in part out of frustration with Supreme Court rulings that limited the government’s power to act openly against dissident groups (Book III, pp. 3, 16). The report cites an Aug. 28, 1956, memorandum from Alan Belmont to L. V. Boardman for the program’s start (Book III, p. 15, n. 63). William C. Sullivan, who later ran the Domestic Intelligence Division, told the committee that similar tactics had been used before 1956 on a “more sporadic” basis (Book III, p. 16).

Four more domestic programs followed.

Each, the committee found, grew out of an intensive investigative program against the same targets, and each began when Bureau officials concluded that ordinary law enforcement had failed (Book III, p. 15).

Socialist Workers Party: initiated Oct. 12, 1961, by the headquarters supervisor of the SWP desk with Hoover’s concurrence; discontinued in 1969 and folded into the New Left program (Book III, pp. 17-18).
White Hate Groups: began July 30, 1964, when Klan investigations moved to the Domestic Intelligence Division; a Sept. 2, 1964, directive to 17 field offices named 17 Klan organizations and nine other “hate” groups as targets (Book III, pp. 18-19).
Black Nationalist-Hate Groups: opened by an Aug. 25, 1967, letter to 23 field offices and expanded to 41 offices on March 4, 1968. The nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was among the initial targets (Book III, pp. 4, 20-21).
New Left: the fifth and final program, aimed at a movement the Bureau never defined. One supervisor described it as “more or less an attitude” (Book III, pp. 4, 23).

Five programs in one table

The table combines the program dates in Book III with the per-program figures in Saxbe’s 1974 statement, which the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Constitutional Rights entered into its Nov. 20, 1974, hearing record. “Approved” means proposals that headquarters approved and implemented.

Program	Active	Proposed	Approved
Communist Party, USA	Aug. 1956 to April 1971	1,850	1,388
Socialist Workers Party	Oct. 1961 to 1969	72	46
White Hate Groups	July 1964 to April 1971	404	289
Black Nationalist	Aug. 1967 to April 1971	540	362
New Left	May 1968 to April 1971	381	285
Total	1956 to 1971	3,247	2,370

The Communist Party program accounts for 1,388 of the 2,370 approved actions, or 59 percent. Across all five programs, the Justice Department found “known results” for 527 approved actions, about 22 percent. The program with the highest rate of known results was White Hate, with 139 of 289 (1974 hearing record).

The Justice Department compiled no comparable figures for the two foreign-directed COINTELPROs, “Special Operations” and “Espionage or Soviet-Satellite Intelligence.” It said their documents were classified Secret and their statistics could not be published (1974 hearing record).

Where the records disagree

Book III dates the New Left program to Oct. 28, 1968 (p. 23). The same report quotes a May 23, 1968, headquarters directive to field offices already “participating” in the program (Book III, p. 24). The FBI’s own headquarters file on the program, file 100-449698, settles the question. Its later correspondence repeatedly cites “Bureau letter to all offices dated 5/10/68” as the program’s authorizing letter, and the file includes the May 9, 1968, memorandum from C. D. Brennan to W. C. Sullivan proposing it.

The table above uses May 1968.

The two accounts also differ by one on the Socialist Workers Party program. Book III gives 45 approved actions (p. 18). The Justice Department table gives 46. Book III’s own footnote cites 2,370 as the total approved (p. 15, n. 64), so the committee was working from the same overall count.

Techniques documented in the files

The Justice Department grouped the approved actions into about a dozen categories. The largest, about 40 percent of all actions, consisted of anonymous or fictitious mailings meant to cause dissent within target groups (1974 hearing record). The Church Committee described a range that ran from mailing reprints of magazine articles to college administrators, to anonymous letters intended to break up marriages, to falsely labeling members of violent groups as police informants (Book III, p. 3). At least four assaults on targets were reported to headquarters as “results” (Book III, p. 8).

The committee also documented targeting based on views rather than conduct. Under the New Left program, two students were made subjects for defending the use of a four-letter word at a free-speech demonstration that the Bureau itself said did not appear to be New Left-inspired (Book III, p. 7). A March 4, 1968, headquarters letter gave as one reason for targeting Martin Luther King Jr. that he might “abandon his supposed ‘obedience'” to nonviolence (Book III, p. 6, n. 18).

Exposure and termination, 1971

On March 8, 1971, the FBI resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania, was burglarized. Documents taken in the break-in were circulated to the press, and some carried the caption “COINTELPRO,” a word then unknown outside the Bureau. NBC reporter Carl Stern filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for related records. The Bureau terminated all programs on April 27, 1971, citing “security reasons,” by memorandum from C. D. Brennan to W. C. Sullivan, and notified field offices the next day (Book III, p. 3, n. 1).

Termination did not end the question of whether similar actions continued. The Church Committee said it could not determine whether such actions had continued, because any proposal for “COINTELPRO-type” action would be filed under an individual case caption, and the Bureau held more than 500,000 case files (Book III, p. 13). The Justice Department had also drafted tentative guidelines that would have let the Attorney General authorize “preventive action” against certain threats (Book III, p. 14).

Much of the program file is public. The FBI Vault holds the headquarters files for the domestic programs, and the Internet Archive hosts a full copy of the New Left file. The Church Committee staff report and the 1974 hearing record, including Saxbe’s statement and the per-program table, are linked below.