PRA/COINTELPRO

Thursday afternoon I left the Association of Sociology of Religion meeting in Boston to meet my friend Abby, husband Greg, and Abby’s colleagues at Political Research Associates at a café in Somerville, a formerly white working class Boston near suburb that’s now been gentrified. Abby, a friend of mine from grad school, edits the PRA journal “Public Eye.“ PRA is a left-liberal think tank that studies the political Right in the United States. I occasionally help Abby edit article submissions for the journal.

(Abby and Greg live in a condo in Brooklyn but Abby comes up on the train every two weeks and stays with her sister and works in the office for several days. Part of her time in Brooklyn Abby works for PRA from home.)

I got there late, but had lunch and met Abby’s colleagues Pam (whose drafts I have edited) and AAA, who’s working on a project on the work of the Right within U.S. mainline Protestant denomination such as mine.

I hung around long enough to walk with the four of them back to their office, on the second floor of a building up the hill from the subway/train station in Somerville (Abby got frustrated with my slow non-New York City-paced walk and Abby and Greg went on ahead.).

There I met more colleagues (mainly student interns) and then Chip Berlet, the intellectual founder of PRA, with whom I’ve talked before, partly in connection with my study of the opposition to desegregation and the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

A couple of years ago in a hotel room during the week of one of these sociology meetings, I watched a documentary, narrated by actor Don Cheadle, which described how and why some white 1960s leftists organized into the violent, secret Weather Underground organization. (I remember the Weather Underground in part because there’s a row house near the New School in library Manhattan with an odd exterior wall – it’s new brick built because in the early 1970s, this row house was a Weather Underground lab which blew, I believe killing some Weather Underground activists. The Weather Underground has also recently been in the news because Senator Obama is acquainted with a still unrepentant former Weather Underground activist – now labeled a (former) terrorist.)

One of the points of the documentary is that these mainly white leftists turned violent in response to a violent federal government campaign against the New Left, Blank Panther party, and black power movement. In the late 1960s J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation developed a widespread campaign to discredit white leftists and black radicals. The FBI had tracked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (perhaps allowing both of them to be assassinated) earlier in the 1960s. As the left began to turn the country against the Vietnam war and many black activists used more assertive and even violent symbolism, the FBI developed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). Working with local law enforcement and some citizen vigilante groups (like Central America-styled death squads or the anti-immigrant Minutemen organizations now operating along the U.S.-Mexico border), the FBI planted hundreds of spies into left-wing and radical black organizations. Besides passing on information, some of what these plants did was akin to what Nixon reelection campaign operatives were doing at the same time to derail Democratic presidential campaigns. But other activities were even more sinister. An incident that Cheadle’s documentary focused on was the work of the Chicago Police Department “Red Squad,” the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, and the FBI that resulted in the assassination of black activist Fred Hampton (pictured above top and below bottom).

(Hampton had brokered a truce/alliance among African American and Latino Chicago gangs, Black Panther Party, and the white-dominated New Left, until intervention by the FBI and allies split this alliance by, for example, circulating to white leftists forged anti-white racist cartoons allegedly created by Hampton and his Black Panther colleagues.) (Hampton’s bodyguard was a former convict whom the police had persuaded to join the Black Panthers as an informant instead of going back to jail.)

An informant (Hampton’s bodyguard) told the FBI that there was a big cache of weapons in the house where Hampton was, which turned out not to be true (sound familiar?), and the sheriff’s department deputies and off-duty police officers went in and unloaded hundreds of rounds of ammunition (reminds of Clint Eastwood’s “The Gauntlet”).

Witnessing this and other incidents helped inspire a few white leftist supporters of the black radicals to form the Weather Underground, as a violent reaction to this deadly campaign on the part of the government.

The primary connection between COINTELPRO and PRA is that Chip Berlet was a researcher for a lawsuit by COINTELPRO victims in Chicago against the FBI in the mid 1-70s. Berlet and the lawyers who were his supervisors managed to get ahold of tens of thousands of pages of documents about COINTELPRO (many with items marked out). He also got Chicago Police Department documents, but not before the police had incinerated thousands of pages of documents. But Chip said the police were so systematic that they started with the oldest documents and so they destroyed documents about the police’s work on late 1800s anarchists (were the police indirectly involved in the assassination of President McKinley? Now – we may never know.). As a result, at the time Chip found out about the incineration and his bosses got an court injunction to stop it, the police still hadn’t burned modern documents which is the stuff that Chip and his colleagues really wanted.

All of these documents Chip inherited are now in the PRA files (along with a great library that easily rivals ones around the East coast I visited for my anti-civil rights research), and one of the student interns I met was in the process of organizing them to put on the Web. Chip showed Greg and me letter documenting how the FBI rewarded informants and agents who reported evidence of violent conspiracies on the part of the left – evidence that was often fabricated – and punished people who reported (often correctly) that there were no such violent conspiracies. (For example, FBI folks who reported that local Black Panther affiliates were mainly working on child care and food kitchen projects – which was often the case.) (Chip said every FBI agents’ worse fear at this point was transfer to the Boise, Idaho field office, which among other things meant a career dead end.) (Sound familiar again?)

(I argued to Chip that there was an element of irrationality to this. Even if you concede the Hoover et al. point of view, that the United States was in a revolutionary situation internally, which could jeopardize our position – ideologically, intelligence-wise, and militarily – in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its Communist allies around the world – I’m still not sure how developing a system which encouraged the government to act against local organizations that had been erroneously identified as security threats to the United States. We didn’t settle this. Once one of these juggernauts gets going, all kinds of bureaucratic politics and (unintended?) consequences arise which can drive the juggernaut in different directions.)

Chip also reported some oddities coming out of this campaign. He said he’s read some instructions to FBI informants that ask two of them to take two opposite positions about future of the left-wing Progressive Labor Party (from within the party). This debate soon engulfed the party in harsh sectarian internal conflict and nearly destroyed it. The interesting thing Chip noted about it was the language that the FBI officials used in their instructions to informants and the language they urged the informants to use. Perusing the documents, Chip said, it’s very clear to him that both some FBI officials and their informants had become very conversant in the ideas and language of some of Lenin’s obscure writings on revolutionary strategy. The FBI had become – if not Leninists – Lenin-ologists!

(I told Chip about a great scene in the new movie “X Files: I Want to Believe” (see earlier blog entry) in which a character in the movie returns after an absence to FBI headquarters and waiting for an elevator finds a photo of President Bush on one side of the elevator door and a photo of Director Hoover on the other side (and – on cue – we in the audience laugh). Of course, it turns out this is not all a laughing matter.)

I asked Chip if – as much as the FBI and allies had infiltrated the left and black radical organizations – had not the left infiltrated the police also? (I recalled that our leftist professor at college recounting that the first question that Viet Cong representatives asked his group when they were visiting North Vietnam during the Vietnam war was: how is your organizing with the police going?) Were there double agents? Chip recounted one story. Jesse Jackson, you might recall, was a young man who was a belated associate of Dr. King within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After King was assassinated, Jackson moved to Chicago, where in the early 1970s he started a group called Operation PUSH, which among other things pushed U.S. corporations to adopt more African American-friendly policies. The Chicago police, under Mayor Daley, had been involved in the violent breakup of anti-war protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Fred Hampton assassination and was traditionally quite racist. The police installed an informant within Operation PUSH. (Chip outlines a process quite a bit like that depicted with characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, and Martin Sheen, early on in “The Departed,” in which DiCaprio’s character is recruited to infiltrate Boston’s Irish Mafia BEFORE he graduates from the police academy, so he can be kicked out and not officially become a police officer before going underground as an informant.) But a small dissident group within the police, the Black Patrolman’s Association, figured out who was the informant within Operation PUSH and they let Jesse Jackson know. At some point, the informant grew attached to the organization, its people, and its philosophy, so much so that he eventually went to Jackson and said: I confess – I’m a government informant. Jackson said – I know – other people told me. I was wondering if you were ever going to let me know. And so Jackson and his colleagues “turned” the informant. The informant continued to work for the police for a couple of more years and “inform” on Jackson and Operation PUSH. But Jackson knew about this the whole time and they apparently talked about it. (Chip did not know whether the informant deliberated fed the police disinformation about Operation PUSH and Jackson’s behalf.)

And so Chip and his colleagues let me know about some odd details about this otherwise horrifying government effort, an effort that should sound all too familiar to those who have been following government activities between 2001 and the present.

I enjoyed visiting with Abby and her colleagues, even though it’s not clear how involved I might become with their projects.

Click here to see a "Weather Underground" clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agx3PVUkv1I

Click here to see an "Assasination of Fred Hampton: clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNuudKzeW6c

-- Perry