James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? Paranoia and Persecution

Part VI
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

Paranoia strikes deep / into your life it will creep
it starts when you’re always afraid
step out of line and they’ll come
and take you away... -- Buffalo Springfield

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2009

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?-- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

During the 1960s, movement activists discovered a new definition of the clinical term, paranoia. If classic paranoia is an irrational response to irrational fears, then the new paranoia could be defined as an irrational response to rational fears. One of the FBI COINTELPRO’s most effective initiatives was to create and exploit paranoia in order to disrupt the organizing work of the American Left.

The following is a list, both paranoid and rational, of known and suspected COINTELPRO operations that I experienced as an underground newspaper editor in Bloomington, Indiana, and later as a writer and anti-war organizer in New York City. Please note that because of continued secrecy surrounding many federal covert operations I am forced to include events that are unproven but fit the COINTELPRO profile. This illustrates precisely why paranoia proved to be such an effective weapon against dissidents:

1. Sometime in late 1967, small calibre gunshots fired through my front door in Bloomington, Indiana. Later this was revealed to be a “fear” tactic used by the FBI against activists, usually carried out by off-duty local police officers or members of right-wing support groups (such as the Bloomington Ku Klux Klan who months later firebombed an African-American bookstore near the Indiana University campus). (The offices of Space City! in Houston were shot up in similar fashion, with the local police and KKK later implicated.)

2. Publication in a local right-wing newspaper of a rude, crude caricature intended to ridicule my appearance and politics. (Note: one wonders whether FBI field agents perhaps had too much time on their hands -- the cartoon made great refrigerator art.) In Los Angeles, a COINTELPRO-produced Black Panther “coloring book” exploited tensions between the Panthers and white cops, on one hand, and Ron Karenga’s black nationalist US, on the other.

When the smoke had cleared, Black Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins had been shot to death on the UCLA campus, and Geronimo Pratt, targeted by a COINTELPRO operation to “neutralize Pratt as an effective BPP functionary,” spent 27 years in prison falsely imprisoned on a murder charge based solely on the testimony of FBI and Los Angeles Police Department informant Julius Butler. Pratt’s conviction was vacated in 1997 when his defense team discovered Butler’s secret “business relationship” with the police.

3. A probable “snitch jacket”operation in Bloomington, revealed in 1967 when friends told me that someone was spreading rumors that I was an undercover agent. During this period, snitch rumors also were rampant about other local activists, narc rumors about some notable potheads, persistent rumors about impending busts. (One local crazy figured out where the rumors were coming from and started his own counter-counter intelligence rumor campaign: a plot to spike the Bloomington drinking water supply with LSD. The reverse rumor operation peaked when the governor publicly announced plans to call out the National Guard to circle and protect the waters of Lake Lemon, and we -- temporarily -- had to find a new place to go skinny dipping.)

4. A fairly recent discovery, thanks to Texan Geoffrey Rips, that Director Hoover himself approved an attempt by the Indianapolis field office to publish a fake “underground newspaper” -- called Armageddon News -- in another crude attempt to discredit The Spectator and divide the local New Left leadership. Hoover himself critiqued the first issue, chiding his field officers for failing to use words and phrases that would sound “authentic” to students.

A note to Ragsters: the FBI created a similar faux underground newspaper in Austin during this time. It was called Longhorn Tales (though a more apt name would have been The Bull Sheet.) I have not spoken with anyone in Bloomington or in Austin who remembers seeing either of the FBI’s “journalistic” enterprises. However, I briefly examined Armageddon Times at the Indiana University Archives several years ago and have to say that it was NOT one of COINTELPRO’s most effective endeavors.

5. Use of the sympathetic courts to “railroad” activists into prison: While this tactic was successful in imprisoning African American, Native American, and hispanic leaders for decades, it was also used against white activists such as myself. In December 1967 I learned that I was the subject of two federal grand indictments alleging Selective Service law violations. (In January a third indictment was announced.) The indictments were so specious that one must wonder whether the government’s intention was actually to gain a conviction or merely to overextend the Bloomington movement’s limited resources and put The Spectator out of business. The government’s “case” was pathetic, as evidenced by the fact that Attorney General Ramsey Clark ordered the federal prosecutor to stop the investigation and later to drop all charges. The judge refused, and in June 1968 I went on trial.

I did not go on trial, however, for technical violations of the Selective Service act, though that is what was written on the indictments. Rather I was put on trial for the editorial content of The Spectator. Lengthy excerpts of articles and editorials were recited into the court record to build a case of sedition. I was portrayed as a revolutionary advocating the violent overthrow of the government, a communist subversive, a seditious traitor. Every time my attorney attempted to object on grounds of relevance to the actual charges, he was overruled by the trial judge, who, time and again, ruled that the prosecution’s relentless political attack was relevant to the case. I was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to six years in federal prison.

Next the judge ruled that my appeal had been improperly filed, and I was incarcerated for almost three months while my new attorney, Leonard Boudin (representing the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee), successfully appealed for my right to appeal. A year later, noting that my order to appear for “additional processing” was not only unsigned but also hand written on blank note paper, rather than official Selective Service stationary as required by law, and that I “was never officially declared delinquent by the Selective Service System,” a stipulated prerequisite for draft law prosecution, Federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on October 2, 1969, overturned all convictions with a strongly worded rebuke to the prosecution and the presiding district trial judge.

6. Discovery of a new “snitch jacket” operation in New York City, where I had moved in late 1968 to assist Boudin’s preparation of my appeal. As before, friends told me about a rumor that I was an FBI informer. At the time, such rumors were rampant in the close-knit Lower East Side activist community, and, indeed, the Movement had been hard hit by police infiltrators and agents provocateurs, notably Crazy George Demerle in the Sam Melville bombing case.

7. Proverbial cracks, hisses, and buzzes during telephone conversations.

8. Numerous observations of New York Police Red Squad and the ubiquitous Detective Finnegan taking photographs as activists entered and exited public meetings at Washington Square Church and other popular Movement meeting places.

9. Discovery of an electronic surveillance operation set up in an adjoining apartment on West Sixteenth Street near Eighth Avenue. The FBI and local authorities moved my next-door neighbor to another location and then used his apartment to eavesdrop on my activities. During this time frame, the same thing happened to my friends Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo (see below).

After I met my neighbor in the hallway with suitcases in hand, leaving for what he said was a theatre gig in upstate New York, I became suspicious when I ran into a crew cut white male -- 30ish, wearing suit, tie and London Fog trenchcoat, and looking very out-of-his-element in this dilapidated tenement building -- leaving the neighbor’s apartment. When he had gone down the stairs, I tapped on the apartment door. When no one answered, I edged my way out on the fire escape landing through my living room window and peeked into the neighbor’s window. Inside the dark room in front of the common wall separating the two apartments, I spotted banks of green-glowing VU meters illuminating slowly moving tape reels.

10. A couple weeks later, I was awakened by a loud banging on my door. I opened it to discover a half-dozen trenchcoat-clad clones, some very large, nasty-looking guys wearing jeans and jackboots, and about a dozen uniformed SWAT police carrying shotguns lining the hallway. Stepping forth, one of the men identified himself as a federal marshal and handed me a subpoena to appear to a federal grand jury hearing.


11. The Guy Goodwin Grand Jury. Following the bombing of a washroom in the Capitol Building in Washington, the FBI faced increased pressure from the White House to catch some radicals. First they seized my friend Leslie Bacon, age 19, from her bed in the Student Mobilization collective house in Washington, D.C., and transported her incommunicado by automobile to Seattle where they put her, represented by counsel arranged by the government, in front of a specially convened grand jury. For two days, Leslie answered seemingly innocuous questions about her personal life and friends. This was the beginning of the infamous Guy Goodwin grand juries; Goodwin used the names revealed by Leslie to issue subpoenas for grand jury proceedings all over the U.S.

I was one of seven activists commanded to testify in New York. Our response was quite appropriate. Stew Albert, a large man with a big blonde afro, wore a custom-made rainbow-sequined dress with appliqué spelling out the name “Bernardine” (for Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground spokeswoman who had announced the group’s responsibility for the Capitol bombing and a number of other equally provocative “armed” actions). Judy “Gumbo” Clavet and Santa Barbara-Isla Vista activist Sandra Wardwell dressed as witches and carried broomsticks… to assist Goodwin in his witch hunt.

I rented a gorilla costume and showed up at the grand jury chambers as King Cong -- remember, Goodwin was looking for, ah, gorilla fighters… Only Walter Teague (who headed a National Liberation Front support group with perhaps the longest set of initials in U.S. movement history) actually got invited into the chamber -- he was wearing his “Walter Teague” working class disguise, i.e., plaid flannel work shirt, jeans, and work boots, and thus probably looked less frightening to the geriatrics who typically serve on grand jury panels. Walter was quickly dismissed after he recited the litany of constitutional amendments which our legal team was using to launch a legal challenge to the government’s “witch hunt.”

Goodwin eventually was forced to call off all grand jury probes when it became obvious that the government could not make any cases without producing volumes of evidence obtained from illegal wiretaps, electronic surveillance, and other illicit operations.

12. “Dumpster diving” and trashcan espionage: several weeks after the subpoena was served, my apartment house superintendent stopped me on my way in. With a big grin splashed across his face, he asked me if I knew that the FBI had been pulling up in a big garbage truck and hauling off trash for the entire building.


13. In the summer of 1974, Fred Newman’s small New York City Upper West Side psychotherapy cult, newly merged into Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), went to the FBI and Justice Department with the story that I had harbored fugitives such as Jane Alpert, at that time on the FBI most-wanted list as one of Sam Melville’s accomplices. The Newmanites also told the FBI that I was working with the Weather Underground.

At that time, I was “underground” myself, having moved my infant son to safety far away from the Newman cult in whose hands Jesse had been criminally neglected, abused, and almost killed. The group was under investigation for child endangerment. This was the period when NCLC was staging violent attacks on public meetings held by the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party, when Chairman LaRouche appeared to be mentally unstable and a number of suspected agents (including Zeke Boyd, who had been thrown out of the Baltimore Black Panther chapter as an agent provocateur) had moved into secondary leadership positions and were orchestrating the group’s orgy of thuggery and intimidation. Many New York activists already had concluded that NCLC had, by this time, become a front for the government’s attack on the anti-racism/anti-imperialism movement.

14. As late as 1990 or 1991, in the midst of a very mellow buzz, my telephone range, and the disturbing voice of a man who said something like, “Hey, Jim. This is [name unintelligible]. I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to. I haven’t seen you since I ran into you at the Indianapolis jail in 1968.” The diction was neither African American nor Southern White, which meant he had not been in lock-up with me. My heightened sense of awareness told me that he sounded like an FBI bureaucrat assigned to work an old case file, trying to scare up some action.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman?, Introduction,
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, Part I.
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? Attacks on 'Negroism' and CPUSA, Part II.
• James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Espionage Octopus, Part III
• James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Huston Plan, Part IV
• James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? Watergate and COINTELPRO, Part V
  

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

The Rag Blog

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[+/-] Summary only...

James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? Watergate and COINTELPRO

Part V
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

The FBI eventually acknowledged conducting 2,218 separate COINTELPRO actions from mid-1956 through mid-1974.

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2009

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
— Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to and earlier installments of “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

In 1973 a group who identified themselves as the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” turned the tables on the FBI by pulling their own “blackbag job” on a bureau field office in Media, Pa. More than a thousand pages of secret COINTELPRO files were “liberated;” the information obtained was widely distributed through left and peace movement channels and was headlined the following week in the Washington Post.

One year later, as the Watergate political scandal began to unravel when one of the five men who were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters was discovered to be an employee of the Committee to Re-elect the President, a government-wide effort was undertaken to convince the public that its institutions were fundamentally sound, albeit in need of fine tuning and a bit of housecleaning. Televised congressional hearings were staged to “get to the bottom of Watergate,” a spectacle which soon led to the resignations of a number of Nixon officials, the brief imprisonment of several, and the resignation of the president himself.

President Nixon’s forced resignation on August 9, 1974, was described in the nation’s press as “a stunning vindication of our constitutional system.” Yet the Watergate affair -- hyped by the media as affirmation that the Fifth Estate is alive and well -- instead merely demonstrated the press’ continued subservience to power and official ideology. Until a year after the dust had settled over Watergate, there was virtually no mention of the clandestine government programs of violence and disruption.

Beginning in 1974, the Senate held hearings to investigate COINTELPRO and other intelligence agency abuses, and in 1975 President Gerald Ford appointed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head the Commission on CIA Activities. Chaired by Senator Frank Church, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee, produced an extensive series of reports entitled, “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,”encompassing not only COINTELPRO, but also a wide variety of other subjects, including: (1) electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency, (2) domestic CIA mail opening programs, (3) the misuse of the IRS, (4) the assassination of President Kennedy, (5) covert actions abroad, (6) assassination plots involving foreign leaders, and (7) various topics related to military intelligence.

The Church committee found that COINTELPRO, presumably set up to protect national security and prevent violence, actually engaged in other actions “which had no conceivable rational relationship to either national security or violent activity. The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the bureau has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order.” This meant that the FBI would act against individuals and organizations simply because they were critical of government policy.

The Church committee report gives examples of such violations of the right of free speech and association in which the FBI targeted people because they opposed U.S. foreign policy, or criticized the Chicago police actions at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The documents assembled by the Church committee “compel the conclusion that federal law enforcement officers looked upon themselves as guardians of the status quo” and cite the surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr., as an example. The committee concluded that:

Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that… The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of 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.

The Church committee’s conclusions with regard to COINTELPRO were based on a staff study of more than 20,000 pages of FBI documents, including depositions by many of the agents involved in the operations. The FBI eventually acknowledged conducting 2,218 separate COINTELPRO actions from mid-1956 through mid-1974. These, the bureau conceded, were undertaken in conjunction with other significant illegal activities, to wit: 2,305 warrantless telephone taps, 697 buggings, and the opening of 57,846 pieces of mail. Though an indication of the magnitude of FBI illicit criminality, this itemization was far from complete. The counterintelligence campaign against the Puerto Rican independence movement was not mentioned at all, while whole categories of operational techniques -- assassinations, for example, and obtaining false convictions against key activists -- were not divulged at all.


Although COINTELPRO and many of the other government covert domestic spy operations were first exposed during the Watergate period, they were virtually ignored by the national press. Writing in Public Eye, a journal published by Political Research Associates, an independent investigative organization, Chip Berlet asserts that major news organizations were silent about the excesses of the government’s secret anti-democratic operations because many of them “willingly cooperated with the FBI knowing they were participating in counterintelligence programs.” For instance, Berlet states, “in 1966 the FBI provided the Chicago Daily News with information that a local Black communist leader owned a ghetto apartment house with building code violations. The resulting article was picked up locally and nationally, resulting in tremendous loss of credibility for the activist.” Berlet further cites many instances in which journalists worked with the FBI and “promised not to reveal that the bureau had suggested coverage or provided information.”

Among the prominent daily newspapers providing support for FBI counterintelligence actions were the New York Daily News, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Hearst chain newspapers were frequently cited as “cooperative,” as Berlet discovered in reading the FBI files, and on one occasion the FBI ordered its bureaus to collect data to assist a Newhouse chain reporter develop his story.

Television stations WHDH in Boston, KTTV in Los Angeles, and WCKT in Miami actively supported COINTELPRO. WCKT-TV, for instance, worked closely with the FBI in preparing a thirty-minute color documentary on the Nation of Islam; “each and every film segment produced by the station” was submitted to the FBI to insure that the FBI was satisfied “and that nothing was included” which in any way was “be contrary” to FBI interests.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman?, Introduction,
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, Part I.
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? Attacks on 'Negroism' and CPUSA, Part II.
• James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Espionage Octopus, Part III
• James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Huston Plan, Part IV

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

The Rag Blog

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[+/-] Summary only...

James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Huston Plan

Part IV
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

The plan, submitted to Nixon on June 25, 1970, called for increasing the role of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency in domestic spying while lifting restrictions on illegal wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins...

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to and earlier installments of “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

The Huston Plan

As a student leader of Young Americans for Freedom at Indiana University during the mid- to late-Sixties, Tom Charles Huston was a walking provocation, intent on smoking out Communists from every dark corner. He once filibustered a campus SDS meeting; this “totalitarian Communist-front” group (according to Huston) was, in fact, so ultra-democratic that its members would not/could not muster enough political will to order him off the stage, though every word from his mouth created rancor and threatened to incite riots.

In fact, it took a spontaneous “direct action” by my friend and frequent co-conspirator Allen Gurevitz and myself to wrap Huston in an American flag and drag him off the stage. Tom Huston has been wrapping himself in American flags ever since.

Therefore it was only a mild surprise when I learned a few years later that Tom Charles Huston, as a new recruit serving on Richard Nixon’s White House staff, authored a clandestine plan to centralize the government’s political police agencies under the direct control, albeit secret, of the president. The plan, submitted to Nixon on June 25, 1970, called for increasing the role of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency in domestic spying while lifting restrictions on illegal wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins.


The impetus for this initiative, according to Huston’s later testimony to the Church Commission, was Nixon’s growing impatience with perceived bureau ineptitude coupled with rumors that the aging Hoover had become “mentally incompetent,” at least in the view of FBI third-in-command William C. Sullivan. Without his boss’ knowledge, Sullivan had collaborated with Huston on a plan that would, in fact, greatly diminish Hoover’s decades-long iron control over domestic covert intelligence operations and would simultaneously elevate Sullivan’s own role.

Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman informed Huston on July 14, 1970, that the president had approved the plan, and Huston gave the various intelligence agencies the go-ahead on July 23. The U.S. had a new and highly illegal security program, one which called for a stronger attack on militants, authorizing illegal break-ins, mail checks, bugs, wiretaps, monitoring of international communications, and “coverage” of American students (and others) traveling and living abroad.

The plan also created a permanent Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security, composed of the chiefs of the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, and military intelligence agencies. The group was to “oversee all domestic intelligence, prepare intelligence estimates and evaluations, and ‘perform such other duties as the president shall, from time to time, assign.’” It was to work in secret, its existence and purpose known only to those with a “need to know.” The goal: better coordination and greater responsiveness to the White House.

There was one stumbling block, however. Though his conspiratorial nose had obviously weakened with age, Hoover was still alert enough to smell a rat, especially one in his own office, i.e., Sullivan. The old man, as Huston later told Haldeman, “refused to go along with a single conclusion drawn or support a single recommendation made” and furthermore had “entered his objections as footnotes to the report.” Hoover took his complaints to Attorney General John Mitchell, who backed Hoover’s contention that the plan be reconsidered. On July 28, the White House was forced to telephone the various agencies and ask them to return the memoranda giving the president’s approval. Sullivan was quietly demoted and quickly lost his position of influence in the domestic intelligence field.

While the Huston Plan was dead, however, the various clandestine operations that it had intended to coordinate and focus continued in the form of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, under whose auspices 13,000 May Day 1971 peace demonstrators were arrested (illegally, so the courts would declare) by riot-gear-clad Washington police and packed into overflowing jails and outdoor stadiums as well as the special grand juries/inquisitions which I will describe in the next installment.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman?, Introduction,
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, Part I.
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? Attacks on 'Negroism' and CPUSA, Part II.
• James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Espionage Octopus, Part III

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Espionage Octopus

Part III
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

Using FBI and CIA intelligence reports, the federal government compiled a Rabble Rouser Index of activists. By 1973 the National Security Council compiled a 'watch list' of 300,000 domestic dissidents with alleged subversive foreign connections.

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / July 10, 2009

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to and first two parts of “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not work alone in creating its modern-day conspiratorial shadow government.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 1967 launched Operation CHAOS, a far-reaching and illegal program targeting American dissidents. The National Security Agency, a virtually “invisible” intelligence-gathering agency with a huge budget and workforce, in 1969 expanded what became Operation MINARET, a program for electronically eavesdropping on overseas communications.

In addition, various military intelligence agencies participated in spying not only on dissident military personnel but also on American civilians. Army Intelligence developed its own 100,000-name “enemies” list. Finally, the FBI and other federal agencies developed close working and information sharing relationships with the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Postal Service; the bureau’s postal connection facilitated mail spying while IRS connection was used effectively to investigate the finances of targeted groups and individuals. In time the IRS compiled an 11,000-name investigation list at the bureau’s behest.

Over the years these large intelligence-gathering agencies had developed internecine rivalries prompted at least in part by the profession’s apparently pathological aversion to sharing the fruits of their labor with anyone else, including, in some cases, the Justice Department and the president. Following Eisenhower’s 1956 example, succeeding administrations called upon the National Security Council to bring together the nation’s spy agencies into a joint covert domestic operation. Using FBI and CIA intelligence reports, the federal government compiled a Rabble Rouser Index of activists. By 1973 the National Security Council compiled a “watch list” of 300,000 domestic dissidents with alleged subversive foreign connections. More than 26,000 activists were targeted under Nixon’s presidential order for detention in the event of some unspecified “national emergency.”

According to David Kaplan, director of the Center for Investigative Reporting

Until 1974, the CIA conducted a widespread, illegal spying operation within the United States. According to Congressional reports, the names of 300,000 U.S. citizens were cross-indexed within agency files, and thousands of Americans were placed on “watch lists” to have their mail opened and telegrams read. The Pentagon’s intelligence operations spilled into a highly questionable area during the 1960s and early 1970s. The U.S. Army Intelligence Command, among others, ran a far-reaching domestic spying program that, at its height, fielded over 1,500 plainclothes agents from 350 offices to spy on anti-war and civil rights groups. The Army’s program was, in the words of a Congressional subcommittee, “both massive and unrestrained,” and compiled an estimated 100,00 dossiers on U.S. citizens. The Secretary of the Army subsequently ordered those files destroyed, although, like the CIA, there are now indications that such activities may have continued.

The FBI, CIA, NSA, and other governmental agencies, despite many obvious instances in which agents operated with obvious disregard for state and federal laws, nonetheless felt inhibited from engaging in certain types of direct action which, if detected, could bring serious political damage to the agencies themselves and quite possibly to the White House. The simple solution was to create so-called extra-jurisdictional agencies that could operate independent of federal control to carry out the agenda of domestic “counterintelligence.” In 1956 the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) was the first such semiofficial agency to set up shop with the CIA providing funding, training, surveillance equipment, and a national computer database.


The FBI and various military intelligence commands worked in much the same way with local police departments to create funding conduits via the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA) which supplied money, arms, and equipment to paramilitary vigilante groups. For example the 113th Military Intelligence Group provided money and arms to the Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad.” These resources were, in turn, channeled to the Legion of Justice paramilitary group noted for violent attacks on the underground press and on New Left activists as well as for the break-in and theft of Chicago Seven conspiracy trial defense files.

In San Diego, where the Republicans initially planned to convene their 1972 national convention, one covert action campaign culminated in the January 6, 1972, assassination attempt on anti-convention organizer Peter Bohmer by the so-called “Secret Army Organization” of rightwing militia, a group formed, subsidized, armed, and protected by the FBI.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman?, Introduction,
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, Part I.
and
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? Attacks on 'Negroism' and CPUSA, Part II.

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? Attacks on 'Negroism' and CPUSA

Cartoon from The Progressive.
Part II
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2009

The repression of dissident groups by shadowy government operatives is nothing new in America. In fact, starting with John Ashcroft, Bush administration attorneys general and their declared nostalgia for the good old days of COINTELPRO resonate with the ideology of another attorney general who left behind an authoritarian legacy more than eighty five years ago -- A. Mitchell Palmer.

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to and Part I of “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

In 1920 the bureau, headed by a youthful and enthusiastic new director named J. Edgar Hoover, carried out the infamous “Palmer Raids” -- 10,000 persons were rounded up in thirty-three cities, resulting in “indiscriminate arrests of the innocent with the guilty, unlawful seizures by federal detectives…,” and other violations of constitutional rights.

The Church Committee quoted the conclusions of a group of distinguished legal scholars who investigated the Palmer raids and “found federal agents guilty of using third-degree tortures, making illegal searches and arrests, using agents provocateurs….” Attorney General Palmer justified his actions “to clean up the country almost unaided by any virile legislation” on grounds that Congress had failed to act “to stamp out these seditious societies in their open defiance of law by various forms of propaganda.” His avowed purpose was “to tear out the radical seeds that have entangled American ideas in their poisonous theories.”

An early FBI target -- and clear precedent for later COINTELPRO practice -- was Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Under his leadership, UNIA, which to this day remains the largest organization of African Americans ever assembled, devoted itself to “bootstrapping” strategies (i.e., undertaking business ventures as a means of attaining its goals of black pride and self-sufficiency).

Despite UNIA’s explicitly capitalist orientation -- or maybe because of it -- Hoover launched an inquiry into Garvey’s activities in August 1919. When this initial probe revealed no tangible evidence of wrongdoing, Hoover, still railing against Garvey's “pro-Negroism,” ordered that the investigation be not only continued but intensified. Still, it was another two years before the bureau was able to find a pretext -- Garvey’s technical violation of laws governing corporate stock offerings -- upon which to bring charges of mail fraud. Convicted in July 1923 by an all-white jury, the UNIA leader was first incarcerated in the federal prison at Atlanta, then deported as an undesirable alien in 1927. By then, his organization had disintegrated, and Hoover vowed to prevent anyone from ever again assuming the standing of what he called a “Negro Moses.”

World War II brought a return of the FBI to counterintelligence operations as President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a series of instructions establishing the basic domestic intelligence structure for the federal government. Roosevelt was advised by Hoover to proceed with the utmost degree of secrecy:

In considering the steps to be taken for the expansion of the present structure of Intelligence work, it is believed imperative that it proceed with the utmost degree of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might be raised to such an expansion by either ill-informed persons or individuals having some ulterior motive ... Consequently, it would seem undesirable to seek any special legislation which would draw attention to the fact that it was proposed to develop a special counterespionage drive of any great magnitude.

According to William C. Sullivan, Hoover’s assistant for many years:

Such a very great man as Franklin D. Roosevelt saw nothing wrong in asking the FBI to investigate those opposing his lend-lease policy -- a purely political request. He also had us look into the activities of others who opposed our entrance into World War II, just as later Administrations had the FBI look into those opposing the conflict in Vietnam. It was a political request also when he [Roosevelt] instructed us to put a telephone tap, a microphone, and a physical surveillance on an internationally known leader in his Administration. It was done. The results he wanted were secured and given to him. Certain records of this kind... were not then or later put into the regular FBI filing system. Rather, they were deliberately kept out of it.

The 1940 passage of the Smith Act made “sedition” a peacetime, as well as a wartime, offense. The doctrine was laid out by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in his opinion upholding of the Smith Act on the grounds “that it was no violation of free speech to convict Communists for conspiring to teach or advocate the forcible overthrow of the government, even if no clear and present danger could be proved.” For if the clear and present danger test were applied, Jackson argued, “it means that Communist plotting is protected during its period of incubation; if preliminary stages of organization and preparation are immune from the law, the Government can move only after imminent action is manifest, when it would, of course, be too late.” Thus there must be “some legal formula that will secure an existing order against revolutionary radicalism.”

J. Edgar Hoover at 29, December 22, 1924.
Hoover claimed that by 1940 “advocates of foreign isms” had succeeded in burrowing into every phase of American life, masquerading behind various front organizations. In 1939, Hoover told the House Appropriations Committee that his General Intelligence Division had “compiled extensive indices of individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in subversive activities, in espionage activities, or any activities that are possibly detrimental to the internal security of the United States… Their backgrounds and activities are known to the Bureau. These indexes will be extremely important and valuable in a grave emergency.”

After World War II, the FBI’s attention turned from fascism to communism, marking the beginning of the Cold War. In March 1946, Hoover informed Attorney General Tom Clark that the FBI had

found it necessary to intensify its investigation of Communist party activities and Soviet espionage cases and it was taking steps to list all members of the Communist party and any others who might be dangerous in the event of a break with the Soviet Union, or other serious crisis involving the United States and the USSR. It might be necessary in a crisis to immediately detain a large number of American citizens.

As for the Communist party, “ordinary conspiracy principles” sufficed to charge any individual associated with it “with responsibility for and participation in all that makes up the Party’s program” and “even an individual,” acting alone and apart from any “conspiracy,” “cannot claim that the Constitution protects him in advocating or teaching overthrow of government by force or violence.”

In 1948, the Mundt-Nixon bill, calling for the registration of the Communist party, was reported out of Richard M. Nixon’s House Committee on Un-American Activities. Senate liberals objected. After Truman’s veto they proposed a substitute -- “the ultimate weapon of repression: concentration camps to intern potential troublemakers on the occasion of some loosely defined future ‘Internal Security Emergency.’”

This substitute was advocated by Senator Hubert Humphrey, then a freshman lawmaker. Humphrey later voted against the bill, though not because he had a chance to reconsider his concentration camp proposal but rather because he was concerned that the conference committee had brought back “a weaker bill, not a bill to strike stronger blows at the Communist menace, but weaker blows.” The problem with the new bill was that those interned in the detention centers would have “the right of habeas corpus so they can be released and go on to do their dirty business.”

Thus when the first formal COINTELPRO was launched against the U.S. Communist Party in 1956, it may have been the first instance in which an internal security agency was instructed to employ the full range of extralegal techniques developed by the bureau’s counterintelligence specialists against a domestic target in a centrally coordinated and programmatic way, but in reality the FBI had conducted such operations on an ad hoc basis against the CPUSA and to a lesser extent the Socialist Workers Party since at least 1941.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman?, Introduction,
and
• James Retherford: Who Watches the Watchman? J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, Part I.

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

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James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO

J. Edgar Hoover and friend.
Part I
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2009

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
— Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

Every high school civics class in America intones the same message that, in a manner unprecedented in world history, the United States’ tripartite form of government with its system of “checks and balances” -- all of which begin and end at the ballot box -- provides its fully enfranchised, politically involved citizenry with the freedom to direct political will over the way we are governed.

Such is the mythology exported to all corners of the earth -- ”America, land of the free” -- in the form of “democratic nation building.”

Imagine then the surprise of thousands of Americans who, in 1971 and thereafter, discovered the existence of another American “government,” a would-be police state, a secret totalitarian government operated by a handful of anti-democratic white men heading the nation’s powerful and virtually autonomous intelligence agencies with the blessing of every American president from Franklin Roosevelt (and before) through Richard Nixon (and beyond). This “shadow” government peeped through keyholes, broke into homes and business offices, searched garbage cans, illegally opened mail and tapped phones, and compiled lengthy lists of “enemies,” designating tens of thousands of American citizens for incarceration in detention camps in the event of an undefined “national emergency” -- for no other reason than the fact that they did not agree with the government’s policies.

And when these tactics failed to achieve the desired ends, this secret cabal launched a clandestine series of judicial frame-ups and political assassinations. In carrying out these clandestine operations against alleged subversive influences among the American people, the agencies and operatives responsible for repression were themselves practicing an insidious brand of subversion -- they were guilty of subverting the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Spearheading this American secret police state was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, headed by its aging, conspiracy-obsessed director, J. Edgar Hoover. In the wake of the collapse of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade and amidst growing administration concerns about the U.S. Communist Party’s potential to commit “espionage and subversion” following the outcome of the Rosenberg trial, President Eisenhower on March 8, 1956, convened a meeting of the National Security Council at which Hoover briefed those present on the scope of the FBI’s surveillance of the Communist Party USA, including the bureau’s use of such illegal investigative techniques as break-ins, bugs, mail openings, and wiretaps; Hoover added that, in the interest of protecting national security, the FBI was seeking, in Hoover’s words, to “infiltrate, penetrate, disorganize and disrupt” the Communist party.

When he encountered no criticism following this disclosure of the FBI’s illegal activities and future plans, Hoover, on his own authority and without prior authorization of the attorney general or the president, in August 1956 launched the bureau’s first official Counter-Intelligence Program (code named COINTELPRO -- Communist Party) to “harass, disrupt, and discredit” the party by targeting key officials and members and non-Communist radical activists as well.

Mindful that a series of recent Supreme Court decisions had limited the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute American Communists, Hoover shifted COINTELPRO’s mission away from developing information for prosecutorial purposes toward the use of aggressive tactics to contain and disrupt radical activists. As the program in the 1960s expanded to include first the Socialist Workers Party and Puerto Rican independence movement, followed by the Ku Klux Klan and white hate groups, then Black nationalist groups, and finally the New Left and American Indian Movement, more and more authority was granted to FBI field operatives to use subterfuge, plant agents provocateur, leak derogatory information to the media, and employ other disruptive tactics to destabilize the operations of the targeted groups. Similar tactics were employed against prominent individuals (such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, actress Jean Seberg, and attorney Leonard Boudin) whose political influence alarmed the FBI director.

In August 1967 Hoover sent a memo to FBI field offices announcing a new operation requiring “imaginative” agents experienced in working with Black nationalists, specifically the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Nation of Islam, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and even the avowedly pacifist Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The Black Panther Party would soon assume a featured position on the top of this list.

Fourteen months later, following the Columbia University strike and with anti-Vietnam War protests mounting in size and intensity across the nation, Hoover launched what would become the final phases of COINTELPRO, targeting the student-led anti-war movement and soon adding the leadership of the Native American struggle. In his July 5, 1968, letter to field operatives, Hoover outlined a twelve-point plan for “counterintelligence action against the New Left.” The FBI secretly instructed its field offices to propose schemes to “misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize “specific individuals and groups.” Close coordination with local police and prosecutors was encouraged. Top FBI officials in Washington, wherein final authority on operations rested, demanded assurance that “there is no possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau.”


Various FBI documents pertaining to COINTELPRO reveal three types of methodology:

1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main function was to discredit and disrupt. Various means to this end are analyzed below.
2. Other forms of deception: The FBI and police also waged psychological warfare from the outside -- through bogus publications, forged correspondence, anonymous letters and telephone calls, and similar forms of deceit.
3. Harassment, intimidation and violence: Eviction, job loss, break-ins, vandalism, grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame-ups, and physical violence were threatened, instigated or directly employed, in an effort to frighten activists and disrupt their movements. Government agents either concealed their involvement or fabricated a legal pretext. In the case of the Black and Native American movements, these assaults -- including outright political assassinations -- were so extensive and vicious that they amounted to terrorism on the part of the government.

Once again the goal was not to build judicial cases but to disrupt and destroy the political work being done by targeted individuals and organizations. For instance, when in 1969 an FBI special agent in San Francisco briefed Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party revealed that in his city, at least, the group was primarily involved with feeding breakfasts to children, Hoover fired back a memo implying the agent’s career ambitions were directly related to his ability to supply the evidence that supported Hoover’s view was that the BPP was “a violence prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means.” Hoover, with even more alacrity and candor, stated in a later departmental memo, “The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt BPP [Black Panther Party] and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.”

According to a report presented by members of the Congressional Black Caucus to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights in Durban, South Africa, last year:

Between 1968-1971, FBI-initiated terror and disruption resulted in the murder of Black Panthers Arthur Morris, Bobby Hutton, Steven Bartholomew, Robert Lawrence, Tommy Lewis, Welton Armstead, Frank Diggs, Alprentice Carter, John Huggins, Alex Rackley, John Savage, Sylvester Bell, Larry Roberson, Nathaniel Clark, Walter Touré Pope, Spurgeon Winters, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Sterling Jones, Eugene Anderson, Babatunde X Omarwali, Carl Hampton, Jonathan Jackson, Fred Bennett, Sandra Lane Pratt, Robert Webb, Samuel Napier, Harold Russell, and George Jackson.

Washington’s repressive shadow government developed equally effective means of neutralizing the activist leaders who escaped the death plots. Often working with sympathetic prosecutors and judges, the FBI was adept at fabricating evidence against targeted individuals and orchestrating subsequent trials so that counter-evidence was suppressed or hidden from the defense team. During the 1960s a number of effective leftist leaders were incarcerated on serious charges and sentenced to long prison terms, based on fictional evidence. One prominent example of an FBI “railroad” that became derailed was the New York City Black Panther 21 case, which in 1969 became the longest criminal trial in New York history -- the prosecution spent months presenting evidence carefully contrived by the FBI and its informants and agents provocateur against the New York Black Panther Party leadership; the jury took less than ninety minutes to reach “not guilty” verdicts in all of the 156 counts against the thirteen defendants who stood trial.

In the case of the American Indian Movement, this has meant the wholesale jailing of the movement's leadership. Virtually every AIM leader in the United States has been incarcerated in either state or federal prisons since 1968, some repeatedly. After the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee, the FBI caused 542 separate charges to be filed against those it identified as “key AIM leaders.” These resulted in fifteen convictions, all on such petty or contrived offenses as “interfering with a federal officer in the performance of his duty.” AIM leader Russell Means faced thirty-seven felony and three misdemeanor charges, none of which held up in court. However, AIM members often languished in jail for months as the cumulative bail required to free them outstripped the financial resources of AIM and its supporters. AIM’s most famous political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, is into his third decade of federal incarceration.

In fact, many American activists remain political prisoners thirty years after the alleged demise of COINTELPRO. Since Los Angeles Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt, after thirty two years of false imprisonment, was set free due to findings of prosecutorial misconduct, the list of political “lifers” now includes, in addition to Peltier, Black Panthers Mumia Abu Jamal, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Marshall Eddie Conway, and Ruchell Magee.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Go here for James Retherford's introduction to “Who Watches the Watchman,” including his personal experiences as a victim of the COINTELPRO program.

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

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James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman?

Introduction:
Who watches the watchman?

COINTELPRO and the federal government’s clandestine attack on the U.S. constitution

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / June 16, 2009

I wonder how many Americans actually remember or are even aware of the excesses of government intrusion during the Vietnam era -- the FBI's COINTELPRO, the CIA's Operation Chaos (later known as "Family Jewels"), the NSA's Operation Minaret, and U.S. Army spying on civilians, as exposed by Christopher Pyle in 1970? All of these were domestic operations carried out against American citizens within the borders of the United States.

And all were ILLEGAL, prohibited by the law of the time. The "inconvenience" of mere law and legalisms, however, didn't stop local law enforcement authorities and the various intelligence agencies during the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and especially Richard Nixon from mobilizing and carrying out illegal wiretaps, break-ins, mail tampering, frame-ups, character assassinations, and, in at least one stunning incident, the real assassination of a charismatic young African-American activist leader, Fred Hampton, by FBI and Chicago police.

A measure of our government's attack on the Bill of Rights and rule of law was documented by the Church Commission in 1975-76. The commission's findings were published in 14 volumes. Very thick volumes filled with chilling specifics.


I first got to know FBI operating procedures "up close and personal" when in 1967-68 I was indicted on three fabricated federal charges, tried in a "kangaroo" court without due process, convicted, and sentenced to six years in federal prison. My REAL "crime": I was co-founder and editor of one of the earliest underground newspapers in the United States, a small, but apparently very effective weekly published in a part of the American heartland where anti-war and pro-civil rights/social justice views were considered subversive, and the First Amendment only existed for those who proudly displayed their "Bomb 'Em Back to the Stone Age" bumper stickers.

My conviction was literally thrown out of the federal appeals court in 1969; the three-judge panel scolded the U.S. attorney for prosecutorial misconduct during the hearing, then also added a reprimand to the trial judge in a strongly worded written decision.

Yet the damage to me already had been achieved when the government imprisoned me during the beginning of the appeal process, and I was unable to continue as editor of the underground newspaper I helped start.

On the other hand, what I assume to be the government’s main objective — to silence a small dissident weekly newspaper — failed when a courageous young man named Mike King – the same Michael King who currently is news editor of the Austin Chronicle – agreed to take over the editorship. Because of the tenacity and extraordinary dedication of a battle-tested staff, our little newspaper survived COINTELPRO's best shot and continued to publish its progressive message week after week, despite ongoing and relentless attacks from the right. Eventually the everyday folks of the heartland came to reject the government's tone-deaf policies and began to embrace the belief that racial injustice and the Vietnam War did not represent either American values or national interests.


My next experience with FBI investigative techniques came a couple years later in New York City when federal agents removed my next-door neighbor from his apartment and installed themselves and a battery of listening devices aimed at my apartment. I discovered the bugging operation when I became suspicious about the trench coats and "suits" moving in and out of my neighbor's sixth-floor tenement walk-up apartment.

One night I heard a commotion in the hallway outside the two apartments and peeked out the front door peep hole. I saw several men, all dressed in London Fog, leaving the apartment. So I decided to do my own investigation. Crawling out on the fire escape, I looked in through the neighbor’s living room window. Through a gap in the curtains, I could see glowing VU meters and moving tape reels lit up in the semi-darkness. I found out later there was no warrant for this eavesdropping operation.

There was, however, a subpoena delivered a few days later to my door by a contingent of federal marshals backed by a SWAT team in body armor and armed with automatic weapons. Together with five friends and compatriots from New York and California, I had been summoned to the Nixon administration’s nationwide “witch hunt”: the Guy Goodwin grand juries. In addition to the New York inquiry, other Goodwin grand juries convened in Detroit, Phoenix, San Diego, and Seattle. All shut down after witnesses followed our lead in New York. We not only refused to cooperate; we were openly contemptuous of the process.

I showed up to testify wearing a King Kong costume -- hey, I wanted to help Assistant AG Goodwin find those urban gorillas. Goodwin -- and ultimately all government prosecutorial “expeditions” -- depend on intimidation to obtain testimony about the protest movement and the underground. Goodwin was helpless when that tactic failed, and he was left only with whatever information he had obtained by using illegal means.


Very simply, here's what I have learned from my experiences with the police state: Anyone who really believes that government can be expected to police its own activities is at best naive, at worst delusional. Because of Bush-era acts and executive orders, activities which in the mid-70s were clearly unlawful now have become lawful. With all of these well-tested tools now LEGALLY available, do not think for a moment that Homeland Security and intelligence agency snoops and spooks will neglect anything in their black bag of tricks to carry out their objective -- i.e., to maintain and protect the authority (money and power) of government and its corporate allies.

The upcoming series was originally researched and written six years ago and describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lock-down social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. I’m not talking about the “fairy tale” of American democracy as taught in high school civics classes. I’m talking about the real U.S. government, i.e., the executives and their highly placed lobbyists representing the nation’s wealthiest, most powerful global corporations (oil and energy, defense, agriculture, telecommunications and information infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, media, the prison industry, etc.), working together with neo-conservative and neo-liberal think tanks, their business partners (Democrat and Republican) in the Administration and the Congress, and their enforcers at the Pentagon and the spy agencies. The single-minded goal of this real U.S. government is to expand and defend domestic and global markets by any means necessary.

A century of paradigm development by the American ruling class produced another success, one never fully realized in previous protofascist regimes: under the control of a new generation of corporate-savvy academicians, the U.S. educational system systematically gutted critical thinking from school curricula from diaper to diploma and began turning out generations of Americans mesmerized by the spectacle of easy credit and conspicuous consumption.

Meanwhile, for those who skipped class, didn’t do their homework, or just plain don’t fit into the program, the real government now has a new, improved police state, one in which the spooks and spies are no longer fettered by law, privacy concerns, habeas corpus, and that nuisance document called the Bill of Rights. In this brave new world order, those things are no longer considered USA-PATRIOTic. Fear replaced Freedom on the new post-9/11 class schedule. Fear works just fine as a social control.

Almost 2,000 years ago, Roman poet Juvenal wrote: "Who watches the watchman?"

It’s a very good question for us here today in the USA.

Coming next: "Who Watches the Watchman? COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution, Part I."

[James Retherford was a founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966. He is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI's Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

The Rag Blog

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[+/-] Summary only...