Spying on Peace Groups Not Surprising Says Civil Rights Vet
The FBI’s current spy and infiltration program “sounds like a COINTELPRO to me,” said a spry 76-year-old civil rights movement veteran.
Robert Keglar of Charleston, Mississippi was referring to an earlier FBI secret program — COunter INTELligence PROgrams or COINTELPROs — that not only promoted spying on and infiltration of civil rights groups but often harassed activists and pitted them against each other, beginning as early as 1956.
“Of course, we had the state of Mississippi spying on us, too. And even private citizens doing it. No one should ever forget the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission or the White Citizens Councils,” Keglar said.
The former teacher and boy scout leader’s mother and her friend were tortured and murdered in 1966 for registering voters in Tallahatchie County; his brother was killed when he tried to learn what happened to his mother.
COINTELPRO programs often made havoc of perfectly lawful activities led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC and other civil rights groups including the NAACP, the organization that both Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett belonged to.
As the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, funded by the state’s legislature one year after the 1955 murder of fourteen year-old Emmett Till, was initiated to ensure integration would not occur, former FBI and military intelligence agents were hired to spy on Mississippians as the Commission came into power.
On the federal side of the surveillance coin, COINTELPROs were initiated by the FBI in the same year.
Private White Citizens Councils, formed one year earlier in 1955, were also a product of Mississippi’s fight to maintain segregation and represented the private voice of the state’s leading segregationists.
Councils members included prominent bankers, attorneys, physicians, elected officials, chambers of commerce members, realtors and others.
Byron de La Beckwith, convicted for the murder of civil rights icon Medgar Evers, was a Citizens Councils member.
John Satterfield of Yazoo City, a Methodist leader and president of the Mississippi State Bar Association and the American Bar Association (for two terms), was a member, too.
Sovereignty Commission reports, first publicly released in 1997, are available online through the state’s department of archives and include files on some Citizens Councils activities as well.
But COINTELPRO files – if they were ever included in Sovereignty Commission’s records – are remarkably invisible. Some Mississippians contend that thousands of Commission files were purged before they were turned over to the ACLU and made public. And that the FBI, Sovereignty Commission and White Citizens Councils worked hand in hand.
“I’ve always wondered how the information was passed on that pinpointed exactly where my mother and her friend would be at that specific time. Who was spying on them? Who told the Klan where they were going? Who knew what route they were taking?” Keglar asks.
The county’s district attorney informed Birdia Keglar’s son of the “car accident.” But relatives and friends, as well as several “eye-witnesses,” reported that she and Hamlett were run off the road, pulled from their car, tortured and murdered by highway patrolmen who were also Klan members. The June 12, 1966 accident was never investigated; Mississippi public officials and the FBI say no reports of the accident exist.
COINTELPRO Discovered in Pennsylvania Break-In
The existence of COINTELPRO came to light back in March of 1971, when a group calling themselves the “Citizens’ Committee to Investigate the FBI” broke into an FBI field office — ironically in Pennsylvania, the same state where current FBI spying charges were lodged this past week – and then provided the press and various members of Congress with secret documents seized from that office, showing the government’s involvement in criminalizing dissent.
While FBI and police harassment were suspected by way of surveillance and infiltration during the 1960s, any talk of secret or dangerous CIA-type activity against domestic dissidents would have been dismissed as paranoid had it not been for the evidence picked up in this raid, according to Brian Glick, the author of “War at Home: Covert action against U. S. activists and what we can do about it.”
Glick, a New York attorney and social justice advocate, is internationally known for his observations and writing on COINTELPRO operations.
In fact, covert operations have been employed against those who speak out against the government throughout the FBI’s history (and even in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars), including recent FBI monitoring of environmental and animal rights organizations, close watch of anti-war groups by a secret Pentagon program and eavesdropping on domestic communications by the National Security Agency.
The formal COINTELPROs of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were at the time considered politically radical, as well, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Within a year of the 1971 Pennsylvania break-in, former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover declared the centralized COINTELPRO over, and all future counterintelligence operations to be handled on a Холодильники Siemens “case-by-case basis,” an official FBI statement that sounds all too familiar following the more recent spy/infiltration discovery.
Back in 1971, Hoover did not promise that the FBI would stop using COINTELPRO tactics, and more secret documents were revealed through lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern and then in 1976 by the “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate,” commonly referred to as the “Church Committee” for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho.
Millions of pages of COINTELPRO documents remain unreleased, while many released documents were almost entirely censored; just as recently released reports on the FBI’s infiltration of the Pennsylvania Peace group, many COINTELPRO documents made available to the public include lines entirely blacked out, making them unreadable.
Also in 1971, the Church Committee concluded that “covert action programs have been used to disrupt the lawful political activities of individual Americans and groups and to discredit them, using dangerous and degrading tactics which are abhorrent in a free and decent society,” writes political scientist Howard Zinn.
Where Did COINTELPRO Come From?
COINTELPRO developed out of the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War years, leading FBI agents into taking actions against groups that had nothing to do with Communism. The Bureau would take actions against individuals and organizations simply because they were critical of government policy, Zinn writes.
The political scientist found numerous examples of free speech violations in which the FBI targeted people because they opposed U. S. foreign policy or criticized police actions.
Documents assembled by the Church Committee “compel the conclusion that Federal law enforcement officers looked upon themselves as guardians of the status quo.” Zinn cites the surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. as an important example.
But SNCC, with its proactive philosophy, topped the list of targeted programs under “Negro radicals.”
And when congressional investigations, political trials, and other traditional legal modes of repression failed to c
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