The Nation: FBI Dirty Tricks

52,648 pages of bad news

COINTELPRO. The name itself sounds Orwellian. The late J. Edgar Hoover's aides invented the acronym in 1956. It stood for Counterintelligence Program, a secret, often illegal FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage against a wide variety of right-and left-wing groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Not until 1971, a year before his death, did Hoover, alarmed by the threat of exposure, suspend the program. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence exposed the full scope of COINTELPRO'S partly unconstitutional...