Word: fbi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hounded from his job and confined to a hospital for the criminally insane for observation. Later a local court ordered him to leave California because of his record of arrests at demonstrations. Though the local police cooperated enthusiastically, the architect of the harassment campaign against Bohmer was an FBI informant in a right-wing terrorist group known as the Secret Army Organization. Bohmer's experience was only one of the more ghastly results of COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program)--a secret campaign waged by the FBI to disrupt radical organizations through illegal means...
COINTELPRO first came to light as a result of the March 1971 burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pa., by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. The files seized in that raid revealed that the bureau spent an extremely large proportion of its time attempting to monitor, infiltrate, and disrupt radical groups in the Philadelphia area. Focusing particular attention on student anti-war activity and on the Black Panthers, the FBI employed such tactics as unauthorized wiretaps, mail openings, and disseminating fraudulent anonymous letters to discredit radical groups, much like Howard Hunt's Kennedy-Diem telegram...
Most of our knowledge about COINTELPRO comes from documents pried out of the FBI after successful lawsuits by NBC reporter Carl Stern and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the target of a major disruption campaign. These SWP documents, published as COINTELPRO are fairly narrowly confined to the FBI's campaign against the SWP, as might well be expected, but they seem to allow a reasonable general portrait of COINTELPRO to be reconstructed...
...COINTELPRO campaign against the Communist party which covertly extended the anti-communist legislation of the fifties. COINTELPRO-SWP was one of many subsequent programs; the others attacked Puerto Rican Independence groups, the KKK, Black militants, and the "New Left" (anti-war and student groups. In COINTELPRO-SWP, the FBI was particularly concerned with interfering in the party's electoral campaigns. The bureau pursued this goal through writing slanderous letters and publicizing dubious aspects of SWP candidates' backgrounds. The FBI also persuaded the established parties to challenge SWP's right to be on the ballot, as in the 1969 New York...
...FBI tried to drive wedges within the SWP by similar means over doctrinal, racial and sexual issues. They attempted to pit the party and its allies in the civil rights and anti-war movements against one and another. And, as in Bohmer's case, the FBI often stooped to intimidation. By pressuring employers to remove leftists from their staffs, the FBI was able to "separate from their employment" a good number of SWPers, particularly in educational institutions in the South and Southwest...