Good Morning POU!
Until unknown people burglarized the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, the night of March 8, 1971, there was only suspicion, not evidence, that the FBI actively worked to suppress dissent. What the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI found though, was more than just the agency working to suppress dissent, they were working to completely oppress African Americans in every facet of their lives.
One of the FBI files found in the Media office was a policy statement so brazen that, as some editorial writers stated at the time, it seemed more like what might be found in the files of the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi rather than in the files of an intelligence or law enforcement agency in a democratic society. In it, FBI agents were urged to “enhance the paranoia……get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
The files revealed that even people who expressed mild liberal opposition to the war or support for civil rights in letters to newspaper editors or in correspondence to their congressional representative acquired dossiers that were added to FBI files. Most of these targets came to the FBI’s attention because of ideas they expressed, or ideas informers surmised they held.
But the Media files revealed that African-Americans, Hoover’s largest targeted group, didn’t have to be perceived as having liberal, or even radical or subversive, ideas to merit being spied on. Nor was it necessary for them to engage in violent behavior to become a watched person. Being black was enough.
The Ghetto Informant Program
The Ghetto Informant Program (GIP) was an intelligence-gathering operation run by the FBI within COINTELPRO from 1967–1973. Its official purpose was to collect information pertaining to riots and civil unrest. Through GIP, the FBI used more than 7000 people to infiltrate poor black communities in the United States.
The Media files revealed directives that required FBI field offices to watch African-Americans wherever they went—in churches, in classrooms, on college campuses, in bars, in restaurants, in bookstores, in their places of employment, in stores, in any social setting, in their neighborhoods and even at the front doors of their homes. Probably few of them realized that the bill collector at their door might be an FBI informer.
In an analysis of the Media files in summer 1971, then–Washington Post reporter William Greider wrote that the files offered “the public and Congress an unprecedented glimpse of how the U.S. government watches its citizens—particularly black citizens.” It conducted such spying, he wrote, in ways that were as unreasonable as it would have been for the bureau to have spied on all lawyers who engaged in politics because, “as everyone knows, some lawyers in politics turn out to be crooks.”
Consider the requirements discovered in the Media files: every agent had to have at least one informer who reported to him regularly on the activities of black people. In Washington, DC, every agent was required to assign six informers to spy on black people. This requirement was so important in the bureau that exemption from it was an elaborate bureaucratic process. Agents in an FBI office in a community where no black people lived were required to “specify by memorandum form 170-6 with a copy for the RA (Resident Agency, what small FBI offices like Media were called) error folder, so that he will not be charged with failure to perform.”
An assignment to build a large network of informers throughout the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia included these recommendations on who should be recruited: men honorably discharged from the armed services and members of veterans organizations; friends, relatives and acquaintances of bureau employees; “employees and owners of businesses in ghetto areas which might include taverns, liquor stores, drug stores, pawn shops, gun ships, barber shops, janitors of apartment buildings, etc.” Bureau officials also suggested that agents establish contact with “persons who frequent ghetto areas on a regular basis such as taxi drivers, salesmen and distributors of newspapers, food and beverages. Installment collectors might also be considered in this regard.”
In other words, at that time, anybody a black person encountered might have been an FBI informer.
The agent in charge of the Philadelphia office wrote in a memorandum that some restaurants and lounges were places where “militant Negroes were known to congregate.”
As Greider noted, the Media files prescribing racial surveillance “sound like instructions for agents being sent to a foreign country.”
The director regarded the need for black informers on campuses as urgent. He required agents to investigate and infiltrate every black student organization at two-year colleges as well as four-year colleges and universities, and to do so without regard for whether there had been disturbances on those campuses. “We must develop network of discreet quality sources in a position to furnish required information,” he wrote. All black students at Swarthmore College were under surveillance. The Black Student Union at Pennsylvania Military College in Chester, Pennsylvania, was described in a file as peaceful and loosely knit, a “basically dormant” group. Nevertheless, the bureau concluded it would “open cases” on the leaders of this group that had “possibly as few as a half dozen” members.
The irony of COINTELPRO’s infiltration of the merging Black Student Unions at colleges and universities was that these BSU organizations were on white college campuses, excluding HBCUs from this particular strategy of surveillance.