Front Burner - Is the FBI’s secret war on American activists back?

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Through the 1960s, the U.S. government waged a war on Black activism, and activism writ large. It was led by the FBI and its longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover.It was called COINTELPRO and was the FBI’s counterintelligence program created to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” its targets.With the Trump administration’s crackdown on the American left through law enforcement campaigns and new directives, it raises the question: is a version of the FBI’s counterintelligence program back today? Beverly Gage, an historian and the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, joins the show to talk about COINTELPRO, the man who made it possible, and the ways the program continues to loom over American life today.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody. I'm Jamie Poisson. Through the 1960s, the U.S. government waged a war on black activism and really activism writ large. It was led by the FBI and especially its longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover. The federal government's primary instrument, in this war was this secretive project called Co-Intel Probe, the FBI's counterintelligence program created to, quote, discredit, disrupt, and otherwise neutralized civil rights in other organizations and their leaders. Well, here is current senior White House advisor Stephen Miller

on Fox News following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God is my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. Sound familiar? Given the Trump administration's crackdown on the American left through law enforcement campaigns and new directives, it got us wondering, is a version of the FBI's counterintelligence program back today?

And what can we stand to learn from the years the U.S. government led a covert war on its own activists? Beverly Gage is an American historian and the author of Jim. G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. She joins us to talk about Cointel Pro, the man who made it possible, and the ways that program continues to loom over American life today. Beverly Hi, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Great to be here. Let's start with the basics. Co-Intel was the FBI's secret counterintelligence program. It was clandestine and often unconstitutional. What would you describe as the tenets of CointelPro?

CointelPro started in the 1950s as a counterintelligence program, as you said, that's what it stands for, that was aimed at the Communist Party in particular. This was a moment when the Communist Party was really vulnerable, and the FBI thought, if we could just get our informers and various pressure points in there, we can make it collapse altogether. And from that, it really extended out to a network of many, many other organizations, as you said, civil rights and black organizations, various activists of the left. Interestingly, the FBI of that moment also deployed some of these same tactics against the Ku Klux Klan, against neo-Nazi groups, groups on the right. So while most of it,

was focused on the left. It wasn't exclusively a program aimed at the left. But it was a large-scale program not only of surveillance, but primarily of disruption. And the idea was that with any social movement, any activist organization, the FBI had ways of sort of trying to create internal conflict, get people mad at each other, make them ineffective. And so a lot of what they were doing was spreading rumors and false newspaper articles and, you know, telling the leader of this group that his girlfriend is sleeping with the leader of that group, that sort of thing. So it wasn't just surveillance. It was active, disruptive measures aimed at manipulating lying to and destroying activist organizations. Would it be fair for me to say that the program really came to focus

its power and authority on the question of black activism throughout the 60s, that in some ways that was the heart of the program. I think that that is fair. The anti-war movement also bore the brunt of co-intel pro, but nobody really absorbed it as much as first figures like Martin Luther King, people relatively in the mainstream of the civil rights movement. And then later on when the Black Panthers came along, they were really the focus of an enormous amount of FBI hostility and attention. When you read through the FBI's now public internal dossiers on the program, they talk a lot about preventing the rise of what they call, they quote, Messiah, someone in their words that

could, quote, unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. And what was the FBI afraid of at this time? What were they working to prevent? their main analysis of what was going to keep movements in general, the left in particular, the civil rights movement in particular week, was division. And so they were seeking to prevent the rise of a single figure who they thought could unify all of these factions. A lot of what they did under Cointel Pro was try to get various factions fighting with each other. So that's what the Black Messiah memo was all about. And it's

really fascinating to think that the FBI of the late 1960s believed that it had the power and the ability to determine who was going to be a leader of a civil rights or black movement in the United States. No, I don't think they actually did have that power. In the end, they weren't super effective in that particular proposition, but it gives you a sense of their ambition and how they thought about themselves. How closely was the FBI working with the White House and other parts of the federal government? It's an interesting question because Co-Intel Pro was certainly a secret program, and Hoover in particular, was very careful about keeping control of it at FBI headquarters. So he would get proposals from agents in the field.

is it okay if I send this fake letter to this person to cause this level of disruption? But all of that ran through headquarters, and he was very, very protective about who would be in the know. All of that said, certainly in a general way, and sometimes in a much more specific way, he was letting the White House know, he was letting Congress know. There were two presidents that he was particularly close to in this period. One was Lyndon Johnson, the other was Richard Nixon, and at least in the broad outlines, if not the operational details, they definitely had a sense of what was going on. American activists, former Black Panthers, and others often refer to this period as domestic war that the U.S. government and its institutions declared war on them. I'm also distruck by the language used by the FBI here, words like neutralize, disrupt. It reads like kind of battlefield terminology.

And to what extent was this actually a domestic war? The FBI certainly conceived of it that way, particularly with the Communist Party, which it thought of as being allied with the Soviet Union. And these are kind of the peak years of the Cold War when all of this is going on. But they also understood themselves to be in a battle with domestic insurrectionists or revolutionaries. Four days of rioting, looting, and arson rocked the city of Detroit. In the worst outbreak of urban racial violence this year, Governor Romney declares a state of emergency,

requests federal troops, and 5,000 paratroopers reinforce the National Guard, state and city police. The city's industry and business are severely affected, and a tight curfew is ordered in the motor center. Events of violence and the potential for violence were a big part of their logic. And in a lot of cases, were part of the kind of legal justification, if there was one, for some of the activities they were undertaking. President Johnson, using firm words, urges the nation's citizens to support the maintenance of law and order. I know that the vast majority of Negroes and white are shocked and are outraged by them.

Pillage, looting, murder, and arson have nothing to do with civil rights. They are criminal conduct. They believed that they were fighting disloyal, revolutionary organizations within the United States that were out to undermine the American way of life, disrupt the Cold War, and sort of destroy America from within. That was the culture of the FBI. I wanted to ask you more about the FBI's campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., specifically. It was known that the Bureau was long involved in a campaign of surveillance and abuse against Dr. King, but you uncovered some really remarkable stuff in your book. There's one letter in particular.

And can you just tell me what it was and how you managed to uncover it? It's a really extraordinary long-term campaign, most of which, which didn't formally take place under the auspices of co-intel probe, but which used many, many of the same disruptive and divisive tactics. And it evolved over time. Its peak came in late 1964 when the FBI had been putting bugs in Martin Luther King's hotel rooms, recording his private sex life, and then tried to use those recordings to discredit King. The press at the time was not super responsive to using these recordings. So the FBI decided they would go for King quite directly.

And they shipped him a number of these recordings along with a faked-up anonymous letter, allegedly from a black supporter, saying, you know, I've been disillusioned. You're a hypocrite. You're a fraud. You know what you have to do if you don't want to be exposed in public. And King understood that to be an attempt by the FBI. He kind of figured out where something like this would come from to get him to kill himself. And so it has since been known as the suicide letter.

We had had a redacted version of this for many years. But when I was doing research in the archives, I found a full unredacted version with all of the outrageous things that the FBI was saying about. and to Martin Luther King. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. When you found that letter, like, what was that like for you? It was really wild.

I sort of thought, oh my gosh, this is the best archival discovery, also maybe among the most disturbing, that I will ever find. And it was interesting because I had had a researcher at the National Archives just kind of taking photos

of this newly reprocessed collection of Hoover's private documents. but he, of course, didn't know what he was looking at. And so then when I saw this, I thought, wait, is this what I think it is? And it turned out the answer was yes. Yeah, wow. Wow. So Cointill Pro, again, an official government program was, as I understand it, also involved in the use of political violence. There are a number of assassinations through this period, believed to have been carried out by the government in association with this program, but probably none more famous than the assassination of the 21-year-old chairman of the Chicago Black Panther chapter, Fred Hampton.

He was assassinated by a team of 14 Chicago police officers and the FBI. He had been drugged by law enforcement and was asleep in bed next to his pregnant girlfriend when he was killed. How indicative was that kind of cooperation of the sort of covert and even violent tactics being used by the federal government through this period? The FBI worked very closely with local police. And in the case of the Chicago police, they had been in a pretty open set of gun battles with the Black Panthers up to this point. So, you know, being involved with the Chicago police, the FBI certainly understood both the potential for violence and the level of vengeance that might be inflicted. They also were infiltrating organizations. like the Black Panthers providing information that made something like Fred Hampton's murder possible. So that is an extreme moment, a moment of real drama and violence. But the tactics, planting informers, sharing information were all very, very standard for Cointelpo. It's sneaky, underhanded. They don't want us to talk about it.

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With BDC, you get financing and advice adapted to your projects. Discover how at BDC.ca.ca slash financing. BDC, financing, advising, no-how. I want to come back to Jay Edgar Hoover with you now. His career would span eight different presidents for a Republican, for a Democrat. Today, he's viewed as a villain, but while he was living, he was this giant of American life, right? as I understand it, Hoover is someone that had approval ratings around 80% at certain points, which is really remarkable. How would you describe just how powerful Hoover was at his peak?

That was one of the great surprises in writing his biography because I think our image of Jay Edgar Hoover tends to come from very late in his career, precisely the sorts of things that you're talking about, the 60s, the 70s, Co-Intel Pro, his war on. on the left. But for most of his career, he was one of the most popular figures in American politics. I am pleased to report that today, all law enforcement presents a united front against so-called fifth-column activities in every state, county, and municipality throughout our land. Remember always that the spy and the saboteur or the destroyer carries no badge. He hides behind a hundred fronts.

He pretends innocence. He likes to rub elbows with patriotic men. He got the job of director of the FBI in 1924 under Calvin Coolidge when he was himself just 29 years old. He kept that job until 1972. So a full 48 years died toward the end of Richard Nixon's first term when he was still in the same job. He never resigned. He was never forced out of office. And during that time, he not only built the FBI, but became one of the biggest political celebrities in American life. And as that track record suggests, someone who had real bipartisan support for most of his career.

And that's one of the fascinating things to me is not only that he was there for such a long period of time as throughout that period, a very outspoken conservative, but that he had such intense support on both sides of the aisle. So now I want to talk to you about the present moment. When we hear figures like Stephen Miller use those same words, identify, disrupt, dismantle, destroy to describe their approach to left-wing activism at the moment. What does that evoke for you? I think Hoover's era is a great cautionary tale about the ways that the FBI can be used, in fact, to go after political enemies, to go after activist organizations that those in power don't like. And so we're hearing, I think, very direct echoes of that. Hoover himself was always quite careful about not wanting to be seen as a partisan figure. So he never would have said, you know, I am the tool of this particular president or this particular party or this particular group's agenda. He saw himself quite differently.

And so in that sense, I think the Trump administration and its relationship to the FBI is quite different from what we saw half a century ago. But the language is there. And many of the techniques that Hoover pioneered are still around. They're not hard things to re-operational. We recently did an episode on the history of anti-fascist protest and Trump's terror designation of Antifa. What we didn't mention was a new directive, the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 or NSPM 7 issued last month. It orders U.S. agencies to prioritize investigating and prosecuting those allegedly tied to domestic terrorism or organized political violence. Again, as a historian living through this moment, how do you read directives like this?

That particular directive brought up two things for me. One is the ways in which violence, political violence, whether you're calling it terrorism or something else, has often been the justification for, these kinds of programs, laws, directives that end up bringing in a whole big net of activists who have nothing to do with violence. One example from history, a law called the Smith Act, which was aimed at penalizing groups that advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, but in the end, ended up producing a bunch of trials and convictions. of people who had been involved in no acts of violence whatsoever. So that has often been the logic.

It has a lot of rhetorical power. It has a certain amount of legal power. And so that seemed very resonant. The other was the idea of anti-fascism itself when the FBI was going after the left in the 1940s and 1950s. One of the ways they identified whether someone had been a communist in the 1930s was to say that they had been prematurely anti-fascist. And so if you were anti-fascist before the moments that the U.S. as an official body was engaged in the war

or was pronouncing itself an anti-fascist country, then that was an indication that you had been part of the communist orbit and therefore you were going to be subject to extra scrutiny. There was a lot made in the first Trump administration about a leaked FBI. internal document that described a newly coined phenomenon. The FBI were quote calling black identity extremism. This is around the same time. The Black Lives Matter protests were first becoming mainstreamed. There was a lot of conversation about this particular designation as a continuation of Co-Intel Pro at the time. Is it too simple to say that this is a continuation of Co-Intel Pro what we're seeing now? Do you believe Co-Intel Pro to be alive today? Or is this something different? Well, I think that designation, which as many critics pointed out, is extremely

broad and can bring in lots and lots of different groups and individuals to be subject to official surveillance. That's very resonant with these earlier periods. Cointelpro itself was a very specific set of tactics, which in theory should not be happening. And I do think that they there is a, or at least there was until recently, a better set of mechanisms of accountability at the FBI than during Hoover's Day. So it's always a little hard to tell from the outside exactly what tactics are being deployed, but certainly those broad characterizations and identifying this broad category of people as being somehow suspicious, somehow a threat to the legal and social order is very resonant with earlier people. periods. One of the more remarkable features of this story is the fact that Coentl Pro remained essentially unknown to the public. As you know, you talked about, activists spoke often about surveillance, wiretabs, undercover agents, but were largely dismissed as paranoid. That is until

in 1971 when a group of anti-war activists staged a break in an FBI office and stole documents that would eventually expose Co-Intel Pro. Were it not for that break, we may never have learned about this scandal. Do you think that people now are liable to dismiss the events of today in much the same way? We saw people being dismissed as paranoid in the 1960s. It's always hard to know whether you're paranoid or not when you're talking about secret operations and all that.

I mean, the media Pennsylvania story, that burglary where the files were stolen, is an amazing story in America. in history, in part because those files were stolen, they were exposed, and in fact, the people who did it were never caught. They have since gone public and described the details of what they were up to. So I think, you know, we will try to get information over time. I think we have some better tools than we did during Hoover's era, but of course the control of information and really the weaponization of certain parts of the intelligence community is rapidly changing by the

hour, if not by the minute. And so I have real concerns both about what's going on and about what we'll actually ever know. Beverly Gage, this was such a pleasure to be able to have you on the show. Thank you so much for making the time. Well, thank you so much. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.