The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States [2 ed.] 0896086488, 9780896086487

Citation preview

the FBI'S documents from AGAINST DISSENT secret wars

IN THE UNITED

STATES

SOUTH END PRESS CLASSICS

THE

COINTELPRO PAPERS Ward Churchill • Jim Vander Wall

In this detailed review of the subversive activities of the national political police over many years, the authors show that the commitment to undermine free association and independent thought is deeply rooted in national policy and subject to only superficial challenge. Their harrowing and extensively documented study lends much credibility to their supposition that “COINTELPRO lives on,” and efforts to organize poor and oppressed people and dissident movements will be targeted for destruction by state power.

—Noam Chomsky

Readers anxious about the loss of civil liberties under George W. Bush will find

ground for their fears—and suggestions for activism—in The COINTELPRO

Papers. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall’s expose of America’s political police force, the FBI, reveals the iron fist hiding beneath the velvet glove of

“compassionate conservatism." Reproducing many original FBI memos, the authors provide extensive analysis of the agency’s treatment of the left, from the Communist Party in the 1950s to the Central America solidarity movement in the 1980s. Ward Churchill’s

substantial new preface to this South End Press Classics edition updates the cases of several incarcerated Black Panthers and analyzes the events at Ruby

Ridge and Waco, as well as the wars on drugs and terrorism. Churchill makes a

compelling argument that U.S. law enforcement has become thoroughly militarized,

with devastating consequences for all those who work for social justice.

$22.00 ISBN: 0-89608-648-8 South End Press www.southendpress.org COVER DESIGN: ELLEN P. SHAPIRO

9 780896 086487

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

The COINTELPRO Papers

Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States

Second Edition

Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall South End Press Classics Series Volume 8 South End Press, Cambridge, MA

Copyright © 1990 and 2002 by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall

Any properly footnoted quotation of up to 500 sequential words may be used without permission, as long as the total number of words quoted does not exceed 2,000. For longer quotations or for a greater number of total words, please write for permission to South End Press.

Cover design and by Ellen Shapiro Page design and production by Saxifrage Publications Group Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Control Number: 2002106479

South End Press, 7 Brookline Street #1, Cambridge, MA 02139-4146 www.southendpress.org 06 05 04 03 02 1 2 3 4 5

Table of Contents Dedication vi Acknowledgements vii

About the Authors viii Foreword by John Trudell ix Preface by Brian Glick x Guide to the Documents by Chip Berlet and Brian Glick xvii

Preface to the Second Edition xxiii Introduction: A Glimpse Into the Files of America’s Secret Police 1 1. Understanding Deletions in FBI Documents 23 2. COINTELPRO-CP, USA 33 3. COINTELPRO-SWP 49

4. COINTELPRO-Puerto Rican Independence Movement 63 5. COINTELPRO-Black Liberation Movement 91 6. COINTELPRO-New Left 165

7. COINTELPRO-AIM 231

8. Conclusion: COINTELPRO Lives On 303 Organizational Contacts 328

Notes 331 Bibliography 420 Index 439

Dedication For Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two brothers who paid COINTELFRO's ultimate penalty during the pre-dawn hours of December 4,1969.

vi

Acknowldgements We would like to thank the following individuals without whose various contributions this book would not have been possible: Mike Albert, Maria del Pilar Arguellas, Chip Berlet, Maria Theresa Blanco, Kathy Boudin, Cindy Bowden, Paulette D'Auteuil-Robideau, Dan Debo, Vine Deloria, Jr., Bill Dunne, Bruce Ellison, Roger Finzel, Carmen Gautier, Sue Gegner, Larry Giddings, Merv Glass, Jr., Brian Glick, Lew Gurwitz, Jeff Haas, Candy Hamilton, Stuart Hanlon, Todd Jailer, M. Annette Jaimes, Bill Kunstler, Winona LaDuke, Tim Lange, Ken Lawrence, Larry Leaventhal, Jonathan Lubell, Peter Matthiessen, Russ Means, Nick Meinhart, Maria Merrill Ramirez, Jim Messerschmidt, Glenn Morris, Ahmed Obafemi, Sheila O'Donnell, Mary O'Melveny, Roz Payne, Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, Ellen Ray, Bob Robideau, Ricardo Romero, Susan Rosenberg, Lydia Sargent, Bill Schaap, Paul Scribner, Afeni Shakur, Standing Deer, Dan Stem, Jan Susler, Flint Taylor, John Thome, Jennie Vander Wall, Bill Vomberger and Louis Wolf. Certain of the documents reproduced herein have previously appeared in Harry Blackstock's COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom (Path­ finder Press, 1987), Christy Macy's and Susan Kaplan's Documents (Penguin, 1980), Edith Tiger's In Re Alger Hiss (Hill and Wang, 1979) and Flint Taylor's and Margaret Vanhouten's Counterintelligence: A Documentary Look at America's Secret Police (Na­ tional Lawyers Guild Task Force on Counterintelligence and the Secret Police, 1978). Portions of the material published herein have been published elsewhere by the authors in other forms. We would therefore like to express our gratitude to Akwesasne Notes, Covert Actioninformation Bulletin, The Other Side, Propaganda Review, Rolling Stock and Zeta Magazine for their various assistance and permission to reprint. In terms of editing, technical assistance and general support we'd like to thank the entire South End Press Collective - Cynthia Peters, Steve Chase and Greg Bates in particular - as well as editor friends such as S.K. Levin and Bob Sipe. The Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado/ Boulder provided certain material assistance, as did the Educational Development Program at the same institution, and the Fourth World Center for Study of Indige­ nous Law and Politics at the University of Colorado/Denver. Thanks is also due the Saxifrage Publications Group (Boulder) for use of layout facilities. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the National Lawyers Guild Anti-Repression Project for its solidarity and financial support. The book could never have been completed without the input and guidance of all of the above. Errors, factual or interpretive, however, remain solely the respon­ sibility of the authors.

vii

About the Authors Ward Churchill (Creek/Cherokee Metis) is co-director, with Glenn Morris, of the Colorado Chapter of the American Indian Movement and coordinator of American Indian Studies with the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado/Boulder. He has served as a delegate of the International Indian Treaty Council to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations and the Inter-American Indian Congress, as well as to the nations of Libya and Cuba. His previous books include Marxism and Native Ameri­ cans (1983), Culture versus Economism: Essays on Marxism in the Multicultural Arena (1984), and Critical Issues in Native North America (1989). He is also a regular columnist for Zeta Magazine and editor of New Studies on the Left. Jim Vander Wall has been an active supporter of the struggles of Native Peoples for sovereignty since 1974 and has written several articles on FBI counter­ intelligence operations. He is co-author, with Ward Churchill, of Agents of Repres­ sion: TheFBI's Secret Warson the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (1988) and an editor of New Studies on the Left.

Brian Glick is an activist/attorney who has long been involved in the defense of those - notably Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt - targeted for neutralization by federal counterintelligence operations. He is coauthor of The Bust Book (1969) andThe Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual (1984), and author of War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (1989).

Chip Berlet is a long-time researcher on the workings of America's police state. Editor of a periodical, The Public Eye, devoted to exposing secret police and intelligence activities, he has also been a frequent contributor to journals like Counterspy and Covert Action Information Bulletin. He is presently associated with the National Lawyers Guild Anti-Repression Project.

John Trudell (Santee Dakota) was national chairman of the American Indian Movement from 1974-79, when the position was dissolved. On February 12 of the latter year, his entire family - his wife Tina, children Ricarda Star (age five), Sunshine Karma (age three) and Eli Changing Sun (age one), as well as his motherin-law, Leah Hicks Manning - were murdered on the Duck Valley Paiute Reserva­ tion in Utah as part of a government anti-AIM counterintelligence operation. An accomplished poet, Trudell has authored a book of verse, Living in Reality (1982), and has recorded several tapes of his poetry with musical accompaniment. These include Tribal Voice (with Tribal Voice, 1983), J.T./J.E.D. (with Kiowa guitarist Jesse Edwin Davis, 1985), A.K.A. Graffitti Man (with the Graffitti Band, 1986), Heart Jump Bouquet (with the Graffitti Band, 1987) and But This Isn 't El Salvador (with the Grafitti Band and Tribal Voice, 1987).

viii

Foreword Living in Reality ...Living in Reality we are targets of your unwariness With Warriors for targets You Create Your own destruction

This is how we bring you down target by target You wound yourself Using your greed WE watch Your spirit fade Living in Reality We can endure Your cages Your bullets Your lies Your confusion

We know You have destroyed Your Peace Living in Reality You only exist.

- John Trudell (Poem Fragment)

ix

The Face of COINTELPRO Regardless of the unattractiveness or noisy militancy of some private citizens or organizations, the Constitution does not permit federal inter­ ference with their activities except through the criminal justice system, armed with its ancient safeguards. There are no exceptions. No federal agency, the CIA, the IRS, or the FBI,£an be at the same time policeman, prosecutor, judge and jury. That is what constitutionally guaranteed due process is all about. It may sometimes be disorderly and unsatisfactory to some, but it is the essence of freedom...I suggest that the philosophy supporting COINTELPRO is the subversive notion that any public offi­ cial, the President or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent power to set aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public interest, or "national security" warrants it. That notion is postulate of tyranny.

- Congressman Don Edwards 1975

The FBI documents collected in this book offer a unique window into the inner workings of the U.S. political police. They expose the secret, systematic, and sometimes savage use of force and fraud, by all levels of government, to sabotage progressive political activity supposedly protected by the U.S. constitution. They reveal ongoing, country-wide CIA-style covert action - infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment, and violence - against a very broad range of domestic dissidents. While prodding us to re-evaluate U.S. democracy and to rethink our understanding of recent U.S. history, these documents can help us to protect our movements from future government attack. This is the final volume of what amounts to a South End Press trilogy on domestic covert action. Ward Churchill's and Jim Vander Wall's Agents of Repres­ sion1 details the FBI's secret war on the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. My War at Home2 shows that such covert operations have become a per­ manent feature of U.S. politics. It analyzes the specific methods used against progressive activists and opens a discussion of how to respond. Now Churchill and Vander Wall have reproduced many of the FBI files on which our books are based. Some of these documents illustrate recent FBI cam­ paigns against the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). Others reveal early attacks on Marcus Garvey (1920s) and Alger Hiss (1950s). The bulk are from the counterintel­ ligence programs (COINTELPROs) that the FBI mounted to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" the dvil rights, black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, anti-war and student movements of the 1960s. x

Preface

In this book, we see the actual directives that set in motion those infamous 1960s programs. Here, too, are action proposals that FBI field offices submitted in response to the COINTELPRO directives. FBI Headquarters teletypes back its approval or modifications. Agents report specific operations in which they took part. Supervi­ sors summarize progress in neutralizing a particular target. Policy memoranda adjust Bureau tactics in light of new dangers and opportunities. Most illuminating are the book's facsimiles of some of the weapons the FBI actually deployed in its hidden war at home. From the Bureau's arsenal of psychological warfare, Churchill and Vander Wall show us: •

the letter the FBI secretly sent to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in December 1964, in an attempt to provoke his suicide;

•

other forged letters to activists and their supporters, families, employers, landlords, college administrators and church superiors;

•

FBI-authored articles and editorials which "cooperative news media" ran as their own;

•

cartoon leaflets that the FBI published in the name of certain radical groups in order to ridicule and antagonize others.

Although some of these documents have been published previously, the collections are hard to find and many are out of print. The most thorough and useful to date - the National Lawyers Guild's Counterintelligence: A Documentary Look at America’s Secret Police,3 - has been incorporated into The COINTELPRO Papers. The NLG Civil Liberties Committee generously donated its limited resources to subsi­ dize publication of this book (and War at Home) instead of reprinting its earlier compilation. The FBI documents reproduced here originated as confidential internal com­ munications. They were for Bureau eyes only. They remained secret until March 1971, when a "Qtizen's Committee to Investigate the FBI" removed boxes of files from an FBI resident agency office in Media, Pennsylvania, and released them to the press. Gradually, more files were obtained through the federal Freedom of Informa­ tion Act (FOIA), which had been temporarily strengthened to help restore public confidence in government in the wake of Watergate and the exposure of official lies about the Vietnam War. A few agents and informers began to disaffect from the FBI and publicly confess their misdeeds. New senate and house intelligence committees held public hearings and published voluminous reports. These, in turn, enabled activists to get more documents through FOIA requests and lawsuits. The full story of COINTELPRO has not yet been told. The Bureau's files were never seized by congress or the courts. Many have been destroyed. Others remain hidden or were released with such heavy deletion that only "the," "and," "or" and "but" remain (examples are reprinted in Chapter 1 of The COINTE LPRO Papers, with a critique of the process which generates such absurdities). The most heinous and

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS embarrassing counterintelligence actions were not committed to writing, and ex­ operatives are now legally prohibited from disclosing them. Still, an unprecedented wealth of detailed information has been amassed. That material is summarized in Agents of Repression, War at Home and elsewhere. What sets The COINTELPRO Papers apart is the number and scope of the FBI documents it reproduces. As the title indicates, these documents are drawn mainly from the FBI's formal counterintelligence programs, in place from 1956-1971. This is not because these were the FBI's only programs of domestic covert action. Rather, it is because they were the only ones to have their records substantially revealed. COINTELPRO involved a unique experiment. Though covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the COINTELPROs were the first to be both broadly targeted and centrally directed. FBI headquarters set policy, assessed progress, charted new directions, demanded increased production, and carefully monitored and controlled day-to-day operations. This arrangement required that national COINTELPRO supervisors and local FBI field offices communicate back and forth, at great length, concerning every operation. They did so quite freely, with little fear of public exposure. This generated a prolific trail of bureaucratic paper. The moment that paper trail began to surface, the FBI discontinued all of its formal domestic counterintelligence programs. It did not, however, cease its covert political activity against U.S. dissidents. The documents show that the Bureau evaluated the COINTELPROs as "successful over the years." It disbanded them only "to afford ad­ ditional security to our sensitive techniques and operations." Continued reliance on those same techniques and operations was officially authorized, only now on a caseby-case basis, "with tight procedures to insure absolute security." By discontinuing use of the term "COINTELPRO," the Bureau gave the appear­ ance of acceding to public and congressional pressure. In reality, it protected its capacity to continue precisely the same activity under other names. Decentralization of covert operations vastly reduced the volume of required reporting. It dispersed the remaining documentation to individual case files in diverse field offices, and it purged those files of any caption suggesting domestic covert action. The Bureau's "sensitive techniques and operations" have since been further insulated from public scrutiny. Scheduled congressional hearings into the Bureau's mid-1970s campaign against AIM were squelched by means of what turns out to have been yet another FBI covert operation. The FOIA has been drastically narrowed, with thousands of files reclassified "top secret." The Intelligence Identities Protection Act now makes it a federal crime to disclose" any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent." This careful concealment of post-COINTELPRO domestic counterintelligence action is part of a broader effort to rehabilitate the U.S. political police. Central to that effort has been a sophisticated campaign to refurbish the public image of the FBI. The Bureau's egomaniacal, reactionary, crudely racist and sexist founder, J. Edgar Hoover, died in 1972. After interim directors failed to restore the Bureau's prestige, two federal judges, William Webster and William Sessions, were recruited to clean xii

Preface

house and build a "new FBI." The new directors have cultivated a low-visibility managerial style and discreetly avoided public attack on prominent liberals. Anti­ communism - the time-honored rationale for political police work - has been augmented by "counter-terrorism" and "the war on drugs," pretexts that better resonate with current popular fears. The old myth of the FBI as crime-busting protector of democratic rights has been revived in modem garb by films like Mississippi Burning and the television series, Mancuso FBI. This repackaging seems to have sold the "new FBI" to some of the most prominentcriticsof earlier COINTELPRO. University professors and congressional committees that helped to expose the domestic covert action of the past now deny its persistence in the present. Because of their credentials, these respectable "objec­ tive" sources do more damage than the FBI's blatant right-wing publicists. Left un­ contested, their sophistry could disarm a new generation of activists, leaving them vulnerable to government subversion. The introduction to The COINTELPRO Papers refutes one such academic expert, Athan Theoharis, in his preposterous claim that the FBI's war on AIM during the 1970s was not a COINTELPRO-style "program of harassment." Equally treacherous is The FBI and CISPES, a 1989 report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence.4 This is nothing more than a whitewash of the Bureau's covert and extralegal effort to wipe out domestic opposition to US. intervention in Central America. That FBI campaign was first made public by a central participant, Frank Varelli. The Bureau admits it paid Varelli from 1981 to 1984 to infiltrate CISPES. Varelli has testified that the FBI's stated objective was to "break" CISPES. He recounts a modus operandi straight out of the annals COINTELPRO - from break-ins, bogus publica­ tions and disruption of public events to planting guns on CISPES members and seducing CISPES leaders in order to get blackmail photos for the FBI.5 Alerted by Varelli's disclosures, the Center for Constitutional Rights obtained a small portion of the Bureau's CISPES files and released them to the press. The files show the U.S. government targeting a very broad range of religious, labor and community groups opposed to its Central America polides.They confirm that the FBI's objective was to attack and "neutralize" these groups.* Mainstream media coverage of these revelations elicited a flurry of congressional investigations and hearings. Publicly exposed, the FBI tried to scapegoat the whistle blower. Its in­ house investigation found Varelli "unreliable" and held his false reports of CISPES terrorism responsible for the entire FBI operation. The Bureau denied any violation of the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens or involvement in the hundreds of breakins reported by Central America activists. A grand total of six agents received "formal censure" and three were suspended for 14 days. The FBI moved its CISPES file to the national archives and Director Sessions declared the case closed, a mere "aberration" due to "failure in FBI management."7 The Bureau's slander of Varelli gave the congress an easy way out. The single congressional report. The FBI and CISPES, endorses the FBI's entire account, without any reservation or qualification. It legitimizes a cover-up of current covert opera­ tions by exploiting the past reputation of the Senate Intelligence Committee. xiii

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS That committee - known initially as the "Church Committee," after its founding chair, Senator Frank Church (D., Idaho) - gained respect in the mid-1970s through detailed public documentation of FBI and CIA abuses. In truth, the committee never did play quite the heroic role claimed for it by liberal historians. Compromised from the outset, it allowed the agencies under investigation to turn over only sanitized versions of selected files and then to edit and censor the committee's reports before publication.8 It colluded in the FBI's continuing concealment of a decade-long secret war on the Puerto Rican independence movement. Church and his successor as committee chair, Senator Birch Bayh (D., Indiana), eventually were driven from office. They fell victim to the same combination of right-wing disinformation and Democratic Party passivity that later set up House Speaker Jim Wright.* Divested of its liberal populist leadership, the intelligence committee became - like so many other congressional and administrative bodies an instrument of the very agencies it purports to oversee. It was this latter-day committee which ratified the FBI's coverup of its campaign against Central America activists without hearing from a single critic or victim. Relying exclusively on FBI and Justice Department testimony, the committee crudely reiterates the Bureau's own self-serving findings, often verbatim. It writes off Frank Varelli with the undocumented assertion that his "credibility...was called into doubt at a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights."10 The committee also ignores testimony that the reports submitted in Varelli's name, which provided the FBI's pretext for attacking CISPES, were actually dictated by FBI higher-ups.11 It makes no reference to Varelli's repeated, detailed sworn statements - corroborated by the Bureau's own files - that the FBI used COIN­ TELPRO methods against CISPES in order to achieve COINTELPRO ends. To rationalize its dismissal of the campaign againstCISPESas a mere "aberration" from the FBI's "definite pattern of adherence to established safeguards for constitutional rights,"12 the committee carefully avoids any reference to the sordid history of COINTELPRO. Neither the acronym nor the concept appear even once in its report. Such a whitewash should not be allowed to obscure the reality of continuing COINTELPRO-type attacks on progressive activists. Ongoing domestic covert ac­ tion is more than amply documented by The COINTELPRO Papers, Agents of Repression and War at Home. The targets are not limited to the opponents of U.S. intervention in Central America. They include virtually all who fight for peace and social justice in the United States - from AIM, Puerto Mean independentistas and the Coalition for a New South, to environmentalists, pacifists, trade unionists, homeless and seniors, feminists, gay and lesbian activists, radical clergy and teachers, pub­ lishers of dissident literature, prison reformers, progressive attorneys, civil rights and anti-poverty workers, and on and on. Consider the following examples drawn from 1989 alone: •

national leaders of Earth First! imprisoned on the word of an FBI infiltrator, Mike Tait;18

xiv

Preface •

the coordinator of the National Lawyers Guild's anti-repression task force, active in the defense of Puerto Rican independentistas, subpoenaed at the FBI's instigation before a gratuitous, punitive grand jury and faced with jail for refusing to testify against a former client;14

•

more than 200 African-American elected officials in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina victimized by FBI smear campaigns, false criminal charges and elaborate "sting" operations.15

These can be no more than the tip of the iceberg, given that the great bulk of COINTELPRO-type operations remain secret until long after their damage has been done. By all indications, domestic covert operations have become a permanent feature of U.S. politics. The implications of this are truly alarming: in the name of protecting our fundamental freedoms, the FBI and police systematically subvert them. They routinely take the law into their own hands to punish dissident speech and association without the least semblance of due process of law. Those who manage to organize for social justice in the United States, despite the many obstacles in their path, face country-wide covert campaigns to discredit and disrupt their con­ stitutionally protected political activity. The documents reproduced in this book reveal a U.S. political reality which is the antithesis of democracy. They also suggest an alternative reading of recent U.S. history. Memoirs and commentaries on "The Sixties" have recently become quite popular. COINTELPRO, however, receives little attention in these accounts. It is rarely mentioned, and even then it seems somehow not to affect the rest of the story. Otherwise responsible historians describe a systematic campaign to covertly dis­ credit progressive movements without so much as considering the possibility that their own perceptions might be distorted as a result of that campaign. Take, for instance, Todd Gitlin's often insightful and eloquent account of his experience in the 1960s. A sophisticated participant-observer and early president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Gitlin is well aware of COINTELPRO. Yet, at least one pivotal incident reported matter-of-factly in his book turns out to have been an FBI covert operation. Recalling a 1969 telephone threat which helped split the emerging women's movement from SDS, Gitlin repeats a widely accepted account attributing the call to Cathy Wilkerson, a late-SDS and future Weather Underground militant. Gitlin was shocked to learn, at an SDS reunion in 1988, that neither Wilkerson nor any other SDS woman had made such a call. Who knows how many other incidents represented as historical fact by Gitlin (let alone in the writings of those lacking his integrity) are actually COINTELPRO fiction?16 COINTELPRO has been especially effective in distorting the public image of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The BPP was the most prominent African-American po­ litical force in the U.S. during the late '60s, with chapters all across the country. Working from a 10 point socialist program for black self-determination, it formed (legal) armed street patrols to deter KKK and police brutality, gave out free food and

xv

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS health care, and fought against hard drugs. The BPP was instrumental in forging a broad-based "rainbow coalition" against U.S. intervention abroad and for commu­ nity control of the police, schools and other key institutions at home. Its weekly newspaper, The Black Panther, brought a radical anti-imperialist perspective on na­ tional and international developments to over 100,000 readers. These achievements have by and large been ignored by white historians, who present instead only the FBI's view of the BPP. Even books about COINTELPRO tend to regurgitate as scholarship the very lies and racist caricatures which the Bureau promoted through COINTELPRO. At best, such studies equate the government's violence with the EPP'S, overlooking the fact that the FBI and police harassed, vandalized, beat, framed and murdered Panthers for years before finally provoking the party's retaliation. A prime example is Kenneth O'Reilly's Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972. Here we find the BPP identified as a gang of "preening ghetto generals spouting off-the-pig rhetoric and sporting blackleathers, Cuban shades, and unkempt Afros." They were "peripheral characters...who never attained mass support." In a portrayal laced with the FBI's racist epithets - "monsters," "cold-blooded killers," "nihilistic terror" - O'Reilly argues that "the Black Panther Party invited the sort of FBI repression that typified Lyndon Johnson's last two years in the White House and Richard Nixon's first four." Chie such "invitation" consisted, we are told, of a "coloring book depicting Black children challenging white law and order in the ghetto." Only the most careful reader will discover, some 21 pages later, that this "outrageous Panther provoca­ tion" was actually a COINTELPRO forgery published by the FBI to discredit the BPP.” Clearly, COINTELPRO and similar operations under other names work to distort academic and popular perceptions of recent U.S. history. They violate our basic democratic rights and undermine our ability to alter government policy and structure. They have done enormous damage to the struggle for peace and social justice. Though formidable and dangerous, such domestic covert action is not insur­ mountable. It can be overcome through a combination of militant public protest (as in recent "FBI Off Campus" campaigns) and careful internal education and prepa­ ration within progressive movements. The greatest gift of The COINTELPRO Papers is its potential for helping present and future activists grasp the methodology of this form of repression in order to defeat it. Read these documents with that in mind, and use them well!

Brian Glick New Rochelle, New York - March 1990-

xvi

Guide to the Documents by Chip Berlet and Brian Glick Introduction 12

13 14-5 16 17 18-9

Memo: Hoover to Attorney General re: Marcus Garvey "prominent Negro agitator." Neutralize his political work with fraud prosecution. Report: From infiltrator who targeted Garvey. Letter: Hiss defense investigator actually reported to FBI. Memo: FBI knew Hiss prosecution claims regarding typewriter forgery were false. Teletype: Agent to infiltrate Dallas CISPES. Teletype: Attack CISPES for defying government policy.

Understanding Deletions in FBI Documents 24 25

Rosenberg memo-text entirely deleted. Document: Systematic deletions from FBI documents follow pattern.

COINTELPRO - CP, USA 40 42 43 44-6 47

Memo: COINTELPRO initiated against CP, USA. Memo: Cause organized crime to attack CP, USA. FBI circulates bogus CP leaflet to provoke mafia. FBI-authored anonymous letter incites Teamsters against CP; authority requested for more. Memo: Teamster business agent of "weak character" cultivated as informant.

COINTELPRO -SWP 51

52-3 54-5 56-7

Memo: Anonymous phone call to subvert NAACP support for Committee to Aid Monroe Defendants. Teletype: Authority sought for media smear of SWP organizers running for public office. Memo: Phoenix FBI requests authority for anonymous letter campaign to provoke firing of SWP faculty member. Memo/Cartoon: From campaign to disrupt anti-war movement and SWP.

COINTELPRO - Puerto Rican Independence Movement 68 69 70

71

Document: Launch program to disrupt Puerto Rican independence movement. Memo: New York suggests "exploiting factionalism" in Puerto Rican independence movement. Document: Hoover suggests plan to promote hostility toward Puerto Rican inde­ pendence movement by planting articles in media. Document: New York and San Juan discuss plans to disrupt Puerto Rican independ­ ence movement.

xvii

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS 73 75 76

77 78 79

80 81

83 85

87 89

Document: Split and disrupt group seeking Puerto Rican independence FBI secretly authors daily newspaper editorial attacking Puerto Rican student independentistas. Document: Delve deeply into independentistas personal lives to "disrupt their activities and compromise their effectiveness." Anonymous leaflet circulated by FBI to discredit independentista leader Juan Mari Bras. Memo: FBI gloats over Mari Bras heart attack and claims its anonymous letter was partial cause. Memo: Anonymous leaflet mailed to 300 in effort to fuel factionalism among independentistas. Document: Anonymous mailing and other covert operations to crush "budding" high school pro-independence movement. Airtel: Anonymous letter approved to foment disputes within independentista movement, as long as Bureau role remains hidden. Memo: San Juan suggests anonymous letter on supposed sexual affair to discredit Mari Bras and alienate other independence advocates. Airtel: San Juan informs Hoover of campaign to subvert 1967 UN plebiscite on Puerto Rican political status. Bogus cartoon ridicules Mari Bras in name of other independentistas. Bogus cartoon linking Puerto Rican independentistas with Fidel Castro, issued in name of fictitious Puerto Rican group set up by FBI to subvert 1967 plebiscite.

COINTELPRO Black Liberation Movement Document: Establish program to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neu­ tralize" black nationalist organizations and leaders. 98 Document: Remove Dr. Martin Luther King from leadership role in civil rights movement. 99 Anonymous Letter: Urges King to commit suicide or face exposure of alleged misdeeds. 100-1 Memo: Anonymous leaflet and article planted in news media to undermine Ameri­ can Friends Service Committee work in Poor People's Campaign. 102 Memo: Strategy discussion on disruption of Nation of Islam ("Black Muslims") takes credit for factional dispute against Malcolm X. 104 Document: Proposal to provoke murder of Dick Gregory by organized crime. 107 Memo expands program to neutralize black movement. 108-11 Airtel: Anti-black program expanded; prevent coalitions, respectability, youth militancy, "rise of a 'messiah'." 113-4 Memo: Disrupt marriage of St. Louis civil rights activist Reverend Charles Koen and discredit him in black community through anonymous accusations of sexual infi­ delity. 115 Second FBI anonymous letter against Koen. 116 Document: St. Louis reports results of distribution of bogus underground newspa­ per designed to divide black activists. 118-9 Document: Director suggests all offices follow Miami example of providing deroga­ tory background information on COINTELPRO targets to cooperative media.

92-3

xviii

Guide to the Documents 120 121 122

124-5 127 128 130

131 132 133

134

136-7 138 139 141

144-5

148 150

151-2 154-5 156 158

160-1 162-3

Memo: Anonymous letter to discredit Republic of New Afrika (RNA) leader. Document: Director approves above letter. Document: Discussion of campaign to discredit RNA and prevent land purchase in Mississippi. Memo: Tactics to "thwart and disrupt the Black Panther Party (BPP)" Memo: Provide information to cooperative media to "foster split" between Black Panther Party and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Document: Proposal to create false impression that Stokely Carmichael is a CIA informant. Memo: Plan to provoke violence between Black Panther Party and another black organization (US). Bogus Cartoons: Used in Black Panther Party/US campaign to provoke violence. Memo: Discussion of continuing plan to provoke violence between Black Panther Party and US. Document: Summary of 'Tangible Results" and "accomplishments" of Black Pan­ ther Party COINTELPRO, e.g., "Shootings, beating and a high degree of unrest;" and collapse of BPP program providing free breakfast for ghetto youth. Documents. Anonymous mailing of derogatory cartoon targeting Newark Black Panther Party. Memo: Proposal to provoke Jewish Defense League violence against BPP. Document: Anonymous letter to Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort provoking violence against BPP. Document/sketch. FBI informant's drawing of floorplan showing where BPP leader Fred Hampton slept. Used by police to murder Hampton and Mark Clark. Airtel: Cash bonus requested for FBI informant who targeted Hampton for deadly raid. Airtel: Hoover reprimands San Francisco FBI for criticizing plan to discredit and destroy BPP. Memo: Summary of anti-black COINTELPRO; friction created among BPP leaders. Airtel: Hoover informs agents that when targeting BPP, purpose is disruption, and "it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." Teletype: Propose forged letter to divide BPP and isolate Geronimo Pratt. Memo: Bogus underground newspaper proposed to discredit Geronimo Pratt, ridicule BPP and "foment mistrust and suspicion" among its members. Teletype: Continue targeting Pratt. Memo: FBI and prosecutor collude to keep evidence from judge and defense attorneys in trial of three former Panthers ("the New York 3"). Airtel: Director summarizes success in shattering BPP and driving BPP leader Huey Newton crazy. Memo: "Thwart BPP newspaper; FBI anonymous letters charge BPP anti-semitism to disaffect donors solicited by conductor Leonard Bernstein; further disinforma­ tion and Jewish Defense League provocation.

COINTELPRO New Left 177-8

Memo: Disruption of new left formalized as new program.

xix

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS 180 181-2 183 185-6

187 192-3

194-6 197 199

200 201 202

203 204 205-7

209 210 211 212

213 214-5 216-7

218 219 227

Target anti-war leaders Dellinger and Hayden. Newark proposes new left be "destroyed or neutralized from the inside/' Hayden labelled as informer. 12 point master plan for COINTELPRO against new left. Memo: Cartoons, pamphlets and anonymous letters used to disrupt SDS at Temple University. Cartoon. Used to discredit SDS at Temple University. Memo: Block emergence of Detroit area anti-war coalition; bogus letter in name of Black United Front demanding $25,000 from "white liberals." Disrupt Liberation News Service through divisive anonymous letter. Memo: Milwaukee proposes plan to discredit alternative newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. Airtel: Newark proposes plan to disrupt Princeton SDS through conservative campus group. Airtel: Director approves plan to disrupt Princeton SDS. Cartoon from campaign to disrupt Princeton SDS Director urges plan to "drive a wedge between the new left and the black student power advocates" at New York University. FBI-authored racist letter from anonymous "SDS member" used in COINTELPRO operation at NYU. Letter: Approval of NYU COINTELPRO. Memo: Plan to use "anonymous messages" with "a mystical connotation" to harass Temple University new left activists. Director urges anonymous communications "to cause confusion in the organizing for [ Los Angeles anti-war] demonstration by causing dissent amongst its sponsors." Memo: COINTELPRO operation proposed to inhibit "the embryonic alliance" between SDS and BPP. Letter: Authority granted for above operation by using informants to create rift. Memo: Detroit requests device to squirt "foul smelling feces" on publications distributed by Radical Education Project. Airtel: Divide SDS and BPP through bogus racist, sexist, homophobic attack in name of "Newark SDS." Airtel: Plant newspaper article decrying Jane Fonda's fundraising for BPP. Airtel: FBI-authored letter to newspaper columnist from fictitious person smearing BPP-supporting actress Jean Seberg as pregnant from Black Panther rather than white husband. Director approves action vs. Seberg, with adjustments to protect FBI cover. Document/Los Angeles Times clipping: Claim Seberg COINTELPRO successful. Document/Postcard: FBI sends "Minutemen" death-threat post card to intimidate author Churchill.

COINTELPRO - AIM 242 243 245-6

Report: Source describes Denver AIM organizational structure. Teletype: Report on AIM sent to legal attache in Ottawa, Canada. Teletype: Police brutality against AIM activist Russell Means.

xx

Guide to the Documents 247-8

252 253 256-60

263-5 266-7

271 274 275 276

277 279

280 281

282-3 284-7

288-9 290-3 294

296

297 298-9 300 301 302

303

Teletype: Circulation of false claim that AIM was obtaining illegal automatic weapons; FBI and local law enforcement coordinate operations against AIM. Document: Establishing predication for criminal investigation of AIM. Teletype: Use of reporter at Wounded Knee as unwitting informant for FBI through covert cooperation of management. Memo: Position paper on role of FBI in case of "a major confrontation in Indian country," based on analysis of Wounded Knee operations. Teletype: Unsubstantiated rumor of AIM arms purchases; proposal to use that rumor to block funding of AIM by Sammy Davis, Jr. Document: Initiate "forceful and penetrative interview program" against AIM activists. Memo: Characterization of AIM as violent and destructive "insurgents." Memo: COINTELPRO veteran agent Richard G. Held assigned to direct investiga­ tion into death of two agents in "Peltier" Pine Ridge killings case. Memo: Involvement of agent Richard W. Held, son of Richard G., in Pine Ridge case. Memo: Glowing evaluation of performance of Richard W. Held on Pine Ridge during period of intense repressive abuses against AIM supporters. Memo: Director desires prompt resolution of any "inconsistencies" in stories relating to Pine Ridge killings. Tactical summary shows use of grand jury to coerce reluctant witnesses to implicate Peltier and others in Pine Ridge killings. Teletype: Richard G. Held returns from Rapid City to duties as SAC Chicago. Memo: Richard G. Held continues involvement in Pine Ridge case, plans to meet with judge. FBI Terrorist Digest: AIM included in summary of possible terrorist attacks on 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. Teletype: Lengthy report from single unverified source alleges non-existent AIM "Dog Soldiers" plan massive campaign of murder and terrorism. Memo: Media leak that FBI shared information on Native American protests with CIA FBI analyzes acquittal in first Pine Ridge killings trial in order to be sure to convict Peltier in second trial. Memo: Co-defendant dismissed so "full prosecutive weight of the Federal Govern­ ment could be directed against Leonard Peltier." Affidavit: Myrtle Poor Bear alleges she heard Peltier plan to ambush FBI agents at Pine Ridge, and that later he confessed. Affidavit: Myrtle Poor Bear alleges she saw Peltier actually shoot FBI agents. Affidavit: Myrtle Poor Bear abandons claim Peltier planned and confessed killings; adds substantial detail to her "eyewitness" account. Airtel: "Enclosed herewith one pair of hands" taken from as yet unidentified Anna Mae Aquash. Initial autopsy inconclusive despite bullet lodged in skull. Identification Report: Fingerprints reveal identity of Anna Mae Aquash. Teletype: Ballistics test showed rifle claimed as Pine Ridge killings weapon could not have fired the cartridge casing recovered from trunk of car. Lab Notes: Firing pin test showing lack of match-—described as "inconclusive" at trial.

xxi

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS 307-9

Document: Summary of justification for and tactics used in AIM investigation, stresses fostering of paranoia.

Conclusion 312 313

315 331

Chart: Admitted FBI illegal acts committed during COINTELPRO era. Teletype: Director calls for compilation of reports of FBI warrantless electronic surveillance in domestic security investigations. Airtel: Wide range of political "extremists" labelled "terrorists." Chart of penal coercion techniques and functions.

xxii

Preface to the Classics Edition

The COINTELPRO Papers: More Relevant Than Ever

Surely any belief that American society and politicians have become more toler­ ant of radical dissent must be seriously shaken by the fact that President George Bush (the elder) and overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress have repeatedly sought since 1989 to amend the Bill of Rights... Moreover, that the FBI harassed activists opposed to the Reagan administration’s nuclear and Cen­ tral America policies and without hesitation handed over hundreds of files on leading Republicans to the Clinton administration (in the so-called filegate scan­ dal) has not exacdy built confidence that the American intelligence establish­ ment has fundamentally changed—especially since its activities once again have been veiled in deep secrecy following the congressional investigations of the mid-1970s.

—Robert Justin Goldstein Political Repression in Modem America (2001)

Within the realm of domestic political repression, much has happened since Jim Vander Wall and I published The COINTELPRO Papers a dozen-odd years ago. Although there has been a bit of good mixed in, the bulk of these developments have been bad or worse, and all of them have bearing—always by way of amplification and reinforcement—upon what we originally wrote. Fortunately, the book’s (re)release in the form of a South End Classics edition affords an opportunity to summarize this new information at the outset, offering readers thereby a broader and more cur­ rent contextualization of what follows. First, the good. As is mentioned in the main text (pp. 157, 303, 363nl37), conclusive evidence was just emerging as the book went to press in early 1990 that the FBI, in collaboration with the New York City prosecutors and

xxiv

COINTELPRO PAPERS

the NYPD’s Bureau of Strategic Services (BOSS, the political police unit), had conspired_to with hold^cl e^xl^ excu 1 patory evidence in obtaining the1973 conviction of former Panther 21 deTeird^hV&KoruHa bin-Wahad (Richard Dhoruba Moore) for the attempted murders of two policemen.1 Bin-Wahad’s life sentence was finally overturned shortly thereafter and he was freed after 19 years of incarceration in maximum security prisons, eight years of it in sol­ itary confinement, for acts those responsible had known all along he’d not committed.2 It is hard to imagine a clearer confirmation of the fact that false prosecutions—frame-ups, as it were—serve as a weapon in the tactical arse­ nal used by America’s “agents of repression” to “neutralize” those they target as “key activists” or “agitators.”3 Nonetheless, if further support of this allegation is needed, it will be eas­ ily found in the example of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), another one-time leader of the Black Panther Party (pp. 155-7, 319, 363nl36). In June 1997, after it was established that the key witness against ji Jaga in his 1972 murder trial—Julius C. Butler, a supposed Panther who, it was proven, was a previ­ ously unadmitted FBI operative—had perjured himself, this conviction, too, was overturned.4 By then, however, ji Jaga had spent 27 years in a maximum security cage—like bin-Wahad, he’d been subjected to eight consecutive years of solitary confinement—as a result of the authorities’ ongoing desire to neutralize his effectiveness as a political organizer.5 Others among America’s numerous political prisoners have come out as well, among them former Panther Johnny Spain, ostensibly involved in George Jackson’s ill-fated 1971 San Quentin “insurrection” (p. 364nl39).6 Free as well is Robert King Wilkerson, who, along with Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, comprised the “Angola 3” Louisiana Panthers. Cumulatively to-date, the Angola 3 have spent 90 years in continuous solitary confinement as a result of their dubious 1972 convictions in the killing of a prison guard.7 On September 10,1999, Alejandrina Torres, Carmen Valentin, Ida Luz Rodri­ guez, Dylcia Pagan and several other Puerto Rican independentistas associated with the Fuer^as Armadas de Liberation Ndtional (FALN; pp. 86, 310, 326), most of them sentenced to terms of veritable life imprisonment after adopting the “freedom fighter defense”—that is, rejecting U.S. pretensions to rightful ju­ risdiction over them or their homeland by refusing to participate in their own trials—were pardoned by Bill Clinton.8 Most recently, on January 20, 2001, his last day in office, Clinton also commuted the sentences of Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans, Euroamerican activists who, Rosenberg in par­ ticular, had already spent 20 years in some of the worst lockups the U.S. has to

Preface

xxv

offer,9 and whose wildly disproportionate terms of incarceration for pos­ session of firearms and explosives—58 and 42 years respectively—are dis­ cussed in the conclusion (also see pp. 412n30, 414n42). While such things are heartening, they are not, as is often asserted by apologists for the status quo, an indication that “the system works” in terms of dispensing anything resembling justice. If th at vj txt so, many of the peo­ ple just mentioned would never have been in prison in the first place, while the rest would have been there far more briefly and under far less abysmal conditions than they were. If the system actually worked as its proponents claim, moreover, those who abused their authority by falsifying and/or hid­ ing evidence, wantonly subverting the judicial system to obtain wrongful convictions against persons they knew to be innocent, would themselves be behind bars. And this, to be sure, has never happened. Despite the record, much of it officially corroborated, and notwithstanding the fact that much of what has been admitted is patently felonious, no FBI agent has spent so much as a minute in jail for his part in framing dissidents like bin-Wahad and ji Jaga.11 The same can be said of the local police personnel, prosecutors, and judges who unquestionably collaborated in such endeavors. Worse are the scores of men and women who continue to languish in various states of confinement, many of them after decades behind the walls of America’s ever more proliferate penal system. Some of them, like AIM leader Leonard Peltier (pp. 294-5, 404-8nl 88-209), continue to attract con­ siderable attention and support even after nearly 30 years.12 The same is true of former Panther cum award-winning radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal (Wesley Cook; p. 320), whose recent manumission into the gen­ eral prison population after two decades on Pennsylvania’s death row should count as a victory, however incomplete.13 But who remembers Mondo We Langa (David Rice) and Ed Poindexter, leaders of the Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party who were railroaded into prison for a cop-killing in 1970, after a trial as fraught with signs of COINTELPRO ma­ nipulation every bit as pronounced as any of their better-known counterparts (pp. 143, 146)?14 Who remembers Marshall Eddy Conway, a Baltimore Panther leader neutralized through another incredibly shaky murder conviction in 1970,15 or Russell “Maroon” Shoats of the Philadelphia Panthers, eliminated in much the same fashion in 1972?16 Who remembers even the name of Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, an LA Panther whose ordeal began in 1989,17 of Hugo “Dahariki” Pinell, one of George Jackson’s “Soledad Brothers” imprisoned

xxvi

COINTELPRO PAPERS

since 1964 (pp. 363-4),18 or of Ruchell “Cinque” Magee, a member of Jackson’s original Black Guerrilla Family in San Quentin, whose incarceration also began nearly 40 years ago?19 Who recalls that dedicated people like Dr. Mutulu Shakur (Jeral Wayne Williams) and Marilyn Buck, the “only white member of the Black Liberation Army,” having been convicted—in what may be the ultimate absurdity in this connection—of having violated provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute (RICO; 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-1968), are serving sentences of 77-years-to-life (pp. 309, 411-2n29)?20 Sundiata Acoli (Clark Squire), Herman Bell, Mark Cook, Gary Tyler, Sekou Odinga (Nathaniel Burns), Jalil Abdul Muntaquin (Anthony Bottom), Basheer Hameed, Robert Seth Hayes, Ojure Lutalo, David Gilbert, Judy Clark, Kathy Boudin, several members of Philadelphia’s MOVE Family, and many others: the list seems all but endless.21 Nor has it ceased to grow. Among the more noteworthy recent additions are Rob Thaxton, an anarchist sentenced to seven years imprisonment for throwing a rock at a policeman during a 1999 street demonstration in Eugene, Oregon,22 and “Free” (Jeffrey Leurs), sentenced during the summer of 2001 to serve 23 years for having torched several SUVs in the same city.23 Most recent of all is the 2002 convic­ tion in Atlanta—despite an almost total lack of coherent evidence against him—of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown; see pp. 105, 112, 126) on charges of having killed one deputy sheriff and wounded another about two years earlier.24 The (Forensic) Evidence Never Lies?

There are perhaps even more sinister examples than the last three. David Williams, one of the Bureau’s top forensic experts, was “ousted from [his principle examiner’s position in] the FBI lab” in 1996 and “investigated for potential criminal charges for his conduct in the [1993] World Trade Center bombing investigation.”25 Captioned TRADBOM by the Bureau, it was this investigation that led to the 1995 convictions and sentences of 240 years apiece meted out to Sheik Omar Ahmad Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and several other “Islamic fundamentalists” alleged to have been responsible.26 In a post-trial probe triggered by complaints on the part of FBI lab analyst Frederic Whitehurst to the effect that his bosses had on more than 200 occa­ sions altered the results of his work, the Justice Department Inspector Gen­ eral’s Office (IG) determined that Williams, together with lab supervisor

Preface

xxvii

Tom Thurman, had systematically falsified evidence, deleting qualifying language from forensic reports to make them appear far more conclusive than they actually were, and occasionally reversing Whitehurst’s conclu­ sions altogether to “make the evidence fit the crime.”27 The IG also re­ ported that its work was seriously hampered by a “systemic” destruction of primary documents by lab personnel.28 The same pattern was found with regard to the FBI’s Oklahoma City bombing investigation (OKBOM), at about the same time. On September 5, 1995, “Williams issued a twenty-eight-page...lab report on the bombing that showed all the hallmarks of his tendency to work backward, draw unsci­ entific conclusions, and overstate results, all in aid of the incrimination of the only suspects, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.”29 Although “the laboratory had issued a policy memorandum on September 1, 1994, explic­ itly requiring the verbatim inclusion of [junior forensic examiners’] re­ ports” in summaries presented to juries, Williams later “admitted changing the reports of David Burmeister, the chief explosives-residue analyst on the Oklahoma City case” in a manner “slanted...in favor of the prosecu­ tion.”30 The quality of Williams’ material was “peer reviewed” by a pair of Brit­ ish experts, Brian Caddy, a British forensics professor, and Dr. John Lloyd, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and 30 year veteran of forensic in­ vestigation, both of whom had worked IRA bombing cases.31 As Caddy put it: If these reports are the ones to be presented to the courts as evidence then I am appalled by their structure and information content... The reports, in my opin­ ion, are not [forensic] reports as such but a mere catalogue of items and the re­ sults of some experimentation... The structure of the reports seems designed to confuse the reader rather than help him.32

Lloyd concurred. The reports are purely conclusory in nature. It is impossible to determine the chain of custody, or precisely what work was done on each item or the reliability of the reported results e.g. of specificity and freedom from the effects of spuri­ ous contamination (explosives or otherwise) or the competence of whoever was responsible for the results.33 Aside from the shoddiness and deliberately misleading nature of Wil­ liams’ reporting, substantial questions have emerged as to how “the most important piece of evidence in the government’s whole case against

xxviii

COINTELPRO PAPERS

McVeigh” came into the FBI’s possession, and whether it ever actually ex­ isted. This concerns a piece of debris recovered near the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—federal evidentiary submis­ sion Q507—which was supposedly impregnated with ammonium nitrate crystals, thereby proving that the explosive material used in the bombing was of a sort linked to the defendant by receipts. The first problem is that, in a striking parallel to Peltier case (pp. 294, 405-7nl 89-202), the FBI provided no photo of the critical item in situ, offered conflicting accounts of who suppos­ edly found it, and could not confirm its chain of custody thereafter.34 Indeed, even in the lab itself, the Bureau was forced to concede that while “Williams’ initials appeared on “virtually every piece of evidence submitted at trial,” he’d “not actually checked the evidence in... [O]thers placed his initials on the evidence at his instruction. It was a chain of custody that meant nothing-”35 The second problem is more serious still. In court, the explosives-residue analyst who’d ostensibly done the lab work on Q507, testified that the incrim­ inating crystals had been imbedded in the wooden object, as if driven in by the force of an explosion. In his lab notes, however, the same analyst had written that the crystals were present in a surface glaze which could have been brushed on after the fact.36 Inadequate documentation made it impossible for defense experts to check the procedures used in detecting the crystals, a mat­ ter of no small importance since the depositing of such residues by the deto­ nation of an ammonium nitrate device was unknown to forensic science.37 The analyst had also failed to preserve a sample of the alleged evidence, of­ fering only a set of inconclusive photos to “confirm” his highly selective an­ notation.38 In any event, an independent lab which examined Q507 found no traces of the offending substance in either imbedded or glazed form, a matter entirely consistent with the fact that the Oklahoma City crime scene had been drenched by a cloudburst before the item was collected for testing.39 There was thus a virtual certainty that any ammonium nitrate residues deposited upon it would have been washed away (indeed, in an effort to explain why the independent lab results were negative, the FBI itself claimed that “high hu­ midity” would have been sufficient to destroy such crystals).40 Although the FBI lab’s violations of the most basic rules of evidence were so flagrant with respect to Q507 that the trial judge, Richard Matsch, could easily have ruled it inadmissible—thereby collapsing the government’s cases against both McVeigh and Nichols—he failed to do so.41 Further, he so sharply circumscribed the ability of the defense to use the IG report in chai-

Preface

xxix

lenging the integrity of the Bureau’s lab work—Matsch ruled that only six of the document’s 517 pages, “all of which [were] arguably necessary to put the lab’s performance in context” could be admitted as evidence42—that the jury was left with the false impression that the overall case against McVeigh had been “scientifically proven” when, in fact, exactly the opposite was true.43 Thus was the defendant sentenced to death, Nichols to de facto life imprisonment, and the public to an “understanding” of what happened in Oklahoma City wildly at odds with even the most widely published photos of the bomb damage.44 The FBI’s manipulation/falsification of physical evidence in this pair of recent and highly political cases—a modus operandi dating back at least as far as the “forgery by typewriter” conducted by the crime lab to obtain the conviction of Alger Hiss in 1951 (pp. 13-5)45—points to a far broader situa­ tion having to do with the spillover of such COINTELPRO-style tech­ niques into otherwise unremarkable /^political cases, not only at the federal level but in state and local jurisdictions as well. As for the Bureau it­ self, such efforts to pump up conviction rates, and thus reinforce its reputa­ tion as “the nation’s premier crime-fighting agency,”46 can be traced to a point not later than the mid-1970s,47 when Thomas Curran, an examiner in the lab’s serology department, was exposed as having “lied repeatedly under oath about his credentials”—he “was variously a zoologist, a biologist, and a psychologist for different court appearances,” although he possessed no degree at all—and that, while he’d been involved in nothing but routine prosecutions, his lab findings had been just as “persistently deceptive” as his claims to holding both a BA and MA in “science.”48 That Curran’s example was by no means anomalous is readily borne out by the still-unfolding case of Joseph Salvati, a completely unoffending Boston truck driver and father of four—a random bystander, in ef­ fect—who, as is now officially conceded, was framed and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967 for a murder to which the FBI personnel who testi­ fied and otherwise fabricated the evidence used to convict him knew he had not the remotest connection. Why? The Bureau needed a fall guy to shield the identity of an informant useful to an operation through which it osten­ sibly sought to use Boston’s Irish mob as a means of undermining the posi­ tion enjoyed by the local Mafia family—it turns out that at least one FBI agent, John Connolly, was for all intents and purposes a member of the Irish mob49—and Salvati just happened to be handy. He spent 30 years in Massa­ chusetts maximum security lockups before Governor William Weld com-

XXX

COINTELPRO PAPERS

muted his sentence (a judge finally voided his bogus conviction altogether in January 2001). However, the retired FBI man most directly responsible for railroading Salvati, while admitting what he’d done during a recent congres­ sional hearing, “showed no remorse” for it, and the Bureau itself has never so much as offered an apology to its victim.50 Given the background in which Curran’s offenses occurred—and there can be no question that his false testimony was responsible for the imprison­ ment of a number of people no less innocent than Joseph Salvati51—he was never charged with perjury. What he did, aside from making the mistake of getting caught at it, was simply standard FBI procedure, a circumstance that remains no less true today. Apart from the already-discussed performances of supervisors like David Williams and Tom Thurman, consider the record of Terry Rudolph, an explosives-residue analyst who handled more than 650 cases during his ten years in the crime lab.52 In 1995, it came out that in more than a third of them, his evidentiary records were “administratively incom­ plete,” that 157 of the cases he’d worked could not be expected to withstand judicial scrutiny, and that some had appeared to hold up in the first place only because of this openly stated willingness to perjure himself whenever neces­ sary.53 By then, however, Rudolph no longer worked in the lab. Instead, having received a cash bonus for his performance in 1992, he’d been promoted to serve as an instructor at the FBI’s Forensic Science Research and Training Center, situated in the Bureau’s academy in Quantico, Virginia.54 It is difficult to overstate the implications of this. Since 1973, the FBI, which has consis­ tently rejected suggestions that it allow qualified civilian scientists to per­ form its lab work, that its lab should be subject to any sort of civilian oversight, or even that it should seek certification from the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, has mounted a sustained drive to train virtu­ ally all the personnel, from managers to lab techs, working in police crime labs across the country.55 Not only the methods employed by the staff of the FBI lab, but the attitudes evident among them—imparted by instructors like Rudolph at the Quantico training facility—have come to permeate the “crimi­ nal forensics community”—about 80 percent of which is composed of ac­ tive-duty police officers—nationwide.56 The effects have been obvious, most especially in the several recent cases where it was revealed that “star” pathologists had introduced evidence against literally hundreds of defendants which was tailored to police/prosecution specifications and thus marked by “rampant fraud and falsification.”

Preface

xxxi

Among these was Fred Zain, a West Virginia state trooper turned “forensic pathologist” who “testified as an expert in dozens of rape and murder cases” in that state before being hired to head the serology department of the medical examiner’s office in San Antonio, Texas. There, he repeated his West Virginia performance, even “testifying about blood evidence in a case where no blood had been found” in order to help his police/prosecution colleagues obtain a conviction.57 Another Texas ace was Ralph Erdmann, a contract medical examiner for 40 counties, who “faked more than one hun­ dred autopsies on unexamined bodies and falsified dozens of toxicology and blood reports.”58 Michael West, a dentist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who claimed to have developed a novel technique of examining evidence under ultraviolet light, was solicited to testify for the prosecution more than 60 times in ten states—at least 20 of these case were on capital charges—before his fraud was exposed in 1996.59 Then there was Louise Robbins, a professor of phys­ ical anthropology who claimed, falsely, that she could match any footprint to the person who made it, who served as an expert witness for more than a decade, helping to convict more than a dozen people, “including an Ohio man who spent six years on Death Row” before his conviction was over­ turned.60 In 2001, it came out that Joyce Gilchrist, a forensic specialist for the Oklahoma City police, had sent “dozens to death row,” and scores of others to prison for long periods, through perjured testimony and falsifica­ tion/suppression of physical evidence.61 All told, between 1974 and 1994, “forty-eight people sentenced to death were freed after convictions were found to be based on fabricated evidence or because exonerating or excul­ patory evidence was withheld.”62 Scores of others have been executed on the basis of equally dubious evidence, however, including 11 of 23 men scheduled to die as a result of Joyce Gilchrist’s participation the cases pre­ sented against them.63 This is just the barest the tip of the iceberg. Even under less sensational circumstances, there can be little question that the sort of falsification of results routinely engaged in at the FBI lab have become endemic to the broader context of police forensics. A competitive testing conducted dur­ ing the late 1970s among about half the nation’s crime labs revealed misera­ ble levels of scientific proficiency: 71 percent of all participants reported faulty results in blood testing, 68 percent failed in hair sample analysis, more than half erred in matching paint samples, over one-third couldn’t make proper soil analysis, and nearly 30 percent made serious mistakes in

xxxii

COINTELPRO PAPERS

firearms identification.64 In a 1995 examination conducted by Collaborative Testing Services, 156 representative fingerprint examiners produced a 22 per­ cent error rate in performing fingerprint IDs.65 Much the same pattern pre­ vailed with regard to the Bureau’s “self-validating” claims with respect to DNA tests during the late-1980s and early-1990s. Although the FBI’s “ex­ perts” have consistently testified that their methods of DNA matching were “ironclad,” it came out in the 1991 case U.S. v. Yee that during an internal qual­ ity control study conducted in 1988 and 1990, the Bureau’s examiners erred 21 percent of the time.66 The results obtaining in state and local police labs is believed to be even worse.67 Small wonder that about two-thirds of the 400-odd forensic facilities now operating in the U.S. have followed the lead set by “the world’s premier crime lab”—as the FBI has billed its operation since it was established in 193268—by never applying for certification by the Laboratory Accreditation Board or review by any other “outside” professional association.69 More to the point, there has been no discernable inclination on the part of police or police-affiliated forensic specialists to equivocate their often contradictory or completely erroneous findings in the least. On the contrary, they all but in­ variably lard their presentations, whether written or verbal, with an aura of “scientific certainty.” Hence, prosecutorial perjury has become truly ubiqui­ tous. “[D]amning evidence is presented against the wrong person” in approx­ imately one in every five felony trials in the U.S., according to David Grieve, editor of the Journal of Forensic Identification.1® Other experienced observers have placed the proportion much higher still.71 Add in the time-honored, generally conceded, and not infrequently docu­ mented tendency of street cops and detectives to plant evidence and/or “juice their testimony” in order to “get scumbags off the street”72—1,400 such cases are at issue in the LAPD’s Ramparts “CRASH Team” scandal alone, another 1,400 with respect to a single “elite” unit in Philadelphia, and so on73— and the old quip about there being “no guilty people” in prison begins to take on a rather different meaning. Applying only Grieve’s low-end formulation would mean that some 400,000 of the roughly two million people currently residing in America’s burgeoning penal system—still proportionately the largest of any in the world, aside from Russia’s (see p. 3 20)74—have been wrongfully convicted. There is no reason, on the face of it, to expect the ratio among death row in­ mates to be lower than among any other sector of the prison population; quite the opposite, there are indications that it may be even higher in that quarter.75 Numerous researchers have concluded that the problem is structural.

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James Starrs, a professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University, noting that the defense seldom possesses the resources neces­ sary to hire its own forensic experts, has observed that it is therefore normal “to find laboratory facilities and personnel who are, for all practical intents and purposes, an arm of the prosecution.... They analyze material submit­ ted, on all but rare occasions, solely by the prosecution.... As a result, their impartiality [assuming it ever existed] is replaced by a viewpoint brightly colored with prosecutorial bias.”76 The same view is voiced by William Thompson, professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine: “The culture of such places, run by police or agents, for police or agents, is...inimical to good scientific practice. The reward system, promo­ tion, incentives...in the end your paycheck is based on successful prosecu­ tions, not good science.”77 Starrs has gone further, explaining that insofar as the standard proce­ dure adopted among those trained by FBI instructors and employed by the police is essentially to “run the investigation backwards, starting with the hypothesis of guilt, then going out to try and prove it,” their findings are “not [the result of] science,” and, correspondingly, official pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding, “these people aren’t scientists” at all.78 As long ago as 1979, former California Congressman Don Edwards, then a member of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, and himself a one-time FBI agent, effectively concurred, observing that the only way that a measure of genuine scientific objectivity might be injected into what was/is being passed off as “forensic science” would be for “the FBI lab to be made independent of the FBI. It has a basic conflict of inter­ est in working for the prosecution.”79 Plainly, the kind of institutional reform Edwards found imperative has not been made. Indeed, the FBI and collaborating police agencies have be­ come steadily more adamant in their collective rejection of the idea that their forensic evidence should meet any but the most self-defined and illusory standards,80 while the judiciary has cooperated by steadily lowering the bar of its own expectations as to what constitutes “hard evidence” and making it more and more difficult for defense attorneys to impeach prosecutors’ “sci­ entific experts.”81 Meanwhile, the bar has been ratcheted steadily upwards with respect to the evidentiary threshold which must be reached if reversal of a conviction is to be obtained on appeal, with the result that such tradi­ tional procedural safeguards as habeas corpus have been all but nullified,82 and even proof of actual innocence has sometimes been ruled insufficient

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grounds to obtain a convicted person’s release from prison.83 Thus have the fates customarily reserved for COINTELPRO targets like Dhoruba binWahad and Geronimo ji Jaga come to be visited upon an ever wider swathe of the public at large.

The Stench of Slaughter Another trend that has become ever more pronounced since 1990 has been militarization of the police. Already well under way at the time The COINTELPRO Papers was first published, the spectacle has by now pro­ gressed to the point that it is difficult to find even a mid-sized city where the “law enforcement” apparatus is not outfitted with an armored vehicle or two, helicopters and/or fixed wing spotter aircraft, as well as a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team whose members have usually been recruited on the basis of prior experience in the Army Rangers, Special Forces, Navy SEALS, or Marine Force Recon, and who are trained, equipped, and sanctioned to un­ dertake for “civilian police agencies” missions comparable in many respects to those assigned such elite military units (p. 325).84 One result has been the assembly of police arsenals that would generate envy among the militaries in many small countries (basic inventories include M-16 assault rifles—real ones, not the semiautomatic imitations which caused so much liberal anguish during the early 1990s—Heckler and Koch (H&K) submachineguns, 12-guage “street-sweeper” shotguns, and much more).85 Here again, there has also been a noticeable spillover effect: body armor, once reserved mostly for SWAT teams, and then only when they were com­ mitted to action, has become a standard—and usually required—part of the daily uniform worn by rank-and-file street cops almost everywhere. The rest of the uniform has tended to mutate as well, with the typical “police look” of yesteryear increasingly replaced by bloused combat boots, side-pocketed, black-dyed commando fatigues, military-style web gear, and other such nifty fashion statements (the image of “SWAT Mystique” is sometimes pursued in ways which are comical—one can readily imagine many of the Walter Mittys who sport such apparel spending their off-hours drooling over the latest Cop Chic clothing catalogue—but the underlying mentality and its implications cannot be dismissed so casually).86 The time-honored sidearm of cops every­ where—a .38 caliber revolver aptly named the “Police Special”—has also given way across-the-board to far more potent 9 mm. Glock and Browning automatics, while even small towns like Longmont, Colorado, mandate their

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patrol officers to load up with the sort of hyper-lethal 120-grain, soft lead, hollow-point ammunition which has been explicitly prohibited for use in warfare since the 1899 Hague Declaration 3 Concerning Use of Expanding Bullets.87 The idea of SWAT ostensibly originated in Austin, as a response to the 1963 bell tower sniper incident at the University of Texas. The first actual deployment of such forces was undertaken in Los Angeles by future police chief Darryl Gates of the LAPD, in coordination with the FBI, during the late-1960s and early-1970s, against such targets as the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA; pp. 141-2).88 By the early 1970s, counterinsurgency theorist Louis O. Giufrida, at the time running a subpart of the California Specialized Training Institute, had been secretly commis­ sioned by Governor Ronald Reagan to develop scenarios for deploying “rapid reaction forces” integrating state and local SWAT teams with police political intelligence units, the national guard, FBI counterintelligence and SWAT personnel, military intelligence, and selected “patriotic” organiza­ tions to quell “civil disturbances (pp. 348n67, 385n50). Code-named “Gar­ den Plot” and “Cable Splicer,” Giufrida’s plans were tentatively adopted by the Bureau, field-tested against AIM during the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee (pp. 243, 385n50),89 and, with by then President Reagan’s appoint­ ment of Giufrida as founding director of the Federal Emergency Manage­ ment Agency (FEMA) in 1982, and, in a refined form, fully incorporated into the structure of repression on a fully national basis (pp. 410-ln23). Among the many manifestations of this trend has been a proliferation of FBI-coordinated Joint Terrorism Task Forces QTTFs) of the sort pio­ neered against the Black Liberation Army and Ohio 7 during the early-1980s (pp. 309-11, 316-7). By 1996, 14 of these federal/state/local combines had been set in place, 30 by 2001, and the current goal is to add another 20 by mid-2003.90 One of the newest was formed in Portland, Ore­ gon, in 1999 to undertake a neutralization campaign against environmental activists involved in the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as well as the area’s hefty and somewhat overlapping contingent of Black Bloc anarchists.91 That such operations carry a lethal edge is readily demonstrated by the at­ tempted assassination of Earth First! organizers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, both of whom narrowly escaped death when an antipersonnel bomb planted under the seat of their car exploded as they were driving through Oakland, California, on May 24,1990.92 A major lawsuit pursued by Cherney—Bari died of cancer in 1997—naming veteran COINTELPRO

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specialist Richard Wallace Held, among others, as having been responsible for the blast, is currently entering its finally phases before the federal court in San Francisco.93 More typical has been the sort of exemplary muscle-flexing evident in a pyrotechnic assault mounted by a combined LAPD/FBI SWAT force against an SLA safe house on May 17, 1974 (six dead),94 and the multiagency Wounded Knee operation two years earlier (pp. 240-9). One such incident oc­ curred on May 13, 1985, when Philadelphia police SWAT units surrounded a house rented by MOVE, a local African American anarchist group, and, using C-4 plastic explosives provided by FBI “consultants,” set it ablaze.95 In the re­ sulting conflagration, 11 people in the targeted building—six adults and five children—were burned to death and the two survivors nearly so.96 The police had ordered firemen to “let it burn,” standing aside as not only the MOVE house but two city blocks were consumed by the flames, an entire inner city neighborhood rendered homeless.97 In the aftermath, city officials claimed the police order resulted from MOVE’S “refusal to surrender.” There is sub­ stantial indication, however, that several victims attempted to escape the in­ ferno, only to be driven back inside by police gunfire.99 A smaller-scale, but no less vicious, series of events transpired at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992, when first a six-man team from the U.S. Mar­ shals Service Special Operations Group (SOG; see p. 243), then a much larger force of FBI SWAT personnel, including the Bureau’s ultra elite Hostage Res­ cue Team (HRT),100 laid siege to the remote cabin of a former Green Beret turned white separatist, Randy Weaver.101 Although Weaver was wanted only for failure to appear on a minor weapons charge—of which he was later acquitted102—and despite the fact that he could’ve been easily arrested when­ ever he ventured into town for supplies, authorities opted to make an example of him.103 One result was that a SOG man, William Degan, was shot to death (apparently by one of his colleagues).104 So, too, were Weaver’s 13-year-old son, Sammy, and wife, Vicki, the latter while holding her baby in her arms, by one of the FBI’s top snipers, veteran HRT member Lon Horiuchi.105 During Randy Weaver’s subsequent trial—he and co-defendant Kevin Harris were charged with murdering Degan; both were exonerated106—and in investigations conducted by both the Justice Department and Congress, it was shown that Horiuchi had eliminated Vicki Weaver in response to a “shoot to kill order” crafted by HRT head Richard Rogers and approved by FBI head­ quarters.107 As the Justice Department report acknowledged, the order au­ thorized “a use of deadly force beyond the scope of the Constitution” and in

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direct contravention of the Bureau’s own written rules of engagement.108 Unlike Weaver and Harris, however, neither Horiuchi nor his superiors were prosecuted for murder.109 This “lapse” is all the more striking in that several FBI officials, including Deputy Director Larry Potts, eventually lost their jobs—one actually spent 18 months in prison for obstructing justice—as their efforts to hide what had actually happened at Ruby Ridge were par­ tially revealed.110

The Ashes of Waco

Meanwhile, as the Weaver/Harris trial was running its course, what Ed Sullivan might have described as the “really big show” began. This resulted from a massive and spectacularly bungled SWAT assault—to all appear­ ances conceived purely as a publicity stunt111—by the Treasury Depart­ ment’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF, sometimes erroneously referred to as the “ATF”) against the Mt. Carmel residential complex outside Waco, Texas, occupied by the “Branch Davidians,” an ob­ scure offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church.112 The BATF opera­ tion, carried out on February 28, 1993, under the codename “Showtime,” involved 76 SWAT personnel supported by three helicopters, all on the pre­ text of “serving a warrant” which had been fraudulently obtained,113 which they failed to bring along,114 and which in any event the Davidians had re­ peatedly offered to peacefully accept.115 Having thus opted to force an armed confrontation, the BATF proved itself utterly inept, suffering four dead and 20 wounded—most, it seems, from “friendly fire”116—before beating a bedraggled retreat (at least four Davidians were also killed).117 Almost immediately, just as the FBI had done after the 1975 Oglala firefight (p. 266), the BATF announced—falsely—that its agents had been “ambushed” and “overwhelmed” by carefully placed machinegunners. In the official version of events, the hapless raiders were, from almost the first instant, taken under a storm of “unrelenting and insurmountable automatic and semiautomatic weapons fire from virtually every area of the com­ pound,” with the Davidians expending an estimated “12,000 rounds” in the process.118 Agents claimed everything from M-16s to Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs) to M-60s and heavy .50 caliber machineguns being fired at them.119 For a while, it was alleged that two agents had been wounded by shrapnel from hand grenades.120 Probably the most embellished version was put forth by BATF intelligence chief David Troy, who informed Con­

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gress in June 1993 that his SWAT men had been blindsided by “the unprece­ dented issue” of “forty or more persons opening] fire indiscriminately with automatic weapons at law enforcement,” something that “had never hap­ pened before.”121 In truth, it didn’t happen then either. The Davidians possessed no BARs, M-60s or .50 caliber machineguns; rather, they had a pair of entirely legal .50 caliber rifles, neither of which appear to have been fired, either during the BATF assault or thereafter.122 No grenades were lobbed—on the contrary, one of the “shrapnel”-wounded agents, Gerald Petrilli, later conceded he might have been hit by a shotgun fired by one of his own colleagues123—and no evidence has ever been presented that the Davidians possessed live ones. It is possible that the defenders wielded a solitary automatic weapon, given that a trigger group for an M-16 was eventually recovered from the Mt. Car­ mel complex.124 That they did is borne out by BATF audio tapes of the firefight, during which a single burst of automatic fire—about ten rounds, in all—is heard about 12 minutes into the exchange. Instructively, a BATF man in the recording van expresses astonishment at hearing what he calls fucking machinegun”; moments later, the same voice exults that a sniper has picked off “the machinegun!”125 There is no indication of automatic weapons fire at any other point on the audiotape; indeed, the total volume of fire by the BATF and Davidians combined, appears to have been “less than one-tenth” that attributed by the BATF to the Davidians alone.126 The FBI’s later claim that it found 48 weapons which had been converted to full automatic at Mt. Carmel—all but three of them dysfunctional, and none available for inde­ pendent examination—is thus more than suspect.127 The hype was sufficient, however, to allow the FBI to take over, deploying its 50-man HRT unit along with some 400 “regular” SWAT personnel, a pair of modified M-60A1 (Abrams) tanks and five Bradley armored fighting vehi­ cles, all to surround 90-odd Davidians (about two-dozen of them known to be children).128 Thus began the 51-day siege of Mt. Carmel—usually referred to simply as “Waco”—the largest and longest since the FBI’s 71-day stand-off with AIM at Wounded Knee in 1973. Unlike its counterpart 20 years earlier, however, the Waco siege ended in a holocaustal conflagration similar to that which consumed the MOVE residence in Philadelphia in 1985, as well as the SLA safe house in 1974, but with far more lethal results: all told, 76 people—20 men, 34 women, and 23 children—were killed, about half of them burned alive.129 The Bureau had spent the weeks of the siege busily spreading disinforma­

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tion, not only with respect to what had happened on February 28 and the supposed illegal weapons trove at Mt. Carmel, but falsehoods to the effect that Davidian leader David Koresh (Vernon Wayne Howell) was a child abuser,130 and his followers a “cult” bent upon mass suicide.131 With public perceptions thus conditioned, it was an easy matter to peddle the myth that, when the FBI began its final assault on April 19, the Davidians themselves kindled the blaze in which all would perish.132 Those with doubts were at a severe disadvantage, given that the press had been allowed nowhere near the scene during the entire siege,133 that the ruins of Mt. Carmel were bull­ dozed “for health reasons” only two weeks after the fire,134 and because the FBI professed to have very few audio/video tapes of what had happened(the BATF claimed that all its video equipment failed on February 28).135 Even the corpses of dead Davidians were allowed to rot, supposedly because of a malfunctioning refrigeration unit at the morgue in Fort Worth, Texas, before they could be examined by independent pathologists.136 Although Congress made its usual pro forma inquires into the “Waco Tragedy,” mainly for purposes of placing its seal of approval upon the FBI’s actions, the state of the evidence remained pretty much the same for the next several years.137 A generalized public dis-ease over the sheer grue­ someness of what had been done to the Davidians does seem to have placed a cautionary brake upon large-scale SWAT assaults138—there was no com­ parable violence during Montana’s 81 -day “Freemen” stand-off in 1995, for example139—but official responses to the slaughter are best characterized by increases to the BATF budget and a near-doubling in the FBI’s HRT strength (from 51 to 90).140 Meanwhile, the toll taken by small-scale SWAT operations, both federal and local, whether by FBI-like design or—as is sometimes clearly the case—BATF-style incompetence, has continued to mount at a steady rate.141 Things began to unravel for both bureaus when, in late-1995, former CIA Director William Colby leaked a dub of a Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) video shot from an FBI helicopter during the final assault to a pri­ vate investigator.142 The FLIR tape was analyzed by Dr. Edward Allard, an independent examiner long employed by the military’s night vision lab, then by a retired Texas Instruments infrared expert, then by the Infraspection Institute in Vermont, and finally by Carlos Ghigliotti, a leading specialist re­ tained by House investigators for that purpose.143 All concurred that the FLIR’s thermal imagery revealed muzzle flashes indicating that snipers had been deployed to the rear of Mt. Carmel and, as the complex went up in

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flames, fired upon anyone attempting to escape (Ghigliotti confirmed at least 69—perhaps more than 130—shots being fired; the FBI had claimed none of its agents had fired a shot during the entire conflagration).144 At one point, two of the shooters moved into the building—onto it might be a better term, since the area had been reduced to rubble after being rammed 30 times by Bradley fighting vehicles—and delivered what appears to have been close-range, aimed fire at one or more Davidians.145 The House struggled valiantly to contain the damage, even going so far as to retain a tiny British firm, Vector Data Systems—which had never before analyzed infrared images—to overrule its own expert with regard to what was on the FLIR tape.146 The game was already lost, however, in that producer-di­ rector Mike McNulty released his Academy Award-nominated/Emmy Award-winning documentary, Waco: The Rules of Engagement—in which ex­ cerpts from FLIR tape feature prominently—at about the same time.147 There was thus no way to prevent the material from being widely viewed, an effect that was compounded tremendously when, in early 1999, McNulty, by then re­ searching a sequel to Waco, came up with proof that the FBI had employed not only military-issue CS gas at Mt. Carmel but also an exotic 40mm. “flash-bang” grenade peculiar to the Army Special Forces.148 This was impor­ tant, since the Bureau had denied using pyrotechnic devices on April 19—flash-bangs are most certainly classified as such—and because the items were discovered amidst a huge stash of evidence—12 tons in all—the Justice Department had flatly denied even existed.149 This had been possible because the material was secreted, at the FBI’s request, in a storage locker maintained by the Texas Rangers.150 McNulty’s discovery, quickly incorporated into an ongoing wrongful death suit filed against the FBI and other federal agencies by the families of the deceased Davidians,151 triggered a series of events that first pitted the Rangers against the FBI,152 then an announcement by Janet Reno that she’d initiated a “criminal investigation” of the Bureau for obstruction of jus­ tice,153 then disclosure of “over 171,000 pages of written materials, hundreds of videotapes, thousands of audio tapes, and over 10,000 photographs in FBI files.” All but 7,000 of what turned out to be more than 30,000 pages of docu­ ments in Pentagon files were also divulged (both the CIA and White House acknowledged they maintained files on Waco, but withheld them on the re­ spective bases of “National Security” and “Executive Privilege”).154 Taken as a whole, the newly-released material produced a picture of what had happened radically different from what previously had been peddled as

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official “truth.” To begin with, the “remarkable patience” supposedly ex­ hibited by the FBI in conducting protracted negotiations to achieve a peace­ ful resolution of the standoff was belied by documents showing that the Bureau had deliberately and consistently sabotaged its own efforts in this regard.155 The whole exercise was thus shown to be little more than a PR maneuver designed to build a public impression of “restraint,” while even the negotiators were all along committed to the idea of a final assault.156 So too, the proposition that there was “no end [of the siege] in sight” when the assault occurred.157 As was revealed by the FLIR tapes, the Bureau was fully aware that the Davidians’ water supply was all but exhausted on April 19, and that the latter would thus have had to give themselves up within a few days at most.158 This is precisely the point at which, in order to obtain her go-ahead for the attack, the FBI knowingly provided false information to Attorney General Janet Reno about how “babies were being beaten” inside Mt. Carmel.159 Although “liquid CS,” a variety of tear gas the FBI claimed was the only type used on April 19,160 is normally nonlethal to healthy adults, even the “best case” logic embodied in the Bureau’s assault plan—that of deliber­ ately subjecting the Davidian children to such excruciating pain that their mothers would “have” to bring them out, thereby prompting a more general exodus from the building—tends to speak for itself.161 CS is lethal to tod­ dlers in far lesser doses than those required to kill adults. During a meeting conducted in mid-April, military advisors warned that introducing CS to the enclosed space of Mt. Carmel at the levels envisioned by FBI planners ran a clear risk of inducing fatalities among the younger kids inside.162 Nonethe­ less, during the assault, far more CS was used than had been planned. In­ deed, the assault teams expended all 400 of the CS “Ferret” rounds with which they had been supplied by the Pentagon—raising gas concentrations within the building to about twice those necessary to asphyxiate full-grown adults—and then called for more^ Additionally, a very substantial quantity of liquid CS was sprayed into the building—quite a bit of it directly into a tornado shelter known as the “vault” or the “pit,” into which the FBI knew the Davidian children and their mothers had been sent for safety once the assault began164—in an aerosol form.165

Failure Analysis Associates would later study the operation, and proclaim it the most intense use of CS against civilians in American history. Indeed, FAA’s analysis bin-Wahad that the first gas injection, taken alone, was enough to raise

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CS levels in parts of the building to between twice and ninety times the level nec­ essary to break trained troops, and... 1.8 times the “immediate risk to life and health level.”166 There were three more such “injections,” the last “by attacking a smaller area, [producing] the highest concentrations of all.”167 Small wonder that “nine persons in the vault were later found dead of asphyxia, without signs of smoke inhalation—meaning they died of asphyxia before the fire. Among these were a pair of one-year-old girls—Mayanah Schneider and Startle Sum­ mers—and six-year-old Star Koresh.”168 Nor is this by any means the end of it. McNulty’s discovery of the expended flash-bangs lends credence to obser­ vations by surviving Davidian Clive Doyle that at least some of the gas pro­ jectiles fired into Mt. Carmel during the assault could be heard “hissing” and were “too hot to pick up.”169 This suggests that, as they began to run out of Ferrets, the HRT switched to using pyrotechnic “dry” CS rounds left over from a training exercise it had undergone at Ft. Hood, Texas, a few weeks ear­ lier. There is evidence, moreover, HRT had requested—and received—a sup­ ply of 100 40mm. illumination rounds (magnesium flares), and 100 40mm. high-explosive (HE) rounds, both of which are designed to be fired from the same M-79 grenade launchers used to “deliver” Ferrets and dry CS projec­ tiles.170 While there is no indication that HE rounds were actually fired into Mt. Carmel, the question nonetheless stands as to why the HRT wanted such ord­ nance at all. Some of the incendiary illumination rounds may very well have been fired and even if they weren’t, firing any sort of pyrotechnic device into a plywood tinderbox already saturated with highly-flammable CS—which the HRT unquestionably did—could be expected to generate only one result.171 This is all the more true in that videotapes record one of the Bureau’s ar­ mored vehicles having earlier demolished storage tanks containing about 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel, then bulldozing the resulting pool of “accelerant” up against the base of building.172 Overall, it is virtually impossi­ ble to avoid concluding that the inferno in which the Davidians were ulti­ mately consumed was ignited not by them, as is officially certified, but by the FBI.173 To all appearances, moreover, sparking such a blaze had figured all along in the Bureau’s contingency planning.174 The idea that this was so receives strong reinforcement from the fact that, although fire-fighting equipment was readily at hand—it was assembled only a half-mile from the blaze—the FBI’s on-site commander, Jeffrey Jamar, re­ fused to allow it to go into action until after Mt. Carmel had collapsed and

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completely burned.175 Subsequent “explanations” to the effect that firefighters might have been endangered by ammunition exploding inside the “compound” and/or Davidian gunfire dissolve under the most minimal scrutiny, given that exploding ammunition is in fact quite harmless to bystanders176 and because both the media’s and the Bureau’s own video tapes plainly show FBI personnel moving about quite freely outside the burning building—in full view of those inside—none of them evidencing the least concern that they might thus be shot.177 Be that as it may, among the uglier aspects of CS is that when it burns it emits substantial quantities of cyanide.178 The burning of liquid CS also produces deadly phosgene and hydrogen chloride gases.181 While it is un­ clear whether testing for hydrogen chloride or phosgene was ever done, more than “half of the Davidian bodies [tested] positive for cyanide, with at least one body displaying concentrations that exceed lethal levels.”180 An­ other 28 Davidians were hit by gunfire, 18 of them fatally.181 Of these last, five were shot in the back or back-of-the-head, wounds inflicted in a man­ ner entirely inconsistent with official claims that they’d either committed suicide or been subjected to “mercy killings” by their friends.182 At least three of the autopsy reports on these fatalities are also extremely sus­ pect.183 On the other hand, the number and nature of gunshot wounds suffered by Davidians is quite consistent, both with the accounts of survivors184 and with the scenario suggested by the earlier-discussed FLIR tapes: a sniper team deployed to the rear of Mt. Carmel prevented victims from escaping the flames and, at certain points, entered the rubble to pick off people at closer range. How else to explain that while the fire was still raging, “CNN news outlets reported that as many as twenty Davidians were seen fleeing out the back of the building,” but that all members of the group were tallied among the dead inside the complex?185 How else to explain that, of the nine Davidians who did in fact survive, eight came out through the front—where they remained visible to the media’s telephoto lenses as they were taken into custody—while only one managed to escape through the back (he made his exit amidst a dense cloud of smoke and was not discovered until three hours after the fact, when a large number of firefighters, Texas Rangers, and other non-FBI personnel were on the scene)?186 How else to explain that, as the fire died down, FBI vehicles were captured on tape systematically bulldozing de­ bris—otherwise know as “evidence”—into the flames, so that it could finish

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burning?187 That this would have included the bodies of any Davidians shot outside the building is self-evident.188 Praetor

The onus of suspicion concerning who, exactly, comprised the active sniper team at Mt. Carmel has always rested squarely upon the FBI’s HRT, especially the “Sierra 1” group headed during the assault by Lon Horiuchi.189 In this instance, however, the Bureau’s denials may be accurate, or at least partially so. Among the Waco-related documents divulged by the Defense Department in 1997 was one mentioning what was termed the “Praetor Guide.”190 “Praetor,” it turns out, refers to a previously se­ cret—and still exceedingly murky—protocol under which the Army is charged with committing personnel from its ultra-elite Delta Force com­ mandos in U.S. domestic settings.191 It has been acknowledged that “Delta,” as the unit is usually called, assigned advisors to work with the FBI in plan­ ning the final assault.192 It was also conceded after 1997 that Delta provided most of the more exotic ordnance and equipment used by FBI SWAT teams throughout the siege.193 Investigators probing the situation further after the existence of Praetor was revealed, also discovered that Delta communi­ cations personnel had in all probability been used to infiltrate “the Davidian compound” in the dead of night to plant an assortment of electronic sur­ veillance devices.194 From there, it is but a short step to Delta personnel engaging in a direct combat role—comprising the lethal sniper team at the rear of Mt. Carmel, for instance—even impersonating FBI personnel in the process.195 If they did, a precedent for their performance will be found during the 1987 insurrection of Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Federal Prison. There, while Delta snipers wearing FBI jackets to conceal their presence were deployed around the pe­ riphery, other teams entered the prison under cover of darkness to plant bugs and a closed circuit TV system.196 In any event, whatever “services” the Delta commandos provided during the FBI’s Waco operation, they required clear­ ance from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.197 Beyond that, the rele­ vant information has been withheld under an extraordinarily stringent “National Security” classification. The military reports disclosed [contain much useful material]. But then entire cat­ egories of data are deleted. A document entitled “Command Involvement at Waco” is stamped “Secret” and “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals”—i.e., even

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to allies with the right clearance. All activities from 2 March 1993 to 13 April 1993 are deleted. Another, labeled “Observation of Operations at Waco, Texas” is dated March 2 (only two days into the siege) and has all its text de­ leted. .. Even six years after the fact, the military insisted on redacting [all infor­ mation as to exactly what] assistance was given.198 Irrespective of what the Delta men did at Mt. Carmel—or Atlanta, for that matter—their participation in such “civil disturbances” was on its face illegal under provision of the 1877 Posse Comitatus Act (p. 243). According to an FBI internal document, Delta’s involvement in putting down the At­ lanta revolt was predicated upon President Ronald Reagan’s having “signed a waiver of the Posse Comitatus Act, which proscribed the use of the mili­ tary for civilian law enforcement purposes.”199 Among other problems with this notion, which has become increasingly common in describing the scope of presidential prerogative,200 is that the chief executive holds no constitu­ tional authority to “waive” any statute. There are three statutory exceptions to the constraints imposed under the principle of Posse Comitatus. The first of these, embodied in the Stafford Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 5121 et seq.) em­ powers the president to deploy troops for humanitarian purposes in the event of a natural disaster, and is thus obviously inapplicable to the situa­ tions at issue. The second exception, devolving upon the Economy Act (P.L. 102-190 § 1088, 105 Stat. 1494), actually amends the Posse Comitatus statute itself, allowing noncomhat military participation in fighting the so-called War on Drugs.201 Both the BATF and FBI indulged in ludicrous attempts to place their Waco operations under this rubric—their argument was that since a methamphetamine dealer was thought to have lived there years before the Davidians, Mt. Carmel should be seen as part of a “drug nexus”—in order to qualify for free military support.202 The General Counsel of the Army saw the charade for what it was, however, determining that the matter “did not involve any significant drug interdiction or counter-drug objectives,” and the Army’s Comptroller thereupon demanded a $206,000 reimburse­ ment for lost or damaged equipment.203 The third and final exception, codified at 10 U.S.C. § 332, allows the president to employ the military to restore order, should enforcement of the law by civil authorities become “impracticable.”204 This authority, which amounts to a prerogative of declaring martial law under certain nar­ rowly defined circumstances, has been invoked several times during the past half-century; notably by President Eisenhower, with respect to the 1958 cri­

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sis in Little Rock, Arkansas, and by Lyndon Johnson to quell the 1967 rebel­ lion in Detroit. More ambiguous were George H.W. Bush’s use of troops during the 1992 Los Angeles insurgency, and Bill Clinton’s during the recent WTO protests in Seattle.205 Neither Atlanta nor Waco involved a public dec­ laration on the part of the president, however, and in both cases a significant number of the military participants went to considerable lengths in trying to hide their participation.206 There is, moreover, nothing to support conten­ tions that law enforcement by civil authorities had been rendered impractica­ ble—as opposed to difficult—at either Atlanta or Waco. Plainly, secret military operations conducted against U.S. citizens on the basis of equally secret presidential decrees do not fall within the parameters of 10 U.S.C. § 332, or the constitution itself. Yet, as the Atlanta and Waco ex­ amples indicate, and as Praetor guidelines confirm by virtue of their very ex­ istence, this has long-since become a standard—though once again highly secretive—operating procedure in the back corridors of American power. The fully integrated “force structure” envisioned in Louis Giufrida’s imagi­ native counterinsurgency scenarios of the late-1960s, refined, polished, and perfected through three decades of field-testing, technological innovation and conceptual adaptation, is now an ever-present reality. Questions of whether “soldiers can be peace officers” are moot: they already are (and vice versa).207 The time-honored lines separating military from civilian authority in the United States have been not so much blurred as dissolved altogether. In our conclusion to the 1990 edition of The COINTELPRO Papers, Vander Wall and I compared everything ostensibly progressive in the U.S. body politic to a person standing on a railway track, the police/penal/military establishment as an oncoming train (p. 325). At Waco, three years later, the in­ evitable collision occurred. Unfortunately, all too few progressives bothered to notice. Preoccupied as always with things happening half a world away —and with such weighty issues as how to remove ashtrays and other accoutre­ ments of poor people’s sensibility from every public space in North Amer­ ica208—progressives by and large defaulted, abandoning both the high ground of moral outrage and attempts at mounting an appropriate response to Timothy McVeigh and others of the radical right.209 Worse, in looking to the state to enact laws imposing their personal lifestyle preferences on others, self-proclaimed progressives have stood at the forefront in rationalizing “quality of life policing,”210 a predicate to the draconian “zero tolerance” policies which have emerged in a nationally normative fashion over the past decade.211 This, in turn, has fostered a climate—a collective mentality, as it

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were—conducive to the consolidation of something along the lines of Prae­ tor (its architects can at least be assured that they are unlikely to come up against a philosophically coherent opposition of any appreciable proportion). If, as surely it must, the degree of freedom obtaining in a country is measured by the relative absence of rules regulating the activities of its citi­ zens, then the “land of the free” has by now become one of the least free so­ cieties ever conceived.212 In describing it, the word “totalitarian”—as in “totalizing” or “totally controlling”—springs all too readily to mind.213 So too, and all the shallowness entailed in formally democratic procedures to the contrary notwithstanding, the word “dictatorial.”214 Witness how in 1985, just before they began to roast children alive, the SWAT units of the Philadelphia police announced through a bullhorn, “Attention, MOVE! This is America! You have to abide by the laws of the United States.”215 Wit­ ness as well the fact that in the aftermath of the much larger child-roasting at Mt. Carmel, FBI official Larry Potts explained in a surprising moment of candor that the Branch Davidians’ real offense was to have “thumbed their noses at law enforcement.”216 And witness how rapidly officials like Bill Clinton and Janet Reno chimed in to hope that the example set at Waco would “deter others from doing the same.”217 Horrific “events” like the MOVE and Davidian massacres should in this sense be considered exemplary actions, exclamation points punctuating a broader and grindingly consistent syntax of social discourse, best illus­ trated perhaps by the fates bestowed upon people like Rodney King, Betty Jean Aborn, and Amadou Diallo, intended to impress upon the populace the rigor with which it is obliged to comply with even the most arbitrary re­ quirements of order.218 No one, anywhere, at any time, or for any reason, is allowed to opt out, no matter how partially or transiently. The “free people” of the United States are free only to do exactly what they are told, exhibiting an unquestioning and instantaneous obedience to anyone endowed with a badge. As Mike Davis has pointed out, the most truly serious offense one can commit on the streets of modern America is “contempt of cop.”219 We are confronted thus with the reality of a totalitarian dictatorship, clinically definable as such but invariably masquerading as the exact oppo­ site of itself—a phenomenon Herbert Marcuse once described as “demo­ cratic totalitarianism”220—its structural integrity protected not only by an ever more comprehensive establishment, but quite literally a Praetorian Guard. The time for concern about how to “prevent America from becom-

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malignant vision conjured by Orwell in 1984 truly pales to insignificance. But then, 1984 is now “ancient history” to the tune of almost 20 years... This Nation of Laws

In line with the Marcusian conception of democratic totalitarianism, it has remained exceedingly important from an elite perspective to maintain an ap­ pearance that, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall famously put it in his 1803 Marbury opinion, the United States is “a nation of laws, not men.”222 Even as they themselves treat such things as the constitution, inter­ national law, and the federal statutory code as veritable toilet paper, those in power understand quite well the hegemonic function served by larding their initiatives with an illusion of utmost legality.223 Nothing has ever proven quite so narcotizing to either the conscience or the sense of simple self-pres­ ervation presumably vested in the body politic as the intonation of the single phrase, “It’s the Law.”224 Concerning COINTELPRO and related matters, its exposure—precipi­ tated by the release of documents taken during the April 1971 burglary of the Bureau’s Media, Pennsylvania, Resident Agency by a group calling itself the Citizens’ Commission to Review the FBI (pp. xi, 343n34)—led to a series of highly publicized hearings conducted by the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee) in 1974 and early ’75.225 While it severely castigated the FBI for certain of the illegalities embodied in its counterintelligence activi­ ties, the Church Committee studiously avoided mentioning the worst of the criminal activity at issue226—outright assassinations, for example227—and permanently “postponed” scrutiny of the Bureau’s then ongoing campaign to neutralize AIM (p. 266). For this reason, the Committee’s “revelations” might be better viewed as an exercise in damage control and containment. Its find­ ings resulted, not in the prosecution of offenders, but only in the promulga­ tion of a set of Attorney General’s guidelines which, it was announced in 1978, would preclude the FBI’s “pattern of abuse” from being repeated.228 This supposed protection lasted all of three years, being effectively nulli­ fied when Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333 on December 4, 1981, (re)authorizing many of the techniques formally prohibited under the guidelines.229 In April 1983, Reagan followed up with EO-12345, providing a “legal authority” for the Bureau and other intelligence agencies to withhold information concerning their employment of counterintelligence methods

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guidelines.229 In April 1983, Reagan followed up with EO-12345, providing a “legal authority” for the Bureau and other intelligence agencies to with­ hold information concerning their employment of counterintelligence methods against U.S. citizens (p. 27). In the interim, another powerful state­ ment was made with the pardon of W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, the only FBI officials ever convicted on COINTELPRO-related charges, be­ fore they’d ever set foot inside a jail cell (indeed, Reagan bestowed the par­ don before they’d had to incur the “ordeal” of appealing the verdicts).230 Little wonder the Bureau experienced a “resurgent sense of institutional self-confidence and mission” during the early 1980s.231 From there, statutory reinforcements began to come fast and furious. The passage of the Bail Reform Act of 1984 (18 U.S.C. § 3142), a measure ostensibly designed to take “drug kingpins, violent offenders and other ob­ vious threats to the community” off the streets while they awaited trial, was quickly converted into a basis for imposing preventive detention upon se­ lected political targets like Puerto Rican independentista Filiberto Ojeda-Rios, Resistance Conspiracy defendant Laura Whitehorn, and IRA political asylum-seeker Joe Dougherty, thus providing the FBI with a weapon far superior to the strategy of pretext arrests used against the Revo­ lutionary Action Movement in 1967 (pp. 112, 235), and AIM a few years later (pp. 235, 253-4).232 This has proven especially true when “bail reform” standards have been applied amidst prosecutions undertaken on the ear­ lier-mentioned basis of systematic misapplications of the RICO statute.233 By the late 1980s, there is ample indication that COINTELPRO-style operations had been fully reinstated, albeit, as is discussed in the conclusion (pp. 306-9), under the rubric of “counterterrorism.” In a 1989 report, the General Accounting Office revealed that “between January 1982 and June 1988, the FBI had opened and closed about 19,500 international terrorism cases [meaning that] the FBI collected as many as 30,000 folders of data on groups and individuals in the name of investigating international terror­ ism.”234 During the same time period of 1982 through 1988, there were twenty-five international terrorist incidents in the U.S., all of them in 1982 and 1983. From 1984 through 1988, there were no international terrorist in­ cidents in the United States. Nearly 68 percent of the international terror­ ism cases studied by the GAO were closed because no evidence was uncovered linking the subject to international terrorist acts. This reinforces

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the finding that most of the FBI cases do not involve the investigation of ac­ tual terrorists.235 As congressional investigators ascertained at about the same time, how­ ever, the Bureau was doing far more than “investigating” its targets. To the contrary, it was demonstrated that the Bureau had mounted a concerted ef­ fort to disrupt and discredit the entirely legitimate political activities of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and several hundred other organizations opposed to the Reagan administration’s Central America policies.236 Similar operations were conducted against Palestinian student groups, Amnesty International, ACT-UP and “the Green Move­ ment.”237 There is ample indication that “destabilizing” operations were also carried over from the 1970s against such targets as AIM.238 Even libraries were encompassed within the parameters of the Bureau’s domestic counterintelligence initiatives by 1990,239 with agents assigned to investigate such things as the class projects undertaken by elementary school students.240 In 1994, the apparatus of domestic repression was considerably rein­ forced by enactment of the Clinton administration’s Omnibus Crime Bill (10 Stat. 2022) which, among other things, supplemented the FBI’s “counterterrorism” budget with an additional $25 million per year, provided the Bureau with an additional $25 million per year for purposes of training state and local SWAT teams, created an “Economic Terrorism Task Force,” and prescribed the death penalty for a dozen new categories of “terrorist ac­ tivity.”241 1994 also saw passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law En­ forcement Act (108 Stat. 1796) which terminated importation and/or domestic manufacture of several classifications of “military-style” semiauto­ matic rifles,242 in a rather transparent effort to ensure that no segment of the citizenry might maintain something resembling a tactical parity of firepower with the country’s rapidly proliferating SWAT units (the measure was ostensi­ bly passed as an “anticrime” measure, although the data revealed that assault rifles—often referred to in the media as “the street criminal’s weapon of choice”—were used in less than 3 percent of all crimes involving gunplay).243 Of 305 murders committed in Baltimore in 1990, only seven involved rifles of any kind, and even fewer involved semi-automatic rifles or shotguns. In Bexar County, Texas, including the city of San Antonio, “assault” weapons were used in only 0.2 percent of homicides from 1987-1992. A gun-by-gun count of confis­ cated weapons by the Denver police in March 1991 turned up only 14 “assault” weapons out of 1,752 total. Of more than 4,000 guns seized by Los Angeles police in 1988, only three percent could be included in [even the most] sweeping defini­

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tion of “assault weapon.” In Florida, so-called assault weapons were used in only 17 of 7,500 gun crimes between the years 1986 [and] ’89. New Jersey could not find a single murder case involving a rifle, much less a semiautomatic rifle. Only 80 “assault-type” rifles were found among 16,000 guns seized by New York police in 1988 [and the] director of the Washington, D.C., Police Firearms Section revealed in 1989 that not a single semiautomatic rifle [was] among the more than 3,000 confiscated by police in 1988 [emphasis original].244 Then, in 1996, with passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (110 Stat. 1214), came the real body blow. Although there was precious little “terrorism” for the new law to combat—“according to the FBI’s own reports, in the eleven years from 1984 through 1994, there had been only two incidents in the United States carried out by international groups,”245 for example—its sweeping provisions served to license almost the full range of repressive techniques which had been quietly continued af­ ter COINTELPRO was supposedly terminated. Among the more conspicu­ ous are clauses explicitly allowing groups and individuals to be targeted, not on the basis of acts they are alleged to have committed, but because of their “association” with other groups or individuals.246 Certain activities—fundraising, for instance—which would otherwise be considered entirely legal, are criminalized to the extent that they can be shown to have been under­ taken in behalf of groups exhibiting a “terrorist orientation,”247 while “ter­ rorism” is defined so vaguely—and thus broadly—that it can be construed as virtually anything officials wish to say it is at any given moment (witness the FBI’s classification during the 1980s of the devout pacifists of Silo Plowshares as terrorists; pp. 307, 409nl5).248 In effect, radicalism of any sort can thus, at the government’s discretion, be formally (re)defined as “terrorism.”249 Much of the 1996 Act’s content was plainly intended to lay the ground­ work for a comprehensive abridgement of even the most fundamental con­ stitutional safeguards supposedly embodied in the U.S. judicial process. Among the casualties were whatever prohibitions against arbitrary deten­ tion remained after the Bail Reform Act,250 and prohibitions against the government’s use of secret evidence in court proceedings.251 The afore­ mentioned truncation of the traditional right to habeas corpus relief among those wrongly convicted of crimes—quite prominently including those sentenced to death—was also exacerbated.252 While the test cases in­ volving utilization of the prosecutorial prerogatives conveyed by the 1996 Act have focused all but exclusively on the alleged associations of

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unnaturalized Arab immigrants, this has been a result of governmental dis­ cretion far more than of any discernible constraint upon their being applied to others.253 Another substantial abridgement of the Posse Comitatus Act was in­ cluded in the Department of Defense Authorization Act for 1997 (10 U.S.C. § 382, added by Sec. 1416 of P.L. 104-201), perhaps to provide a post hoc sem­ blance of legitimacy to the then still secret Praetor protocol.254 The Intelli­ gence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 (112 Stat. 2396, 2413, amending 18 U.S.C. § 2518(1 l)(b)) added other vital ingredients, effectively gutting protections against electronic surveillance which had remained in place since passage of the Federal Communications Act of 1934 (48 Stat. 1064 § 605; see pp. 338-9n26).255

In what was basically a legislative sneak attack...a broadened roving [telephone] tap authority.. .was added behind closed doors by the conference committee after it had been left out of bills passed by both the House and the Senate.... Under prior law, investigators had been able to obtain a roving tap only when they could show to a judge that the target of surveillance was changing telephones (e.g., by using different pay phones) with the purpose of avoiding interception. Under the [new] law, it is now sufficient to show merely that any of the person’s actions could have the effect of thwarting interception. Moreover, the roving tap may re­ main “for such time as it is reasonable to presume that the person [identified in the order] is or was reasonably proximate to the instrument through which such communications will be or was transmitted.” This means the government can tap the phones in the homes and offices of friends, relatives and business associates visited by a suspect, obliterating the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that the government specify with particularity the person or place to be searched.256 In addition, the 1999 Act (actually passed in 1998) “included other en­ hancements in FBI authority, creating explicit authority to use pen register and trap and trace devices in counterintelligence and international terrorism investigations.”257 One indication of the implications is that “when Congress authorized the FBI to order phone lines set aside to support its electronic sur­ veillance, the FBI promptly ordered 60,000.”258 To this must be added the de­ velopment of the Bureau’s “Carnivore” computer program, designed to “skim off any named target’s emails and copy them for later examination.”259 Things have obviously come a long way from the then illegal “mail cover” op­ erations conducted by the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies during the 1960s (p. 3 04).260 The same can be said with respect to the use of “human intelligence assets”—informants and infiltrators—authorized in the name of

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“crime fighting” and “counterterrorism.”261 Also propelled by both the 1996 and 1999 Acts has been consolidation of a vast computerized “law enforcement” database, interlocking “informa­ tion flows” from the full array of federal agencies with those from literally every local police department in the country, a matter facilitated through the establishment of 28 Regional Policing Institutes.262 By 2002, in Denver alone, this initiative had resulted in the city police compiling some 3,200 files on individuals, and another 208 on organizations such as Amnesty In­ ternational and the Chiapas Coalition, designated “Criminal Extremists.”263 One prod used in obtaining uniformity in such matters was a stipulation put forth by the Justice Department in early 2000 that, in order to qualify for federal funding, the police in every locality in the country would have to provide annual and detailed “terrorist risk assessments” of “potential threat elements” within their immediate areas.264 This has led to absurdities such as the Iowa Department of Public Safety reporting in 2001 that there were “probably...three or four terrorist cells” operating within its domain, and the department’s Kansas counterpart worrying that “environmental groups” such as the Sierra Club posed a “potential” danger.265 In February of 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the effort had been so successful that an additional $1 billion is being allotted to expand it.266 All told, from 1993 through the end of fiscal year 1999, the portion of the FBI’s annual budget devoted directly to “counterterrorism operations” swelled from $78 million to $301 million.267 Factoring in resource commit­ ments dedicated to supporting such operations in a more indirect fashion would stand to more than double the dollar amount involved. Encom­ passing comparable commitments of resources by the CIA, NSA, FEMA and other federal agencies during the same time-frame, not to mention those underwritten by state and local authorities, would undoubtedly in­ crease the aggregated bottom line to well over $10 billion per year by fiscal year 2000 (at which point dramatic increases were once again being de­ manded).268 Yet, as was made abundantly clear on September 11,2001, none of this—not the lavish funding increases, nor the virtually unlimited lati­ tude granted law enforcement agencies to engage in politically repressive activities during the 1990s—yielded the least effect in terms of protecting anyone from the ravages of bona fide terrorist attacks.269 Indeed, there is every indication that, like the “counterterrorism inves­ tigations” of CISPES and other organizations during the 1980s, they were never really intended to accomplish such results. Instead, they seem more

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than anything to have represented a final drive towards consummation of the kind of antidemocratic (re)ordering of American society described quite elo­ quently by Robert Justin Goldstein in both the opening and the closing pages of his magisterial study, Political Repression in Modern America.™ The so-called USA Patriot Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropri­ ate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001; P.L. 107-56) rushed into effect in the wake of 9-11 simply adds the finishing touches, mandating not only another massive infusion of cash but an overt horizontal/vertical integration of the FBI/CIA/military/police apparatus in a manner imaginable to only the most “irresponsible” students of the subject only two short years ago.271 Military tribunals, checkpoints populated by cam­ ouflage-clad troops armed with M-16s, and eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations have become the order of the day.272 The feeble remnants of the U.S. Constitution have thus for all intents and purposes at last been shredded, cast like confetti into Leon Trotsky’s prover­ bial “dustbin of history.” This has been done “in the name of the law...or­ der...national security [and] public safety.”273 The means are now in place by which the complete pacification not of “terrorists” but of the American body politic can finally be accomplished. Only a popular insurrection on a scale not witnessed in the United States since 1861 seems likely to favorably alter the situation. All things considered, the ghosts of J. Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO specialists of yesteryear must be positively beaming with delight. This was, to be sure, exactly what they had in mind.

—Ward Churchill Boulder, Colorado, April 2002

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Notes 1. Dan Debo, “The Struggle Continues: An Interview with Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin-Wahad,” in Ward Churchill and J.J. Vander Wall, eds., Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1992) pp. 227-39, esp. pp. 227-30; Dhoruba bin-Wahad, “War Within,” in Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones and Sylvere Lotringer, eds., Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the U.S. War Against Black Revolutionaries (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993) pp. 9-56. 2. Robert J. Boyle, “COINTELPRO: The 19-Year Ordeal of Dhoruba Bin-Wahad,” Covert Action / Information Bulletin, No. 36,1990; Winston A. Grady-Willis, “The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners,” in Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1998) pp. 180-3. 3. The first phrase used is of course taken from the title of my and Vander Wall’s Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, [Classics Ed.] 2002). On the subparts of the FBI’s “Security Index” (now captioned the “Administrative Index” or “ADEX”) known as the “Key Activist Index,” “Rabble Rouser Index,” and/or “Agita­ tor Index,” see Sanford J. Ungar, FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls (Boston: Lit­ tle, Brown, 1976) pp. 128-9; Richard G. Powers, Secrety and Power: The Life of]. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987) p. 432; Curt Gentry,/. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) pp. 212-3, 244. 4. Edward J. Boyer, “Pratt Strides to Freedom,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1997. 5. Jack Olsen, Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday, 2000) pp. 453-66. For further details on the nature of ji Jaga’s frame-up, see M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Expose (Boston: South End Press, 1995) pp. 84-7; Johnnie L. Cochrane with Tim Rutten, Journey to Justice (New York: One World, 1996) pp. 128-48. 6. Spain was paroled on March, 10, 1988, after 21 years in prison; Lori Andrews, Black Power, White Blood: The Life and Times ofJohnny Spain (Philadelphia: Temple Univer­ sity Press, [2nd ed.] 1999) p. 280. Also see Paul Libertore, The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham and the San Quentin Massacre (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996) p. 193. 7. Woodfox and Wallace remain incarcerated, while Wilkerson is “working to con­ vince the courts that the intricacies of habeas corpus law should not be invoked to pre­ vent the invalidation of his conviction, a conviction the U.S. Court of Appeals has now twice ruled was obtained unconstitutionally”; Scott Fleming, “Lockdown at Angola:

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The Case of the Angola 3,” in George Katsiaficas and Kathleen Cleaver, eds., Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001) pp. 228-36. Also see Scott Fleming, “Angola 3’s Herman Wallace Placed in Punishment Camp,” Prison Art Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 4, Apr. 2002. 8. Alicia Rodriguez, “Puerto Rican Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War,” in Can't jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S. (Chicago: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, 2002) p. 161. For background on the FALN, see Ronald Fernandez, Prisoners of Colonialism: The StruggleforJustice in Puerto Rico (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994) pp. 205-18. 9. As is mentioned in the conclusion (pp. 321-4), Rosenberg was held for an ex­ tended period in an experimental below ground sensory deprivation unit within the fed­ eral prison for women at Lexington, Kentucky. For further details, see Susan Rosenberg, “Reflections on Being Buried Alive,” in Churchill and Vander Wall, Cages of Steel, pp. 128-31. 10. Indeed, some of the more egregious offenders were actually promoted; see, e.g., my “COINTELPRO as a Family Business: The Case of the Two Richard Helds,” Zeta, Mar. 1989. 11. As is noted at pp. 314-5, charges were brought in 1978 against several FBI offi­ cials, including a former director L. Patrick Gray, former acting associate director W. Mark Felt, former assistant director Edward S. Miller, and John Kearny, former head of the New York Field Office’s Squad 47 (as that office’s COINTELPRO section was called), for counterintelligence-related violations. Felt and Miller were actually con­ victed in 1980, but pardoned by Ronald Reagan in 1981, before their appeals were ex­ hausted, and before they’d set foot in jail. When signing the pardons, Reagan explained that it was “time to heal the wounds” rendered by “an unfortunate period in our nation’s history.” Such presidential magnanimity extended only to the perpetrators of COINTELPRO, not its multitudinous victims; see my “Have We Tut It All Behind Us’? Wages of COINTELPRO Still Evident in Omaha Black Panther Case,” American Samiz­ dat, No. 1, Winter 2000-2001. 12. It should be noted that Bill Clinton indicated right up until the morning he left office that he would pardon Peltier. That he failed to do so appears more than anything to have resulted from his having to negotiate a quid pro quo arrangement by which he would leave Peltier in prison in exchange for the FBI’s soft-pedaling its investigation(s) of the many illegalities Clinton is alleged to have committed during his eight-year presi­ dency; see “Special Report: ‘He Traded His Freedom for Mine’: Among the Things Bill Clinton Left Behind are a Broken Promise and Questions of a Deal,” Colorado Daily, May 15, 2001. For Peltier’s own view on his incarceration, see his Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 13. Abu-Jamal has written beautifully about his sentence and its context; see his Live from Death Row (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995); Death Blossoms: Reflections of a Pris­ oner of Conscience (Farmington, PA: Plough, 1997); All Things Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000). On the case itself, see Leonard Weinglass, Race for Justice: Mumia

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Abu-Jamal's Fight against the Death Penalty (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995); Daniel R. Williams, Executing Justice: An Inside Account of the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001). 14. Leon Scatterfield, “Anti-government rant (circa 1970): Rice-Poindexter Re­ visited,” Lincoln Journal Star., June 30, 1997; Nan Graf, “Miscarriage of Justice: The Mondo We Langa/Ed Poindexter Case,” Nebraska Report, July/Aug. 1997; Cory Zurowsky, “2867 Ohio Street,” Buffalo Chip, Vol. II, No. 2, June 1997 (originally pub­ lished in Cityview, a Des Moines weekly). 15. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Set Our Warriors Free: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party and Political Prisoners,” in Jones, Black Panthers Reconsidered, p. 426; Paul Shoates, “Update on Political Prisoners: Marshall Eddie Conway,” The Black Panther, Fall 1991. 16. Omowale Umoja, “Warriors,” p. 431. For Russell Shoats’ own view of his case and its context, see his “Black Fighting Formations: Their Strengths, Weaknesses, and Potentialities,” in Katsiaficas and Cleaver, Black Panther Party, pp. 128-38. 17. On Fitzgerald’s case, see Michael Newton, Bitter Grain: Huey Newton and the Black PantherParty (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1991) p. 99; Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Remembering King’s Assassination,” in Katsiaficas and Cleaver, Black PantherParty, p. 228; Omowale Umoja, “Warriors,” p. 426. 18. See Libertore, Road to Hell\ Min S. Yee, The Melancholy Histoty ofSoledad Prison: In Which a Utopian Scheme Turns Bedlam (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973). An autobiographical statement by Pinell will be found in Can't Jail the Spirit: Political Pris­ oners in the U.S. (Chicago: Editorial El Coqui, 1992) pp. 85-6. 19. Magee is backgrounded to a certain extent in Gregory Armstrong’s The Dragon Has Come (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Also see Shoats, “Fighting Formations,” pp. 133, 135, 137. 20. The RICO statute (18 U.S.C. § 1961-1968) was ostensibly designed to combat organized criminal enterprises of the Mafia variety. Since the early 1980s, however, it has been routinely employed—with varying degrees of success—against political tar­ gets like the Ohio 7, the independentista Macheteros organization, and the so-called Rev­ olutionary Armed Task Force (pp. 309-12, 511-4n25-43) of which Shakur, Buck, Sekou Odinga and others were allegedly a part; see, my “The Third World at Home: Political Prisons and Prisoners in the United States” and Ray Luc Levasseur’s “The RICO Act and Political Targets: Statement to the Jury, January 10, 1989,” both in Churchill and Vander Wall, Cages of Steel, pp. 6-8, 281-98. 21. For summaries of the cases of the individuals named, and numerous others, see Can'tJail the Spirit (2002 ed.) as well as Green Anarchy, No. 8, Spring 2002. For back­ ground on the MOVE cases, which are intertwined with that of Mumia Abu-Jamal, see Margot Harry, "Attention MOVE! This is America!" (Chicago: Banner Press, 1987). 22. The draconian nature of the penalty visited upon Thaxton for rock-throwing bears obvious similarity to that imposed by Israelis on Palestinian youngsters “guilty” of similar offenses during the 1980s; see, e.g., Jeff Stork, “The Significance of Stones:

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Notes from the Seventh Month,” in Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 1989) pp. 67-80. 23. On Leurs’ case, see “Free Sentenced to 22 Years,” Green Anarchy, No. 6, Summer 2001. Leurs’ codefendant, Craig Marshall (known as “Critter”) had earlier entered a guilty plea resulting in a much-reduced sentence on the same charges. 24. Mitch Stacy, “Ex-radical gets life for killing deputy,” Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 14, 2002. For background, see Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, “H. Rap Brown/Jamil Al-Amin: A Profoundly American Story,” The Nation, Mar. 18, 2002. For insight into the spiritual transformation wrought in Al-Amin since his youthful days as Rap Brown, it is useful to compare books he published during both periods; see H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! (New York: Dial Press, 1969); Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Revolution by the Book: The Rap is Dive (Beltsville, MD: Writers, 1994). 25. John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne, TaintingFvidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Tab (New York: Free Press, 1998) p. 163. 26. Ibid., pp. 162-94. There are actually two cases at issue: U.S. v. MohammedSalameh, et al. (S593CR.180 (KDT; 1994)) and U.S. v. Omar AH Abdel Rahman, et al. (S593 Cr. 181 (1995)). 27. The IG investigators’ conclusion was that Williams’ “Salameh [trial] testi­ mony... was, at best, incomplete and, at worst, knowingly incorrect... The purpose of a criminal trial is of course to determine guilt. The issue of guilt is the ultimate question to which all others are directed. In contrast Williams began with the presumption of guilt as a foundation upon which to build inferences”; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, The FBI Laboratory: An Investigation into Laboratory Practices and Alleged Misconduct in Fxplosives-Related and Other Cases (Washington, DC: Dept, of Justice, Apr. 1997; hereinafter referred to as IG Report) pp. 108, 104. 28. “The IG’s inquiry team ran into the problem of missing documentation at almost every turn... Where were the missing dictations? Could they have been destroyed inten­ tionally? The sheer numbers suggested something systemic. If senior examiners were prepared to tamper with reports, might they not be prepared to get rid of them alto­ gether? Even the FBI thought this was a possibility”; Kelly and Wearne, TaintingLvidence, p. 179. 29. Ibid., p. 200; IG Report, p. 218. 30. Kelly and Wearne, TaintingFvidence, p. 202. 31. “Both men had played major roles in challenging the evidence and overturning the convictions of several groups of Irish nationals who had all served long prison terms in Britain for IRA bombings”; ibid., p. 213. 32. Letter from Caddy to Robert Nigh, Jr., Aug. 6, 1996; quoted in Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 213. 33. Affidavit of John Brian Ford Lloyd, Aug. 24, 1996; quoted in Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 213. 34. At trial, Frederic Whitehurst testified that Williams had instructed him not to bother examining Q507 as it had been “turned in by a civilian” and would therefore not

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be used as evidence. Explosive-residue analyst Ron Kelly, on the other hand, testified that he personally had found the item. Williams himself, when asked about this dis­ crepancy by McVeigh defense counsel Christopher Tritico, confessed he didn’t know which version was correct. There was, moreover, no record of the item’s discovery in the FBI’s evidence log; U.S. v. Timothy James McVeigh (CA No. 96-CR-68 (May 27, 1996)). 35. Kelly and Wearne, Tdinting Evidence, p. 200. 36. Testimony of Steven Burmeister, U.S. v. McVeigh, May 27, 1997. 37. Kelly and Wearne, Tdinting Evidence, pp. 223-4. 38. As Burmeister put it on the stand, retaining actual samples of materials discov­ ered in lab analysis “is not normally a procedure that I follow... I’m sure that there is a special packaging that I could have done to preserve them for the future, but I feel that I’ve documented them enough that there was no need to do that”; U.S. v. McVeigh, May 27, 1997. How, absent such samples, defense analysts were supposed to verify or dis­ prove the validity of his work—rather than simply taking his word for it—was a ques­ tion left unanswered. It should be noted that such nonretention of physical evidence by the FBI lab also marked a case brought against Dennis Banks and three other AIM members during the late 1980s (pp. 399-400nl62); see my “Due Process be Damned: The Case of the Portland Four,” Zeta, Jan. 1988. Also see Kenneth S. Stern, Eoud Hawk: The United States versus the American Indian Movement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). 39. As defense attorney Christopher Tritico observed, “The magic crystals, the crystals that so magically appeared, have also disappeared. They’re gone. ICI [the inde­ pendent lab] doesn’t get to test them. [Defense analysts don’t] get to test them. There is only one person on the face of the earth that got an opportunity to test the crystals of ammonium nitrate on Q507: Special Agent Steven Burmeister”; U.S. v. McVeigh, May 28, 1997. 40. “Ammonium nitrate easily absorbs moisture, any moisture—rain, humidity, even dew—and rapidly liquefies. Q507 was not recovered until the morning of April 21, more than forty-eight hours after the blast. Yet the night of the bombing there was a torrential thunderstorm in Oklahoma City. The storm was so violent that the flight [FBI explosives-residue analysts] Ron Kelly and Steve Burmeister were traveling on to Oklahoma City was forced to land overnight in Little Rock, Arkansas. How had the crystals survived the deluge?”; Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 224. Frederic Whitehurst testified that he didn’t believe they could have; U.S. v. McVeigh, May 27, 1997. For Burmeister’s “explanation” of how the crystals might have disappeared be­ fore Q507 arrived at the independent lab, see U.S. v. McVeigh, May 20, 1997. 41. The same can be said with regard to most of the rest of the physical evidence presented against McVeigh. Much was made at trial by FBI witnesses concerning the fact that residues of PETN, a substance associated with the “det cord” presumably used as a fuse on the Oklahoma City bomb, were found in the pocket of a pair of jeans he was wearing when he was arrested, as well as on the upper portions of a pair of

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T-shirts and a set of earplugs in his possession. McVeigh was by all accounts a “gun nut,” however, and PETN has also “been listed as one of twenty-three organic compounds that might occur in smokeless powders used in ammunition.” The residues were thus in themselves “hardly incriminating,” more likely accruing from time spent on a firing range than building bombs; Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, pp. 228-9. 42. Ibid., pp. 220-1. This figured heavily in the last minute, but ultimately very tem­ porary, stay of McVeigh’s execution in May 2001, when it came out that the FBI and prosecutors—with Judge Matsch’s cooperation—had withheld at least 3,135 investiga­ tive documents which should have been turned over to defense attorneys during the course of the trial; Nancy Gibbs, “Botching the Big Case,” Time, May 21, 2001. 43. At trial, Burmeister testified that the lab had submitted as evidence the results of tests performed both by himself and by another technician, Roger Martz, but only when such results “were consistent with one another”; U.S. v. McVeigh, May 28,1997. Yet, as it turned out, “almost every test Martz and Burmeister had performed separately had pro­ duced different results: Martz found PETN explosive on McVeigh’s knife, Burmeister did not... Martz did not find PETN on McVeigh’s T-shirt, Burmeister did; Burmeister found nitroglycerin on the knife, Martz did not; Martz found RDX, another explosive residue, in the pockets of McVeigh’s pants [while] Burmeister found none,” and so on; Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, pp. 226-7. In effect, senior analyst Williams, in his Sept. 5,1995 report (see note 29 and accompanying text) had simply selected from these obviously conflicting outcomes those most useful to the prosecution, arbitrarily dis­ counting the alternative on that basis alone, and creating thereby a false appearance of consistency in the results. Williams’ report was thus to all intents and purposes a perjury, as was Burmeister’s corroborating testimony. 44. Damage inflicted on an adjacent structure by a single bomb—the FBI scenario of what happened in Oklahoma City—appears from above in the form of a half-moon shape conforming to the “blast radius” of the explosive. Aerial photos of the Murrah Building, before it was hastily torn down by federal authorities for “health” reasons, re­ veal not one but two half-moons. There is also the matter of the mysterious “John Doe II” mentioned as accompanying McVeigh by virtually every witness who placed him in the Ryder truck used to transport the bomb on the fatal day, whom federal authorities were clearly at pains not to identify, in court or otherwise. Historically, such official be­ havior has most commonly prevailed when protecting the identity of an FBI provoca­ teur has been at issue. Whatever else might be said of the Oklahoma City bombing—and there is much—the fact is that, other than that the Bureau’s version of events cannot withstand even minimal scrutiny, we have no idea either of what happened or of Tim McVeigh’s actual role in it; see Gore Vidal, “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” Fair, Sept. 2001. Also see Jim Keith, OKBOMB! Conspiracy and Cover-up (Lilburn, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1996); Mark S. Hamm, Apocalypse in Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997). 45. Morton Levitt and Michael Levitt, A Tissue of Ties: Nixon vs. Hiss (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979) pp. 184-209; Alger Hiss, Recollections of a Life (New York: Henry

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Holt, 1988) pp. 212-24. 46. Contrary to the myth carefully contrived by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has never been especially adept at combating genuinely criminal rather than “politically objectionable” activity. For an excellent study of how the opposite impression was fostered among the public, see Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983). 47. Actually, a good case can be made that such practices commenced as early as 1934, when FBI lab technicians appear to have faked a fingerprint on a beer bottle to link Charley Arthur Floyd to the so-called Kansas City Massacre, thereby justifying the Bureau’s naming of the small-time bank robber as “Public Enemy Number 1.” Al­ though “Pretty Boy” was himself shortly gunned down in an Ohio cornfield by a spe­ cial FBI hit team assembled for precisely such purposes, the bogus print was introduced as evidence against Floyd’s partner, Adam Richetti, resulting in his being convicted of the Kansas City murders and executed; see Robert Unger, The Union Sta­ tion Massacre: The Original Sin ofJ. Edgar Hoover's FBI (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 1997) pp. 129-31,215. 48. Kelly and Wearne, TaintingEvidence, pp. 14, 22; James E. Starrs, “Mountebanks among Forensic Scientists,” Forensic Science Handbook, Vol. II (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1988) pp. 2-37. The Curran revelations came at about the same time that the lab’s assistant director, Briggs J. White, was explaining to journalist Sanford J. Ungar that “it has been established throughout the country that we give completely objective testimony and send out very well qualified people”; quoted in Ungar, FBI, p. 154. 49. Aside from Connolly, indicted on RICO conspiracy, murder, and other charges on October 11, 2000 {U.S. v. John J. Connolly Jr., et al. (C. Doc. 99-10428 (U.S. Dist. Ct., Dist. of Mass. (2000)), other agents taken under grand jury investigation for having engaged in comparable activities include Paul Rico, Dennis Condon, Mike Buckley, and Nick Gianturko; Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Black Mass: The True Story ofan Unholy Alliance between the FBI and the Irish Mob (New York: HarperPerennial, 2001) pp. 319-31. 50. “The FBI’s Big Blunders,” Time, May 21, 2001. 51. To offer but one example, in 1974 Curran, having qualified himself to the jury as not only an FBI lab examiner but the holder of both BA and MA degrees in “sci­ ence”—he possessed no such credentials—testified in the rape-murder trial of Thomas Doepel that the defendant was of blood type O, thus circumstantially linking him to the crime. Doepel, who was convicted, was actually of blood type B, a matter which would have ruled him out as the perpetrator, had Curran entered accurate testi­ mony; Doepel v. U.S. (434 A.2d 449 (D.C. App. 1981)). 52. Rudolph handled the forensics on one high-profile case, that of “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski (the investigation was captioned UNABOM). The work was so sloppily handled that prosecutor Robert Cleary was forced to announce that “to the extent that the government will offer explosives residue evidence in the Kaczynski case, it will be relying upon conclusions of non-FBI experts”; National Association of

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Criminal Defense Lawyers, “FBI Crime Lab: Cleanup or Coverup?” The Champion, June 1997. For broader context, see Michael Mello, The United States versus Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber (New York: Context Books, 1999). 53. IG Report, pp. 85, 87-8. 54. Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, pp. 86, 89-90. 55. Ibid., pp. 16, 23-4, 30-5. Also see Bennett Beach, “Mr. Wizard Comes to Court,” Time, Mar. 1, 1982. 56. It should be noted that there is no requirement, either federal or state, that a per­ son establish some minimum level of scientific competency before being licensed as a forensic examiner. In effect, crime labs function as self-certifying entities. As long ago as 1976, a set of uniform guidelines was proposed by the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, but—with the staff of “the nation’s premier crime lab” at FBIHQ leading the way—practicioners rejected them by a vote of two to one; Joseph L. Peterson, Ethicallssues in the Collection, Examination and Use ofPhysical Evidence in Forensic Science (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society Occasional Papers, 1986) p. 43. 57. Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 13. 58. Erdmann ultimately pleaded guilty to seven “specimen felonies,” but—unlike his victims—was sentenced only to probation; ibid., pp. 13, 26. 59. Mark Hansen, “Out of the Blue,” American Bar Association Journal, No. 82, Feb. 1996, p. 50. West’s “method” was blatantly bogus, but no more so than the FBI’s own contention during the 1970s that “voiceprint analysis” was possible, that is, “the claim that a spectograph could be used to produce a unique pattern for any single individual’s speech”; Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, pp. 18-9; National Academy of Science, Committee on Evaluation of Speech Spectograms, On the Theory and Practice of Voice Identi­ fication (Washington, DC: National Academy of Science, 1979). 60. Kelly and Wearne, TaintingEvidence, p. 13. 61. Belinda Luscombe, “When the Evidence Lies,” Time, May 21, 2001. 62. Laura Frank and John Hanchette, “Convicted on False Evidence? False Science Often Sways Juries, Judges,” USA Today, July 19, 1994. 63. Luscombe, “Evidence Lies,” p. 27. 64. Overall, see J.L. Peterson, E.L. Fabricant, K.S. Field, and J.I. Thornton, Crime Eaboratory Testing Research Program (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978). 65. Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 32. Also see Joseph L. Peterson and Penelope N. Markham, “Crime Laboratory Testing Results, 1978-1991,1: Identification and Classification of Physical Evidence and Resolving Problems of Common Origin,” Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol. 40, No. 6, Nov. 1995. 66. See generally Benjamin W. Grunbaum, “A Foundational Objection to DNA Evi­ dence: A Critique of the FBI’s Process for Self-Validation of Methods for Protein and DNA Genetic Marker Typing of Biological Evidence,” California Attorneys for Criminal Justice/Forum, Vol. 21, No. 3, June 1994.

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67. William C. Thompson, “Accepting Lower Standards: The National Research Council’s Second Report on Forensic DNA Evidence,” Jurimetrics, Vol. 37, No. 4, 1997. 68. Ungar, FBI, pp. 56, 153-4; Gentry, Hoover, p. 131. For a full-bore rendition of the standard hype, see Ronald Kessler, The FBI (New York: Pocket Books, 1993) pp. 252-64. 69. Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 31. 70. David L. Grieve, “The Possession of the Truth,” Journal ofForensic Identification, Vol. 46, No. 5, 1996. 71. The late and much-celebrated defense attorney William Kunstler once ex­ plained to me that the very refusal of government forensic witnesses to qualify their findings before juries is inherently antiscientific and therefore, since it’s presented as science, false by definition. Hence, in his estimation, perjury is committed virtually ev­ ery time a forensic witness takes the stand for the prosecution. 72. This state-of-the-art police terminology is actually used by former FBI head firearms and toolmarks examiner Evan Hodge—notable for his perjury during the trial and 1984 appeal hearing of Leonard Peltier (pp. 294, 297, 406nl91, 407n201-2) in a published article; Evan Hodge, “Guarding Against Error,” Journal of the Association of Firearms and Toolmarks Examiners, No. 20, July 1988. 73. For background, see Diana Gordon, The Justice Juggernaut: Fighting Street Crime, Controlling Citizens (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); James Fyfe and Jerome Skolnick, Above theEaw (New York: Free Press, 1993); Paul Chevigny, Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas (New York: Free Press, 1995). 74. Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 1999) p. 23. 75. See, e.g., Stephen B. Bright, “How American Juries Decide Death Penalty Cases: The Capital Jury Project,” in Hugo Adam Bedau, ed., The Death Penalty in Amer­ ica: Current Controversies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) pp. 333-43. 76. James E. Starrs, “The Ethical Obligations of the Forensic Scientist in the Criminal Justice System,” Journal of the Official Association of Official Analytical Chemists, Vol. 54, No. 4, 1971, p. 2. 77. Quoted in Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 15. 78. Quoted in ibid., p. 16. 79. Quoted in ibid., p. 30. Also see U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Hearings on FBI Autho­ risation: Forensic Science Eaboratories and Jurisdiction on Indian Reservations (Washington, DC: 86th Cong., 2d Sess., Apr. 2, 1981). 80. Peter Barnett, Edward Blake and Robert Ogle, Jr., “FBI Laboratory Problems, Scientific Sleuthing Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 1997. 81. Until the mid-1970s, the judicial standard was the so-called Frye test, deriving from a 1923 case in which it was established that evidence-gathering techniques and technologies should be restricted to those which had “gained general acceptance in the scientific community” (this is why polygraph results are inadmissible in court). In

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1975, Rule 702 of the FederalRules ofEvidence effectively supplanted Frye, however, lower­ ing the bar so that all an “expert” need do is satisfy a judge that s/he can provide infor­ mation that might otherwise remain “beyond the competence” of a jury; Kelly and Wearne, Fainting Evidence, pp. 25-6. Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, on the other hand, has been consistently interpreted to exclude such things as bench notes, raw calculations, instrumentation printouts and the like—that is, the guts of any scien­ tific testing procedure—from discovery by the defense. Thus, even as government fo­ rensic witnesses are allowed to pontificate with an often completely unwarranted air of authority, those charged with cross-examining them “are lucky to get a two-page lab re­ port saying it’s your guy, he’s guilty, thank you very much”; William Thompson, quoted in ibid., p. 28. 82. As journalist Stephen Labaton observed in the New York Times on Apr. 25, 1996, the current regime imposes “the most rigorous constraints on the constitutional right to seek Federal review of convictions since Lincoln suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus in the Civil War.” For further details, see H.A. Bedau, “Habeas Corpus and Other Con­ stitutional Controversies,” in Bedau, Death Penalty, pp. 238-45. 83. Herrera v. Collins (506 U.S. 390 (1992)). For background, see George M. Arend, “Herrera v. Collins: Does Actual Innocence Warrant Federal Habeas Corpus Relief?” Gonzaga Eaw Review, No. 29, 1993-94. 84. Peter B. Kraska and Victor E. Kappler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems, Vol. 44, No. 1, Feb. 1997; Pe­ ter Cassidy, “The Rise in Paramilitary Policing,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1997; Lee Hancock, “Smith County Sheriff Unveils Armored Unit: Military Personnel Carriers Add Weight to the War on Crime,” Dallas Morning News, Apr. 10, 1997; Kathleen Cei, “Commando Cops,” New Haven Advocate, Apr. 16, 1998. 85. See my “To Serve and Protect? The Social Context of Michael Dewar’s Weapons and Equipment of Counter-Terrorism f New Studies on the Eeft, Vol. XIV, Nos. 1&2, Win­ ter-Spring 1989. For random updates, see Steve Marshall, “L.A. Cops Get 600 M-16s to Help Even Odds on Street,” USA Today, Sept. 17,1997; Kevin Krause, “Sheriff beefs up deputies’ arsenal,” Fort Eauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Aug. 28, 1997; David Haase, “Surplus Bayonets Used as Tools, Not Weapons, Police Say,” Indianapolis Star Eedger, Nov. 7, 1997; Derrick DePledge, “Lawmen Rake In Free Military Surplus Gear,” Newark Star Eedger, Nov. 23,1997; Peter Cassidy, “Police Take Military Turn Counter to Other Image as Neighborhood Peacekeepers,” Boston Globe, Jan. 11, 1998; Kevin P. Connolly, “Police in Apopka Add More Firepower: Patrol Sergeants Will Soon be Packing Assault Weapons Instead of Shotguns,” Orlando Sentinel, Sept. 13, 1998. Overall, see Pat Cascio and John McSweeney, SWAT Battle Tactics: How to Organise, Train and Equip a SWAT Team for Eaw Enforcement or Self-Defense (Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1996). 86. Peter Kraska, “Enjoying Militarism: Personal/Political Dilemmas in Studying U.S. Police Paramilitary Units,” Justice Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, Sept. 1996. My reference to Cop Chic—a fictional publication—is only partially tongue-in-check. There actually is a magazine called SWAT, laden with clothing ads. It is very popular with police, whether

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or not they are really SWAT team members, as are other he-man titles such as Soldier of Fortune. 87. The Longmont example is drawn from my experience with two homicides committed by police in the town during the 1980s, although it should be noted that use of such ammunition by police is endemic. As concerns the 1899 Hague Declaration, banning “use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body,” thereby causing “unnecessary suffering,” see Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff, eds., Docu­ ments on the Laws of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 39-42. 88. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (Lon­ don: Verso, 1999) p. 112. Also see Darryl Gates, “Control of Civil Disorders,” The Po­ lice Chief May 1968; Darryl Gates, et al., Special Weapons and Tactics (Los Angeles: LAPD Special Report, July 1974); Susie Bernstein, et al., The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police (Berkeley, CA: Center for Research and Criminal Justice, [2nd ed.] 1975) pp. 93-8. 89. Tim Butz, “Garden Plot and SWAT: U.S. Police as New Action Army,” Coun­ terspy , Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 1976. For more on the Wounded Knee operation, see my and Vander Wall’s Agents of Repression, pp. 135-77. 90. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Terrorism in the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept, of Justice, 1996) p. 21; Robert Dreyfuss, “Spying on Ourselves,” Rolling Stone, Mar. 28, 2002. 91. See generally, Jim Redden, “Police State Targets the Left,” in Eddie Yuen, George Katsiaficas, and Daniel Burton-Rose, eds., The Pattie of Seattle: The New Chal­ lenge to Capitalist Globalisation (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002) pp. 139-51. On the Black Bloc, see L.A. Kauffman, “Who Are Those Masked Anarchists?”, ibid., pp. 125-9. 92. Judi Bari, Timber Wars (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994); Also see my “The FBI Targets Judi Bari: A Case Study in Domestic Counterinsurgency,” Covert Action Quarterly, No. 47, Winter 1993-1994. In my article, I suggested, on the basis of what I considered solid indications, that an individual named Irv Sutley had functioned as a provocateur within Earth First’s 1990 Redwood Summer campaign in northern California. This generated a storm of controversy in certain circles, with allegations that, since I’d publicly “bad-jacketed” Sutley, I rather than he must be a federal opera­ tive. In 2001, however, DNA testing by an independent forensics lab linked Sutley to the saliva on the envelope flaps on anonymous letters mailed by whoever had infil­ trated the Bari/Cherney group, making it a virtual certainty that my allegations were correct; Mike Geniella, “DNA Tests Revitalize Bari Case: Analysis of Envelope Shows that Activist Hurt in 1990 Bombing Did Not Seal Letter Claiming Responsibility,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Sept. 17, 2001. 93. Pari et al. v. U.S. et al. (Civ. No. 91-1057 CW+ (1993)). Held, whose meteoric career suggested he was destined for an FBI assistant directorship by his mid-50s, took a sudden early retirement when evidence of his role in the Bari/Cherney bombing be­ gan to emerge. He is now head of security for the Visa Corporation; Mike Geniella,

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“FBI finished with Bari-Cherney bomb case,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 22, 1993. On the court case, see “Who Bombed Judi Bari? Historic Lawsuit Against the FBI,” Red­ wood Nation Earth First! No. 41, Spring 2002. 94. Bernstein, et al., Iron First/ Velvet Glove, pp. 95-6. Also see Les Payne and Tim Findley, The Life and Death of the SLA (New York: Ballantine, 1976) pp. 265-91. Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) p. 244. 95. Harry, “Attention, MOVE!", pp. 63-6. 96. Both survivors, Birdie Africa (aged 13) and Ramona Africa (aged 30) were treated for extensive second- and third-degree burns; ibid., pp. 73, 97. Michael Boyette with Randi Boyette, “Let It Burn!” The Philadelphia Tragedy (Chi­ cago: Contemporary Books, 1989) pp. 193-5, 205. 98. See the statements of Mayor Wilson Goode and others; “3 MOVEers Slain; 60 Homes Burn,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 1985; “MOVE House Bombed: Blaze In­ volves 60 Homes/Gunfight Continues After Blast,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 1985; “MOVE Death Toll Reaches 11/Goode to Pick Panel for Probe,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 16, 1985; “How the Fire Spread Past MOVE,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 26, 1985. 99. “ [Overwhelming evidence points to a. ..murderous chain of events: police gun­ fire kept MOVE members trapped inside...when they made an initial effort to leave; when some of the MOVE people finally made a desperate effort to exit because the con­ ditions had become unendurable, some were forced back into the house while others were shot to death and their bodies... thrown back into the fire to destroy the evidence; it seems almost certain that children were among those gunned down and their bodies thrown back into the fire. This chain of events is established by the accounts of Ramona and Birdie Africa; from information in [a police detective’s] log, which is corroborated by a fire department battalion chief; and from...ballistic and forensic evidence”; Harry, “Attention MOVE!”, p. 76. Also see “Gunfight or Not? Answers Keep Changing,” Phila­ delphia Inquirer, May 17, 1985; “Goode, 2 Aides Differ on MOVE: Accounts of Events Conflict,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 17, 1985; “Q: Shootout? A: Yes. Yes. No.,” Philadel­ phia Daily News, May 17, 1985; “Had Others Agreed to Surrender?” Philadelphia Daily News, May 22,1985; “Officer Says Five People Fled Fiery MOVE House,” Philadelphialnquirer, June 30, 1985; “Log: Cop ‘Downed’ MOVE Member,” Philadelphia Daily News, Aug. 20,1985; “Committee Hears Differing Accounts of Police Actions,” Philadelphia In­ quirer, Nov. 1,1985; “After Light Moments, More Dark Questions,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 1, 1985. 100. “The HRT is not merely intended to be a simple SWAT team—the FBI already has fifty-six of those, one for each field office... Rather, [it] was created to serve as the ul­ timate SWAT team—in effect, a national strike force. It recruits extensively from the military, and particularly from Special Forces and Special Operations personnel. It trains in what may be fairly characterized as military...tactics [involving] the ultimate deploy­ ment of force [in which] the opposing force is, perforce, annihilated rather than taken prisoner... [It is], in effect, a machine specifically designed for making war on designated

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elements... of America’s civilian population”; David T. Hardy with Rex Kimball, This is Not an Assault: Penetrating the Web of Official Lies Regarding the Waco Incident (San Anto­ nio, TX: Xlibris, 2001) pp. 240-1. 101. For what is probably the best overview, see Alan W. Bock, Ambush at Ruby Ridge: How Government Agents Set Randy Weaver Up and Took His Family Down (Irvine, CA: Dickens Press, 1995). 102. “In 1989, [a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; BATF or ATF] infor­ mant had entrapped Randy Weaver, who agreed to supply him with two shotguns with illegally sawed-off barrels. The charge was designed as leverage. The ATF wanted Weaver, a white separatist Christian Identist, to become a source of information on the Aryan Nations, a leading white supremacist organization based on a forty-acre com­ pound in Hayden Lake, near Couer d’Alene, Idaho. Weaver had refused and, although not a member of the Aryan Nations, had rung the compound to tell them of the infil­ tration effort. After being charged, Weaver was issued a court summons with an incor­ rect date. When he did not appear, a warrant was served”; Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, p. 131. Also see Bock, Ruby Ridge, p. 203. 103. Ibid., p. 53. 104. Kevin Harris, Weaver’s co-defendant in the Ruby Ridge case, was accused of having killed Degan. He was, however, acquitted, in large part because his attorney was able to show that it was more likely that Degan had actually been shot by fellow SOG team member Larry Cooper; Bock, Ruby Ridge, pp. 191-2; Kelly and Wearne, Tainting Evidence, pp. 129, 145. 105. At Weaver’s trial, Horiuchi was “cold, unemotional, his expression never changing no matter what the nature of his testimony. He explained that he was a West Point graduate, that he had served eight years in the U.S. Army, then joined the FBI, that he had been on the Hostage Rescue Team for eight years and had volunteered to be a sniper four years before. He explained the requirements—accuracy within a quar­ ter-inch at two hundred yards, and thousands of practice rounds (and some in live con­ frontations) fired at moving targets”; Bock, Ruby Ridge, p. 172. The possibility that this man hit Vicki Weaver by “accident,” as he claimed, is all but nil; Jess Walter, Evey Knee Shall Bow: The Truth and the Tragedy of Ruby Ridge and the Randy Weaver Family (New York: ReganBooks, 1995) pp. 327-9. 106. Bock, Ruby Ridge, p. 205. 107. The order authorized the snipers to kill any armed male they observed, whether or not the individual posed an immediate threat. Women and children were expressly exempted from this directive. Horiuchi fired through a door into the Weaver cabin, where he knew both Vicki Weaver and the surviving Weaver children—young Sammy was already dead—had taken refuge. At trial, it was claimed variously that Horiuchi fired the fatal shot in order to protect an FBI helicopter crew (although the crew testified they’d been in no danger), that his shot had been fired from an angle sug­ gesting it would pass on harmlessly into the woods if he missed (a completely inaccu­ rate diagram was introduced into evidence to support this false premise), and that, in

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any event, he’d not known Vicki Weaver was anywhere near his line of fire (Horiuchi’s own after action diagram of the shooting—withheld by the FBI until after he’d testi­ fied—included the outline of her head, along with Kevin Harris’s, as being within the “target frame” he’d fired at); Bock, Ruby Ridge, 173-5. The federal documents in question include the Attorney General’s 751 page Report Regardinglnternal Investigation ofShootings at Ruby Ridge (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, June 1994) and U.S. House of Representatives, Intelligence Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information, The Federal Raid on Raiby Ridge (Washington, D.C.: 105th Cong., 1st Sess., 1997). For the clearest assessment of the probability that Horiuchi’s ac­ tion added up to murder, see Kelly and Wearne, TaintingEvidence, pp. 157-8. 108. Quoted in Bock, Ruby Ridge, p. 229. 109. Jerry Seper, “Five Federal Agents Could Face Murder Charges in Idaho Raid,” Washington Times, Dec. 25,1994. The State of Idaho, rather than the federal government, did file a manslaughter charge against Horiuchi. However, “the case was moved to U.S. District Court, where the judge ruled—in a decision since upheld by the Court of Ap­ peals (albeit under reconsideration as we write)—that a State could not prosecute a Fed­ eral employee for crimes committed in the line of his employment”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 300. 110. Potts was promoted to this position by newly appointed Director Louis Freeh, and confirmed by Attorney General Janet Reno, despite the fact that he was already un­ der investigation for his role in the Ruby Ridge debacle (he’d issued the illegal shoot-to-kill order, then orchestrated the cover-up). As the extent to which the FBI was hiding the facts of what had happened became increasingly apparent, however, the coun­ try was treated to the spectacle of five veteran agents invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to testify—and thus incriminate themselves—before Congress. Freeh at­ tempted to contain things by issuing reprimands to a dozen of those involved, including Potts. One of those censured, Salt Lake City SAC Eugene Glenn, refused to be scapegoated and, to some extent, went public. The outcome was a criminal investigation headed by U.S. Attorney Michael Styles, which led, in Oct. 1996, to the entering of a plea bargain agreement by Michael Kahoe, head of the Bureau’s Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section, on the charge of having willfully destroyed incriminating evidence. Four others—including Deputy Director Potts, Daniel Coulson (Deputy Assistant Di­ rector of the Criminal Division), and Gale Evans (Kahoe’s immediate subordi­ nate)—were also found to have been involved in obstructing justice, but, although they resigned, none were prosecuted; Kelly and Wearne, Tdinting Evidence, pp. 141, 154-6. 111. The BATF was at the time under severe pressure, including a very real prospect of being abolished, because of an ultimately successful suit brought by over 200 black agents on the basis of blatant racial discrimination, as well as allegations of sexual harass­ ment publicly aired by female staff on 60 Minutes in January 1993. “One solution to the ATF’s unenviable predicament would be to carry out a spectacular raid—a raid that would make it evident to the White House and key supporters in Congress that the ATF was indeed carrying out important work, work that far outweighed its institutional prob­

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lems—that despite these problems, it needed to be supported with increased funding, not punished for in-house peccadilloes”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 178. “Televised film of the raid—‘a dynamic entry,’ the ATF called it—would, at the very least, establish a counterpoint to the...bad publicity... Dramatic footage of the raid might even air in a documentary serial like Cops”-, Dick J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995) p. 32. 112. Probably the best early overview will be found in Carol Moore’s The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions About Waco Which Must be Raised (Franklin, TN/Springfield, VA: Legacy Communications/Gun Owners Foundation, 1995). 113. In the affidavit he prepared to support the BATF’s request for a warrant, agent Davy Aguilera misrepresented the Davidians’ acquisition of a large number of entirely legal weapons—e.g., 104 AR-15 semiautomatic rifles—as well as dummy hand grenades, black powder and other chemicals, in combination with the fact that a ma­ chine shop was known to exist at Mt. Carmel, as amounting to evidence that they were illegally manufacturing unregistered machineguns and explosive devices. In reality, the rifles were purchased as an investment, given the probability that their value would rapidly appreciate in the wake of then anticipated federal legislation restricting their manufacture (indeed, the price of an AR-15 more than doubled—rising from roughly $600 to more than $1400—in 1994, the year of the law’s passage). There is no indica­ tion that the Davidians were modifying the rifles rather than holding them for resale on Feb. 28,1993; indeed, the BATF’s own investigation had failed to turn up evidence that they’d acquired the parts necessary to do so. As to the dummy grenades, they were being used as adornments on customized hunting vests manufactured at Mt. Carmel and marketed at gun shows under the brand name “David Koresh Survival Wear.” Aguilera spiced up his allegation with the observation that Davidian leader Koresh (Vernon Wayne Howell) subscribed to a “clandestine periodical” entitled Shotgun News—actually an entirely above-ground publication with 145,000 subscribers—and that he’d recently shown his followers a video which the agent considered “hostile to the BATF”; Reavis, Ashes of Waco, pp. 34-8. Also mentioned in the affidavit are allega­ tions of child abuse—which is not a. federal offense—with no reference to the fact that “the case was closed on April 30, 1992, with no evidence of [such] abuse”; Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 60-1. As to the legality of individual citizens possessing unlim­ ited numbers of otherwise unproscribed weapons see § 26 of the 1986 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act; also see U.S. v. Anders (885 F.2d 1248 (5th Cir., 1989)). Black powder and the other chemicals at issue—all of which are widely used to reload ammu­ nition—were/are also entirely legal in the quantities the Davidians acquired them; Ti­ tle 18 U.S.C. §§ 841 etseq., Title 26 U.S.C. §§ 5845(f). The situation is summed up by the 1978 Supreme Court opinion rendered in Tranks v. Delaware, that a search warrant is in­ valid if the party requesting it has lied to or otherwise misled the issuing judge. 114. Title 18 U.S.C. 3109 specifically requires that—other than under special cir­ cumstances where “no knock” entry is judicially authorized, which it wasn’t at Mt. Car­ mel—a law enforcement officer must “give notice of his legal authority” and state his

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purpose before entering a premises. Service of a search or arrest warrant—which cannot be done if the warrant is not in hand—is the usual means to this end. Among other things, such a procedure affords those to be searched or arrested an opportunity to vol­ untarily comply. That the BATF assault force didn’t bother to take along a warrant on Feb. 28, and included no provision for Davidian cooperation in their plan for “Showtime,” plainly demonstrates how little they were concerned with either the legality of their operation or a peaceful outcome. This was an especially dicey proposition in Texas, to which state’s statutory code the Davidians might reasonably have presumed themselves bound to comply, where “the use of deadly force to resist arrest or search is justified [under the law] ‘if, before the actor offers any resistance, the peace offi­ cer...uses or attempts to use greater force than is necessary to make the arrest or search”; Reavis, A shes of Waco, p. 281. In effect, given the BATF’s launching of a sudden and unannounced assault upon them, the Davidians would’ve been well within their le­ gal rights if they’d simply shot every agent involved. That they didn’t—that they may in fact have injured no agents at all—should be taken as a indication of their restraint. 115. Subsequent court testimony revealed that Koresh had offered to allow Agent Aguilera to “come on out and look” at the Davidians’ “arsenal” at any time and without prior notice. Aguilera declined to do so; “Koresh to Agents: Should’ve Called Me,” Washington Times, May 26, 1993; Marc Smith, “Agent allegedly refused Koresh’s offer,” Houston Chronicle, Sept. 11,1993. Koresh had, contrary to claims later made by the BATF, voluntarily submitted to arrest and searches on several prior occasions; Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 79-80. As former local district attorney Vic Feazell observed at the time, “If [the BATF] had called and talked to them, the Davidians would have given them what they wanted”; Roy Bragg, “Ex-Prosecutor Laments Agents’ ‘Storm Trooper’ Tactics,” Houston Chronicle, Mar. 2,1993. Or as it was put by a Justice Department consultant, “Da­ vid Koresh asked why they did not serve him a warrant directly rather than through an armed assault... The question is [indeed] why”; Dr. Robert Cancro, in Recommendations of Experts for Improvements in Federal Eaw Enforcement After Waco (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept, of Justice, Oct. 8, 1993) p. 2. 116. None of the slugs that hit a BATF agent were ever matched to a Davidian weapon, and the FBI crime lab never bothered to try and match them to weapons used by the BATF itself. However, it is known that the bullet with which Agent Glen Jordan was struck was of the extremely destructive 9 mm. “hydroshock” variety used exclu­ sively by the BATF on Feb. 28 (it is unavailable to civilians). In subsequent court testi­ mony, Agent Keith Constantino admitted that the round might well have come from his own sidearm; Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 174. One agent appears to have accidentally shot himself. Unidentified federal sources have indicated that at least two of the dead and several of the wounded agents apparently shot one another as two teams blasted their way into an upstairs bedroom at Mt. Carmel from opposite directions. Overall, most of the agents seem to have fired blindly during the firefight, using military “point and shoot” techniques, a matter which makes it little short of a miracle that more people weren’t killed; “Was It Friendly Fire?” Newsweek, Apr. 5,1993; James L. Pate, “Waco: Be­

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hind the Cover-Up,” Soldier of Fortune, Nov. 1993; Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 171. 117. The Davidians claimed, and there is considerable evidence to support them, that all four were by gunfire coming from the helicopters; ibid., pp. 157-60; Reavis, Ashes of Waco, pp. 128-36. To this day, despite the fact that its own in-flight audio re­ cordings demonstrate that the contrary is true, the BATF contends no shots were fired from these aircraft; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 189-93. 118. Report of the Department of the Treasury on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire­ arms Investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell, also known as David Koresh (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept, of the Treasury, Sept. 1993) p. 101. The 12,000 round figure comes from a speech delivered by BATF Director John Magaw, in a speech delivered to students at Eastern Illinois University on Apr. 1, 1998; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 361nl68. 119. Scott W. Wright, “Agents at Branch Davidian trial describe blitz of bullets at raid,” Austin-American Statesman,]^. 21,1994; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 35,199. The agents’ testimonies will be found in the trial transcript of 11 Davidian sur­ vivors prosecuted for conspiring to murder federal officers about a year after the as­ sault; U.S. v. Branch (No. 93-CR-046 (W.D. Texas (1994)) at 1744, 1957,1966, 2064-7, 2077, 2091, 2142, 2222, 2331, 2405, 2523, 2689, 2706. 120. Mary Jordan and Sue Pressley, “Cult Leader Wants to Die a Martyr in ‘All-Out Firefight’,” Washington Post, Mar. 9, 1993. 121. House Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing, June 9, 1993, p. 173. 122. “At trial, FBI weapons expert James Cadigan was forced to admit that [the Bureau had] not found any .50-caliber cartridge cases with firing pin impressions, indi­ cating that no .50-caliber weapon was fired during the fifty-one days” the Davidians were subsequently under siege; Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 170-1. Also see U.S. v. Branch at 1251, 1558, 1744-6, 2000, 2331, 2463. 123. Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 171; U.S. v. Branch at 2363. 124. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 145. 125. Ibid., pp. 200, 202,213. 126. Ibid., p. 235. 127. These consisted of 22 AR-15 and 20 AK-47 rifles, 2 H&K SP-89 pistols, and 2 MAC-11 pistols; “Cult Had Illegal Arms, Expert Says,” New York Times, Jan. 15, 1994. The FBI declined to allow anyone, including the Texas Dept, of Public Safety, to examine the weapons, and also declined to put its own examiner, Ken Carter, on the stand; U.S. v. Branch at pp. 1092-5, 1222-3, 1266-7. Virginia attorney Stan Halbrook, who specializes in such cases, states than he has uncovered more than 100 instances in which federal authorities have performed post hoc modifications to weapons in order to “prove” automatic weapons charges; Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 8-9, 65-7. The FBI is known to have done this in the 1971 RNA 11 case in Mississippi (pp. 355-6n60), and similarities to the dysfunctional “Wichita AR-15” used as evidence in the 1977 case of Leonard Peltier are striking (p. 294).

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128. For the best overall analysis of the propaganda campaign, see the essays col­ lected by Stuart A. Wright, ed., Armageddon at Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. Anson Shupe and Jeffrey K. Hadden, “Cops, News Copy, and Public Opinion: Legitimacy and the Social Construction of Evil at Waco,” pp. 177-202. On the FBI deployment, which totaled 668 people, see Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 223-4, 233; Report to the Attorney General on the Invents at Waco, Texas: February 28 to April 19, 1993 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept, of Jus­ tice, Oct. 8, 1993) pp. 10, 117. 129. A complete list of the dead will be found in Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. xii-xiv. 130. There was no basis to the child abuse allegations, as the FBI later admitted; Report to Attorney General, p. 275. Gustav Nieguhr and Pierre Thomas, “Abuse Allegations Unproven: Koresh Investigated in Texas, California,” Washington Post, Apr. 25, 1993. The Bureau nonetheless maintained a drumbeat of publicity on this front throughout the siege, using such claims in convincing Attorney General Reno to approve its final as­ sault; Mark England and Darlene McCormick, “The Sinful Messiah,” Waco Tribune-Her­ ald, Mar. 1,1993; Stephen Labaton, “Officials Contradict One Another on Rationale for Assault on Cult,” New York Times, Apr. 21, 1993. More broadly, see Christopher G. Ellison and John P. Bartowski, “ ‘Babies Were Being Beaten’: Exploring Child Abuse Al­ legations at Ranch Apocalypse,” and James T. Richardson, “Manufacturing Consent About Koresh,” both in Wright, Armageddon at Waco, pp. 111-49, 153-76. 131. Jordan and Pressley, “Cult Leader”; Mark England and Darlene McCormick, “The Sinful Messiah,” Waco Tribune-Herald, Feb. 27, 1993; Michael deCourcy Hinds, “Texas Cult Membership,” New York Times, Apr. 20, 1993. Much of the disinformation was/is based on the statements of disaffected Davidian Marc Breault; see Andrew Milne, “The Cult Awareness Network: Its Role in the Waco Tragedy,” in James R. Lewis, ed., From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994) pp. 137-42. Overall, see Stuart A. Wright, “Construction and Escalation of a Cult Threat: Dissecting Moral Panic and Official Reaction to the Branch Davidians,” in Wright, Ar­ mageddon in Waco, pp. 75-94. 132. Ross E. Milloy, “Angry Telephone Call Signals the End of the World for Cult Members,” New York Times, Apr. 20, 1993; “The Seven Week Siege,” Washington Post, Apr. 20, 1993; Steven R. Reed, “Would-be messiah gave death, not life,” Houston Chroni­ cle, Apr. 20, 1993; “A Countdown to Disaster,” USA Today, Apr. 20, 1993; “FBI Places Full Blame on Koresh for Tragedy,” Cos Angeles Times, Apr. 21, 1993; Mark Mayfield, “Poll: 93% Blame Koresh,” USA Today, Apr. 21, 1993; Michael Isakoff and Pierre Thomas, “FBI Negotiators Detail Koresh’s Threats to Avoid Being Captured,” Washing­ ton Post, Apr. 22, 1993; Dick Johnson, “Inside the Cult: Fire and Terror on the Final Day,” New York Times, Apr. 26, 1993; Jerry Seper, “Tragedy Blamed on Cult: Reno Says Report is Not a Whitewash,” Washington Times, Oct. 9, 1993; Diana R. Fuentes, “Jury Hears About Mass Suicide Plan,” San Antonio Express-News, Feb. 2, 1994; Sam Howe Verhovek, “FBI Cites Fresh Evidence That Cult Set Fatal Fire,” New York Times, Apr. 21,

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1994. Also see the ABC news special entitled Waco: The Decision to Die, aired on Apr. 20, 1993. 133. The same procedure was employed at least as early as the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee (pp. 247, 387n67), and has long since become standard. At Waco, the Bureau claimed it was necessary in order to “protect” journalists from the Davidians. The Davidians, meanwhile, had hung a banner on Mt. Carmel with an inscription read­ ing, “God Help Us—We Need the Press”; Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 234-7. 134. “Cultists’ Lawyer Calls Bulldozing of Site a Cover-up,” Washington Times, May 13, 1993. In July, several inches of topsoil were also removed from the site, ostensibly because of lead contamination caused by expended ammunition, but more likely to prevent independent testing for cyanide; Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 418-9. 135. See Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, throughout. 136. Reavis, Ashes of Waco, pp. 148-9. A complete list of the Davidians upon whom complete autopsies were never performed is provided in Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 399-400. 137. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings into Events Concerning the Branch Davidians Cult Standoff in Waco, Texas (Washington, DC: 103rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1993); Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, and Committee on Governmental Reform and Oversight, Subcommittee on National Security, Investigation into the Activities of Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Toward the Branch Davidians (Washington, D.C.: 104th Cong., 1st Sess., July 28, 1995). 138. On dis-ease, see, e.g., Richard Leiby and Jim McGee, “Still Burning: Was Waco a Massacre? Four Years Later, the Question Still is Not Extinguished,” Washing­ ton Post, Apr. 18, 1997. 139. See, e.g., Scott McMahan Bowman, Turning Point: A Personal Account of the “Freemen” Standoff (Salem, OR: Thumbprint, 1997); Dale and Connie Jakes with Clint Richmond, False Prophets: The Firsthand Account of a Husband-Wife Team Working for the FBI and Eiving in Deepest Cover with the Montana Freemen (Los Angeles: Dove, 1998). 140. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 301. 141. See, as examples, Karen Alexander, “2 Cities Settle Pratt Lawsuits: 92 SWAT raid left Everett woman dead,” Seattle Times, Oct., 20, 1995; Gregory R. Hall, “SWAT team shoots 75 rounds to kill suspected dealer, age 73,” Miami Times, Mar. 21, 1996; Brian M. Trotta, “SWAT Experts: Officers in Shooting Undertrained,” Hartford Cou­ rant, Dec. 5, 1996; Cindy Glover, “Residents Ask Open Hearing on Shooting,” Albu­ querque Journal, Feb. 4, 1997; M. Floyd Hall, “1 dead after fire guts home raided by Bethlehem police,” Allentown Morning Call, Apr. 24,1997; Lewis Griswold, “SWAT Ac­ tion Resulting in 2 Deaths Questioned,” Fresno Bee, Jan. 20, 1998; “Police Shooting Draws Protests,” Greensboro News & Record, Sept. 7, 1998; “Farm Town’s SWAT Team Leaves Costly Legacy,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 5,1999. Also see “Use of SWAT Teams Up Greatly Across Country,” CBS Evening News report aired Dec. 8,1997. Some sense of the magnitude of what is involved can be gleaned by leafing through the hundreds of

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summaries contained in Stolen Lives: Killed by Law Enforcement (New York/Los Angeles: Anthony Baez Foundation/National Lawyers Guild, [2nd ed.] 1999). 142. Hardy and Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 69. 143. Ibid., pp. 57-61. 144. Ghigliotti’s preliminary report, dated Mar. 18, 2000, is included as Appendix I in Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 337-42. At this point, he’d confirmed 69 shots into the building. Shortly before his death a few weeks later, however, he stated that he’d by then identified almost double that number, noting that the barrel of one of the snip­ ers’ weapons had actually grown hot enough to be visible on infrared; ibid., p. 113. On Ghigliotti himself, see Richard Leiby, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Washington Post, May 26, 2000. 145. One of these appears to have been firing a rifle or M-79 grenade launcher downwards, into the “pit,” an underground concrete room originally built as a tornado shelter, where the Davidian women and children had taken refuge. Another fired at a Davidian trying to take cover behind a chunk of downed roof; ibid., pp. 116-7, 114. 146. Vector Data, which at the time had a total of 17 employees, is essentially a sub­ sidiary of the U.S. Anteon Corp., which does about 65% of its business with the federal executive, mainly the Justice Dept.; ibid., p. 139. Also see U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Governmental Reform and Oversight, The Tragedy at Waco: New Evidence Considered (Washington, DC: 103rd Cong., 2d Sess., 1997); Committee on the Judiciary, Materials delating to the Investigation into Activities of Law Enforcement Agencies Toward the Branch Davidians (Washington, D.C.: 104th Cong., 2d Sess., 1997). 147. McNulty’s film also won the International Documentary Association’s award for distinguished achievement; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 87. 148. The casings of the flash-bangs, designed to be fired from an M-79 grenade launcher, were stamped NICO, a German armaments manufacturer. The Texas Rangers later ascertained that the rounds in question, intended to penetrate buildings, had been produced in a small lot for the U.S. Army during the 1980s; ibid., pp. 90-1. 149. See, e.g., Lee Hancock, “U.S. Fights Evidence Order,” Dallas Morning News, Sept. 1, 1999; Lee Hancock, “U.S. Seeks Delay on Waco Files,” Dallas Morning News, Nov. 2, 1999; Lee Hancock, “U.S. Warned to Release Waco Files,” Dallas Morning News, Nov. 3, 1999. How McNulty came upon these items, as well as their implications, is out­ lined in his film, Waco: A New Revelation (2000). 150. The Rangers had been asked to assume “custodial responsibility ” over all phys­ ical evidence, while the FBI maintained de facto supervisory control. This allowed the Bureau to deny, with a technical sort of accuracy—but glaring disingenuousness—that it was “in possession” of much evidence; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 88-108. 151. There were actually three separate actions, the lead attorneys of which were Mike Caddell, Jim Brannon, and Ramsey Clark. These were combined into a single docket under the Federal Tort Claims Act (1947); Brown v. United States (No. H-95-587 (S.D. Tex. (1995); since transferred to W.D. Tex.). Much of the evidentiary material was pursued under a collateral suit filed by Clark’s co-counsel, David Hardy; Hardy v. FBI

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(No. 95-883 (D. Ariz. (1997)). 152. The Rangers, it turned out, had in 1993 recommended filing state charges against BATF personnel. They were also disinclined to allow the FBI to set them up to take the heat on allegations of withholding evidence. Hence, on July 9,1999, the Texas Dept, of Public Safety filed a motion in federal court, asking that the court itself accept custody of all Waco-related evidence then in possession of the Rangers. The reason stated for this extraordinary request was concern that the material would be destroyed if it were turned over to either the FBI or BATF. Pending resolution of the issue, Rangers were posted at the evidence locker(s) and instructed to “arrest on the spot” any federal agent attempting to gain access; Lee Hancock, “DPS Chief Raises Ques­ tions About Davidian Fire,” Dallas Morning News,} Ay 28, 1999. 153. Richard Leiby, “FBI Reverses Position on Actions in Waco Siege,” Washington Post, Aug. 26,1999; David Stout, “FBI Backs Away from Flat Denial in Waco Cult Fire,” New York Tinies, Aug. 26,1999. The pattern here is very similar to that which prevailed in the Hampton/Clark case; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, p. 76. 154. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 107. 155. Lee Hancock, “FBI Missteps Doomed Siege Talks, Memos Say,” Dallas Morn­ ing News, Dec. 30, 1999; Lee Hancock, “FBI was Warned Noise Broadcasts Would Backfire if Used Against Sect,” Dallas Morning News, Dec. 30, 1999; Stuart Wright, “Anatomy of a Government Massacre: Abuses of Hostage-Barrier Protocols During the Waco Standoff,” Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence (forthcoming). 156. Lee Hancock, “Waco Negotiators Felt Tear Gas Inevitable, One Says,” Dallas Morning News, Dec. 30, 1999. 157. James Adams, “They Could Have Waited: A Lesson in How Not to Play the Hostage Game,” Washington Post, Apr. 25, 1993. 158. The FLIR tapes on “the nights before April 19...had imaged the water re­ maining in the Davidians’ storage tanks. Their levels had been going down, and on the sound track the aircrew commented on thefact [to the effect that] thirst would soon force an end to the affair, and there was no need for a gassing attack (emphasis added)”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 120-1. 159. Michael Isakoff and Pierre Thomas, “Reno Says, T Made the Decision’,” Washington Post, Apr. 20, 1993; Anne Marie Kilday and Kathy Lewis, “FBI Plan Had Reno’s Approval,” Dallas Morning News, Apr. 20,1993; Ellison and Bartowski, “‘Babies Were Being Beaten’.” 160. This does not mean that liquid CS is not extremely dangerous, however. It is in fact classified as a poisonous gas of the sort forbidden for combat usage since the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases went into effect in 1925; see Roberts and Guelff, Daws of War, pp. 137-46. More specifically, “CS is actually dust, and an extremely powerful and painful irritant which sears eyes, nose and throat. In the ‘liquid’ form, CS is dissolved in methylene chloride (commonly abbreviated MeCl), an industrial solvent... MeCl is considerably more dangerous in overdose than is CS... Inhaled, it functions as an anesthetic, pro­

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ducing disorientation, giddiness, and eventually coma and death. Dow Chemical, one of the manufacturers of methylene chloride, warns that it is intoxicating at 500-1,000 parts per million and causes death by cardiac arrest at 10,000 parts per million. The ATMS Standard Guide for Labeling toxic substances warns ‘Do not use in poorly ventilated or confined spaces...’ MeCl is metabolized in the body to carbon monoxide, and at a very high rate of return. These traits have led to its being banned for use in paint removers.... The standard ‘liquid CS’ mixture is five pounds of MeCl to one ounce of CS—it can be accurately described as methylene chloride with some CS added”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 270-1, citing Dow Chemical, Inc., Material Hazard Safety Data Sheet (undated) and Richard Stewart. “Paint Remover Hazard,” Journal of the American Medical Association, No. 235 (1976). 161. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 283-4; House Hearings, July 26, 1995, p. 41; Lee Hancock, “Siege Plans Weighed by FBI Detailed,” Dalias Morning News, Oct. 9, 1999. 162. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 265-6. There was, in fact, a case re­ corded in the literature of a toddler exposed to CS in a concentration far smaller than that planned for the Davidian children—and for about a third the time the Davidian were ultimately exposed. The child went into respiratory failure and had to be placed on a respirator and required 28 days of intensive care; Sungmin Park and Samuel Giammona, “Toxic Effects of Tear Gas on an Infant Following Prolonged Exposure,” American Journal of the Disabled Child, No. 123, 1972. This is truly an interesting approach to “preventing child abuse.” 163. “The manufacturer of Ferrets...gives formulae for calculating the correct amount—generally... 1-2 Ferrets for a small room, and 2-3 for a very large one”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 271, citing Manufacturing Assembly, Inc., Summaries of Risk Assessment Reports of AAI Corporation's MGP CS Powdered Gas Dispensing System and Ferret Liquid Tear Gas Dispensing System (undated). Aside from “the pit”—an underground tornado shelter where the Davidian children and their mothers were quite predictably sent for “safety” on Apr. 19—there were the equivalent of 20 small, two large and one very large rooms on the ground floor of the Mt. Carmel complex, another 22 small rooms on the second floor; see layout in Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 24-5. Applying the manufacturer’s “maximum safe dosage” formulation, the FBI should have fired not more than 100 Ferret rounds into the building. The number actually fired thus produces a concentration four times the “safe” level—or about twice the lethal threshold level—for adults. It should also be noted that CS powder is heavier than air, and thus tends to settle in low places. Concentrations in the pit, where the children were clustered, were thus—again, quite predictably—much higher than is indicated by the preceding data. 164. According to Col. Rod Rawlings, a military liaison who was present in the FBI’s on-site command center, bugs planted inside Mt. Carmel “picked up orders for mothers and children to retire into the concrete vault” almost as soon as the assault began; Lee Hancock, “Ex-Colonel Says FBI Heard Cult’s Secret Fire Plans,” Dallas Morning News, Oct. 8, 1999.

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165. This was delivered from Ispara gas injectors, each containing about five pounds of liquid CS, fitted to a pair of Combat Engineering Vehicles (CEVs) loaned to the FBI by the military (one CEV was rigged to carry two Isparas, the other, four); Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 269-70. Based on the number of times the videotapes show CEVs ramming into Mt. Carmel during the assault—punching holes in the walls so that CS could be sprayed into the building’s interior—it can be esti­ mated that about 300 pounds were dispersed in this manner, doubling the already le­ thal concentration inside. 166. Ibid., p. 274. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid., p. 276. 169. Brown v. U.S., Affidavit of Clive Doyle, Feb. 2, 1996. 170. Lee Hancock, “FBI Armory During Branch Davidian Siege,” Dallas Morning News, Sept. 9,1999. The munitions were issued by the Ft. Hood armory at the Bureau’s request, ostensibly for HRT “training” purposes, but with the peculiar proviso that trainees would be allowed to retain whatever they did not actually expend during the exercise (thus rendering it untraceable). Since both HE and illumination rounds are characterized by a much higher velocity than CS rounds, they are useless as a training aide with respect to dispensing of tear gas. Throughout the siege, the Mt. Carmel per­ imeter was brilliantly lit by an array of military-provided spotlights. The FBI was thus in no need of illumination rounds, at least for use as flares rather than as incendiaries. The HRT’s desire to possess HE rounds—the sole purpose of which is to kill—is even more revealing. 171. The MeCl making liquid CS a liquid evaporates rapidly, leaving the CS itself in the form of a highly-volatile dust. As to dry CS projectiles, the warning that they are a fire hazard is stamped in capital letters right on their casings, along with a specific in­ struction not use them against buildings; Hardy and Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 286. 172. Ibid., pp. 78-9. 173. For the official version—which has never really changed—see Michael deCourcy Hinds, “Arson Investigators Say Cult Members Started Fire,” New York Times, Apr. 27, 1993; J. Michael Kennedy, “Waco Cult Set Wire, Texas Officials Say,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 27, 1993; Hugh Aynesworth, “Koresh Followers Set Fire,” Washington Times, Apr. 27, 1993. 174. This would accord quite well with previous assault operations in which the FBI was either in charge or involved, including not only the already mentioned exam­ ples of the SLA and MOVE, but those against Posse Comitatus tax resister Gordon Kahl in 1983, where agents literally poured fuel down a chimney to “burn him out” of his “stronghold”—actually a woodframe farmhouse—and against neo-Nazi Robert Jay Mathews the same year (p. 413n42), where magnesium flares were used to the same end. On Kahl, see James Corcoran, Bitter Harvest: Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus Murder in the Heartland (New York: Viking Press, 1990) esp. pp. 233-46. On Mathews,

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see Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America's Racist Under­ ground (New York: Free Press, 1989) pp. 379-84. 175. CNN live coverage, Apr. 19, 1993. 176. “The moment the bullet pops out of the brass cartridge, all the powder gases es­ cape around it, so that the bullet lacks the momentum necessary even to penetrate a piece of cardboard”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 292. 177. The “exploding ammunition” rationale was advanced by FBI Director William Sessions in 1993 congressional testimony; House, Hearings on Branch Davidians, pp. 80-1. The “Davidian gunfire” alternative was presented by Jamar in his 1995 testimony; House, Investigation into Taw Enforcement Activity (July 26), p. 44. 178. Howard Hu, et al., “Tear Gas—Harassing Agent or Toxic Chemical Weapon?” Journal of the American Medical Association, No. 262, 1989. 179. MeCl, in large volumes—such as those obviously at issue inside Mt. Car­ mel—“forms flammable vapor-air mixtures.... May be an explosion hazard in a con­ fined space. Combustion may cause irritants and toxic gases. Combustion by-products include hydrogen chloride and phosgene”; Reavis, Ashes of Waco, p. 268, quoting stan­ dard reference manual. 180. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 290. 181. Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 391. Also see “Inquest: 28 Davidians Were Shot,” Washington Times, Sept. 25, 1994. 182. SA Jeffrey Jamar, quoted in Sue Anne Pressley and Mary Jordan, “Cultists May Have Been Forced to Stay,” Washington Post, Apr. 21, 1993; “3 Waco Cultists Shot Point Blank, Autopsies Show,” Washington Post, July 15, 1993. 183. For example, the official report on Stephen Schneider, a Davidian who suppos­ edly shot David Koresh in the forehead before killing himself, lists cause of death as a “gunshot wound to the mouth”; Mary Jordan and Sue Anne Pressley, ‘“Gunshot Wounds to the Head’ Killed 2 Found in Cult Compound,” Washington Post, Apr. 25,1993; Sue Anne Pressley, “Koresh Wound Not Typical of Suicide,” Washington Post, May 18, 1993. Independent autopsies performed on both Schneider and Koresh by pathologist Cyril H. Wecht found that Schneider had actually been shot in the back of the head; Evan Moore, “Law Suit Accuses FBI of Shooting Cultists, Bombing Compound,” Houston Chronicle, Feb. 25,1995. The resemblance here to the sorts of bogus autopsy reports pro­ vided to the FBI by Nebraska coroner W.O. Brown during the Bureau’s Pine Ridge oper­ ations of the mid 1970s is unmistakable (see pp. 262,291,393nl21,397nl44,404nl83). 184. Moore, “Law Suit Accuses FBI”; interview with survivor Ruth Biddle included as an NBC Dateline segment on June 15,1993; trial testimony of Darren Borst, quoted in Mark Potock, “Davidian Trial’s Hoopla Mirrors Strange Case,” USA Today, Jan. 11, 1994. Survivor Derek Lovelock also “claimed that Davidians trying to exit the back were shot down”; Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 396. 185. Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 393. 186. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 291. 187. “Network footage, replayed in both “Waco: The Big Lie” videos clearly shows

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several tanks equipped with bulldozer blades systematically pushing the remaining de­ bris into the flaming rubble”; Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 415. Waco: The Big Lie is a documentary produced by Indianapolis attorney Linda Thompson. While rather faulty in its allegations, it nonetheless contains considerable useful footage. The same rule applies to its sequel. 188. The clearest indication that this was the case concerns the remains of gunshot fatality Jimmy Riddle—killed by a rifle shot to the head—the upper portion of whose body was burned beyond recognition, the lower portion so little that his clothing was intact. The pattern is consistent with his having died outside the building, then placed back inside as the fire died down. Riddle’s right arm was also missing, amputated in a fashion consistent with having been caught up in the running gear of a tank or other track-laying vehicle; Moore, Davidian Massacre, p. 396; Hardy with Kimball, Notan Assault, p. 49. 189. This is in part because the FBI is known to have considered using snipers to “eliminate” David Koresh, and perhaps other “key” Davidians, at least a week before the assault; Lee Hancock, “No Easy Answers: Law Authorities Puzzle Over Methods to End Branch Davidians Siege,” Dallas Morning News, Apr. 15, 1993. On snipers’ sus­ pected identity, see Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 392-4, 396; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 273. 190. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 85. 191. On the unit’s origins and mission, see Col. Charlie A. Beckwith (Ret.) and Donald Knox, Delta Force (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983). For more recent information, see Terry Griswold and D.M. Giangreco, Delta: America's Elite Counterterrorist Force (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1992). For further back­ ground on the “Praetor” concept, see John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1991) esp. pp. 104-13. 192. Hancock, “Ex-Colonel.” The presence of Army special warfare advisers dur­ ing an FBI siege is clearly reminiscent of the situation at Wounded Knee in 1973 (pp. 243, 385n48). 193. See, e.g., note 149 and accompanying text. This is in addition to the “four he­ licopters, three busses, two heavy tanks, ten Bradley fighting vehicles, 100 sets of body armor, 2,000 sand bags... three battlefield robots (tiny tanks with cameras, night vision equipment and infrared sensors... together with teams of operators and 22,000 feet of the expensive optical cable that controlled them...a satellite jamming system, with thirteen operators,” communications gear, a huge illumination system, night vision goggles, miles of concertina wire and a host of other items provided through more mundane channels; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 246-7, citing an undated Equipment Utilization Index found among the DoD documents, as well as an assort­ ment of letters and memos. 194. Hancock, “Siege Plans Weighed.” The Delta operatives were, presumably, among the “23 active-duty regular troops,” otherwise unidentified, listed as having been among the items committed to support the FBI’s Waco operation in the Daily

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Staff Journal of Duty Officer’s Log at Ft. Hood on May 6,1993. Michael McNulty main­ tains that Special Forces Sergeant Steven M. Barry, now retired, explained to him that Delta’s B Squadron was used for precisely this purpose; Hardy with Kimball, Not an As­ sault, p. 250. 195. In the documentary New Revelation, former CIA employee Eugene Cul­ len states that Delta personnel confided in him that they’d been “right up front” during the final assault on Mt. Carmel, both “operating tanks” and engaging in a “gun battle” with Davidians; Lee Hancock, “Film Sequel Continues Charge of FBI Coverup,” Dallas Morning News, Nov. 4,1999. An oblique confirmation may be found in a carefully worded passage in the 1995 congressional report when it is noted that an unspecified number of Special Forces personnel were “present” during the siege, and that their duties “con­ sisted primarily”—but apparently not exclusively—of handling electronic equipment; House, Investigation into Daw Enforcement Activity, p. 92. 196. These details are contained in an FBI 302 Report filed by Deputy Assistant Di­ rector of the Criminal Division Daniel Coulson on July 13,1993. Coulson was among the FBI officials later forced to resign after being charged with obstruction of justice in the Ruby Ridge case (see note 110). 197. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 251, quoting DoD memo. 198. Ibid. 199. Coulson 302 Report. 200. See, e.g., the recent statement of White House cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke that, “The president...can waive this law at a moment’s notice, as it was during the Atlanta prison riots a decade ago. If the decision is made to waive posse comitatus, it can be done very rapidly”; quoted in Dreyfuss, “Spying.” 201. The actual amendments to the Posse Comitatus Act will be found at 32 U.S.C. § 112 and 10 U.S.C. § 371. 202. Moore, Davidian Massacre, pp. 99-100. 203. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 246. Even this was a substantial dis­ count. The FBI had crashed a helicopter, necessitating some $200,000 in repairs, and in­ flicted nearly $175,000 in damage to the tanks and other armored vehicles it had been loaned. To top things off, Army auditors later discovered that the HRT had never re­ turned—i.e., stole—$36,000 worth of night vision equipment it had “borrowed”: ibid., p. 247. 204. To be thorough, there are two other, state-oriented exceptions: “10 U.S. Code § 331, which authorizes the President to use military force in event of an insurrection against a State government; this requires an application by the State legislature, or its governor, if the legislature is not in session, and 10 U.S. Code § 333, which authorizes use of the military if an insurrection against a State is meant to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights and the State government refuses to deal with it”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 367n230. 205. Dreyfuss, “Spying,” p. 34. Also see Jim Redden, “Police State Targets the Left,” in Yuen, et al., The Battle of Seattle, pp. 139-51.

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206. Reagan’s signing of a secret decree in 1987 has already been mentioned (note 199 and accompanying text). It appears that Bill Clinton did the same thing in 1993, a matter which may well explain the earlier-cited White House refusal to divulge its Waco related documents (note 154), and the fact that the identity of the responsible ci­ vilian authority is blacked out on all documents released by the DoD; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 251-2. This raises the obvious question of why, if the au­ thorities really believe the process through which use of Delta commandos in domes­ tic police operations was instigated, they’d still be at such pains to cover it up. 207. David Kopel and Paul Blackman, “Can Soldiers Be Peace Officers? The Waco Disaster and the Militarization of American Law Enforcement,” Akron Law Re­ view, No. 30, 1997; David Bresnahan, “The Military’s New Cowboys,” Worldnet Daily, Feb. 25, 1999. 208. For a comprehensive and altogether devastating critique of the sham at issue here, including the race/class correlations of “smoking behaviors,” see Jacob Sullum, For Your Own Good: T'he Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny ofPublic Health (New York: Free Press, 1998). It should be noted that Sullum is a lifelong nonsmoker who has never been the recipient of funding from tobacco corporations. 209. I have yet to encounter anything resembling a serious study of Waco and its implications authored by a self-styled progressive. Moore’s Davidian Massacre comes closest, although she identifies herself as a “libertarian pacifist,” and the “left” has dis­ played a paucity of interest in her book. Whatever else may be said of them—and whether or not they committed the acts attributed to them—Tim McVeigh and his col­ leagues at least demonstrated a capacity to assign the massacre the kind of significance it warrants. That’s far more than can be said of the left. 210. See the chapter entitled “Discipline in Playland, Part II—Policing the Themepark City,” in Parenti, Lockdown America, pp. 90-110. Also see Mike Davis, City ofQuart FLxcavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990); Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996). 211. Parenti makes the link very well in a section entitled “The Terrifying Quality of Life” (^Lockdown America, pp. 77-80), while exemplifying the progressive contradic­ tion by announcing that those aspects of zero tolerance policies with which he person­ ally agrees on “philosophical” grounds—disarming the populace, for instance (p. 79)—are “harder to quibble with.” By that definition, of course, he’d have a hard time quibbling with the BATF’s pretext for its initial assault on Mt. Carmel and/or the FBI’s later justification for its actions. It is also worth noting that while he correctly condemns the formation of special police squads to combat New York’s truants, “squeegee men,” and prostitutes, he carefully omits mention of similar squads formed to ensure that the city’s diners no longer provide smoking sections (another “quality of life” law with which he apparently agrees). In other words, so long as its his personal preferences that are being imposed, there’s no real problem with “zero tolerance” (other than, perhaps, the usual liberal concerns over whether the means of enforce­ ment are sometimes “excessive”). These biases are consistently replicated in other

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progressive studies of the issue; see, e.g., Andrea McArdle and Tanya Erzen, eds., Zero Tolerance: Quality ofLife and Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York Univer­ sity Press, 2001). 212. In his essay “Redefining ‘Law and Order’” (The New American, Apr. 4, 1994), William Norman Grigg observes that a free society is one in which “laws are relatively few and easily understood,” a “totalitarian police state” as any context in which “laws are plentiful and frequently unintelligible, and the state can intervene at whim into a per­ son’s private affairs.” 213. “We have seen totalitarian governments before—the word ‘totalitarian’ deriv­ ing from the root, ‘total,’ implying a political system whose philosophical aim is as near-total social control as it is possible to achieve”; Hard with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 309. 214. Perhaps the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, in which the loser of the popular ballot, George W. Bush, was nonetheless installed in office, will finally lay the myth of “American Democracy” to rest. One sincerely doubts it, however. As yet, far too great a proportion of the population remains wedded to the convenience of the myth—abandoning it would imply that they might actually have to do something of a po­ litical nature—and can thus be relied upon to persist in pretending that “the opposite of everything is true.” Such pathological denial is common among alcoholics and other ad­ dicts; William H. Chrisman, The Opposite of Everything is True: Reflections on Denial in Alco­ holic F'amities (New York: William Morrow, 1991). 215. Quoted in Henry “Attention MOVE!” . 41. Also see “Six Bodies, 2 of Children, Taken from MOVE Rubble,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 15, 1985. 216. Quoted in Labaton, “Officials Contradict One Another.” 217. Quoted in R.W. Bradford, “Who Started the Fires? Mass Murder, American-Style,” in James R. Lewis, ed., From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994) p. 113. 218. Betty Jean Aborn was “a homeless, middle-aged Black woman with a history of mental illness. Confronted by seven burly [Los Angeles County] sheriffs after stealing an ice cream from a convenience store, she supposedly brandished a butcher knife. The re­ sponse was an incredible volley of twenty-eight rounds, eighteen of which perforated her body”; Davis, City ofQuart^ p. 8. On Diallo, see Michael Cooper, “Officers in Bronx Fire 41 Shots, and an Unarmed Man is Killed,” New York Times, Feb 5, 1999. More broadly, see Stolen Lives; Chevigny, Edge of the Knife; Allyson Collins, Shieldedfrom Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998); Jill Nelson, ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). 219. Mike Davis, public lecture broadcast on radio station KGNU, Boulder, CO, Apr. 18, 1997. 220. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) esp. pp. 1-18. 221. Quoted in Staff, “Just Because You’re Not Paranoid........ Doesn’t mean you’re not being stroboscopically photographed from space,” Adbusters, No. 40, Mar./Apr.

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2002. 222. Marbury v. Madison (1 Cranch (5 U.S.) 137 (1803)). 223. I use the term “hegemonic” in the Gramscian sense of “historical bloc”; see Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and devolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) pp.170-9. 224. Thomas I. Emerson’s magisterial The System of Free Expression (New York: Random House, 1970) provides a superb analysis of one vector of this conditioning process. 225. The best overview will be found in Athan Theoharis’ Spying on Americans: Po­ litical Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978). 226. These were, the Committee said, “repugnant to a democracy”; U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Ac­ tivities, Final Report: Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Ameri­ cans, Book III (Washington, D.C.: 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1976) p. 7. Also see U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Hearings on FBI Counterintelligence Programs (Washington, D.C.: 93d Cong., 2nd Sess., 1974). 227. The Committee was willing to concede only that some of the operations con­ ducted against the Black Panther Party, for example, “came close to” complicity in murder; U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Re­ spect to Intelligence Activities, The FBI's Covert Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party (Washington, D.C.: 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1976) p. 38. 228. For discussion, see Arnold Beichman and Roy Godson, “Legal Constraints and Incentives,” in Roy Godson, ed., Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s: Counterintelligence (Washington, D.C.: National Strategy Information Ctr., 1980) pp. 281-319. 229. First published in the Federal Register on Dec. 4, 1981, EO 12333 was most re­ cently reprinted in U.S. Department of Justice, Compilation ofIntelligence Laws and Related Laws and Executive Orders of Interest to the National Intelligence Community (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995) p. 753. For analysis, see Editors, “The Executive Order,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 16, Mar. 1982. 230. See note 11. 231. M. Wesley Swearingen, conversation in Santa Fe, NM, Apr. 1992 (notes on file). 232. Laura Whitehorn, “Preventive Detention: A Prevention of Human Rights? In Churchill and Vander Wall, Cages of Steel, pp. 365-79. On Ojeda-Rios, who spent five years in lockup before going to trial—and being acquitted—see “Filiberto is Free!” La Patria Radical, NcA. 2, No.2, Sept. 1989. On Joe Dougherty, see re Dougherty (599 F.Supp. 270, 275 (S.D.N.Y. 1984)). Overall, see Susie Day, “Political Prisoners: Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” Sojourner, Feb. 1989. 233. See note 20 and accompanying text.

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233. Levasseur, “RICO Act.” Also see Ric Kahn, “Fed Excesses: Going too far to get the Ohio 7,” Boston Phoenix,8, 1988. 234. James X. Dempsey and David Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security (Los Angeles: First Amendment Foundation, 1999) p. 181n30. For the report itself, see General Accounting Office, “International Terrorism: FBI Investigates Domestic Activities to Identify Terrorists,” in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Civil and Constitu­ tional Rights, FBI Investigation of First Amendment Activities (Washington, D.C.: 101st Cong., 1st Sess., 1989) pp. 112-57. 235. Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, p. 161n30. 236. House, FBI Investigation. Also see U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Break-ins at Sanctuary Churches and Organisations Opposed to Administration Policy in Central America (Washington, D.C.: 100th Cong., 1st Sess., 1987); Committee on the Judiciary, CISPES and FBI Counterterrorism Investigations (Washington, D.C.: 100th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1988); Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War against the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1991). 237. On the Palestinians, see American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee v. Meese (714 F.Supp. 1060 (C.D. CA. 1989)), American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee v. Thornburgh (970 F.2d 501 (9th Cir. 1991)), American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee v. Reno (70 F. 3d 1045, 1053 (9th Cir. 1995). On Amnesty International, see Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, pp. 47-9. On ACT-UP, see Greg B. Smith, “FBI to Probe Itself on AIDS Group File,” New York Daily News, May 18, 1995. On the “Green Movement,” see Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement (New York: Viking Press, 1993) esp. pp. 316-41; David Helvarg, The War Against the Greens (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997). 238. See, e.g., the new preface to the Classics edition of my and Vander Wall’s Agents of Repression. 239. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, FBI Counterintelligence Visits to Libraries (Washington, D.C.: 100th Cong., 2d Sess., 1988). Also see Robert D. McFadden, “FBI in New York Asks Librarians’ Aid in Reporting Spies,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1987. 240. “A sixth grade elementary school student, Brad Patterson, wrote letters to 169 foreign countries in 1983 requesting information for a school project. This prompted a visit by the FBI to Todd’s home in Newark in late 1983. An FBI agent questioned Todd’s parents, and later the boy himself, about the school project and international correspon­ dence received in response to Todd’s letters. After these, the FBI created a file on Todd. While the FBI maintained [during subsequent court proceedings] that it conducted no further investigations after 1983, FBI documents indicated that it continued to monitor Todd’s activities as late as December 1985”; Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Con­ stitution, p. 49. The courts upheld the Bureau’s right to do so insofar as its investigation was categorized as being “counterterrorist ” in nature; Patterson v. U.S. (705 F.Supp. 1033

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(D. NJ. 1989), affd, 893 F.2d 595 (3d Cir. 1990), cert, denied, 498 U.S. 812 (1990)). The parallel to the FBI’s investigation of a Boy Scout troop suspected of “subversive activi­ ties” during the 1960s should be obvious (p. 51). 241. See my “Third World at Home,” pp. 15-6; Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, p. 107. 242. The very term “assault rifle” is a misnomer when applied to semiautomatics. A real assault rifle—the importation for civilian consumption of which was banned under the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 (100 Stat. 449)—is capable of firing on full automatic. Real assault rifles were therefore subject to the same stringent con­ trols pertaining to the National Firearms Act of 1934 (ch. 757,48 Stat. 1236, now codi­ fied at 26 U.S.C. §§ 5801-72 (1994)) and the revisions contained in the Gun Control Act of 1968 (82 Stat. 1213). See generally, U.S. v. Anders (885 F.2d 1248 (5th Cir.(1989)). 243. “To secure passage of the legislation, statements were made that can only be described as lies. California’s Senator [Barbara] Feinstein assured the Senate that one extremely expensive Swiss rifle had become the preferred weapon of gang shoot­ ers—when in fact no case could be found of its criminal use”; Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 320. More broadly, see Richard Morgan and David Kopel, The “Assault Weapon” Panic (Golden, CO: Independence Institute, 1993). For some of the better le­ gal analyses, see Sanford Levinson, “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” Yale Taw Journal, No. 99, 1989; Akhil Reed Amar, “The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment,” Yale Taw Journal, No. 101, 1992; William Van Alstyne, “The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Bear Arms,” Duke Taw Journal, No 43, 1994. 244. Richard I. Mack and Timothy Robert Walters, From My Cold Dead Fingers: Why America Needs Guns! (Safford, AZ: Rawhide Western, 1994) pp. 80-1. It should be noted that at this point New Jersey does at last have an assault weapon case. On April 10,2002, an off-duty Dover Township policeman named Edward Lutes used an MP-5 to murder five neighbors, wound his boss, and kill himself; John Curran, “Jersey police stunned after cop kills five, self,” San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 11, 2002. 245. Actually, only one of these—the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—might rightly be classified as a “terrorist act.” The other “incident,” which occurred in Apr. 1992, was a brief sit-in by five people at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York, for which the offenders were sentenced to three months apiece in jail. As for “domestic terrorism,” there were a total 16 acts thus classified for all of 1992-93, nine of them “committed in a single night by animal rights activists who vandalized displays of furs in Chicago department stores.” As for “terrorist attacks against U.S. interests abroad,” these had also been declining steadily since 1987, according to the State Department; Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, pp. 111-2, citing the FBI’s annual report, Terrorism in the United States, for 1998, as well as the State De­ partment’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism. For further information, see Annamarie Oliverio, The State of Terror (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998).

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246. “[T]he Act reintroduces to federal law the principle of‘guilt by association’ that defined the McCarthy era. People can be punished, the Act says, not for what they do or abet, but for supporting the wholly lawful acts of disfavored groups. If the law had been on the books in the 1980s, it would have been a crime to give money to the African Na­ tional Congress during Nelson Mandela’s speaking tours here, for the State Department routinely listed the ANC as a ‘terrorist group’”; Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Con­ stitution, p. 118. 247. “Whoever in the United States or subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organiza­ tion, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years or both”; 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, as added by Section 303 of the Antiterrorism Act. 248. 8 U.S.C. § 1189, as added by Section 302 of the Antiterrorism Act. 249. Among the immediately discernable impacts was the revival of the long-dis­ credited ideological exclusion provisions of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act (66 Stat. 26)—repealed under the Immigration Act of 1990 (104 Stat. 4978, amendments codified at 8 U.S.C. §§ 1101 et seq.)—which “barred from the U.S. not only suspected Commu­ nists but also critics of U.S. foreign and defense policy seeking to visit the U.S. to speak to U.S. citizens”; Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, p. 124. 250. Ironically, the sheer arbitrariness of the Act’s detention provisions may best be highlighted by its erroneous—but nonetheless protracted—application to several peo­ ple working for the CIA as intelligence assets; Tim Weiner, “6 Iraqis Who Aided C.I.A. are Ordered Deported from U.S.,” New York Times, Mar. 11, 1998; R. James Woolsey, “Iraqi Dissidents Railroaded by U.S.,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 1998; Vernon Loeb, “Iraqis Detained on Flawed Data, Lawyers Say,” Washington Post, July 19,1998; Patrick J. McDonnell, “New Files Cast Doubt on Case Against 6 Iraqis,” Cos Angeles Times, Aug. 10, 1998. 251. A special “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” had already been estab­ lished under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (92 Stat. 1783, codified at 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801-11 (1982 & Supp. Ill), 18 U.S.C. §§ 2511, 2518-19 (1982 & Supp. IV 1986). for purposes of accommodating the use of classified—secret—evidence in espio­ nage cases. The 1996 Act led to the establishment of another such entity, dubbed the “Alien Terrorist Removal Court.” The constitutional problems inherent to the creation of such entities, as well as the spillover of secret evidence practices into “regular” judi­ cial proceedings, are covered in “Intelligence on the FISA Court,” Legal Times, Apr. 15, 1997; Benjamin Wittes, “Anti-Terrorism Act: Rhetoric vs. Reality,” Legal Times, June 2, 1997. 252. “Demonstrating the vulnerability of all rights in the face of antiterrorism rheto­ ric, the Act includes several destructive provisions having nothing to do with terrorism. One sharply curtails the right of habeas corpus, the ‘Great Writ’ by which federal courts have granted relief to people imprisoned as a result of violations of the Bill of Rights in state court criminal proceedings”; Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, p.

Preface

Ixxxvii

119.

253. William Branigin, “Secret U.S. Evidence Entangles Immigrants: Rarely Used Law Now Falls Most Heavily on Arabs,” Washington Post, Oct. 9, 1997; Ronald Smothers, “Secret Data and Hidden Accusers Used Against Some Immigrants,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 1998; John Mintz and Michael Grunswald, “FBI Terror Probes Focus on U.S. Muslims,” Washington Post, Oct. 31, 1998. Also see the editorial entitled “A New Brand of American Justice?” in the Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1998; Wittes, “Rhetoric vs. Reality.” 254. Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, p. 142. 255. One of the effects is to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to add a new Title IV, allowing the use of pen registers and trace devices, and a new Title V, expanding access to business records. 256. Dempsey and Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution, p. 143. 257. Ibid. 258. Richard Willing, “Wiretaps Sought in Record Numbers,” USA Today, June 5, 2000. The sheer quantity involved should be compared to that of the “bad old days” of COINTELPRO, charted herein at p. 304. 259. Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, p. 308. 260. For further details, see Theoharis, Spying on Americans, pp. 128-32; Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods ofAmerica's Political Intelligence Sys­ tem (New York: Vintage, 1981) pp. 275-6. 261. For an excellent overview, see Jim Redden, Snitch Culture... How Citizens are Turned Into the Eyes and Ears of the State (Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000). See especially the chapter on the activities of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith entitled “The ADL Spy Scandal,” pp. 205-10. The structural similarity between the ADL/police relationship described therein is remarkably similar to that which long prevailed between ACLU General Counsel Morris Ernst and the FBI; Gentry, Hoover, pp. 234-6. 262. Dreyfuss, “Spying,” p. 33. 263. Sarah Huntley, “Cops have ‘spy files,’ groups say,” Pocky Mountain News, Mar. 12, 2002; John C. Ensslin, “ ‘Spy files’ a mistake, Webb says,” Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 14, 2002; John C. Ensslin, “Spy files have storied past,” Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 14, 2002. 264. Dreyfuss, “Spying,” p. 33. Also see Robert Dreyfuss, “Is Terrorism a Phan­ tom Menace?” Mother Jones, Sept.-Oct. 2000. 265. Dreyfuss, “Spying,” p. 33. 266. Ibid. 267. Statement of Louis J. Freeh, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, on President’s Fiscal Year 2000 Budget Before the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee for the Departments of Commerce, Justice and State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies (Feb. 4, 1999). 268. President William Jefferson Clinton, State of the Union Address, Jan. 27, 2000.

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269. For background, see Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001). 270. Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America From 1870 to 1976 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [2nd ed.] 2001) pp. xxi-xxxii, 569-74. Also see Hardy with Kimball, Not an Assault, pp. 310-1. 271. Dreyfuss, “Spying,” pp. 33-4. 272. See Statement for the Record of the American Civil Liberties Union Submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee Concerning Department of Justice Oversight: Pre­ serving Our Freedoms While Defending Against Terrorism (Nov. 28, 2001). As has else­ where been observed, “To upstage and camouflage a real war at home, the threat of terror is being employed to justify a phony war” abroad; John Edgar Widemam, “Whose War: The Color of Terror,” Harper’s Magazine, Mar. 2002. 273. The verbiage is taken from a press conference convened by Attorney General Ashcroft in conjunction with FBI Director Robert Mueller on Sept. 17, 2001. I could as easily have elected to draw from statements by numerous other officials from the presi­ dent on down.

Introduction Gee, but I'd like to be a G-Man And go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Just like Dick Tracy, what a "he-man" And go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I'd do as I please, act high-handed and regal 'Cause when you're a G-Man there's nothing illegal.

- Harold Rome from "The G-Man Song" 1937

Introduction A Glimpse Into the Files of America's Political Police The inescapable message of much of the material we have covered is that the FBI jeopardizes the whole system of freedom of expression which is the cornerstone of an open society...At worst it raises the specter of a police state...in essence the FBI conceives of itself as an instrument to prevent radical social change in America...the Bureau's view of its function leads it beyond data collection and into political warfare.

- Thomas I. Emerson Yale Law Professor 1971

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Actually seeing the visual representation of that which others describe, and from which they draw conclu­ sions, can serve for many people as a sort of ultimate proof of the propositions at issue. The truth of this old adage seems quite pronounced in this instance, which leads us to reproduce secret FBI documents to allow the Bureau to document its own lawlessness. In Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (South End Press, 1988), we endeavored to prove among other things that the Bureau has since its inception acted not as the country's foremost crime-fighting agency - an image it has always actively promoted in col­ laboration with a vast array of "friendly" media representatives and "scholars" -but as America's political police engaged in all manner of extralegality and illegality as expedients to containing and controlling political diversity within the United States. In essence, we argued that the FBI's raison d'etre is and always has been the implementation of what the Bureau formally designated from the mid-1950s through the early '70s as "COINTELPROs" (COunterINTELligence PROgrams) designed to "disrupt and destabilize," "cripple," "destroy" or otherwise "neutral­ ize" dissident individuals and political groupings in the United States, a process de­ nounced by congressional investigators as being "a sophisticated vigilante opera­ tion."1 Our case, it seemed to us, was rather plainly made. Such clarity is, predictably enough, anathema to the Bureau and the more conscious apologists it has cultivated, both of whom wish to deny the realities we have sought to expose. For the FBI, as well as the broader politico-legalistic structure of which it is an integral part, there are matters of policy and outright criminal culpability to be covered up through systematic denial of truth and the extension of

1

2

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

certain countervailing mythologies. Many apologists have based their careers and professional reputations on shielding the Bureau from exposure while assisting in the perfection and perpetuation of its preferred myths. On this score, a review of Agents of Repression written for the Washington Post by Athan Theoharis, a professor at Marquette University, serves as an instructive example.2 The techniques employed in this attempt to discredit our theses afford virtual textbook instruction in how the facts of the Bureau's activities and agenda are obscured from the public by properly-anointed "experts" while the officiallyapproved image of the Bureau is reinforced, or at least maintained, through the mainstream media.3 Consequently, the Post review bears detailed scrutiny.

Of Myths and Documentation After accurately summarizing the main thrust of our conclusions regarding the nature, scope and duration of the FBI's domestic counterintelligence operations, Theoharis tries to bring about their dismissal out-of-hand. "Do the authors doc­ ument these alarming charges?" he asks. "The answer is quite simply: They do not." Observe that he does not attempt to challenge the appropriateness of the documen­ tation we offer, arguing that it is insufficient to our purposes or that we have somehow misinterpreted it. Instead, he asserts that we use no documentation at all, a claim intended to lead his readers to the false impression that Agents consists of nothing more than a lengthy stream of heavy-handed and unsupported accusations against the FBI. In order to accomplish this gross distortion, he simply remains silent about the fact that we accompanied our 388 pages of text with 79 pages of notes (all in fine print), some 1,513 entries in all, hundreds of them citing more than a single source, and fully a third referring to specific FBI and/or other government documents. Having ignored the evidentiary record upon which we base our work, he contrives to extend a countering, essentially fictitious "record" of his own. Focusing on our main thesis, that rather than being suspended in anything other than name in 1971 (when the FBI says it was), COINTELPRO was actually continued and even escalated against the American Indian Movement over the next several years, the reviewer sets his stage.4 The most serious problem with Agents, he says, is that "the authors seem indifferent to the uniqueness, and thus significance, of the FBI's COINTELPRO operations. They were unique because Bureau officials launched formal, action-oriented programs whose main purpose was not to collect evidence for prosecution, and in the process created a rather comprehensive written record of their actions."5 He goes on to claim that: In contrast to its activities against the Black Panthers [before 1971], activities authorized and monitored exclusively by the Bureau, the FBI's activities involving AIM were designed to result in judicial prosecution [and] were subject to review by

Introduction

3

Justice Department officials...The FBI files released on AIM do not document a program of harassment.

In this passage, Theoharis has carefully implanted another pair of serious pieces of disinformation in his supposedly factual rebuttal. One concerns the extent to which the Bureau has made available documents concerning its anti-AIM cam­ paign, while the other centers upon what is allegedly revealed within this documen­ tation. Both of these contribute directly to furtherance of the myth by which the FBI wishes to be publicly understood. Each element will be considered in turn, because both reveal much about the methods and functions of academic apologists in service to the Bureau propaganda system. "The AIM Files"

After mentioning "the FBI files released on AIM," Theoharis sums up his point with a snide query: "Can we then read between the lines and conclude that by the 1970s FBI actions were not recorded in writing?" Leaving aside the possibility that by this point in its history agents might well have learned not to record certain things in written form, it is abundantly clear to anyone familiar with the material to which the reviewer refers that neither we nor he has had the opportunity to assess what the FBI did or did not commit to paper with regard to its actions against AIM. Still less have we been forced to "read between the lines" of available documents in order to arrive at conclusions contradicted by such evidence. Contrary to Theoharis' smug remark about what his own perusal of these files shows, the fact of the matter is that the vast bulk of them have never been released. Although the Bureau acknowledgeshaving compiled hundreds of thousands of "investigative" documents during the course of its major anti-AIM activities, only 17,000-odd pages of this material have been declassified and made available to re­ searchers at the "reading room" facility in FBI headquarters, and most of these show extensive deletions. The reviewer is being deliberately misleading when he casually juxtaposes the veritable mountains of paper available through the FBI on its Black Panther COINTELPRO with the paucity of documents made available on AIM pretending these are equivalent data-bases - and then suggests he had predicated his conclusions upon a comparison of the two sets of files. Nor is he more forthcom­ ing about why such a disparity in the availability of these records exists. In essence, the FBI was quite literally forced to divulge most of its Panther files by the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations during hearings held in 1974 and 1975. Conversely, the Bureau was able to avoid being compelled to do this with regard to its anti-AIM operations, under circumstances which bear recounting.* Concerning the Panther documents, the Senate committee itself found its hand forced by a seemingly endless series of revelations about governmental transgressions during the early '70s. There was a "credibility gap" engendered by the federal executive branch having been caught lying too many times, too red-

4

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

handedly and over too many years in its efforts to dupe the public into supporting the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. This had reached epic proportions when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the "Pentagon Papers/' a highly secret government documentary history of official duplicity by which America had become embroiled in Indochina, and caused particularly sensitive excerpts to be published in the New York Times.7 The situation was greatly exacerbated by the so-called Watergate Scandal, which followed immediately, in which it was publicly revealed that virtually the entire Nixon administration had been, as a matter of course, engaging in exactly the same sort of behavior on many other fronts, both at home and abroad. To compound the crisis even further, a citizen's action group raided the FBI's Media, Pennsylvania resident agency, appropriated its files, and exposed the long-secret existence of COINTELPRO in the Washington Post.* As a result of all of these factors, public confidence in government was at an all-time low, and showed signs of unraveling even further. In this peculiar and potentially volatile set of circumstances, a governmentwide effort was undertaken to convince the citizenry that its institutions were fundamentally sound, albeit in need of "fine-tuning" and a bit of "housecleaning." It was immediately announced that U.S. ground forces would be withdrawn from Vietnam as rapidly as possible. Televised congressional hearings were staged to "get to the bottom of Watergate," a spectacle which soon led to the resignations of a number of Nixon officials, the brief imprisonment of a few of them, and the eventual resignation of the president himself. Another form assumed by this highlevel exercise in (re)establishing a national consensus favoring faith-in-government was the conducting of a series of well-publicized and tightly-scripted show-trialtype hearings with regard to the various police and intelligence agencies which had been exposed as complicit in the Vietnam and Watergate "messes." For its part, the FBI was cast as an agency which had "in the past' (no matter how recent) and "temporarily" (no matter how long the duration) "gotten out of control," thus "aberrantly" but busily trampling upon citizens' civil and constitutional rights in the name of social and political orthodoxy. To add just the right touch of melodrama to the whole affair, the Bureau was made to "confess" to a certain range of its already completed COINTELPRO operations - such as the not-directly-lethal dimensions of its anti-Panther activities - and to provide extensive portions of its internal documentation of these misdeeds. As a finale, Bureau officials were made to appear properly contrite while promising never to engage in such naughty things again. The FBI's quid pro quo for cooperating in this charade seems to have been that none of its agents would actually see the inside of a prison as a result of the "excesses" thereby revealed.’ The object of all this illusory congressional muscle-flexing was, of course, to instill in the public a perception that congress had finally gotten tough, placing itself in a position to administer "appropriate oversight" of the FBI. It followed that citizens had no further reason to worry over what the Bureau was doing at that very moment, or what it might do in the future. This, in turn, would allow the status quo

Introduction

5

sufficient breathing room to pass laws and executive orders gradually converting the FBI's COINTELPRO-style illegalities into legal, or at least protected, spheres of endeavor.10 The selling of this bill of goods was apparently deemed so important that congress was willing go to to extreme lengths in achieving success. Hence, in 1975 the Senate Select Committee concluded that in order to complete its (re)building of the required public impression, it might be necessary to risk going beyond exploration of the Bureau's past counterintelligence practices and explore ongoing (i.e.: ostensibly post-COINTELPRO) FBI conduct vis a vis political activists. Specifically at issue in this connection was what was even then being done to AIM, and hearings were scheduled to begin in July. But this is where the Bureau, which had been reluctantly going along up to that point, drew the line. The hearings never happened. Instead, they were "indefinitely postponed" in late June of 1975, at the direct request of the FBI, and on the basis of what by the Bureau's own admission turned out to have been a major disinformation ploy designed to win it widespread public support.11 The FBI's AIM files have thus ended up, not in the public domain as Theoharis would have his readers believe, but amongst the Bureau's most secret archives. While it is true, as the reviewer states, that die relatively few AIM files the FBI has chosen to release "do not document a program of harassment," what he intention­ ally leaves unstated is even more true: the released files in themselves provide a vastly insufficient evidentiary base from which Theoharis or anyone else might conclusively determine whether a de facto COINTELPRO was conducted against AIM. And sheer common sense will warn that the Bureau has not so fiercely resisted producing its records in this matter because their content is neutral or serves to absolve it of wrongdoing.12 "Judicial Prosecution" The obvious question at this point is whether the FBI's success in blocking access to AIM files makes it impossible to arrive at any legitimate conclusion concerning what the Bureau did to that organization. Are we guilty, as Theoharis claims, of mere reliance upon "guilt by association - i.e., that because the FBI launched a formal program to harass the Black Panthers, it adopted the same practices against AIM"? Hardly. Even disregarding such unofficial sources as eyewitness and victim ac­ counts of various episodes of the Bureau's anti-AIM campaign - many of which we will always insist hold at least as much validity and integrity as any FBI teletype, field report or memorandum - there are still a great number of official sources which we could and did use to support the conclusions we reached in Agents. These include several reports of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a pair of reports of the Justice Department's Task Force on Indian Matters, a report of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (Subcommittee on Internal Security), the find­ ings of the federally-sponsored Minnesota Citizens' Commission to Review the FBI, a report from the General Accounting Office, transcripts of the 97th Congress' first

6

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

session on FBI authorizations, several legal depositions, Bureau of Prison records, grand jury summaries, voluminous trial transcripts, an array of legal briefs and hearing transcripts, transcriptions of oral arguments on appeal and a number of judicial opinions. These sources, adding up to tens of thousands of pages of documentation, were all cited repeatedly, and most of them quoted, in Agents. Theoharis avoids mentioning this extensive documentary base - consisting of the same sort of material he himself has drawn upon quite heavily in his own books on the FBI - while summarily dismissing our effort as "undocumented." And well he might. The conclusions reached in virtually every item of the real record correspond quite neatly with one or more of those drawn in Agents. This is to say that the tangible, officially available record of the FBI's anti-AIM campaign leads directly away from the sort of absolution of the Bureau Theoharis seeks to foist on his readers. It was, after all, the Civil Rights Commission - not Churchill and Vander Wall - which determined after extensive on-site investigation that the FBI had been complicit in rigging the 1974 Pine Ridge tribal election against AIM candidates.13 And it was this same federal agency which officially reported that the Bureau was involved in perpetrating "a reign of terror" against AIM members and supporters on the same reservation, during the same period.14 Similarly, it was not the "tendentious" authors of Agents, but federal district judge Fred Nichol who noted that he was dismissing charges against AIM defen­ dants because of the methods employed by the FBI and federal prosecutors. "The waters of justice have been polluted," said the judge, by the Bureau he had "revered so long," but which had "stooped so low" in its vendetta against AIM.15 And again, it was not us but the foreman of a federal jury who, when acquitting other AIM defendants of murder charges the FBI had lodged against them, observed that aspects of the case assembled by the Bureau had been so obviously fabricated that not a member of the jury believed them.16 We could, as we did in Agents, go on in this vein for hundreds of pages. But that book has already been written. The last two examples are especially important, however, since they disprove Theoharis' argument that, "in contrast to its activities against the Black Panthers...the FBI's activities involving AIM were designed to result in judicial prosecu­ tion." The first untruth embedded in this proposition is that the COINTELPRO directed against the Panthers did not use false prosecution as a tactic.17 The reality is, as is borne out in a Bureau document quoted verbatim in Agents, "key black activists" were repeatedly arrested "on any excuse" until "they could no longer make bail." As an illustration of how this worked, we examined in some detail the case of former Panther leader Geronimo Pratt, imprisoned in San Quentin for the past 18 years as a result of FBI actions causing him to be repeatedly prosecuted on bogus charges until he was finally convicted of a murder the Bureau had knew he never committed.18 As concerns AIM, the facts - which Theoharis opts to ignore - fit precisely the same pattern. After the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee, for instance, the FBI caused 542 separate charges to be filed against those it identified as "key AIM leaders." Russell

Introduction

7

Means alone was faced with 37 felony and three misdemeanor charges. Organiza­ tion members often languished in jail for months as the cumulative bail required to free them outstripped resource capabilities of AIM and supporting groups. Yet, when it came time for the trials, the transparency of the Bureau's evidence was such that hundreds of charges were simply dropped while the remaining defendants were acquitted in droves. The net result of this FBI "prosecution" effort was an absurdly low 15 convictions, all on such petty or contrived "offenses" as "interfering with a federal officer in the performance of his duty." None of the 40 charges leveled at Means held up in court.19 But, while the juridical nature of what the Bureau was doing may be seen as ludicrous at best, this "prosecutorial" element of the anti-AIM campaign self-evidently served to "disrupt," "destabilize" and even "cripple" its target. At another level, one might reasonably ask what sort of bona fide "investigation to facilitate prosecution" is involved in FBI agents bribing an individual, as they did with Louis Moves Camp, to testify as an "eyewitness" to the participation of others in felonious acts allegedly committed at a time when the witness was a thousand miles from the scene?20 This is just one of the "Bureau activities involving AIM" which came out during the 1974 trial of Russell Means and Dennis Banks, the sort of activity which caused Judge Nichol to dismiss charges and write the opinion quoted earlier. The same query might be entered with regard to other of the FBI's efforts to secure conviction of AIM members. For example, what sort of legitimacy is it that attaches itself to the arrangement in which charges were dropped against Marvin Redshirt, confessed murderer of Los Angeles cab driver George Aird, in exchange for his admittedly perjured testimony against AIM members Paul "Skyhorse" Durant and Richard "Mohawk" Billings, men who were subsequently exonerated from having any part in the crime?21 We can easily go on framing such questions: What, exactly, is the difference between the way the FBI subverted the judicial system to "get results" during its COINTELPROs against "black extremists," and its well-documented kidnapping and raw coercion of a mentally unbalanced Indian woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, in order to force her to sign three mutually contradictory - and utterly false - affidavits; the Bureau's choice of the affidavits was, to be sure, duly submitted in court as an expedient to obtaining AIM member Leonard Peltier's extradition from Canada.22 For that matter, what is the precise distinction between the COINTELPRO usage of phony witnesses such as Julio Butler in order to obtain the murder conviction of Geronimo Pratt on the one hand, and the FBI's later use of Poor Bear in the same capacity to secure a murder conviction against AIM member Richard Marshall on the other?23 And again, what are we to make of FBI agents who went on the stand and testified to one thing in the murder trial of AIM members Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, only to reverse completely their testimony on the same events during the subsequent trial of Leonard Peltier on the same charge? Obviously, the documented nature of the FBI's activities "designed to result in judicial prosecution" of AIM members was identical to those it employed under the

8

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

rubric of COINTELPRO against the Black Panther Party and other black liberation organizations. For Theoharis to argue that the Bureau's "prosecutorial" tactics against AIM are normal FBI procedure not only tends to dissolve the very distinction between the COINTELPRO and "post-COINTELPRO" eras he seeks to establish, it bespeaks a very interesting view on his part of how the judicial process should be used. Theoharis does make an important and serious point when he observes that the Panther COINTELPRO was "action-oriented" in ways which went beyond any conceivable definition of the judicial arena. We agree. So much so that, in Agents, we broke the tactical methodologies of COINTELPRO out into 10 separate categories, only one of which concerned manipulation of the judicial system, and demonstrated by example how each had been applied to the Panthers and other black liberation groups. This, however, hardly serves to validate either his assertion of a "contrast" between what was done to the Panthers and AIM, or his contention that the latter was not subjected to a comparable "program of harassment." To the contrary, we also demonstrated, on the basis of available documentation, that each of the remain­ ing nine non-judicial COINTELPRO methods was utilized during the repression of AIM. Take, for example, the category of "black propaganda." In the book, we quote verbatim one of the FBI's "Dog Soldier Teletypes," deliberately released to the press in 1976 under the guise of alerting the public to the "fact" that some "2,000 AIM warriors" were on the verge of launching an outlandish wave of terrorism through­ out South Dakota. We cite a number of articles in major newspapers across the country in which this disinformation immediately and prominently appeared, as well as statements by local police authorities responding to the "menace." And we quote then-director of the FBI Clarence Kelley, on the witness stand shortly there­ after, admitting that he knew of no factual basis whatsoever to support these wild public allegations on the part of his typically close-mouthed Bureau. Several other instances of FBI activity vis a vis AIM in the propaganda area are also chronicled and substantiated with comparable documentation in Agents.1* Or, take the matter of the COINTELPRO tactic of infiltrating agents provocateurs into target organizations (provocateurs, as opposed to mere informants, are used to actively and illegally disrupt, entrap and otherwise neutralize their quarry). In Agents, we present an undeniable case that this was done to AIM in exactly the same fashion as it was done to the Panthers. The matter concerns the activities of one Douglass Durham, and is abundantly documented through such sources as the earlier-mentioned Skyhorse/Mohawk case (during which FBI undercover em­ ployee Durham went on the stand impersonating an "Iowa psychologist" in order to cause bail to be denied the defendants), the provocateur's own admission of what he'd done after he was unmasked as an infiltrator in 1975, and his subsequent testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. And so it goes, point by point, down the entire list of elements comprising the Bureau's COINTELPRO repertoire.

Introduction

9

All of this disproves Theoharis' assertion that, when it came to AIM, the FBI's methods "were designed [only] to result in [legitimate] judicial prosecution." It also contradicts his accusation that, in concluding otherwise, we were forced to rely upon sheer "guilt by association." And, by rights, it should expose for what it really is the reviewer's allegation that "at no time do [we] substantiate [our] conjecture that an FBI-orchestrated conspiracy to harass AIM." Contrary to the fabricated version of reality presented in die Post review, it has been solidly demonstrated that the American Indian Movement was very much the victim of a de facto COINTELPRO operation.

Mythology

Merely being on the receiving end of a disingenuous review, while never pleasant, hardly warrants the assembly of an in-depth counter-critique such as we have provided here. At issue here, however, is not just the fact that Theoharis used his mainstream media forum as a vehicle with which to prevent accurate informa­ tion from reaching the public, but the kinds of inaccuracies he seeks to promulgate as a replacement. It is not so much that he denies the validity of the way in which we used our documentation in Agents, for example, as that he denies such documenta­ tion exists. The upshot here is that he deliberately portrays the FBI - which in actuality went to extraordinary lengths to block disclosure of its AIM files in the 1970s, and which has clamped tire tightest mantle of secrecy around them ever since - as a model of propriety, thoroughly forthcoming and above-board in the handling of these records, with nothing hidden about its anti-AIM campaign. The image projected by Theoharis' reference to a fictional "release" of AIM files is that the Bureau - which in reality has once again taken to treating the Freedom of Informa­ tion and Privacy Acts as so much toilet paper, generally refusing to release any new document unless expressly required to do so by court order - is that of an "open" agency which typically makes its records available to researchers and the public at large. The resultant mis-impression is a building block in the reviewer's reasonably subtle construction of the real "contrast" he wishes to impart concerning what was done to the Black Panther Party and what was done to AIM. The locus of the false distinction Theoharis is after lies not so much within the experiences of the two groups as within the FBI itself. In "the bad old days" of COINTELPRO, the story goes, the Bureau was proven to have committed criminal acts and used official secrecy to conceal them, but those days ended forever in the wake of the Church Committee investigations. When an FBI agent like Richard W. Held orchestrated a program in 1971 to disrupt and destroy the Los Angeles Black Panther Party, Theoharis agrees that this was a political counterintelligence programbecause FBI documents released to the Church Committee concerning these activities bore the caption "COINTELPRO." However, when the same agent was involved in the same type of program using exactly the same techniques against AIM on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 or the Puerto

10

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

Rican independence movement in San Juan in 1985, Theoharis would have us believe this could not have been a COINTELPRO because the FBI has not released related documents bearing said caption. And, according to him, for us to assert otherwise is by definition simply "guilt by association."25 The pacifying effect upon readers intended by the spooning up of this stale pabulum is unmistakable. And for the relative few who might remain skeptical in the face of this sort of reassurance, the reviewer offers a slightly different tranquilizer. They are calmly handed the option of sharing "the authors' outrage over some of the Bureau's [postCOINTELPRO] investigative methods and the fairness of the American legal system [emphasis added]," as if in the end we had somehow all agreed that it is only investigative rather than counterintelligence techniques which are at issue, and that the actions of the FBI in this quarter conform to some recognizable system of legality. The invitation extended to skeptics is thus no more than a final touch to the review's main purpose, a ruse designed not only to divert the last measure of attention away from what is contained in Agents, but to posit in its stead an impression of the reviewer's preferred version of reality. We have arrived at the core of the myth, perpetuation of which constitutes the real purpose of reviews such as Theoharis'. This is, and has always been, the central myth of the FBI. Regardless of the variations and complexities of the lesser mytholo­ gies required to support it at a given moment or given context, it has remained remarkably consistent and ultimately reducible to the simplest terms: "Don't worry, everything is OK now." No matter when or in what circumstances the Bureau has been called to account, its official spokespeople and unofficial apologists can be counted upon to queue up and say whatever is necessary to pass along the idea that, while there may have been "problems" or "errors" in the past, these have been corrected. There has never been, in such recountings, any current reason for worry or concern. All has already been set right. This theme prevailed in the 1920s, in the wake of the Palmer Raids. It was main­ tained in the '30s, after the worst of the Bureau's union busting had been completed. It continued in the '40s, when the true extent of the FBI's surveillance of the citizenry began to be apparent. During the '50s, it held up even as the Bureau's linkages to Mc­ Carthyism were exposed. In the '60s, those who would pose uncomfortable ques­ tions concerning FBI activities were, like Martin Luther King, dismissed as liars and "paranoids." Even during the 1970s, as the COINTELPRO revelations were ushered forth, the myth was used as the Bureau's major defense. And in the end, as always, it held sway. Meanwhile, through it all, the apparatus of political repression which the myth was created to shield continued, essentially unhindered by real public scrutiny of any sort, to be evolved, perfected and applied. As we enter the '90s, the FBI's slaughter of "AIM militants" has long since been completed and hidden from view. CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) and some 200 other domestic dissident groups have more recently found themselves monitored, disrupted and occasionally destabilized by Bureau operatives using many of the same COINTELPRO tactics employed against "New

Introduction

11

Left" organizations two decades ago.2* And still Professor Theoharis would have us believe the FBI no longer engages in political counterintelligence programs and when evidence emerges to the contrary, the Bureau (not the victims) should be given every benefit of the doubt. We readily concur with his assessment that these are "important questions of decided contemporary relevance." Unlike him, however, we will continue to conclude that their importance lies in the fact that, concerning the form and function of the FBI, things have never been "OK." Further, we will continue to assert that things will never be OK in this regard until the realities both he and the Bureau seek so desperately to hide are brought fully into the open, until the whole pattern of FBI performance has at last been pieced completely together, called by its right name and placed before the public. Then, perhaps, real corrective action can occur. Unquestionably, the start of any such positive process must rest in destroying the myth Theoharis so clearly presents.

The COINTELPRO Papers Citation of materials not readily accessible to the general public is not in itself sufficient to decide such issues, and this takes us right back to the proposition that a picture is worth a thousand words. Therefore, in this follow-up volume to Agents we will photographically reproduce a substantial selection of the FBI documents which led us to the conclusions expressed in Agents. Hence, when we say, for example, that the Bureau was engaged from its earliest moments in precisely the same tactics of political repression which later marked the COINTELPRO era per se, we do not intend to leave the matter open to debate or charges of "conjecture." Instead, we will provide the exact facsimile of a document - such as the accompa­ nying 1919 letter written by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover proposing a strategy which was ultimately used to neutralize black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey - allowing the Bureau itself to create a "word picture" concretizing our case for us. As concerns the Garvey letter, readers should take careful note of the fact, clearly drawn by Hoover, that it is not written about an individual who is believed to have violated (or is planning to violate) any particular law. To the contrary, the FBI director is recommending - to the very sort of Justice Department officials whose "review" Theoharis would have us believe now safeguards us against such FBI activities - that the federal government devote its vast legal resources to contriving a case, any case, against Garvey, to make him appear guilty of a crime. In this way, the black dissident's eventual imprisonment could be made to seem a simple "criminal matter" rather than the act of political repression it actually was. The key to understanding what really happened in the Garvey case lies squarely in appre­ ciation of the fact that the decision to bring about his elimination had been made at the highest level of the Bureau long before any hint of criminal conduct could be attached to him. In the same vein, when we contend that upon approval of Hoover's plan the FBI

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

12

< DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, JftT-TPO

WASHINGTON, O. C.

October 11, 1919. MZMORALfDUM ?0R ITll. RIDGELY.

I sun transmitting herewith a communication which h'.-8 come to my attention from ;he Panama Canul, Washington office, rela­ tive to the activities of MARCUS JARVRY. Garvey is a WestIndian negro and in addition to his activities in endeavoring to establish the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation he has also been particularly active among the radical elements in New York City in agitating the negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an un­ desirable alien, from the point of view of deportation. It occurs to me, however, from the attached clipping that there might be some proceeding against him for fraud in connection with his Black Star Line propaganda and for this reason I am transmitting the communication to you for your appropriate attention. The following is a brief statement of Marcus Garvey and his activities: Subject a native of the West Indies and one of the most prominent negro agitators in New York; He is a founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Asso­ ciation and African Communities League; He is the promulgator of the Black Star Line and is the managing editor of the Negro World; He is an exceptionally fine orator, creating much excitement among the negroes through his steamship proposition; In his paper the "Negro World" the Soviet Russian Rule is upheld and there is open advocation of Bolshevism.

Respectfully,

1919 letter from J. Edgar Hoover to the Attorney General, proposing to frame Marcus Garvey as a means of "neutralizing" the black nationalist leader's political effectiveness.

used infiltrators against Garvey's non-criminal United Negro Improvement Asso­ ciation (UNIA) in order to cast about for some kind of "evidence" through which a plausible case against its leader could be developed, we are prepared to back it up. For instance, we can reproduce the 1921 report to the Bureau from James Wormley Jones, code-named "Confidential Agent 800," a black man paid by the Bureau to work his way into a position of trust within UNIA. It should be noted that even with this highly-placed source of inside information, the FBI was unable to assemble any sort of case against Garvey in its first two attempts, both of which had to be abandoned for lack of even the appearance of substance. In the end, having charged him with everything from income tax evasion to conspiracy, the Bureau managed

Introduction

13

A report from James Wonnley Jones, the "confidential agent 800" who infiltrated UNIA and helped finger Marcus Garvey for the FBI.

to obtain a conviction on only a single, relatively minor, count of mail fraud. This was enough, however, to take the black leader out of the political arena and into Atlanta federal prison, from whence he could be deported as an "undesirable alien" in 1927.27 Or, if we wish to leap three decades ahead and assert that comparable methods were utilized by the Bureau vis a vis "liberal" government officials such as Alger Hiss - an expedient in promoting McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early z50s - we can produce documents to this effect. For example, consider the accompanying letter from Horace Schmahl to FBI agent Thomas Spencer. Schmahl, it should be noted, was an ostensible private investigator retained by Hiss defense attorneys to ferret out evidence which would exonerate their client from charges he'd used a position in the State Department to spy for the Soviet Union. In actuality, Schmahl was reporting directly to the Bureau on every nuance of the defense strategy, a matter which undoubtedly proved a great boon in the government's securing of a conviction. The particular missive from Schmahl we reproduce is especially interesting because it shows him alerting the FBI to Hiss' attorneys' plans to argue on appeal that the key piece of evidence introduced by the government at the trial - a

14

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

HORACE »>• . SCHMAHL TfclAL PREPARATION TEL. DI4-1795 Robert S. Gilson,Jr. Edward F. Gamber Associates

’ _ 62 William Street New York, New York

22 November 1950

Mr. Thomas Spencer, Special Agent Federal Bureau of Investigation U.S. Court House Foley Square New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Spencer:

Today I had a visit from Mr. J. Howard Haring, the hand­ writing expert who had been retained upon your suggestion by Mr. McLean in the origional Hiss investigation. I had an occasion to use Mr. Haring on some other matter, and he told me that Mr. Lock­ wood had recently called on him, accompanied by an attorney named Lane. Mr. Haring told me that Messers. Lockwood and Lane had with them a typewriter expert named Tytel. According to Mr. Haring, Lockwood and Lane proposed to retain Mr. Haring to assist Mr. Tytel in some task which he had undertaken upon the request of Messrs. Lockwood and Lane in anticipation of a new trial in the Hiss case. It appears that Tytel had been retained by Mr. Hiss* attorneys to reconstruct a Woodstock typewriter which would have the identical type characteristics as the machine on which the Whittaker Chambers papers had been typed. It seems furthermore that Tytel is doing this work with the aid of typed records only. He claims that he has not seen or had any physical contact with the Woodstock typewriter which figured in the original trial. Tytel told Mr. Haring that he expected to testify in this anticipated new trial that he had been able to reproduce a machine having the same type characteristics as the machine introduced in the course of the original trial without ever having seen the machine. This would appear to indicate that Hiss* new counsel might try to argue that the Whittaker Chambers papers, on the basis of which Hiss was convicted, were forgeries produced on a machine other than the Fansler Woodstock typewriter which had been doctored up to match the type of that machine. Mr. Tytel furthermore told Mr. Haring that in the course of his efforts to produce a Woodstock typewriter which would match the type characteristics of the original machine, he went "form blind”. Mr. Haring tells me that "form blindness" is an occupational ailment that sometimes befalls handwriting or typewriting experts when they concentrate strenuously on certain types of print or writing over a period of time. Tyel wanted to

Letter demonstrating that the private investigator supposedly working on Alger Hiss' defense effort was actually reporting to the FBI.

Woodstock typewriter once owned by Hiss, the type irregularities of which suppos­ edly matched those appearing in alleged espionage correspondence - could have been altered to produce the desired result. Schmahl's warning allowed the Bureau

15

Introduction

Page 2 - Mr. Thomas Spencer

retain Haring to complete his work. Haring, who is a good patriotic American, said that he would have none of it and suggested that Messrs. Lockwood, Lane and Tytel leave his office. Mr. Kenneth Simon left with my secretary an affidavit obviously prepared by Mr. Rosenwald, which he wanted me to sign. I refused to sign this affidavit. However, I am sending you here­ with enclosed a copy of it for your files. I expect to be pretty well tied up for the remainder of this week and therefore, find it difficult to drop-up and see you personally. I would prefer that you destroy this letter after it has served your purpose. I remain, with my very best personal regards to yourself and Mr. McAndrews. Faithfully yours, Horace Schmahl

P.S. Needless to say that any other information that will come into my hands will be promptly submitted to you.

suffident time to assemble a countering argument that no such modifications to a typewriter were possible. When we say the FBI was aware that its counter-argument - which served to keep the government's "proof of espionage" propaganda cam­ paign alive (and Hiss in prison) was categorically untrue, we can make our case by reproducing the accompanying January 1951 memo from A.H. Belmont to D.M. Ladd in which the author admits the "FBI Laboratory advised that it would be possible for a person who is well versed in typewriter defects and similarities in type design to construct a typewriter so that it would make these defective characteristics appear on paper when the machine was used." Instructively, both documents were among the many thousands of pages in its Hiss files the Bureau kept secret for nearly three decades after the case was closed.28 Both of the examples used thus far have seemed to demonstrate that the reality of COINTELPRO greatly predates the formal adoption of the acronym during the mid-1950s. If, on the other hand, we wish to demonstrate that this reality has continued to exist after the FBI so pointedly abandoned the term in 1971, we can readily illustrate our point. We can, for example, simply reproduce the accompany­ ing September 1983 teletype concerning the infiltration of an agent with "extensive UC [undercover] experience" into the Dallas chapter of CISPES. And lest the reader be persuaded the Bureau was doing this because it genuinely believed the organi­ zation was engaged (or planning to engage) in bona fide criminal activities "terrorism," according to current FBI director William Sessions - attention should

16

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

■ FORM NOU M

- Office "Mn'inorandum • TO

:

Zfr. D. Lf. Ladd

PROM

:

X. a. Be Imo nt f’*

united states

>

date: January 32), jp$i

JAY DAVID JllITTA.iER CHAHDEfS, ---- ------- Uia^ ET AL -....... ’ HHJUi.Y

SUBJECT:

.

To advise that the Hiss attorneys ha no. attempted to^construct a Jo adstock, typewriter which will have the same' typing chnracteristics as the typing on the Chambers documents used as evidence in this case; that by pure conjee ture they apparently intend to show that Chambers had'constructed a foodstock typewriter on which Chambers typed these documents, and that they, too, can construct a similar typewriter from the typing characteristics on the Chambers documents; that they are also endeavoring to prove that the film on which the "punakin papers'* v:-ere .photographed was not manufactured in 1935, but was manufactured at a later date. The FBI Laboratory advised »^hat it would be possible for a person who' is well ue~rsed in 'typewriter’def ects and similarities of type design to construct' । la typewriter so that it would make these defective characteristics »l (appear on paper when the machine was used; that if the Hiss attorneys have subsequently had a machine "doctored" to produce the defects appear ing i'n the 64 Chambers documents used by fhe Laboratory technician in his testimony in court,.and »those only, then they could easily have made a ^rave error, inasmuch, as every different character that makiz- its appearance iji the 64 dbcunents would h^ve to be studied cc. efully and the type faces "fixed" :n fhe typewriter; that jnot znly would the defects discovered fy the Laboratory- have to be identical, but the reconstructed typewriter would have to ave all of . t> its own characteristic letter defects eliminated and all of *’ ..the character istics appearing on the 54 documents. SA-.G I Donegan and USA JSaypol have been fully advised of defense tactics and they contemplate no action until such tine as the ; defense files a notion for a new trial based on newly-discovered j evidence. ' ,

. wwjinhtd

tX. - 75

’

- :£

• j..... .

......

' *

You will recall that Alger Hiss^jcp^ mainly on the Government's presentation in e vidence~'oj 64 typewr itten documents produced by uhittakcr Chambers, which.he claimed were FLJ:eas;(njf) Jh

Although federal prosecutors in the case of Alger Hiss contended that it would be impossible to alter Hiss' typewriter to match incriminating documents, here we find the FBI acknowledging the reverse was true. Upon advice of the Bureau, the government con­ tinued to deny the possibility of alteration during Hiss' appeal.

17

Introduction

L”

JP-A3

I0“4 • * DL00010 M3035 0Z

RR H

RECiWW ULE'’’ and leaflet set out in relet as the beginning of a long-range £ program to cause a dispute between I*a Coss Nostra (LCN) and ° the Connunist Party, USA (CPUSA). To strengthen this alleged o attack, add a last sentence to the leaflet: "Lstfs shoe 5 the hoodlums and the bosses that the workers are united against sweatshops,"

Take the usual precautions to insure this nailing cannot bo associated with the Bureau and advise of tangible to ' results. New Tork should also subnit /bllow-up recommendations § a to continue this program. 1. The Party has been the subject of recent bombings,, a typical hoodlum technique. Consider a spurious Party a —. statement blaming the LCN for the bonbings because of y ^arty efforts on behalf of the workersThis statenenfo ICT jflfigfiR qpuld be aimed at specific LCN members if appropriate. ft Xn developing this program, thought should also bo ‘ \given to initiating spurious LCN attacks on the CPUSA, so that -eachT, group would think the other was mounting arcampaign > Agaikdt it. % _ *

The Bureau very nuch appreciates New York's careful analysis of this program and the initial "low-key** technique suggested. ,$1 ? 1. - Special Investigative (Route tlfrougb for review) JJ

TJDsjss orandum Batts abovw, prepared' byp*

to Mr

Memorandum authorizing Operation Hoodwink. Senior FBI officials could not have helped but be aware that the proposed plan could easily result in the murder of CP leaders and organizers. This became a standard COINTELPRO tactic.

calling for the abolition of HUAC and because the church gave office space to a group the FBI did not like. In 1965, the FBI tried to block a City Council campaign of a lawyer who had defended Smith Act defendants. In 1966, the FBI tried to get the Texas State Alcohol Beverage Control Commission to raid a Democratic Party fundraising affair because two Democratic candidates who would be present had participated in anti-war and anti-HUAC activities.46

44

THE COINTELPRO PAPERS

Memorandum to

: DIRECTOR, FBI (1OO*W>533)

ridg/^SAC, NEW YORK (100*159^07)

ZljWf

hew York purposes olacing this caii

' K

; ...

'j

...w- .

.

>^M;,rd-l.'ifons . i_ L._ , f advised that tne CA'D was being operated from SWP hcadauarters and directed on a day-to-dav basis bv Berta Green, SWP member, and CAMD \ secretary. nass this Nnr»?anon on t0 aPPronriatc i--ccrs or tne NAACP in view of tne 5 stlpr>nTt Tf Sfnl 1 v ^tended to the CAMD. ‘

....

Memo initiating CAMD COINTELPRO.

University professor Morris Starsky (a matter which was not consummated until 1970).14 On other fronts, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out: Beginning in the late fall of 1971, some curious events took place in Detroit, Michigan. In late October, lists of supporters, contributors, and subscribers to the

COINTELPRO -SWP

Date:

TO:

DIRECWR, FBI

FRO.’!:

SAC, DFA'VEK

--------------

53

5/4/C5

< '

.A

sff.ject:,./’< "jurist tarty, v/.a co’cAtjxirt.-lail .A-’grar ' iiO'^AAL'S?aT;J J / -’C....... (SOCIALIST ••CR1L..RS FATTY)

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/

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