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COINTELPRO (an acronym for COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed "subversive", including anti-Vietnam War organizers, members of black civil rights and nationalist liberation organizations (e.g. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader "New Left". FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate" the activities of these movements and their leaders.〔(COINTELPRO Revisited - Spying & Disruption - IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE F.B.I. PAPERS )〕 Under Hoover, the agent in charge of COINTELPRO was William C. Sullivan.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 196. "Sullivan would become Hoover's field marshal in matters of national security, chief of FBI intelligence, and commandant of COINTELPRO. In that top secret and tightly compartmentalized world, an FBI inside of the FBI, Sullivan served as the executor of Hoover's most clandestine and recondite demands."〕 Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of these programs.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 233. "RFK knew much more about this surveillance than he ever admitted. He personally renewed his authorization for the taps on Levison's office, and he approved Hoover's request to tap Levison's home telephone, where King called late at night several times a week."〕 Kennedy would later learn that he also had been a target of FBI surveillance. ==History== Centralized operations under COINTELPRO officially began in August 1956 with a program designed to "increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections" inside the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA). Tactics included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide American communists internally.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 195〕 An October 1956 memo from Hoover reclassified the FBI's ongoing surveillance of black leaders, including it within COINTELPRO, with the justification that the movement was infiltrated by communists.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 198. "On October 2, 1956, Hoover stepped up the FBI's long-standing surveillance of black civil rights activists. He sent a COINTELPRO memo to the field, warning that the Communist Party was seeking to infiltrate the movement."〕 In 1956, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South.〔David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, ''Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 148, 154–59.〕 When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded in 1957, the FBI began to monitor and target the group almost immediately, focusing particularly on Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison, and, eventually, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 200.〕 After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote: In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech. ... We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 235.〕Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 236. "The bugs got quick results. When King traveled, as he did constantly in the ensuing weeks, to Washington, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Honolulu, the Bureau planted hidden microphones in his hotel rooms. The FBI placed a total of eight wiretaps and sixteen bugs on King."〕 In the mid-1960s, King began publicly criticizing the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most "notorious liar" in the United States.〔Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon and Shuster, 1999), p. 524-529〕 In his 1991 memoir, ''Washington Post'' journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous November 21, 1964 "suicide package" sent by the FBI that contained audio recordings of King's sexual indiscretions combined with a letter telling him "There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation."〔(Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon and Shuster, 1999) p. 527-529 )〕 During the same period the program also targeted Malcolm X. While an FBI spokesman has denied that the FBI was "directly" involved in Malcolm's murder, it is documented that the Bureau worked to "widen the rift" between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad that led to Malcolm's assassination.〔Taylor Branch, ''Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965'' (Simon and Shuster, 1999), p. 243〕〔(Gregory Kane, "FBI should acknowledge complicity in the assassination of Malcolm X" The Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2000 )〕 The FBI heavily infiltrated Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity in the final months of his life. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable asserts that most of the men who plotted Malcolm's assassination were never apprehended and that the full extent of the FBI's involvement in his death cannot be known.〔(Toure "Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr" The New York Times, June 17, 2011 )〕〔(James W. Douglass "The Converging Martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture, Princeton Theological Seminary, March 29, 2006 )〕 Amidst the urban unrest of July–August 1967, the FBI began "COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE", which focused on King and the SCLC as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Nation of Islam.〔("Guide to the Microfilm Edition of FBI Surveillance Files: Black Extremist Organizations, Part 1" Lexis-Nexis )〕 BLACK HATE established the Ghetto Informant Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations".〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 271.〕 A March 1968 memo stated the program's goal was to "prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups" ; to "Prevent the RISE OF A 'MESSIAH' who could unify...the militant black nationalist movement" ; "to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence (authorities )." ; to "Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to...both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy..."; and to "prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth." Dr. King was said to have potential to be the "messiah" figure, should he abandon nonviolence and integrationism;〔("The FBI Sets Goals for COINTELPRO" American Social History Project, City University of New York )〕 Stokely Carmichael was noted to have "the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way." 〔(Rob Warden "Hoover Rated Carmichael As 'Black Messiah'" Chicago Daily News, Feb 10, 1976 )〕 This program coincided with a broader federal effort to prepare military responses for urban riots, and began increased collaboration between the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense. The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1967 called Operation CHAOS.〔Weiner, ''Enemies'' (2012), p. 272. "Some 1,500 army intelligence officers in civilian clothing undertook the surveillance of some 100,000 American citizens. Army intelligence shared all their reports over the next three years. The CIA tracked antiwar leaders and black militants who traveled overseas, and it reported back to the FBI. The FBI, in turn, shared thousands of selected files on Americans with army intelligence and the CIA. All three intelligence services sent the names of Americans to the National Security Agency for inclusion on a global watch list; the NSA relayed back to the FBI hundreds of transcripts of intercepted telephone calls to and from suspect Americans."〕 A particular target was the Poor People's Campaign, a national effort organized by King and the SCLC to occupy Washington, D.C. The FBI monitored and disrupted the campaign on a national level, while using targeted smear tactics locally to undermine support for the march.〔McKnight, ''Last Crusade'', pp. 26–28. "By March the Hoover Bureau's campaign against King was virtually on a total war footing. In a March 21 'urgent' teletype, Hoover urged all field offices involved the in the POCAM project to exploit every tactic in the bureau's arsenal of covert political warfare to bring down King and the SCLC."〕 Overall, COINTELPRO encompassed disruption and sabotage of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party (1967), and the entire New Left social/political movement, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). A later investigation by the Senate's Church Committee (see below) stated that "COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident groups ..."〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=United States Senate )〕 Official congressional committees and several court cases〔See, for example, ''Hobson v. Wilson'',737 F.2d 1 (1984); ''Rugiero v. U.S. Dept. of Justice'', 257 F.3d 534, 546 (2001).〕 have concluded that COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「cointelpro」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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