My fellow Peace Action board member, Lawrence (Larry) Wittner, published in NewPolitics a review of Betty Medsger's book, The Burglary (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). I have selectively excerpted Larry's review to give a sense of what Medsger found out about the FBI's secretive ways after she learned that two old friends of hers had participated in the burglary. After persuading the two friends to be interviewed, she learned the identity of the other six participants and was able to interview them.
"The Burglary tells the story of how, on March 8, 19871, in the midst of the Vietnam War, eight peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in a effort to discover whether the FBI was working, illegally, to suppress American dissent. Spiriting away all the records in the FBI office, these daring men and women soon learned that the crime-fighting bureau was, indeed, engaging in a broad range of unlawful activities."
"A major virtue of the book is its revelation of vast FBI criminality. Hoover's secret FBI, as Medsger summarizes it:
'Usurped citizens' liberties... and used deception, disinformation, and violence as tools to harass, damage and ... silence people whose opinions the director opposed.... Agents and informers were
required to be outlaws. Blackmail and burglary were favorite tools in the secret FBI. Agents and
informers were ordered to spy on -- and create ongoing files on -- the private lives, including the
sexual activities, of the nation's highest officials and other powerful people.' "
"The FBI's spying operation were extraordinarily extensive. All black college student organizations, for example, were placed under surveillance and infiltrated. Indeed, on some college campuses, every black student was placed under surveillance. Moreover, the FBI infiltrated the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the NAACP. In fact, NAACP officials were also under continuous FBI surveillance since 1923."
COINTELPRO "was perhaps Hoover's most ambitious program of criminal activity. Created by Hoover in 1956 to harass Communists and other radicals, COINTELPRO was updated to COINTELPRO-New Left by the FBI director in 1968. The revised model was designed to 'expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize' the New Left movement by any means necessary, including spreading false, derogatory information about its leaders and organizations, creating conflicts among its leaders and members, burglary and violence. It targeted nearly all social change movements, including the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement. The FBI also secretly, and sometimes, violently, attacked college campus and alternative newspapers. Medsger observes that the bureau worked at 'forcing the publications to close, infiltrating them with informants, and threatening the credibility -- and sometimes the lives -- of their staff.' "
"With the FBI operating almost everywhere, its records grew enormously, and eventually included 500,000 domestic intelligence files, each typically including several individuals' names; Medsger writes of Hoover:
'No part of the government or American life was outside his reach. He used his secret power to destroy
individuals and to manipulate and destroy organizations. ... He secretly punished people he regarded
as wrong-thinking -- civil rights leaders, senior members of Congress who questioned war policy,
and also average people who wrote letters to a member of Congress or dared to express their dissent by appearing at an antiwar demonstration. In hoover's world ... any American was fair game.' "
"Thousands of university faculty members were spied upon and many fired from their jobs as a result of FBI activity. A 1958 study found that two-thirds of the then approximately 2,500 social science faculty members surveyed had been visited by the FBI at least once, and a third had been visited three or more times.' "
Plots against Dr. Martin Luther King JR. included office break-ins, use of informers, mail openings, wiretapping and burglary. Hoover's FBI even tied to convince King to commit suicide.
When in 1943, the U.S. Attorney General told Hoover to end his Custodial Detention Index -- a list of 26,000 Americans who might be imprisoned in the event of a war or national emergency -- Hoover lied about ending it. Hoover used material in his files as blackmail.
President Ronald Reagan relaxed restrictive guidelines on FBI activity put in by Attorney General Edward Levi.
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