7. The 'Do Not File' File
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Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Previously on Snafu. The FBI arrested 20 persons in Camden, New Jersey early today and charged them with trying to steal draft records from the federal building there. What we wanted was to persuade the jury that the war was wrong and that it had to be stopped and that our action was an attempt to find a jury who would set us free and end the war.

Why should these lives be cut down for tin, rubber and oil? And the judge says to the foreperson, do you have any other verdicts on any of the other defendants that are different on any of these counts? And the foreman said, no, your honor. And Senator Dole, the Republican chairman, accused the Democrats of trying to make the FBI look like an American Gestapo.

I'm the deputy chairman of the state of Illinois Black Catholic Party, Fred Hampton. We said that we would work with anybody, form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind. In the late 1960s, a lot of people had revolution on their minds. So when Fred Hampton spoke, they listened. He really was a great organizer and could relate to people quite well and had that charisma where people would follow him.

That's Omar Barbour, who joined the Black Panther Party in 1967. You have to have integrity and people have to feel you have integrity. And you can feel that with Fred, that he had integrity. Because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism. And we know that racism is just, it's a byproduct of capitalism.

Hampton opposed the war in Vietnam as another byproduct of capitalism. He empathized with the people of Vietnam. In his view, their suffering at the hands of the US military was inextricably linked to the oppression that Americans of color faced at home. In response to that oppression and the poverty around them, Hampton and the Black Panthers offered simple, effective solutions.

free breakfast programs for kids, free healthcare clinics, the kinds of things the U.S. government wasn't providing. - That's people's thing. Socialism is the people. If you're afraid of socialism, you're afraid of yourself. - Hampton mobilized real working Americans, particularly people of color, which made him a threat to the wealthy white establishment. Hampton knew he was on J. Edgar Hoover's radar. - We know they have our pictures. We know they're looking for us. We know they want us.

And then... December 4th, 1969, the day that we all wrote our will and testaments. Police arrived at Fred Hampton's West Side apartment at 4.45 this morning. They had a search warrant authorizing them to look for illegal weapons. That morning, America woke up to the news that Hampton had been killed, ostensibly in a shootout with police. The state's attorney's office says that Hampton and another man were killed in the 15-minute gun battle which followed.

The official story was the police were investigating a tip about an illegal weapons stash at Hampton's home. When the cops arrived, the story went, the Panthers unleashed a hail of gunfire on the police, setting off a shootout that killed Hampton. But that story did not hold up to scrutiny. Looking at the crime scene, it was immediately apparent that there hadn't been a shootout at all.

At least 100 shots had been fired, but the bullet holes clearly showed that 99 of them had come from police guns outside. Hampton didn't pick up a gun. He hadn't even gotten out of bed. The police had murdered him in cold blood. When we found out that of all the shots that were fired in the apartment, only one was fired out and everything else was fired in, then it became much more clearer that it was a shoot-in and not a shoot-out. Never said a word. Never got up out of bed.

Akua Njeri was Fred Hampton's girlfriend. At the time of the shooting, she was eight months pregnant. In this interview, she's holding their new infant son. A person was in the room. He kept calling out, stop shooting, stop shooting. We have a pregnant woman, a pregnant sister in here. Pigs kept on shooting. Heard a pig say, he's barely alive, he'll barely make it. I assume they were talking about Chairman Fred.

The whole thing was fabricated and was disproved. And that really got you to understand that there was definitely much more involved than just them coming to serve a warrant or whatever the justification was.

In 1971, the Illinois state's attorney who ordered the raid was charged with obstructing justice in the Hampton case. The illusion that Hampton died in a gunfight with police evaporated, leaving the public to wonder who wanted him dead and why they thought they could murder him with impunity. The answers took years to come out, but when they finally did, America would learn the truth behind Hampton's murder.

and the truth about J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. On season two, Medburg, the story of a daring heist that exposed J. Edgar Hoover's epic FBI snafu.

The Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI had pulled off an incredibly risky heist. They'd leaked the stolen documents to the press and successfully evaded J. Edgar Hoover's dragnet. As you might recall, buried within those documents was a single word, a codename, Cointelpro. To the burglars at the time, it meant nothing, just some bureau jargon.

Soon, an even splashier scandal. Watergate was dominating the headlines. The media burglary could have become a historical footnote, but it wasn't over yet. I had gone to the Senate Judiciary Committee to pick up a very mundane item, and people were using the photocopy machine, and I had to wait to get a copy of this report.

Carl Stern was a young reporter covering the Justice Department for NBC. One day in 1972, he was in a government office just waiting for a copy machine when an offhand comment piqued his interest. While I was waiting, my friend said, "Have you ever seen these papers?" And he had a couple of dozen pages that had been provided courtesy of the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI.

"While you're wasting time here, why don't you take a look?" And then flipping through the pages, I noticed one. It said, "Co-Intel Pro New Left." The FBI file contained an article from Barron's magazine criticizing left-wing student activism at Columbia. The file also contained a memo to agents of the media FBI office instructing them to anonymously mail this article to local college administrators.

There was even a little handwriting below the notice to the field office that said, Tom, referring to the agent in charge there, Tom Lewis, Tom, can you handle Swarthmore, Haverford, and Villanova? I mean, they had this thing really quite explicitly described. That's what caught my eye.

The implication was clear. The FBI was covertly trying to sway colleges into cracking down on anti-war students. COINTELPRO, New Left, appeared to be the name of this operation. But what the hell kind of operation was this? Mailed anonymously? Do FBI agents mail anti-left-wing literature anonymously? Is that what FBI agents do? And that's what bothered me.

Carl asked his usual government sources. A series of Justice Department and FBI employees, when I raised it, I said, whoop, you know, we can't talk about that. Which is Fed speak for keep your nose out of this, Carl. Well, nothing is going to get a reporter's interest more quickly than saying they can't talk about it.

So Carl turned to FOIA, the good old Freedom of Information Act. Although at this time, it was actually the good new Freedom of Information Act. It had only passed a few years earlier in 1968. Of course, the FBI denied his initial request, citing national security concerns. But Carl was a dog with a COINTELPRO bone.

So he sued the government. Now a judge would read a batch of documents explaining COINTELPRO and rule on whether or not they could be released to Carl. But he didn't want to read all those pages. So he gave it to his clerk, one of his clerks, to read over the weekend. The clerk lived in one of these housing developments over in Virginia. It was summertime, quite hot. He went to the swimming pool to take a dip and took the...

a handful of the documents with him to read at the pool. Northern Virginia, where even the poolside reading is highly classified. Okay.

Well, unfortunately, after his swim, he went back to his apartment. The doorbell rang, and it was some sweet young thing holding the documents saying, Sir, you left these under your chair, your lounger. So here were these highly important documents, which were in court litigating the sea, and they were under his chair at the swimming pool.

There's probably an alternate universe in which the aforementioned sweet young thing was a Soviet spy who picked up these documents, leaked them all and brought down the U.S. government. But instead, that sweet young thing who found and retrieved these documents and saved the republic, she became the clerk's wife.

Yep, it was the first meet cute in the history of the Freedom of Information Act, a victory for Love, and soon, maybe, a victory for Carl. But just as Carl started digging for its deepest, darkest secrets, the Bureau suffered the greatest loss of its 64-year history. I'll let Walter Cronkite break the news to you.

Good evening. J. Edgar Hoover has died at the age of 77. For almost every living American generation, Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, stood as the symbol of incorruptible law enforcement and untouchable who liked to boast that his men could not be bought. On May 2nd, 1972, J. Edgar Hoover died suddenly at his home in Washington, D.C. The official cause of death, cardiovascular disease. We like to think that maybe we hastened that a little bit.

Okay, so Bonnie Raines and the other burglars might not have been too upset. But mainstream America was in mourning. President Nixon ordered flags flown at half-staff. Hoover's body lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda, the first unelected civil servant given that honor. After thousands of people streamed through the Capitol to pay their respects, the only director the FBI had ever known was laid to rest at Congressional Cemetery.

In his eulogy for Hoover, President Nixon didn't just praise the late FBI director, he also lashed out at the FBI's haters. "The FBI will carry on in the future, true to its finest traditions in the past, because regardless of what the snipers and detractors would have us believe, the fact is that Director Hoover built the Bureau totally on principle."

Hoover died a hero to mainstream America, having blackmailed, imprisoned, buried, or otherwise outlasted generations of enemies and detractors. I'll be honest, I wish Hoover had lived just a little bit longer, because the following year, the judge in Carl Stern's secret document case ruled in his favor and ordered the release of a few crucial documents explaining that mysterious phrase, COINTELPRO.

What I got was four pages of paper. Okay, so not a lot of pages, but turns out, a lot of revelations. Even the first of the four pages referenced eight COINTELPRO programs dealing with things as a black extremist, socialist workers' party, disruption of white hate groups. They got New Left, of course, and so on and on.

It had been more than two and a half years since the burglars first uncovered that word, COINTELPRO. Now, finally, the world would know what it meant. This was the umbrella term for no fewer than eight FBI programs, all using patently unconstitutional counterintelligence tactics against American citizens. And according to Carl's sources, all happening without the knowledge of any attorneys general.

It was an explosive story. On December 6th, 1973, a dapper and confident young Carl Stern appeared on the NBC nightly news and introduced America to the dark sides of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The documents prove for the first time that the FBI undertook a program to harass and destroy new left political organizations whose views the federal police agency disagreed with.

Wrote FBI Director Hoover, the purpose of the program would be to expose and disrupt the new left. We must frustrate every effort of these groups and individuals to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents.

Carl's referencing memos from 1968 here, but to be clear, COINTELPRO began all the way back in 1956. The FBI had kept it a secret for the better part of two decades. But now, Carl was reading the Bureau's secrets out loud on national television. One former agent who participated in the program has described how burglaries, forged blackmail letters, and threats of violence were used to try to stop anti-war marches.

Many of the techniques were clearly illegal, but justified in the interest of national security. Today, the Justice Department said no attorney general authorized or knew of the program.

Almost immediately, the calls for congressional hearings began. But in classic Congress fashion, Congress dragged its feet. It took several more shocking revelations, including the news that Hoover had illegally spied on members of Congress, for the legislative branch to officially establish a committee to start looking into all this shit. Leading that committee was Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho.

He once said to me and others that he would be the last Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Idaho. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. That's Locke Johnson. He was special assistant to Frank Church during what came to be known as the Church Committee hearings. Locke and his team of investigators conducted an exhaustive review of intelligence practices at the FBI, CIA, NSA, and a bunch of other spooky acronyms.

By the way, for more on that, I hope you'll check out our bonus interview with Locke. Anyway, it took more than a year before the committee was ready to make its findings public. We were slow-rolled and stonewalled, and we used a couple of Washington expressions. We had to fight them tooth and nail.

Despite the slow rolling and stonewalling, Church's team eventually pried mountains of COINTELPRO documents away from the FBI. They conducted interviews with agents and with victims of the Bureau's misbehavior. On November 18, 1975, Frank Church sat in a crowded, high-columned chamber in the Russell Senate Office building and called to order a momentous hearing.

There has never been a full public accounting of FBI domestic intelligence operations. Therefore, this committee has undertaken such an investigation.

And it was packed with people, very ornate place. And in the front of the people, there were 500 people or so, citizens, tourists in many cases, and no doubt some KGB people in there trying to learn about American intelligence. In the front were television cameras and reporters, senators, all the 11 senators. And behind the senators were we staffers sitting to help them if they needed help.

You can actually see a young Locke Johnson just behind Frank Church in the old C-SPAN footage of the hearings. The proceedings began with a thank you. Frank Church voiced his appreciation for the anonymous burglars whose courageous actions had precipitated these hearings. From there, the focus turned to two government lawyers, Fritz Schwartz and Curtis Smothers. They were there to lay out the facts of Hoover's secret FBI. Here's Schwartz. Now, turning to COINTELPRO,

COINTELPRO is an abbreviation of the words "Counterintelligence Program". COINTELPRO is the name for the effort by the Bureau to destroy people and to destroy organizations, or as they use the words, disrupt and neutralize. All these horrible operations by the intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI,

against American citizens had their origins in this false belief that communism was going to destroy us. Counterintelligence activities are, by definition, conducted to counter the activities of foreign intelligence agents. But for years, the FBI had operated under the assumption that anyone speaking out against the government could be a foreign agent, or at least could be investigated as if they were.

Here's Curtis Smothers. Part of the problem is they attempted to translate the tactics used first against the Communist Party against virtually every perceived enemy as the Bureau looked across the landscape and decided who should be neutralized, discredited or destroyed. Take, for example, the Socialist Workers Party. They had been the target of what the FBI called, quote, black bag jobs, acute euphemism for when the FBI just straight up committed burglary.

Between 1960 and 66, FBI agents broke into the party's New York City offices no fewer than 92 times. You know what they say. If at first you don't succeed in finding evidence of Soviet espionage, try, try again. 91 more times. More than 400 black bag jobs would eventually come to light. Many of them involved photographing private homes and offices and or leaving behind listening devices to gather information on their targets.

This kind of thing is legal if you have a warrant. But the FBI never bothered with that pesky formality, which meant none of what they learned from these break-ins would be admissible in court. Hoover and his men were well aware of this. They didn't intend to build criminal cases against COINTELPRO's targets. Rather, the goal of these operations was simply to gather information that could be used against them. All information on activities in connection with demonstrations aimed at social reform.

whatever that may be. Basically, if your politics didn't meet with the FBI's approval, the Bureau felt entitled to gather information on every aspect of your life. Information which extended to their personal lives, indeed down to and including sex activities.

Hoover kept these black bag jobs under wraps with an almost unbelievably simplistic bureaucratic trick. Any files related to the break-ins went into a specially designated file called, I swear I'm not making this up, the Do Not File file. Presumably, Hoover kept that file locked in his This Is Not a Filing Cabinet filing cabinet.

And whenever he needed to threaten, embarrass, or just confuse his targets, he knew exactly where to look. The do not file file. Bureau agents were told to attack the new left by...

disinformation and misinformation. Schwartz recounted a story from the first inauguration of Richard Nixon. He told the committee how a protest group called the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam had cooperated with police in their efforts to keep demonstrations calm and organized. But the FBI didn't want an orderly protest. They wanted chaos. So they resorted to counterintelligence tactics. Now, what did the FBI do?

They found out what citizen band was being used for walkie-talkies, and they used that citizen band to supply the marshals with misinformation and, pretending to be a unit of the national mobilization to end the war in Vietnam, countermanded the orders issued by the movement.

The Bureau had targeted a lot of people that went way beyond even spying. These documents made it clear that the FBI was attacking these individuals, attempting to destroy their reputations. As it turned out, investigating actual criminals took a back seat to petty vindictive harassment, like trying to get people fired.

They'd even contacted a bank in Wisconsin and urged them not to give a home loan to a Cub Scout leader with communist sympathies. And I'll never forget going to visit Anatole Rappaport. He wrote some of the pioneer work in game theory. So he was one of America's finest intellectuals. Rappaport was a Russian immigrant, U.S. Air Force veteran, and professor at the University of Michigan.

He'd been at the forefront of the teach-in movement, inviting students to drop what they were doing and join open discussions of what was going on in Vietnam. Jay Gover went after him like you wouldn't believe, through anonymous letter writing in particular. Why? Well, first of all, Rappaport had been born in Russia. Ooh, scary.

So the FBI began to send out these anonymous letters claiming that Rappaport was a communist, that he was in control of Moscow and the KGB. The letters went to legislators in the state of Michigan, went to university administrators, and to the great shame of all of them involved, they believed these stories and finally hounded Rappaport out of the University of Michigan.

By the time Locke learned that Rappaport had been a target of COINTELPRO, Rappaport was living in Canada. And he sat down and leafed through these documents as I sat there, and he would shake his head, and he just couldn't believe that his own government...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been the one behind all of these attacks against him. And at the end of going a couple hours through these documents, he began to weep. It's a very sad spectacle. And that's just, you know, one of probably 2,000 or so cases like that throughout the country. This was one of COINTELPRO's favorite tactics, the poison pen letter.

usually sent anonymously or forged to employers, colleagues, or even loved ones. At the hearings, Curtis Smothers was visibly uncomfortable as he read aloud from a particularly disgusting example, an anonymous letter sent by the FBI to the husband of a white woman who was involved with a black activist group.

Remember, the FBI was overwhelmingly white at this time. It was almost certainly a white male FBI agent who wrote these lines. It signed a soul sister.

The FBI used this same tactic against white actress Jean Seberg, who was known for supporting groups like the NAACP and the Black Panthers. When Seberg became pregnant in 1970, the Los Angeles office of the FBI saw an opportunity to neutralize her.

With Hoover's approval, agents furnished fake letters to a gossip columnist who reported in the LA Times that an anonymous actress matching Seberg's description had cheated on her husband with a Black Panther and was carrying his child. Overwhelmed with stress from these public smears, Seberg went into premature labor and the baby did not survive. Seberg never recovered, though she lived long enough to see the FBI's role in the affair come to light.

She died by suicide in 1979. And then came the Bureau's most infamous poison pen letter of all. It would emerge as part of the FBI's sweeping and relentless effort to disrupt the civil rights movement. COINTELPRO files on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. revealed that Hoover had become paranoid to the point of delusion. By January of '62, Mr. Hoover has already typed Dr. King as "no good."

Hoover is particularly disturbed after in 1963 it became clear that the concept of nonviolence was gaining adherence. Quoting from a memorandum, the plan here is to completely discredit Dr. King by, quote, taking him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence.

In the wake of the 1963 march on Washington for jobs and freedom, where King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, Hoover had his men conduct an exhaustive investigation into ties between King and Soviet intelligence. The connection between them, his agents reported back, was quote, "infinitesimal." This was not accepted by the director of the FBI. He found that thinking wrong, unacceptable.

and said that it must be changed, and it was changed. Think about that for a second. When his own well-oiled investigative machine presented Hoover with facts that didn't line up with his assumptions, he ordered his agents to ignore those facts. And he launched an effort to destroy King anyway. The lower-level people in the FBI apologize for having misunderstood matters, and on they go with this effort to discredit. And stark they do, the bugs...

on Dr. King. - Eventually, an illegal bug picked up evidence that King was having an affair. As he prepared to travel to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI sent him the ultimate poison pen letter. - The Bureau went so far as to mail anonymous letters to Dr. King and his wife, which were mailed shortly before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and finishes with this suggestion.

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it. This exact number has been selected for a specific reason. It has definite practical significance. It was 34 days before the award. You are done. That was taken by Dr. King to mean a suggestion for suicide, was it not? That's our understanding, Senator. Who wrote the letter? Well, that's a matter of dispute. It was found in the files of Mr. Sullivan.

Schwartz was referring to FBI Director Bill Sullivan. Sullivan's name was all over the COINTELPRO documents. He'd helped Hoover design the first COINTELPRO operations back in 1956.

He claims that it's a plant in his files and that someone else in the bureau, in fact, wrote the document. The document which was found is a draft of the letter, which was the anonymous letter, which was actually sent. Is there any dispute that the letter did, in fact, come from the FBI? We've heard no dispute of that. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia and with the help of law enforcement brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As the church committee hearings went on, it became clear that the FBI had strayed light years away from its mandate. The Bureau was supposed to enforce America's laws and prevent criminal activity. But even when the targets were actual criminals, COINTELPRO didn't appear at all interested in enforcing the law. We had one FBI informant who had infiltrated the Klan.

Shortly before he was set to testify, this informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, told the church committee staff he didn't want his face on camera. He had been a mole in the Birmingham, Alabama KKK, and if anyone recognized him, his life might be in danger. So we had him wear a mask.

with eye holes and a mouth hole so he could speak. Locke's underselling it. Roe basically testified before Congress with what looked kind of like a diaper on his head. Just Google Gary Roe Church Committee. You'll see what I mean.

He told us that the FBI had told him, "Look, what we want you to do is go down there and have affairs with Klan members' wives." And so the word gets out that this is going on and the Klan members' families will be dissolved and disrupted.

Okay, now that's a weird government assignment. But Roe was also gathering some very valuable intel. He discovered that the Birmingham chapter of the Klan was planning to assault the Freedom Riders as they came through town.

He even learned that the local police were going to assist them by looking the other way. So Rowe did what an informant is supposed to do. He informed his handlers that a violent crime was about to happen. Did you inform the FBI about planned violence prior to that incident? Sir, I gave them FBI information pertaining to the Freedom Riders' assault approximately three weeks before it occurred.

But the FBI did nothing. On Mother's Day 1961, the Freedom Riders reached Birmingham and were brutally assaulted by the KKK. They were beaten very badly, yes. There were a thousand men at least on Mother's Day of the morning of the Freedom Riders just roaming up and down right in front of City Hall. We had baseball bats, we had clubs, we had chains, we had pistols sticking in our belts. It was just unbelievable.

Later, Roe asked his handler why the G-men hadn't stepped in. He said, we are an investigating agency, not an enforcement agency. All we do is gather information. That was my answer.

Tens of thousands of, quote, subversives surveilled over the course of decades. Hundreds of illegal break-ins, thousands of informants and wiretaps. You'd think that casting a net this wide, the FBI would have prevented some crime or another, even if it was by accident. Hadn't the G-men caught at least one actual bad guy in all of this? Apparently not. Just as blanket surveillance had failed to catch the media burglars,

A decade and a half of COINTELPRO operations also failed to catch a single communist agent or any other criminal. Hoover's FBI had gotten people fired, broken up marriages, destabilized law-abiding political groups, and sown a general sense of paranoia throughout the American left.

But years later, when historian and FBI expert Ethan Theo Harris conducted an exhaustive analysis of everything that had come to light, he reached a devastating conclusion. Quote, I can think of no crime that was stopped by information gained during COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO hadn't saved a single American life. In fact, as the church committee was about to learn, the opposite was true. The FBI had American blood on its hands. In 1968, J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo. In it, he urged his G-men to, quote, "...prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement."

That movement and its leaders became COINTELPRO's chief targets. And Black Panthers, by the way, were the arch victims among all the array of other victims, from Anatole Rappaport to Dr. King to Klu Klux Klan, you name it. The Black Panthers and other Black kind of extremist groups, but nonviolent, were the major targets that Hoover wanted to destroy.

He declares the Black Panther Party the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States in 1968. That's Donna Murch, a scholar of the Black Panther Party. And does it at precisely the moment that the party is turning away from its use of police patrols and explicit armed self-defense imagery.

These police patrols were organized groups of Black Panthers who patrolled their neighborhood, armed, in accordance with the Second Amendment, as a deterrent against police violence. They saw this as an essential way to defend their communities against ongoing, unchecked, and widely accepted abuse from police. But Donna says the Panthers were turning away from their focus on guns, in favor of social programs, just as the FBI stepped up its efforts against the Panthers.

She told us the FBI's interest in the Panthers was never really about the threat of violence, but about their ideas. And so I think there was a real sense of fright about the strength of their ideas and the depth of support that they had within the Black community, but also among mother country radicals, among white college students, also white artists and writers, because the Panthers were an intellectual movement.

It was this awakening, if you will, as what it was to be a young black African-American. This is Omar Barbour again, whom you heard from at the top of this episode. When we joined the party, one of the things we had to do was to read not only the autobiography of Malcolm X, but James Baldwin's various books, as well as Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.

If this is different from the image you have in your mind when you hear Black Panthers, that's probably because the FBI was so successful in smearing them. The Panthers were committed socialists. Fred Hampton's socialist principles compelled him to feed the poor, educate kids, and reach out across racial lines. In 68, Hampton formed the Rainbow Coalition, a collection of groups that were not natural allies. In fact, some of them had actively fought against each other.

They ranged from street charities to street gangs, and from Chinese and Puerto Rican revolutionaries to the Young Patriots organization, a group of poor white Appalachians who'd moved to Chicago to find work. Through the Rainbow Coalition, Fred demonstrated that these disparate movements had a lot in common. But then he would articulate what their standard of living was, their children's education.

their ability to feed themselves, and he would say, "Look, that's the same problem we have down in Bronzeville in Chicago." He wasn't coming to those Appalachian whites and saying, "You know, your guys should come with us because we are the better ones." No, he was saying, you know, if you really look at your condition and you understand it is because of capitalism.

The Black Panther newspaper, which they distributed in cities all over the country, was a visible reminder of their presence and their political agenda. So were the Panthers' food distribution programs. Both became targets of the FBI. They sprayed Scatol, which is this foul-smelling, basically chemical agent on the newspaper. We used to get the paper shipped in from the

Oakland and to Kennedy Airport, we'd go pick up the papers, they would be destroyed, watered. And we would get a call from a lot of the workers saying, "Man, you guys better go get your papers." In fact, some of the workers used to hide our papers for us till we come get them and stuff like that. The breakfast programs had to constantly be moved.

that they were really trying to destroy the breakfast programs because they, meaning the FBI and local and state law enforcement, they saw those as such a danger because of the ways that they would influence parents and children and families. Omar and his fellow Panthers knew they were being targeted by the government, but it was never really clear exactly who was behind it. The core strategy is to criminalize and kill the leadership of the party and the rank and file.

At the very least, a third of the party was agent provocateurs and informers. Omar says it's now clear that many of the people around him were working to undermine the Black Panther Party. We had members who were doing stick-ups, robbing people, and doing other things, and we used to call them agent provocateurs.

These provocateurs would commit flagrant crimes like robberies and muggings, and they would make sure that their actions implicated the Panther organization, giving law enforcement an excuse to move in. And subsequently, we learned to find a lot of those people were, in fact, not only agent provocateurs, but undercover officers, police officers.

You're inserting people into organizations to increase that level of anger and to increase that level of violence and often inserting violence because that was a way to have people arrested and then locked away in prison.

The FBI's strategy worked. The Bureau successfully created deep rifts within the party, using forged letters and agent provocateurs to encourage violence and foster grievances. The same was true for the Black Panthers' relationships to other Black organizations. A special agent in San Diego wrote a classified letter back to J. Edgar Hoover saying, we've managed to convince one Black group in San Diego that

that their real enemies are another black group. And we've got them into an argument and there've been some shootings and some killings between these two groups. And we prevented them from concentrating on civil rights by getting them involved in gang warfare against each other. And that was a COINTELPRO goal. - In 1968, COINTELPRO successfully framed a Panther named Geronimo Pratt, who was arrested and convicted of murdering a woman in Los Angeles.

He spent 27 years in prison before it was finally proven that Pratt had been in Oakland, 400 miles away at the time of the crime. The FBI had known Pratt was innocent the entire time, but they allowed him to spend nearly three decades in prison.

And then there was the case of Fred Hampton. The Black Panthers and many others had long been convinced that J. Edgar Hoover had assassinated Hampton. Now that Hoover was dead and his secrets were out, the nation finally learned the full story.

In 1967, a young black man named William O'Neill stole a car in Chicago, drove it to Indiana, and abandoned it. Since he'd crossed state lines, his crime was a federal one, so the FBI investigated. Eventually, an agent caught up with O'Neill. He told him that even though he was caught red-handed, there was no need to worry. They could work something out. He then asked O'Neill to infiltrate the Illinois Black Panther Party.

O'Neill excelled as an informant. He ingratiated himself with the Panthers and became head of security to their charismatic young leader, Fred Hampton. In late 1969, O'Neill provided the FBI with the address of the house where Hampton was staying. He told them there were guns there, and he drew a map of the house, even marking the location of Fred Hampton's bed.

On the night of December 3rd, 1969, O'Neal slipped a sedative into a glass of Kool-Aid and gave it to Chairman Fred and then departed. A few hours later, the police arrived and shot their way into the apartment. Using the map, they went straight to the bedroom and killed Fred Hampton in cold blood as he lay drugged and knocked out in his bed. O'Neal was not the last informant and Hampton was not the last Panther to die. Not only was it the organization's

that were targeted at COINTELPRO but the greater Black community. There was a criminalization of a people, a race of people, not just the organization that may have been representing those people. That's an angle that we still have to look at. There were a lot of Panthers that were killed in very unusual circumstances. There were a lot of Panthers that were in jail. If the committee to investigate had not uncovered those files, I think we would have seen more deaths.

As part of his research before the hearings, Locke Johnson traveled to Boston to interview former FBI assistant director Bill Sullivan, one of the chief architects of COINTELPRO. Now, he was sitting directly across from Locke in a private room at Logan Airport. And I asked him, "How could you have done these things? How could you have tried to destroy Anatole Rappaport and Dr. King and the hundreds upon hundreds of other people?"

and the Civil Rights Movement, and then the anti-war protest movement. How could you have done that to these people who weren't breaking any laws, that they were expressing their views? And he said, "That's what Hoover wanted me to do." And I had a mortgage on my house, and I had three kids in college. It reminded me of Hannah Arendt's "Banality of Evil."

How people do the most awful things for the most mundane reasons is really quite shocking. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to.

Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the Mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia and with the help of law enforcement brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You know the old cliche about you could hear a pin drop? That's exactly the way it was in the Russell Auditorium. After hearing the facts of COINTELPRO laid out before the church committee, Michigan Senator Philip Hart spoke up. I've been told for years by, among others, some of my own family, that this is exactly what the Bureau was doing all the time. And in my great wisdom and high office, I assured them they were on pot.

This just wasn't true. Couldn't happen. They wouldn't do it. Hart was nearing the end of his third and final term in the Senate. His health was declining. In fact, according to Locke, Hart had to miss some of the hearings for medical reasons. But he had heard enough. What you've described is a series of illegal actions intended squarely to deny First Amendment rights to some Americans. The trick now, as I see it, Mr. Chairman,

is for this committee to be able to figure out how to persuade the people of this country that indeed it did go on. And how shall we ensure that it never happened again? And it was kind of a turning point in which even the three conservative Republicans sort of had an epiphany that the FBI had really gone way too far. They had no accountability. And the anchor of democracy is accountability.

As he fielded questions from the Church Committee, visibly sweaty and red as a phone-tappin' tomato, FBI Deputy Associate Director James Adams acknowledged that the Bureau had strayed from its mission. He encouraged Congress to give them some, quote, guidelines, at which point Frank Church reminded him that he already had some. You know, laws. You shouldn't have ever had to have had guidelines to tell you that the

Hindsight's 2020. Congress wasn't going to accept that old chestnut and leave it at that.

In the wake of the church hearings, it passed a new law limiting future FBI directors to a term of 10 years. Finally, in 1975, we began to do something in the United States of America about secret power, the most dangerous power of all. And we tried to tame secret power by creating a House and Senate Intelligence Committee. It sounds crazy now, but the church committee really was the first time that Congress ever held the FBI to account.

In the wake of these revelations, both houses of Congress eventually voted to keep permanent standing committees to review what intelligence agencies were doing, which they still do today.

The media burglars watched the hearings unfold, unable to discuss them with each other or take any credit for the crucial role they'd played. It was very exciting when the church committee decided to take this on. I thought, this is fabulous. I wasn't sure it was going to rise to that level, but I thought it was amazing. And, you know, we had raised the consciousness in the whole country about the FBI. I had sort of a feeling of, well, finally, you know,

Not that I expected a whole lot out of it, but at least it was, you know, that Congress was acknowledging the, you know, the anti-democratic stuff that had been going on. Our hope was that there would be serious oversight of the FBI and the CIA long overdue in this so-called democracy.

If you look at the history of J. Edgar Hoover, it was the most damaging act against him in that long history. In my view, they were more heroes than burglars because it brought to light the fact that COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the FBI, existed. Next on Snafu, the fallout from the Church Committee revelations. What are we going to do about this? He says we're going to get the toughest son of a bitch we can fly in.

The final chapters of our burglars' stories. I changed my name and started my underground life. And a return to the scene of the crime. Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This season of Snafu is based on the book The Burglary, the discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger.

It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer is Stephen Wood. This episode was written by Albert Chen, Sarah Joyner, and Stephen Wood with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms.

Tori Smith is our associate producer. Nevin Kalapalli is our production assistant. Facts Checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Sensitivity Consult from Ola Wakemi Aladasui. Editing, sound design, and original music by Ben Chugg.

Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canney, and Gemma Costelli Foley. Theme music by Dan Rosato. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak. Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary, 1971.

Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy Feingold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Raines, John Raines, Sarah Schumer, and Bob Williamson. ♪

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.