Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (24 page)

You thought that the “I” in “FBI” stood for “investigation” and not “infiltration” or “intimidation” or “instigation”? Think again!

One way the memo proposed to remove King from the national scene was to send Dr. King an anonymous letter that would induce him to commit suicide (!), the suggested content of which follows (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 99):

What, you weren’t aware that “giving peace a chance” to the extent that you won a Nobel Peace prize was a federal crime deserving of a self-inflicted death penalty? Since
the FBI is only authorized to investigate violations of federal law
, they obviously thought so. Unless there is some sort of subterranean law we haven’t been permitted to examine, you might want to go back to the statute books on that one, guys.

King wasn’t the only antiwar activist targeted. Another memo, issued in 1968, was used to create potential violence against comedian Dick Gregory (who was outspoken against the Vietnam war), using the Mafia as its involuntary intermediary (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 104):

These latter efforts were comparatively primitive. But an August 5, 1968 memo detailed a propaganda project in southern Florida aspiring to the level of
Operations Northwoods
sophistication, a project designed to suck some of the sunshine out of the Sunshine State.

Working with their “propaganda assets,” local COINTELPRO specialists oversaw the creation of a television “documentary” on both the black liberation movement and the new left in the Miami area, a documentary anything but “news”: the basic idea was to take the least media-savvy representatives of the “New Left”, and shine the spotlight on them instead of their more articulate brethren (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 119):

The program, viewed by a large Florida television audience not aware that the FBI was doing a “Walt Disney” on them, was edited to take the statements of key activists out of context in such a way as to make them appear to
advocate gratuitous violence
and, in addition (and inconsistently)
seem cowardly
. To add to the professionalism, the documentary made sure to de-contextualize the comments of the activists, thus turning potentially plausible claims into inherently absurd claims, utilizing camera angles deliberately selected to make those interviewed come off like “rats trapped under scientific observation” (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 119):

The FBI leadership called upon “[e]ach counterintelligence office [to] be alert to exploit this technique both for black nationalists and New Left types,” which was extremely effective in framing those who were on the show in “a most unfavorable light” (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 119):

Shows like this obviously played a role in accounting for much of the negativity with which the New Left and black liberation movements came to be publicly viewed by the end of the 1960s. Unfortunately, the FBI made sure that the agents in charge would not alert the American public that they were the well from which the geyser of disinformation was spurting, so that government-manufactured reality would appear to be the natural order of things (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 119):

This particular COINTELPRO operation could have probably gone on indefinitely, but the memos you have seen were distributed to news agencies. Having their cover blown, Director Hoover declared that this flavor of COINTELPRO was deep-sixed (at least until the heat was off).

However, while the official program supposedly was ended, the program was unofficially continued by changing the name of activists to “terrorists,” which then opened the door to re-frame further organizations. The FBI started with the Mafia, and ended with . . .
nuns
? (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 306; footnotes omitted; definition of acronym added in brackets):

This was accomplished in the immediate aftermath of COINTELPROs alleged demise, as is shown in the accompanying April 12, 1972 Airtel from Director L. Patrick Gray to the SAC, Albany. The word selected was “terrorist”. . . The public, which experience had shown would balk at the idea of the FBI acting to curtail political diversity as such, could be counted on to rally to the notion that the Bureau was now acting only to protect them against “terror.” Thus, the Bureau secured a terminological license by which to pursue precisely the same goals, objectives and tactics attending COINTELPRO, but in an even more vicious, concerted and sophisticated fashion.

The results of such linguistic subterfuge were, as was noted in the introduction to this book, readily evidenced during the 1980s when it was revealed that
the FBI had employed the rubric of a “terrorist investigation”
to rationalize the undertaking of a multi-year “probe” of the nonviolent CISPES [
Committee In Solidarity With The People Of El Salvador
] organization —
extended to encompass at least 215 other groups, including Clergy and Laity Concerned, the Maryknoll Sisters, Amnesty International, the Chicago Interreligious Task Force, the U.S. Catholic Conference, and the Virginia Education Association — opposed to U.S. policy in Central America.
Needless to say, the CISPES operation was attended by systematic resort to such time-honored COINTELPRO tactics as the
use of infiltrators/provocateurs, disinformation, black bag jobs, telephone intercepts, conspicuous surveillance (to make targets believe “there’s an agent behind every mail box”)
, and so on.

If the FBI can on a limited budget and with limited motivation frame people of little notoriety who, being alive, could defend themselves, just imagine what they could do to a person dead, with no defense, a national pariah to boot, and with resources and motivation unlimited.

A person like Lee Harvey Oswald.