March 8, 2006THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.
The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied. ...
Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."
The Media documents -- along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed -- made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups -- many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups -- that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening.
For instance, agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining women other than his wife -- and threatened to make it public. "King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.
LA Times : A break-in to end all break-ins
By Allan M. Jalon
I met Joe Frazier once when I was a teenager hanging out at the shopping center with friends
Joe and his buddy were drunk off there ...es
I read the whole link you posted about that break in....
Ironic that Sen. Church was involved at the end...he was the one that we have to thank for practically zero humint intelligence in the countries that we are now having to spar with over WMDS...
Those, though, that would want to draw a line from that to the NSA wiretapping should instead take a detour to the Barrett Report....where people's IRS files were used for nefarious reasons by the Clinton adminstration...