COINTELPRO

Opening

On 8 March 1971, International Women's Day, eight people calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the Bureau's three-room resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania, and took more than a thousand documents. None of the eight was caught. Selected pages went out in the mail to newspapers, and WIN magazine later printed a large set. Some of the files were marked COINTELPRO: the FBI's domestic counterintelligence program, running since 1956 against the Communist Party and later against the Klan, the New Left, Black nationalist groups and others the Bureau had decided were a problem.

The haul showed the mix in one small office: about 40 percent political surveillance and 1 percent organised crime. J. Edgar Hoover shut down the COINTELPRO name in April 1971, once the papers were out. Five years later the Church Committee laid out the methods in full: anonymous letters, planted news stories, infiltrators, and attempts to break people rather than only to watch them. The burglars stayed unnamed in public for decades. The files did not.

Timeline

1956The program begins against the Communist Party and expands.

8 March 1971The Media resident agency is burgled and more than a thousand pages are taken. Copies are mailed to newspapers, and WIN prints a large set.

April 1971Hoover retires the COINTELPRO name. Retiring the name was not the same as ending all of the work.

Mid-1970sThe Church Committee sets out the methods in public, in far more detail than the burglars could have mailed. The eight remain unnamed in public for years afterwards.

Key figures

The eight burglars carried out the Media break-in and were never caught.

The field offices that ran COINTELPRO operations carried out the methods described in the pages.

Hoover retired the name once the files were public.

The Church Committee's staff made the full program public. The agents whose files left the building had their work exposed without any say in it.

Physical and documentary trail

The trail:

One: the Media burglary of 8 March 1971 and the mailed pages.

Two: files bearing the COINTELPRO marking from 1956 onwards.

Three: the mix of work in that small office, later summarised as about 40 percent political surveillance.

Four: Hoover's April 1971 retirement of the name, and the Church Committee volumes.

The program is not in doubt: the pages exist. What is missing is a complete inventory of every field office's COINTELPRO work in one public collection, and the eight were never arrested.

Prevent the rise of a messiah.

Things you might not know

• It happened on fight night. The burglars chose 8 March 1971, the night of the Ali-Frazier fight, expecting the whole country to be glued to radios and televisions.
• The most damaging page was a routing slip. The document with the biggest impact was an internal routing slip dated 1968 that carried the word "Cointelpro".
• The FBI had a sketch of one of them. Investigators had a sketch of Bonnie Raines but never found her.
• The case closed once the clock ran out. The FBI closed the investigation on 11 March 1976, three days after the statute of limitations ran out.
• They came forward in 2014. John and Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth were among five of the eight named in Betty Medsger's 2014 book The Burglary. Medsger had been one of the reporters who received the stolen files in 1971.

Competing explanations

A domestic program to break targets, not only to watch them. This is what the Church Committee and the Media pages show, in the FBI's own markings and methods.

Ordinary counterintelligence exaggerated by radicals. This reading is weak once the memos themselves are in print.

A few rogue offices. Possible at the edges, but the COINTELPRO marking and direction were national.

Later life of the case

The Media burglary is now seen as one of the turning points in American oversight of intelligence. It led, through the press and the Church Committee, to the reforms of the later 1970s. When the burglars went public in 2014, Betty Medsger's book The Burglary and the documentary 1971 told their side for the first time. For the committee that laid the programme out, see the Church Committee.

Finding

Eight people walked out of an FBI office in Media on 8 March 1971 with pages marked COINTELPRO. Those pages showed a domestic program that Hoover then retired by name, and that the Church Committee later laid out in full.

What still will not resolve: a complete inventory of the program across all field offices, and the full extent of the work that continued after the name was dropped.