COINTELPRO stands for "counterintelligence program." It was an FBI program in the 1960s and early 1970s. It involved selecting so-called subversive people and groups for covert harassment, infiltration, and disruption. (Even groups such as women's liberation groups were targeted.) In small letters, cointelpro refers to any such operation, including those that continued after COINTELPRO officially ended. (People are still in prison who were targeted and framed or set up by the original COINTELPRO.) MHCHAOS was a similar program by the CIA at around the same time which, for example, targeted independent newspapers and student groups. Much of what occurred under MHCHAOS, and who was targeted, is still classified as secret and not publicly known. This page contains links and items related to the sort of political harassment that occurred under COINTELPRO, regardless of the official designation or time frame. Here is an archive on U.S. Domestic Covert Operations at mediafilter.org. It contains a great deal of information on COINTELPRO, including how the course of U.S. history was altered by these criminal and undemocratic government actions -- though this point is almost never mentioned in any of the nostalgic or supposedly informed retrospectives on the 1960s.
The article "COINTELPRO Revisited: Spying and Disruption" [*] by Brian Glick gives a brief introduction to COINTELPRO. Glick also discusses whether COINTELPRO really ended, and gives some advice for people and groups who may currently be undergoing cointelpro actions about how to cope with it.
A good source of information on MHCHAOS is Angus Mackenzie's book Secrets: The CIA's War at Home. Here is a book review from the Columbia Journalism Review. [*] Here is an article by Mackenzie himself, from the Nov/Dec 1991 CJR, titled "The Secrecy Obsession." [*]
This article by Verne Lyon, a former CIA operative, provides another description of Operation CHAOS. It is online at the Serendipity site and is titled, "Domestic Surveillance: The History of Operation CHAOS." [*]
The book The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, documents COINTELPRO using numerous FBI documents. The entire book is online at Paul Wolf's COINELPRO site along with many other relevant documents [try this link if these URLs are not working]. The book makes the point that there is no real reason to think COINTELPRO ever stopped, aside from name changes and increased secrecy. As an example of the documents, see the first page of the FBI's 12-point master plan for COINTELPRO against the New Left and the second page. See this link at Pinknoiz for a description of the destruction of actress Jean Seberg's life by the FBI because she supported the Black Panthers, based on the documents in Churchill and Wall's book.
This article in Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1997, discusses recent trends in political spying. It is Mitzi Waltz and is titled, "Policing Activists: Think Global, Spy Local." [*]
Some recent cointelpros are described on the page America's Secret Police: FBI COINTELPRO in the 1990s [*] at the Judi Bari Web Site of the Redwood Summer Justice Project.
See also U.S. Domestic Spying.
