After Mark Felt outed himself as the legendary Deep Throat in the Watergate
case last week, there was a media rush to canonize the FBI’s former Number Two
man, and politicians proposed he be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But
in all this gush to make Felt a hero, there has been little or no mention of Felt’s
prime role in COINTELPRO — the most gigantic domestic political spying and disruption
operation ever in American history, illegally conducted by the FBI.
Felt, in fact, was indicted and convicted in federal court in 1980 of directing nine illegal break-ins, aimed at domestic political targets, when he was boss of the COINTELPRO operation. Felt thus became the highest-ranking FBI official to be convicted of criminal charges since J. Edgar Hoover became head of the bureau in 1924. (He was later pardoned by Ronald Reagan.) And in the early ’70s, Felt appeared repeatedly on national TV (on shows like Meet the Press) trying to whip up a climate of security hysteria that this country didn’t see until post-9/11, by painting the anti-Vietnam-war left as agents of foreign powers. Here’s what the Senate Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (headed by then-Senator Frank Church of Idaho, and known to historians as the Church Committee) said about COINTELPRO in its final report in 1976, after an extensive, headline-making, three-year investigation: “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even
if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went
far beyond that . . . the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation
aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech
and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups
and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and
deter violence.” (The Church Committee’s 14 reports, the most extensive official
review of intelligence activities ever made public, are available online in their
entirety, at https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm.)
The FBI compiled dossiers on more than 500,000 Americans during the course
of COINTELPRO.
“There’s a great deal of irony in the fact that Felt — at the very time he was meeting Bob Woodward in those parking garages to confide information about the Watergate break-in and other illegal spying by the Nixon administration — was again and again directing exactly the same sort of thing against groups on the left the FBI didn’t like — illegal activities that Felt continued to order even after Richard Nixon was in deep trouble because of Watergate,” the historian Athan Theoharis — whose many books include Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counter-Intelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years and The FBI & American Democracy: A Brief Critical History — told me this week. Morever, Theoharis says, the FBI had a history of leaking on presidents and pols: It leaked information on Truman in the 1948 campaign (for which its agents wrote Republican campaign literature), spread slurs that Adlai Stevenson was a homosexual when he ran for president in 1952, and delivered a dossier to the Nixon White House concerning the alleged homosexual proclivities of certain solons Nixon didn’t like. The FBI’s targets in its COINTELPRO operation included: the Communist Party–USA, especially its black members and groups; the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group; black nationalist organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam; New Left groups such as Students for a Democratic Society; Youth Against War and Fascism; the Progressive Labor Party; the National Committee To Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, and other anti-HUAC coalitions; the Puerto Rican Independence Movement; anti-Vietnam war groups, especially those on campuses; and various media, ranging from the Liberation News Service to the New York Post (then the most liberal newspaper in the country). One of the victims of Felt-directed break-ins was Juan Gonzalez, now a columnist for the New York Daily News, and co-host — with Amy Goodman — of the radio and TV news show “Democracy Now!” On his radio show last week, Gonzalez said: “I can testify, having been a member of the Young Lords [a leftist Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panthers] . . . that the numerous break-ins that occurred in the homes of Young Lord members, including my own, back in 1972, clearly were political break-ins . . . the things that were stolen had nothing to do with valuable goods of a drug dealer, but were clearly break-ins looking for material and information . . . [Felt] authorized some break-ins of my apartments.” The FBI stopped at nothing in its efforts to disrupt and destroy leftist groups and activists, including the use of agents provocateurs who engaged in arson, bombings and attempted murder. Historical amnesia is sadly rampant in this country, but one other reason
that the media may have made little or no mention of Felt’s COINTELPRO crimes
is that a huge number of media outlets were themselves complicit in COINTELPRO,
which had an extensive disinformation campaign aimed at newspapers and television.
Journalists promised not to reveal that the FBI had suggested stories or provided
information for them, and some reporters went further and actually volunteered
to help the bureau, writing articles designed to damage a specific FBI-targeted
individual, event or group.
Media outlets with reporters cooperating in COINTELPRO, according to the Church Committee report, included: the Associated Press; U.S. News & World Report; the Hearst and Newhouse newspaper chains; the New York Daily News, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; as well as KTTV in Los Angeles and 11 other local TV stations; and many more. Even Bob Woodward, in his long, June 2 Washington Post article explaining “How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat,’” never mentioned Felt’s COINTELPRO convictions at all, or the other Felt-directed FBI crimes for which he was never prosecuted. As to Deep Throat’s motivations, the National Security Archive last Friday released transcripts of some Nixon White House tapes on the FBI — including one on which Nixon declares he wants a “house cleaning” at the FBI, which one can deduce included Felt, who, in his 1979 Memoir, The FBI Pyramid From the Inside, wrote that he thought he stood an “excellent chance” of being named the bureau’s director until Nixon passed over him. On another tape, Nixon — who’d just been told by Al Haig that Felt had leaked material to The New York Times — says of Felt, “He’s a bad guy, you see.” Both these conversations were before Watergate. Disgusted by not getting the top FBI job, Felt resigned from the bureau in June of 1973. I’m perfectly prepared to acknowledge that Deep Throat’s confirmations and occasional
“look in this direction” guidance put some spine into Ben Bradlee, giving him
reassurance that Woodstein were on the right track and that the story should be
pursued (as Bradlee admitted to Ted Koppel on Nightline last week). But
to make a hero out of Felt — the serial Constitution-shredder and convicted criminal
— for his self-serving, parking-garage torpedoes aimed at a president who didn’t
like him, strikes me as a chapter in the book of laughter and forgetting.
DOUG IRELAND can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at https://direland.typepad.com/direland/.

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