Federal Bureau of Intimidation
by
Howard Zinn
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This HTML document is a production of Covert Action Quarterly.
I thought it would be good to talk about the FBI because they talk
about us. They don't like to be talked about. They don't even like the
fact that you're listening to them being talked about. They are very
sensitive people. If you look into the history of the FBI and Martin
Luther King-which now has become notorious in that totally notorious
history of the FBI- the FBI attempted to neutralize, perhaps kill him,
perhaps get him to commit suicide, certainly to destroy him as a
leader of black people in the United States. And if you follow the
progression of that treatment of King, it starts, not even with the
Montgomery Bus Boycott; it starts when King begins to criticize the
FBI. You see, then suddenly Hoover's ears, all four of them, perk up.
And he says, okay, we have to start working on King.
I was interested in this especially because I was reading the Church
Committee report. In 1975, the Senate Select Committee investigated
the CIA and the FBI and issued voluminous reports and pointed out at
what point the FBI became interested in King. In 1961-62 after the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, after the sit-ins, after the Freedom Rides of
'61, there was an outbreak of mass demonstrations in a very little,
very Southern, almost slave town of southern Georgia called Albany.
There had been nothing like this in that town. A quiet, apparently
passive town, everybody happy, of course. And then suddenly the black
people rose up and a good part of the black population of Albany ended
up in jail. There were not enough jails for all who demonstrated.
A report was made for the Southern Regional Council of Atlanta on the
events in Albany. The report, which was very critical of the FBI, came
out in the New York Times. And King was asked what he thought of the
role of the FBI. He said he agreed with the report that the FBI was
not doing its job, that the FBI was racist, etcetera, etcetera.
At that point, the FBI also inquired who the author of that report
was, and asked that an investigation begin on the author. Since I had
written it, I was interested in the FBI's interest in the author. In
fact, I sent away for whatever information the FBI had on me, through
the Freedom of Information Act. I became curious, I guess. I wanted to
test myself because if I found that the FBI did not have any dossier
on me, it would have been tremendously embarrassing and I wouldn't
have been able to face my friends. But, fortunately, there were
several hundred pages of absolutely inconsequential material. Very
consequential for the FBI, I suppose, but inconsequential for any
intelligent person.
I'm talking about the FBI and U.S. democracy because here we have this
peculiar situation that we live in a democratic country-everybody
knows that, everybody says it, it's repeated, it's dinned into our
ears a thousand times, you grow up, you pledge allegiance, you salute
the flag, you hail democracy, you look at the totalitarian states, you
read the history of tyrannies, and here is the beacon light of
democracy. And, of course, there's some truth to that. There are
things you can do in the United States that you can't do many other
places without being put in jail.
But the United States is a very complex system. It's very hard to
describe because, yes, there are elements of democracy; there are
things that you're grateful for, that you're not in front of the death
squads in El Salvador. On the other hand, it's not quite a democracy.
And one of the things that makes it not quite a democracy is the
existence of outfits like the FBI and the CIA. Democracy is based on
openness, and the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of
dissident citizens, violates the spirit of democracy. There are a lot
of other things that make the U.S. less than a democracy. For
instance, what happens in police stations, and in the encounters
between police and citizens on the street. Or what happens in the
military, which is a kind of fascist enclave inside this democracy. Or
what happens in courtrooms which are supposedly little repositories of
democracy, yet the courtroom is presided over by an emperor who
decides everything that happens in a courtroom -what evidence is
given, what evidence is withheld, what instructions are given to the
jury, what sentences are ultimately meted out to the guilty and so on.
So it's a peculiar kind of democracy. Yes, you vote. You have a
choice. Clinton, Bush and Perot! It's fantastic. Time and Newsweek.
CBS and NBC. It's called a pluralist society. But in so many of the
little places of everyday life in which life is lived out, somehow
democracy doesn't exist. And one of the creeping hands of
totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
I think it was seeing the film Mississippi Burning that led me to want
to talk about the FBI. I had sort of reached a point where I said,
"Who wants to hear anymore about the FBI?" But then I saw Mississippi
Burning. It relates a very, very important incident in the history of
the civil rights movement in the U.S. In the summer of 1964, these
three young men in the movement, two white, one black, had traveled to
investigate the burning of a church in a place called Philadelphia,
Mississippi-city of brotherly love. They were arrested, held in jail,
released in the night, followed by cars, stalked, taken off and beaten
very, very badly with chains and clubs and shot to death-
executed-June 21, 1964. The bodies were found in August. It's a great
theme for an important film. Mississippi Burning, I suppose, does
something useful in capturing the terror of Mississippi, the violence,
the ugliness.
But after it does that, it does something which I think is very
harmful: In the apprehension of the murderers, it portrays two FBI
operatives and a whole flotilla-if FBI men float-of FBI people as the
heroes of this episode. Anybody who knows anything about the history
of the civil rights movement, or certainly people who were in the
movement at that time in the South, would have to be horrified by that
portrayal. I was just one of many people who was involved in the
movement. I was teaching in Atlanta, Georgia, in a black college for
about seven years from 1956 to 1963, and I became involved in the
movement, in Albany, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama, and Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, and Greenwood and Greenville and Jackson, Mississippi in
the summer of '64. I was involved with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. Anybody who was involved in the Southern
movement at that time knew with absolute certainty: The FBI could not
be counted on and it was not the friend of the civil rights movement.
The FBI stood by with their suits and ties-I'm sorry I'm dressed this
way today, but I was just trying to throw them off the track-and took
notes while people were being beaten in front of them. This happened
again, and again, and again. The Justice Department, to which the FBI
is presumably accountable, was called again and again, in times of
stress by people of the civil rights movement saying, hey, somebody's
in danger here. Somebody's about to be beaten, somebody's about to be
arrested, somebody's about to be killed. We need help from the federal
government. We do have a Constitution, don't we? We do have rights. We
do have the constitutional right to just live, or to walk, or to
speak, or to pray, or to demonstrate. We have a Bill of Rights. It's
America. It's a democracy. You're the Justice Department, your job is
to enforce the Constitution of the United States. That's what you took
an oath to do, so where are you? The Justice Department wasn't
responding. They wouldn't return phone calls, they wouldn't show up,
or when they did show up, they did nothing.
The civil rights movement was very, very clear about the role of the
FBI. And it wasn't just the FBI; it goes back to the Justice
Department; back to Washington; back to politics; back to Kennedy
appointing racist judges in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia to do
favors for his Southern Democratic political cronies, only becoming
concerned about black people when things appeared on television that
embarrassed the administration and the nation before the world.
Only then did things happen. Oh, we'll send troops to Little Rock,
we'll send troops to Oxford, Mississippi, and so on. Do something big
and dramatic and so on. But in all the days and all the hours in
between, before and after, if there's no international attention,
forget it. Leave these black folk at the mercy of the law enforcement
officers down there. Just as after the Civil War, blacks were left at
the mercy of Southern power and Southern plantation owners by Northern
politicians who made their deal with the white South in 1877.
If you want to read the hour-by-hour description of this, you could
read a wonderful book by Mary King, Freedom Song. She was a SNCC
staff person in the Atlanta office whose job was to get on the phone
and call the newspapers, the government, the Justice Department and
say: Hey, three young men have not come back from Philadelphia,
Mississippi. She called and called and called and it took several days
before she got a response. Deaf ears. They were dead. Probably none of
those calls would have saved them.
It was too late, but there was something that could have saved them.
And it's something I haven't seen reported in the press. If there had
been federal agents accompanying the three on their trip, if there had
been federal agents in the police station in Philadelphia,
Mississippi, that might not have happened. If there had been somebody
determined to enforce law, enforce constitutional rights, to protect
the rights of people who were just going around, driving, talking,
working, then those three murders might have been averted.
In fact, 12 days before the three disappeared, there was a gathering
in Washington, D.C., on June 9, 1964. A busload of black
Mississippians came all the way up-it was a long bus ride to
Washington-to the National Theater.
There was a jury of fairly well known Americans- college presidents,
writers, other people-assembled to hear the testimony. The black
people's testimony before the press and an audience was recorded and
transcribed. They testified that what was going to happen in
Mississippi that summer with all these volunteers coming down was
very, very dangerous. They testified about their experiences, about
their history of being beaten, about the bodies of black people found
floating in the rivers of Mississippi and they said, people are going
to get killed; we need the protection of the federal government.
Also appearing at this hearing were specialists in constitutional law
who made the proper legal points that the federal government had
absolute power to protect people going down into Mississippi. Section
333, Title 10 of the U.S. Code (some numbers burn themselves into you
because you have to use them again and again) gives the federal
government the power to do anything to enforce constitutional rights
when local authorities either refused or failed to protect those
rights.
So they take all this testimony at the National Theater and put it
into a transcript and deliver it to Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
hand deliver it to the White House, and ask the federal government to
send marshals down to Mississippi. Not an army, a few hundred
marshals, that's all. Plainclothes people for protection. This is
1964; by now you've sent 40,000 soldiers to Vietnam, so you can send
200 plainclothes people to Mississippi. No response from the Attorney
General, none from the President. Twelve days later those three men
disappear.
Well, why didn't they put that in the film? Why didn't anybody say
anything about that? So the FBI are the heroes of this film.
Well, that's only part, as you know, of the history of the FBI. Going
back, the FBI was formed first as the Bureau of Investigation under
Theodore Roosevelt-don't worry, I'm not going to take you year by year
through this history. It's a very depressing history.
But, it just interested me. In 1908, under Theodore Roosevelt, his
Attorney General, a man named Bonaparte, a grand nephew of
Napoleon-set up the Bureau of Investigation which later became the
FBI. One of its first acts was to enforce a new federal law- the Mann
Act. This law made it illegal to transport women across state lines
for immoral purposes. Yes, one of their first acts was to prosecute
the black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, because he was living
with a white woman and they actually crossed a state line. One of the
first heroic acts of the FBI. They go way back. Racism goes way back
in the FBI and comes way forward, comes right up to now. By the way-in
the film they show a black FBI man. But there was no black person in
the FBI in 1964. A chauffeur, maybe. A maid, maybe. No black FBI
agents in 1964. But there was this black FBI agent in the film.
Yes, the racism comes right up to yesterday when a black FBI man-in
Detroit, I think-is harassed by his fellow white FBI agents who do all
sorts of funny things to him to make life miserable for him. You
think, where is the solidarity among FBI people? FBI people, black and
white together, we shall overcome. Well, apparently the FBI doesn't
believe in that.
There's too much to say about the FBI and racism. It's not just J.
Edgar Hoover. Everybody says, oh, J. Edgar Hoover, he really hated
black people. He hated the civil rights movement, but it's not just
him, of course. It's too easy to pin all this on J. Edgar Hoover, to
pin it just on the FBI as if they're wild cards. The president says, oh
sorry, we didn't know what they were doing. Well, it's just like
Oliver North. A wild card North was doing these crazy things and his
defense was absolutely right: I did it for them. He did. He did it for
them and now they have turned on him. He doesn't have to worry,
they'll take good care of him. They take care of their own.
When people in the CIA and FBI commit crimes, how do they get handled?
They don't. They're forgotten about. Do you know how many crimes have
been committed by the FBI and the CIA? How many black bag jobs?
Breaking and entering? Try breaking and entering. Really. Try breaking
and entering in the daytime, or nighttime, and see what happens to
you. Different punishments depending on what hour of the day. The FBI
broke and entered again and again and again and again, hundreds and
hundreds of times.
There were hundreds of FBI men involved in these breaks. Two men were
actually prosecuted. This happens every once in a while. When huge
public attention finally gets focused, they pick out two from the pack
and prosecute them and they find them guilty and they sentence them.
To what? To nothing. Fine, $5,000 for one person. That's FBI petty
cash. $3,500 for the other. And then they say that justice has been
done and the system works.
Remember when Richard Helms of the CIA was found guilty of perjury in
1976? Hiss went to jail for four years for perjury, Helms didn't go to
jail for two hours. And Helms's perjury, if you examine it, was far,
far more serious than Alger Hiss's, if Hiss was indeed guilty. But if
you're CIA, if you're FBI, you get off.
But North is right; he did it for them. He did what they expected him,
wanted him, to do. They use this phrase, plausible denial, a very neat
device. You have to be able to do things that the President wants you
to do but that he can deny he wanted you to do, or deny he ordered you
to do if push comes to shove.
It's not just the FBI. It's the government. It's part of the system,
not just a few people here and there. The FBI has names of millions of
people. The FBI has a security index of tens of thousands of people-
they won't tell us the exact numbers. Security index. That's people
who in the event of national emergency will be picked up without trial
and held. Just like that. The FBI's been preparing for a long time,
waiting for an emergency.You get horrified at South Africa, or Israel,
or Haiti where they detain people without trial, just pick them up and
hold them incommunicado. You never hear from them, don't know where
they are. The FBI's been preparing to do this for a long time. Just
waiting for an emergency. These are all countries in emergency; South
Africa's in an emergency, Chile was in an emergency, all emergencies.
James Madison made the point way back. One of the founding fathers.
They were not dumb. They may have been rich and white and reactionary
and slave holders but they weren't dumb. Madison said the best way to
infringe on liberty is to create an external menace.
What can a citizen do in a situation like this? Well, one thing is
simply to expose the FBI. They hate to be exposed, they're a secret
outfit. Everything they do is secret. Their threat rests on secrecy.
Don't know where they are. Not everybody in a trench coat is an FBI
agent. We don't know where they are, who they are, or what they're
doing. Are they tapping? Right. And what are you going to do about it?
The one thing you shouldn't think will do anything is to pass a law
against the FBI. There are always people who come up with that. That's
the biggest laugh in the world. These are people who pay absolutely no
attention to the law, again and again. They've violated the law
thousands of times. Pass another law; that's funny.
No, the only thing you can do with the FBI is expose them to public
understanding-education, ridicule. They deserve it. They have
"garbologists" ransacking garbage pails. A lot of interesting stuff in
garbage pails. They have to be exposed, brought down from that
hallowed point where they once were. And, by the way, they have been
brought down. That's one of the comforting things about what has
happened in the United States in the last 30 years. The FBI at one
point was absolutely untouchable. Everybody had great respect for the
FBI. In 1965 when they took a poll of Americans; do you have a strong
admiration for the FBI? Eight-five percent of people said, "Yes." When
they asked again in '75, 35 percent said, "Yes." That's a big
comedown. That's education -education by events, education by
exposure. They know they've come down in the public mind and so now
they're trying to look kinder and gentler. But they're not likely to
merge with the American Civil Liberties Union. They're more likely,
whatever their soothing words, to keep doing what they're in the habit
of doing, assaulting the rights of citizens.
The most important thing you can do is simply to continue exposing
them. Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of
people. Were they doing this because of a Soviet invasion threat or
because they thought the Socialist Workers Party was about to take
over the country? Are they going after whoever their current target is
because the country is in imminent danger, internal or external? No.
They are doing it because they don't like these organizations. They
don't like the civil rights organizations, they don't like the women's
organizations, they don't like the anti-war organizations, they don't
like the Central American organizations. They don't like social
movements. They work for the establishment and the corporations and
the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten
and chill the people who are trying to change things. So the best
defense against them and resistance against them is simply to keep on
fighting back, to keep on exposing them. That's all I have to say.
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