Church Committee

Cointelpro Church Committee

COINTELPRO is an abbreviation (Counter Intelligence Program) for a series of covert action programs by the Federal Bureau of Investigation directed against domestic groups. In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to "disrupt" and "neutralize" target groups and individuals, which included the civil rights movement (such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), anti-war protestors, feminists, environmentalists, animal rights organizers, the American Indian Movement, and a variety of left-wing organizations. The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers). This report is based on a staff study of a committee led by Senator Frank Church of more than 20,000 pages of Bureau documents, depositions of many of the Bureau agents involved in the programs, and interviews of several COINTELPRO targets. The selected cases demonstrate the consequences of a Government agency's decision to take the law into its own hands for the "greater good" of the country.