A Man Who Knew Where the Bedroom Was
At 4:45 on the morning of 4 December 1969, fourteen Chicago police officers and four FBI agents entered an apartment on West Monroe Street. They were carrying a floor plan. It showed the layout of every room, the position of the furniture, and the exact location of the bedroom where Fred Hampton slept.
Hampton was twenty-one years old. He was chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, an organiser of genuine ability who had brokered an unprecedented truce between Chicago’s street gangs and was running a free breakfast programme for local children. He had been described internally by the FBI as a rising political threat.
The raid lasted less than two minutes. Hampton was shot twice in the head at close range. He never woke up. A subsequent independent forensic analysis found that between 82 and 99 of the bullets fired during the raid came from police weapons. One, possibly, came from inside the apartment.
The man who had provided the floor plan — including the precise location of Hampton’s bedroom — was a seventeen-year-old FBI informant named William O’Neal. He had joined the Black Panther Party on the Bureau’s instructions three years earlier. The night before the raid, he had served Fred Hampton dinner. He had added a sedative to Hampton’s drink before the meal.
What happened on West Monroe Street was not an aberration. It was a tactic. And it had a name.
The Bureau That Kept America Safe
To understand what COINTELPRO was, it helps to understand what J. Edgar Hoover told the world the FBI was.
By the mid-1950s, Hoover had spent three decades constructing a public identity for himself and his Bureau as the last reliable line of defence between American democracy and the forces that wished to destroy it. The Soviet Union was real. The Communist Party USA had genuine ties to Moscow. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed for espionage in 1953. The threat of ideological subversion was not invented — it was, in the atmosphere of the time, broadly accepted as the legitimate concern of a security service operating in a dangerous world.
Hoover’s FBI presented itself accordingly. It was professional, incorruptible, methodical. It investigated criminals and foreign agents. It did not, it was understood, involve itself in domestic politics. The Bureau operated within the law. That was the point of it.
This was the public account. Congress accepted it. Presidents relied on it. For fifteen years, no one with the authority to look chose to look.
What was actually happening inside the FBI during those fifteen years was classified under a name that appeared in none of its public communications.
COINTELPRO.
The Word in the Stolen File
The FBI ran covert operations against the Socialist Workers Party from 1961 to 1976. The SWP was a legal political party. It fielded candidates in elections. It published a newspaper. In fifteen years of intensive surveillance, the Bureau produced over 20,000 pages of files on an organisation whose members had committed no violence and broken no laws. Informants were planted. Employers were contacted. Anonymous letters were sent. The operations continued for so long and caused such demonstrable harm that in 1986 a federal judge ruled the FBI had violated the SWP’s civil rights across a period of decades. The Bureau was ordered to pay $264,000 in damages. No official was disciplined. The money came from the public purse.
If the FBI was willing to run a fifteen-year covert programme against a party that contested local elections and printed a newsletter, the question of what it was prepared to do to organisations it considered genuinely threatening answers itself.
On the night of 8 March 1971, while much of America was watching Muhammad Ali fight Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, a group of eight people broke into the FBI’s resident agency office in Media, Pennsylvania. They brought a crowbar. They took everything they could carry — roughly a thousand documents — loaded them into suitcases and drove away.
They called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. They had no weapons, no political party, no funding. They were teachers, a daycare worker, a cab driver, a graduate student. They had decided, after considerable deliberation, that the only way to find out what the FBI was actually doing was to steal its files.
Over the following weeks they mailed the documents to journalists and members of Congress. Most recipients, fearful of prosecution, returned them to the FBI unopened. Betty Medsger at the Washington Post did not. Her editor, after consulting lawyers, published the stories.
Among the files was a memo containing a word nobody outside the FBI had encountered before. COINTELPRO. The document gave no explanation of what it meant. But it was clearly a programme of some kind, and it was clearly directed at domestic political organisations, and that was enough to raise questions that Hoover could not answer without revealing everything.
He tried, briefly, to dismiss the stolen files as insignificant. Nobody believed him.
Four years later, a New York Times front page by Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA had been running illegal domestic surveillance operations — part of a wider collapse of public trust in federal institutions accelerated by the break-in at the Watergate complex and everything that followed. Senator Frank Church of Idaho convened a select committee to investigate. Its remit expanded quickly to include the FBI. What the Church Committee found over the following two years would become the definitive account of what American intelligence agencies had been doing, in secret, to American citizens — and the Senate investigation that would expose the full scope of CIA and FBI abuses had its roots in a crowbar and a suitcase full of stolen paper.
What the Files Actually Said
COINTELPRO — the Counter Intelligence Programme — was formally established by J. Edgar Hoover on 25 August 1956. It ran for fifteen years. In that time, the FBI approved 2,218 separate covert actions against domestic political organisations. Not investigations. Actions. Operations designed not to gather intelligence but to destroy their targets.
The programme’s initial focus was the Communist Party USA. It expanded to include the Socialist Workers Party, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Ku Klux Klan, Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and — from 1967 onwards — what an internal FBI memo classified as “Black Nationalist Hate Groups.”
That 1967 memo, signed by Hoover and now available in full through the FBI’s own document archive, stated the programme’s goals in language that required no interpretation. The Bureau intended to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralise its targets. It intended to prevent the rise of what the document called
“a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.”
The memo listed three men who might fulfil that role. Stokely Carmichael. Elijah Muhammad. And Martin Luther King Jr., should he “abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to white liberal doctrines.”
The methods were varied. Agents sent anonymous letters to activists’ spouses, alleging infidelity. They contacted employers to have targets dismissed. They planted stories in newspapers through journalists on retainer to the Bureau. They created forged documents attributed to target organisations, designed to provoke conflict between rival groups. They recruited informants and instructed them not merely to report but to “create factionalism” and “cause disruption” — to become active agents of the organisation’s destruction from within.
The technique had a name inside the Bureau. Snitch-jacketing. An informant would accuse genuine members of being FBI plants. Trust collapsed. Organisations fractured. Nobody was certain who to believe, because the FBI had ensured that doubt, once seeded, could not be uprooted.
The most lethal application of these techniques was not directed at King. It was directed at two organisations the FBI had decided should destroy each other.
By 1969, both the Black Panther Party and the US Organization — a Black cultural nationalist group founded in Los Angeles by Ron Karenga — had established significant presences in southern California. They disagreed on ideology and strategy. The disagreements were real but they were political, not violent. The FBI decided to change that.
Field agents began producing and distributing forged letters, each purportedly from one organisation to the other, containing threats. The letters were written to sound authentic — specific enough to be believed, inflammatory enough to provoke a response. When the letters alone proved insufficient, agents escalated. A cartoon was produced and circulated depicting members of the US Organization shooting Panther leaders. It was attributed to the Panthers.
An internal FBI memo from the Los Angeles field office, subsequently recovered and published, stated the operation’s objective plainly: the Bureau intended to exploit
“all avenues of creating further dissension in the ranks of the BPP.”
Dissension was a bureaucratic word for what followed. Between January and December 1969, four Black Panther members were killed in confrontations with US Organization members in Los Angeles. John Huggins and Alprentice Carter were shot dead on the UCLA campus in January. Larry Roberson and Sylvester Bell were killed in separate incidents later that year.
The Church Committee’s investigation confirmed the FBI’s role in engineering the escalation. No agent was charged in connection with any of the deaths. The Los Angeles field office received no formal censure. The operation was, from the Bureau’s internal perspective, a success: two organisations that might have found common ground had been set against each other, and four people who might have organised, recruited and led were dead.
This was not a rogue operation. It was approved through the standard COINTELPRO authorisation process, reviewed at headquarters, and filed alongside the other 2,217 actions the programme generated. The method was bureaucratic. The outcome was not.
In November 1964, the FBI prepared a package for Martin Luther King Jr. Inside was a composite recording — assembled from surveillance tapes of King’s hotel rooms — and a letter. The letter was written to appear as though it came from a disillusioned Black supporter. It told King that his “filthy, abnormal fraudulent self” was known. It told him the recording would be released to the press. Then it gave him an instruction.
“King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”
The package was sent one month before King was due to collect the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The Church Committee later confirmed the letter was composed at FBI headquarters. Hoover was aware of it. Nobody was disciplined. Nobody was charged. King’s response was to show the package to his colleagues and continue working.
That the FBI attempted to drive the most prominent civil rights leader in American history to suicide is not a theory. It is documented in the Bureau’s own files, confirmed by a Senate investigation, and available for anyone to read.
The Church Committee’s final report concluded that COINTELPRO “went far beyond” what would be
“tolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.”
Most of them had not been involved in violent activity. Most of them were organisers, writers, lawyers and students who had committed the specific offence of holding political views the Director of the FBI found inconvenient.
None of it — not one operation across fifteen years and 2,218 actions — had been authorised by Congress. None of it had been reviewed by a court. Successive presidents had been kept partly informed and had not asked the questions that would have required honest answers. The programme operated entirely outside the constitutional framework it claimed to be protecting.
For the full account of what happened on West Monroe Street — the informant’s role, the floor plan, the sedative, and what the evidence showed about the raid itself — see [the pre-dawn raid that killed Fred Hampton]. For the Bureau’s sustained personal campaign against King across more than a decade, including the full surveillance operation that preceded the suicide letter, see [the FBI’s parallel campaign to destroy King personally].
What Happened to the People Involved
J. Edgar Hoover died in office on 2 May 1972, eight months after COINTELPRO was formally disbanded and one year before the Senate investigations began. He was never questioned under oath about any of it. He received a state funeral. President Nixon ordered the flags flown at half-mast.
No FBI official was ever criminally charged for any COINTELPRO operation.
The city of Chicago eventually paid $1.85 million to the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the second man killed in the West Monroe Street raid. The settlement was not an admission of liability. It was, a city spokesman said, a resolution.
William O’Neal, the informant who provided the floor plan and drugged Hampton’s drink, gave a single interview about his role — to the documentary series Eyes on the Prize in 1989. He appeared uncomfortable throughout. On 15 January 1990, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, he walked onto the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago and was struck by a car. He was thirty-nine. The Cook County medical examiner ruled it suicide.
The Citizens’ Commission members who broke into the Media office kept their identities secret for forty-three years. In 2014, most of them went public in a book and a documentary. No charges were brought — the statute of limitations had expired decades earlier. Several said they had no regrets.
The Church Committee’s work led directly to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which established a special court to oversee domestic intelligence operations and require judicial approval for surveillance warrants. It was presented as the structural safeguard that would ensure nothing like COINTELPRO could happen again.
In its first decade of operation, the FISA court approved 99.97% of government surveillance applications. The FBI was not alone in operating outside any legal framework during this period — across the same years, the CIA was running its own secret programme of experiments on unwitting American citizens.
The Pattern That Doesn’t End
In 2017, the FBI’s counterterrorism division circulated an internal report designating “Black Identity Extremists” as a domestic security threat. The category was broad enough that civil liberties organisations warned it could apply to anyone publicly advocating for Black people’s rights. The classification was a functional echo of the “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” designation that had put Martin Luther King Jr. in a surveillance file fifty years earlier.
In 2020, the FBI paid a violent felon named Mickey Windecker to infiltrate Denver’s racial justice movement following the protests over George Floyd’s killing. Windecker rose to a leadership position within the group, accused genuine activists of being FBI informants — the snitch-jacketing technique the Bureau had developed under COINTELPRO — and attempted to entrap members in violent crimes. The operation was documented in detail by The Intercept in 2023.
FOIA requests confirmed that FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces had tracked the travel plans of Black Lives Matter activists across multiple cities and maintained individual dossiers on people against whom there was no documented basis for suspecting violent activity.
The Church Committee concluded in 1976 that the FBI had used every resource at its disposal to destroy Dr King. The full list of every person subjected to the same treatment has never been released.
The Documents
COINTELPRO Files, Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Vault. vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro
Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), US Senate, 1976. intelligence.senate.gov
COINTELPRO Collection, National Security Archive, George Washington University. nsarchive.gwu.edu
‘Discredit, Disrupt, and Destroy’: FBI Records and the Surveillance of Black Leaders and Civil Rights Organisations. UC Berkeley Library, January 2021. lib.berkeley.edu
Aaronson, Trevor. ‘The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement.’ The Intercept, February 2023. theintercept.com
Center for Constitutional Rights and Color Of Change. FOIA Request re: FBI Surveillance of Black Lives Matter Protests, 2016. Documents cited in Atlanta Black Star, March 2018.
Churchill, Ward & Vander Wall, Jim. The COINTELPRO Papers. South End Press, 2002.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007.
Go Deeper
The primary document-based account of the programme, built from the recovered FBI files themselves. The COINTELPRO Papers by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall reproduces the key operational memos alongside analysis — it is simultaneously a primary source anthology and the most comprehensive history of the programme in print.