Isegoria

The Church Committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO actions in L.A., Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther and a decorated Vietnam vet:

Pratt would be imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a murder the FBI knew he didn’t commit. He was in Oakland at the time of the crime, four hundred miles away, at a Black Panther house that the Bureau had wiretapped. It had transcripts of a call he’d made to the Panther headquarters in Los Angeles just hours before the murder. Still, Bureau agents enlisted a federal informant to lie on the stand about Pratt’s involvement. Even before the frame-up, FBI gunmen had attempted to kill Pratt by shooting at him through the window of his apartment; he survived only because a spine injury he’d sustained in the war made it more comfortable to sleep on the floor.

Pratt was serving a life sentence when the Church Committee released its landmark findings, confirming what he’d long suspected: LASO and the LAPD were complicit in the COINTELPRO operation. The committee quoted a report that the FBI’s Los Angeles outpost had sent to Hoover himself, advising that “the Los Angeles [Field] Office [of the FBI] is furnishing on a daily basis information to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office Intelligence Division and the Los Angeles Police Department Intelligence and Criminal Conspiracy Divisions concerning the activities of black nationalist groups in the anticipation that such information might lead to the arrest of the militants.” By the Church Committee’s estimation, this meant that Los Angeles law enforcement was guilty of obstructing justice and hindering prosecution.

In August 1967, the same month Hoover launched COINTELPRO, CIA director Richard Helms inaugurated the agency’s domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, which also infiltrated “subversive” groups and “neutralized” them:

CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis. In the summer of ’67, the president was convinced that the divided, disorderly America he led couldn’t possibly be the product of his own policies. Foreign agents, and presumably foreign money, must be to blame. He ordered the CIA to prove that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their origins abroad.

Richard Helms complied without hesitation. In the six years that followed, the CIA tracked thousands of Americans, insulating its information gathering so thoroughly that even those at the top of its counterintelligence division were clueless about its domestic surveillance. CHAOS kept tabs on three hundred thousand people, more than seven thousand of them American citizens. The agency shared information with the FBI, the White House, and the Justice Department. At its peak, CHAOS had fifty-two dedicated agents, most of whom served to infiltrate antiwar groups, like their counterparts in the FBI. Undercover, they hoped to identify Russian instigators, although they never found any. With the Interdivision Intelligence Unit (IDIU), a new branch of the Justice Department outfitted with sophisticated computerized databases, they collaborated on a list of more than ten thousand names, all thought to be dangerous activists; the IDIU produced regular reports on these people, hoping to predict their activities.

The journalist Seymour Hersh got wind of CHAOS late in 1974. He told James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence, and William Colby, the director of the CIA, that he had a story “bigger than My Lai” about CIA domestic activities. Colby was forced to admit that Hersh’s findings were accurate, and Angleton resigned from the agency. The story broke on December 22, on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.”

The Church Committee probed the CIA’s illegal activities, as did a separate government investigation, the Rockefeller Commission—but neither was able to penetrate the agency’s veil of secrecy. Since the CIA has no right to operate on American soil, the program should have brought even more censure than COINTELPRO; instead, it drew only a muted response. CIA leadership stonewalled at every opportunity. Even if they hadn’t, investigators were crippled by the dearth of information. When Richard Helms had disbanded CHAOS before leaving office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of every file pertaining to it, and since the seventies, almost nothing has come out. The operation hardly left a footprint.

[…]

In a memoir, former CIA director Colby later claimed that President Gerald Ford fired him for refusing to help Rockefeller sabotage his own investigation. According to Colby, CHAOS was so highly classified that even he, the director of the CIA, didn’t have access to it. “I found it impossible to do much about whatever was wrong with [CHAOS],” he wrote. “Its super-secrecy and extreme compartmentalization kept me very much on its periphery.”

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