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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen COINTELPRO = National Security - 'NBC Reporter Recounts Breaking FBI Spying Story' - NBC
NBC reporter recounts breaking FBI spying storyBy Michael Isikoff - NBC News National Investigative Correspondent
1/8/14
<snip>
The files stolen from an FBI office outside Philadelphia in 1971 were stunning, describing secret efforts to spy on student protestors and infiltrate civil rights groups. But one document proved especially interesting to the NBC News correspondent who would later break the news of the FBIs most notorious secret program of nationwide domestic surveillance. It discussed a proposal from bureau headquarters that agents send letters anonymously to college professors who had shown a reluctance to take decisive action against left-wing protestors. And it included a cryptic acronym hed never seen before: COINTELPRO.
The first question that popped in my mind was, By what authority do FBI agents write anonymous letters? recalls Carl Stern, who covered the Justice Department for NBC News for nearly 30 years. He also wanted to know what COINTELPRO stood for. But when he pressed those questions with top DOJ officials, nobody would talk to me about it.
Stern recalled his efforts to learn more about the documentand the mysterious reference to COINTELPRO -- on Tuesday after the confession by three former peace activists that they had committed the unsolved burglary of the Media, Pa. office in order to document what they were convinced was massive illegal surveillance by J. Edgar Hoovers FBI. The identities of the burglars are revealed in a new book, The Burglary, by former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, and were reported Tuesday on the Today show.
The burglars cracked open the door to exposing illicit FBI snooping by stealing the files and sending them to select journalists, but it was Stern who opened it all the way. Using a then-novel tool called the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from the government, Stern uncovered the long-running surveillance program known as COINTELPRO, a now-infamous effort at political intimidation and disruption that may have been Hoover's biggest secret.
As Stern recalled it, when his initial inquiries about COINTELPRO were rebuffed, he refused to take no for an answer and sought an explanation over lunch with L. Patrick Gray, who had become acting director of the FBI after Hoover died in 1972. He got back a terse letter in Sept. 1972. This matter involved a highly sensitive operation, it read. It has now been discontinued and any further disclosures would definitely be harmful to the Bureaus operations and to the national security.
So Stern filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act...
<snip>
More: http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/08/22220561-nbc-reporter-recounts-breaking-fbi-spying-story?lite
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When COINTELPRO = National Security - 'NBC Reporter Recounts Breaking FBI Spying Story' - NBC (Original Post)
WillyT
Jan 2014
OP
2naSalit
(86,536 posts)1. Bookmarked
to read later, looks like a "must read".
WillyT
(72,631 posts)2. Kick !!!