Come on fellers. I can only seem to dig up stuff about failed intelligence and whatnot.
What are somethings the FBI has done in the past that are just plain wrong?
I’m thinking things along the lines of Waco. You know, they killed a bunch of people because they were going to commit suicide. Things of that nature.
I understand that during the Civil Rights era, the FBI spent quite a bit of time harassing Martin Luther King and friends. Definitely something they’d like to forget.
Do you mean stupid or evil? They investigated Mad Magazine and the song “Louie Louie.” There are some good documents about that on The Smoking Gun. They also investigated the Bonsai Kitten people. I think those were some pretty stupid things to do.
Sorry, it does sound like I meant evil.
I meant stupid.
Diceman speaks the truth. The FBI had a rather imfamous program known as Cointelpro. Among other things, they tried to undermine the civil rights movement, tried to get MLK to commit suicide, tried to destroy his marriage, planted news stories, and generally harrassed left leaning people and groups.
By way of backgound, I heard that Cointelpro’s efforts against King, etc. were based on the slightly earlier and successful (though technically illegal) efforts against the KKK. Hoover apparently thought King and the like were as dangerous to the US as the Klan, not bothering to look at their respective goals.
There are too many right answers to fit conveniently in the GQ forum, so I’ll move this thread to MPSIMS.
During the Second World War the FBI expended enormous resources searching for Samuel Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.
This was because Hammett was an outspoken Communist. He was not a bomb-throwing terrorist or a spy for the Soviet Union, merely someone who voted for people who didn’t have a rat’s ass of a chance of winning. There seems to be no particular evidence that he was any more or less dangerous than he would have been had he been active in the Vegetarian parties or the effort to bring back Prohibition.
But this is not the really stupid part.
The really stupid part is that the FBI, though it expended thousands of man hours and a great deal of money, never did find him until the war was over. And where was Hammett all that time?
Considering himself a patriotic American, Hammett, then in his 50s, had requested, and, by special Act of Congress, had been permitted, to resume his noncommissioned rank which he had held honorably during the First World War. He spent the duration writing for the army publication Yank as a special correspondent, explaining the war and the significance of America’s role in it to servicemen. His name often appeared prominently on the front cover of the publication, which was world-famous at the time, and was circulated around the globe.
All of this had been reported on the front page of papers around the country when Hammett re-enlisted shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The FBI once sent a letter to Dr. Martin Luther King recommending that he commit suicide. They also sent his wife a tape which they claimed was of him having sex with another woman. She later said she didn’t believe it sounded like his voice on the tape at all.
Throughout the sixties the FBI had a strident campaign to discredit Dr. King. I still recall how, one night a year or two before King’s assassination, (I would have been in junior high at the time), my father told my mother, my brother, sister and I one night at the dinner table about how an FBI agent he knew had told him that King was adulterer with many mistresses.
My father was shocked, not so much because of the revelation about King (my dad was kind of cynical about celebrities in general and, while generally supportive of civil rights, he didn’t really have an opinion one way or another about King personally). Instead he thought it was incredibly unprofessional for a government agent to shoot his mouth off that way.
The FBI converted the fire station down the street from the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis into a 24-hour surgveillance center with which they spied on King. Yet they were unable to detect James Earl Ray’s plan to kill him, to interfere with those efforts, or to keep Ray from fleeing to England.
A few years after King’s assassination, his widow gave a speech on the anniversary of his death in which she referred to her husband as having had “a dream”. Life Magazine reported that an FBI agent came up to Mrs. King after the speech and demanded to know what this “dream” was, and was it something subversive.
The FBI had Felix Frankfurter on a list of dangerous subversives, and kept him under strict surveillance as a threat to the nation, right up to the time he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. It had similar suspicions about Helen Keller and a number of other benevolent individuals because of their involvement with the civil rights movement and the ACLU.
During World War II the FBI conducted an extensive investigation of Walt Disney. This was not primarily because of his political activities, although he had been a supporter of the German American Bund movement before the war. Rather, what got them excited was a Mickey Mouse comic strip in which Goofy was trying to play a guitar. To suggest that he was playing badly, the artist drew a number of crooked and slanted musical notes. One jumble of them, with a whole lot of imagination, looked a very little like a swastika.
At the same time the FBI used Disney as an informant about Hollywood “subversives” and continued to do so for many years to come, apparently accepting at face value his insistence that anyone who attempted to unionize his employees or otherwise cause him expense was a Communist. To keep Disney loyal, the FBI used agents on government time to research where Disney had been born; he was adopted and wanted to know where he was from originally. They never did figure it out despite years of effort.
The FBI also used to prepare reviews of new movies for Hoover’s benefit, often with idea in mind of seeing if the FBI was mentioned. James Bond films in particular were checked out in advance.
In the 1930s Dalton Trumbo wrote a best-selling novel called Johnny Got His Gun. It was an horrific account of the thoughts of a WWI veteran who was left deaf, blind and crippled. As America drew towards active involvement in the war, Trumbo was disturbed by the many letters he was receiving from people who appeared to be Nazi sympathizers who said they liked his novel and said they saw it as arguing for America staying out of the war.
Trumbo voluntarily withdrew the book from circulation after Pearl Harbor, and he forwarded the names of come his correspondents to the FBI. Their action was swift and lasting; they spent years investigating Trumbo, who was eventually blacklisted from Hollywood.
Until well into the U.S. involvement in Vietnam the FBI required its agents who sought to inflitrate student radical groups to maintain the FBI dress code. You could generally pick out the spy as the Yippie or SDS member who had a buzz cut and spit-shined shoes. This may help to explain why an undercover agent once reported that the group he had infiltrated was planning to hijack the Staten Island Ferry and sail it to China.
Hoover was so fixated on the physical appearance of his agents that recruitment interview forms contained spaces in which evaluators commented on whether an applicant was handsome. Richard Nixon, who once interviewed for a job, was written up as ordinary-looking. It was also noted that he liked to dance.
The U.S. government fought a long struggle to have John Lennon
deported. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act last year disclosed that these efforts were largely started at the suggestion of Senator Strom Thurmond who wrote to President Nixon about his concern over Lennon’s “activities”.
What were these activities? John Lennon was active in vote registration efforts. Eighteen-year-olds had only recently been enfranchised, and he was afraid that if too many people aged 18 to 21 actually went and voted, it could undermine the war effort.
Anxious to do its part to suppress subversive activities such as voting, the FBI prepared a packet of information on Lennon which it sent to the NYPD with the suggestion that they watch him closely. It was sort of like issuing a wanted poster for a man who wasn’t wanted for anything. Although Lennon was, at the time, one of the best known entertainers in the world, the packet listed the wrong address for him. It listed a street in Manhattan he hadn’t lived on in years, and listed an address where he had never stayed. In addition, the photograph they supplied was not of Lennon, but of a folk singer who performed on street corners in New York City.
The General Accounting Office once estimated that the American Communist Party would have gone broke had its many undercover FBI members not been so conscientious in keeping up their dues. For a long time there was one “cell” of the Communist Party which had only three members–and two of them were FBI agents.
At the same time, the FBI under Hoover never managed to infiltrate the Mafia. In The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight novelist Jimmy Breslin quotes an FBI agent as testifying before Congress that this was because they didn’t have many agents who looked Italian.
In addition to lacking Italian-looking agents, the FBI under Hoover restricted its black personnel largely to Hoover’s private chauffeurs. In the 1930s the FBI attempted to infiltrate meetings of various kinds conducted by the Nation of Islam. To do this, they sent white agents in blackface.