The FBI has used informants and undercover operatives since its earliest days. As David H. Price writes in his book The American Surveillance State: How the U.S. Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022): “[J. Edgar] Hoover fed on secrecy. He fetishized this hunger with the endless creation of lists and secret files filled with private details to be scurrilously used as needed at some later date. Hoover created the world’s most comprehensive pre-computer cross-listed filing system profiling millions of Americans.”
A few months after my Freedom of Information (FOIA) request from the U.S. Department of Justice/Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the mid 2000s, I received a manila envelope with about 130-+ pages. In addition to some biographical material, and my mother and father’s birthdates, most of the report covered my activities as an anti-war activist while at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas -- including working on “Vortex” (nee “Reconstruction”), Lawrence’s alternative newspaper – and my 1973 trip to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade.
Perhaps the most curious section in the packet involved a visit I made with several other members of the Venceremos Brigade to the North Korean embassy on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Havana in 1973. After lunch at the Hotel Nacionale -- the site of the 1946 infamous mob summit organized by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, and attended by a who’s who of American mobsters -- we were approached by a member of the North Korean embassy who was looking for leaders of the Brigade. None being available; they settled on us. We piled into a car and drove to the nearby embassy. While drinking some powerful and unidentifiable Korean schnapps, and eating ham sandwiches, we discussed the U.S. movement against the War in Vietnam, anti-War organizing within the U.S. military, and related issues. My FBI file contained an almost word-for-word transcription of our conversations.
It was clear that Kansas Bureau of Investigation-linked informers followed political activists around and attending meetings, and filing handwritten reports on our activities.
Talking about the convening of grand juries aimed at disrupting the left, I told The Lawrence Times reporter that "[A]t the time, we were well aware there was an effort to destabilize the leftist movement in the U.S. Our question was, how much of it was happening in our area."
In a 2006 interview with The Lawrence Times, I talked about the FBI’s surveillance activities after the Brigade returned to the states in 1973. The KBI came calling: "I think the first question they asked me was, 'How was the weather down there?’ I told the Lawrence Times. “It was clear that they were interested in what we had going on."
According to the Lawrence Times piece, Kansas University’s Spencer Library collection “shows that many pages were withheld under FOIA caveats, with a common reason listed as ‘information furnished by a confidential source.’"
I noted that every so often, new faces would arrive on the scene. “Those unlikely joiners, tended to have violent streaks, he says, prompting further rumors that FBI sources or members themselves were behind on-campus bombings and other lawbreaking. The thinking was, these individuals aimed to incite violence by groups under scrutiny, thus justifying their own surveillance.”
"As the FBI ratcheted up their surveillance, we — the progressives — ratcheted up our paranoia," I added. “It was a paranoia that now appears to have been warranted,” The Lawrence Times pointed out. “In one of the most striking documents in the Spencer collection, two government agents give handwritten detail of goings-on at 645 Michigan Street, [where I lived] a location thought to have been connected with the radical Lawrence Liberation Front. The surveillance log, dated Sept. 18, 1970, describes vehicles by their license number and "Kimball for sheriff" stickers, as well as the people who came and went:
"5:40 p.m. — Surveillance established, a white female, long, over the shoulder dishwater blond hair, blue eyes, fair complexion, was observed sitting on the front porch. She was reading a women's newspaper pink in color..."
Later in the log:
"6:21 p.m. — W/M, long brown hair, shoulder length, wearing cowboy boots, fu-manchu mustache, came out onto the front porch with a rifle and loaded it with several shells. He then sighted the rifle by pointing it around the parking lot..."
The American Surveillance State
In The American Surveillance State, David H. Price notes that “The FBI pooled information from information ranging from criminals-in-a-pinch, to ideologue members of the American Legion and other reactionary citizen groups who mailed-in informer reports based on their suspicions of coworkers, neighbors, or fellow citizens, clipped letters to the editors of local newspapers it reported free-floating suspicions of local citizens…”
In 1908, with the westward spread of the country westward, the US victory in the Spanish-American War, and increasing industrialization, violent crime was on the rise. “But violence was just the tip of the criminal iceberg. Corruption was rampant nationwide—especially in local politics, with crooked political machines like Tammany Hall in full flower,” according to “A Brief History: The Nation Calls 1908-1923” (https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history). “Big business had its share of sleaze, too, from the shoddy, even criminal, conditions in meat packaging plants and factories (as muckrakers like Upton Sinclair had so artfully exposed) to the illegal monopolies threatening to control entire industries.”
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Charles Bonaparte as his second Attorney General. By 1908, tired of obstacles put in his way from operatives of the Secret Service, Bonaparte, the grandnephew of the infamous French emperor, “ordered Department of Justice attorneys to refer most investigative matters to his Chief Examiner, Stanley W. Finch, for handling by one of these 34 agents. The new force had its mission—to conduct investigations for the Department of Justice—so that date is celebrated as the official birth of the FBI.” However, the Justice Department’s Bureau of investigation wasn’t officially named the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 1935, with J. Edgar Hoover at its helm.
In June 1940, responding to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call for investigating domestic threats, the FBI set up a Special Intelligence Service that “deployed scores of undercover agents to ferret out Axis spy networks” (https://www.fbi.gov/history/history-of-legal-attaches).
David H. Price, a Professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin’s University’s Department of Society and Social Justice, and the author of several books on the FBI and CIA, has frequently used the Freedom of Information Act in his work. Growing up in the 1960s, he heard the horrifying stories about oppression in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states. He writes: “The many convergences between what was once comfortably identified as totalitarian monitoring and controlling of citizens, and the now routine [monitoring] practices by corporations and the American government are striking.”
While Price recognizes differences between how governments employ surveillance methods, he finds that it is “striking not only to find some general parallel developments, but also how rapidly the American public so easily adapted to accept new forms of surveillance and denial of due process.”
Price presents several case studies of surveillance including FBI targeting of Professor Edward Said, who spoke out on Palestinian rights; journalist Alexander Cockburn; academy award-winning American cinematographer Haskell Wexler; economic historian Walt Whitman Rostow; economist Andre Gunder Frank; and, author, documentary filmmaker Saul Landau.
As to my FOIA request: I learned that In addition to containing the complete text of the “Preliminary Dissenting Report Of The Student Faculty Committee On University Governance” -- an official Kansas University committee to reconsider the University’s governing policies that I served on in the Summer of 1968 -- the FBI sent copies of the report to nine agencies “for possible dissemination by the Bureau in view of local dissemination by the Kansas City Office to the U.S. Secret Service, Military Intelligence (Kansas City. Missouri), Naval Investigative Service (Kansas City, Missouri), and Office of Special Investigations (Offutt AFB, Nebr).” One of the cover pages blacked out the names of informants, including “a former PSI,” two people that were “under development as a panel source,” and “as a PSI”, and “an established source.”
Historically, the FBI has targeted left wing, progressive and anti-capitalist activists with far greater zeal than right-wing organizations. However, since the January 6 insurrection, agency directives indicate that far-right organizations are a great threat to democratic institutions, and are now subjects of informers and greater surveillance. Which brings up a thorny issue: How much surveillance is necessary to track the threat of the fascist right, and how does that intersect with protecting civil liberties?