Dangers of Dissent : the FBI and Civil Liberties Since 1965 / Ivan Greenberg
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THE DANGERS OF DISSENT 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb i 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb iiii 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM THE DANGERS OF DISSENT The FBI and Civil Liberties since 1965 Ivan Greenberg L EXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb iiiiii 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenberg, Ivan, 1962– The dangers of dissent : the FBI and civil liberties since 1965 / Ivan Greenberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4938-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4940-9 (electronic) 1. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation—History. 2. Criminal investigation— United States—History. 3. Undercover operations—United States—History. 4. Internal security—United States—History. 5. Intelligence service—United States—History. 6. Civil rights—United States—History. 7. Abuse of administrative power—United States—History. I. Title. HV8144.F43G74 2010 363.250973—dc22 2010028153 ϱ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb iivv 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM To my father, Bob, and my son, Andrew 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb v 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb vvii 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 State Crimes 31 2 The Evolution of 1970s Spying 69 3 Did the FBI Really Change? 115 4 The Need for Enemies after the Cold War 151 5 The Terror Scare 183 6 Information Flow and Political Policing 213 7 Suing the FBI for Spying 251 8 The FBI in the Surveillance Society 291 Selected Bibliography 307 Index 319 — vii — 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb vviiii 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb vviiiiii 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM Acknowledgments EVERAL PEOPLE GENEROUSLY READ PARTS of the manuscript or provided help in Sthe research. Dolores Greenberg was a sharp, sympathetic critic who read almost every page and offered advice at different stages of preparing the manu- script. I remain indebted to her. Michael Ravnitzky, Nancy C. Carnevale, Morris Dickstein, Richard Greenwald, Luisa D’Arista, and John Proeller read specific chapters. They all helped improve the work in different ways. In the research process several people kindly shared FBI files they obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. My thanks especially to Michael Ravnitzky, a college friend, whose FOIA activism is contagious. He alerted me to many documents I oth- erwise would not have been able to find. Ernie Lazar also shared material. It was a pleasure to work with attorneys Mark S. Zaid and Bradley P. Moss, who initiated the lawsuit Greenberg v. FBI to liberate records used in chapter 2. I also want to thank Mara Drogan and my editors at Lexington Books, Joseph Parry and Patricia Stevenson. As I trace my intellectual origins and development, I am grateful to several teachers who taught me to think critically about politics, culture, power, and history: Richard Polenberg, Herbert G. Gutman, David Rosner, Daniel Walkowitz, Frances Fox Piven, Irwin Yellowitz, and Morris Dickstein. More- over, I wish to acknowledge the late great punk rocker Joe Strummer for articulating a musical protest sensibility that has inspired me over the years. I thank across generations my son, Andrew, who was excited about my writing project, and my father, Robert, who talked to me with love and enthusiasm about intellectual matters from a young age. Ivan Greenberg, Bronx, New York — ix — 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb iixx 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb x 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM Introduction N 1970, A FEDERAL GRAND JURY CHARGED Roger Lippman, along with seven other Iindividuals, with conspiracy to organize a riot in Seattle. Lippman, a local leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), recently had quit Reed College to work full time against the war in Vietnam. He remembers unpaid, sixty-hour weeks dedicated to building a social movement for peace and jus- tice. Among his organizing efforts, he attended several political meetings in preparation for a street demonstration to be held on February 17, 1970, outside the federal courthouse to rally support for the defendants in the Chicago Con- spiracy trial. The Seattle protest was one of many organized across the nation in response to Judge Julius Hoffman’s jailing of the Chicago defendants (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner, Bobby Seale, and John Froines) for contempt of court. When about two thousand protestors, led by the Seattle Liberation Front, tried to shut down the Seattle courthouse by throwing rocks, bottles, and paint, an extended melee broke out with police. Lippman later wrote, “Tear gas drifted into a courthouse elevator just as the door was closing to take a prosecutor upstairs. The news- papers reported that a demonstrator threw a grenade at the building.”1 Twenty people were injured in the riot and seventy-six were arrested. In fact, Lippman did not attend the protest, having moved to San Francisco several weeks earlier to edit The Movement, a radical newspaper representing SDS and Friends of SNCC. But he was indicted anyway for conspiracy to cause damage to federal property. The government built its case on the 1968 antiriot statute, which Congress enacted in the wake of urban unrest follow- ing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The criminalizing of intent — 1 — 110_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb0_503_Greenberg_Finals.indb 1 99/23/10/23/10 88:18:18 AAMM 2 Introduction to create social disorder was a clear attack on political dissent, and Lippman spent a month in jail before the beginning of what became known as the Se- attle Conspiracy Trial.2 Lippman believes his arrest was part of an effort to “blame protest leaders for the national chaos caused by the war in Vietnam, as well as to tie up lead- ing organizers and get us off the streets.” As he put it, “The conspiracy indict- ment was a frame-up, at least as regards me and one or two of the others. I was charged with attending two meetings (and nothing else!), in planning for the demonstration but those two meetings were only tangentially about the demonstration, and I barely participated, if at all.” While he played very little part in organizing the protest, his mere presence at the SLF meetings provided the opportunity for the government finally to pin a criminal charge on him in an effort to curtail his activism. Such “counterintelligence” activity has a long history in the United States and persists into the twenty-first century. Lippman added, “I doubt I said anything publicly in those two SLF meetings I attended, and if so, nothing about The Day After Protests [TDA]. I was there more as an observer. Government spies knew me as an anti-war leader in Seattle; they must have assumed I was involved in planning TDA; and I’m sure they wanted me as a defendant, despite the lack of evidence, because I provided a political target that could be used as part of their scare tactics.” When he later obtained his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, he learned that “I was awarded the FBI’s highest rating, Security Index-Level 1, which meant that my activities were under continuous surveillance.”3 In 1968, the FBI began a major counteroffensive against the New Left, opening a new section of its COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), and the Bureau designated leading New Left leaders as “key activists” subject to intensive surveillance in everyday life. The Bureau defined key activists as “extremely active and most vocal in their statements denouncing the United States and calling for civil disobedience and other forms of unlawful and dis- ruptive acts.” FBI Headquarters told agents to use informers and physical and electronic surveillance to identify “their sources of funds, foreign contacts, and future plans.” By 1971, about half of seventy-three people designated as key activists had been prosecuted in some form by federal or local officials.4 Lippman says about his FBI file, “At various times I was flagged as being on the Agitator Index, Rabble-Rouser Index, and Security Index. My FBI file is most notable for demonstrating how little they knew or understood of what I was doing.”5 The Seattle Conspiracy Trial garnered substantial public attention and supporters