By Rich Lowry
Monday, August 05, 2019
At some point in the late 1960s, you could be forgiven
for thinking that the FBI was running the KKK.
It infiltrated, manipulated, and ran the Klan into the
ground. The name of the operation: COINTELPRO–White Hate (cointelpro meant
counter-intelligence program). With violent white hate again on the rise, we
should take some inspiration — even if the methods can’t be replicated — from
the FBI’s past grappling with racist extremists.
If there was any doubt that the country has a
white-nationalist problem, the shocking attack on an El Paso Walmart should
remove it. These self-radicalizing freaks, who are a subset of the broader
mass-shooting phenomenon, take inspiration from prior acts of vicious mayhem
and cheer high body counts on Internet message boards. They are domestic
subversives and terrorists, and deserve to be treated as such.
There is no doubt that if we suffered a string of
massacres on our soil carried out by Islamic radicals, we’d do everything in
our power to diminish and hopefully eradicate the danger — indeed, we have. The
national response to the racist extremists in our midst should show the same
alacrity and resolve, while acknowledging that they represent a different,
more-difficult-to-counter threat than the old Klan did.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover to go after the Klan as he had the Communists. The seedbed of the
program was the bureau’s in-depth work, involving 200 agents, investigating the
horrific murder of civil-rights workers in Mississippi.
Running until 1971 and involving 26 field offices,
COINTELPRO–White Hate targeted groups and people deemed violent threats, not
their ideology per se.
The effort was comprehensive and no-holds-barred. In his
history of the FBI, Tim Weiner writes that “the FBI dangled small fortunes
before potential KKK informers, offered outright bribes to Klansmen who could
serve as double agents inside state and local police forces, planted bugs and
wiretaps in Klaverns, carried out black-bag jobs to steal membership lists and
(on at least one occasion) dynamite caches.”
In an article in the journal Social Science History,
David Cunningham recounts how the FBI degraded, and came to effectively
control, Klan groups.
At the outset, the FBI carried out what it called
“intensive interview programs” with Klan leaders. The sheer fact of the
interviews, seeking to “bring to the attention of [Klansmen] an awareness of
the FBI’s interest in any illegal activities of the Klan,” disrupted the
membership and operations of the groups.
The FBI acquired hundreds of Klan informants, accounting
for at least 6 percent of the membership, probably more. According to one FBI
official, “There would be a Klan meeting with ten people there, and six of them
would be reporting back the next day.”
The FBI worked to preempt violent acts and gained an
enormous influence over Klan groups. The New Orleans office was so successful
at degrading the Louisiana chapter of the United Klans of America that the
office’s concern became propping the group up, lest its disintegration loosen
the FBI’s control. The Tampa office had the same problem. The Charlotte office
managed to decimate the violent North Carolina UKA and shift its membership to
an alternative group under FBI influence.
One informant even became the speechwriter for the leader
of the national UKA, Robert Shelton. The FBI mole worked to moderate Shelton’s
views. According to a FBI report, this effort led to the Klansman’s relatively
“softened position — less racist, critical of violence, more strongly
anticommunist.”
Overall, Klan membership began shrinking in the late
1960s, from an estimated 14,000 members in 1964 to 4,300 in 1971. Per Shelton
himself, “the FBI’s counterintelligence program hit us in membership and
weakened us for about ten years.”
Of course, the contemporary FBI obviously isn’t going to
take over the alt-right, nor should we want it to. The abuses of the COINTELPRO
programs — the FBI also targeted civil-rights groups and the New Left, among
others — became notorious when they were exposed in the 1970s.
There are also practical obstacles to the FBI duplicating
its anti-Klan work, the most important of which is that the Klan was an
organization, whereas today’s white supremacists are isolated, free-floating
haters whose only connection to anyone else often is anonymous Internet
postings.
Yet the FBI needs to be intensely focused on this threat.
The bureau should take an intelligence-based approach. It should monitor sewer
Internet boards such as 8chan, the preferred white-supremacist forum for
propagandizing for mass murder. Posters who cross over from First
Amendment–protected speech to incitement should be prosecuted. The FBI should
interview anyone expressing sympathy with terrorism — just as it does with
suspected Islamic extremists — and surveil such persons as appropriate and
permitted under the law.
El Paso was an outrage, and surely not the last. We need
to react accordingly.
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