← Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes
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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [00:41]
Crime House Narrator
This is crime house.
- [00:47]
Vanessa Richardson
On January 2, 1920, agents from a new branch of the Justice Department fanned out across more than 30American cities. The branch was called the General Intelligence Division, and on the orders of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, its agents launched one of the largest roundups in US History. Working with local police, they raided Communist meeting halls, leftist bookstores and union offices and arrested everyone inside. As many as 10,000 people were swept up across the country and held without charges. In Detroit alone, nearly a thousand people were packed into a windowless room on the top floor of a federal building. They were kept there for six days with barely any food and a single toilet. Interrogators grilled them about their ties to radical groups and beat many of them when they didn't like their answers. Almost all of these people were eventually let go without ever being charged or tried. A few hundred were deported to the Soviet Union. Officials said the Palmer raids, as they came to be known, had foiled a communist plot to overthrow the government. But most of the people arrested had no criminal record. And in all those nationwide raids, agents seized a grand total of three pistols. Despite what the government said, it was clear the raids weren't about stopping a revolution. They were about silencing political groups the government didn't like. Palmer himself would be gone within a year. But the ambitious 25 year old running the General Intelligence Division was just getting started. His name was J. Edgar Hoover. And eventually he'd turn the tactics he learned during the Palmer raids into something far bigger. A secret operation he called COINTELPRO. For the next 15 years, he'd use it to spy on sabotage and even kill members of the 20th century's most important movement. But these people weren't criminals. They weren't spies. They were Americans. And the man hunting them ran the entire FBI. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors. These aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults and Crimes. A Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow also so we can continue building this community together. And and if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Today I'm digging into the secret files of cointelpro and an FBI program built to harass, intimidate and tear apart left wing political groups. For years, the idea that the federal government was secretly sabotaging civil rights organizations sounded like a paranoid conspiracy theory. Then a small group of activists got fed up and decided to fight back. Their plan was audacious. Break into an FBI office and steal the proof. And it worked. The documents they walked out with exposed the FBI's illegal campaign for the first time and left the public asking, can we really trust the government? All that and more coming up. We've all been there. You look up. Suddenly life has thrown so much at you that your to do list is completely out of control. For me, it was last month when I moved and I needed to install a cabinet in my bathroom and fix a broken light fixture. I knew just where to turn. Finding A tasker on TaskRabbit makes tackling your to do list even easier, and I honestly felt this wave of blissful relief watching a seasoned tasker handle it all in a couple of hours. I like to use the same Tasker for home repairs, but I know if he's not available. The app is filled with more than qualified taskers. TaskRabbit is an app that makes everyday life easier by helping people get more done around the home. It connects you with skilled taskers in your area for everything from mounting and yard work to home repairs. You can search for the best tasker for the job based on cost, skill set availability and past client reviews so you always feel confident. I use TaskRabbit and you should check it out too. When life happens, your to do list grows. Get ahead of it now and get $15 off your first task@taskrabbit.com or on the TaskRabbit app using promo code Crime house Taskers book up fast, especially for same day tasks. So book trusted home help today. That's $15 off your first task using promo code crime house with the TaskRabbit app or@taskrabbit.com Best thing that's ever happened to you financially.
- [06:19]
Tyler Reddick
Go easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really.
- [06:23]
Vanessa Richardson
I hit 200 on a scratcher.
- [06:25]
Tyler Reddick
Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once.
- [06:33]
Vanessa Richardson
Okay, that's fair.
- [06:34]
Tyler Reddick
It's like the lottery, except you always win.
- [06:38]
Vanessa Richardson
Not like the lottery at all, actually.
- [06:40]
Tyler Reddick
Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply.
- [06:49]
Vanessa Richardson
J. Edgar Hoover was born on January 1, 1895, in Washington, D.C. the city where he'd live his entire life. From a young age, he was logical, calculating and determined to steamroll anything in his path. As a boy, he actually had a stutter. He got rid of it by teaching himself to talk fast. He never lost that habit. Later in court, he'd rattle off testimony so quickly that stenographers struggled to keep up. In high school in the 1910s, Hoover took that combative streak to the debate team. He was good at it, and his politics were already on full display. In one early debate, he argued in favor of the death penalty. In another, he argued against giving women the right to vote. Hoover went on to law school at George Washington university, graduating in 1917 at 22 years old. The Justice Department hired him right away. He'd stay there for the next 55 years. He spent his first two years at the Alien Enemy Bureau, investigating and jailing foreigners suspected of disloyalty during World War I. He was so good at it that by 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer him in charge of the new General Intelligence Division. People sometimes called it the Radical Division. Its job was to track and disrupt political movements the department considered dangerous. The Palmer raids only lasted a few months, from November 1919 to January 1920. But they worked, even though most of the 10,000 people Hoover's agents rounded up were released without charges. The raids sent a chill through the American left. Before they began, the American Communist Party had more than 27,000 active members. By the middle of 1920, that number had collapsed to fewer than 9,000. What Hoover did was blatantly unconstitutional. It was also wildly popular because even then, Americans were already terrified of communism. In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution unseated the monarchy and installed communism in Russia. The new leaders seized private property and redistributed wealth from the rich to the poor, often violently. To a lot of Americans, especially wealthy ones, that looked like the beginning of the end. If it could happen in Russia, it could happen here. So when Hoover went after American Communists, the business community cheered him on. His reward was a promotion. Hoover was put in charge of a recently reorganized agency, the Bureau of Investigation. Years later, in 1935, it would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. From the start, Hoover worked to sell the Bureau as a serious professional crime fighting outfit. He publicly promised it would stay out of, quote, political activities and just enforce the law. And to be fair, he did deliver some of that. Hoover cleaned up corruption inside the Bureau, making sure his roughly 450 field agents weren't taking bribes. And in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his agents hunted down famous bank robbers like John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly. But behind the headlines, Hoover was using the same Bureau to crush workers. His agents helped break a coal miners strike in Kentucky, a farm workers strike in California, and textile strikes in New Jersey and Massachusetts. He also kept files on union leaders hunting for material he could use to blackmail them. By the end of the 1930s, Hoover got the green light to go after the left even harder. And it came from the very top, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1939, World War II was breaking out in Europe and President Roosevelt ordered the Bureau to take the lead on investigating, quote, subversive activities. Roosevelt was worried about foreign agents trying to undermine the country from the inside. But Hoover treated the order as a blank check to go after any left leaning group in America. In the early 1940s, leaders of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party started getting anonymous threats, letters and phone calls. All of them were secretly the work of Bureau agents. At the same time, the Bureau started wiretapping Communist Party leaders across the country. Whenever those wiretaps turned up something embarrassing, agents fed it to friendly media figures like radio host and gossip columnist Walter Winchell. The leaks chipped away at the party's reputation and made it harder to recruit. Then Congress handed Hoover a new weapon. It was called the Smith act. And it made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the US Government by force and even just in speech or in writing. To prosecutors, that was a perfect fit for the Communist Party. They argued that the Communist Manifesto's call for workers to seize the means of production was in effect a call to topple the government. Now, the first amendment is supposed to protect political speech, even radical speech. But over the next decade, the Smith act put dozens of communists and social workers party members on trial, and it won conviction after conviction. For Hoover, it was a huge win in his long war on the left. But eventually the strategy started to backfire. To win those convictions, more than 100 of the bureau's undercover informants had to take the stand and testify about Communist Party activities. That sealed the cases, but it also blew the informants cover, which made it almost impossible to keep spying on the Party from the inside. And so by the mid-1950s, Hoover changed course. He decided that dragging communists into court wasn't worth it anymore. Instead, he'd skip the legal system entirely and quietly destroy these groups from within. On August 28, 1956, he put it in writing. In a secret memo, Hoover called for a new program to, quote, disruption, discredit, and otherwise neutralize the Communist Party. The official name was the Counter Intelligence Program, But Hoover loved an acronym, so he called it cointelpro. By then, the red scare was at its peak, and the party was already shrinking. It was down to 10,000 members or fewer nationwide. But it was still a real organization. And like any large group, it had its own factions, rivalries, and power centers. One of the very first COINTELPRO operations was designed to turn those factions against each other. The Bureau sent undercover agents to join local Communist Party chapters and win the trust of the other members. Before they went in, the agents were briefed on the issues most likely to start a fight. Everything from deep disputes over Marxist theory to petty squabbles over party bylaws and budgets. Then, at the end, meeting after meeting, the agents would steer the conversation straight toward those flashpoints and let the room erupt. It did two things. It poisoned relationships between rival communist factions, and it burned up. Hour after hour that the Party could have spent actually organizing. All that infighting wore people down, and it drove new members away. Communist leaders could tell something was wrong. Across the country, chapter heads kept noticing the same thing. Argumentative newcomers who'd suddenly appeared and seemed strangely fixated on documenting every meeting. The result was paranoia at the top of the Party, and the Bureau weaponized it. Agents forged documents to make it look like one of the leaders of the New York Communist Party was a government informant. Then they planted the documents in his car where other members were sure to find them. When the papers turned up, the man was thrown out of the party. But the Bureau didn't stop attacking the inside. In the 1960s, agents invented a fake organization called the Committee for Expansion of Socialist Thought in America. On paper, the Committee echoed the Communist Party's pro worker message, but it also pushed racism and anti immigrant views, positions the real party rejected. The whole point was to bait the party into exhausting public fights about whether to align with this supposed new workers movement. In Operation Hoodwink, the Bureau even tried to spark a war between the Communist Party and the Mafia. Agents printed fake leaflets made to look like official party literature, attacking the mob for its corrupt grip on labor unions. They hoped that the Mafia would respond by killing communists. That didn't happen. But by the late 1960s, COINTELPRO had already done its damage. Party membership had fallen below 3,000, its leadership was widely seen as toothless, and the average member was now 49 years old. Hardly the young revolutionary movement Hoover had warned the country about. And keep in mind, the Communist Party wasn't breaking any laws. Everything it did was protected by the first first Amendment. The FBI drove it into the ground anyway. But the communists were just the beginning.
- [16:33]
Tyler Reddick
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- [16:40]
Vanessa Richardson
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- [16:43]
Tyler Reddick
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- [16:46]
Vanessa Richardson
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Vanessa Richardson
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- [17:04]
Crime House Narrator
The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours. That's how long detectives have before the trail begins to go cold. From A E and Crime House. This is the official podcast from the famous true crime series. The first 48 step inside the critical window. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. I'm Carter Roy. Each week I revisit a landmark homicide investigation with the depth you know and immersive long form storytelling built for your ears. Real detectives, real cases, real stakes. This is the first 48 new episodes every Thursday. Listen to and follow the first 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [18:06]
Vanessa Richardson
COINTELPRO's first target was the Communist party, and the program nearly destroyed it using, using forged documents, fake front groups, and undercover agents who turned members against one another. But the party was only one of Hoover's obsessions. For decades, he'd been just as suspicious of black Americans organizing for their rights. As far back as 1919, when he was still running the general intelligence division, Hoover opened an investigation into the black activist Marcus Garvey. He. He eventually had Garvey prosecuted for mail fraud and later deported to Jamaica. But Hoover's war on racial justice really kicked into high gear in the early 1960s as the Civil rights movement gained traction. Here's the backdrop. The supreme court had ruled more than once that segregating interstate buses by race was illegal. But southern states ignored those rulings and went on enforcing Jim Crow, the web of local laws that kept black and white passengers apart. And the federal government refused to step in and enforce the court's decisions. So in 1961, activists decided to force the issue themselves. They organized the freedom rides. Black and white volunteers boarding buses together and riding straight into the segregated south. All that spring and summer, dozens of these rides rolled into states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. White supremacist groups met them with violence, and the worst of it came from the Klux Klan. Klansmen met up at bus terminals and beat the riders bloody as they stepped off. Local police just watched. Sometimes they even joined in. The bureau was monitoring the clan and often knew exactly when and where an attack was coming. But while Hoover's agents worked overtime to disrupt the communist party, they did nothing to stop these beatings. And in some cases, the FBI did worse than nothing. Agents often tracked which buses the riders would be on and tipped off their informants inside the Klan. One of these informants was a klansman named Gary Thomas Rowe. He took part in several attacks on the riders in the summer of 1961. And that was only the start of what he'd do on the FBI's payroll. In September 1963, Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls. Rowe's own clan chapter was behind the attack. Many have suspected Rowe himself took part, Though a later federal investigation turned up no proof that he did. Either way, he never reported the plot, and he was never charged. But two years later, Rowe's role turned from suspected to undeniable. In March 1965, he and three other Klansmen chased down a car on a dark Alabama highway and opened fire. They killed white civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo as she drove activists home from the Selma to Montgomery march. The FBI arrested all four men within a day. What the public didn't know was that one of those men was on the FBI's payroll, and Hoover wanted to keep it that way. So to bury the story, he launched a smear campaign against the victim. He told reporters and friendly politicians that Liuzzo was a drug addict who had only joined the movement because she wanted to sleep with black men. Roe later testified against the other Klansmen. He was never charged with Liuzo's murder. Instead, the FBI rewarded him with a new identity and a job as a U.S. marshal. But the Bureau's role in attacks on civil rights workers was only half the story. Cointelpro reserved its sharpest weapons for the movement's leaders. And no one was a bigger target that the most famous civilization civil rights leader in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On August 28, 1963, Dr. King led the March on Washington, where more than 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to demand civil rights for black Americans. It was there that King delivered his I have a Dream speech framing the fight for racial equality as the fulfillment of America's own founding promises. It was a soaring, hopeful speech, and it terrified J. Edgar Hoover. Soon after, FBI intelligence chief William Sullivan wrote in a memo that King should be marked as the most dangerous individual of the future in this nation. Within two months, agents had King under constant surveillance with wiretaps on his home and office phones. And Hoover wasn't going rogue here. The wiretap on King was personally approved by the attorney general at the time, Robert F. Kennedy. Other parts of the government pitched in, too. In early 1964, the IRS dug through Dr. King's finances and those of his civil rights group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were hunting for any hint of financial wrongdoing the Bureau could use to force King out of public life. They came up empty. When the disappointing report landed on Hoover's desk, he scrawled three words in the margin quote, what a farce. End quote. And King only kept rising. On October 14, 1964, the world learned he'd been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In response, the Bureau sank to a new low. Just days after the Nobel announcement, agents took two years of recordings from the wiretaps in King's home and office and spliced them into a single tape. They edited it to make it sound like King had been having a string of affairs. Then they mailed the tape to him anonymously, along with a typed letter. The letter called King a fraud and an evil, abnormal man man and told him there was only one way out, strongly implying he should die by suicide before the Nobel ceremony. Coretta King's wife was the one who actually opened the package at their home in Atlanta, expecting a recording of one of her husband's speeches. It was something else entirely. She brought the tape to King, and he knew right away who'd sent it. The FBI. And years later, investigators proved him right. A draft of that letter turned up in the files of one of Hoover's top intelligence chiefs. King refused to give in. So bureau officials tried to leak the tape to the press themselves. But the mainstream outlets wouldn't touch it. By the late 1960s, King's message was growing more radical. He started speaking less about civil rights alone and more about economic justice for poor people of every race. In 1968, he organized the poor people's campaign, calling for a guaranteed basic income and an end to the war in Vietnam. A multiracial movement demanding a sweeping redistribution of wealth was Hoover's worst nightmare. But the poor people's campaign never fully got off the ground. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old. A white supremacist named James Earl Ray was arrested for the murder. Ray confessed and pleaded guilty so he didn't have to stand trial. Then, almost immediately, he took it all back. He recanted his confession and claimed others had been involved in a conspiracy. To this day, many people, including members of Dr. King's own family, believe the FBI played a role in his death. We'll get to all of it in an upcoming episode. But the FBI and the justice department have always insisted that James Earl Ray acted alone and that the bureau had nothing to do with it. But in the years after King's murder, the FBI played a central role in the death of another prominent civil rights leader. Martin Luther King, Jr. Had always preached non violence. But after his death, a younger, more militant group stepped forward to carry the fight for black liberation. The Black panther party. The panthers called for equal rights, fair housing, community control of schools and police, and an end to the war in Vietnam. And they were open about their willingness to use force to get there. Party members showed up armed at the California state capitol and patrolled some black neighborhoods to keep watch on police departments with histories of racist violence. You can already guess how j. Edgar Hoover felt about the black panthers. In late 1968, he ordered every FBI field office in the country to throw itself into dismantling the group. Cointelpro had already proven it could turn the communist movement against itself. And the same playbook worked even better with the black Panthers. Agents circulated forged documents suggesting that black panther leader Stokely Carmichael was secretly a CIA informant. They used more fake documents and anonymous letters to drive a wedge between other Leaders like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. The mistrust and infighting left the group weak and divided. But the Bureau didn't only sow conflict inside the Panthers. It also pitted them against rivals. Agents zeroed in on another black nationalist group, the United Slaves, which often competed with the Panthers for members and influence. Then they started mailing the United Slaves anonymous letters and forged documents. Fake proof of a supposed Black Panther plot to assassinate the group's leader. Then the bureau printed crude, insulting cartoons and distributed them anonymously in black neighborhoods. The ones mocking the Panthers were signed by the United Slaves. The ones mocking the United Slaves were signed by the Panthers. The goal was to manufacture bad blood between the two groups. And it worked. In early 1969, the feud turned deadly. Members of the United Slaves shot and killed two Black Panthers, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles. The killings kicked off a cycle of revenge. More shootings, more beatings, and at least four more deaths between the two groups. Meanwhile in Chicago, COINTELPRO agents were closing in on another rising Panther leader. Fred Hampton was a revolutionary socialist and the deputy chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. He was only 21 years old, but he'd already passed impact a lifetime of organizing. Into those few years, Hampton had co founded an anti racist alliance called the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together black, white and Puerto Rican activists to push for economic justice. He'd even brokered a truce among Chicago's major street gangs and pulled them into the coalition too. Hampton was a once in a generation organizer, someone who could unite people across cross racial lines and build a real movement. Which is exactly why the FBI decided he had to die. In early December 1969, the Chicago Police and the FBI planned a joint raid on Hampton's apartment, supposedly to search for illegal weapons. The Bureau had an informant inside the Chicago Panthers named William o'. Neal. He'd gotten so close, close to Hampton, that he was working as his personal bodyguard. In the days before the raid, o' Neal drew the FBI a detailed map of Hampton's apartment and marked exactly where Hampton slept. On the night of December 3rd, O' Neal slipped a heavy dose of sleeping drugs into Hampton's drink at dinner. So in the early morning hours of Dec. 4, when police stormed through the door, Hampton was un conscious in bed. Beside him was his fiance, Deborah Johnson, eight months pregnant with their first child. As the gunfire tore through the apartment, Johnson threw her body over Hampton's to shield him. There were seven other Panthers in the apartment that night, and several of them survived. They later said that after the shooting paused, officers pulled Johnson out of the bedroom, and that's when two more shots rang out. Hampton, still unconscious, was shot twice in the head at point blank range. Another Panther leader, 22 year old Mark Clark, was on security duty in the front room. Police killed him, too. In all, police fired close to 100 rounds into the apartment, wounding several other Panthers. The Panthers fired a single shot the entire time, and ballistics experts later concluded even that was a reflex fired as Clark was hit. But the official story was that the Panthers had started the gunfight. To back it up, police pointed to what they said were bullet holes in the front door, supposedly proof that the Panthers had been firing out at them. It was a lie. Investigators later found that the bullet bullet holes were nail holes made by the police themselves. Afterward, the survivors were dragged out, beaten while handcuffed and charged with attempted murder. William o', Neal, the informant, collected a cash bonus from the FBI for his help, and the following month a county coroner's jury ruled Fred Hampton's killing a justifiable homicide. Deborah Johnson made it out alive and gave birth to their son just weeks later. For more than a decade, cointelpro had operated in total darkness, going after anyone Hoover didn't like, with no regard for the law and no fear of getting caught. That was about to change. A little over a year after Fred Hampton's death, a small group of ordinary people would turn the FBI's own tactics back on the bureau and finally drag its years of surveillance, sabotage and murder into the light.
- [32:56]
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Vanessa Richardson
Through the 1950s and 60s, the FBI's COINTELPRO program used illegal surveillance and dirty tricks to spy on and sabotage civil rights and left wing groups. On J. Edgar Hoover's orders, agents tried to start a war between the Communist Party and the Mafia. They wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. And tried to blackmail him into killing himself. And they engineered the death of Fred Hampton, paying his own bodyguard to drug him so police could shoot him in his sleep. And they got away with all of it, because almost no one knew any of it was happening. Cointelpro was a secret, and you can't stop what you can't see. Hoover's FBI looked untouchable until a handful of activists struck back with a little sabotage of their own. In early 1971, a young woman in glasses, gloves and a winter cap was walked into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, a suburb a few miles outside of Philadelphia. She told the agents at the front desk she was a student at Swarthmore College, working on a paper about job opportunities for women at the FBI. She'd called ahead and set up an interview with the head of the office. The agents waved her in. The special agent in charge showed her around and answered her questions. She was friendly and curious and scribbled pages of notes. She also seemed a little scattered. When the interview wrapped up, she got lost and wandered into an off limits part of the building. Eventually, agents found her and pointed her toward the exit. Nobody at the office gave the visit a second thought. What they didn't know was that the pleasant, slightly absent minded student wasn't a student at all. She was a 29 year old activist named Bonnie Rains. And her interest in the FBI had nothing to do with finding a job. Bonnie Rains ran a daycare in the Philadelphia area. Her husband John taught religion at Temple University. Both were deeply involved in the local anti war movement, joining protests and acts of civil disobedience against the war in Vietnam. In those circles, everyone simply assumed the FBI was watching them. A lot of these activists were veterans of the civil rights movement or other leftist causes. And they all had stories. The suspicious clicks on the phone line, the anonymous letters. The unmarked cars idling outside. What they didn't have was proof. One of Bonnie's friends wanted to change that. His name was William Davidson and he was a physics professor at Haverford College. He came to Bonnie and John with a daring idea. Break into an FBI office and walk out with evidence of the Bureau's illegal spying. They were in together. They pulled in five more activists and started planning. A few of them had done something like this before. Some had broken into draft board offices and destroyed records, hoping to keep low income men from being shipped off to Vietnam. But breaking into an FBI building was like walking straight into the lion's den. For the Raines, the stakes were especially high. They had three children under the age of 10 at home. If the break in went wrong, they were looking at years in prison and their kids growing up without them. They decided it was worth it anyway. Quietly, they arranged for John's parents and brother to raise the children if they were caught. The group scouted the FBI's main Philadelphia office first and ruled it out fast. Too much security. So they set their sights on the smaller regional office in the quiet town of Media. That's where Bonnie set up her fake interview under a fake name. While Bonnie pretended to hang on the office director's every word, she was actually casing the building. No security cameras, no alarms. The filing cabinets didn't have locks and there was a second door at the back. The whole time, she kept her hat and gloves on, hiding her face and making sure she didn't leave a single fingerprint. After her visit, the group spent weeks watching the building to learn its rhythms. When the office emptied out at night, when the neighbors went to bed, when the local police cruised past. Once they knew the place cold, all that was left was to pick the knight. And they had the perfect one in mind. On March 8, 1971, heavyweight champion Joe Frazier was set to fight Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden. They were billing it as the fight of the century, and it lived up to the name. The two men weren't just the best boxers on the planet. They'd come to stand for opposite sides of the country's biggest fight. Ali was an anti war hero. He'd been stripped of his title for refusing to be drafted to Vietnam. Frasier was cast as the fighter the establishment was rooting for. The whole country would be glued to that fight, which meant nobody would be paying attention to an empty federal office in the Philadelphia suburbs that night. As the fight got underway, four of the activists slipped up to the front door. The one of them, Keith Farsyth, had taken a lock picking course just for this. But when he knelt down to work, he found a second lock they'd never spotted during all those weeks of surveillance. And this one was going to take far too long to crack. That's when Bonnie's work paid off. She'd noticed that back door during her tour weeks earlier. She told them to Try that instead. Farsyth got it open in no time, and the four of them slipped inside. Working fast, they pried open the file cabinets and emptied thousands of documents into suitcases. Then they hauled everything out to the getaway cars and disappeared into the night. Across the country at Madison Square Garden, Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali. But the establishment's fighter wasn't the only winner. That night, for America's activists, the real victory was unfolding. Building. Back in Pennsylvania, the burglars regrouped at a farmhouse an hour outside the city and started going through their hall. What they read stunned them. Page after page laid out years of COINTELPRO operations. Surveillance, sabotage, targeting of political opponents. Nearly every document described another flagrant abuse of power. One file in particular stopped them cold. It was a Bureau memo coaching agents on how to treat the people they were watching. The memo explained that the whole goal was to, quote, enhance the paranoia among activists. It was the surveillance state saying the quiet part out loud on its own letterhead. It was everything the burglars had suspected and could never prove. The FBI was a rogue agency operating outside the law. So they sorted the files, made copies, and mailed them to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and two members of Congress. They left their names off the envelopes. Instead, they signed themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. Then they made a pact never to speak about what they'd done. They went back to their ordinary lives and let the press take it from there. The story broke later that March when the Washington Post ran a front page article on the stolen documents and the surveillance they exposed. Almost overnight, COINTELPRO was the lead story in newspapers across the country. The details horrified people. Some of the documents showed the FBI was monitoring the Black Student Use union at nearly every college in the country. Others revealed that every single black student at Swarthmore was under FBI surveillance. At the height of the Cold War. Americans like to think of themselves as the citizens of a free country, the opposite of the Soviet Union with its secret police and its crackdowns. The COINTEL profile suggested the United States had been running the same plays at home. And it wasn't just the public that was furious. Members of Congress were too, including some who'd spent years defending Hoover and the Bureau. But here's the thing about that anger. It had been building for years with nowhere to go. For decades, almost nobody in Washington dared cross Hoover. He kept secret files on the powerful senators, congressmen, even presidents. The threat was unspoken. Come after the Bureau and whatever Hoover had on you might suddenly find its way into the wrong hands. It was the same weapon he'd used on Dr. King now pointed at the people who were supposed to be keeping him in check. With Congress finally closing in, hoover formally shut COINTELPRO down on April 28, 1971, barely seven weeks and after the break in, the media raid was a humiliation for the FBI. As the Bureau scrambled to contain the cointelpro story, it also threw itself into hunting down the burglars. Agents interviewed the staff at the media office and quickly realized the student who'd come in for an interview hadn't been a student at all. They put together a sketch of Bonnie Rains in her hat and glasses and circulated it to police departments and folks field offices around the country. But the Bureau that had spent years spying on activists couldn't find Bonnie or anyone else in the group. The mighty FBI had been outsmarted by a daycare director and a few college professors. The humiliation came at the very end of Hoover's life. He died on May 2, 1972, a little over a year after the break in. A few years later, with the statute of limitations expired, the FBI court quietly closed its investigation and the burglars kept their secret. Bonnie Rains and the rest of the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI didn't reveal their identities until 2014. More than four decades later, in the wake of Hoover's death, the Cointelpro revelations and the Watergate scandal, Congress finally got serious about reining in the government's abuses of power. In 1975, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a series of official hearings into the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The church committee pried loose thousands more COINTELPRO documents, along with testimony from former agents about what the Bureau had done. Its conclusion was damning. The committee found that cointelpro had been a quote, sophisticated vigilante program aimed squarely at crushing Americans First Amendment rights. The hearings led to real reforms. Congress created permanent intelligence committees in both the House and the Senate to keep watch over the FBI. It also passed the Inspector General act, putting independent investigators inside federal agencies to guard against exactly the kind of abuses cointelpro represented. But for all the outrage, the headlines and the new laws, not a single FBI official was ever tried or jailed for cointelpro. And the program didn't really disappear, it just changed its name. In the 50 plus years since COINTELPRO officially ended, the FBI has gone right on surveilling and sabotaging protest movements. The full list could fill its own podcast, but here are just a few examples. Through the 1970s, agents infiltrated, wiretapped, and harassed groups tied to the American Indian movement. According to researchers Ward Churchill and Jim VanderWaal, more than 60 Native American activists were murdered between 1973 and 1976. They were on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The FBI had primary jurisdiction over that land, and it never solved a single one of those killings. In the 1980s, the Bureau ran wide surveillance on groups that opposed President Ronald Reagan's military interventions in Central America. It also infiltrated activists who were protesting the government's refusal to confront the AIDS crisis after the September 11 attacks. In 2001, Congress passed the Patriot act, which dramatically expanded the government's power to spy on its own citizens. In the years that followed, the FBI and local police sharply ramped up surveillance of mosques and of American Muslim communities. And in 2013, during the Obama administration, a whistleblower named Edward Snowden came forward. He revealed that the National Security Act Agency was secretly collecting the phone and email records of millions of Americans without warrants. It's tempting to write cointelpro off as the work of one man, J. Edgar Hoover, a single power hungry zealot with a badge. But the truth is harder to sit with. Cointelpro existed because a lot of powerful people wanted it to. They wanted to stop working people from organization organizing. They wanted to stop black Americans from challenging a system built against them. And they wanted to make sure no one could hold them accountable for any of it. As long as power stays concentrated in a few hands, there will always be some version of cointelpro working to protect it. But the best defense against it may be the very thing the program was built to crush. The people in it tried to silence Martin Luther King Jr. Fred Hampton and so many others kept organizing anyway. And that's the part Hoover never understood. You can wiretap a phone, but you can't wiretap a whole movement. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. 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Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theory, Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Truman Capps, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A and E are teaming up on the podcast podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.