COINTELPRO — short for Counterintelligence Program — began in 1956 as a domestic FBI operation targeting the U.S. Communist Party. For its first decade, it was largely a Cold War program: infiltrate, surveil, and disrupt leftist political groups. But in 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dramatically expanded the program's scope with a classified memo ordering agents to neutralize what he called 'Black nationalist hate groups.' On his list: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party — and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself.

Hoover's stated goal, preserved in government documents, was to prevent the 'rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement.' He considered such a figure more dangerous than any foreign enemy. To that end, COINTELPRO operatives sent anonymous letters to King's wife Coretta with recordings meant to imply infidelity. They sent forged letters to Black Panther leaders designed to provoke internal violence. They infiltrated organizations, paid informants to provide false information, and in some cases, coordinated directly with local law enforcement to use lethal force.

The most documented example of the program's lethal consequences was the 1969 killing of Fred Hampton. Hampton was 21 years old and the Illinois chairman of the Black Panther Party — a brilliant organizer who had brokered an unprecedented multiracial coalition between the Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and working-class white street gangs in Chicago. The FBI paid a Panther informant named William O'Neal, Hampton's own security chief, to provide a detailed floor plan of Hampton's apartment. On December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided the apartment at 4 a.m. and fired approximately 100 bullets. Hampton was shot in his bed, almost certainly sedated. He was dead before he turned 22.

The program's existence only came to light because of a burglary. In March 1971, eight activists broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole hundreds of classified documents. They mailed copies anonymously to journalists across the country. The documents were the first public confirmation that the FBI had been systematically targeting civil rights organizations as a matter of federal policy — not rogue action, not individual agents going off-script, but official, authorized, documented program operations. The bureau tried to suppress the story. It failed.

In 1975 and 1976, the Senate's Church Committee conducted a sweeping investigation into U.S. intelligence agencies and confirmed what the stolen documents had alleged. COINTELPRO was real, broad, and deeply unconstitutional. The committee documented that the program had targeted over 2,000 organizations and 250,000 individuals. Congress implemented new oversight rules and restricted what intelligence agencies could do domestically. But the infrastructure — the legal architecture, the surveillance capabilities, the institutional culture — remained largely intact. In 1982, the federal government paid a $1.85 million settlement to the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, another Panther killed that night, without admitting wrongdoing.