Conspiracy // COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO
FBI counter-intelligence programme from 1956 to 1971 targeting domestic political organisations.
ALSO KNOWN AS: COINTELPRO
Exposed by the 1971 break-in at the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office. Subsequently investigated by the Church Committee.
COINTELPRO is not a theory. It is an admitted programme of covert action, run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation against citizens, civil rights organisations, anti-war groups and political dissidents on American soil. The files that surfaced after activists removed them from the Media field office, and the findings of the Senate Select Committee chaired by Frank Church, established beyond dispute what the Bureau had long denied: a sustained campaign of surveillance, infiltration, forged correspondence, disinformation and deliberate efforts to disrupt lawful association.
We hold the entry to the documentary record. Where the Church Committee, the released files and subsequent disclosures confirm a tactic or a target, we say so plainly. Where the record is partial or contested, we mark it as such rather than fill the gap with inference.
This is among the firmest ground the archive occupies, and it matters for that reason. COINTELPRO is part of the documented baseline — proof that a government did, in fact, run a secret programme against its own people that was for years dismissed as paranoia. It is why, elsewhere in this archive, we treat the difference between what is alleged and what is established with such care.
CASE FILES
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MY-26005 // Española and Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States // tagged
Operation Animal Mutilation — the Rommel Report and the FBI Cattle-Mutilation Files
Between March 1979 and June 1980 two official responses to the American cattle-mutilation panic were recorded — a narrowly-scoped FBI investigation limited to Indian lands in New Mexico, and "Operation Animal Mutilation", a federally-funded state inquiry run by former FBI agent Kenneth M. Rommel Jr. out of the First Judicial District Attorney's office. Both concluded the damage was predator and scavenger activity on animals that had generally died of natural causes. The FBI file is public at vault.fbi.gov; Rommel's June 1980 report was never a federal publication and survives mainly through library copies and transcriptions.
CONFIDENTIAL -
CS-26005 // Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., United States // tagged
The MK-Ultra Program
MK-Ultra was a CIA umbrella programme of covert human research into drugs and behavioural modification, formally approved by Director Allen Dulles on the thirteenth of April 1953 and running its main experimental phase through 1964 across 149 subprojects at some 80 institutions. Most records were destroyed on the order of CIA Director Richard Helms in 1973; the programme became public through the 1975 Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee, and roughly 20,000 surviving financial pages were released after a 1977 FOIA discovery. It is a closed, declassified historical programme — no successor of the same name operates.
CONFIDENTIAL