He beat Nixon's own plummers in the political warfare department. Of course, he was a professional and they were mostly hired hands.http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/newsline.html<SNIP>
In Seattle, FBI agent Louis Harris recruited David Sannes in 1970,
a patriotic veteran who was willing to help them catch some bombers.
Sannes worked with explosives expert Jeffrey Paul Desmond and FBI agent
Bert Carter. Their instructions were to find people interested in bombing.
"For a few of the members it was a matter of many weeks of persuasion to
actually have them carry through with the bombing projects," said Sannes.
When Carter made it clear that he planned to have one bomber die in a
booby-trapped explosion, Sannes dropped his FBI work and went public.
"My own knowledge is that the FBI along with other Federal law enforcement
agencies has been involved in a campaign of bombing, arson and terrorism
in order to create in the mass public mind a connection between political
dissidence of whatever stripe and revolutionaries of whatever violent
tendencies," Sannes reported in an interview on WBAI radio.<9>
The situation in Seattle is merely one of many examples of the FBI's
campaign against the New Left. Two agents, W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller,
admitted to a grand jury that they had authorized illegal break-ins and
burglaries against friends and relatives of Weather Underground fugitives.
A 25-year FBI veteran, M. Wesley Swearingen, claimed that the FBI routinely
lied to Congress about the number of break-ins and wiretaps: "I myself
actually participated in more than 238 while assigned to the Chicago
office,
conducted thousands of bag jobs." Swearingen charged that
agents had lied to a Washington grand jury about the number, locations, and
duration of illegal practices in pursuit of the Weather Underground.<10>
FBI director William Webster disciplined only six of the 68 agents referred
to him by the Justice Department. Felt and Miller were convicted in 1980,
and a few months later were pardoned by President Reagan. Today the FBI
can still use these same techniques, simply by mislabeling their targets
as foreign agents or terrorists.
In 1971 Congress finally repealed the Internal Security Act of 1950,
which provided for custodial detention of citizens whose names were on
lists of "subversives" maintained by the FBI. Over the years these lists
were expanded from Communist Party members, to all members of SDS and
other "pro-Communist New Left-type groups," and by 1970 even included
members of every "commune" where individuals reside in one location and
"share income and adhere to the philosophy of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
oriented violent revolution." Despite the repeal, the FBI simply changed
the names of the Security Index and Reserve Index to the "Administrative
Index," with the excuse that they were preparing for possible future
legislation. The FBI's continuation of these lists was authorized by
attorney general John Mitchell.<11>
The FBI also waged a war against the underground press. As early
as 1968 they assigned three informants to penetrate the Liberation News
Service (LNS), while nine others reported on it from the outside. These
reports were shared with the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Branch, the
Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Navy, the Air Force, and
the CIA. The FBI set up Pacific International News Service in San Francisco
and New York Press Service on the east coast. When NYPS director Louis
Salzberg blew his cover by appearing as a government witness at the Chicago
Seven trial, the FBI's New York office tried to swing this in their favor
by preparing an anonymous letter denouncing LNS as a government front as
well. Other underground newspapers were handled more gently by the FBI,
by getting record companies to pull ads from their pages.<12>
<SNIP>B-) :bounce: