agent johnson's journal infiltration of the youth anarchist league a success
the disguise worked perfectly and i was able to sit in on their secret public meetings
these subversives have many plans to tear down the state
they intend to knowingly and willingly feed the homeless and are planning something they call a
book fair not sure what that is i must investigate further the recommendation is simple try and drive
a divide if they go through with feeding the homeless maybe assassinate their leader
so if you're a left-wing activist or part of any sort of organization that does something
radical like want to keep the planet alive you've probably been a victim of co-intel pro
cointelpro is an fbi organization that has uh to different levels of success manage to keep
the left suppressed within american politics to do so they've done everything from selling division
death threats possibly even murders and while i made a video in the past about why there's
no left-wing party in american politics i didn't quite get enough into the role the fbi played and
actively making sure it never happened and of course this story like all stories begins
somewhere so today we're going to talk about the birth of the fbi and counter intelligence
and essentially how this anti-democratic machine came into being hello my name is six-time bafta
winner bernard cronshaw you might know me as the star of the hit youtube series step back history
you might also know me as the butler from the body political thriller 420 downing street or
as the inventor of the marmite dorito but today we are taking a brief interruption from our regular
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wonderful you get to tonight set yourself up tuck on in and enjoy now let's get back to the content
oh and i hope the british people are watching um trans rights
hello my name is tristan johnson this is step back make sure to subscribe hit the bell notification
to never miss another history video so how did the freest nation of freedom in the free world
develop what is essentially america's secret police in the form of cointelpro it's actually
quite the story that has a lot to do with hating immigrants suppressing left-wing politics hating
immigrants the red scare and hating immigrants like many police institutions you'd actually be
surprised how recently the u.s basically had no federal level police what would become the feds
was the u.s department of justice the doj covered a mix of disorganized law enforcement agencies
like the secret service they essentially outsource their work to marshals and private detectives
in 1892 even these outsourcing options were removed and the doj became notorious for being
essentially unable to get much of anything done you'd be surprised how recently
law enforcement extended barely beyond grabbing the closest person of color they could find
say they did the crime and extrajudicially murder them yeah it's almost as if the entire
institution has always been steeped in racism and should be abolished still
anyway i'm getting distracted and my mom got mad at me the last time i railed on the fuzz
on my channel so let's just mosey along around the 20th century a particular whoopsie doodle
involving president mckinley led people to think that maybe the police should be professionalized
in some capacity and a mere eight years later attorney general charles bonaparte decided to
ask congress for resources to start a small elite force to run investigations for the justice
department however congress decided to instead say 12 and restrict their investigative capacity even
more by saying they couldn't just outsource it to the secret service those boys were to be kept
busy making sure an anarchist didn't reshoot the president bonaparte decided to go around congress
and put together a crack team made up of former secret service officers to make special agents
in charge of investigations on behalf of the doj these agents were the seed of what would become
the treasured fbi to make sure congress didn't see this as an overreach of the federal government's
power wow those are the days these 30-some agents mostly worked on issues dealing with interstate
commerce and anti-trust laws president howard taft's attorney general george wickersham secured
funding for this group and officially established the bureau of investigation in 1909 this new
bureau was founded on a gentleman's agreement it was a powerful norm that their work would stay
limited to things like fraud and damage to public property but it very soon expanded to things like
interstate human trafficking and the like you know the things a normal federal investigation force
might do and nothing secret policy at all but then everything changed when the austrians attacked
serbia and then a few years later the u.s joined in the worldwide conflagration of what could only
be called the worst family therapy session in human history the first world war and americans
were shocked to find germans had been infiltrating america since the 1670s this goes deeper than we
thought it wasn't just germans that were the threat the bureau worked with vigilante mobs
i mean volunteer organizations of loyal citizens called the american protective league
oh boy and enlisted their help to track down anyone who wasn't registering for the draft these
eager volunteers with police help raided and arrested hundreds of thousands of people
suspected of draft dodging of which less than one percent were actually doing said
crime because you know they went after people who were old or children or people with disabilities
for the crime of not having a draft card they were ineligible for or you know they just committed
the treasonous crime of having left their draft card at home mob justice it's a hell of a thing
so despite this being a violation of people's civil liberties and i'm pretty sure constitutional
violations as well this was seen as a massive success agents continued these raids to the
point where it became their go-to move when trying to arrest lots of people but then then
the largest threat to american national security occurred what was it the world war german u-boats
segregation in the south oh no much much worse in the very american state of the russian empire
a group of plucky rogues called the bolsheviks launched a revolution to depose and kill the
imperial family in a few thousand anarchists just for fun and with their evil promises of
bread peace and land americans began to freak out about the reds and when there's a moral
panic to oppress a group of egalitarians made up primarily of ethnic minorities the feds
will be there a law passed in 1918 called the alien act had language expressly to exclude and
expel what they called quote anarchistic classes this meant anyone who wanted to overthrow the
government which quickly turned into anyone who spoke out against the government or the war effort
i guess kronstadt was still three years away so the irony of lumping communists into this law
would only come in retrospect now apparently in 1919 a bunch of bombs went off around the country
the police then found that whoever set off these bombs conveniently left anarchist leaflets around
the place including the home of then attorney general a mitchell palmer he then revitalized the
bi giving it its own intelligence division headed by assistant attorney general frances garvin
and helped by a younger lawyer named john edgar hoover the idea of the gid
was to engage in counter-intelligence against subversives counterintelligence is when you try
not only to gather intelligence on an organization but do covert actions to try and break it apart
dig up dirt on them so division that sort of thing before long it became a colossal intelligence
gathering organization and was ready for a massive raid on anyone two left wing and raid they did
in late 1919 and early 1920 the palmer raids as they were called arrested as many as ten thousand
immigrants for the crime of being communists or anarchists step back viewers might remember this
for being the sweep that arrested and eventually deported my personal hero emma goldman yeah not
even kidding if you look right there a wonderful viewer actually sent me a print of emma goldman
when she got arrested surprisingly thousands of people's illegal mass arrests for the crime
of expressing their free speech didn't make the bureau popular the assistant secretary of labor
criticized palmer and hoover for the raids and in response hoover got agents to start digging up
dirt on him this more or less destroyed palmer's political career and the bureau took quite a hit
the harding administration shook up the bureau but still maintained the gid there were strikers
forming unions and those unions had to be taken down after all and then of course there was the
more legitimate work of infiltrating and taking down the resurgent ku klux klan the bureau however
gotten hot water again when hoover ordered agents to try and dig up dirt on and try to compromise a
senator who criticized improprieties within the doj this soon became public and gave the bureau
yet another black eye the then head of the bureau a man named william j burns was fired
over it and replaced with none other than j edgar hoover who would run what he rebranded as the
federal bureau of investigation from 1924 until he died in 1972. now, who the hell is j Edgar hoover,
a creature of Washington dc from birth hoover began his career in the DOJ at 22. His first
assignment with president Woodrow Wilson's approval was to use the 1917 espionage act
to arrest any immigrant suspected of being disloyal to the state they'd be thrown in jail
without trial. Then at 24, he became head of the gid the first red scare allowed him to launch all
sorts of illegal operations to disrupt the work of whoever the state decided were dangerous radicals,
including the infamous Palmer raids in 1924 he rose and ranked to head of the whole damn
department, and he wasn't even 30. throughout his entire career a disregard for civil liberties and
an obsessive hatred of communists would color the whole fbi which grew into an extension of
hoover himself in his near five decades of leadership memoirs of fbi agents speak of
hoover as a visionary leader the whole department grew around his every desire hoover's fbi remained
an obscure organization for several years as he transformed it from the ground up hoover
emphasized professionalization and primarily the organization functioned to collect statistics
tracking crime waves in the new prohibition era in the 1930s the fbi gained a world-class crime lab
a fingerprint identification system and sold itself as the best of the best in law enforcement
agents went by the name of g-men which stands for government men and their reputation grew
as they took down notorious gangsters like john dillinger machine gun kelly and bonnie
and clyde dillinger's case was so dramatic and widespread it was dramatized in the 1935 movie
g-men overnight these g-men made fbi and gangster movies a staple genre of film and the fbi became
superheroes hoover saw this as an opportunity and soon established a whole fbi media strategy
endorsing comics films and radio shows he'd make sure those who portrayed the fbi positively
received close collaboration with the bureau fan clubs grew up around these g-men and hoover
became a national celebrity and a new president administration was about to come in and change the
federal landscape forever the days of cautiousness about expanding federal power dropped with the
mounting economic crisis of the great depression which pushed franklin delano roosevelt into the
white house roosevelt promised a vast expansion of federal programs to fight the depression with the
growth of the federal government came a change in the fbi after a lull in intelligence work the fbi
was called back into action against critics of the new deal as well as populists like huey long
anyone who challenged roosevelt's authority became targets of fbi intelligence gathering in the case
of huey long a lot of those counter intelligence activities came into use which would build the
handbook of cointelpro campaigns and to top it all off domestic intelligence gathering consolidated
under the fbi right before the second world war and of course this entire apparatus also extended
towards communists fdr saw covert dirt digging as a better way to suppress them than witch hunts
like the dice committee which became the basis for the house on american activities committee
this included wiretapping bugging meeting sites making anonymous calls and sending
letters planting false evidence and burglaries to gather evidence you know
the usual legal stuff that happens in a democracy as hoover's anti-communist paranoia grew
he then would run afoul of the now truman white house by sharing his intelligence with hueck so
he was now feeding the witch hunt anyway that was all going to change though with the i'm
just kidding the eisenhower white house loved the fbi and wanted to bring them back into the fold
former fbi agents got critical positions in the state department hoover returned the favor by
turning on mccarthy and HUAC both of which were frustrating old ike all right but the good times
of openly suppressing left-wing organizations had to come to an end sometime not still going
on today sorry yet it did hit a skid when a 1955 supreme court decision came to the conclusion
that the fbi could not just prosecute people for believing things they now needed at least
something resembling a reason to spy on people so the fbi formalized their intelligence
and counter-intelligence projects into a program called and i can finally say it now
cointelpro-cpusa it was nothing new but it formalized and centralized what they
had been doing anyway so it was all now quote-unquote legal they determined that
communist party usa threatened a violent takeover of the united states despite 1956 being
a year of significant decline for the party in 1956 soviet premier nikita khrushchev
admitted to stalin's crimes which really depressed support for communist projects
the party really wasn't a threat anymore however this was not about real threats to the state
cointelpro was about the systematic dismantling of any and all left-wing politics in america
a story we'd see over the next few decades of these programs cointelpro cpusa got no political
opposition hoover saw this as a green light to expand the attack to the civil rights movement
the puerto rican independence movement and later anti-vietnam war protesters
the template had been well drawn to institute the fbi as america's kgb stasi or gestapo essentially
its secret police membership in cpusa dropped that year and the fbi saw this as a big success for the
program of course not enough to end it but enough to consider it a w they then expanded it to the
socialist workers party a rival socialist party made up of trotskyites who left cpusa in the late
1920s president kenny didn't oppose it so they continued to expand as they attacked the civil
rights movement in the 1960s they spied on nearly every civil rights movement in the south as well
as the naacp they spent extra resources to destroy and discredit civil rights icon martin luther king
whether they had a hand in his murder is still up for debate but it's not entirely out of the
question for this program i made a video about mlk's assassination though that you can watch here
the militant black rights group the black panthers were heavily spied upon and harassed by cointel
pro including again murder to be fair this effort also expanded to the white supremacist group
the ku klux klan they only did so because they got political pressure after the kkk
murdered a whole bunch of civil rights workers but they did eventually do something leek didn't
tell shows though that their anti-left versus anti-right cointel pro efforts skewed left 99
times to one spying on the kkk did let the fbi expand the definition of subversives worthy of
counterintelligence it grew the boundaries of what the fbi felt they had the right to attack this led
to their cointel program against what they dubbed the new left a vague term for an invented group
of various civil and political rights protesters this included anti-war groups and student groups
you know basically young people who disapproved of what the government was doing it got so out
of hand hoover actually started becoming the voice of caution against ballooning surveillance
and counter-intelligence apparati we know about these programs because of a 1971 break-in of an
fbi resident agency in media pennsylvania a group called the citizens commission to investigate the
fbi played the bureau's own tricks back at them and made off with a treasure trove of documents
exposing these programs the leaks were a massive blow to the fbi and led to an official dismantling
of their programs they apologized in 1974 but beyond that little seems to have changed at the
fbi reports of cointelpro tactics seem to paint a picture of their efforts not really stopping
furthermore the war on terror gave them even more leniency to spy on dangerous camping trips
and the like states will always need programs like cointelpro to function because the nature
of states the fact that they are non-voluntary organizations that impose a hierarchy on you
means that the general populace needs to be essentially suppressed at any given time in
order to maintain their power otherwise you know they might win and people would not be dominated
over which is completely antagonistic to the idea of states as concepts anyways here's the thing
to click possibly part two of this series this video does well and i'll see you guys next time