From 1956 until 1971, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, conducted a series of projects

that were meant to discredit and disrupt a collection of American political organizations,

especially those that the Bureau thought might be subversive in some way.

Their targets included the U.S. Communist Party, anti-Vietnam

war activists, civil rights activists, and movements, including those working toward

feminist causes and those working toward racial justice-related causes, like Martin Luther

King Jr. and his associates. Folks involved with the Black Panther Party and other

black power movements, alongside environmentalists, animal rights organizations, the American

Indian movement, and a flurry of movements surrounding independence for Puerto Rico.

The FBI also periodically targeted far-right groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but more frequently, they

aimed at left-leaning and far-left groups and used the far-right groups as proxies in those efforts.

As was the case when the FBI armed and directed, extremist members of the Minuteman

paramilitary group, helping them form a subgroup called

the Secret Army Organization, which went on to target the aforementioned activists and

organizations with violence and intimidation. In this way, the FBI could at times viciously

assault organizations they didn't like without getting their hands dirty.

They would let militant fringe groups they could weaponize and guide do it for them.

The FBI has arguably used such tactics since the Bureau's inception,

but these acts, organized under the designation of Co-Intel Pro, short for Counterintelligence

program, were issued by the immensely controversial then-director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover,

and are today generally considered to have been illegal due to how unconstrained and unmoderated

some of these actions were.

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