Justice  /  Q&A

Infiltrating the Left

The FBI has long tried to destroy socialist organizations, but its actions aren't limited to surveillance.
Nikki Arai/Shoshana Arai

What most people know about counterintelligence is this program that was developed in the mid to late sixties, which targeted groups like the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the New Left and other forces. It involved a lot of dirty tricks and it’s really creepy stuff. There’s the famous example of sending a phony letter to Martin Luther King encouraging him to kill himself.

It’s appalling stuff but it’s a very small fraction of what the FBI actually does.

We set out to give people a better picture what this counterintelligence stuff is. We got all these documents after writing our first book, which was focused more specifically on the largest Maoist group in the United States, the Revolutionary Union. The second book [came from] looking at these documents.

What we saw was that these informants had gotten to the very top of leftist organizations.

A revelation we had while researching the book was that wiretapping comes when there isn’t human intelligence. If you and I are having a conversation, and I’m an informant, I can give a much better recreation to my handlers. I can also maneuver you in the conversation. I can testify in court, theoretically, although many informants won’t.

We realized there was a kind of methodology. When there are not live people, there’s a premium on electronic surveillance.


MU
Can you talk a bit about that methodology? When I was starting the book, I thought of a informant or an infiltrator as being a beefy guy in the back of the room. He’s got his aviator shades down. He’s sitting low. That’s not who you profile in the book. You profiled people at the very highest levels of these left organizations.

AJL
I was in the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party for a very long time. I left and was in a position then of reflecting on it from the standpoint of an outsider. One of the myths among the New Communist Movement was you can’t really avoid informants. The best thing you can do is make them work for you.