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disobedientmedia.com

How The CIA Undermined Civil

Rights
William Craddick
15-19 minutes

Although the Civil Rights Movement resulted in many well

known changes at an institutional level, it is widely
agreed that the movement did not succeed in a total
transformation of American society. The dream of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. was not fully realized. The exact reasons for
this are subject to debate, which often unfortunately
devolves into partisan blame shifting between conservatives
and liberals. In contemplating this history, little attention is
given to one of the most unfortunate reasons that the Civil
Rights Movement lost steam – interference and attacks
from American intelligence agencies bent on neutralizing
what they saw as a force of change that could destabilize
society.

Efforts to marginalize and degrade the success of the Civil

Rights Movement has played out for many years, but took
on an initial intensity during the 1960’s. CIA assets including
Gloria Steinem were never far removed from a larger
overall process in which black American civil rights leaders
were targeted and African American society was disrupted.
Agents like Steinem were directly involved with spreading

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propaganda like a virus during the 60’s and beyond. The

effects on the black community in the United States have
been so tragically consequential that they could safely be
defined as an experiment in population control. An
examination of the methods in which the Civil Rights
Movement was targeted can teach us much about our
history, and even more about what we must vigilantly watch
for in the future.

I. Steinem’s History With The CIA

The beginning of Steinem’s history with the CIA is

somewhat unclear, although the facts indicate she was
recruited either during her university years or immediately
afterwards. From 1956 to 1958, Steinem traveled to India
as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow. According to
documentation of Steinem’s career, individuals she met with
during her time there included Indian Communist Party
founder M. N. Roy and a researcher who appeared to have
been a CIA agent. Steinem’s “official” association with the
CIA began upon her return to the United States in 1959
when she took charge of a front organization called the
Independent Research Service where she was tasked with
recruiting students to attend Soviet-controlled youth
festivals in 1959 and 1962.

In 1978, feminist group Restockings wrote in the book

Feminist Revolution that Steinem was listed as a co-director
of an Independent Research Service pamphlet titled A
Review of Negro Segregation in the United States which
alleged that segregation of black Americans was at least
partially self-perpetuated. When Feminist Revolution was
first published, the CIA-connected Ford Foundation was

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among those to demand that publisher Random House

remove all references to Steinem and the Independent
Research Service.

The connection between Steinem, the Independent

Research Service the CIA was not exposed until 1967 when
the details of the clandestine support were leaked to
Ramparts Magazine, then reported widely by the
Washington Post and New York Times. Both the CIA and
Steinem herself would ultimately acknowledge the
connection in subsequent years, although they both insisted
that their work aimed to combat Communism.

Steinem discusses her tenure with the CIA in the aftermath

of its exposure

Steinem’s acknowledged tenure with the CIA resulted in a

number of high profile connections with individuals involved
in various CIA operations. Research from the University of
Missouri-St. Louis lists the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan
Bank chairman John McCloy, OSS psychological warfare

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expert and senior executive at Time, Inc. C.D. Jackson and

Watergate-connected CIA operative Cord Meyer as
individuals who supported her work with the Independent
Research Service. Although the CIA placed some degree of
trust in Steinem, other agencies were wary of her. A few
years later the FBI warned the Justice Department’s civil
rights division that Steinem was a security risk and an
inadvisable hire due to what they considered to be
unacceptable far left associations.

Although the relationship between Steinem and the CIA

supposedly terminated after 1962, her associations with
high profile figures controlling public policy continued.
According to Julian Assange, Steinem dated Henry
Kissinger during his years working for the Nixon
administration. She would also spend nine years in a
relationship with Stanley Pottinger, the former Assistant
Attorney General with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights
Division who insisted that there was no evidence of FBI
involvement in the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

When Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in 1971, she chose

Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a PR executive who helped with
advance work for John F. Kennedy’s 1963 trip to Dallas,
Texas as her co-founder and publisher. An examination of
the effects and goal of her work throughout the late 1960’s
and early 70’s gives the distinct impression that Steinem’s
association with the CIA may not have ended, instead
playing a role in the agency’s known attempts to undermine
domestic Civil Rights groups during this period.

II. Targeting Of Black America And Civil Rights

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The rapid initial success of the civil rights movement, and

the promise it held to effectively disrupt the power
structures in the United States at the height of the Cold War
made it an obvious target for intelligence groups, both
within the United States and abroad. Actions taken against
the black community during these years included targeting
civil rights leadership, drafting and deploying black males to
fight in foreign conflicts and destruction of black society by
targeting the family unit and promoting gender conflict.

A. Targeting Black Leaders

Black leaders had been targeted by intelligence and

government agencies long before the 1960’s, but it was the
60’s that were marked by a series of targeted
assassinations. Two of the most well known from this period
are likely Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Although
Malcolm X, a Black Nationalist, spent most of his career in
opposition to MLK’s nonviolent approach to Civil Rights his
opinions shifted just a year prior to his death. In May 1964,
Malcolm was quoted in the New York Times as stating that
his perspectives of white people had changed and that he
would work with the younger generations to combat racism.
He was assassinated in February 1965.

As one of the most iconic leaders of the Civil Rights

Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. was undoubtedly a high-
priority target. Although Dr. King delivered a number of
socialistic critiques of capitalism during his lifetime he was
ardently opposed to communism. It was this opposition in
fact that caused him to be the only high profile American to
be targeted by intelligence agencies in both the United
States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s KGB

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opposed Dr. King due to his unwillingness to allow

Communist sympathizers to foment poor race relations. His
death came several years after Malcolm X’s in 1968.

Civil rights leader Andrew Young (L) and others standing on

balcony of Lorraine motel pointing in direction of assailant
after assassination of civil rights ldr. Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., who is lying at their feet. Joseph Louw—The LIFE
Images Collection/Getty Images

The removal of leadership figures like Martin Luther King Jr.

and Malcolm X was essential to sideline individuals who
might be more nationalistically minded or support American
socialists over foreign supported extremism intended to
deteriorate the Civil Rights situation.

B. Disrupting Black Society

Targeted assassinations of leadership figures coincided with

the Vietnam War, which lead to a disproportionate number
of black men being drafted or otherwise deployed to the war
zone. The Oxford Companion to American Military

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History stated that although blacks represented 11% of the

US population from 1965 to 1969, they made up 12.6% of
the soldiers in Vietnam. The majority of these served in the
infantry where they suffered casualty rates of 14.9%.

It was statistics like these that caused Martin Luther King Jr.
and other Civil Rights leaders to denounce Vietnam as
being “a white man’s war, a black man’s fight” where black
men were far more likely to see combat. Deploying males to
a war zone also had the effect of disrupting society in a
manner similar to the Second World War.

C. Consolidation Of CIA Domestic Intelligence

Programs Under Operation CHAOS

The Central Intelligence Agency has a long and tenured

history of interfering in foreign politics. Their domestic
operations, however, have been given considerably less
attention in recent years. By the end of the 60’s the CIA
began to centralize their various domestic operations under
a single program known as Operation CHAOS. Officially
begun in 1967, all existing CIA domestic programs were
consolidated under CHAOS after Richard Nixon assumed
the presidency in January 1969.

Operation CHAOS served as a means for the CIA to

infiltrate and spy on groups and individuals they considered
to be behaving in a manner that was “illegal and
subversive.” Organizations that were targeted by the CIA
included socialist-leaning student organizations, the Black
Panther Party and Ramparts Magazine, the publication that
first exposed Gloria Steinem’s relationship with the CIA.

On April 4th, 1969, Steinem published her “landmark” piece

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“After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” in New York

Magazine. The article’s main focus was to encourage
women to break away from the Civil Rights movement and
“start concentrating on their own problems.” With Civil
Rights leadership weakened by targeted assassination and
men of fighting age being shipped out to a foreign theater of
combat her writings served to perpetuate these issues by
causing gender conflict within the civil rights movement.

“After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” stood in total

contrast to previous prevailing philosophies that supported
societal models, which Steinem attacked as
“patriarchal.” Leadership such as Dr. King preached that the
cornerstone to building a strong black American community
was the nuclear family. In 1966, King gave a speech where
he stated that black America’s “very survival was bound” to
their ability to create and foster strong families. “The whole
of society,” King said, “rests on this foundation for stability,
understanding and social peace.” With figures like King out
of the way by 1969 there was clear opportunity to attack
what he had seen as a cornerstone of the black society in
America – healthy and harmonious families. The spark that
was lit by Steinem’s article would inoculate the Civil Rights
Movement with a new strain of feminism that spread like a
pathogen.

III. Exposure Of Operation CHAOS And Coverup

The years following 1969 were marked by turbulence and

increasing inter agency spats. While the FBI supplied the
CIA with intelligence for Operations CHAOS, they refused
to provide any context or analysis due to the perception that
this would violate their charter. It’s possible that this tension

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contributed to the outbreak of the 1972 Watergate scandal,

where an active CIA asset was arrested while bugging the
DNC’s headquarters and a senior FBI official provided
information exposing the scandal to the Washington Post.

With the increasing public scrutiny of covert domestic

programs, Operation CHAOS was officially shut down in
1973. In 1974, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the
program with an investigative piece published in the New
York Times. The expose caused enough public outrage for
the establishment of committees in the House and Senate
as well as the Rockefeller Commission, headed Vice
President Nelson A. Rockefeller. These investigations were
marked by attempts from Ford Administration officials to
block Congressional committees from accessing
information and interview with officials and focusing on the
more easily controlled Rockefeller Commission.

The Commission’s goal was not to reveal wrongdoing by

US intelligence agencies but to mitigate damage caused by
leaks. Famous revelations such as the disclosure of Project
MKULTRA were in fact “safe” because CIA officials
considered these programs to be failures. It is already
public knowledge that some information including
disclosures of the CIA’s involvement in assassination plots
was removed from the final report by the Commission. The
involvement of Nelson Rockefeller, whose family was
involved with government calls for population control and
funded Nazi-affiliated eugenics programs which maintained
files on millions of Americans marked for genetic elimination
was especially inappropriate and showed the pervasive
interest of special interests in embedding themselves within

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the Rockefeller Commission for their own private purposes.

IV. Post-Rockefeller Commission

Targeting black communities continued long after the

1960’s. When disclosure of US bioweapon experimentation
on American populations began in the 1970’s tragedies
such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments showed that
black Americans were specifically targeted by various
bioweapon programs conducted by various government
agencies. Much of the information surrounding these
programs remains classified, “destroyed” or otherwise kept
from the public sphere. It is impossible to know the full
extent of these programs that used American citizens as
guinea pigs for experiments in biological warfare and
population control methods.

Reporters who exposed other CIA targeting of black

American communities were singled out for discrediting and
character assassination. Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series
published with The Mercury News alleged the involvement
of the CIA in trafficking of crack cocaine that was rampantly
distributed in black communities and resulted in
disproportionate sentencing of black Americans. The high
incarceration rates that resulted from these policies further
contributed to the fragmentation of the black American
family unit. Webb was attacked by almost every mainstream
media outlet for his revelations and was ultimately found
dead with two gunshots to the head.

The combined effect of legal, biological and sociological

attacks on the black community has prevented them from
realizing Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a black American

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society built on bedrock of stable family units. In 1960, two

thirds of black children lived with two parents – today that
number has been reduced to one third. Over 73% of black
children are born out of wedlock according the data
published by the Center for Disease Control in 2012 (a
dramatic increase from 11% in 1938). These statistics are
part of an overall decrease in fertility and birth rates that
have continued uninterrupted to this day. This trend is
alarming, given that social scientists have been observing
since the 1960’s that the breakdown of the family unit was
not due to economic factors. The obstacles created by the
intelligence community and new social theories degraded
the ability of black families to retain their cohesive structure,
exposing generations to the struggles of single parenthood
and continuous poverty.

Despite these factors that disrupt family structure and make

life more difficult for black women, Gloria Steinem as
recently as 2015 told the Huffington Post that she credited
black women with “starting the feminist movement” she
helped foster and spread in the 1960’s and 70’s. She has
remained active in various social justice movements. In
January 2017, she was a speaker at the Women’s March
protests in Washington DC.

It seems that Operation CHAOS may have lingered on past

1973 in spirit if not in name. Certain members of the
Reagan administration would eventually attempt to allow
the CIA to resume domestic operations in the 1980’s. The
proposal received strong criticism in the New York Times. In
2015, reports began to emerge highlighting claims that an
activist crossing the Canadian border was “randomly

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selected” for a search as part of a program called

“Operation Chaos.”

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