The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen

Author:Ruth Rosen [Rosen, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780140097191
Publisher: Tantor eBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE FBI

Both feminists and the FBI suffered from legitimate fears as well as paranoia. Activists often imagined that agents were everywhere and that the FBI viewed the women’s movement as a serious threat to “national security.” But the truth, as always, was far more complicated. The women’s movement was dangerous, but not in the way the FBI assumed, and FBI informants were everywhere, but they were not usually the most visible or obvious women.

Sometimes research ends up confirming your worst fears. The extent of FBI infiltration of movements of the sixties is by now well documented. Younger women in the New Left had firsthand acquaintance with the FBI’s infiltration of civil rights groups, SDS, the Black Panther Party, the Native American Movement, the Yippies, and many other protest groups. They knew the Bureau’s methods: create division and dissension. Spread false rumors about members. Plant bogus evidence to discredit leaders. Utilize agent provocateurs. Send false letters to intensify fear of infiltration. In an internal memo dated July 5, 1968, the FBI listed twelve suggestions for destroying the New Left. One was to take “advantage of personal conflicts or animosities existing between New Left leaders.” Another suggestion was that agents should create “the impression that certain New Left leaders are informants for the Bureau or other law enforcement agencies.” The memo also suggested that agents “consider the use of cartoons, photographs and anonymous letters which will have the effect of ridiculing the New Left. Ridicule is one of the most potent weapons which we can use against it.” Above all, “whenever possible, agents and informers were to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize specific individuals and groups.”27

Through close coordination with local police—sometimes called Red Squads—as well as the press, universities, businesses, churches, and trade union officials, the FBI successfully cast suspicion on leaders and helped destroy their leadership and credibility. These young women also knew how FBI informers had pushed activists in the black power movement toward sectarian divisions and, in the case of the Black Panthers and other black nationalist groups, into deadly rivalries.

Older female activists—those who had been targeted as Communists or identified as labor organizers or members of Women Strike for Peace—were not at all surprised that the FBI would scrutinize their actions. During the fifties, the FBI had hounded these women, followed their children to school, interrogated their neighbors and coworkers, and often constituted nearly half the membership of some organizations.

Still, in my wildest flights of paranoia I never imagined the extent to which the FBI spied on feminists or how many women did the spying. We may never know the full extent of this infiltration, what damage it caused, or how it affected the trajectory of American feminism. Surprisingly, no significant examination of this secret has yet taken place.

Surveillance of the women’s movement began as part of the Cointelpro program, an FBI domestic surveillance program begun in 1956. In 1968, J. Edgar Hoover redefined the Cointelpro mission: “It was to ‘neutralize’ the effectiveness of civil rights, New Left, antiwar and black liberation groups.

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