Superspies by Jules Archer

Author:Jules Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sky Pony
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I never used to look at our country from the political aspect for I have always felt secure. But now I do…. Recently a friend and I were walking down Brady St. around midnight…. We heard a series of clicks. Looking around, we saw an unmarked police car with one officer inside. He had his camera aimed at us and was taking pictures. I rather believed in the law, but this action caused me to wonder. Why was it done?

Michigan State Police collected secret files on fifty thousand people, basing their authority on 1931 and 1950 “antisubversive” laws. County Circuit Judge Thomas Brown ruled the laws unconstitutional. He ordered the Subversive Activities Unit to disband and destroy its files, in order to end the “chilling effect on civil liberties.”

Chicago’s Red Squad has often worked closely with the FBI. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention several FBI agents, disguised as counterculture dissidents, penetrated the ranks of the antiwar demonstrators. They fed data to the Chicago police, who subsequently attacked the demonstrators in what a government report called “a police riot.”

Questioned at the trial of seven arrested demonstrators, Lieutenant Joseph Healy admitted bluntly that his Red Squad spied on “any organization that could create problems for the city or country.” The Red Squad was divided into overt and secret sections—overt agents photographed dissenters attending meetings and demonstrations; covert agents infiltrated dissident groups to spy on members and their plans.

The Red Squad operated to suppress social change. One young lawyer found himself under surveillance for helping poor people through Legal Aid, and for representing a free medical clinic that the city was trying to close down.

A unit of the Red Squad called “Code 39” spied on the private lives of public officials and prominent people who were political opponents of “Boss” Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago. One victim, Congressman Ralph Metcalfe of Illinois, asked the US General Accounting Office about Chicago’s use of federal revenue-sharing funds for surveillance. The GAO reported that such funds accounted for up to 10 percent of the city’s $10 million police intelligence budget, and were supposed to be used only for “priority expenditures.”

Metcalfe demanded to know whether political spying could be construed as a “priority expenditure”; he declared, “It is time that this Administration began to care for its citizens, rather than to treat them as enemies.”

After hearing testimony from seventy-one witnesses regarding improper and illegal intelligence gathering by the Chicago Red Squad, a Cook County grand jury released its report in November 1976. It concluded, “This system produces inherently inaccurate and distorted data…. Finally, political spying by police lowers the community respect for law enforcement.”

In Cleveland when Carl Stokes was elected the city’s first black mayor, a policeman revealed that hostile Cleveland police tapped all City Hall phones including the mayor’s. Stokes’s staff had been reluctant to call in the city’s police intelligence unit to remove the electronic bugs and wiretaps for fear “they would have removed five and put in ten.” Consequently Stokes did not dare

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