COINTELPRO ran from 1956 until March 1971, when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a small field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and mailed the files to journalists. Targets included the Socialist Workers Party, the Klan, Black nationalist groups, the New Left, and Martin Luther King Jr., whom the Bureau surveilled and sent an anonymous letter suggesting suicide. The Church Committee concluded the Bureau acted as guardians of the status quo, conducting actions with no conceivable rational relationship to either national security or violent activity.
The toolbox was psychological: forged letters to break marriages, fake cartoons, anonymous mailings accusing activists of being informants, the snitch jacket, engineered faction fights between groups that agreed on everything except what the FBI invented. The goal was rarely arrest. It was paranoia as policy, making movements distrust themselves into paralysis.
The claim: COINTELPRO's real legacy is proof of concept, that a domestic security agency can run perception operations against citizens for fifteen years, be exposed completely, suffer no prosecutions, and pass the playbook to successors. Verdict: the exposure and impunity are documented; successor claims vary case by case. The harder question the files leave behind: a Bureau that filed King under subversion was not malfunctioning. It was defining national security as the existing order, and saying so in writing.
Who watches the watchers' files?