Deep Covers: “Deep Throat,” Civil Rights and COINTELPRO

I was a mere 8-years old when the Watergate Hearings were taking place. Despite my general lack of knowledge of electoral politics at the time, like many in my generation, the hearings and the subsequent resignation of then President Richard Nixon, long colored my view of electoral politics. Years after Nixon’s resignation, Gil Scott-Heron’s “H20 Gate Blues”, a chilling critique of the debacle (“the government you have elected is inoperable), was echoed in KRS-ONE’s “Why is That?”(1988)—evidence perhaps that Watergate was part of the political fabric of the hip-hop generation. But I suspect that for many in the post-Civil Rights generation, the fine points of Watergate were conveyed to us via the film All the President’s Men. More than anything the film—based on a book by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward—provided me with a romantic view of the power of Fourth Estate (a romance dutifully squashed in the Bush era). Indeed the figure of “Deep Throat” was a hero to me.

That all changed on Tuesday May, 31 2005 when 91-year-old Mark Felt, a former deputy director of the FBI, was identified as “Deep Throat.” While many heaped praise on the man who helped topple the damn-near despotic regime of Richard M. Nixon, the reality is that Mark Felt is no hero—he was a prominent cog in the mechanism that was used to destabilize many of the insurgent political movements in the United States in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence program) was created by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 to begin the illegal surveillance, infiltration and ultimate disruption of political organizations, particularly those aligned on the Left. Former US Attorney General William B. Saxbe made information about COINTELPRO public in 1975, including information about how the FBI targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. Many of the radicals of that era have been able to read files related to COINTELPRO via the “Federal Information Act”. It is because of the FIA that we now know the role that the FBI played, for example, in the death of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.

COINTELPRO was supposedly disbanded in April of 1971 and that no doubt played a part in the Justice Department’s decision in 1975 not to prosecute any FBI officials implicated in COINTELPRO activities. That all changed a few years later when a Justice Department investigation led to the indictment and subsequent conviction of our man MARK FELT (Deep Throat) and Edward S. Miller for “illegal break-ins” (for the purpose of illegal surveillance) related to the activities of the Weather Underground. Felt served no jail time—he was fined $5,000—and was later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan a few month after he took office. According to Reagan, Felt and Miller, served the nation “with great distinction” (NYT 4/16/81)

The indictments of Felt and Miller led to a period when the practice of illegal surveillance by government entities was significantly curtailed. Because COINTELPRO is something that many Americans remains ignorant of, there is little connection made between COINTELPRO and some of the core attributes of the Patriot Act (2001)—this ironically at a time when one of COINTELPRO’s architects is being hailed as an “American hero”.