ITIII $l0llllTs BY M. SWEANINGEN ITIIESTEY FBI SECRETS tl, K I' Advance Praise for FBI SECRETS by M. Wesley Swearingen "FBI SECRETS ought to snap Americans out of their compla- cency over this covert agency. It rips aside the curtain hiding big- otry, burglary, and accessory to murder, setting up what should be a Bureaugate." -William W. Turner, former FBI Special Agent, author of Hoover's FBI: The Men and the Myth "A former insider's guided tour of the FBI's chamber of hor_ rors, documenting in shocking detail crimes ranging from bag jobs to sanctioned assassinations, FBI SECRETS is a must read for any- one concerned with the subversion of the democratic process.,, -Curt Gentry, author of J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets FBT SECRETS "At last, an FBI whistleblower! Here is the inside story of FBI break-ins and the frame-up of Black panther leader Geronimo pratt. Must reading for '60s veterans, today's activists, and anyone who An Agent's Expos6 values freedom and democracy." -Brian Glick, legal counsel to Geronimo pratt and author of War at Home "With this book, Wes Swearingen does for the FBI what philip By M. Wesley Swearingen Agee did for the CIA. In clear, eye-witness detail, he exposes the day-to-day corruption and subversion of democratic valuei that has permeated our national police since its inception, and which contin- ues to this day." -William H. Schaap, co-founder, CovertAction euarterly "Swearingen skewers Hoover with this film noire account of corruption, racism and authoritarianism among the G-Men of the FBI. As fiction it would be a classic, but as fact it is a powerful trag- edy detailing how ultra-patriotism and power breed repression and police-state mentality." = -Chip Berlet, co-chair, Civif,ft,ibertics Cor'mittee, National Lawyers Guilde = South End Presg Bogton, MA Swearingen Copyright @ M. Wesley , Any properly footnoted quotation of up to 500 sequeqtial words may be used without permission, as long as the total nuniber of words quoted does not exceed 2,000. For longer quotations or for a greater number of total words, please write for permission to South End Press. Text design and production by the South End Press collective Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Swearingen, M. Wesley FBI Secrets: an agent's expos6/ M. Wesley Swearingen [i.e. Swearingenl p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0-89608-502-3: $40.00. 0-89608-501-5 (pbk.): -ISBN $13.00 1. Swearingen, M. Wesley. 2. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation-Officials and employees-Biography. 3. United To the memory of my dear friend, Charles R. Garry, who States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 4. Political persecu- spent his life in the courtroom in the struggle for human tion-United States-Case studies. I. Title. rights and human dignity for all. HV7911.S844A3 1995 363.2',s',0973-4c20 94-39629 CIP South End Press, 116 Saint Botolph Street, Boston, MA 02115 9998979695 '@: 2345678 ,i, -Sr Acknowledgements I owe thanks to my attorney, Charles R. Garry, who convinced me that my story should be heard by the people, to help them in their struggle for equal rights under the law, and who helped me on my way to exposing FBI conuption. I wish to thank John Crewdson, former reporter for the New York Times and currently national editor of the Chicago Tribune, for writing accurate news articles about FBI conuption based on my in- formation, and for encouraging me to publish my memoirs. I want to express my gratitude to the South End Press collec- tive for having the courage to publish an agent's first-hand account of FBI corruption and wrongdoing. Loie Hayes deserves a commen- dation for supporting my early drafts, and for having faith in a first- time author. My editor, Sonia Shah, is the one who made it all possible because she had to edit out many personal stories, anec- dotes, and sidelines to keep the book focused on the story line. 'l ( t Contents Foreword Lifting the Shroud of Secrecy, by Ward Churchill Introduction by M. Wesley Swearingen Chapter 1 A Conventional Beginning Chapter 2 The Making of an Agent Chapter 3 Chicago's 24-Men Burglary Squad 2l Chapter 4 A Close Encounter 31 l Chapter 5 The Security Index 39 Chapter 5 Starting Over 53 Chapter 7 Louisville 59 chapter 8 "There are no Weathermen in LA" 67 tl, Chapter 9 The Black Panther Party 81 # Chapter 10 No Weathermen Anymore 9t Chapter 11 Lying to the GAO 97 Chapter 12 Perjury Before Congress 101 Chapter 13 COINTELPRO 105 Chapter 14 My 25-Year Award 131 Chapter 15 t4r Streetfighter in the Courtroom "There is something addicting about a secret." Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) Chapter 15 -J. The Sweet Smell of Success r63 t7l Appendix A: The Logistics of a Bag Job Appendix B: Operations Against Leon Katzen 175 Appendix C: The Arrest of Claude Lightfoot 177 Appendix D: Hoover's Commendation 180 l8l Notes to Foreword Index 185 t, Foreword Lifting the Shroud of Secrecy by Ward Churchill During the ten years that I was on the U.S. Intelligence Board...never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the questions: "Is this course of action which we have agreed upon law- ful, is it legal, is it moral and ethical?" We never gave any thought to that realm of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragma- tists. The one thing we were concerned with was this: WilL this course of action work, will it get us what we want, will it reach the objective we desire to reach? -w'riamc'Sulrivan,3ffi::l:i"tli!*1,"#ii jfli; Beginning with the l97l citizens' break-in at the Media, penn- sylvania Resident Agency FBI office, in which a large number of Top Secret documents were stolen and subsequently made public, the past quarter-century has been replete with revelations concern- ing pervasive criminal activities engaged in by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.t Over the years, it has become increasingly appar- ent that such conduct on the part of the "nation's police force,' has, overwhelmingly, been directed against politically dissident indi- ,a-. viduals and organizations. This is how the bureau has functioned from its inception in 1908 to today. In effect, the FBI exists, as much as anything else, as a national political police. Much of the operational history of the bureau's many cam- paigns against political diversity in the United States has been de- tailed in the voluminous reports of a Senate Select Committee (Church Committee) during the mid-70s,2 and in such books as * FBI SECRETS Lif ting t.he Shroud of Secrecy Robert Justin Goldstein's Political Repression in Modem America, violence, to outright assassination of selected leaders.t Although the Cathy Perkus' COINTELPRO, Athan Theoharis' Spying on Ameri- profile of the FBI's lexicon of illicitly repressive modes and meth- cans, David Wise's The American Police State,Peter MatthiessQn's ods is in some ways substantially complete, there has always been In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Brian Glick's War at Home, Dalid an important missing ingredient: namely, detailed tales of the bu- Garrow's The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., Ross Gelbspan's reau's adventures and wrongdoings. In contrast, much has been Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI, and my own collaborations written about the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency with Jim VanderWall, Agents of Repression andThe COINTELPRO (CIA), the FBI's figurative counterpart in U.S. external affairs. Sev- Papers.3 eral former CIA agents and officials have offered up details that From this array of sources, both primary and secondary, corroborate and amplify the information about CIA techniques emerges a portrait of a massive, deeply entrenched and increasingly available from official and unofficial sources.u The dramatic stories ubiquitous institutional entity devoted to the curtailment of domestic of Philip Agee, John Stockwell, Victor Marchetti, Frank Snepp, and political action and expression. The individual objects of the bu- Ralph McGehee have clarified and confirmed our knowledge of reau's attentions in this respect have been people as different in "The Company."' their lives and outlooks as Ernest Hemingway and Dr. Martin Unfortunately, it seems the bureau has produced virtually no- Luther King, Jr., the Benigan brothers and Russell Means, Ber- body-until now-with the requisite conscience, courage, and per- nardine Dohrn and Malcolm X, Janis Joplin and Kathy Boudin, sonal integrity to match their CIA counterparts in disclosing their Huey P. Newton and Joan Baez, George Jackson and Walter insider's direct knowledge of what the FBI has done. Indeed, the Reuther. The organizations subject to FBI counterintelligence op- major example of an agent who "quit and told" has until now been erations have been equally wide-ranging, extending from the Black Joseph Schott, whose 1975 book, No Left Turns, was designed to Panther Party, American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican inde- embarrass the memory of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.8 An earlier pendentistas and the Weathermen faction of the Students for a effort by former agent William Turner, Hoover's FBl, was so lim- Democratic Society, to the entirety of the labor movement and the ited as to be nearly useless in today's research on the FBI.e Communist and Socialist Workers parties, and onward still, to the Given the veritable vacuum into which it injects itself, then, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Committee in Soli- the present book is not only unique but vitally important. Here at darity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Every Mother for last is a career veteran of the bureau's clandestine wars against po- Peace, Clergy and Laity Concerned, Silo Plowshares, even Duke litical freedom in America-a participant in literally hundreds of University.4 burglaries, disinformation campaigns, and worse-who has, how- On record, the methods employed against such "deviants" ever belatedly, demonstrated the fortitude and character necessary have included every sort of tactic from discrediting targeted persons to admit, first to himself and then to the rest of us, not just the ille- or groups by circulating defamatory rumors about them in their gality but the intrinsic wrongness of what he did "in service to the communities and/or planting false reports abo.ut them in the media, bureau." Thus, the author, M. Wesley Swearingen, has finally posi- to causing "politically objectionable indiviffis" to be evicted from tioned himself to reveal what he learned in the course of his decades their homes and fired from their jobs by contacting their landlords as an active-duty FBI agent. and employers, to orchestrating the repeated arrests on spurious This, to be sure, is a lot. The chapters which follow are laced charges of those targeted, to obtaining the conviction and conse- with privileged information. Exposed, for example, are the mechan- quent imprisonment of "key activists" by introducing fabricated evi- ics of how Los Angeles Black Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt dence against them at trial, to provoking inter- and intragroup was railroaded into an ongoing life term in prison by agents with lll FB] SECRETS Lift.ing t.he Shroud of Secrecy whom the author worked during the early 1970s. Similarly, Swear- FBI Secrets represents a giant step toward lifting the shroud of ingen recounts a drinking scene in which another agent, a friepd secrecy under which the bureau has sought to conceal its true malig- with whom he had long worked in Chicago, confessed the burea{r's nancy. It stands as a singular testimony, a precedent, one which may involvement in the December 1969 assassinations of Illinois Panthbr quite possibly lay the groundwork for other agents or former agents, leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.to Light is also shed on the with other knowledge and other anecdotes, to step forward to share victimization of others, Jean Seberg and Leonard Peltier among their own insights and experiences. This is certainly an outcome to them.rt Additional vignettes highlight the FBI's more-or-less con- be hoped for. But, whether or not such a potential is ever borne out, tinuous subversion of "objectionable" electoral candidates, the hy- the material herein cries out to be read in its own right, and its per-reactionary racial and sexual attitudes of the average agent, and author is deserving of genuine respect for having proven himself much more . courageous enough to have written it. Altogether, FBI Secrets serves much the same purpose as Churchill -Ward Agee's Inside the Company or Stockwell's In Search of Enemies, Boulder, Colorado providing an indispensable validation of certain conclusions already October 1994 drawn by independent analysts and researchers.r2 Swearingen's Los Angeles counterintelligence colleagues also played a role in bringing about the murders of other Panthers-Fred Bennett, for instance, and Frank Diggs, Sandra Lane Pratt, Jimmie Carr, Bunchy Carter, and Jon Huggins-and were probably in- volved in setting up the 1970 Marin County Courthouse disaster that resulted in the deaths of Jonathan Jackson and several others, while very nearly ending the career of activist/intellectual Angela Davis.13 Scholars and activists are still debating the question of the bureau's possible participation in orchestrating the assassination of George Jackson in 197l.ta The FBI also used street gangs during the late-60s and early- 70s as surrogates with which to destroy the Panthers.tt The Party, of course, is known to have fielded a strong and tentatively viable anti- drug program in many inner cities during that period. The gangs with which the bureau aligned itself, and to which it appears to have extended some sort of criminal immunity as a quid pro quo-the Black P. Stone Nation cum El Rukn group in Ct$qaeo is a salient example-largely went on to become primary dru$ distributors in their respective localities once the Panthers had been obliterated.t6 The FBI's activities on such matters illuminate the meaning of the Reagan/Bush "War on Drugs" and the present Clinton "Get Tough on Crime" initiative.'t lv *