Hoover conducted COINTELPRO operations in total secrecy for decades. He repeatedly told the highest officials in the bureau and agents in charge of FBI offices around the country to guard them with deep secrecy and to keep sending proposals for new COINTELPRO operations to headquarters. He liked to evaluate them himself. He especially enjoyed one that came from the Los Angeles office: a proposal to plant with a journalist the false claim that actress Jean Seberg was pregnant with the baby of a Black Panther leader. He quickly approved that plan. Soon after a Los Angeles Times gossip columnist published the false claim, describing Seberg so accurately that it was clear who the unnamed actress was, Seberg went into labor months early and gave birth to a dead white baby. The FBI felt the operation was a success. Every year on the anniversary of the birth of her dead baby, Seberg attempted suicide. She succeeded on the ninth anniversary.

Hoover succeeded in keeping these worst bureau crimes a secret from 1956 until 1971. He intended for them to be secret forever. Congress and the attorneys general who were his titular bosses were so threatened by his potential power to destroy, because of the files he slyly let them know he kept, that they provided no oversight of his operations.

Activists in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s suspected he was spying on them, but most thought that, given Hoover’s great power, the question of whether he was illegally suppressing dissent could not be confronted. Finally, one activist—William Davidon, a physics professor at Haverford College who had opposed the war from the beginning because of his concern that nuclear weapons would be used—decided the issue must be confronted. He thought that if official suppression of dissent was taking place it was a crime against democracy—a crime that must be stopped.

Davidon assembled a group of nine, eventually eight, people who agreed with him that the issue was so serious they were willing to risk decades of freedom in order to find documentary evidence that would establish whether Hoover’s FBI was guilty of suppressing dissent.

The group he assembled called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. They had met while participating in draft board raids organized by the Catholic peace movement, an amorphous group that raided draft boards throughout the Northeast and upper Midwest. In addition to Davidon, the group he assembled included John and Bonnie Raines, he a professor of comparative religion and she director of a daycare center; Keith Forsyth, a cab driver; Bob Williamson, a social worker for the state of Pennsylvania; Sara Shumer, a political science professor; Ralph Daniel, a graduate student preparing to be a therapist; and Judi Feingold, a draft counselor for the American Friends Service Committee. Because they strongly opposed the war in Vietnam, they were keenly aware of the importance of protecting the right to dissent.

On the night of March 8, 1971, they broke into the small FBI office in Media, Pa., and removed every file in the office. Ten days later, three reporters, including this writer, and two members of Congress received copies of the first files they revealed. These files documented an FBI unknown to the public. Thanks to the success of Hoover’s large and successful public relations operation in the FBI, and a compliant press, a very large portion of the public adored Hoover.

With the release of the stolen files, the public’s understanding of the FBI changed drastically, beginning with revelations that FBI officials wanted the public to think there was an FBI agent “behind every mailbox” and instructed agents to behave in such a way that activists would become “paranoid.”

Many significant revelations were in the files, including ones that described the FBI’s massive Stasi-like files on Black people, created not because of suspicion of crime but simply because they wanted to create files on as many Black people as possible. Hoover’s profound hatred of Black people was a strong thread that ran through all the revelations that would become known.

But it wasn’t until COINTELPRO started being revealed in 1974 that the public demanded that the bureau be investigated. One of the documents stolen by the Media burglars, a mere cover sheet, contained the label COINTELPRO in the top right corner. Because I wrote about the file it was attached to, Hoover and his top officials realized that as of that day in early April 1971, the term COINTELPRO existed outside the bureau for the first time. They panicked.

Hoover was outraged that any files had been removed and released. But as memos he and other high FBI officials wrote, they worried most about whether files about COINTELPRO operations would be released. Their fears greatly increased when they realized I had a document that contained, but did not explain, the term. Hoover notified agents in charge of offices throughout the country to guard COINTELPRO files with even greater secrecy. At the end of the month, he sent another message telling them that the bureau no longer would use the term COINTELPRO. If anyone asked about those operations, he said, they should be told COINTELPRO no longer exists. But it did. He also told the agents in charge of offices that they should continue proposing the same types of operations, but without a COINTELPRO label.

COINTELPRO remained a secret until after NBC journalist Carl Stern won a lawsuit that forced the FBI to release the four pages that described the origin of COINTELPRO. It had been founded by Hoover in 1956 to disrupt and damage the Communist Party and its members. Over the next decades, he added COINTELPRO operations that focused on each new political movement he opposed.

Once COINTELPRO’s existence became known in late 1973, a few documents that described watered-down descriptions of COINTELPRO operations were released in late 1974 by the Department of Justice. Even those watered-down versions were shocking. By the end of 1974, people were enraged that such crimes could be committed against Americans by the country’s supposedly premier law enforcement agency. Then, in late December 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency, against its charter, also had conducted a massive surveillance operation against antiwar activists.

Both houses of Congress immediately conducted their first investigations of the FBI and other intelligence agencies. The country faced what its law enforcement and intelligence agencies had done. Startling secrets were revealed, including COINTELPRO operations that were beyond belief, as officials were compelled to testify under oath at hearings conducted by the Senate’s committee, known as the Church Committee for its chair, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho). One top FBI official, William Sullivan, who had created and supervised the execution of the plan to cause Martin Luther King to commit suicide, testified that “never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is the course of action we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning.”

That apparently is the case inside the Trump administration today. After pardoning the people convicted of serious crimes in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol immediately after he was inaugurated for his second term, Trump set out on a retribution campaign that involved instructing the Department of Justice to fire the prosecutors and FBI officials and thousands of agents who were involved in investigating the January 6 attack and also the ones who investigated and prosecuted the federal charges brought against Trump.

Having obeyed Trump’s orders that his perceived enemies be fired, the new FBI director, Kash Patel, can be expected to continue to enforce Trump’s retribution demands. Given the government’s severe actions against protesters in Minnesota, likewise with the Department of Homeland Security.

While there are clear similarities between Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations and the Trump administration’s Homeland Security operations, there also are strong differences. When the public became aware of gross injustices by the FBI and CIA in the 1970s, there were public demands that Congress act. And it did. Those bulwarks of justice then—the public and Congress—are remarkably quiet today. Unlike then, today Congress has shown little or no interest in investigating the crimes committed by federal officials in Minneapolis and that are still being committed in communities and ICE detention centers throughout the country. That’s true despite the fact that today’s grave injustices are happening not in secrecy but in broad daylight.