The FBI COINTELPRO Files
An Archival Collection {home}

Michigan

Hoover was willing to use false claims to attack his political enemies. In one memo he wrote: "Purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge."

-FBI document, 16 September 1970, Director FBI to SAC's in Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Haven, San Francisco, and Washington Field Office available at the FBI reading room

In one particularly controversial incident, civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was killed in 1965 by a shot from a car in which four Ku Klux Klansmen were riding; one of the Klansmen was an FBI informant. Afterward COINTELPRO spread false rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement

(portions revised from Wikipedia)