Article · Geopolitics · Conspiracies
Eight people broke into an FBI office and found a program that could no longer be denied
Yes, the FBI secretly surveilled and disrupted the civil rights movement for a decade, including Martin Luther King. It came to light not through an inside leak but on 8 March 1971, when eight activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole more than a thousand documents and mailed them to journalists. Congress's Church Committee later reviewed 110,000 documents and confirmed the program's scope in an official 1976 report.
Before 1971, COINTELPRO wasn't publicly known, not even by name. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ran it as a strictly internal matter, with no outside oversight.