Cheapened and neutralized: why the FBI destroyed actress Jean Seberg’s life
In 1956, the conspiracy-obsessed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover originated on his own, and with no higher authority, the first incarnation of a counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO, to “infiltrate, penetrate, disorganize and disrupt” the U.S. Communist Party following the fall of McCarthyism.
Hoover and fellow Bureau officials were convinced that existing laws were insufficient to control the activities of targeted dissident groups, and they were hamstrung by early 1960s-era Supreme Court decisions limiting the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute American Communists. Accordingly, Hoover directed COINTELPRO’s operations as a personal vendetta, using antagonistic and frequently patently illegal strategies to “contain and disrupt” radical activists he personally deemed threats to the American way of life. In essence, the Bureau simply took the law into its own hands, conducting a high-tech vigilante operation against who it perceived as “domestic enemies.”
These activist organizations included not just communists but the Socialist Workers Party from 1961–69, white hate groups from…
