Most Insane FBI COVERUPS

Sweeping racially motivated murders under the rug. Destroying activist groups from within while building wannabe terrorist cells from the ground up. Even assisting in the rounding up of innocent citizens whose freedom wasn’t convenient for the state. We’re not describing some Eastern Bloc secret police group like the Stasi or the KGB. These are all horrifying cover-ups from the FBI, America’s premier domestic federal law enforcement body. While they catch criminals and save the day in movies and on TV, there’s another side to this organization- A side they want to keep hidden in the shadows.

What skeletons does the FBI have in its closet? And what is it about this organization that makes some of its activities so shady in the first place? To fully understand, we’re going to need to wind back the clock and see how the FBI first came to be.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was founded in 1908, though it was just called the Bureau of Investigation back then. Up until that point, crimes that occurred across state lines were handled by the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, while regulation of Interstate commerce was managed by the Justice Department. However, following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, started to believe that more needed to be done to stop the threat of anarchism in the US. He proposed the creation of a new investigative body, independent of other government organizations and reporting only to the Attorney General. This proposal was met with some pushback, as even early on, detractors in Congress were worried that this new bureau would become a sort of secret police department. This was a grim omen of some of the activities that agents of this new law enforcement bureau would soon get themselves involved in.

Eventually, on July 26th, 1908, the Bureau of Investigation was founded, with its development being headed by Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte using funds from the Department of Justice. The first large-scale task the bureau would ever take on was enforcing the Mann Act - a law that forbids transporting women across state lines to engage in prostitution introduced in 1910. In the 20s and 30s, they targeted organized crime and bootlegging operations, merging with the Bureau of Prohibition in 1933.

This restructured organization, rechristened as the FBI in 1935, would go on to apprehend some of the most notorious gangsters in American history- John Dillinger, Ma Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, and Babyface Nelson, just to name a few. But despite their successes in the so-called 'war on crime,' the FBI has been guilty of some truly shady stuff that they'd rather have us all forget. Sometimes, as far as the FBI is concerned, the definition of crime is just 'anything that upsets the status quo.'

During World War II, a big part of the FBI's job was monitoring the potential threat of enemy spies in America. Even before America officially entered the war following the Pearl Harbour attack, the FBI had a list of possible 'troublemakers' who would be brought into custody in the event that an Axis Power attacked the United States. The problem?

That list included over 5 thousand innocent Japanese-American men who, following Pearl Harbour, were arrested en masse without warrants. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066, which required people who were deemed potential threats to national security to be relocated to government-run internment camps. Over the course of World War II, almost 70 thousand Japanese Americans, as well as some people of Italian and German descent, were arrested even though most of them had been born in America. The Supreme Court eventually ordered the president to suspend the mass arrests in 1944, and all 10 of the internment camps were shut down by 1946.

Despite having done away with the camps themselves, the executive order was not officially revoked until 1976, when President Gerald Ford formally terminated it. In the 1930s, one of the FBI's targets was Pedro Albizu Campos, president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico and a leading figure in the Puerto Rican Independence movement. Of course, an independent Puerto Rico would mean less profits for American-owned sugar companies present on the island, so naturally, the FBI had to step in. They spied on Campos consistently throughout his political career, arresting him and his supporters multiple times.

The first arrest was in 1937 for his supposed plans to overthrow the US government, the second was in 1950 for attempted murder, and in 1954 for an armed assault on the House of Representatives. It's important to note on that last one that Campos wasn't even there at the time of the attack, but he was assumed to be the mastermind behind the attack. The FBI's stalking of Campos was completely covert, only revealed to the general public following a Freedom of Information Act made by Congressman Luis Gutierrez in the 1980s.

The documents recovered suggested that the FBI was even keeping tabs on his friends and family right up until his death in 1965. The constant surveillance clearly took a huge toll on Campos' mental health, as during his third period of incarceration, he started claiming that the prison was experimenting on him and bombarding him with radiation beams. However, other prisoners in the same prison made similar claims, so maybe that was part of the cover-up as well. Starting in April of 1950, then-FBI director J Edgar Hoover disseminated a list of 393 names to the White House, the armed forces, and the US Civil Service Commission. Was it a list of suspected Russian spies? No, it was a list of people who had, at varying points since 1947, been arrested in Washington DC for 'sexual irregularity.' As you can probably guess, back in the 50's, that was just another way of saying 'gay.' This list was the start of the FBI's sex deviants program, which monitored government employees who were suspected of so-called sexual irregularity.

All those who were found guilty would be fired from their jobs, no matter if they were an office clerk or an aide to the president. This culminated in Executive Order 10450, which barred all gay people from being employed by any federal body. This continued through the 50's and 60's, until 1975 when the federal civil service lifted its ban on gay and lesbian employees. In 1977, the State Department did the same. That same year, 300,000 collected pages of compromising information on supposed sexual deviants were destroyed by FBI officials. Even though the FBI stopped tracking government employees' sexual activity, Executive Order 10450 wasn't fully repealed until 2017.

You thought that was bad? Well, we’re just getting started! Let’s look at perhaps the most famous cases of FBI cover-ups, the COINTELPRO program, which started in 1956. This series of projects were covertly and often illegally run by the FBI in order to infiltrate, destabilize, and discredit any political groups deemed too subversive or disruptive to American society. This, of course, included far-right white nationalist groups like the KKK, but a whopping 85% of groups surveilled were civil rights organizations, feminist groups, animal rights advocates, environmentalist groups, trade unions, as well as anyone who publicly opposed the Vietnam War. So, basically, anybody who was unhappy with the way the government was running things.

Members of these groups would be targeted based on supposed national security threats, even though almost none had any contact with foreign governments. You didn't even have to do anything particularly revolutionary to end up on a COINTELPRO watch list - even nonviolent political action groups were targeted based on a supposed potential to commit violence in the future. COINTELPRO used a variety of dirty tactics to destabilize these groups, including releasing forged letters and documents to tarnish group members' reputations, arresting activists based on falsified evidence, producing heavily biased 'documentaries' to paint them in a bad light, and denying activists a platform that they could use to bolster their reputations. These tactics were also used to create hostility between different activist groups.

For example, FBI operatives once forged a letter to Ron Karenga, the leader of the black nationalist group US Organisation, warning him of a nonexistent assassination plot against him by members of the Black Panthers. Even though the KKK was a target of COINTELPRO as well, that didn't stop the FBI from covering up racially motivated murders done by one of their own informants, who was also a member of the KKK. Gary Thomas Rowe Jr was a paid FBI informant who was formerly employed by the ATF before being recruited to the FBI in 1960. Initially, he was recruited to help destabilize the Klan from the inside, because he was exactly the type of man you'd expect to be a member of the KKK. This logic was sound, as Rowe was able to successfully infiltrate Eastview Klan 13, the most violent chapter of the organization in American history.

Unfortunately, since he was exactly the type of man you'd expect to be a member of the KKK, he was also super racist. In 1961, Rowe led a violent attack on a freedom riders bus driving through Alabama, where the police promised his group a 15-minute head start before any arrests would be made. In 1963, Rowe was one of the potential suspects in the 16th Street church bombings, which killed four young girls. Then, most shockingly of all, in 1965, he shot and killed a white activist named Viola Liuzzo, who was driving back from a protest march with a black man in the car with her. Instead of arresting Rowe, the FBI covered up and downplayed his involvement, spreading nasty rumors about Ms. Liuzzo, like saying that she was a heroin addict, a communist, and sleeping around with the black male members of her activist group. Rowe went on to testify against the other men who had been in the car with him and was put into witness protection in Savannah, Georgia, with later attempts to extradite him back to Alabama being unsuccessful.

Rowe would go on to claim that he’d been given complete immunity by the FBI in exchange for the information he provided on other klansmen. The FBI also kept tabs on a number of celebrities who were involved with the communist party, the civil rights movement, or who were openly anti-war. Some of these celebrities included Jane Fonda, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, and Bob Dylan. The FBI's list of cover-ups doesn't stop with the civil rights movement and Vietnam, though. In the early 1970s, the bureau planted over 500 bugs and opened over 2000 pieces of mail while targeting members of activist groups like Earth First and the American Indian Movement. Under the Reagan administration, new counter-terrorism measures were put in place that critics have said were essentially an extension of COINTELPRO. Multiple authors, including Ward Churchill, Rex Weyler, and Peter Matthiessen have claimed that the FBI's efforts to destabilize and discredit the American Indian movement were motivated by the government's desire to mine uranium deposits located on Lakota tribal land.

These shady tactics continue into the present day. In 2007, in order to investigate a potential bomb threat, an FBI agent posed as a member of the Associated Press online to catch a 15-year-old suspect in Olympia, Washington. The agent wrote a fake AP article about recent cyber-attacks directed at the suspect's school. The file contained a link to tracking software that then allowed the FBI to monitor his location and internet use. This story wasn't revealed until 2014, and although then-director James Comey claimed it was all above board at the time, the executive editor of the AP called the tactic 'unacceptable.' In 2009, the FBI was involved in concocting a fake terrorism plot to shoot down military planes and bomb two synagogues in the Bronx, New York City. Why would they do something like that?

To bait potential real terrorists who might want to join in. Much like with Gary Rowe in the '60s, the FBI informant was a criminal who joined them to gain immunity. His name was Shahed Hussain, a Pakistani national who had been convicted of defrauding the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. Along with another FBI informant, Hussain recruited four men from the local Muslim community to take part in their plot. The first person to join was James Cromitie, to whom Hussain offered 250,000 dollars if he agreed to help him bomb the nearby Riverdale Jewish Centre.

The other three members of the group were recruited by Cromitie. We also should mention that none of these men had any working knowledge of how to build a bomb. While the fake plot was being carried out, Hussain used money given to him by the FBI to pay for the men's groceries. He also provided the weapons and fake bombs, and selected the targets. In fact, in 2010, the defense lawyers for Cromitie and his associates argued that the case could be thrown out completely on the grounds of entrapment - the FBI and their informants had been so closely involved in the planning that there was very little that the supposed 'real' terrorists could've done on their own. The judge on the case, Coleen McMahon, said she considered the men to be "not political or religious martyrs, [just] thugs for hire, plain and simple." A similar case happened with eco-anarchist Eric McDavid in the 2000s. His group was infiltrated by a mysterious woman named Anna, who McDavid immediately fell for, and who was going to help them sabotage the Nimbus Dam. 

She provided them with a cabin to work in, materials to make bombs with, and, with their consent, recorded many of their activities. Then, on January 13th, 2006, McDavid and his associates were all arrested by the FBI. Turns out that "Anna" was really an FBI informant named Zoe Voss, who acted as an agent provocateur who baited the group into criminal activity. Voss had been involved in 12 other similar anarchist groups in the past, and her reveal following McDavid's arrest led to a wave of paranoia within animal rights and environmentalist groups across America. McDavid was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but he was released in 2015 when it was uncovered that the FBI had withheld approximately 2500 pages of evidence, including love letters between McDavid and "Anna," which were helpful in proving that his arrest had been a case of entrapment. The FBI also revealed that they had exempted her from a lie detector test during the investigation.

In 2018, the Atlanta Black Star also reported on cases of Black Lives Matter protesters being harassed in a manner similar to COINTELPRO tactics. These claims were supported by FBI internal documents that described stalking tactics being used against what they referred to as ‘black identity extremists.’ Even more recently, in 2021, a DOJ report found that FBI agents were involved in covering up the sexual abuse committed by former Olympic gymnastics team doctor Lary Nassar. In 2015, USA Gymnastics filed a number of allegations against Nassar to the Indianapolis field office of the FBI, but the response was extremely slow and very limited in its scope. Instead of owning up after doing such a poor job, the two agents assigned to the case lied during interviews.

The icing on the cake in this story is the reason for this cover up- while one of the agents involved wasn't named in the report, the other one, Jay Abbott, was in talks to try and get a job on the Olympic committee during the time the investigation was taking place. It's hard to imagine how you could let such a horrible crime go uninvestigated for such a trivial reason. The FBI may be the good guys in movies a lot of the time, but it seems like they've got their fair share of skeletons in the closet.