COINTELPRO
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COINTELPRO was the FBI's counterintelligence programme directed at Americans, and one of the four abuses John Kiriakou lists whenever he is asked what the Church Committee was for.

His description of it is short and unqualified: the committee was "looking at the FBI's surveillance program and spying on Americans without any warrant or court order. They would just arbitrarily do it, through a program then called COINTELPRO."

He sets it alongside the CIA's international assassinations programme, the Army's programme to infiltrate peace and anti-Vietnam-war groups, and MKUltra, the four together being what he means by crimes committed by the deep state, and the standard against which he measures later committees claiming the Church Committee's mantle.

Its most consequential application, in Kiriakou's account, was the campaign against Martin Luther King, an operation whose surveillance component he describes as running to two hundred agents, and which he treats as the demonstration of what the programme was ultimately for: "they tried to label him first as some kind of communist agent. That didn't go over, then as some kind of pervert, or something. But destroy him."

See also

- Church Committee
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- MLK assassination
- FBI
