COINTELPRO

The claim, in its accurate form: activists who said they were being watched, infiltrated and set against each other by federal agents were describing an actual operating programme, not paranoia.

On 8 March 1971 burglars took roughly 1,000 documents from the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania and mailed them to journalists. One carried the routing word COINTELPRO. The Church Committee investigated from 1975.

Paraphrased summaries of publicly circulating reports, not verbatim quotes from identified individuals. Unverified by definition.

• “An organiser described years of assuming the surveillance was imagined — mail arriving opened, friends turning on each other over letters nobody wrote — and then reading the routing slips after the 1971 file release.”

  reported harmReported 1975

  Paraphrased from published interviews with 1960s activists

Confirmed. The Church Committee found the programme targeted civil-rights organisations, anti-war groups, Black nationalist organisations and the Communist Party, with tactics including anonymous poison-pen letters, planted news stories and efforts to provoke violence between groups. The FBI's campaign against Martin Luther King Jr, including a letter urging him toward suicide, is documented in the Bureau's own records. The programme was formally ended in April 1971, weeks after the burglary. What remains contested is the extent of FBI foreknowledge in specific deaths, where the record is incomplete rather than settled.