50 years of Covert Operations in the US

By: Larry Seigle and Farrell Dobbs and Steve Clark

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Synopsis: In August 1987 a US district court judge issued an injunction that dealt a sharp blow to decades of covert operations by Washington’s political police. Deciding in favor of the Socialist Workers Party in a suit filed against the FBI and other federal police agencies some fifteen years earlier, Judge Thomas Griesa ruled that use of informers, “black bag jobs,” and covert disruption operations against political organizations and individuals— including communists and other working-class militants—is unconstitutional. He ordered that no documents obtained through unconstitutional methods can be “used, released, or disclosed” by the government. That ruling stands to this day. It is a weapon in the hands of working people fighting to keep open political space to speak, organize, and act—in our own interests and on our own terrain, in the factories, on picket lines, and in the streets. These pages tell the story of where that suit came from, tracing the fight—from the late 1930s to today—to push back the expansion of Washington’s political police operations and the growth of the “national security” state.