Remembering the burglary that broke Cointelpro

These documents led to the public exposure of the Bureau’s now-infamous domestic Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which, under the leadership of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, conducted widespread surveillance of American citizens and mostly left-wing political groups and activists, including civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. The reporter who received the files and broke the story is Betty Medsger, who is also the author of The Burglary, a book detailing the Citizens Commission’s efforts to unveil the FBI’s surveillance program and how Hoover’s Bureau responded. What happened at those other two newspapers – there were two very dramatic things and different from each other – but what the New York Times did, looking at the files and turning them in and never even thinking about writing about them until we published our story the next day, that more than anything illustrates this culture of the time.

Source: www.muckrock.com