FBI and CIA Mounted Illegal Surveillance Operation on Progressive Student Activists in Southern States in 1960s

New study based on declassified records reveals paranoia about subversion in conservative states that resulted in serious constitutional violations

[This article follows CovertAction Magazine’s efforts to spotlight the history of the CIA and other intelligence agencies and their participation in illegal and unethical activities.—Editors]

In April 1967, legendary Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael gave a fiery speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, pointing attention to the systemic racism in American life, to the hypocrisy of mainstream liberals and the Black political establishment, and to the evils of U.S. imperialism that were on display in the war in Vietnam.

Afterwards, riot-clad police confronted Black students, precipitating a riot after making nearly 100 arrests that caused tens of thousands of dollars in property damage.

Newly declassified documents reveal that student groups which had sponsored Carmichael’s visit had been spied upon by a political intelligence, or “Red Squad,” unit in the Nashville Police Department, which gathered information and collaborated with the FBI to undermine the groups.

The Nashville “Red Squad” was headed by John Sorace, a Brooklyn native who testified before Congress that the conflict between students and police following Carmichael’s talk was the result of a “premeditated conspiracy crafted in secret meetings by hate-mongering, anti-American Black extremists and their Communist-linked white allies, many from outside Nashville, who had duped and manipulated the local community into rioting.”^[1]

Promoted to Assistant Police Chief, Sorace was a pioneer in using new surveillance technologies and compiling computerized records of “subversives” whom his “Red Squad” unit ceaselessly monitored.

Gregg L. Michel’s new book, Spying on Students: The FBI, Red Squads, and Student Activists in the 1960s South, recounts the hidden history of police “Red Squads” in the U.S. South during the 1960s and 1970s that were formed to spy on and disrupt leftist activist groups.

Like their counterparts in other cities, these “Red Squads” committed myriad constitutional violations, including through participation in illegal break-ins, framing activists for arrest by planting drugs on them, and coercing them into committing other illegal acts.

The impact of their operations was often devastating, as the people targeted experienced family ruptures, expulsions from school, and arrests.

A professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Michel notes that the U.S. South is traditionally left out of histories of the 1960s, though activist groups devoted to civil rights and anti-war organizing proliferated there.

The few histories of police “Red Squads” and FBI surveillance predominantly focus on northern and midwestern cities, as in Frank Donner’s landmark study, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

The governing authorities of the South were particularly conservative in their orientation, and prone to view any progressive activism negatively, even if lawfully carried out and reasonable in approach. Southern leaders were quick to label student activists as being communist influenced and anti-American subversives threatening to the social order.

These activists were especially hated because they punctured the carefully cultivated myth embraced by the white upper-class that the New South was a progressive, racially harmonious place where Blacks had been given access to government jobs and economic opportunities.

Michel points out that the expansion of “Red Squads” in southern cities was enabled by the Johnson administration’s creation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) under the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which offered federal grants to local and state law enforcement agencies they could use to bolster their intelligence and surveillance capabilities, including by purchasing new surveillance technologies.^[2]

U.S. Army Intelligence and the CIA became more active in advising local police forces as they upgraded their intelligence gathering and introduced tools and tactics that had been adopted in the Vietnam War.^[3]

The FBI also collaborated closely with southern police “Red Squads” and sent agents to compile dossiers on students who attended Stop the Draft Week events, picketed defense contractors like Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s plant in Cobb County, Georgia, and protested the appearance of war-mongering politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey on their campuses.^[4]

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was a bitter foe of 1960s youth activists, wrote “An Open Letter to College Students” in 1970, that warned about extremists in The New Left movement who “ridicule the flag, poke fun at American institutions, seek to destroy our society….leading to violence, lawlessness, and disrespect for the rights of others on many college campuses during the past year.”

The FBI’s Counterintelligence New Left program was put under the direction of William C. Sullivan, likely author of a 1966 letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraging him to commit suicide.

COINTELPRO-New Left worked with police “Red Squads” to disrupt the operations of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading campus New Left group, and “neutralize” the young people associated with it. ^[5]

One strategy for achieving this was to leak disinformation about SDS activists to local media to discredit them in the eyes of the local population, and to write letters to their families saying that they were sexually promiscuous and on drugs.

Another method was to manufacture discord within SDS campus branches and factionalism to weaken them.^[6]

Yet another method was to hand out incendiary and pro-communist material under SDS’s name that were sure to alienate the local population.^[7]

In the state of Oklahoma, a bastion of evangelical anti-communism, Republican Governor Dewey F. Bartlett (1967-1971) set up a secret surveillance agency within the state’s military department to spy on New Left activists. It was dubbed “the Sooner CIA.”

This agency compiled thousands of files on people, including members of the small SDS branches at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and Oklahoma State University (OSU), who faced blacklisting and had difficulty finding jobs or were driven to near mental breakdown.^[8]

An ACLU lawsuit charged that the Sooner CIA “violated constitutionally protected rights of speech and assembly” and “cast a pall over lawful political protest” while “harassing and intimidating” people to “deter them from exercising their constitutionally protected right to political protest and to dissent from government policies.”^[9]

Similar violations were carried out by South Carolina’s counterpart to the “Sooner CIA,” which was headed by a lawman named Joseph Preston “Pete” Strom, who gained the nickname “The J. Edgar Hoover of South Carolina.”^[10]

Strom knew Hoover personally and followed in his footsteps by cultivating an expansive informant network for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), which he headed from 1956 until his death in 1987.

When protests erupted during a ceremony granting South Carolinian native son General William Westmoreland an honorary law degree at the University of South Carolina (USC), Strom characteristically had the protesters removed and used city ordinances to shut down musical acts at an anti-war coffee house in Columbia.^[11]

One of Strom’s undercover agents, Jack Weatherford, urged members of USC’s anti-war movement to paint graffiti on the local draft board office and called Strom in advance so police would be on the scene to arrest them.

When Brett Bursey realized he had been betrayed, he was totally surprised since Weatherford had played the part of a hippie activist extremely well, down to his long hair and dress. To add insult to injury, Weatherford proved to be a good witness in court and Bursey was given 18 months in prison—an extremely harsh sentence considering the offense.^[12]

Bursey later sued Weatherford and Strom for violating his constitutional right to a fair trial, since Weatherford had participated in trial planning meetings with him and his attorney. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Bursey lost, though Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan issued a dissenting opinion stating that they could not “join in providing even the narrowest of openings in the practice of spying upon attorney-client communications.”^[13]

Mississippi’s counterpart to the “Sooner CIA” and SLED, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC), was headed for a period by one of J. Edgar Hoover’s administrative assistants, Zack J. Van Landingham. It compiled 5,000 index cards on “subversive activity” and rivaled if not eclipsed the other southern states in its adoption of dirty tricks.^[14]

Erle Johnston, the MSSC’s director in the mid-1960s, said that the MSSC operated as a “mini- FBI.”^[15]

When students at Millsaps College in Jackson established an underground newspaper, the “mini- FBI” had the editors arrested for trying to hand it out at a local high school and framed staffers on drug possession charges after an informant planted a bag of marijuana in the newspaper office.^[16]

Police agents affiliated with the MSSC were also suspected of setting a fire at the location of a hippie music festival hosted by the newspaper.^[17]

The Director of Police and Fire in Memphis during the late 1960s, Frank Holloman, was another former G-man who worked directly with Hoover as the inspector in charge of his Washington office.^[18]

Holloman is suspected of having an intimate role in planning the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., with Hoover’s top assistant and gay lover, Clyde Tolson.

In Memphis, Holloman built up the police’s domestic intelligence unit (i.e., “Red Squad”) and infiltrated The Invaders, a radical Black Power group.

The Memphis Red Squad’s ace underground agent, Marrell McCollough was a former military policeman who later went to work for the CIA.

He got himself appointed The Invaders’ Minister of Transportation as part of his cover. Frank Kallaher, a member of the group, recalled in 1970 that McCollough “called us pigs, called us names that you’ve never heard of. He played it to the hilt.”^[19]

In the end, McCollough’s efforts helped to destroy the organization as the Memphis “Red Squad” initiated a campaign of intimidation and harassment and arrested the group’s leaders.^[20]

In 1978, the city of Memphis agreed to stop all police spying and harassment of political organizations and to disband its “Red Squad” under threat of an ACLU lawsuit.

The lawsuit was precipitated after Eric Carter, a member of Memphis State University’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) chapter, who uncovered the identity of a police agent, Gene Townsend, requested access to his FBI file and the Memphis police destroyed the file.

Depositions stemming from the lawsuit and discovery of documents the police had failed to destroy “painted a picture of a department with a long history of extensive spying and surveillance conducted with little oversight, dismissive if not unaware of constitutional concerns, and contemptuous of the leftist causes, from civil rights, to antiwar that animated Memphis activists,” according to Michel.^[21]

This latter assessment applies to police “Red Squads” throughout numerous Southern cities—along with northern and midwestern ones.

The ultimate historical implications are considerable. Even though many “Red Squads” were disbanded, their legacy lived on in that younger generations were intimidated from carrying out left-wing political activism and the American political spectrum shifted further to the right.

And when new political movements for social change erupted—be it the “anti-globalization movement” of the late 1990s, Occupy Wall Street, or Black Lives Matter—police intelligence units were reactivated even if the term “Red Squad” was no longer used.

---

1. 
   

   Gregg L. Michel, Spying on Students: The FBI, Red Squads, and Student Activists in the 1960s South (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2024), 172. ↑

   
   
2. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 182. ↑

   
   
3. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 182. ↑

   
   
4. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 36. ↑

   
   
5. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 41, 42. ↑

   
   
6. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 42, 43. Michel gives the example of the manufacture of a letter that was sent to the Nashville-based chairman of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), Tom Gardner, denigrating David Doggett, a member of the campus activist group at Mississippi’s Millsaps College. ↑

   
   
7. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 46. ↑

   
   
8. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 68-75. The SDS branch at OSU only had three students. At OU, it had about a dozen. The Sooner CIA even tracked what professors said in class. ↑

   
   
9. 
   

   Michel, Spying on Students, 75. ↑

   
   
10. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 78. ↑

    
    
11. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 80, 81. ↑

    
    
12. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 86. ↑

    
    
13. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 87. ↑

    
    
14. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 90. ↑

    
    
15. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 91. ↑

    
    
16. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 98. ↑

    
    
17. 
    

    Idem. ↑

    
    
18. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 125. ↑

    
    
19. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 132. McCollough used his cover as a member of The Invaders to infiltrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle and was pictured kneeling over him after his death. It has been alleged that he assisted the FBI in planning King’s assassination. ↑

    
    
20. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 133. McCollough was a student at Memphis State University and reported on activities of the campus’s SDS organization to the FBI. ↑

    
    
21. 
    

    Michel, Spying on Students, 154. ↑

    
    

---

CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptions, orders and donations from readers like you.

Blow the Whistle on U.S. Imperialism

Click the whistle and donate

When you donate to CovertAction Magazine, you are supporting investigative journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine.

CovertAction Magazine does not receive corporate or government sponsorship. Yet, we hold a steadfast commitment to providing compensation for writers, editorial and technical support. Your support helps facilitate this compensation as well as increase the caliber of this work.

Please make a donation by clicking on the donate logo above and enter the amount and your credit or debit card information.

CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and your gift is tax-deductible for federal income purposes. CAI’s tax-exempt ID number is 87-2461683.

We sincerely thank you for your support.

---

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the author(s). CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI), including its Board of Directors (BD), Editorial Board (EB), Advisory Board (AB), staff, volunteers and its projects (including CovertAction Magazine) are not responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. This article also does not necessarily represent the views the BD, the EB, the AB, staff, volunteers, or any members of its projects.

Differing viewpoints: CAM publishes articles with differing viewpoints in an effort to nurture vibrant debate and thoughtful critical analysis. Feel free to comment on the articles in the comment section and/or send your letters to the Editors, which we will publish in the Letters column.

Copyrighted Material: This web site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a not-for-profit charitable organization incorporated in the State of New York, we are making such material available in an effort to advance the understanding of humanity’s problems and hopefully to help find solutions for those problems. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. You can read more about ‘fair use’ and US Copyright Law at the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Republishing: CovertAction Magazine (CAM) grants permission to cross-post CAM articles on not-for-profit community internet sites as long as the source is acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original CovertAction Magazine article. Also, kindly let us know at info@CovertActionMagazine.com. For publication of CAM articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: info@CovertActionMagazine.com.

By using this site, you agree to these terms above.

---

About the Author