Project Veritas: The New COINTELPRO?
Written by: Daniel Xie
It has been reported by Democracy Now that Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, is working with Project Veritas to infiltrate progressive organizations. According to the report, a former spy recruited by Prince assisted in running operation initiated by Project Veritas to secretly tape leaders of the Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers in 2017, a teacher’s union that Prince’s sister, current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, opposed. In the same video that in 2018, similar attempts were made to spy on the congressional campaign of former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger by an infiltrator affiliated with Project Veritas; said spy was fired when Spanberger figured out what was going on.
According to Intercept writer Matthew Cole, Erik Prince and Betsy DeVos, along with the Mercer family, are bankrolling efforts by Project Veritas to infiltrate the media, labour unions, as well as progressive and left-leaning organizations and “expose” people that express perceived “liberal bias” in these organizations. Prince himself would work with figures within British Intelligence such as Richard Seddon, to train Project Veritas at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming. The training offered involved both weapons training and undercover video work; the type of training associated with espionage.
As reported on this site, and various other news sources, a recent consequence of Project Veritas’ spying on supposed leftists in America was the suspension of Emmy winning journalist David Wright on February 26, 2020 for being a democratic socialist and expressing concern for the dominance of Disney over ABC news, as well as the lack of discussion on real issues by the media. A month earlier, on January 28, 2020, Project Veritas tried to infiltrate the Bernie Sanders’ campaign as part of it’s #Expose2020 series, where it took a video of two of Bernie Sanders’ field organizers in South Carolina expressed support for overthrowing capitalism.
Destroying the Left From Within: The Historical Context
In a sense, the broader implications of Project Veritas’ efforts to rat out leftists, both real and imagined, within labour organizations, the media, and progressive campaigns and groups seems to be a form of counter-intelligence directed by right-wing organizations against the left. This echoes a disturbing historical precedence in that historically, the American government, particularly intelligence agencies such as the FBI, has sought, through infiltration and surveillance, to destroy organizations, particularly leftist and progressive organizations, that it deems as a threat to national security.
The most infamous of these government instigated initiatives was COINTELPRO, a massive operation undertaken during from 1956-1971 by the FBI, particularly during the height of the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movement. COINTELPRO involved the infiltration of various groups by FBI operatives deemed to be a threat. These included various anti-war organizations, communists (whom were their initial targets), new left organizations, student movements, black power organizations, and feminist movements that sprang up in the 60s. The goal of the program was not only to spy on these organizations and report their operations back to the FBI, but also to sow division within their ranks.
To achieve this goal, FBI operatives would bring up controversial issues or raise acrimonious debates in order to spark conflict, or deflect any efforts to expose them by planting falsified evidence suggesting that a particular individual was a CIA/FBI informant, which would raise further suspicions within organizations. This was what happened to black power theorist and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael, who was deemed by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover as the man most likely to succeed Malcolm X as America's "black messiah". Through COINTELPRO, the FBI undermined efforts by Carmichael to merge the Black Panthers (of which he was the "Honorary Prime Minister" of) and the SNCC by spreading disinformation that Carmichael was a CIA operative. As a result of their actions, Carmichael was banished from SNCC that year, and alienated from the Black Panthers.
Apart from destroying radical organizations from within through infiltration, other methods taken by COINTELPRO to suppress perceived threats from the left was distributing misinformation through newspaper and gossip outlets controlled secretly by the FBI to demonize specific activists, breaking into offices of various organizations such as the Socialist Workers Party to dig up personal information of individuals affiliated with radical and leftist organizations. This was specifically done in order to exploit any weaknesses they see in the personal backgrounds of the targeted activists and use it to their advantage.
The mass media was complicit in these efforts to destroy the anti-war movement, the new left, the black power movement and the civil rights movement from within. The FBI relied on friendly media sources to broadcast any information that could weaken anyone they deemed to be a threat. In addition, they worked with the media to produce content that could demonize activists in movements such as black liberation movements, as evident by a documentary demonizing black panthers and New Left activists in the Miami area; the FBI praising the television station that helped make said documentary for working with the FBI by its own accord to demonize the left.
While Project Veritas is currently an independent initiative taken by a right-wing activist, it does share disturbing similarities with COINTELPRO. These similarities manifest themselves mainly through attempts taken by both the FBI and O’Keefe’s organization to infiltrate and subvert any organization they deem to be a threat from within. Interestingly enough, while the FBI has yet to be involved in Project Veritas, Erik Prince, as noted above, has been able to recruit British intelligence operatives to help train Veritas operatives.
In the case of both the historical COINTELPRO operation and Project Veritas, operatives would infiltrate organizations or institutions deemed to be troublesome, gain the trust of those whom they want to destroy, and exploit that trust to expose any weakness or opening that the parent organization(the FBI, Project Veritas) would seek to take advantage of in order to ruin the lives and reputations of those they target.
Of course, media complicity and collaboration is a key factor in both COINTELPRO and Project Veritas. Project Veritas was able to succeed in destroying the career of an Emmy award winning journalist because ABC news, in response to Project Veritas’ expose of David Wright identifying as a democratic socialist, decided to suspend him from any further “biased” political coverage; presumably in response to his leftist leanings and his criticism of ABC being influenced by Disney.
A large chunk of American media is controlled by six wealthy corporations, with these corporations themselves having previously ratted out news reporters. A famous example was the shutting down of the Donahue show on the General Electric owned MSNBC in 2003. This was done to prevent media from giving space for opposition to the Iraq War. In modern times, James O’Keefe, Erik Prince, and Project Veritas has a strong base of willing accomplices that would fall behind their efforts to root out any potential leftist voices in the media.
Implications
O’Keefe and Prince’s own form of COINTELPRO in the form of Project Veritas, directed against liberal and progressive politicians, labour unions and progressive voices in media, has disturbing implications for the future. On a surface level, it demonstrates the hypocrisy of right wingers that claim to be defenders of “Freedom of Speech” against a supposedly totalitarian and monolithic “left”.
It shows that the right is willing to resort to tactics employed by the US government, particularly during the 1960s, in order to “silence” any opinions that lie to their left. This being regardless of how such actions trample on the ability of leftists to express themselves freely. Leftists and even progressives and liberals, in the eyes of O’Keefe, are to be silenced whenever they appear, their circles infiltrated whenever possible, and shunned from society through the public exposing of any information that could be used against them.
On a deeper level, Project Veritas raises an even more frightening question beyond the hypocrisy of the far right: “What would happen if the US government and US intelligence agencies were to resume COINTELPRO, with the media once again being complicit collaborators in rooting out suspected threats to dominant narratives in society? Forms of surveillance has evolved since the 1960s, with the growth of the surveillance state, and thus growing repression on the home front against suspected dissidents, having expanded as a result of the War on Terror. This was something that O’Keefe and Prince kept in mind as they were expanding Project Veritas, working with British intelligence agencies to train their spies in keeping up with modern forms of espionage and surveillance.
The constant evolution of surveillance and repression raises important questions for the future. What if the government, through an organization such as the FBI or the NSA, with the full might of the surveillance state behind them, launches another COINTELPRO directed against suspected progressives and leftists? How much damage would another COINTELPRO conducted using modern surveillance do to the left?
Most importantly, how complicit would the media institutions which consistently kowtow to right-wing and corporate influences be? Would they help expand a hypothetical “second COINTELPRO” directed against “subversive” and “left-leaning” elements of American society regardless of the consequences? If they ever do this, the results could be devastating for the left.
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