Exhibit 299

COINTELPRO: The FBI's Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens (Church Committee, Book III)

Exhibit 299 · Congressional report

COINTELPRO: The FBI's Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens (Church Committee, Book III)

In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to "disrupt" and "neutralize" target groups and individuals.

Staff study of more than 20,000 pages of FBI documents. Records five domestic programs (1956-71), 2,370 approved actions, the August 1967 and March 1968 Black Nationalist directives, and that no one outside the Bureau was informed of three of the programs.

Source: United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
Date: 23 April 1976
Quoted from: Book III, COINTELPRO report, Part I, p. 3 (PDF p. 7)
Grade: Primary record
Document: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-94755-iii.pdf
Accessed: 2026-11-09
Cited by: Findings citing this exhibit

Cited by

Finding INF-5.6: Primary record The Church Committee's 1976 study of the FBI's COINTELPRO counted 2,370 approved actions in five domestic programs from 1956 to 1971 and described them as secret action designed to "disrupt" and "neutralize" target groups and individuals. It also quotes a 16 September 1970 FBI Philadelphia memorandum describing an effort to have New Left campus groups think "there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."
Finding DEF-6.1: Primary record The Church Committee found that the FBI ran five COINTELPRO programs from 1956 to 1971 and approved 2,370 actions to "disrupt" and "neutralize" domestic groups and individuals, among them the November 1964 anonymous note to Martin Luther King Jr.