A Half Century of Failure to Reform the FBI Has Gifted Patel With Alarming Power

Witnesses who refused to cooperate with HUAC would often be convicted of contempt of Congress and jailed. Across those targeted in different ways, hundreds ultimately suffered periods of incarceration—for contempt, for proxy offences unrelated to their political views, or using the 1940 Smith Act outlawing advocating the forcible overthrow of the government, under which 145 people were indicted, of whom 108 were convicted and sentenced to a total of 418 years in prison.

These US-wide developments were mirrored at a local level. In nearly every state, there were mini-HUACs, Smith Act replicas, oaths of allegiance, and blacklists. California’s Un-American Activities Committee, for example, published 15 reports and named in them some 20,000 people and organizations during its 30-year existence. In New York City, Caute says, the sustained purge of schools and colleges throughout the 1950s ended up ousting an estimated 379 teachers from their jobs.

A central issue facing Church was whether to ban the FBI from investigating “ideas or associations” completely. In a hearing on December 11, 1975, committee member Walter Mondale argued that such investigations should happen only by exception and “under the severest and most closely defined standards,” adding: “If we fail to do that, I am convinced that this committee has failed and that in another 50 years, there will be hearings just like this in which the excesses that we have uncovered will have been repeated.”

How right he was. Nearly all of Church’s 96 recommendations have been either ditched, diluted or defied. The Smith Act has not been repealed. New guidelines requiring the FBI to have “specific and articulable facts” concerning possible violence before targeting a political group were replaced as early as 1983 by a requirement only to have a “reasonable indication” of such a threat and have been watered down even further since.

A recommendation that judicial warrants must be obtained for surveillance, which led to Congress passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, mutated into a secret court nodding through virtually every request, including bulk authorizations since the act was amended in 2008. Meanwhile, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—established in response to Church’s call for “intensified” congressional oversight—has proven hopelessly ineffective in living up to its brief.

While the Church Committee’s exposure of past abuses was historic, the harsh reality is that it failed to produce a fundamental change in the modus operandi of US intelligence agencies. The FBI did not even make cosmetic changes. Not only is its headquarters still named after Hoover; its website has a tribute to his third in command, Cartha De Loach, who continued to work for the agency as a consultant after the Church inquiry and was hailed when he died in 2013 by the then–FBI Director Robert Mueller as someone who upheld the agency’s “highest ideals.”

At the heart of the problem is the question of whom the intelligence agencies deem “subversive” to the interests they serve. In the decade following Church, the FBI targeted groups campaigning against US military intervention in Central America. The American Civil Liberties Union discovered in 2008 that the FBI had been targeting anti-war groups such as the Thomas Merton Center and United for Peace and Justice. In recent years, it has mounted surveillance and covert operations against racial justice activists. Now pro-Palestine protesters are top of the list.

To make matters worse, the FBI now has 38,000 staff, compared to the 4,602 at the height of the witch hunt in 1950—and access to technology beyond Hoover’s wildest dreams. While Washington politicians worry about this force being weaponized against each other, the real issue for progressives is whether it is being used for repression of dissent.

The lesson from Hoover’s era is the classic adage that we must not stand by while they come for people whose views we don’t wholly or even partially share. Hoover may have started with communists—but social democrats and liberals soon found themselves caught in his net. It was not until the latter stages of the witch hunt that opposition to it took on a mass character, as happened with protests against HUAC hearings in San Juan in 1959 and San Francisco in 1960. Those events were the beginning of the end for HUAC, though it would also take a burglary in 1971 by seven brave civil rights activists to expose the way Hoover had turned to covert action as other weapons in his war on progressives were being denied him.

Today, we should expect Trump and Patel to act fast and fiercely in cracking down on political dissent. Sadly, liberal failure to fight for the implementation of the Church report has gifted them with an FBI still rooted in the culture of Hoover.