After Mark Felt (photo left) outed himself as the legendary “Deep Throat” in the Watergate case last week, there was a media rush to canonize the FBI’s former Number Two man, and politicians proposed he be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in all this gush to make Felt a hero, there has been little or no mention of Felt’s prime role in COINTELPRO -- the most gigantic domestic political spying and disruption operation ever in American history, illegally conducted by the FBI.
Felt, in fact, was indicted and convicted in federal court in 1980 of directing nine illegal break-ins, aimed at domestic political targets, when he was boss of the COINTELPRO operation. Felt thus became the highest ranking FBI official to be convicted of criminal charges since J. Edgar Hoover (photo right, with Nixon) became head of the Bureau in 1924. (He was later pardoned by Ronald Reagan.) And in the early ‘70s, Felt appeared repeatedly on national TV (on shows like “Meet the Press”) trying to whip up a climate of security hysteria that this country didn’t see until post-9/11, by painting the anti-Vietnam war left as agents of foreign powers.
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