I am finally getting around to reading FBI on Trial: The victory in the Socialist Workers Party suit against government spying. The statistics on Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltration of the group are just amazing, even to jaundiced old me.
In 1966, ten percent of all SWP members were government informers. Five percent of all Young Socialist Alliance members (the SWP’s youth group) were snitches, too (70).
From 1967 through 1976, as many as nine percent of the group’s members informed; at minimum, two percent regularly told the FBI what was going on at the SWP (70).
From 1943 to the early 1950s, the government wiretapped the group for approximately 20,000 wiretap days. It microphone-bugged the group for around 12,000 “bug days” (88).
These informants provided the FBI with approximately 12,600 SWP and YSA documents, most of which were intended for party eyes only (74).
Over 50 informants sat on SWP executive committees or executive boards (73).
The FBI had its own customized attack protocol for the SWP, in addition to various COINTELPRO New Left operations that the Bureau deployed. The SWP specific op was titled the “SWP Disruption Program,” and involved the completion of 46 discrete campaigns to discredit and destabilize the group (79).
Some of these informers were paid as much as $300 a month, which (trust me) was a very comfortable sum in 1970. Sixteen of them were paid $358k between 1960 and 1976 (68).
In the late 1970s, the Socialist Workers Party sued the government over this infiltration. In 1986 a federal court awarded the group $264,000 in damages (11).
