COINTELPRO: America’s War on Dissent

Zersetzung: A History of Breaking Minds — Book 6

The origins of COINTELPRO can only be understood within the climate of Cold War paranoia that gripped the United States after 1945. With the Soviet Union cast as an existential enemy, every form of domestic dissent—no matter how local or reformist—was filtered through the lens of subversion and treason.

Against this backdrop, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover built an internal war machine aimed not at foreign agents but at America’s own citizens. Civil rights leaders, anti-war organizers, and Black liberation movements were branded not as expressions of democracy but as threats to national security. Hoover’s obsession blurred the line between law enforcement and political policing, transforming the FBI into a domestic counterintelligence agency.

This book exposes the dark architecture of COINTELPRO, revealing how letters, forgeries, rumors, and infiltration were weaponized to disrupt and destroy political movements from within. It connects Hoover’s tactics to the wider history of psychological warfare, showing how the seeds of today’s Digital Inquisition were planted decades earlier.

Part of the acclaimed Zersetzung: A History of Breaking Minds series, this volume provides a chilling account of how the FBI perfected psychological operations against its own people—and how those methods continue to echo into the present.