COINTELPRO and The Camden 28

 COINTELPRO AND THE CAMDEN 28

Jefferson Morley, in his December 6, 2022 presentation at the Mary Ferrell Press Conference at the National Press Club in Washington, said that the records released under the JFK Act indicate a strong interest in Lee Harvey Oswald by high level CIA officers while President Kennedy was still alive. He also said there is reason to believe Oswald was involved in a CIA operation before the assassination, one designed to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that was disbanded shortly after the assassination. In addition, Morley mentioned that this operation may have been a joint FBI-CIA COINTELPRO operation.

We only know about COINTELPRO because a group of anti-war activists, who called themselves the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI, broke into the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office and stole their files in the early 1970s. They then distributed the FBI documents to various media outlets, including the Washington Post, and the media recognized the COINTELPRO documents referred to the FBI’s activities against anti-Vietnam War groups.

Media is a small town just outside of Philadelphia, and is where Ruth and Michael Paine were married in 1959 in a Quaker ceremony just around the corner from the FBI office. Since the Media FBI office break-in was never solved, some of those involved, now that the statute of limitations had expired, to write a book about their experince.

But the COINTELPRO documents gave a clear indication as to how the FBI was trying to disrupt the anti-War activities, and the case of the Camden 28 provides an adequate example of that.

Camden is a city across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, and the Camden 28, in the early 1970s, were active anti-war protesters, nominally lead by Father Michael Doyle, an Irish born Catholic priest who was my Religion teacher at Camden Catholic High School and recently died.  If I hadn’t been away at college I probably would have been among them when they broke into the Camden Federal Building and began to steal the military draft records, mine included.

One of the Camden 28 was Robert “Bob” Hardy, an ex-US Marine Corps veteran who was also an FBI informant. Hardy had a truck, provided the ladders, glass cutters and tools, provided by the FBI, and it can be said that the break-in cold not have happened if it wasn’t for the assistance of Bob Hardy and the FBI.

Of course, in the middle of the heist, the FBI, state and local police, including my father, a Camden Police Lieutenant at the time, closed in and arrested them all. When the case got to court, it became clear that Hardy was an FBI informant, and was to provide stats evidence.

As accurately portrayed in the documentary film The Camden 28, by Antholy Giacchino in 2007, in the middle of the trial, Bob Hardy’s son was tragically killed in an accident, and Father Doyle and the rest of the Camden 28 forgave him and sympathized with his plight, so much so that he defected from the FBI and became a witness for the defense. That led to their being found not-guilty.

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Camden_28_(film)    ]

[   https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0808190/?ref_=ext_shr_em ]

The COINTELPRO documents from the Media, FBI office, and the story of the Camden 28 clearly how the COINTELPRO operations worked, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, with its domestic and foreign attributes, support Morley’s contention that the COINTELPRO operation to discredit the FPCC was a joint FBI-CIA operation.

We know the CIA was involved because of the records that show David Atlee Phillips was part of it, as this document, released in the December15th 2022 batch, clearly indicates.

 [  https://m.facebook.com/photo.php/?fbid=10227561547759826 ]

Anthony Giacchino, director of The Camden 28, also directed The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After (2009), that chronicles the first 24 hours after the assassination, but leaves out a lot of key elements.

[  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1549069/  ]

In any case, the COINTELPRO documents from the Media FBI office and the story of the Camden 28 both reinforce the idea that Oswald – a Bob Hardy type of individual, was involved in a joint FBI-CIA operation to discredit the FPFCC in the months leading up to the assassination.