10 Outlandish Conspiracies That Were Actually True
3. The FBI Screw Everyone With COINTELPRO
These conspiracies have gone all the way to the top. And when you've reached the top, where do you go? You spread out laterally, and get involved in some shadowy dealings that not only operate at the highest levels of government but every level of society and politics.
Which is exactly what the FBI did between 1953 and 1971 with COINTELPRO (short for COunter INTELligence PROgram), a series of covert missions which aimed to infiltrate, discredit and destroy political organisations according to the whims of Bureau head/nutter J Edgar Hoover. Actually, COINTELPRO tactics are still used by the FBI to this day, despite them being uniformly immoral and mostly illegal.
These tactics include (but are by no means limited to) surveillance, psychological warfare, smear campaigns using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, and just straight up murdering folk who get in their way. This is not only a real life conspiracy, but one that's still sorta active.
It was between the fifties and seventies - around the same time as MKUltra, come to think of it - that COINTELPRO was at its peak. In that time, the FBI secretly conspired against Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, almost every group that protested the war in Vietnam, the IRA, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway (whose suicide was linked to his pressure at being under constant surveillance), and sometimes people who actually were bad, like the KKK. Initially they just sought to stamp out the Communism that was supposedly spreading through the country, before dramatically expanding their scope.
This was all done completely unbeknownst to the American people, and often under the direct order from the various Presidents of the era. In fact they'd been doing this sort of thing since the first world war, when the FBI were charged with rounding up and deporting radicals and anarchists. All totally covertly, with lots of people in on it. Chilling.