Unamerican Activities: The Campaign Against the Underground Press

Geoffrey Rips, coordinator of PEN American Center Freedom to Write Committee, has compiled a crucial report on illegal surveillance and harassment of the potent independent press movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Citing government records and editors' files, he tells the story of FBI, CIA, NSA, military and police efforts to silence dissident voices of antiwar, New Left, youth, women's and minority rights movements.

The FBI 12 Point Plan to Disrupt the New Left launched a nationwide campaign to ridicule, discredit, and 'confuse by misinformation.' Government agents blackmailed, tapped phones, monitored bank and tax records, beat up and jailed people. Police searched without warrants, destroyed presses and equipment, countenanced terrorist thugs, bombings and murder. Rips investigation of government high crimes and misdemeanors puts questions of censorship and free speech in sharp focus.

Civil libertarian Aryeh Neier surveys political surveillance in the U.S. from the early 19th century to the 'invisible' censorship of today's sophisticated police networks.

Todd Gitlin, author of 'The Whole World is Watching' reviews 'The Underground Press and Its Cave-In' in the context of the New Left as a whole.

Looking into the CIA's Operation CHAOS, Angus Mackenzie focuses on the strange case of agent and informer Sal Ferrera. And he details government pressure on record companies to withdraw advertising contracts which the underground press relied on for revenues.

Allen Ginsberg, prophet and sleuth (instrumental in exposing CiA heroin trafficking), furnished PEN with files he gathered between 1968 and 1972 concerning illegal government sabotage of the written word. In his forward he writes, 'Our Bill of Writes was adopted to limit the pushiness of police spies, government gossips, agents-provocateurs, drunken busy-bodies, kinky bureaucrats, off-the-wall paper-pushers.'