King V. Rapoport

The FBI also had to get tangible evidence from the social dissenter, so the operation called for undercover operatives to be placed in Rapoport’s class to “report on his subversive activities.” The danger Dr. Rapoport posed to the United States motivated the FBI field office in Ann Arbor to order the intellectual to be “embarrassed, discredited and spied upon in whatever imaginative ways” the local agents deemed necessary. This is just one of many cases of a gross abuse of power to physically drive an individual out of the United States for being critical of American policies. Valuable resources and manpower were used in instances like this all over the nation to simultaneously erode public trust and disregard real threats of subversion from state actors from 1947 to 1974.

Another prominent and disturbing abuse of power stumbled upon by the Church Committee was against none other than the civil rights leader preaching non-violence, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The targeting of Reverend King was intended to quell the internal stability in the US, an easy opening to Communist and anarchical subversions seeking a foothold in a disgruntled

At the beginning, Congressional indifference left intelligence operatives with wide lateral limits to their authority and autonomy within the Executive branch, with some programs even being hidden from the President himself. The small subcommittees within the Armed Services and Appropriations committees in the House and Senate did not have the drive to interfere with intelligence work or were indifferent about the operations. Leveret Saltonstall recalled that he “was hesitant to ‘obtain information which I personally would rather not have, unless it was essential for me as a member of Congress to have