Wikipedia tells us COINTELPRO is an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program and was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States.  The FBI's stated motivation at the time was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order."  According to FBI records, 85% of COINTELPRO resources were expended on infiltrating, disrupting, marginalizing, and/or subverting groups suspected of being subversive, such as communist and socialist organizations; the women's rights movement; militant black nationalist groups, and the non-violent civil rights movement, including individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, and other civil rights groups. . [snip] .  The other 15% of COINTELPRO resources were expended to marginalize and subvert "white hate groups," including the Klu Klux Klan and National States' Rights Party.  Directives governing COINTELPRO were issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and their leaders.

Suspicions persist that COINTELPRO operations are continuing, only better hidden.  Some wonder "If Viking Penguin paid over 2.5 Million to defend Peter Matthiessen's book, then who paid the commensurate legal fees required to press those lawsuits?"  But such questions contribute only suspicions - and maybe even paranoid ones, at that.  Within Indian country, AIM had managed to catch native imaginations.  In the early 1970s there were several confrontations between Indians, AIM, and the government - where AIM had raised its characteristic upside-down U.S. flag: the international distress symbol, because "Indians were in bad trouble and needed help." (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 37.)  With their inverted flags and their red wind bands, some took them quite literally to be "Red Indians."  After all, hadn't Indians always shared their property communally?  And Sid Mills, Hank Adams and Russell Means were said to have been welcomed by Communists in Hanoi in the Spring of 1972!  (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 55.)  Golly, gee - how could our nation even survive without a useful "menace" to exterminate?

Nevertheless, the FBI couldn't have thought that AIM Indians or the Black Panthers, or even the puny U.S. Communist Party were ever a real threat to National Security.  But one cannot underestimate the power of a guilty conscience:  As the Bible says in Proverbs 28:1  "The wicked man flees although no one pursues him; but the just man, like a lion, feels sure of himself."  Myself, I think that what was being protected was the "American Dream," that swollen system of conspicuous consumption and gross pollution that had for so long proved so profitable to big corporations and so destructive to the long-term survival of humanity.  Besides, big mining interests wanted the Uranium that had been found near Edgemont in the Black Hills. In 1973 AIM was classified as an "extremist organization" and several of its leaders were added to the bureau's list of "key extremists."

Indians had developed the temerity to protest murders and rapes?  But great numbers of them had remained peaceable during the civil-rights upheaval of the 1960s.  .  .  .  They must be: on the WARPATH!  The sentiment grew that without any AIM agitators, those unruly Sioux would again relapse into dependence on the BIA and on tribal-council handouts.  The need was clear: a tougher policy was required, not just towards AIM, but towards any who even dare support them.  As fate would have it, the "right" man took over the job of president of the Pine Ridge Tribal Council in the spring of 1972:  A paunchy pale-skinned man with dark glasses, a military haircut, and a heavy drinking habit, Richard "Dick" Wilson was violently anti-AIM.  No sooner was he in office than he handed out fat Tribal Council salaries to his wife, brother, cousin, sons, and nephew.  "There's nothing in tribal law against nepotism" he said.  (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 60.)  Meanwhile Russell Means, Council President Wilson's main political rival on Pine Ridge, was fed up with city life and planned to create a food co-op for people in the traditional village of Porcupine.  Wilson banned all AIM activities and commenced an open war against AIM supporters, including his own Vice-President, whom he fired.

He then used federal highway funds assigned for a "Highway Safety Program" and for "Tribal Rangers" to augment the BIA police by outfitting and arming his own private police force.  Tribal members soon started calling them Wilson's "goon squad" because of their drunken brutality.  (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 61.)  In a conspicuous display of arrogance, his private "police force" openly adopted the term as an acronym for "Guardians of the Oglala Nation."  People were getting hurt.  Even though repeatedly threatened with impeachment by his own Tribal Council for a whole series of illegal acts, Wilson was strongly supported by the BIA, and the FBI too.  The Justice Department was only too happy to endorse this serviceable Indian, who asked them to attack AIM members - and then even offered his own goons to help.  (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 61.)  In January 1973 a man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death in Buffalo Gap by a white businessman known locally as "Mad Dog," who stated "he was going to kill him an Indian."  (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 62.)  The victim's mother asked AIM to seek justice from State authorities.  Uneasy officials heard AIM was mobilizing, and brought heavy police support to a meeting with Indians in Custer, South Dakota.  A fracas between police and Indians spread through the courthouse.

"While we were talking to the state's attorneys, the mayor and commissioners and all," Dennis Banks remembers, "fighting started outside on the steps, then swept into the corridors outside the room.  Next thing we knew, the door opened and a tear-gas cannister came rolling in."  The rioting lasted forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.  Originally Dennis Banks was questioned and released, but a few days later he was arrested and charged with arson, burglary, and malicious damage to a public building - "not because I had broken any laws but because I was a leader of AIM."  (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 63.)  The presence of FBI observers at this "uprising" suggested to the Indians that state and government authorities were less concerned with law and order than with the obstacle to Black Hills mining leases AIM's focus on Indian sovereign could present.  Following the Custer riot, the Attorney General assigned sixty-five U.S. marshals to Pine Ridge:  The "new Indian wars" were underway!