Charles P Pierce- Ghosts of Tradecraft Past

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We had a look today at some of the work done by a previous generation of stalwart, but curiously error-prone, heroes of the surveillance state.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter, nearly 50 years ago, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him to kill himself - and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite its half-baked prose, self-conscious amateurism and other attempts at misdirection, King was certain the letter had come from the F.B.I. Its infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to see King discredited. A little more than a decade later, the Senate's Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King's suspicion.

The people who came up with the idea, and the people who put the plan into motion, and the people who were listening in on the wiretaps, and whoever it was who sat down and typed up this feverish forgery all thought they were protecting the nation from dangerous subversion and imminent destruction from within. I guarantee you, among these people, and in the shadowy offices in which met their skeevy little cabals, they considered this an act of courage and of highest patriotism. I know this because the temperament of the times was such that this kind of thing ensnared even such otherwise noble souls as Bill Moyers and the Kennedy brothers. For all its newfound vig-ah, the country had yet to shake off the Red Terror of the postwar years, and the political ferment of what would eventually become The Sixties was just gathering steam. By 1968, Robert Kennedy was able to go into Indianapolis the night of King's murder and quote Aeschylus in what is still the most remarkable speech given by an American politician in my lifetime. It was a genuinely strange period in our history, but, as I said, I am absolutely sure that the people who bugged King's hotel room thought themselves to be heroes of the homeland. Just sayin'

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Old_Days_And_Heroes