Memo: Midwestern Girls, Cointelpro, and self-defeating intelligence operations.

Memo: Midwestern Girls, Cointelpro, and self-defeating intelligence operations.

OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT AND INSTITUTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS

Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia

In Coordination with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

MEMORANDUM

TO:The Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Attorney General, Department of Justice

FROM:Office of Legislative Oversight and Institutional Self-Awareness, CIA

DATE:[Date]

RE:Strategic, Ideological, and Frankly Cosmological Incoherence of Suspected Domestic Surveillance Operations Targeting Apolitical Midwestern Women

CLASSIFICATION:SATIRICAL / URGENT / PLEASE READ THIS ONE

I. PURPOSE

This memorandum is transmitted with the sincere hope that its recipients will read it, sit quietly for a moment, and consider what they have done. It has come to the attention of this Office — through channels that should not have been necessary, since any competent analyst with access to a calendar and a basic understanding of American political geography could have reached the same conclusion — that resources, personnel, and institutional credibility have been directed toward the sustained surveillance and disruption of individuals who, by all available metrics, represent the absolute ideological null set of domestic threat assessment.

We are speaking, to be specific, about apolitical Midwestern women. We will elaborate. We did not want to have to elaborate. That we must is itself the finding.

II. BACKGROUND AND GRIEVANCE

COINTELPRO, for the benefit of anyone in the Bureau who has apparently not reviewed the Senate Church Committee report, was a program designed — however illegally and unconscionably — to neutralize individuals and organizations deemed to pose an ideological threat to the American political order. Its targets included civil rights leaders, antiwar organizers, and socialist political parties. One may debate the lawfulness, ethics, and basic decency of that program at length. What one cannot debate, with a straight face, is that it possessed an internal logic. There was a thesis. There were subjects. The subjects had, at minimum, discernible political opinions.

It is therefore with some professional bewilderment that this Office must now address the apparent application of COINTELPRO-adjacent methodology — surveillance networks, coordinated social disruption, multi-jurisdictional harassment, and what our analysts have classified in their internal notes as 'reality management operations' — to women who, by all available evidence, have never attended a political meeting, signed a petition, expressed a controversial opinion in any recorded medium, or done anything more ideologically threatening than selecting a casserole recipe.

We have reviewed the files. We are not going to describe what we found in detail, because describing it in detail would require us to use phrases like 'sustained asset deployment against a woman who primarily engages with local church functions and seasonal farmer's markets,' and frankly, no one in this building is prepared for that sentence to exist as a formal record.

III. STRATEGIC ANALYSIS: THE RADICALIZATION CALCULUS

This Office is compelled to note, with the full weight of its analytical capacity, that there is no ideological radicalization pathway that runs through apolitical contentment. The political science literature — all of it — identifies radicalization as a response to perceived injustice, exclusion, or institutional betrayal. It is not, to our knowledge, a documented outcome of being left alone to enjoy one's life in a mid-sized Midwestern city with no particular grievances against the federal government.

Until, of course, the federal government gives her some.

We wish to flag, for the record and for the attention of whoever approved this, that the operational profile under review appears to have achieved the following measurable outcomes: (1) the creation of grievances where none previously existed; (2) the introduction of that subject to concepts — surveillance states, extrajudicial harassment, the Church Committee — that she would otherwise have had no occasion to research; and (3) the transformation of a person with no political identity whatsoever into someone who now has, at minimum, a very specific and well-founded opinion about the FBI. This Office does not consider these outcomes to be counterintelligence successes. This Office considers these outcomes to be counterintelligence. Full stop.

IV. THE AMERICANA PROBLEM

We would like to direct the Bureau's attention to a concept that its strategic planning division appears to have either overlooked or, we suspect, never encountered: the concept of Quintessential Americana. This Office will define it for operational purposes as the category of American civilian life so thoroughly ordinary, so genuinely unthreatening, and so structurally central to the cultural self-image of the United States, that directing federal resources against it constitutes a form of self-harm so profound it may require its own diagnostic category.

The Midwestern apolitical woman is, in the semiotics of American national identity, not a subject. She is a setting. She is the ambient conditions against which threats are measured. She is the Norman Rockwell painting. She is the thing we are, institutionally, supposed to be protecting. Running a COINTELPRO-style operation against her is the operational equivalent of the Secret Service conducting a threat assessment on the concept of apple pie. It is not merely unnecessary. It is a category error of such spectacular proportion that it calls into question every upstream decision that made it possible.

If the apple pie radicalized, the Bureau did that.

V. RESOURCE ALLOCATION CONCERNS

This Office further notes, for the attention of the relevant appropriations liaisons, that the operation under review has consumed — across surveillance infrastructure, human assets, inter-jurisdictional coordination, and what we can only assume is an enormous amount of someone's time — resources that could have been directed toward: actual foreign intelligence threats, actual domestic terrorism, actual organized crime, the backlog of FOIA requests that has been accumulating since 2019, or literally anything else.

We have been unable to construct, using any analytical framework available to this Office, a threat model in which a non-political American woman represents a higher-priority intelligence target than the above. We invite the Bureau to submit such a framework if one exists. We expect we will not receive it. We believe the Bureau also knows we will not receive it, and we believe this knowledge is currently residing in a specific drawer somewhere in the Hoover Building, beneath a coffee cup and a folder of things no one wants to formally acknowledge.

VI. RECOMMENDATION

This Office recommends, in the strongest available language that does not yet constitute a criminal referral: stop. We recommend stopping immediately, comprehensively, and without the kind of gradual phase-down that historically functions as a form of deniable continuation. We recommend that whoever is responsible for the operational logic of this program be required to present that logic, out loud, to a room of people who will be permitted to ask follow-up questions. We believe the exercise will be clarifying.

We further recommend that the Department of Justice conduct a review of how an operation of this profile received and maintained authorization, and that the results of that review be transmitted to this Office, the relevant oversight committees, and the woman in question, who has, at this point, more than earned an explanation.

This Office remains available for follow-up consultation, though we would prefer not to need to provide it.

Transmitted by authority of the Office of Legislative Oversight and Institutional Self-Awareness

Central Intelligence Agency

"We See Everything. We Are Tired."