DHS Scrubs Record of FBI Financing of Right-Wing Terror Group
FBI was integral in organizing the right-wing terrorist Secret Army Organization, which engaged in bombings & assassination. FBI's SAO reports were part of a secret FBI operation called "Inlet."
Prelude
“The organizations and activists who spout revolution and unlawfully challenge society to obtain their demands must not only be contained but must be neutralized.” — J. Edgar Hoover, Director, FBI, May 14, 19681
“It would be much easier for people, including people within the CIA, to accept the domestic operations if they thought they were aimed primarily at stopping terrorism rather than at stopping dissent.” — Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (as quoted here)
“Use deceptive measures. Subscribe to one or more left-wing periodicals or get on the mailing list of some ‘peace movement’…. While doing this our members can be of great assistance in searching this left-wing literature for names and addresses of fellow travelers and forwarding this information for our Central Intelligence files. We desperately need people to assist in this work…. Avoid telephone calls to known members of the organization as much as possible.” — from Secret Army Organization “Practical Security Measures” memo, undated, Declassified SAO FBI files, PDF pg. 134
“An agent-provocateur is a police agent who is introduced into any political organization with instructions to foment discontent… or to fake a case in order to give his employers the right to act against the organization in question.” — Colonel Victor Kaledin, Imperial Russian Military Intelligence, from epigraph to The Glass House Tapes, Avon Books, 1973, pg. 5
Introduction
In February 2013, while I was still writing for the website Firedoglake, I reported that a website “run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) out of the University of Maryland” had described how “the Secret Army Organization [SAO], a right-wing terrorist group in the early 1970s… was ‘possibly funded by the FBI.’” Since I wrote the story, DHS or one of its subordinate agencies has removed the webpage from its relevant servers.
I was not by any means the first person to write about the SAO, though this bizarre story is mostly forgotten today. It is vital to remember the history of U.S. police and intelligence abuses, especially in a period, like today, of expanded government calls for surveillance and political prosecutions.
A September 1999 article by Noam Chomsky recalled “how the FBI managed to convert a disbanded right-wing paramilitary organization (Minutemen) into the Secret Army Organization (SAO), placing an FBI informant, Howard Godfrey, in a leadership position. Godfrey was paid $250 a month plus expenses. ‘Between 1967 and 1972, Godfrey, using F.B.I. resources, furnished firearms, explosives, other equipment and funds to the Minutemen and SAO,’ supplying at least 75% of the SAO’s operating expenses,” Chomsky wrote, quoting an ACLU investigatory report submitted in 1975 to the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee. (The expenses mentioned here are in 1972 dollars. Today, the FBI payments to Godfrey would be equivalent to approximately $2000 a month.)
Godfrey was, as a 1973 article by Richard Popkin, “The San Diego Coup,” put it, “a one-man plumbers’ operation within the SAO. He knew how to pick locks, burglarize, bomb and handle guns.” A 1975 New York Times article explained that Godfrey had been “a former San Diego fireman, elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints and, for three years, an F.B.I. informer in the Minutemen.”
The SAO became known for harassing and threatening anti-Vietnam War protesters, and engaging in bombings and attempted assassinations. Its most prominent leader, FBI informant Godfrey, escaped any legal consequences for leading the SAO’s campaign of violence and political intimidation. FBI agent Steven Christiansen, who acted as Godfrey’s supervisor, was centrally involved in hiding evidence of the attempted SAO assassination of a San Francisco State University professor, Peter Bohmer.
In a 1991 essay by Ward Churchill, “Death Squads in the United States: Confessions of a Government Terrorist,” former FBI provocateur Louis Tackwood and “other Bureau-sponsored infiltrators of dissident organizations” were said to have asserted “often and categorically, [that] assassination of ‘key activists’ is a standard part of the tactical methodology utilized by America’s political police.”
Churchill believed the Secret Army Organization, “developed under aegis of the FBI in southern California during the early-70s,” was essentially a unit of the nation’s “political police.” The SAO’s “express purpose, among other things, was to liquidate ‘radical leaders,’” Churchill wrote (pg. 96).
As the SAO-FBI scandal unravelled in the early-to-mid 1970s, it came out that there were serious links between the SAO story and both the Watergate scandal and other governmental agencies as well.
The full story is long and complex. It helps to think of this article as combining two separate but related stories. One story involves how the Department of Homeland Security went about suppressing its own publication about the SAO and its FBI ties. The second part of this article is the story of the SAO itself, a story that deserves to be remembered and recalled now as the U.S. government under Donald Trump is greatly expanding its police powers.
As one follows this story, it’s good to keep in mind that as egregious as the Trump administration’s actions have been, this blatantly illegal use of police and military forces to undermine and destroy lawful political conduct is not merely due to the actions of one or another bad leader, but a function of the current system. This is empirically true, whether or not one accepts the Marxist view of the state as armed groups of men and women organized to protect capitalist property and the institutions most invested in the capitalist system. As this article will show, the use of government informers and illegal surveillance reaches across different historical periods, and different political parties.
The Trump administration claims to have discovered a left-wing conspiracy. Centered around the unfounded accusation that antifascist activists (“Antifa”), in league with other Marxists and leftists, have coalesced as an organization aiming to overthrow the U.S. government, on September 22, 2025, Donald Trump issued the executive order, “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization.”
Based on a supposed “pattern of political violence designed to suppress lawful political activity and obstruct the rule of law,” Trump held that “Antifa” (a term for an anti-fascist) constituted “a domestic terrorist organization.” While “Antifa” as an organization doesn’t exist — what is its organizational structure? who is its leader? — Trump nevertheless hyperbolically maintained it was “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”
Trump made it clear he was unleashing his police agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” Antifa, that is, antifascist operations. He wrapped this act of political oppression in the raiments of anti-terrorism, which is an old, if not hoary, government ploy whenever it wants to go after the left. Anyone offering “material support” to an antifascist action was to be subject to possible investigation and prosecution. This may be the most pro-fascist U.S. government proclamation ever issued!
As this article was about to go to press, Reuters reported that the Trump administration has expanded its attack on “Antifa” groups. The U.S. government singled out “four entities in Germany, Italy and Greece as global terrorists, accusing them of being ‘violent Antifa groups’ as President Donald Trump takes aim at left-wing groups.”
Trump followed his “Antifa” executive order with the even more ominous National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) “on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute affiliated with the New York University School of Law, NSPM-7 builds upon “the antifa executive order [“Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization”], which already targets a broad range of political speech….”
The Brennan Center report continued: “NSPM-7 directs federal agencies to prioritize investigations of a swath of identities and ideologies that it depicts as falling under ‘the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’ These include ‘anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.’”
And who decides what are these “traditional American views”? What is “anti-Americanism?” What is “anti-Christianity”? This kind of tendentious language is red meat for police agencies, who must justify their budgets with ever new “dangers.” But the real danger is to both the left and even liberal opposition to Trump’s policies, as the government expands its powerful instruments of surveillance, disruption, and prosecution of political opponents.
START, the FBI and the SAO
This all carries, for someone of my advanced age, a strong whiff of déjà vu. In fact, in the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. government whipped up fear of left-wing “terrorism,” as the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and even the U.S. Army ran surveillance and counterintelligence operations to disrupt and destroy the antiwar, Native American, and civil rights movements.
In June 2024, the CIA’s own in-house organ, Studies in Intelligence, published an essay by CIA Chief Historian David Robarge which described the CIA’s covert domestic surveillance and disruption programs of the 1960s and 1970s (MHCHAOS and HTLINGUAL), while also summarizing parallel programs of government repression originating in the FBI (COINTELPRO), the NSA (Shamrock and Minaret), and the U.S. Army. Roberge’s report may downplay the full impact of the government repression, but I’m linking to it here so that readers who mistrust more leftwing, or even certain mainstream news sources can appreciate this important, if too often ignored, history.
While the machinations of the Nixon Administration will get most of the attention in this article, Roberge’s essay is of value also for the way it puts the accelerated surveillance on the left as something that began before the Nixon Administration.
Roberge wrote:
Seeing the growing intensity of domestic opposition to the war in Vietnam, especially from American youth in urban areas and on college campuses, President Lyndon Johnson became convinced that such dissent was not possible without foreign (and likely Communist) backing. In August 1967, Johnson tasked the CIA, NSA, and FBI with tracking down the links he presumed to exist between the protesters and foreign governments—the Soviet Union and the PRC, but possibly also North Korea, North Vietnam, Algeria, and others—and what the secret funding and other support was being used for. DCI Richard Helms remembers Johnson saying, “Can’t [the CIA] find out what’s going on here? Look at these people in the streets; we can’t imagine that good Americans do things like this.” [page 2, bracketed material in text was in original — “PRC” refers to the People’s Republic of China]
The material that follows below concentrates mostly, though not exclusively, on the actions of the FBI.2 Back in February 2013, I stumbled upon a brief history of one of these Vietnam War-era U.S. government covert domestic operations, namely the FBI’s sponsorship of the Secret Army Organization, which was described, believe it or not, at a Department of Homeland Security’s START webpage. START stands for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses for Terrorism. Today, START is a Department of Homeland Security Emeritus Center of Excellence headquartered at the University of Maryland.
According to the current version of their website, “START is a part of the collection of Centers of Excellence supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and also receives funding and support from a variety of Federal agencies, private foundations, and universities. All of START’s research is conducted using non-classified materials and its findings are those of individual researchers and do not reflect the official position of any START funders.”
From my standpoint, given the funding and the attachment of “Department of Homeland Security” to their name, START is basically an appendage of DHS.
The original webpage about the Secret Army Organization is now scrubbed from START’s website. The link for the page in the previous sentence is from an archive of the START site at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (see illustrative screenshots reproduced below). The START webpage presented a so-called “Terrorist Organization Profile” for the SAO. The DHS/START website indicated that the group, involved in bombings and assassinations, was “possibly funded by the FBI.” That certainly caught my attention!
According to Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, their archive of the webpage begins with a URL capture on October 13, 2010. (Readers not interested in the minutiae of the evolution of START’s webpage on SAO can skip to the next section, “A federally funded antipoverty program for the right wing.”)
The last “capture” of the SAO webpage, which elicited a “Not Found” response, was on December 5, 2022. The START entry on the Secret Army Organization was apparently removed from the START database sometime between December 2013 and August 2019. There were no Wayback Machine archival saves for that URL in the intervening period.
The August 2019 Wayback Machine capture of the original URL brought up the message, “Got an http 301 response at crawl time,” indicating the original webpage had been moved permanently. The page then redirected me to “https://www.start.umd.edu/TOPS”, which page doesn’t exist anymore. (TOPS apparently stands for “Terrorist Organization Profile.”) The Wayback Machine then redirected my request to another START page, a “terrorist” database of “updated, vetted and sourced narratives, and relationship information and social network data on 50 of the most notorious terrorist organizations in the world since 1998.” SAO was not listed among these, but then SAO was out of business by 1973.
A year later, the Wayback Machine archival URL capture for June 30, 2020 of the old START-SAO webpage only indicated “Page Not Found.” A box above this message explained, “The page you requested does not exist.” Evidently, the final purge of the SAO information from START was completed by at least summer 2020.
In February 2013, I published an article on the DHS/START entry on SAO at the old Firedoglake/MyFDL website, which was reposted at The Dissenter, a legacy site of Firedoglake that is also now defunct. The article, “DHS Says FBI ‘Possibly Funded’ Terrorist Group,” only exists in archived format now, and can be accessed here.
Today, a search for the “Secret Army Organization” at the START website yields “no results” (see screenshot reproduced above). Did my 2013 article alert someone at either DHS or FBI (or both) about the politically embarrassing START SAO entry? Did they then move to delete the file and in essence bury that history? I can’t say for sure what motivated the SAO page’s removal, but the timing of the webpage’s purge seems highly suspicious.
“A federally funded antipoverty program for the right wing”
According to START’s original SAO webpage, “The Secret Army Organization (SAO), a right-wing militant group based in San Diego, was active from 1969 to 1972. They targeted individuals and groups who spoke out against the Vietnam War, especially those who organized public demonstrations and distributed anti-war literature.”
The SAO saw itself as a successor to the Minutemen, but less susceptible to government subversion because it was less centralized or reliant on a few select leaders. In a “History of the Secret Army Organization” provided to potential members, and reproduced in declassified FBI files, SAO told prospective members that they should “fully expect that some of us will have to make the ultimate sacrifice before victory is achieved…. There is no place in this organization for bunglers, playboys or lukewarm conservatives” (pg. 169).
Membership dues were $3.00 per month (comparative to about $25.00 a month in current dollars).
The full 2013 START/DHS narrative about the SAO is worth quoting at length. Its terse summary of key events in SAO’s existence elicits more than one shocking revelation. This is what DHS apparently wanted scrubbed:
In 1975, the ACLU submitted a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee alleging that the SAO was directed and funded by the FBI in order to suppress anti-war sentiment and curb criticisms of the Nixon White House. The report also stated that the SAO planned to kidnap and murder protestors of the 1972 Republican National Convention, which was to be held in San Diego before being relocated to Miami Beach. An assassination attempt of Dr. Peter Bohmer, professor at San Diego State University, and Paula Tharp, reporter for the San Diego Street Journal, brought about the arrests of several SAO members who later acknowledge an FBI connection. During the investigation, the gun used in the assassination attempt was found in the home of FBI agent Steven Christiansen, who was subsequently identified as a SAO contact. In 1973, Godfrey, testifying as an FBI informant, claimed he received up to $20,000 in weapons and a $250 per month income from the FBI to recruit new SAO members and provide information to agents. He also testified to the criminal acts of several SAO operatives, including fellow leader Jerry Lynn Davis. Official statements from the FBI claimed no involvement with the SAO, and no agents were prosecuted….
The SAO became inactive after the assassination case drew much public attention to the group’s operations. The testimony of Godfrey against SAO members resulted in prison terms for a significant portion of the San Diego group. Of course, if the SAO was actually FBI-run, the notoriety drawn to the case would have been the impetus to dissolve the group.
Pretty damning! I can see why the U.S. intelligence community would want the public’s memory of these events to be erased. As it is, the existing documentary record backs and expands the DHS/START narrative.
On June 23, 1973, The New York Times published an article by Steven V. Roberts, “F.B.I. Informer Is Linked to Right-wing Violence.” At the time, it seemed as if this was yet another Watergate-related scandal. The article outed FBI informant Howard Barry Godfrey, a former member of the Minutemen, a fascistic paramilitary group. Godfrey subsequently became the head of the San Diego branch of the SAO.
According to the SAO’s “former Southern California coordinator,” Jerry Lynn Davis, and corroborated by “[l]aw enforcement officers and others familiar with the situation,” Godfrey “participated in a shooting, as well as several fire‐bombings and burglaries, while receiving regular payments from the F.B.I. for his services.”
The Times article zeroed in on a “money quote” from former Godfrey associate, Davis.
Given Godfrey’s contributions to the Secret Army Organization in time and money, Davis said, “you might say that the S.A.O. was a federally funded antipoverty program for the right wing.”
As bad as all this sounded, even more astounding was the assertion by two SAO members that they had seen Watergate figure and White House operative Donald Segretti in discussions with SAO leaders, including Godfrey. Segretti had worked for Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), and was convicted of “distributing illegal campaign literature,” for which he ultimately spent four months in prison. The SAO members knew him as “Donald Simms,” a pseudonym very close to one of Segretti’s known assumed names, “Donald Simmons.”
Roberts’ article claimed that Segretti and the SAO had “discussed the idea of abducting radicals who might disrupt the [upcoming 1972 GOP] convention” (bracketed material added for context - JK). At the same time, Roberts maintained that “so far, there has been no firm evidence linking Mr. Segretti to the” SAO.
A few years later, a possible SAO link to the CIA also surfaced when an article in the Ann Arbor Sun reported that Jerry Lynn Davis had “once participated in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion.”
The Sun article also expanded upon the Segretti story. According to the Sun, which was drawing upon an ACLU investigation, the SAO was “an interagency apparatus organized ‘at the direction of Richard M. Nixon.’”
Reportedly the link to Nixon went through White House “plumbers” operative Donald Segretti, whom affidavits claimed had given funds and military hardware to SAO to disrupt the 1972 GOP convention in San Diego. (See also footnote 6 below.) The convention was subsequently moved to Miami Beach. Was the move to Miami because Dick Nixon got wind of rightwing assassination plots against him, as described further on in this article? Was there a “false flag” operation in the works, on that was ultimately called off? Whatever was going on with Segretti, it was the FBI who seems to have been operationally in charge.
From the Sun: “SAO operative Jerry Lynn Davis… revealed that [admitted FBI informant Howard Barry] Godfrey had regularly supplied the SAO with money and weapons on behalf of the FBI” (bracket material added).
But the FBI was not alone in their manipulation and use of the SAO group. “Segretti furnished the SAO with funds and military hardware to be used against leftist demonstrators at the [San Diego GOP] convention,” the Sun reported.
More on the Segretti aspect of the SAO story was reported in a March 18, 1976 article by Milton Viorst in The New York Review of Books. The allegations got wilder and wilder.
Viorst related how former SAO member, Jerry Busch, turned on his previous comrades and revealed to both a local radical newspaper, and also under oath to the San Diego County Superior Court, what he could recall about the SAO’s plans, and the role of FBI informant (or more properly, provocateur) Howard Godfrey.3
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with the two assassination attempts made on Donald Trump in the summer of 2024 will find the next revelation quite interesting.
“The same man [Busch] who reported Godfrey’s meeting with Segretti has stated under oath that he heard Godfrey suggest plans for killing not only left-wing demonstrators at the Republican National Convention but Richard Nixon himself,” Viorst wrote.
An attempted assassination of Nixon would have likely supercharged Nixon’s own apparatus of governmental repression. It’s difficult to know, however, just who was plotting what, or how far the FBI’s tentacles spread (or the CIA’s, for that matter). Was Godfrey strictly stage-managed, or was he oftentimes acting as a free agent, albeit one protected by the FBI? Perhaps the answer is a bit of both, but it’s not out of the question that the entire scheme came from FBI headquarters, or the offices of Nixon’s “plumbers” operation.
On July 5, 1973, Jerry Busch wrote a letter to the editor of the left-wing San Diego paper, The Door. The idea of assassinating President Nixon surfaced here, too. (See pages 24-34 at this National Archives PDF link.)
Busch detailed a number of Godfrey’s wild schemes, some of which were definitely carried out, as for example the June 19, 1963 bombing of the Guild Theater in San Diego, and the attempted assassination of San Diego antiwar activist Dr. Peter Bohmer some six months earlier. It’s obvious that no aircraft with C-4 was ever flown into Air Force One. Nor were “massive doses of LSD, cyanide, or strychnine” ever used to spike punchbowls at “antiwar group meetings,” so far as we know. If anything, this latter scheme sounds more like a CIA MKULTRA plot than anything the FBI was doing.
Ultimately, Godfrey would testify in court against two SAO members, George “Mickey” Hoover, who fired the shot into Peter Bohmer’s house that wounded Paula Tharp — as Godfrey sat next to him in the car! — and William Francis Yakopec, who admitted to bombing the Guild Theater. In the matter of the Tharp shooting, Godfrey took Hoover’s gun and turned it over to FBI Special Agent Steven L. Christiansen, who hid it at his residence for some months, until its existence was revealed when the July arrests of Hoover and Yakopec occurred.
Christiansen, who was Godfrey’s control agent, was ultimately forced to resign from the FBI after this scandal, but he was not prosecuted for hiding evidence in an attempted murder. For his part, Christiansen claimed that his FBI supervisors had approved of his actions.
Viorst’s NYRB article quoted Godfrey’s attorney, who placed the blame for all the violence on the FBI.
Godfrey now insists that he was exploited and then betrayed by the FBI. His lawyer, Richard K. Turner of Sacramento, told me, “The FBI loved what Godfrey was doing. They blessed it and told him it was great. He was taking orders like any FBI agent, like a civil servant. They thought what he was doing was fantastic. Then they dumped him and now they want him to take the rap for them.”
No official action was ever taken against the FBI in the San Diego Minutemen-SAO terror spree. The local San Diego prosecutor, quoted in the Viorst article, said they had a choice to go after the SAO or the FBI. “We didn’t cover up for the FBI,” he told Viorst. “We just took on the problem that was most immediate to us.” But it’s clear the prosecutors saw the difficulties in even attempting to press charges against the FBI or its agents.
On June 27, 1975, The New York Times published an article by Everett R. Holles, “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded ‘Army’ to Terrorize Antiwar Protesters” (alternate link).
According to the Times, the ACLU compiled a 5,000 page report on the SAO, a group of former Minutemen and other right-wingers and violent home-grown fascists, for the benefit of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “alleging the Federal Bureau of Intelligence recruited a band of right-wing terrorists and supplied them with money and weapons to attack young antiwar demonstrators.”4
Operation “Inlet”
The 1975 New York Times article said the FBI denied helping create the SAO, “nor did we have anything to do with the direction of its activities,” an FBI spokesperson said. The Times report continued:
According to the A.C.L.U. report, the Secret Army Organization was setup “on instructions of F.B.I. officials” to serve as agents provocateurs, inciting disorders as a means of exposing “domestic radicals,” particularly campus leaders of the New Left protesting the war in Southeast Asia.
The paramilitary extremist organization, consisting of about a dozen members locally with others scattered throughout southern California, was described by the A.C.L.U. as an outgrowth of an elaborate interagency espionage apparatus organized “at the direction of Richard M. Nixon” early in his Administration to intimidate and silence domestic critics.
The Times reported that the “interagency espionage apparatus” carried the code name “Inlet.” On April 2, 1973, Congressman Les Aspin wrote to President Nixon, referencing a January 21, 1971 memo from the FBI’s Portland, Oregon office to “All Agents.” Congressman Aspin was clearly upset. Aspin described the memo5:
It concerns an FBI operation called “Inlet,” under which agents are ordered to report specified “intelligence data” to the President and Attorney General [John Mitchell]. Among the data specifically requested are, “Items of an unusual twist or concerning prominent personalities which may be of special interest to the President or the Attorney General.” I am sure that you will agree that this is not a proper function for the FBI. Operation Inlet should be halted immediately and there should be a thorough investigation to determine how such a program could ever have been instituted.
On April 3, 1973, Sen. Bob Packwood sent a telex to the White House, the majority of which is reproduced below.
The White House replied that the program was “purely administrative” in nature. Moreover, the Nixon administration explained, “The term ‘Inlet’ stands for Intelligence Letter…. an administrative attempt to improve the procedures for processing such intelligence information, in order that it could be made available to the Attorney General and/ or the President on a more timely basis….” (See pg. 17 of National Archives document collection.)
One thing that belied the Nixon Administration’s claim that Inlet was “purely administrative” was the fact that items with an “unusual twist or concerning prominent personalities” could “be obtained through investigations not wholly related to the security field.”
Below I have reproduced from the National Archives collection linked above the full January 21, 1971 FBI memo on Inlet for reference purposes. It was apparently written by or originated from the office of the Special Agent in Charge at the FBI’s Portland, Oregon, field office. The words are a bit blurry in the original, but most of the memo is readable. Of special interest is item 5, which calls for reports on “‘Inside’ information concerning demonstrations, disorders or other civil disruptions which is of more than local significance.” This was a blatant attempt at surveillance of national and regional segments of the antiwar community, and the left more generally.
The memo described the code-named “Inlet” operation as one that expeditiously supplied a “steady flow of quality intelligence data” on “subversive organizations, new left groups, racial matters, hate groups, and espionage and counterintelligence matters [that] should be reviewed daily.”
The memo’s instructions maintained, “communications concerning subject items should be submitted by the most expeditious means warranted and should be flagged with the code name ‘Inlet.’” The memo said it was “essential that a steady flow of quality intelligence data be received from all Field Offices.”
This stovepiping of raw intelligence reports to Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell cannot have been something these two individuals could really keep up with on a daily basis. Instead, I believe, it was an attempt by the FBI and other intelligence officials to overwhelm the Nixon Administration with “evidence” of out-of-control leftist extremism, in order to produce a sense of emergency and allow for the activation of ever greater police, intelligence, and military interventions.
According to a December 26, 1972 Bureau memo to the FBI’s then-Acting Director, Mark Felt (who was later outed as the Watergate figure “Deep Throat”), the Inlet program began on November 26, 1969. That memo stated that Inlet memos were to be sent to “all field offices to furnish the Bureau high-level intelligence data in the security field which was to be furnished to the President and the Attorney General on a continuing basis….”
As a June 27, 1975 article at The New York Times further explained, “Under ‘Inlet,’ the F.B.I. allegedly made daily intelligence reports involving ‘demonstrators and domestic radicals’ to John N. Mitchell, then the Attorney General, and to Mr. Nixon by way of H. R. Haldeman, the former White House Chief of Staff, and John D. Ehrlichman, the former Chief Adviser on Domestic Affairs in the Nixon White House.”
By late December 1972, however, Inlet was supposedly discontinued. The memo to Mark Felt announced that when it came to the “intelligence letters,” “an evolution in policies and practices has occurred.” Field offices were instructed to continue to gather the types of intelligence that occurred under Inlet, with teletypes now sent from each field office directly to the President and Vice President. I’m not sure how this really changed anything.
The “interagency espionage apparatus” which the ACLU described to the Senate Intelligence Committee involved FBI informants placed in the right-wing “shadowy militia group” known as the Minutemen, and subsequently in its later incarnation, the Secret Army Organization. The Minutemen and SAO’s “stated purpose was to use guerrilla warfare to repel the Communist invasion they always believed was at hand.” A 1965 FBI publication, “Minutemen: Extremist Guerrilla Warfare Group,” described the activities of the Minutemen, including the caching of arms and ammunition. It doesn’t mention that the FBI had high-level informants in the group.
The ACLU revelations about the Secret Army Organization came only two days after the FBI had been forced to acknowledge the existence of their COINTELPRO operation, which at the time was said to consist of harassment of and discrediting operations aimed at left wing groups from May 1968 to April 1971.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO operations were ultimately shown to embrace much more than just leftwing groups, and its time frame went back to the 1950s, and consisted of operations to sabotage and defeat not just the Communist Party and its rival Socialist Workers Party, and their respective youth groups, but civil rights and Native American organizations, as well as non-Marxist “peace” groups.
The story of the SAO is a forgotten piece of contemporary history that is directly relevant to a number of current issues, including the prosecution of the bogus “war on terror,” and the FBI’s role in it; Trump’s executive order targeting anti-fascist groups or others who oppose mainstream “Americanism”; and government surveillance of and attacks upon dissent in this country.
The lack of discussion about the U.S. history of government provocateurs among left groups, like the SAO, also could be considered a prime example of the historical amnesia that plagues our times, an amnesia hastened by disinterest by most of the major media, cheered on by government agencies none too interested in accountability for government overreach or even criminality.
But the lack of discussion or referents related to groups like the SAO is also due to a deliberate attempt by the government to bury historical knowledge of such groups. That’s certainly what seems to have occurred when DHS or START (with or without the input of the FBI) aimed at disappearing the government webpage on the SAO.
A Botched Assassination
The SAO’s use of terror and political repression had real world effects. A newspaper office was attacked. A car was firebombed. A theater, where unfortunately for the FBI two San Diego police officials were present, was bombed. Informants infiltrated leftist groups, while meetings were monitored. Bulletins were published on “how to make booby traps, how to use ammonium nitrate in high explosives,” with techniques derived from “Army technical manuals on ‘Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques.’” Other bulletins identified “local liberals, radicals and antiwar activists, all of whom were lumped together as communists.”
And then, there was the assassination plot, or rather plots, as the SAO bungled one assassination attempt after another in an attempt to kill left-wing professor and antiwar activist Peter Bohmer, who taught at San Diego State University (SDSU).
A 1973 article by Richard Popkin at Ramparts Magazine described the threats and the attack, when an SAO hitman, accompanied by FBI-paid driver, Godfrey, tried to kill an American college professor on January 6, 1972, solely because of his political views and activism.
But first, I should note this was not the first of the assassination plans. An Associated Press article at the time described a different failed plot that had yet another FBI informant, Gilbert Romero, and a San Diego undercover cop kidnapping Peter Bohmer and taking him to Tijuana, setting him up to be killed by Mexican Federal police. The New York Times wrote that the ACLU report mentioned earlier included testimony from a FBI informant, John Raspberry, who said in the winter of 1971-72, the FBI approached him to kill Bohmer. For some reason, that attack never took place.
According to Popkin, Godfrey “was assigned to [FBI] agent Steve Christiansen, to whom he reported verbally every day. Godfrey was to work on the militant right wing, and was paid two hundred fifty dollars per month by the FBI.”
Popkin continued, “Apparently, Godfrey himself was among the more dangerous elements in the SAO, and [FBI] agent Christiansen among the more dangerous eminences grises of the operation.... Godfrey admitted that he had driven the car from which another SAO member, George Hoover, had fired into Bohmer’s house, wounding Paula Tharp. Subsequently, he had taken the weapon to Christiansen, who had hidden it for six months. (This was evidently insufficient grounds for the FBI to take disciplinary action against agent Christiansen. He continued as Godfrey’s contact until the bombing of the Guild Theatre, at which point he was removed by L. Patrick Gray himself...)”
The shots fired into Bohmer’s residence were the culmination of a campaign by SAO targeting the San Diego State professor. According to a brief on COINTELPRO crimes submitted to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights by members of the Congressional Black Congress on September 1, 2001, the harassment of Bohmer went back to early 1971.
In April [1971], tear gas crystals were dumped in a car parked in front of his home. On May 4, a muffled voice warned over the phone “the cross hairs are on you.”
In the summer of 1971, San Diego was chosen as the site for the 1972 Republican convention. Harassment against Bohmer increased, punctuated by assaults targeting the antiwar and Chicano movements.6 Among these acts were destruction of newspaper offices and book stores, firebombing of cars, and the distribution of leaflets giving the address of the collective where anti-war activist Peter Bohmer lived “for any of our readers who may care to look up this Red Scum, and say hello.”
On January 6, 1972 the SAO dramatically upped the ante. Earlier that day SAO cross-hair stickers were plastered on the door of Bohmer’s office; that evening a caller threatened, “This time we left a sticker, next time we may leave a grenade. This is the SAO!”
A few hours later, in a car parked outside Bohmer’s home, SAO soldier George Mitchell Hoover fiddled with a gun. Sitting next to him was Godfrey, the FBI’s informant. Aiming a 9mm Polish Radom pistol, Hoover fired two shots into the house; he would have fired a third but the weapon jammed. The first bullet struck San Diego Street Journal reporter Paula Tharp, shattering her elbow. The second shot narrowly missed Shari Whitehead and lodged in a window frame above her head. Two shell-casings matching the slug removed from Tharp’s arm were retrieved from the street.
The next day Godfrey turned over the gun to his FBI control agent, Steve Christiansen, a devout Mormon and dedicated anti-communist himself. The Special Agent hid the weapon under his couch for more than six months while the San Diego police conducted a half-hearted investigation. Though guilty of covering-up a criminal act, Christiansen insisted that Bureau superiors knew he was hiding the gun and fully approved of his actions to protect “confidential sources.” [PDF, pg. 34]
The START page on SAO commented dryly on the aftermath of the botched assassination: “The SAO became inactive after the assassination case drew much public attention to the group’s operations,” DHS’s Center for Excellence reported. “The testimony of Godfrey against SAO members resulted in prison terms for a significant portion of the San Diego group. Of course, if the SAO was actually FBI-run, the notoriety drawn to the case would have been the impetus to dissolve the group.”
In fact, that’s exactly what happened. By 1974, the group was moribund, and a number of its members were in jail.
Bohmer’s Story
I think it’s appropriate to allow Peter Bohmer to, in a sense, speak for himself. He survived the SAO’s vendetta and assassination attempts. While he lost his job as an assistant professor in economics at San Diego State, the victim of a witch-hunt, he went on to join the faculty at Evergreen State College in Washington. In a 2010 talk, he described the tactics the government used to go after antiwar activists, including the infiltration of radical groups, use of psychological warfare, harassment via the legal system, and state sponsored violence.
A few words about COINTELPRO before I come back to my story. It is short for counterintelligence program. COINTELPRO was/is a program coordinated by the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” individuals and groups.... Although COINTELPRO officially ended in 1971, it has continued although in a somewhat less extreme form without the name up to September 11th 2001. Since then we are going backwards towards more police powers, infiltration and framing of activists....
Although no group I worked in San Diego planned or carried out any violent actions, and many groups were purely educational; 20 people I knew in these groups turned out to be police or FBI agents or informers, many worked for both. They worked hard to cause divisions among individuals and groups. Some but not all were provocateurs.... the FBI visited my employer, SDSU to get me fired, they visited landlords where I lived to get us evicted. They opened my mail, and monitored my checking accounts. We got anonymous phone calls about people being agents who I am sure weren’t....
FBI sponsored groups did firebombings, slashed tires of my cars, continual death threats, put out a wanted poster on me distributed in San Diego in 1971. The Secret Army Organization or (SAO) a group financed from FBI funds and led by an FBI informant, shot into a collective I lived in with the bullet permanently injuring a member of the collective, Paula Tharp in January 1972.
Howard Barry Godfrey, a well-paid FBI informant and head of the Secret Army Organization (SAO) admitted almost a year later in court to driving the car the night of the shooting but claimed another SAO member did the actual shooting. After the shooting into my house, other FBI agents in San Diego covered up the crime and hid the evidence such as the gun used in the shooting. The head of the FBI in LA, working with SD [San Diego] FBI, at this time was Richard W. Held who has been involved in the cases against many activists and political prisoners such as Judi Bari, Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt.
After the shooting, threats and harassment continued. After the Secret Army Organization began threatening liberals as well as radicals and bombed a pornography theater where some police were present, the San Diego police demanded that the FBI reveal their informants in the SAO and the SAO were arrested in the summer of 1972 on numerous charges. Government lawyers hired by the FBI claimed various privileges such as not having to reveal much of the behavior because of security concerns. The full FBI involvement in this attempted murder didn’t come out although one FBI agent was forced to resign. Godfrey, the FBI informant and provocateur in the Secret Army Organization (SAO) didn’t go to prison although two other members of the SAO did.
Today, Peter Bohmer’s Facebook page shows he remains politically active and involved. He identifies himself on FB as “Faculty emeritus in political economy at The Evergreen State College, anti-imperialist and Socialist.”
Epilogue: Mark Felt and the Church Committee
During the period when the SAO functioned, as well as the FBI’s Operation Inlet, Mark Felt was Assistant Director of the FBI. He is most famous for being revealed twenty years ago to have been Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s source on Watergate, “Deep Throat.” But he was also heavily involved in COINTELPRO operations.
According to a 2005 article by Dan Berger at The Nation, Felt was one of only two people who were ultimately convicted for FBI crimes committed under COINTELPRO.
Along with Edward Miller, the FBI’s assistant director of the domestic intelligence division, Felt was convicted in December 1980 for supervising or ordering the warrantless break-ins of “friends and acquaintances” of the Weather Underground in 1972 and 1973. As the Public Research Associates website reports, Felt also admitted approving a “black-bag job” against the Arab Information Center in Dallas in 1972. The prosecutor said Felt was responsible for “violation of the rights of all people of this country, violations that cannot and will not be tolerated as long as we have a Bill of Rights.”
Felt and Miller were both pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in what Berger wrote was Reagan’s “first act in office.” A couple years after that, “a judge ordered [Felt and Miller’s] criminal records swept clean, and just like that the government’s widespread, illegal counterinsurgency efforts disappeared from legal consideration,” Berger added.
Over the years there has been speculation as to why Felt turned Watergate whistleblower. Given the Segretti/CREEP/FBI connection to the SAO and its terror campaign, it seems to me that Felt wanted a central perch for the FBI in the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation, the better to steer reporters away from anything that might compromise the Bureau, or himself. If anything were turned up on the FBI, he could either nudge the reporters away from it, or get the Bureau out in front of any embarrassing revelations, the better to manage any public outcry. It seems difficult to believe that neither Woodward or Bernstein would be ignorant of Felt’s likely motivations.
To this day, the FBI maintains it did exemplary work on its own Watergate investigation. “It was clear from the beginning that this was no ordinary burglary, and the FBI immediately found itself involved in the most politically sensitive investigation in its history,” says a FBI webpage on Watergate. “In the end, despite some issues in its own ranks, the Bureau’s exhaustive efforts were invaluable to unraveling the Watergate saga.”
From everything discussed in this article, the FBI’s statement on Watergate seems more than dubious.
In April 1976, the Church Committee issued its final report on “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.” Citing the example of FBI informant Howard Godfrey, “who actually rose to a position of leadership in the SAO and became an innovator of various harassment actions” (pg. 11), such as firebombings and attempted assassination, among other instances of unsavory FBI informant crimes, the Committee produced its final conclusion and recommendation. Whether it was taken seriously or implemented by the FBI and other intelligence agencies is highly doubtful. The careful reader will see that the Congressional panel’s recommendation was also, as a matter of enforcement, entirely toothless.
The Committee finds that where informants are paid and directed by a government agency, the government has a responsibility to impose clear restrictions on their conduct. Unwritten practice or general provisions aimed at persons other than the informants themselves are not sufficient. In the investigation of violence or illegal activity, it is essential that the government not be implicated in such activity.
[pg. 12]
FBI Memorandum, 5/14/68; From Director FBI to SAC (Special Agent in Charge-Albany, New York), Re: “Counter Intelligence Program: Internal Security: Disruption of the New Left.”
A March 18, 1976 article by Milton Viorst in The New York Review of Books quoted the Hoover memo: “The purpose of this program is to expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize the activities of the various New Left organizations, the leadership and adherents…. In every instance, consideration should be given to disrupting the organized activity of these groups and no opportunity should be missed to capitalize upon organizational and personal conflicts of their leadership.”
Viorst noted that the 1968 memo initiated what “was actually the fifth in a series of COINTELPRO operations directed against groups of domestic dissidents, the four earlier ones being against the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, ‘White Hate Groups,’ and ‘Black Extremists.’ The model for the program, the Justice Department has said, was the campaign against the Communist Party initiated during the McCarthy period…. out of 381 proposals that were submitted, 285 such authorizations were granted for actions against the New Left.”
There are many good books on the FBI and government repression, particularly Cointelpro. Some I have particularly enjoyed and recommend (though this list is not meant to be comprehensive) are The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI Kindle Edition (Vintage Books, 2014) by Betty Medsger; A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974 (Repeater, 2017) by Aaron J Leonard & Conor A. Gallagher; Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2024) by Seth Rosenfeld; and the classic 1990 book by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, republished in 2022 by Black Classic Press.
For readers interested in the other programs of government repression, see:
Spies Among Us, Clay Risen, The American Scholar, December 1, 2008. (On the U.S. Army’s surveillance program)
Church Committee Memorandum, September 9, 1975, “NSA Monitoring”
“Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal”: The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.”, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441, Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr, November 14, 2008
CIA Status Report on MHCHAOS Activities, August 20, 1973, Author’s name redacted
“Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” Seymour Hersh, The New York Times, December 22, 1974
“Sabotaging the Dissident Press: the Untold Story of the Secret Offensive Waged by the U.S. Government Against Antiwar Publications,” Angus Mackenzie, Columbia Journalist Review, March-April 1981
“The U.S. national security state is spying on you through your mail,” Chris Garaffa, Liberation, June 30, 2024
“The Biggest Mail Censorship Program in U.S. History (Which You Never Heard Of),” Jeffrey S. Kaye, Hidden Histories, February 21, 2024
Those wishing to peruse the documentary record on the SAO in greater detail would do well to start with these 172 page and 1264 page declassified FBI file collections, which cover SAO from 1971-1974. The PDF pages are assembled in reverse order, such that the oldest document is at the end of the file. There’s a lot of interesting information in these collections, though much remains redacted. One thing these FBI documents show is how carefully the FBI sought to protect their confidential informants, like Godfrey. This current article cannot be said to adequately portray the entire documentary record available on the SAO. That would certainly take an entire book.
FBI informants’ identities are closely guarded secrets, but sometimes, as the current article shows, they do get identified, and often, as in Godfrey’s case, in court. For a more recent example of this, an August 2024 Wired article on right-wing extremist Joshua Caleb Sutter described how Sutter’s status as an FBI informant was revealed when “testimony from a confidential human source in the 2021 trial of [Atomwaffen Division leader] Kaleb Cole, while redacting Sutter’s name, revealed his relationship with the bureau through details about his 2003 conviction on gun-related charges.” The article demonstrates that the FBI has not changed much since the days of the SAO.
On October 20, 2025, I emailed the ACLU of Southern California, the authoring agency of the report, asking for a copy of the 1975 report, which apparently has never been publicly released. As of the publication date of this article, I have not heard back from them. At this point (three weeks later), I don’t suppose I ever will.
This material, as well a number of other items on Inlet came from an FBI FOIA release to a request on Operation Inlet, submitted by Robert Skvarla, Jr. at the Muckrock web portal on November 23, 2021. Mr. Skvarla was insistent that the FBI fulfill their statutory FOIA obligations on Inlet, and kept pushing the FBI for more releases, when it was evident that the FBI was trying to minimize its original releases. On September 26, 2025, the FBI released some 236 pages of documents on Inlet to Mr. Skvarla. It is clearly evident that the FBI has much more they can release on this matter.
The attempt to tie Bohmer and other antiwar activists to supposed leftwing attempts to violently disrupt the Republican National Convention were corroborated in a large sense by a former longtime police informant, Louis Tackwood.
As reported in the Los Angeles Times (October 17, 1971), Tackwood indicated, “That CCS and the FBI had organized a special squad, ‘Squad 19,’ to provoke violence at the 1972 Republican National Convention in San Diego which could be blamed on leftists. The object: ‘To create a situation which would permit the President to invoke special emergency powers leading to the arrest and detention of political activists throughout the country.’” (Page B-2 of the LA Times; page 26 as numbered by newspapers.com)
The CCS was the “criminal conspiracy section” of the Los Angeles Police Department, also known as the “Red Squad.” Tackwood had also said CCS was full of former FBI agents and that the FBI trained the squad.
This government false flag to disrupt the GOP convention in San Diego deserves its own investigation and a full article to understand what was rumor and what was not. The details about Segretti and CREEP intersect the SAO and FBI elements of this story in ways that are not fully understood, at least by me. That includes allegations that FBI informant-provocateur Godfrey was advocating the assassination of Richard Nixon. That something untoward was going on is clear, but how exactly it went down, and why the decision was made to move the convention to Miami is a mystery. Perhaps the answer is out there and I just haven’t found it yet, as the 1972 GOP convention is a rabbit hole I chose not to go further down as it would have taken me too far away from the subject matter of this article.
In a post at X.com (old Twitter), Alan MacLeod, a Senior Staff writer at Mint Press News, wrote the following, which I find apropos of the topic of my essay on SAO and the US government, as well as what I had to say about Trump's anti-antifa campaign:
"Yesterday, the United Nations voted on a resolution 'Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism & other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia & related intolerance.'
"Virtually the entire West voted against it.
"Western countries feel that the resolution undermines their support for Ukraine, and that the bill is a thinly-veiled Russian attempt to smear their ally.
"The resolution has been voted on every year since 2012, where it overwhelmingly passed 129-3, with only the US🇺🇸, Canada 🇨🇦 and Palau 🇵🇼 voting against it.
"The US remains the only country to vote 'no' to the resolution every time since 2012.
"The West's overwhelming rejection of anti-fascism as an ideology, coupled with the rise in far-right sentiment, hints at a very dark future."
https://x.com/alanrmacleod/status/1989885086926348298?s=46&t=MdAcq3BliR8aw5ul51s6ww
And the West talks of Stalinism, at least there they were not hidden, you could see them coming,
I lived under dictatorships of different colours, but everything was black or white. you were in or
out but it wasn't so psichologicaly sick. or contagious.