It is widely known that during the 1960's and 70's, at the height of the Vietnam War and the the Black LIberation Movement, the FBI and the CIA did massive secret spying, infiltration, sent in provocateurs to disrupt the functioning of left groups and set them up for arrests, even assassinations (of Black leaders such as Fred Hampton.) 

What is not as well known is that the newly active Wmen's Liberation Movement of the 1960's/70's, which was spreading like wildfire around the country, was also infiltrated, spied on and disrupted. Thousands of pages of information that have been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, have revealed that a number of women's liberation/feminist groups and individuals were closely watched by both the FBI and CIA, and that names of women's groups appeared in the files of "Operation Chaos", a CIA project to disrupt left movements.

A statement by Radical Women of the Freedom Socialist Party, reads: "1,377 pages of files released by the FBI in February, 1977 reveal massive spying against the feminist movement since the late 1960’s.

FBI agents infiltrated meetings, disrupted organizations, and methodically amassed information on hundreds of women’s organizations.

One local FBI office complained that its efforts were not paying off, but then-director J. Edgar Hoover insisted on maintaining the harassment. “It is absolutely essential,” he wrote, “that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish the subversive ramifications of the Women’s Liberation Movement.”

What is even less well known is that FBI investigations of women's groups started in the 1920's as the FBI was beginning to form under J. Edgar Hoover's leadership. Newly won women's suffrage was being attacked by the Right of that era and labeled a "socialist plot"--especially when women started organizing to vote in blocs, in a coordinated attempt to push for social change and included anti-militarism in its goals--which triggered the FBI to start keeping files on every women's group from the Women's League for Peace and Freedom to non-political women's clubs and charitable organizations.

In today's show, we'll interview Kathie Sarachild, a pioneer women's liberationist, who was a member of Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement--and still is--the group that created many of the actions, ideas and analyses that got the Women's Liberation Movement onto the map and started the modern feminist movement. She'll talk about what was discovered when Redstockings sent for their files in 1969 and her suspicions--hard to prove--that the radical group was interfered with by the FBI. We'll get into the deeper politics of why the Government considered the Women's Liberation Movement enough of a threat to have put so much energy into spying on it.

We'll also interview Gina Petry, the Seattle organizer for the socialist-feminist group Radical Women--which is associated with the Freedom Socialist Party. She'll talk about how the party was spied on by the FBI and how she and others were recently (2018) approached by the FBI in an obvious fishing expedition around their clinic defense work for abortion rights in 2018.

We'll hear a recorded talk on women's organizing after suffrage during the 1920's and how that led to FBI surveillance back then--by activist-scholar Professor Carol Giardina; a recording of the "Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activity within the U.S." ("The Church Committee"), which specifially lists the its activities spying on the Women's Liberation Movement--and we'll read excerpts from a a pivotal paper by Roberta L. Salper entitled "U.S. Government Surveillance and the Women's Liberation Movement, 1968-1973. A Case Study".

The program will also include a Feminist News segment and topical music.