The vital source of this political control is the FBI informer system. "The informer system is subject to the same forms of organization and control as other agencies of the government with which you may be more familiar." Frank Donner told the conference. Donner's thesis--that the extragovernmental informer system is intended as a permanent, organized arm of repression, which has as its aim the management of certain parts of American political life--is supported by the FBI time card displayed by Turner. Each agent, it would seem is assigned a quota of informers to produce, regardless of the magnitude of the "internal danger" to the nation at the time or in his area. In his paper. Turner cities the internal controversy in the FBI over a new type of informer added in the late Sixties: "Racial Informant (Ghetto)." The "Racial Informant" was hired to infiltrate specific black militant organizations. The "Racial Informant--Ghetto" is a resident of a black or brown ghetto who comes into contact with a large number of the residents every day: e.g., a bartender, barber, newsstand owner, etc. This informer is paid to keep an ear open for rumblings of impending riots or demonstrations, without actively attempting to penetrate a group.

When the classification was added, each FBI office was ordered to obtain a number of "Racial Informants--Ghetto." Heads of offices in rural areas immediately protested, pointing out that in their area there were no ghettos. After bureaucratic consultation, the FBI headquarters devised a notation to be written on reports from these bureaus to explain their failure to comply with the order.

"The recruitment of informers is intended as a restraint on free expression, as a curb on movements for change." Donner wrote.

There is abundant evidence to support his charge. Robert Wall, a former Special Agent who had been assigned to political intelligence gathering in Washington. D.C., told the conference of one occasion on which he was ordered to investigate a school run by a black organization. After placing four informers inside the school, he concluded that it was engaged in educational activities and sent a report to his superiors stating that it was a school and recommending that surveillance be stopped.

His superiors shot back a memo accusing him of being "Native," and ordering him to continue the surveillance (Wall later resigned from the FBI because, he said, "the type of crushing of human relationships that resulted from our investigations was more than I could take."). It is obvious that the FBI hierarchy had already evaluated the school before assigning surveillance.

During the Fifties, Donner writes, the Bureau would often order informers who had infiltrated the Communist Party to join other organizations which it wished to investigate. The presence of the informer was then cited in reports as evidence of Communist penetration of the group, and informers were hired to penetrate it.

Informers are seldom used as witnesses in court, both Donner and Turner said, because "surfacing" an informer would mean his agent would then be forced to recruit another informer. Informers themselves, once they have accepted their status, are often reluctant to give it up, because doing so would mean the end of their regular salary payments, which in some cases have been as high as $75 a week.

Veteran leftists assume as a matter of course that their public meetings are penetrated by informers. This assumption is most likely true: the groups which informers have been sent into range from The Klan to the Weathermen to almost every Black student group to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Because the FBI informer is considered a permanent feature of political life by the target groups, organizers have developed some reticence about trusting every new recruit in their ranks. The informer must win their trust: usually he attempts this by adopting a more militant line than the rest of the rank and file. By showing great political zeal and uncompromising devotion to the cause, he hopes to be recognized as one of the initiate and moved into a position of trust.

An informer for the FBI in Seattle who infiltrated the Seattle Eight Defense Committee, told the conference tHat he had formed a plan with a group of Seattle radicals to blow up a bridge--but that he had, with the approval of the Bureau, prepared a booby-trapped bomb which would blow up the person who set it. The plan was never carried out, and the FBI denies that it knew or approved of the plan. Given the unstable nature of informers, the denial is very probably true--but it was the Bureau, after all, which injected him into the political life of Seattle, whether or not they approved his most blatant outrages.

Beyond corrupting the political conduct of the American left--and, to a much smaller extent, the American right--the FBI maintains a network of controls over the conduct of the American legal and economic system. FBI penetration of the law-enforcement community in the United States has grown to such an extent that some policemen themselves have become alarmed that it may be turning into a super-police agency.

The Bureau has for years published an FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, directed at local police officials and rural sheriffs (the Bulletin is not to be shown to laymen, and carries a warning to that effect in each issue; it is intended for policemen alone). The Bulletin includes articles by Hoover and his associates along with tips on scientific crime detection, political analyses with a law-and-order theme (one recent issue carried an article by Supreme Court nominee Lewis F. Powell), and plugs for the FBI's police aid and training programs such as the FBI National Crime Information Center and National Law Enforcement Academy.

The National Academy conducts 12-week training programs for local policemen: the Bureau modestly named it the "West Point of Law Enforcement." Many local police officials have said that this training increases the professionalism of local police forces--particularly those too small to have rigorous training programs. The two police chiefs at the Princeton conference--Vincent Broderick, former police commissioner of New York City, and Jerry Ahearn, police commissioner of New Haven. Conn.--agreed, however, that the training was worse than useless for a modern, urban police force.

But whatever the objective effect of the FBI's training programs on police performance, there is one other effect: it staffs police forces across the country with officers who are in close sympathy with the FBI and who are willing to work with it. In addition, small police forces and sheriff's offices across the country are staffed with former agents who can be counted on to share information and cooperate in Bureau investigations.

The close cooperation with local police forces has become a subject of controversy throughout the Deep South. Terrill Glenn, a former U.S. attorney in South Carolina, told the conference that the FBI had not conducted any meaningful investigation of the shootings of four black students at Orangeburg, S.C. because the agents were close friends with the Highway Patrolmen who had done the shooting. Andrew Young, a veteran SCLC organizer, told the conference that civil rights groups had met with an outstanding lack of success in seeking FBI investigation of harassment beatings and shootings of civil rights workers in the deep South because the Bureau was unwilling to invade the domain of local sheriffs. Vern Countryman, professor of Law, said, "When it comes to Civil Rights, the FBI's position is that while it can shoot airline hijackers and John Dillinger, it has no law enforcement powers. So FBI agents stand by taking notes while a lawyer for the Justice Department's Civil Rights division is pummelled on the street."