The FBI operated the Ghetto Informant Program from 1967 to 1973 after the 1965 Watts uprising and the Newark and Detroit unrest of 1967. The program was ordered in a letter from Attorney General Ramsey Clark to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, directing the development of informants in Black nationalist organizations, SNCC, and other groups. More than 7,000 people were used to gather intelligence in poor Black communities, including barbers and shopkeepers described internally as community “listening posts.”
GIP overlapped with COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE and operated, according to the supplied account, without court or congressional oversight. Informants monitored figures including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Huey Newton; at least 67 were members of the Black Panther Party and were tasked with reporting and, in some cases, spreading disinformation. Operation POCAM used the network against the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, while later directives expanded reporting to bookstores and political literature. An FBI Inspection Division memo dated November 24, 1972, criticized the program’s accumulation of unrelated intelligence. The GIP ended in July 1973, with informants reclassified or dismissed; its legacy influenced later criticism of community-surveillance initiatives such as Operation TIPS.
