A Threat of the First Magnitude

Book excerpt: Discover the inner workings of FBI counterintelligence in this untold story of the FBI informants who infiltrated the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and other threats to US security. A Threat of the First Magnitude tells the story of the FBI’s fake Maoist organization and the informants they used to penetrate the highest levels of the Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party, the Revolutionary Union and other groups labelled threats to the internal security of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. As once again the FBI is thrust into the spotlight of US politics, A Threat of a First Magnitude offers a view of the historic inner-workings of the Bureau’s counterintelligence operations—from generating “fake news” and the utilization of “sensitive intelligence methods” to the handling of “reliable sources”—that matches or exceeds the sophistication of any contenders.