NSA spied on King, Ali, and other war critics

The National Security Agency eavesdropped on civil rights icon Martin Luther King, heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali and other leading critics of the Vietnam War in a secret programme later deemed “disreputable”, declassified documents revealed.

The six-year spying programme, “Minaret”, had been exposed in the 1970s but the targets of the surveillance had been kept secret until now.

The documents released this week showed the NSA tracked King and his colleague Whitney Young, boxing star Ali, journalists from The New York Times and The Washington Post, and two members of Congress, Senator Frank Church of Idaho and Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee.

The declassified NSA historical account of the episode called the spying “disreputable if not outright illegal”.

The documents were published after the government panel overseeing classification ruled in favour of researchers at George Washington University who had long sought the release of the secret papers.

The intensity of anti-war dissent at home led President Lyndon Johnson to ask US intelligence agencies in 1967 to find out if some protests were fuelled by foreign powers. The NSA worked with other spy agencies to draw up “watch lists” of anti-war critics to tap their overseas phone calls.

The programme continued after Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969, and historians say it reflected a climate of paranoia pervading his presidency.

US attorney general Elliot Richardson shut down the NSA programme in 1973, just as the Nixon administration was engulfed in scandal.

The 1975 disclosure of the NSA programme, along with other domestic spying on Americans, caused public outrage and one of the senators who had been tapped, Church, led reforms that created stricter limits on surveillance and spy agencies.

But the NSA has been accused of overstepping its authority and flouting civil rights protections since the attacks of Sept 11, 2001.