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When Jean Seberg was viciously targeted by the FBI
Over the years, the American government has conducted a lot of extremely objectionable operations through the FBI and the CIA. Ranging from the manipulation of political interests to severely distressing projects such as MKUltra, government institutions in the US have routinely proven that they are above the laws they are supposed to protect.
One of the most prominent illegal operations by the FBI was COINTELPRO, a series of shady activities which was aimed at destabilising domestic political groups in the US through infiltration, surveillance and other methods. From feminist groups to communist organisations and anti-Vietnam activists, the FBI spared no one.
Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and other vocal groups of resistance like the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam were primary targets of the COINTELPRO project. When the reports about their activities surfaced, it became clear that the US government was extremely paranoid about the existence of any kind of radicalism that threatened to upset the status quo.
In an interview, Noam Chomsky said: “COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations… by the time it got through, I won’t run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entire new left, at the women’s movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination.”
The FBI destroyed the lives of many public figures through COINTELPRO, using tactics such as harassment and providing false information to the media in order to sway public perception. One such person whose life was completely destroyed by this unimaginable violation was Jean Seberg – the French New Wave icon who starred in films like the unforgettable Jean-Luc Godard debut Breathless.
Seberg’s political inclinations were transparent since she regularly donated to the NAACP, the Black Panther Party and other institutions such as Native American schools. The FBI received information about Seberg’s donations and launched a massive campaign against her which was directly supervised by none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself.
According to the documents that were later declassified, the FBI admitted that they had targeted Seberg in order to “cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the public” while also claiming that their primary target was her “neutralisation”. They even planted a false story with The Los Angeles Times which made it seem as if Seberg was carrying Black Panther activist Raymond Hewitt’s baby instead of her husband’s.
FBI’s harassment of Seberg wasn’t just limited to gossip column splashes; they subjected her to aggressive surveillance by following her to other countries as well and even tried to intimidate her by breaking into her house on multiple occasions. Due to COINTELPRO’s activities, Seberg was blacklisted by Hollywood agents.
This intense abuse ultimately resulted in her death in 1979 when the actress disappeared for nine days before her body was found in a blanket alongside a bottle of barbiturates and a note which read: “Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.” It was well-known that she had been suicidal for a while and her ex-husband Romain Gary claimed that it was the FBI who had driven her to that point.
Jean Seberg’s abuse by the FBI and the subsequent “neutralisation” is just another chapter in its long history of engaging in covert operations which target ideologies that deviate from the normative structures in America. It is symptomatic of a malignant disease within the sociopolitical frameworks of the country which refuses to let go of the collective psyche.
