William C. Sullivan

William Cornelius Sullivan (May 12, 1912 – November 9, 1977) was an assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was in charge of the agency's domestic intelligence operations from 1961 to 1971. Sullivan was forced out of the FBI at the end of September 1971 due to disagreements with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The following year, Sullivan was appointed as the head of the Justice Department's new Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, which he led from June 1972 to July 1973. Sullivan died in a hunting accident in 1977. His memoir of his thirty-year career in the FBI, written with journalist Bill Brown, was published posthumously by commercial publisher W. W. Norton & Company in 1979.

Sullivan led the highly controversial COINTELPRO aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations, political opposition and civil rights movements, which were, among other things, assassinated, imprisoned, publicly humiliated or falsely charged with crimes. Provided by Wikipedia