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| 2026-05-15 | 2026-10-09 | William Sullivan |
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Law Enforcement & Legal | FBI domestic intelligence chief who ran COINTELPRO, was named in FBI records as preparing the 1964 anonymous letter to Martin Luther King Jr., was fired in 1971, and died in a 1977 hunting accident. | 1912-05-12 | 1977-11-09 | Sugar Hill, New Hampshire |
William Cornelius Sullivan (May 12, 1912 - November 9, 1977) was the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Assistant Director for Domestic Intelligence (Division 5) from 1961 to 1971, serving under Director J. Edgar Hoover as the primary operational architect of COINTELPRO and the FBI's surveillance programs targeting civil rights organizations and political dissidents. Sullivan drafted or oversaw the drafting of the anonymous letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1964 suggesting he commit suicide before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He was fired by Hoover in 1971 after a falling-out over White House relations, subsequently cooperated with congressional investigators examining FBI abuses, and was shot in what was ruled a hunting accident near Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on November 9, 1977 - one day before he was scheduled to testify to congressional investigators.1
Early Career and Rise
Sullivan joined the FBI in 1941 and rose through the ranks under Hoover's patronage. He developed expertise in domestic intelligence matters, particularly the monitoring of left-wing and civil rights organizations for alleged communist influence. By the late 1950s he headed the Domestic Intelligence Division, which made him responsible for COINTELPRO operations after the program was formalized in 1956.
Sullivan was known within the FBI as intellectually aggressive and willing to push the boundaries of domestic surveillance authorities. He developed a close working relationship with Hoover while also building relationships with Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence figures, including through his collaboration with the CIA's domestic surveillance programs targeting civil rights organizations under Project MERRIMAC and Operation CHAOS.1
COINTELPRO and King
As head of Domestic Intelligence, Sullivan was the senior FBI official responsible for COINTELPRO operations targeting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and King personally. Following the announcement that King would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1964, Sullivan supervised the preparation of an anonymous package containing a tape recording from a King hotel room accompanied by a letter characterizing King as a fraud and implicitly encouraging him to commit suicide before the Nobel ceremony. The package was addressed to King and mailed from a post office near the Miami airport on or about November 21, 1964, and was received at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office in Atlanta, Georgia, which stored it and later sent it to King's home with other tapes.2
The Church Committee recorded that Sullivan testified on November 1, 1975 that Alan Belmont told him Hoover wanted a King tape mailed to Coretta Scott King, that he sent an agent to Tampa to mail a package, and that he did not recall ever having seen the letter given to the committee by the FBI, which he said it was "possible" he had something to do with and which he suggested might have been "planted" in his files.2 In his 1979 memoir Sullivan wrote that his division prepared the letter.3 The letter was the most extreme documented example of the FBI's COINTELPRO effort to neutralize King as a civil rights leader, and it appeared in the Church Committee's final report as evidence of one of the most egregious abuses of the program.
Sullivan also supervised the wiretapping of King's phones and hotel rooms, the infiltration of SCLC chapters with informants, and the dissemination of derogatory information about King to news organizations and government officials including the White House and Department of Justice.4
Break with Hoover
Sullivan's relationship with Hoover deteriorated significantly in 1970-1971. Sullivan had become associated with Richard Nixon administration desires to use the FBI for White House political intelligence - an orientation that conflicted with Hoover's insistence on personal control of the bureau and its relationships with the administration.
In August 1971, Sullivan wrote Hoover a letter criticizing his leadership. Hoover responded by having the locks on Sullivan's office changed while he was away, preventing his return. Sullivan was effectively fired and formally left the FBI in October 1971.
After leaving the FBI, Sullivan began cooperating with congressional and journalistic investigations into FBI abuses. He wrote a memoir, published posthumously as The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI (Norton, 1979) - one of the first insider accounts to document Hoover's abuses and COINTELPRO from a senior participant's perspective.1
Death
On November 9, 1977, Sullivan was shot near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. The shooting was ruled a hunting accident: a companion identified Sullivan as a deer in low light and fired, killing him. Sullivan was 65 years old.
Sullivan's death occurred during a period of active congressional investigation of intelligence abuses. He had been cooperating with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was then investigating the Kennedy assassination and the question of whether the FBI had withheld relevant information from the Warren Commission. He was scheduled to provide additional testimony to investigators in the period immediately following his death.
The timing of Sullivan's death - the day before planned congressional testimony, during the most active phase of congressional intelligence investigations - has been noted by researchers as part of a broader pattern. The HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey noted Sullivan as one of several witnesses whose deaths reduced the committee's access to relevant FBI institutional knowledge. The hunting accident ruling was not challenged through any formal legal proceeding.1
Footnotes
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Sullivan, William C. The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI. Norton, 1979. Church Committee (U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities). Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. Book II, Senate Report No. 94-755, 1976. ↩︎
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Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book III, S. Rept. 94-755, April 26, 1976, King case study, pp. 158 to 161 (Sullivan, November 1, 1975, pp. 104 to 106 and 112; Young, February 19, 1976). ↩︎
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William C. Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI (Norton, 1979). ↩︎
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Garrow, David. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. Norton, 1981. O'Reilly, Kenneth. "Racial Matters": The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972. Free Press, 1989. ↩︎