First Season of Investigative Podcast ‘Alphabet Boys’ Concludes with Remarkable Impact, Provokes Calls from Lawmakers for FBI Accountability
The 10-episode documentary podcast revealed the FBI’s infiltration of the racial justice movement, triggering national media coverage and calls from elected officials for answers and accountability.
The new investigative podcast “Alphabet Boys” finished its first 10-episode season, revealing in detail how the FBI used a violent felon driving a silver hearse and a pink-haired undercover police officer to infiltrate and undermine the racial justice movement in Colorado during the summer of 2020.
Reported and hosted by investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, “Alphabet Boys” exposed how the FBI used undercover agents to spy on activists and attempted to entrap those activists in violent crimes to undermine the growing Black Lives movement. In Denver, an FBI informant encouraged violence at demonstrations and tried to recruit two activists in a plot to assassinate the state’s attorney general. In Colorado Springs, a detective working with the FBI collected information on activists and attempted to entrap two men in a gun-running conspiracy.
Internal FBI records obtained by Aaronson revealed that all of the activists investigated were targeted based on First Amendment-protected activity. The revelations in “Alphabet Boys” prompted bipartisan calls for answers.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon called the FBI’s behavior “outrageous,” adding: “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”
“This is what the FBI does,” Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina said, describing the FBI’s activity documented in the podcast as “wrong.”
Former Democratic Senator Gary Hart, the last surviving member of the so-called Church Committee that investigated the FBI’s COINTELPRO abuses, said the findings in “Alphabet Boys” might suggest “the FBI is slipping back into the old patterns.”
“Alphabet Boys” also received significant attention in the national news media, with The Guardian, The Daily Beast, and Democracy Now!, among others, praising the reporting in the show.
“‘Alphabet Boys’ is an extremely important show that helps us see how our government continues to actively work against us as we fight for freedom,” Touré wrote in The Grio.
You can listen to all 10 episodes of “Alphabet Boys,” from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts, HERE. Aaronson also summarized key findings in “Alphabet Boys” in The Intercept (“The Snitch in the Silver Hearse” and “The Honey Trap”).
Season two, “Alphabet Boys: Up in Arms,” will be released this summer, telling the strange story of an international arms trafficking investigation that tangles up the CIA, the DEA, and the FBI. At the center of the investigation is an alleged arms dealer who claims to be a CIA asset.