The FBI surveilled the Nation from the 1940s and made it a formal COINTELPRO target from the program's first Black-nationalist directives — Elijah Muhammad's phones tapped, informers seeded through the temples, and anonymous-letter operations working to inflame the Malcolm X split and the succession. Local police added raw violence: Los Angeles officers shot seven unarmed Muslims at Mosque No. 27 in 1962, killing Ronald Stokes — the atrocity that nearly sent Malcolm X to war — and juries then convicted Muslims, not police, for the melee.
In January 1972, a false report drew armed police into Harlem's Mosque No. 7; in the chaos an officer was killed, and the case was pursued against Nation members for years. The pattern — surveillance, provocation, raid, prosecution — bracketed the Nation's whole classical era.