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.

[1] Sullivan later recounted that growing up in Bolton was a life without modern conveniences, including public transportation, school buses, telephone, mail service, or even electricity.

[1] "The pressure on a trainee to conform was unremitting," Sullivan remembered, with those questioning FBI policies or violating agency rules quickly funneled out of the system.

[1] In addition, ideological homogeneity was reinforced by the universal recruitment of Anglo-Saxon candidates, with African-Americans, Jews, and Hispanics excluded from the training program as a matter of official policy.

Hoover's concerns about the American Communist Party were overemphasized when compared to violations of federal civil rights laws in the segregated South.

Sullivan then became even more vocal about Hoover's controversial domestic counterintelligence programs, collectively labeled COINTELPRO, including operations that he himself had conceived and administered.

Sullivan described the frameup of party leader William Albertson in a June 30, 1964, internal document filed by him and fellow FBI agent Fred J. Baumgardner: My memorandum dated 6/12/64 was approved, authorizing a unique counterintelligence operation calculated to cast suspicion on Communist Party (CP) National Committee member and Executive Secretary of the New York District Organization, William Albertson.

[7] In 1975, Sullivan testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, "Never once did I hear anybody, including myself raise the question, is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?"

Because such contacts suggested the civil rights movement was being co-opted by the CPUSA under the guidance of the KGB's Soviet Active Measures program, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the tapping of King's telephone.

[citation needed] After Hoover's death in May 1972, U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst appointed Sullivan director of the newly created Office of National Narcotics Intelligence under the Department of Justice in June 1972.

On November 9, 1977, days before he was to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, twenty minutes before sunrise, sixty-five-year-old Sullivan was walking through the woods near his retirement home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on the way to meet hunting companions.

Another hunter, Robert Daniels, Jr., a twenty-two-year-old son of a state policeman, using a telescopic sight on a .30 caliber rifle, said he mistook Sullivan for a deer, shot him in the neck, and killed him instantly.