COINTELPRO
A History to Learn From
Predictably, the most serious of
the FBI's disruption programs [between 1956 and 1971]
were those directed at "Black Nationalists."
These programs ... initiated under liberal Democratic
administrations, had as their purpose "to expose,
disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize
the activities of black nationalist, hate-type
organizations and groupings, their leadership,
spokesmen, membership, and supporters"...Agents
were instructed to "inspire action in instances
where circumstances warrant."
Specifically, they were to
undertake actions to discredit these groups both within
the "responsible Negro community" and to
"Negro radicals," and also "to the white
community, both the responsible community and liberals'
who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black
nationalists..."
- Noam Chomsky
COINTELPRO:
Lessons for Muslims in America
by Jamaaluddin al-Haidar, al-Bayan
[to be uploaded by 7/1/99] ,Inshaallah
COINTELPRO
Defined
WHAT WAS COINTELPRO?
"COINTELPRO" was the FBI's secret program
to undermine the popular upsurge which swept the country
during the 1960s. Though the name stands for
"Counterintelligence Program," the targets
were not enemy spies. The FBI set out to eliminate
"radical" political opposition inside the US.
When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant
harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed
to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to
fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and
secretly used fraud and force to sabotage
constitutionally- protected political activity. Its
methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to
a domestic version of the covert action for which the
CIA has become infamous throughout the world.
HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT IT?
COINTELPRO was discovered in March, 1971, when
secret files were removed from an FBI office and
released to news media. Freedom of Information requests,
lawsuits, and former agents' public confessions deepened
the exposure until a major scandal loomed. To control
the damage and re-establish government legitimacy in the
wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress and the courts
compelled the FBI to reveal part of what it had done and
to promise it would not do it again.
HOW DID IT WORK?
The FBI secretly instructed its field offices to
propose schemes to "misdirect, discredit, disrupt
and otherwise neutralize "specific individuals and
groups. Close coordination with local police and
prosecutors was encouraged. Final authority rested with
top FBI officials in Washington, who demanded assurance
that "there is no possibility of embarrassment to
the Bureau." More than 2000 individual actions were
officially approved. The documents reveal three types of
methods:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers
did not merely spy on political activists. Their main
function was to discredit and disrupt. Various means to
this end are analyzed below.
2. Other forms of deception: The FBI
and police also waged psychological warfare from the
outside--through bogus publications, forged
correspondence, anonymous letters and telephone calls,
and similar forms of deceit.
3. Harassment, intimidation and
violence: Eviction, job loss, break-ins, vandalism,
grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame- ups, and
physical violence were threatened, instigated or
directly employed, in an effort to frighten activists
and disrupt their movements. Government agents either concealed
their involvement or fabricated a legal pretext. In the
case of the Black and Native American movements, these
assaults--including outright political
assassinations--were so extensive and vicious that they
amounted to terrorism on the part of the government.
WHO WERE THE MAIN TARGETS?
The most intense operations were directed against
the Black movement, particularly the Black Panther
Party. This resulted from FBI and police racism, the
Black community's lack of material resources for
fighting back, and the tendency of the media--and whites
in general--to ignore or tolerate attacks on Black
groups. It also reflected government and corporate fear
of the Black movement because of its militance, its
broad domestic base and international support, and its
historic role in galvanizing the entire Sixties'
upsurge. Many other activists who organized against US
intervention abroad or for racial, gender or class
justice at home also came under covert attack. The
targets were in no way limited to those who used
physical force or took up arms. Martin Luther King,
David Dellinger, Phillip Berrigan and other leading
pacifists were high on the list, as were projects
directly protected by the Bill of Rights, such as
alternative newspapers.
The Black Panthers came under attack
at a time when their work featured free food and health
care and community control of schools and police, and
when they carried guns only for deterrent and symbolic
purposes. It was the terrorism of the FBI and police
that eventually provoked the Panthers to retaliate with
the armed actions that later were cited to justify their
repression.
Ultimately the FBI disclosed six
official counterintelligence programs: Communist
Party-USA (1956-71); "Groups Seeking Independence
for Puerto Rico" (1960-71); Socialist Workers Party
(1961-71); "White Hate Groups" (1964-71);
"Black Nationalist Hate Groups" (1967-71); and
"New Left" (1968- 71).The latter operations
hit anti-war, student, and feminist groups. The
"Black Nationalist" caption actually
encompassed Martin Luther King and most of the civil
rights and Black Power movements. The "white
hate" program functioned mainly as a cover for
covert aid to the KKK and similar right-wing vigilantes,
who were given funds and information, so long as they
confined their attacks to COINTELPRO targets. FBI
documents also reveal covert action against Native
American, Chicano, Phillipine, Arab- American, and other
activists, apparently without formal Counterintelligence
programs.
WHAT EFFECT DID IT HAVE?
COINTELPRO's impact is difficult to fully assess
since we do not know the entire scope of what was done
(especially against such pivotal targets as Malcolm X,
Martin Luther King, SNCC and SDS),and we have no
generally accepted analysis of the Sixties. It is
clear,however, that:
-COINTELPRO distorted the public's
view of radical groups in a way that helped to isolate
them and to legitimize open political repression.
-It reinforced and exacerbated the
weaknesses of these groups, making it very difficult for
the inexperienced activists of the Sixties to learn from
their mistakes and build solid, durable organizations.
-Its violent assaults and covert
manipulation eventually helped to push some of the most
committed and experienced groups to withdraw from
grass-roots organizing and to substitute armed actions
which isolated them and deprived the movement of much of
its leadership.
-COINTELPRO often convinced its
victims to blame themselves and each other for the
problems it created, leaving a legacy of cynicism and
despair that persists today.
-By operating covertly, the FBI and
police were able to severely weaken domestic political
opposition without shaking the conviction of most US
people that they live in a democracy, with free speech
and the rule of law.
[Source: Brian Glick-author of War at
Home, South End Press]
THE DANGER WE FACE IS ....
DID COINTELPRO EVER REALLY END?
Excerpts
from Chapters 5-6 of
"The COINTELPRO Papers" by Ward Churchill,
South End Press
The COINTELPRO against Garvey and
the UNIA
Although the FBI's COINTELPRO against
the black liberation movement was not formally initiated
until issuance of J. Edgar Hoover's August 25, 1967 memo
quoted above by Noam Chomsky (see accompanying
document), the roots of the Bureau's anti-black
counterintelligence operations extend much deeper into
U.S. history. As was documented in the introduction to
this volume, Hoover was engaged at least as early as
1918 in plans to destroy black nationalist leader Marcus
Garvey under the guise of "criminal
proceedings." This occurred in the context of
"the infamous race riot that first engulfed East
St. Louis in July 1917, taking the lives of thirty-nine
blacks and nine whites and the explosion that occurred
less than two months later in Houston, Texas, in which
two black soldiers and seventeen white men lost their
lives." Such violence was part of the process by
which the U.S. national order, in which blacks as an
overall population lived under near-total political
disenfranchisement, economic prostration, and super
exploitation of their labor by the Euroamerican status
quo, was intended to be preserved. In the aftermath of
World War 1, blacks had begun to mount the first serious
challenge to such circumstances since the Reconstruction
period immediately following the Civil War; Hoover and
his proto-FBI organization, in kind with white vigilante
formations seem to have seen one of their primary
missions as keeping blacks "in their place" by
what ever repressive means were available.
Memo
initiating COINTELPRO - Black Liberation Movement Page
two of same memo
It was into this disturbed atmosphere,
further disturbed by the painful experiences of black
soldiers during the [World War 1] mobilization, that a
new generation of radical black spokesmen, calling
themselves "the New Negro" stepped ... Buoyed
by a wide array of spirited newspapers and militant
journals that helped shape the black community's
political consciousness, the New Negro radicals
represented a new and startling breed ... [offering]
radical, some might even say revolutionary,
prescriptions for overturning the status quo of white
supremacy.
Development of this "new racial
awareness on the part of blacks led to a sharp increase
in the number of lynchings after 1917 - seventy-six
blacks were lynched in 1919 alone - and the simultaneous
unprecedented wave of violent racial clashes,
culminating in the summer of 1919 (known as 'Red
Summer'), that must be seen largely as the attempt by
whites to restore the racial status quo ante ... In
trying to contain the movement, the U.S. government
chose to respond by launching a massive surveillance
campaign to counter the influence of black leaders.
Spearheaded by the Justice Department's Bureau of
Investigation, forerunner of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, the intelligence services tended to view
the newly awakened black militancy through the tinted
prism of the Red Scare (i.e., as an offshoot of
communist agitation), leading them to adopt against
blacks many of the same repressive measures employed
against so-called subversives ... What the official
evidence now discloses is the apprehension by
authorities of a parallel 'Black Scare .'"
In this regard, Marcus Garvey and his
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) were a
primary target. When the FBI was able, after five solid
years of intensive effort, to arrange for Garvey's
indictment and subsequent conviction on extremely
dubious "fraud" charges, "he was jailed
without even one day to arrange for UNIA's future."
Instead, he was surrounded by "heavily armed
federal agents who conducted him to the Tombs prison [in
New York City], from which he was taken [straight] to
the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in February 1925,"
as if he were a public menace rather than - at worst -
the perpetrator of an offense devoid of physical
violence. As a result:
By the summer of 1926 [UNIA] was no
longer a coordinated unit, even though it still had
hundreds of thousands of members, perhaps a million. The
official Universal Negro Improvement Association was
still there, and there was one last gigantic
international convention in 1929, but the organization
was no longer what it had been before Garvey entered
prison.
Nor was Garvey alone in being accorded
"special attention" by the Bureau. For
instance, during the massive railroad strikes in the
1920s, the FBI - as part of its much broader anti-labor
and anti-black endeavors - went out of its way to topple
A. Philip Randolph, black head of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters Union. At about the same time,
Hoover's agents initiated a "close
surveillance" (a term usually associated with
infiltration) of W.E.B. DuBois' National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the name of
knowing "what every radical organization in the
country was doing." The monitoring continued
throughout the 1920s and '30s although it was not until
1940 that Hoover offered a definition of what the FBI
meant by the term "subversive activities" with
which he "justified" such activities. It
included:
"[T]he holding of office in ...
Communist groups; the distribution of literature and
propaganda favorable to a foreign power and opposed to
the American way of life; agitators who are adherents of
foreign ideologies who have for their purpose the
stirring of internal strike [sic], class hatreds and the
development of activities which in time of war would be
a serious handicap in a program of internal security and
national defense.
This bald assertion of the political
interests of the status quo was utilized as the
rationale by which to step up investigation of possible
CP "contamination and manipulation of the
NAACP," a process which was "continued for
twenty-five years despite FBI's failing to uncover any
evidence of subversive domination of the [black
organization]."
The [escalated] FBI investigation of
the NAACP, begun in 1941, continued until 1966. Although
the FBI prepared massive reports on the NAACP, including
information on the group's political and legislative
plans, the Bureau never uncovered any evidence of
subversive domination or sympathies. In 1957, the New
York field office of the FBI prepared a 137-page report
on NAACP activities during the previous year, based on
information supplied by 151 informers or confidential
sources. From 1946 to 1960, the FBI used about three
thousand wiretaps and over eight hundred
"bugs," and obtained membership and financial
records of [such] dissident groups.
Notwithstanding its tangible lack of
success in linking the NAACP to the CP or any other
"foreign dominated" organization, the FBI
lobbied to have it included among the groups covered by
the Communist Control Act of 1954, and a cluster of
corresponding state laws. Only a series of Supreme Court
decisions prevented the entire NAACP membership from
being forced to register as "subversives," or
going to prison for refusing to do so. Meanwhile, the
Bureau also began to focus its attention upon the
recently- formed Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), an entirely reformist and
philosophically nonviolent black civil rights advocacy
organization established in 1957 by the Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and "several dozen other
southern black ministers."
The FBI
and Martin Luther King
The stated objective of the SCLC, and
the nature of its practical activities, was to organize
for the securing of black voting rights across the rural
South, with an eye toward the ultimate dismantlement of
at least the most blatant aspects of the southern U.S.
system of "segregation" (apartheid). Even this
seemingly innocuous agenda was, however, seen as a
threat by the FBI. In mid-September of 1957, FBI
supervisor J.G. Kelly forwarded a newspaper clipping
describing the formation of the SCLC to the Bureau's
Atlanta field office - that city being the location of
SCLC headquarters - informing local agents, for reasons
which were never specified, the civil rights group was
"a likely target for communist infiltration,"
and that "in view of the stated purpose of the
organization you should remain alert for public source
information concerning it in connection with the racial
situation."
The Atlanta field office "looked
into" the matter and ultimately opened a COMINFIL
investigation of the SCLC, apparently based on the fact
that a single SWP member, Lonnie Cross, had offered his
services as a clerk in the organization's main office.
By the end of the first year of FBI scrutiny, in
September of 1958, a personal file had been opened on
King himself, ostensibly because he had been approached
on the steps of a Harlem church in which he'd delivered
a guest sermon by black CP member Benjamin J. Davis. By
October 1960, as the SCLC call for desegregation and
black voting rights in the south gained increasing
attention and support across the nation, the Bureau
began actively infiltrating organizational meetings and
conferences.
In less than a year, by July of 1961
FBI intelligence on the group was detailed enough to
recount that King had been affiliated with the
Progressive Party in 1948 (while an undergraduate at
Atlanta's Morehouse College), and that executive
director Wyatt Tee Walker had once subscribed to a CP
newspaper, The Worker. Actual counterintelligence
operations against King and the SCLC more generally seem
to have begun with a January 8, 1962 letter from Hoover
to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, contending that
the civil rights leader enjoyed a "close
relationship" with Stanley D. Levison, "a
member of the Communist Party, USA," and that
Isadore Wofsy, "a high ranking communist
leader," had written a speech for King.
On the night of March 15-16,1962, FBI
agents secretly broke into Levison's New York office and
planted a bug; a wiretap of his office phone followed on
March 20. Among the other things picked up by this
ELSURS surveillance was information that Jack ODell, who
also had an alleged "record of ties to the
Communist party," had been recommended by both King
and Levison to serve as an assistant to Wyatt Tee
Walker. Although none of these supposed communist
affiliations were ever substantiated, it was on this
basis that SCLC was targeted within the Bureau's ongoing
COINTELPRO-CP,USA, beginning with the planting of five
disinformational "news stories" concerning the
organization's "communist connections" on
October 24, 1962. By this point, Martin Luther King's
name had been placed in Section A of the FBI Reserve
Index, one step below those individuals registered in
the Security Index and scheduled to be rounded up and
"preventively detained" in concentration camps
in the event of a declared national emergency; Attorney
General Kennedy had also authorized round-the-clock
ELSURS surveillance of all SCLC offices, as well as
King's home. Hence, by November 8,1963, comprehensive
telephone taps had been installed at all organizational
offices, and King's residence.
The reasons for this covert but
steadily mounting attention to the Reverend Dr. King
were posited in an internal monograph on the subject
prepared by FBI counterintelligence specialist Charles
D. Brennan at the behest of COINTELPRO head William C.
Sullivan in September 1963. In this 11-page document,
Brennan found that, given the scope of support it had
attracted over the preceding five years, civil rights
agitation represented a clear threat to "the
established order" of the U.S., and that "King
is growing in stature daily as the leader among leaders
of the Negro movement ... so goes Martin Luther King,
and also so goes the Negro movement in the United
States." This accorded well with Sullivan's own
view, committed to writing shortly after King's landmark
"I Have a Dream" speech during the massive
civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., on
August 28 of the same year:
We must mark [King] now, if we have
not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of
this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro,
and national security ... it may be unrealistic to limit
[our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that
would stand up in court or before Congressional
Committees.
By 1964, King was not only firmly
established as a preeminent civil rights leader, but was
beginning to show signs of pursuing a more fundamental
structural agenda of social change. Correspondingly, as
the text of the accompanying memo from Sullivan to
Joseph A. Sizoo makes plain, the Bureau's intent had
crystallized into an unvarnished intervention into the
domestic political process, with the goal of bringing
about King's replacement with someone
"acceptable" to the FBI. The means employed in
the attempt to accomplish this centered in continued
efforts to discredit King, maintaining a drumbeat of
mass media-distributed propaganda concerning his
supposed "communist influences" and sexual
proclivities, as well as the triggering of a spate of
harassment by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). When
this strategy failed to the extent that it was announced
on October 14 of that year that King would receive a
Nobel Peace Prize as a reward for his work in behalf of
the rights of American blacks, the Bureau - exhibiting a
certain sense of desperation by this juncture -
dramatically escalated its efforts to neutralize him.
Memo
proposing the sending of an anonymous letter (below) to
Martin Luther King in an unsuccessful attempt to
convince him to commit suicide.
Actual
approved text of letter sent to King
Still, the Bureau's
counterintelligence operations against King continued
apace, right up to the moment of the target's death by
sniper fire on a Memphis hotel balcony on April 4,1968.
34 Indeed, as the accompanying memo from Sullivan to
George C. Moore (head of the Bureau's "racial
intelligence" squad) on May 22 of the same year
amply demonstrates, certain of King's projects - such as
the Poor People's Campaign - remained the focus of
active COINTELPRO endeavors even after their leader's
assassination. By 1969, as has been noted elsewhere,
"[FBI] efforts to ",expose' Martin Luther
King, Jr., had not slackened even though King had been
dead for a year. [The Bureau] furnished ammunition to
conservatives to attack King's memory, and ... tried to
block efforts to honor the slain leader."
COINTELPRO
against Malcolm X
Memo
taking credit for the assassination of Malcolm X, killed
in an FBI- provoked factional dispute on February 14,
1965.
King and the SCLC were, of course,
hardly the only objects of the Bureau's de facto
COINTELPRO against the emerging black liberation
movement during this period. As Manning Marable has
pointed out, the FBI also went after the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an affiliated
but rather more radical civil rights organization than
the SCLC, very early on: "In late 1960, FBI agents
began to monitor SNCC meetings. [President Lyndon]
Johnson's Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, gave
approval for the FBI to wiretap all SNCC leaders' phones
in 1965 ... Hoover ordered the extensive infiltration
and disruption of SNCC." Another instance concerns
the Nation of Islam (NoI) or "Black Muslim"
movement headed by Elijah Muhammad (s/n: Elijah Poole):
The Bureau began wiretap surveillance
of Elijah Muhammed's [sic] Chicago residence in 1957 ...
on the grounds that members of the NoI "disavow
allegiance to the United States" and "are
taught not to obey the laws of the United States"
... When Elijah Muhammed bought a winter home in Arizona
in 1961, a wiretap and microphone were installed there.
Both forms of surveillance continued for years ... [The
FBI] played assorted COINTEL tricks on the organization
as early as the late 1950s.
As was documented in Chapter 3, when
Malcolm X, one of Elijah Muhammad's principle
lieutenants, broke away from the Nol in March of 1964 to
establish a separate church, the Muslim Mosque, Inc.,
and a consciously political black organization, the
Organization of Afro- American Unity (OAAU), the Bureau
undertook concerted COINTELPRO actions to block the
development of alliances between the OAAU and white
radical organizations such as the SWP. By the point of
Malcolm's assassination during a speech in Harlem on the
night of February 14,1965, the FBI had compiled at least
2,300 pages of material on the victim in just one of its
files on him, the NoI and the OAAU. Malcolm X was
supposedly murdered by former colleagues in the NoI as a
result of the faction-fighting which had led to his
splitting away from that movement, and their
"natural wrath" at his establishment of a
competing entity. However, as the accompanying January
22,1969 memo from the SAC, Chicago, to the Director
makes clear, the Nol factionalism at issue didn't
"just happen." Rather, it had "been
developed" by deliberate Bureau actions - through
infiltration and the "sparking of acrimonious
debates within the organization," rumor-mongering,
and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes -
which were always the standard fare of COINTELPRO. The
Chicago SAC, Marlin Johnson, who would shortly oversee
the assassinations of Illinois Black Panther Party
leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, makes it quite
obvious that he views the murder of Malcolm X as
something of a model for "successful"
counterintelligence operations.
COINTELPRO
against Dick Gregory
Proposal
to provoke the murder of comedian/activist Dick Gregory
by "La Cosa Nostra" a la COINTELPRO - CPUSA's
Operation Hoodwink.
Nor was it necessary for black
spokespersons to be heading or forming political
organizations in order to be targeted for elimination by
the FBI's "informal" counterintelligence
methods. As the accompanying May 15, 1968 memo from
Director Hoover to the Chicago SAC reveals, even
independent activists such as the writer/comedian Dick
Gregory came in for potentially lethal treatment. In
Gregory's case, these assumed the form - a la COINTELPRO-CP,
USA's Operation Hoodwink (see Chapter 2) - of attempting
to provoke "La Cosa Nostra" into dispensing
with him. A considerable body of circumstantial evidence
suggests - although documents have yet to be released -
that the Bureau undertook comparably Machiavellian
efforts to achieve the neutralization of a number of
other black leaders during the late 1960s and early
1970s. These ranged from the Reverend Ralph Abernathy
(King's replacement in SCLC to Georgia Senator Julian
Bond.
The War
Against Black Liberation
As the 1960s unfolded, the true extent
of official resistance to even the most moderate
improvements in the status of blacks - and concomitant
alterations in the balance of social, economic and
political power in the U.S. - became increasingly
apparent. This recalcitrance on the part of the status
quo was signified but hardly encompassed by the
repressive activities of the FBI vis a vis figures such
as King. This official posture gave rise to a spiral of
frustration on the part of those whose objectives had
initially been merely the obtaining of such elemental
rights as the ballot, equal pay for equal work, use of
public facilities and the like. In turn, this
frustration both led to broad acceptance of increasingly
radical analyses of U.S. society on the part of black
activists and theorists. By the mid-60s, the primacy of
those such as King who had developed a mass following on
the basis of appeals for "equal rights" was
being rapidly supplanted by that of younger leaders such
as SNCC's Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who
espoused a much more militant vision of "black
power."
At the same time, not only conscious
black power adherents, but the black community as a
whole, showed increasing signs of abandoning the posture
of "principled nonviolence" which had all
along marked the SCLC performance. This was manifested
not only in Carmichael's and Brown's oversight of a
change in SNCC's name from Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee to Student National Coordinating
Committee, but much more concretely, "in the
streets." This corresponded with the rise of a
generalized perception among blacks that, far from being
restricted to the former Confederate states of the
"Old South," the problems they confronted were
fully national in scope:
Even before the assassination of
Malcolm, many social critics sensed that nonviolent
direct action, a tactic of protest used effectively in
the South, would have little appeal in the Northern
ghetto. Far more likely were a series of urban social
upheavals which could not be controlled or channeled by
the civil rights leadership ... In the spring and summer
months of 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1968, massive black
rebellions swept across almost every major US city in
the Northeast, Middle West and California. In Watts and
Compton, the black districts of Los Angeles, black men
and women took to the streets, attacking and burning
white-owned property and institutions. The [1965] Watts
rebellion left $40 million in private property damage
and 34 persons killed. Federal authorities ordered
15,000 state police and National Guardsmen into Detroit
to quell that city's uprising of 1967. In Detroit 43
residents were killed; almost 2,000 were injured; 2,700
white-owned businesses were broken into, and 50 per cent
of these were gutted by fire or completely destroyed;
fourteen square miles of Detroit's inner city were
torched; 5,000 black persons were left without homes.
Combining the total weight of socio-economic
destruction, the ghetto rebellions from 1964 to 1972 led
to 250 deaths, 10,000 serious injuries, and 60,000
arrests, at a cost of police, troops, and other coercive
measures taken by the state and losses to business in
the billions of dollars.
Given this, it is fair to say that, by
1967 at the latest, black Americans were in a state of
open insurgency against the Euroamerican society to
whose interests they had all along been subordinated.
Established order in the U.S. was thereby confronted
with its most serious internal challenge since the
period of the First World War. The response of the
status quo was essentially twofold. On the one hand, the
government moved to defuse the situation through a
series of cooptive gestures designed to make it appear
that things were finally changing for the better. The
executive branch, under President Lyndon B. Johnson,
declared "war on poverty" and launched a
series of tokenistic and soon to be forgotten programs
such as "Project Build." Congress cooperated
in this exercise in damage control by quickly enacting
bits of legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965
and revision of the Civil Rights Act in 1968, structured
in such a way as to convey a superficial impression of
Iiprogress" to disgruntled blacks while leaving
fundamental social relations very much intact.
On the other hand, key government
figures were astute enough to perceive that the ghetto
rebellions were largely spontaneous and uncoordinated
outpourings of black rage. Costly as the ghetto revolts
were, real danger to the status quo would come only when
a black organizational leadership appeared with the
capacity to harness and direct the force of such anger.
If this occurred, it was recognized, mere gestures would
be insufficient to contain black pressure for social
justice. Already, activist concepts and rhetoric had
shifted from demands for black power within American
society to black liberation from U.S. "internal
colonialism." The task thus presented in completing
the federal counterinsurgency strategy was to destroy
such community-based black leadership before it had an
opportunity to consolidate itself and instill a vision
of real freedom among the great mass of blacks. In this,
of course, the FBI assumed a central role. President
Johnson publicly announced, in the wake of the 1967
uprisings in Detroit and Newark, that he had issued
"standing instructions" that the Bureau should
bring "the instigators" of such
"riots" to heel, by any means at its disposal,
while his attorney general, Ramsey Clark, instructed
Hoover by memo to:
[U]se the [FBI's] maximum resources,
investigative and intelligence, to collect and report
all facts bearing upon the question as to whether there
has been or is a scheme or conspiracy by any group of
whatever size, effectiveness or affiliation to plan,
promote or aggravate riot activity.
Memorandum
expanding COINTELPRO - Black Liberation Movement to
fully National scope.
Airtel itemizing expanded list of FBI
field offices participating in COINTELPRO Black
Liberation Movement. List of original participants and a
description of this COINTELPRO.
Memorandum
reference to "Mau Mau" Primary
targets
The attorney general's memo further
suggested the FBI expand or establish "sources or
informants" within "black nationalist
organizations" such as SNCC, the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) and "other less publicized
groups" in order to "determine the size and
purpose of these groups and their relationship to other
groups, and also to determine the whereabouts of persons
who might be involved" in their activities. As was
shown at the outset of this chapter, Hoover responded by
launching a formal anti-black liberation COINTELPRO in
August 1967. By early 1968, as the accompanying Airtel
from G.C. Moore to William C. Sullivan demonstrates, the
counterintelligence operation was not only in full swing
across the country, but was being expanded from 23 to 41
cities. Both the initial and expanded lists of
participating field offices are brought out in the
accompanying March 4,1968 memo from Hoover to the SAC,
Albany, in which he shifts COINTELPRO-Black Liberation
Movement from "Internal Security" to
"Racial Intelligence" for purposes of internal
Bureau classification, and describes the overall goals
of the effort.
These last explicitly include the
blocking of coalitions between radical black political
organizations, the targeting of key leaders such as
"Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah
Muhammed" for special attention by the Bureau, the
"neutralizing" - by unspecified means - of
both organizations and selected leaders, the undertaking
of propaganda efforts to "discredit" targeted
groups and individuals in order to deny them
"respectability" within their own communities
and, hence, "prevent the long-range growth of
militant black nationalist organizations, especially
among youth." Elsewhere, Hoover called upon his
operatives to intervene directly in blocking free speech
and access by black radicals to the media:
"Consideration should be given to preclude [black]
rabble-rouser leaders of these hate groups from
spreading their philosophy publicly or through the
communications media."
Over the first year of its official
anti-black COINTELPRO, the FBI developed a network of
some 4,000 members, assembled from what had previously
been codenamed the TOPLEV ("Top Level" Black
Community Leadership Program) BLACPRO ("Black
Program") efforts as well as new recruits, called
the "Ghetto Informant Program." It also used
the information thus collected to go after the incipient
black liberation movement, hammer and tong:
In August 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover ordered the extensive infiltration and disruption
of SNCC, as well as other ... formations, such as the
militant Revolutionary Action Movement, the Deacons of
Defense, and CORE ... FBI agents were sent to monitor [Stokely]
Carmichael and [H. Rap] Brown wherever they went,
seeking to elicit evidence to imprison them. Brown was
charged with inciting a race riot in Maryland, and was
eventually sentenced to five years in a federal
penitentiary for carrying a rifle across state lines
while under criminal indictment. [SNCC leader Ralph]
Featherstone and ... activist Che Payne were murdered on
9 March 1970, when a bomb exploded in their automobile
in Bel Air, Maryland. [SNCC leader Cleveland] Sellers
was indicted for organizing black students in South
Carolina and for [himself] resisting the draft.
As has been noted elsewhere, "the
FBI had between 5,000 and 10,000 active cases on matters
of race at any given time nationwide. In 1967 some 1,246
FBI agents received ... racial intelligence assignments
each month. By [1968] the number had jumped to 1,678 ...
Hoover [also ordered William Sullivan] to compile a more
refined listing of 'vociferous rabble rousers' than
provided by the Security Index. [He] hoped the first
edition of the new Rabble Rouser Index of 'individuals
who have demonstrated a potential for fomenting racial
discord' would facilitate target selection for the new
black nationalist counterintelligence program ...
Everything was computerized."
Although Hoover contended the Bureau's
COINTELPRO tactics were necessitated by the
"violence" of its intended victims, his March
4 memo negates even this flimsy rationalization by
placing King's purely pacifistic SCLC among its primary
targets from the beginning, adding King himself in
February 1968, shortly before the civil rights leader's
assassination. Similarly, he included SNCC, still
calling it by its long-standing descriptor as a
nonviolent entity. Even in the case of Maxwell Sanford's
Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which had never
offered professions of pacifist intent, Hoover was
forced to admit that his agents had turned up no hard
evidence of violence or other criminal activities.
Rather, the director points with pride to an anti-RAM
COINTELPRO operation undertaken during the summer of
1967 in which RAM members were "arrested on every
possible charge until they could no longer make
bail" and consequently "spent most of the
summer in jail," even though there had never been
any intent to take them to trial on the variety of
contrived offenses with which they were charged. Hoover
recommended this campaign of deliberate false arrest as
being the sort of "neutralizing" method he had
in mind for black activists, and then ordered each of
the 41 field offices receiving his memo to assign a
full-time coordinator to such COINTELPRO activities
within 30 days.
Similarly, in New York, the Bureau
"placed the fifteen or twenty members of Charles
37X Kenyatta's Harlem Mau Mau on the COINTELPRO target
list." Although the details of the operations
directed against the group remain murky, they may well
have played into the April 1973 murder of Malcolm X's
brother, Hakim Jamal (s/n: Allen Donaldson), by a
Roxbury, Massachusetts affiliate dubbed "De Mau Mau
." In any event, the death of Jamal prompted the
Boston FBI office to file a request that headquarters
"delete subject from the [Black] Extremist
Photograph Album," indicating that he too had been
a high-priority COINTELPRO target.
Meanwhile, in southern Florida, as the
accompanying August 5, 1968 memo from Hoover to the SAC,
Albany, bears out, a more sophisticated propaganda
effort had been conducted. Working with obviously
"friendly" media representatives, local
COINTELPRO specialists oversaw the finalization of a
television "documentary" on both the black
liberation movement and the new left in the Miami area.
The program, which was viewed by a mass audience, was
consciously edited to take the statements of key
activists out of context in such a way as to make them
appear to advocate gratuitous violence and seem
"cowardly," and utilized camera angles
deliberately selected to make those interviewed come off
like "rats trapped under scientific
observation." After detailing such intentionally
gross distortion of reality - passed off all the while
as "news" and "objective journalism"
- Hoover called upon "[e]ach counterintelligence
office [to] be alert to exploit this technique both for
black nationalists and New Left types." Overall, it
appears that most field offices complied with this
instruction to the best of their respective abilities, a
matter which perhaps accounts for much of the negativity
with which the black liberation movement came to be
publicly viewed by the end of the 1960s.
Shaping
the news. Memo establishing model of COINTELPRO
media techniques utilized against the new left and black
liberation movement.
COINTELPRO
against the RNA-Republic of New Afrika
Memo
initiating COINTELPRO against the Republic of New Afrika
by targeting its leader, Imari Abubakari Obadele (s/n:
Richard Henry), shortly after the organization's
founding in 1968. 2nd
Memo
In Detroit, COINTELPRO operatives set
out to destroy the recently-founded Republic of New
Afrika (RNA) by targeting its leader, Imari Abubakari
Obadele (s/ n: Richard Henry). At first they used, as
the accompanying memos dated November 22 and December
3,1968 reveal, a barrage of anonymous letters in much
the same fashion as those employed against Koen in St.
Louis, albeit in this case they charged financial rather
than sexual impropriety. When this approach failed to
achieve the desired result, the Bureau escalated,
setting out to bring about their target's imprisonment.
In the view of involved agents, "If Obadele can be
kept off the streets, it may prevent further problems
with the RNA inasmuch as he completely dominates the
organization and all members follow his
instructions." Hence, when the RNA leader moved
south to consummate an organizational plan of
establishing a "liberated zone" in the
Mississippi River delta, near Jackson, Mississippi, the
FBI moved to provoke a confrontation which could then be
used to obtain a conviction. First, as is shown in the
accompanying December 12, 1970 memo from the SAC,
Jackson (Elmer Linberg), to Hoover, agents intervened to
block the perfectly legal sale of a land parcel to
Obadele. SA George Holder and his associates undertook
by word of mouth to foster a marked increase in anti-RNA
sentiment in the Klan-ridden Jackson area. Finally, they
coordinated an early morning assault on RNA facilities
in the city involving some 36 heavily armed agents and
local police headed by SAC Linberg - as well as an
armored car - on August 18, 1971.
Excerpt
from a December 2,1970 report detailing the COINTELPRO
operations in Mississippi which resulted in the case of
the RNA 11.
In the resultant firefight, one police
officer, William Skinner, was killed and an agent,
William Stringer, was wounded. Imari Obadele and 10
other RNA members were arrested - thereby becoming the
"RNA 11" - and charged with murder, assault,
sedition, conspiracy, possession of illegal weapons, and
"treason against the state of Mississippi."
Tellingly, the original charges, which had ostensibly
provided a basis for the massive police raid, were never
brought to court. In the end, eight of the accused were
convicted, but only of conspiracy to assault federal
officers, assault, illegal possession of a nonexistent
automatic weapon, and having used weapons in the
commission of these other "felonies." This is
to say they were imprisoned for having defended
themselves from the armed attack of a large number of
FBI agents and police who could never show any
particular reason for having launched the assault in the
first place. Obadele received a twelve year sentence,
served seven, and the entire operation undoubtedly
entered the annals of "successful" COINTELPROs.
COINTELPRO
Against the Black Panther Party
Memo
initiating COINTELPRO - BPP 2nd
page
By the fall of 1968, the FBI felt it
had identified the organization most likely to succeed
as the catalyst of a united black liberation movement in
the U.S. This was the Black Panther Party (BPP),
originally established as the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense in the San Francisco Bay area city of
Oakland by Merritt College students Huey P. Newton and
Bobby Seale (a former RAM member) during October of
1966. On September 8,1968, J. Edgar Hoover let it be
known in the pages of the New York Times that he
considered the Panthers "the greatest [single]
threat to the internal security of the country."
Shortly thereafter, William Sullivan sent the
accompanying memo to George C. Moore, outlining a plan
by which already-existing COINTELPRO actions against the
BPP might "be accelerated."
Although Sullivan utilized the
habitual Bureau pretense that targets of such attention
were "violence-prone" and making "efforts
to perpetrate violence in the United States," the
party's predication -as evidenced in its Ten-Point
Program- was in some ways rather moderate and, in any
event, entirely legal. Far from conducting
"physical attacks on police," as Sullivan
claimed, the Panthers were well-known to have anchored
themselves firmly in the constitutional right to bear
arms and effect citizens arrests in order to curtail the
high level of systematic (and generally quite illegal)
violence customarily visited upon black inner city
residents by local police. More to the point, but left
unmentioned by the FBI assistant director, was that the
entire thrust of BPP organizing - reliance on the
principle of armed selfdefense included - went to
forging direct community political control over and
economic self sufficiency within the black ghettos. As
has been noted elsewhere, "In late 1967, the
Panthers initiated a free breakfast programme for black
children, and offered free health care to ghetto
residents." By the summer of 1968, these
undertakings had been augmented by a community education
project and an antiheroin campaign. The party was
offering a coherent strategy to improve the realities -
both spiritual and material - of ghetto life.
Consequently, black community perceptions of the BPP
were radically different from those entertained by the
police establishment (which the Panthers described as an
"occupying army").
A significant measure of the Black
Panthers' success was described in racist terms by
Sullivan who noted that membership was "multiplying
rapidly." Beginning with a core of five members in
1966, the BPP had grown to include as many as 5,000
members within two years, and had spread from its
original Oakland base to include chapters in more than a
dozen cities. This seems due, not only to the appeal
inherent in the Panthers' combination of standing up for
basic black rights in the face of even the most visible
expressions of state power with concrete programs to
upgrade inner city life, but to the party's unique
inclusiveness. Although the conditions for acceptance
into the BPP were in some ways quite stringent, Newton
and Seale had from the outset focused their recruiting
and organizing efforts on what they termed "the
lumpen" - a cast of street gangs, prostitutes,
convicts and excons typically shunned by progressive
movements - with an eye towards forming a new political
force based upon this "most oppressed and alienated
sector of the population" and activating its
socially constructive energies.
COINTELPRO
against SNCC- Student Non-violent Coordinating Committe
Also of apparent concern to the Bureau
was the Panthers' demonstrated ability to link their new
recruitment base to other important sectors of the U.S.
opposition. One of the party's first major achievements
in this regard came when Chairman Bobby Seale and
Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver managed to
engineer the merger of SNCC with their organization, an
event signified at a mass rally in Oakland on February
17, 1968 when Stokely Carmichael was designated as
honorary BPP Prime Minister, H. Rap Brown as Minister of
justice and James Forman as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
As is demonstrated in the accompanying October 10, 1968
memo from Moore to Sullivan, the FBI quickly initiated a
COINTELPRO effort to "foster a split between ...
the two most prominent black nationalist extremist
groups" through the media.
The SNCC leadership was also targeted
more heavily than ever. H. Rap Brown was shortly
eliminated by being "charged with inciting a race
riot in Maryland," allowed to make bail only under
the constitutionally dubious proviso that he not leave
the Borough of Manhattan in New York, "and was
eventually sentenced to five years in a federal
penitentiary [not on the original charge, but] for
carrying a rifle across state lines while under criminal
indictment." Stokely Carmichael's neutralization
took a rather different form. Utilizing the services of
Peter Cardoza, an infiltrator who had worked his way
into a position as the SNCC leader's bodyguard, the
Bureau applied a "bad jacket," deliberately
creating the false appearance that Carmichael was
himself an operative. In a memo dated July 10, 1968, the
SAC, New York, proposed to Hoover that:
... consideration be given to convey
the impression that CARMICHAEL is a CIA informer. One
method of accomplishing [this] would be to have a carbon
copy of an informant report supposedly written by
CARMICHAEL to the CIA carefully deposited in the
automobile of a close Black Nationalist friend ... It is
hoped that when the informant report is read it will
help promote distrust between CARMICHAEL and the Black
Community ... It is also suggested that we inform a
certain percentage of reliable criminal and racial
informants that "we have it from reliable sources
that CARMICHAEL is a CIA agent. It is hoped that the
informants would spread the rumor in various large Negro
communities across the land.
Pursuant to a May 19,1969 Airtel from
the SAC, San Francisco, to Hoover, the Bureau then
proceeded to "assist" the BPP in
"expelling" Carmichael through the forgery of
letters on party letterhead. The gambit worked, as is
evidenced in the September 5,1970 assertion by BPP head
Huey P. Newton: 'We ... charge that Stokely Carmichael
is operating as an agent of the CIA."
Memo
outlining tactic to split the BPP and SNCC.
Meanwhile, according to the New York
SAC, his COINTELPRO technicians had followed up, using
the target's mother as a prop in their scheme:
On 9/4/68, a pretext phone call was
placed to the residence of STOKELY CARMICHAEL and in
absence of CARMICHAEL his mother was told that a friend
was calling who was fearful of the future safety of her
son. It was explained to Mrs. CARMICHAEL the absolute
necessity for CARMICHAEL to "hide out"
inasmuch as several BPP members were out to kill him.
Mrs. CARMICHAEL appeared shocked upon hearing the news
and stated she would tell STOKELY when he came home.
Excerpt
from July 10, 1968 memo proposing the bad-jacketing of
SNCC/BPP leader Stokely Carmichael.
Although there is no evidence
whatsoever that a Panther "hit team" had been
assembled to silence the accused informer, Carmichael
left the U.S. for an extended period in Africa the
following day, and the SNCC/Panther coalition was
effectively destroyed.
As all this was going on, Cleaver was
developing another highly visible alliance, this one
with "white mother country radicals," which he
and Seale had initiated in December 1967. This was with
the so-called Peace and Freedom Party, which planned to
place Cleaver - not only in his capacity as a leading
Panther, but as the celebrated convict author of Soul on
Ice and parolee editor of Ramparts magazine on the
California ballot as a presidential candidate during the
1968 election; his vice presidential candidate was
slated to be SDS co-founder Tom Hayden, while Huey P.
Newton was offered as a congressional candidate from his
prison cell. The ensuing campaign resulted in a wave of
positive exposure for the BPP which the authorities were
relatively powerless to counteract. Hence, Cleaver - the
powerful writer and speaker at the center of it all -
was targeted for rapid elimination.
On April 6 [1968], two days after
Martin Luther King was killed, Cleaver was in the
Ramparts office in the late afternoon, dictating his
article, "Requiem for Nonviolence." In a
matter of hours he and other Panthers would be involved
in a shootout with the Oakland police.
Seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton died, shot in the back
moments after he and Eldridge, arms above their heads,
stumbled out of the building where they'd taken refuge.
Cleaver, who was wounded in the leg, was taken first to
Oakland's Highland Hospital; then to the Alameda County
Courthouse where police made him lie on the floor while
he was being booked; and finally, that same night, to
San Quentin Hospital where a guard pushed him down a
flight of stairs. He was brought to the state medical
facility at Vacaville and confined in the
"hole."
Although Cleaver was never convicted
of any charge stemming from the firefight, and it soon
became apparent that Ray Brown's Oakland Panther Squad
had deliberately provoked the incident, his "parole
was quickly revoked, and for two months he sat at
Vacaville. The [California] Adult Authority had
exercised its authority to suspend or revoke parole
without notice or hearing, basing its actions solely on
police reports. Three parole violations were listed:
possession of firearms, associating with individuals of
bad reputation, and failing to cooperate with the parole
agent." But, when Charles Garry, Cleaver's
attorney, petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, it was
granted by state Superior Court Judge Raymond J.
Sherwin, in Solano County (where Vacaville is located).
Judge Sherwin almost immediately
dismissed the claim that Cleaver had associated with
persons of "bad reputation," noting that the
adult authority had been unable to even list who was
supposedly at issue. The noncooperation claim was also
scuttled when Garry introduced evidence that the parole
officer in question had consistently assessed Cleaver in
written reports as "reliable" and
"cooperative" since his release from prison.
The state's weapons possession claim also fell apart
when the judge found that, "Cleaver's only handling
of a firearm [a rifle] was in obedience to a police
command. He did not handle a hand gun at all." The
judge concluded that:
It has to be stressed that the
uncontradicted evidence presented to this Court
indicated that the petitioner had been a model parolee.
The peril to his parole status stemmed from no failure
of personal rehabilitation, but from his undue eloquence
in pursuing political goals, goals which were offensive
to many of his contemporaries. Not only was there
absence of cause for the cancellation of his parole, it
was the product of a type of pressure unbecoming, to say
the least, to the law enforcement paraphernalia of the
state.
With that, Judge Sherwin ordered
Cleaver's release, a ruling which was immediately
appealed by the adult authority to the state appellate
court. The higher court, refusing to hear any evidence
in the matter, simply affirmed "the arbitrary power
of the adult authority to revoke parole."
Consequently, despite having been shown to have engaged
in no criminal activity at all, Cleaver was ordered back
to San Quentin as of November 27,1968. Under such
conditions, he opted instead to go into exile, first in
Cuba, then Algeria and, eventually, France. The
immediacy of his talents, energy and stature were thus
lost to the BPP - along with the life of Bobby Hutton,
one of its earliest and most dedicated members - while
the stage was set for a future COINTELPRO operation.
COINTELPRO
to develop lethal feuds between Black Panther Party and
other black liberation groups
Memo
initiating the lethal COINTELPRO which pitted the US
organization against the BPP. Note the similarity in
method to that of Operation Hoodwink.
Anti-Panther COINTELPRO activities
were directed not only at blocking or destroying the
party's coalition-building. They were, as the
accompanying November 25,1968 memo from Hoover to the
SAC, Baltimore, bears out, also devoted to exacerbating
tensions between the BPP and organizations with which it
had strong ideological differences. In the case of the
so-called United Slaves (US), a black cultural
nationalist group based primarily in southern
California, this was done despite - or because of -
"The struggle ... taking on the aura of gang
warfare with attendant threats of murder and
reprisal." What was meant by the Bureau "fully
capitalizing" on the situation is readily attested
by the accompanying November 29 memo to Hoover from the
SAC, Los Angeles, proposing the sending of an anonymous
letter - attributed to the Panthers -
"revealing" a fictional BPP plot to
assassinate US head Ron Karenga. The stated objective
was to provoke "an US and BPP vendetta." A
number of defamatory cartoons - attributed to both US
and the BPP, with each side appearing to viciously
ridicule the other - were also produced and distributed
within local black communities by the Los Angeles and
San Diego FBI offices.
Samples
of the sorts of cartoons produced and distributed by
the FBI in southern California to provoke violence
between US and the BPP.
Excerpt
from an August 20,1969 report summarizing the
"accomplishments" and plans for the BPP/US
COINTELPRO in San Diego
On January 17,1969, these tactics bore
their malignant fruit when Los Angeles BPP leaders
Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and Jon Huggins
were shot to death by US members George and Joseph
Stiner, and Claude Hubert, in a classroom at UCLA's
Campbell Hall. Apparently at the FBI's behest, the Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD) followed up by
conducting a massive raid - 75 to 100 SWAT equipped
police participated - on the home of Jon Huggins' widow,
Ericka, on the evening of his death, an action
guaranteed to drastically raise the level of rage and
frustration felt by the Panthers assembled there. The
police contended that the rousting of Ericka Huggins and
other surviving LA-BPP leaders was intended to
"avert further violence," a rationale which
hardly explains why during the raid a cop placed a
loaded gun to the head of the Huggins' six-month-old
baby, Mai, laughed and said "You're next." 84
In the aftermath, southern California COINTELPRO
specialists assigned themselves "a good measure of
credit" for these "accomplishments," and
proposed distribution of a new series of cartoons -
including the accompanying examples - to "indicate
to the BPP that the US organization feels they are
ineffectual, inadequate, and riddled with graft and
corruption."
The idea was approved and, as is shown
in the accompanying excerpts from an August 20,1969
report by the San Diego SAC to Hoover, obtained similar
results.
The BPP/US COINTELPRO continued in
the east.
Among the "tangible results"
which the SAC found to be "directly attributable to
this program" were "shootings, beatings, and a
high degree of unrest ... in the ghetto area." At
another point, he noted that one of the shootings had
resulted in the death of Panther Sylvester Bell at the
hands of US gunmen on August 14 (another San Diego
Panther, John Savage, had also been murdered by US on
May 23), and announced that, apparently on the basis of
such a resounding success, "a new cartoon is being
considered in the hopes that it will assist in the
continuance of the rift between the BPP and US."
The Newark field office also joined in
the act, as is attested by the accompanying October
2,1969 memo from the SAC in that city to Hoover, and the
cartoon which corresponds to it. Newark credited the
COINTELPRO with three other Panther murders as of
September 30, 1969, when it sent an anonymous letter to
the local BPP chapter warning them to "watch out:
Karenga's coming," and listing a national "box
score" of "US - 6, Panthers - 0." While
this seems to have been the extent of the fatalities
induced through the COINTELPRO operation - a body count
which in itself would not have proven crippling to
either side of the dispute - such FBI activities did, as
cultural nationalist leader Amiri Baraka (s/n: LeRoi
Jones) has pointed out, help solidify deep divisions
within the radical black community as a whole which took
years to overcome, and which effectively precluded the
possibility of unified political action within the black
liberation movement.
As has been noted elsewhere, one
"of the FBI's favorite tactics was to accuse the
Panthers and other black nationalists of anti-Semitism,
a tactic designed to destroy the movement's image 'among
liberal and naive elements.' Bureau interest in
anti-Semitism grew during the summer of 1967 at the
National Convention for a New Politics, when SNCC`s
James Forman and Rap Brown led a floor fight for a
resolution condemning Zionist expansion. The
convention's black caucus introduced the resolution, and
SNCC emerged as the first black group to take a public
stand against Israel in the Mid-East conflict." In
New York, as is revealed in the accompanying September
10, 1969 memo, this assumed the form of sending
anonymous letters to Rabbi Meir Kahane of the
neo-fascistic Jewish Defense League in hopes that the
"embellishment" of "factual
information" within the missives might provoke
Kahane's thugs "to act" against the BPP.
Comparable methods were used in
Chicago, where BPP leader Fred Hampton was showing
considerable promise in negotiating a working alliance
with a huge black street gang known as the Blackstone
Rangers (or Black P. Stone Nation). As is demonstrated
in the accompanying January 30,1969 letter from Hoover
to Marlin Johnson, the Chicago SAC (see page 138), this
"threat" prompted the local COINTELPRO section
to propose - and Hoover to approve - the sending of an
anonymous letter to Ranger head Jeff Fort, falsely
warning that Hampton had "a hit [murder contract]
out on" him as part of a Panther plot to take over
his gang. What the Bureau expected to result from the
sending of this missive had already been outlined by
Johnson in a memo to Hoover on January 10:
It is believed that the [letter] may
intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups
and occasion Forte [sic] to take retaliatory action
which could disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against
its leadership ... Consideration has been given to a
similar letter to the BPP alleging a Ranger plot against
the BPP leadership; however, it is not felt that this
would be productive principally because the BPP ... is
not believed to be as violence prone as the Rangers, to
whom violent type activity - shooting and the like - is
second nature [emphasis added].
COINTELPRO
to provoke conflict between Black Panther Party and
Jewish Defense League
Memo
proposing anonymous letter to provoke conflict between
the Jewish Defense League and the BPP. Text of letter
follows. 2nd
page
The FBI's concern in the matter was
not, as Hoover makes abundantly clear in his letter,
that someone might be killed as a consequence of such
"disruptive activities," but that a properly
nondescript envelope be employed in the mailing of the
bogus letter in order that "any tangible results
obtained" could not be "traced back to"
the Bureau. Similar tactics were employed to block or
"destabilize" emerging alliances between the
Chicago BPP and another black gang, the Mau Maus
(unrelated to Kenyatta's Harlem-based organization), as
well as the already politicized Puertorriqueno Young
Lords, a white street gang called the Young Patriots,
and even SDS, the white radical organization. The
letter-writing COINTELPRO had a significant impact in
preventing Hampton from consolidating the city-wide
"Rainbow Coalition" he was attempting to
establish at the time, but it failed to bring about his
physical liquidation.
COINTELPRO
against Fred Hampton
Letter
authorizing sending of bogus letter to Chicago gang
leader Jeff Fort in hopes that it will provoke violent
retaliation against city BPP head Fred Hampton.
Hence, in mid-November 1969,
COINTELPRO specialist Roy Mitchell met with William
O'Neal, a possibly psychopathic infiltrator/provocateur
who had managed to become Hampton's personal bodyguard
and chief of local BPP security, at the Golden Torch
Restaurant in downtown Chicago. The agent secured from
O'Neal the accompanying detailed floorplan of Hampton's
apartment, including the disposition of furniture, and
denotation of exactly where the BPP leader might be
expected to be sleeping on any given night. Mitchell
then took the floorplan to Richard Jalovec, overseer of
a special police unit assigned to State's Attorney
Edward V. Hanrahan; together, Mitchell and Jalovec met
with police sergeant Daniel Groth, operational commander
of the unit, and planned an "arms raid" on the
Hampton residence.
Floor
plan of Hampton's apartment provided by FBI
infiltrator William O'Neal in order to pinpoint targets
during the Panther leader's assassination.
On the evening of December 3,1969,
shortly before the planned raid, infiltrator O'Neal
seems to have slipped Hampton a substantial dose of
secobarbital in a glass of kool-aid. The BPP leader was
thus comatose in his bed when the fourteen-man police
team - armed with a submachinegun and other special
hardware - slammed into his home at about 4 a.m. on the
morning of December 4. He was nonetheless shot three
times, once more-or-less slightly in the chest, and then
twice more in the head at point-blank range. Also killed
was Mark Clark, head of the Peoria, Illinois, BPP
chapter. Wounded were Panthers Ronald "Doc"
Satchell, Blair Anderson and Verlina Brewer. Panthers
Deborah Johnson (Hampton's fiancee eight months pregnant
with their child), Brenda Harris, Louis Truelock and
Harold Bell were uninjured during the shooting. Despite
the fact that no Panther had fired a shot (with the
possible exception of Clark, who may have squeezed off a
single round during his death convulsions) while the
police had pumped at least 98 rounds into the apartment,
the BPP survivors were all beaten while handcuffed,
charged with "aggressive assault" and
"attempted murder" of the raiders, and held on
$100,000 bond apiece.
A week later, on December 11, Chicago
COINTELPRO section head Robert Piper took a major share
of the "credit" for this "success"
in the accompanying memo, informing headquarters that
the raid could not have occurred without intelligence
information, "not available from any other
source," provided by O'Neal via Mitchell and
himself. He specifically noted that "the chairman
of the Illinois BPP, Fred Hampton," was killed in
the raid and that this was due, in large part, to the
"tremendous value" of O'Neal's work inside the
party. He then requested payment of a $300 cash
"bonus" to the infiltrator for services
rendered, a matter quickly approved at FBI headquarters.
The Hampton-Clark assassinations were
unique in that the cover stories of involved police and
local officials quickly unraveled. Notwithstanding the
FBI's best efforts to help "keep the lid on,"
there was a point when the sheer blatancy of the lies
used to "explain" what had happened, the
obvious falsification of ballistics and other evidence,
and so on, led to the indictment of State's Attorney
Hanrahan, Jalovec, and a dozen Chicago police personnel
for conspiring to obstruct justice. This was dropped by
Chicago Judge Phillip Romitti on November 1, 1972 as
part of a quid pro quo arrangement in which remaining
charges were dropped against the Panther survivors. The
latter then joined the mothers of the deceased in a $47
million civil rights suit against not only the former
state defendants, but a number of Chicago police
investigators who had "cleared" the raiders of
wrongdoing, and the FBI as well.
Airtel recommending cash
bonus be paid infiltrator O'Neal for services
rendered in the Hampton-Clark assassinations. The money
was quickly approved.
The Bureau had long-since brought in
ace COINTELPRO manager Richard G. Held, who replaced
Marlin Johnson as Chicago SAC, in order to handle the
administrative aspects of what was to be a monumental
attempted cover-up. But even his undeniable skills in
this regard were insufficient to gloss over the more
than 100,000 pages of relevant Bureau documents
concerning Hampton and the Chicago BPP he claimed under
oath did not exist. Finally, after years of resolute
perjury and stonewalling by the FBI and Chicago police,
as well as directed acquittals of the government
defendants by U.S. District Judge J. Sam Perry (which
had to be appealed and reversed by the Eighth Circuit
Court), People's Law Office attorneys Flint Taylor, Jeff
Haas and Dennis Cunningham finally scored. In November
1982, District Judge John F. Grady determined that there
was sufficient evidence of a conspiracy to deprive the
Panthers of their civil rights to award the plaintiffs
$1.85 million in damages.
The Hampton-Clark assassinations were
hardly an isolated phenomenon. Four days after the
lethal raid in Chicago, a similar scenario was acted out
in Los Angeles. In this instance, the FBI utilized an
infiltrator named Melvin "Cotton" Smith who,
like O'Neal, had become the chief of local BPP security.
Like O'Neal, Smith provided the Bureau with a detailed
floorplan - albeit, in the form of a cardboard mock-up
rather than a mere diagram - of the BPP facility to be
assaulted. Forty men from the LAPD SWAT squad were
employed, along with more than 100 regular police as
"backup" in the 5:30 a.m. attack on December
8, 1969. This time, however, the primary target, LA
Panther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, was not
in his assigned spot. Unbeknownst to the police, he had
decided to sleep on the floor alongside his bed on the
night of the raid; consequently, the opening burst of
gunfire which was apparently supposed to kill him missed
entirely. Another major difference between the events in
Chicago and those in LA was that, in the latter, a
sufficient number of Panthers were awake when the
shooting started to mount an effective resistance:
The Panthers chose to defend
themselves, and for four hours they fought off the
police, refusing to surrender until press and public
were on the scene. Six were wounded. Thirteen were
arrested. Miraculously, none of them were killed."
As in Chicago, the raiders were
headed, not by a SWAT or regular police commander, but
by a coordinator of the local police Red Squad. The Los
Angeles raid was led by Detective Ray Callahan, a
ranking member of the LAPD Criminal Conspiracy Section
(CCS), a Panther-focused "subversives unit"
tightly interlocked with the local FBI COINTELPRO
section, headed by Richard Wallace Held, son of Chicago
SAC Richard G. Held. Also as in Chicago, the Panthers
were immediately charged with "assaulting the
police," an accusation which received considerable
media play until it was quietly dropped when the matter
was finally decided by a jury - and the defendants
acquitted on December 23,1971. Pratt, meantime, spent a
solid two months in the LA County Jail in the wake of
the firefight, until his $125,000 bond money could be
raised.
As the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco
put it at the time, pointing to a special "Panther
unit" created by the Justice Department
specifically to assist federal/local .cooperation"
in "containing" the black liberation movement,
"Whatever they say they're doing, they're out to
get the Panthers." Hence, although many antiPanther
actions around the country appeared to be purely local
police initiatives, most were actually coordinated by
the FBI's COINTELPRO operatives in each locality. By
1969, a uniform drumbeat of anti-BPP repression was
readily apparent across the nation:
From April to December, 1969, police
raided Panther headquarters in San Francisco, Chicago,
Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Denver, San Diego,
Sacramento and Los Angeles, including four separate
raids in Chicago, two in San Diego and two in Los
Angeles. Frequently Panthers were arrested during these
raids on charges such as illegal use of sound equipment,
harboring fugitives, possessing stolen goods and flight
to avoid prosecution, and later released. In September,
1969, alone, police across the nation arrested Panthers
in forty-six separate incidents [at least 348 were
arrested during the whole year] ... Police raids
frequently involved severe damage to Panther
headquarters. Thus during a raid in Sacramento in June,
1969, in search of an alleged sniper who was never
found, police sprayed the building with teargas, shot up
the walls, broke typewriters and destroyed bulk food the
Panthers were distributing free to ghetto children.
Sacramento Mayor Richard Marriot said he was
"shocked and horrified" by the
"shambles" he reported police had left behind.
During raids on Panther headquarters in Philadelphia in
September, 1970, police ransacked the office, ripped out
plumbing and chopped up and carted away furniture. Six
Panthers were led into the street, placed against a wall
and stripped as Police Chief [later mayor] Frank Rizzo
boasted to newsmen, "Imagine the big Black Panthers
with their pants down."
Airtel from J. Edgar Hoover
reprimanding the San Francisco office for its lack
of vigor in pursuing COINTELPRO operations against the
BPP.
2nd
page of reprimand
In August 1971, FBI agents and local
police arrested two Black Panthers in Omaha ... David
Rice and Ed Poindexter, on charges of killing a local
policeman. In subsequent investigations by Amnesty
International and other human rights agencies, it was
revealed that the FBI had collected over 2000 pages of
information on the Omaha chapter of the Black Panthers,
and that the actual murderer of the police officer was a
former drug addict who was soon released by authorities,
and who subsequently "disappeared." Both Rice
and Poindexter were convicted, however, and still remain
in federal penitentiaries.
The pressure placed upon the party
through such "extralegal legality" was
enormous. As Panther attorney Charles Garry observed in
1970,
In a period of two years - December,
1967 to December, 1969 - the Black Panther Party has
expended in bail-bond premiums alone -just the premiums,
that is, money that will never be returned - a sum in
excess of $200,000! How many breakfasts or lunches for
hungry children, how much medical attention sorely
needed in the ghetto communities would that $200,000
have furnished? ... In the same two-year period,
twenty-eight Panthers were killed ... Let me cite some
additional statistics, though for a complete record, I
would recommend you consult the special issue of The
Black Panther (February 21,1970) entitled,
"Evidence and Intimidation of Fascist Crimes by
U.S.A." Between May 2, 1967 and December 25, 1969
charges were dropped against at least 87 Panthers
arrested for a wide variety of so-called violations of
the law. Yet these men and women were kept in prison for
days, weeks and months even though there was absolutely
no evidence against them, and they were finally
released. At least a dozen cases involving Panthers have
been dismissed in court. In these cases, the purpose has
clearly been to intimidate, to frighten, to remove from
operation and activities the Panthers, and to hope the
[resultant public] hysteria against the Black Panther
Party would produce convictions and imprisonments.
By 1970, what was occurring was
evident enough that Mayor Wes Uhlman of Seattle, when
his police were approached by agents in the local FBI
office about rousting the city's BPP chapter, publicly
announced that, "We are not going to have any 1932
Gestapo-type raids against anyone." Even SAC
Charles Bates in San Francisco had attempted to protest
at least the extent of what the Bureau was doing to the
Panthers. For his trouble, Bates received the
accompanying May 27, 1969 Airtel from Hoover informing
him that he had "obviously missed the point"
and that his outlook was "not in line with Bureau
objectives." The director also used the opportunity
to order Bates to target the BPP Breakfast for Children
Program in the Bay Area. Hoover then unleashed William
Sullivan to pull Bates' office back in line:
Sullivan gave Bates two weeks to
assign his best agents to the COINTELPRO desks and get
on with the task at hand: "Eradicate [the
Panthers'] 'serve the people' programs ... So [Charles]
Gain, [William] Cohendet, and the other four agents
assigned to the BPP squad supervised the taps and bugs
on Panther homes and offices; mailed a William F.
Buckley, Jr., column on the Panthers to prominent
citizens in the Bay area; tipped off San Francisco
Examiner reporter Ed Montgomery to Huey Newton's posh
Oakland apartment overlooking Lake Merritt; disrupted
the breakfast-for-children program "in the
notorious Haight-Ashbury District" and elsewhere by
spreading a rumor "that various personnel in
[Panther] national headquarters are infected with
venereal disease," tried to break up Panther
marriages with letters to wives about affairs with
teenage girls; and assisted with a plan to harass the
Panthers' attorney, Charles Garry ... They carried out
dozens of other counterintelligence operations as well.
As should be obvious from the Rice,
Poindexter and other cases already mentioned, spurious
criminal prosecution was a favorite tactic used in
neutralizing the BPP leadership. For instance, in 1969
Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale was charged along
with seven other Chicago conspiracy defendants,
"although he had only the most tangential
connection with the demonstrations during the Democratic
Convention in Chicago during August of 1968 [which
precipitated a major police riot in full view of
national television, and for whic
