A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  Nonetheless, she was swept up in the times—and the FBI’s intel dragnet.

  Withers shot photos of her for Lawrence as she marched with an anti-poverty group, the Memphis Welfare Rights Organization, and confirmed her connection to a similar group, Citizens Opposed to Starvation Taxes.16

  FBI interest intensified when Hunninen began associating with suspected Communists in 1970.

  Available records show the FBI first recorded such a connection on January 12, 1970, when the activist reportedly attended “a Marxist-Leninist study session” at a two-story stone house in Midtown. The meeting was covered by as many as three informants. That June, an informant reported Hunninen was “a member of the Memphis unit of the” Young Workers Liberation League, the communist youth group brought to Memphis by Allan Fuson and Michael Welch. Agents meticulously recorded the addresses of a series of apartments where the student lived, the names of restaurants where she held waitressing jobs, her educational history, and other personal details. They logged her appearance at more than sixty meetings, rallies, and political events between 1968 and 1970.17

  The FBI redoubled its interest as Hunninen became involved in the campaign to free Angela Davis, the jailed Communist Party member and Black Panther supporter. Withers shot pictures in January 1971 of Hunninen conferring with civil rights icon Anne Braden, who had come to rally support for Davis, and he told agents weeks later of Michael Honey’s plans to bring in a West Coast leader in the Committee to Free Angela Davis.18

  Combustible as it was, the Angela Davis campaign triggered incendiary consequences—literally—for the group. Someone tossed a hand grenade in the parking lot outside Hunninen’s Midtown apartment one evening in April 1971. The blast punched holes in her Volkswagen station wagon featuring a “Free Angela” sticker on the tailgate. No one was arrested. The incident sent chills through Hunninen and her friends, who long suspected a right-wing extremist or a police informer.19

  “We hear this huge explosion. My car’s on fire,” Hunninen said. “It definitely was because of my activities.”

  One of the first people she called was Withers.

  Aiming his camera into the darkness, the photographer shot more than a dozen pictures, stamping prints with his distinctive “Pictures Tell The Story” imprint on the back. One shows Hunninen in a colorful muumuu peering into her charred VW. It ran along with an article in the Southern Patriot, the news organ for Carl and Anne Braden’s Southern Conference Educational Fund.20

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  EIGHT DAYS BEFORE he photographed the car bombing, Withers reported to the FBI that Hunninen had been soliciting money for her communist youth group from Stax Records. A Stax executive “gave Kathy Roop and the YWLL $250 and also has made donations to Free Angela Davis,” agent Howell Lowe wrote in April 1971.*3 The report was one of many from a range of informants deployed that spring to help monitor the prolific activist.21

  The FBI logged Hunninen’s attendance at thirty meetings, rallies, and other events between that January and April. Like Hunninen’s fund-raising at Stax, every bit of that activity involved constitutionally protected political activity. Several reports involved meetings in private homes and churches to discuss the war, Angela Davis, and the legal defense of activists jailed for trying to move poor squatters into public housing without authorization. Representatives of the FBI and MPD listened as Hunninen spoke at a downtown rally, as she characterized the country’s selective service laws as racist and condemned the U.S. bombing of Laos and Cambodia. Hunninen told the crowd “the bombs dropped on Laos were greater than the bombs dropped on any country in the history of warfare,” an agent reported.22

  The FBI kept the heat on through 1972, taking interest in her first big job after college: working as a labor organizer for the Distributive Workers of America, Local 19—the same union (but with a slightly altered name) that Sen. James Eastland had denounced in public hearings in 1951 as a communist front. Hunninen hired Withers that summer to chronicle her efforts to organize some four hundred workers at the Donruss Bubblegum Co.’s Memphis plant. The Southern Patriot published an uninspired photo he shot of ten workers, black and white, posing outside the plant. It accompanied an article discussing the interracial union’s long struggles in Memphis.23

  Again, Withers kicked the information to law enforcement behind Hunninen’s back. He reported Hunninen’s organizing efforts to the FBI on July 5, 1972, along with details about her working relationship with her supervisor, Earl Fisher, the same African American labor leader whom Senator Eastland had grilled and berated in his 1951 hearings on communism.

  “Kathy has indicated that her boss, Mr. Earl Fisher, and leader of the Distributors Local, is watching her very closely to see if she will be successful in her first organizing attempt,” an agent wrote after debriefing Withers. The photographer reported, too, that Hunninen and her colleague Allan Fuson planned to attend the Democratic National Convention in Miami.24

  Adhering to the mandate from headquarters to maintain a virtual “day-to-day appraisal” of subversive activity, agents inventoried her appearance at as many as sixty-two meetings and political events between May 1971 and January 1972, when it cranked up its attention yet another notch after learning she’d assumed the chairmanship of the Harriet Tubman Club, a suspected communist front. But the Memphis office’s file on Hunninen neared its terminus on August 12, 1974, when, in its 659th report on the activist, the agency learned she was leaving town.25

  Withers said Hunninen had just told him over the phone she was moving to Ohio, where she’d received a scholarship for graduate study.26

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  BY 1984, HUNNINEN had left Memphis far behind her. She’d earned a master’s degree and was completing a doctorate at the University of Cincinnati Medical School in the arcane field of gas chromatography—the analysis of toxic chemicals—when the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health offered her a position as an industrial hygienist. The ex-activist, then thirty-six, would test workplaces for hazardous chemicals and materials like asbestos. But there was a snag.

  Conducting a “name check,” a cursory review routinely performed on new federal employees, the FBI told the Office of Personnel Management that its indices showed Hunninen had been the focus of a national security investigation between 1971 and 1975. In turn, OPM asked for a full field investigation—interviews of employers, educators, and associates as well as extensive records searches—aimed at determining Hunninen’s loyalty. When she refused to sign a privacy waiver, the probationary employee was fired. She was reinstated after filing a suit in federal court.27

  Still, OPM pushed for a full field investigation. The controversy hinged on a polarizing Cold War–era policy that screened the politics and behavior of federal employees. OPM sought the investigation in accordance with Executive Order 10450 signed by President Eisenhower in 1953. The measure had revoked Truman’s Loyalty Order, reforming its more overt political elements. It remained oppressive, however, in the estimation of many. Critics have written much in recent years of its “immoral or notoriously disgraceful” clause that banned gays from federal employment for decades.28

  The impasse dragged on for more than a year when Hunninen’s lawyer, David Gersch, moved to end her probationary limbo. In a sharply worded letter, he asserted the government’s 1970s security investigation of his client had pivoted on “illegal surveillance” by MPD’s Domestic Intelligence Unit. The lawyer advised FBI officials of the 1978 federal court order that had disbanded the Memphis police unit for its many First Amendment violations. He reminded them that Hunninen’s duties, testing for asbestos and clean indoor air, were hardly matters of national security. “Moreover,” he wrote in October 1985, “the records which the FBI does have regarding Ms. Hunninen are probably over ten years old and concern her domestic political activities, not contacts with foreign powers.”29

  But Hunninen was worn down. Three months later—in January 1986—she resign
ed.

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  IN A POSTMORTEM of her employment, the Justice Department weighed in. Then–Counsel for Intelligence Policy Mary C. Lawton wrote an internal memo advising that, despite Hunninen’s nonsensitive position, a full field investigation would have been warranted had she stayed on. A key consideration involved her “knowing membership in a domestic organization that seeks to overthrow the Government of the United States,” Lawton wrote. Among concerns, records of the FBI’s investigation showed Hunninen had remained active in the Communist Party in Cincinnati until at least 1975. Like the probe in Memphis, however, those records showed nothing explicitly traitorous: she spoke in favor of women’s rights at one meeting; she marched for equality; she attended a convention in Chicago.30

  “It had nothing to do with supporting Russia, with supporting Red totalitarianism,” Hunninen said, reflecting on not just her membership in the Communist Party, which she said lasted a year and a half or less, but the larger experience of communist activists in Memphis. “The only reason I joined the Communist Party was they were the only ones standing up against racism.”

  She remains deeply embittered toward the FBI—and Withers.

  “This man has ruined my life. He has ruined my life,” Hunninen said after reviewing records detailing Withers’s repeated reporting to the FBI.

  “Betrayal? Betrayal isn’t even the word. I have been scarred for life.”31

  *1 The settlement records show Withers passed phone numbers to the FBI frequently between 1961 and 1973. Incidents involving the Invaders are discussed in chapters 22–24, including one in which Withers gave Lawrence the organization’s official notebook with pages of phone numbers.

  *2 Lawrence wrote in longhand on a form FD-340, or evidence slip, that Withers shot the photos on November 29, 1968. Though the slip references twenty photos, the government released a single picture to the author that Withers shot that day, a grainy photo of Hunninen’s left profile.

  *3 The April 19, 1971, report helps illustrate the breadth of Withers’s informing. Starting with an FBI form FD-306, or “Cover Sheet for Informant Report or Material,” the report gives updates on a range of leftist and militant groups Withers followed, including the National Welfare Rights Organization, the Young Workers Liberation League, and the Black Panther Party. Though the FBI fought efforts by the author in his lawsuit to release serial numbers from Withers’s informant file, this report lists the corresponding serial in Withers’s file: 170-70-808. That means this report appears as the 808th in his file. An FD-306 filed in November 1975 shows that the number of reports in Withers’s file reached 893. The actual number of reports likely is higher. The FBI started its 170 “extremist informant” classification in 1964. The number of reports involving Withers before that, between 1958 and 1963, is unknown.

  21.

  THE RISE OF THE INVADERS: COINTELPRO, THE MEDIA, AND THE FBI

  WINTER 2010

  AN OLD MAN IN A wheelchair wobbled down the linoleum hallway as the explosive reports of a dry cough resonated from a distant room around the corner. This is the Americare nursing home, once the notorious Oakville Sanatorium. Now it was home to one of Memphis’s most feared denizens of the late 1960s, Black Power militant Charles Cabbage.

  “I really thought we were going to succeed, overthrow the United States government,” he told me as he sat in bed wearing just a hospital gown. “At that time in history it needed it.”

  He was sixty-five now and in failing health. His right leg had been amputated below the knee as a result of diabetes. His tired face sagged from years of hard living—he was but a wisp now. In five months he’d be dead. But back in 1968 teams of undercover police treated him as a legitimate threat.

  As cofounder of the Invaders, a homegrown Black Power group styled after the militant H. Rap Brown’s SNCC and influenced by Oakland’s Black Panthers, he spread the gospel of black separatism. He urged young African American men to tear up draft cards and boycott the “white man’s war” in Vietnam. He had a much-publicized summit meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., at the height of the sanitation strike, when the leader of the nonviolent movement tried to rein him in. He was incorrigible. He studied books on Marx and Mao, talked revolution, even handed out leaflets with instructions for making the street fighters’ weapon of choice, the Molotov cocktail.

  He was mostly talk.

  If Charles Laverne “Cab” Cabbage ever shot or killed a man, there’s no record of it. Murder wasn’t in him. But many misdeeds short of it were.

  His life on the wrong side of the law started as a matter of principle. Prosecuted by the federal government for evading the draft, Cab turned to street crime. A gifted athlete who’d played basketball at Memphis’s Carver High School before attending Morehouse College in Atlanta where he was radicalized, he was a natural leader: smart, articulate, blessed with a hearty sense of laughter. During our visit he joked of running for the nursing home’s resident council. “They do not want me on their board,” he giggled. But there was a dark side, too. He smiled coyly as he recalled his efforts to “organize” the hustlers, thieves, and gamblers on Beale Street, to enlist them as soldiers in the movement. What he managed to do was to build his own lengthy rap sheet for burglary, carrying a pistol, and unseemly conduct.

  “I basically was a pimp,” he confessed. “I fell in with the Beale Street crowd. Image went to shit.”1

  I had come here to see Cab with Coby Smith, who cofounded the Invaders with Cab in 1967. Smith had been giving me a tour of his old haunts, and Cab, his old friend, was a must-see. The two couldn’t have been more different: Cab lean and tall; Smith short and stocky. They differed philosophically, too. Like Cabbage, Smith’s activism grew from his opposition to the war. But as elements of the Black Power movement trended away from the struggle for equality, toward separatism and violence, Smith pulled back. He focused on personal advancement. He was among the first black students to attend Memphis’s elite Southwestern College, and he later moved north to pursue a doctorate in education.

  His studies just might have saved him from Cab’s fate—and the fate of many others in the Invaders.

  “You thought you were paranoid. Everybody’s after you,” Smith recalled of the forces that drove him from the Black Power movement. He feared the Invaders’ more militant wing, which emulated radicals like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. He feared the police more. At one point he thought he was marked for assassination. “A friend told me, ‘All the police got a picture of Coby and Cab.’ He said, ‘Man, the police are taking pictures of you and Cab out of trees.’ ”

  The Invaders have been lionized in recent years, celebrated as young, angry freedom fighters battling oppression. Indeed, the group made significant contributions by raising awareness of police brutality, poverty, and black pride. Yet its alter ego, the much-feared street gang, is largely overlooked. Not everyone who was an Invader was a crook, but many were. Elements within the informal group, which included scores of youths, set buildings on fire, extorted tribute from businessmen, intimidated newsmen, and physically beat rivals senseless. One of Cab’s closest friends in the Invaders went to prison for robbery. Three others were convicted for the sniper wounding of a Memphis police officer. Many more did jail time for drug possession, thievery, and a range of minor offenses.2

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  THOUGH THE INVADERS were deeply flawed in their own right, the truth is the FBI targeted them for destruction. In close cooperation with the Memphis Police Department, Bill Lawrence and his colleagues at the Bureau infiltrated the Invaders with as many as five informants and undercover MPD officers. It’s believed, though unproved, that at least a share of the Invaders’ criminal acts were provoked or encouraged by one or more of these operatives. This much is certain: the FBI fed a flow of detail on the Invaders’ transgressions to the news media as a counterintelligence tactic intended to undercut the group’s support in the black community. The agency placed Cab and Coby on it
s Security and Agitator indices, targeting them for special attention as enemies of the state. It unsuccessfully lobbied the Justice Department to prosecute the Invaders’ leaders for sedition. More troubling, the FBI aimed its campaign of dirty tricks at law-abiding moderates who so much as sympathized with the Invaders.

  Much of what the FBI learned about the group came from its prized informant in the black press, Ernest Withers.

  Cab and Coby never knew it, but Withers—a virtual father figure to the young militants—informed on them, too. Between 1966 and 1969, as he worked to gain the trust of key players in the blossoming Black Power movement, Withers passed as many as seventy-three photos of the two activists to the FBI along with oral intelligence documenting their activities—details contained in eighty-seven separate reports. Much of the information he shared was aimed at Cabbage’s dereliction and Smith’s outspokenness.

  “He was a dear friend,” Cab said when asked about an old Withers photo he’d saved. A grainy black-and-white, it was propped up in his hospital room’s windowsill, one of Cab’s few remaining possessions. Taken in 1968, it depicted a young Cabbage on his feet at a church rally, angrily confronting one of the mainstream leaders of the Memphis sanitation strike. As Cab recalled it, he was accusing union leader Jessie Epps of stealing donations intended for the striking garbagemen. Withers captured the moment.

  Withers was always there: through wit and charm, he found a front-row seat at the Invaders’ clandestine meetings at their office on Vance Avenue, where the photographer served as an adviser to the group. He developed personal relationships with several of the young men, listening to their complaints, helping them work through troubles, even providing small cash loans and gifts to some.

  But all those pictures made some suspicious. Though he got over it, there was a time when Cab, too, wondered about the loyalties of his older photographer friend.