by Jay Feldman
Among the most troubling aspects of COINTELPRO-WHG were the numerous instances in which paid FBI informants, with bureau knowledge, approval, and cooperation, worked to incite violence. A stark example took place in Meridian, Mississippi, shortly after midnight on June 30, 1968.
For almost a year, the Meridian-Jackson area had been plagued by a severe wave of anti-Jewish and antiblack bombings. Despite intensive investigation and the existence of a reward fund in the tens of thousands of dollars raised by the Jewish community, the FBI and local law-enforcement agencies were unable to solve the crimes. In desperation, the FBI paid an intermediary to arrange a meeting with two members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a group suspected of committing over three hundred acts of violence, including bombings, burnings, beatings, and nine murders. Bureau agents conspired with Alton Wayne Roberts—who was under a ten-year sentence in the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner—and his younger brother Raymond to set up the bombing of a Jewish businessman’s home, in order to apprehend two other Klansmen suspected of being behind the Meridian-Jackson bombings. The Roberts brothers were paid $36,500 and promised immunity from prosecution in several church bombings, in exchange for arranging the explosion with the two wanted Klansmen, Thomas Albert Tarrants III and Danny Joe Hawkins. FBI agents staked out the targeted home, but at the appointed time Tarrants showed up instead with Kathy Ainsworth, who had no police record and was completely unknown to the FBI. A gun battle broke out, during which Ainsworth was killed and Tarrants wounded. In the ensuing pursuit of Tarrants, a police officer and a bystander were also wounded.
In an editorial about the case, the Los Angeles Times wrote:
The courts have held that in order to capture a suspect the police may help him commit a crime he could otherwise reasonably be expected to commit, but the police may not entrap an innocent person into a crime. What constitutes impermissible entrapment depends on the facts of the case. The Mississippi case, though, raises a moral question that, we submit, is not ambiguous … The authorities stretched beyond acceptable limits the bonds of restraint which the people put upon their government in the interest of the liberty of all citizens.
The Times editorial also made another point:
No matter how great the provocation, the police can never take it on themselves to decide who is guilty, who is innocent; who is to live, and who to die. For, if they should feel free to make such decisions in one place about the Ku Klux Klan—an organization which every liberty-loving person must loathe—might they not feel free to make such decisions about another group in another place, say, for instance, the Black Panthers? Now, there are no doubt many citizens who loathe the Panthers as much as the Klan is loathed. Yet could one therefore advocate that the police resort to such methods in order to quash the Panthers? The very suggestion is repugnant to our concept of liberty.60
In fact, the FBI had been using just “such methods” in a COINTELPRO against the Black Panthers for more than a year, and against other “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” for two and a half years.
* Twelve years later, Sullivan told the Senate investigating committee, “I put in this memorandum what Hoover wanted to hear. He was so damn mad at us … [W]e had to engage in a lot of nonsense which we ourselves did not believe in … or we would be finished” (Church Committee, bk. 3, pp. 107 n. 118, 108).
† A measure of how out of touch with reality the FBI brass was can be inferred from Sullivan’s suggestion of Samuel R. Pierce Jr. as the successor to King once the latter had been discredited. Pierce, a member of a prominent Park Avenue law firm, was a former judge, assistant district attorney for New York City, assistant U.S. attorney, and a Republican. Hoover gave the plan his approval, though Pierce, presumably, had no idea he was being touted as King’s “replacement.”
‡ Years later, Andrew Young described the conference as “a completely nonfunctional meeting” (see “Playboy Interview: Andrew Young,” Playboy, July 1977, p. 75).
§ In one anonymous mailing, postcards were sent to six thousand Klan members, whose names and addresses had been gained from stolen membership lists, with the message “KLANSMEN, trying to hide your identity behind your sheet? You received this. Someone KNOWS who you are!” In another, a letter from “A God-fearing klanswoman” was sent to the wife of a Grand Dragon to inform her that her husband “has been committing the greatest of sins of our Lord for many years. He has … been committing adultery” (both quoted in Donner, Age of Surveillance, pp. 208, 210).
CHAPTER 15
We Never Gave It a Thought
The summer of 1967 was one of violent discontent in black communities across America. More than 150 riots broke out in U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, Rochester, and Tampa. In August, Hoover created two initiatives in response. The first was the establishment of the “Rabble Rouser Index,” a list of the names and background information on “known rabble rousers … who have demonstrated a propensity for fomenting racial disorder.”1* The second was the creation of COINTELPRO–Black Nationalist Hate Groups, announced in a letter from Hoover to twenty-three field offices. The instructions for the program were similar to those of other COINTELPROs, and organizations warranting “intensified attention” included the Congress of Racial Equality, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Nation of Islam, Revolutionary Action Movement, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In addition, specific individuals were singled out, including H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad, and Maxwell Stanford.
The methods used in COINTELPRO-BNHG included the by-now-customary ploys: agents provocateurs, anonymous letters, blackmail, bogus news stories, burglary, defamation of character, derogatory cartoons, disinformation, electronic surveillance, extortion, false identity, forgery, and snitch jackets. FBI agents also encouraged local police to arrest members of targeted groups on little or no evidence, as was the case with the Revolutionary Action Movement in Philadelphia during the summer of 1968. According to an FBI internal memo, Philadelphia police kept RAM leaders in jail for most of the summer by arresting them on every possible charge, until they could no longer afford bail.
A rather more sinister case occurred in Seattle, where in May 1970, at the FBI’s behest, the informer Alfie Burnett attempted to recruit a former member of the Black Panthers to blow up a building. The ex-Panther was unavailable, so Burnett turned to Larry Ward, a twice-wounded, thrice-decorated twenty-two-year-old black Vietnam veteran, offering him $75 to carry out the job. When Ward showed up to plant the bomb, he was killed in a police ambush. “The police wanted a bomber and I got one for them,” said Burnett. “I didn’t know Larry Ward would be killed.” In discussing the case, Seattle’s police intelligence chief, Captain John Williams, insisted, “As far as I can tell, Ward was a relatively decent kid. Somebody set this whole thing up. It wasn’t the police department.”2
Hoover micromanaged COINTELPRO-BNHG, as he did all the other counterintelligence operations, with every proposed action requiring the approval of FBI headquarters before being put into play. From its inception, COINTELPRO-BNHG was also characterized by an underlying racism and nativism that reflected Hoover’s prejudices. Robert Wall, a special agent with the Washington office, later wrote that “the appalling racism of the FBI on every level became glaringly apparent to me.” Driven by this endemic racism, COINTELPRO-BNHG was carried out with a ferocity and brutality unmatched in any of the other COINTELPROs. As Hoover bluntly stated in a follow-up to the memo expanding the operation, “The Negro youth and moderate must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”3
Just as he had in his vendetta against Martin Luther King, Hoover disguised his racist bent behind a declared concern for national security. But as Dr. James Turner, president of the African Heritage Studies Association—then the largest organization of scholars in African and African-Americ
an studies—stated in 1974, the fundamental motivation behind COINTELPRO-BNHG was a “conscious and concerted” effort “to break the momentum developed in black communities.”4
While COINTELPRO-BNHG was an across-the-board attack on emerging African-American awareness and black pride, there was one group that bore the brunt of the assault. The Black Panther Party, which was not even mentioned in the FBI’s original COINTELPRO-BNHG memo, soon became the main focus of the operation. By destroying the Black Panthers, the FBI effectively managed to undermine the entire movement.
Founded in Oakland in 1966 by the Merritt College students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the militant Black Panther Party for Self Defense soon became known for patrolling the high-crime slums of Oakland’s inner-city ghetto in their black berets and black leather jackets, openly bearing firearms. They made a practice of following police cars around the neighborhoods, keeping an eye out for arrests, and advising detainees of their rights. For all their violent tendencies, the Panthers—at least early on—also demonstrated a civic-minded spirit, organizing eviction protests, working with welfare recipients, counseling African-American prisoners, and establishing a free breakfast program that fed thousands of ghetto children daily.
Seale, the party’s chairman, later recalled formulating the Panthers’ platform: “We want power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. We want organized political electoral power. Full employment. Decent housing. Decent education to tell us about our true selves. Not to have to fight in Vietnam. An immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. The right to have juries of our peers in the courts. We summed it up: We wanted land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.”5
From the beginning, the Panthers’ inflammatory rhetoric and street-theater tactics were aimed at grabbing headlines, and on May 2, 1967, they made the front pages of newspapers across the country when about thirty members, including five women, brazenly marched into the California State Capitol brandishing guns and wearing bandoliers of bullets, to protest proposed legislation to outlaw the carrying of a loaded weapon in public. The bill was a transparent attempt to curtail the Panthers’ armed shadowing of police cars in the ghetto. A dozen or more of the group made it into the assembly chamber, where the state legislature was in session. The intruders were ejected by sergeants at arms, but violence was avoided, and the incident thrust the Panthers into the national spotlight.
Six months later, the Black Panthers’ minister of defense, Huey Newton, and a woman companion were stopped by two Oakland policemen at 5:00 a.m. for a routine traffic violation. When Newton got out of his car, there was an exchange of gunfire, and after the smoke cleared, one police officer was dead. Newton and the other officer were wounded, and Newton was jailed on a murder charge.
“Free Huey” now became a rallying cry. At an Oakland rally in February 1968, Stokely Carmichael, the confrontational and controversial head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, appeared along with Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers’ minister of information, who had been paroled after serving nine years on an assault charge and was widely known for his prison memoir, Soul on Ice. In their speeches that day, Carmichael and Cleaver announced the merger of the Black Panther Party and SNCC.
The alliance of the Panthers and SNCC seriously disquieted the FBI, and within weeks the bureau extended COINTELPRO-BNHG to eighteen additional field offices. In the memo announcing the program’s expansion, George C. Moore, head of the Racial Intelligence Section, a new division created to coordinate COINTELPRO-BNHG, listed the long-range goals of the operation. The first was “Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups [that] might be the first step toward a real ‘Mau Mau’ in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.” The rest were:
2. Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position …
3. Prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups … Through counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.
4. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community … [T]o, first, the responsible Negro community. Second … to the white community, both the responsible community and to “liberals” who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist groups simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement …
5. A final goal should be to prevent the long-range growth of black nationalist organizations, especially among youth.6
A month after the Free Huey rally, the Panthers announced their affiliation with the predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party, and Cleaver was nominated to be the PFP’s candidate for president of the United States. Now the FBI had a new concern, as the Panthers were beginning to attract the support of white radicals and anti–Vietnam War activists.
The rise of the black liberation and anti–Vietnam War movements called forth two repressive laws—the Anti-Riot Act of 1968, passed in April, and the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968, passed in June. The former, a provision of the landmark 1968 Civil Rights Act, made it a crime to cross state lines with the intent of inciting a riot or of aiding and abetting a riot. The latter statute was the first law in U.S. history that explicitly legalized electronic surveillance by the federal government.
On April 4, a month after COINTELPRO-BNHG was expanded, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and riots erupted in black communities across the country. On the night of April 6, under circumstances that have never been clearly defined, there was a firefight between Oakland police and more than a dozen Black Panthers. Two policemen and two party members were wounded, as the rest of the Panthers took refuge in a nearby house. Cleaver and the Panthers’ treasurer, Bobby Hutton, who had been the party’s first recruit and at seventeen was the group’s youngest member, holed up in the basement. After a ninety-minute gun battle, police fired tear gas into the house, and Cleaver and Hutton threw their guns out onto the street and emerged in their underwear, hands raised high over their heads. They were immediately surrounded, and the unarmed Hutton was slain by a volley of police bullets. According to the coroner, he was shot at close range at least six times.
At once, the Black Panthers became the primary object on the COINTELPRO-BNHG radar screen. The special agent Wayne Davis of the Washington FBI office later remembered that “there was a great deal of fear about the Panthers’ philosophy … I think that the law enforcement and the government structure saw this as perhaps the beginnings of a breakdown in respect for law enforcement and obedience to the laws—and perhaps the seeds of anarchy.”7
Eight Black Panthers were arrested in connection with the April 6 shoot-out, including Cleaver, whose parole was then revoked, and Chief of Staff David Hilliard. With Hutton dead, and Newton, Cleaver, and Hilliard in custody, the party leadership was decimated, but the attendant publicity also brought with it a spate of new recruits. Soon there were forty chapters throughout the country, and The Black Panther, the party’s weekly newspaper, enjoyed a circulation of 150,000.
In June, Cleaver was released on a writ of habeas corpus, and he took up where he had left off. Embarking on a nationwide speaking tour, he threatened, “Free Huey or the sky’s the limit.”8
Hoover now described the Black Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country … Leaders and representatives of the Black Panther Party travel extensively all over the United States preaching their gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents, but to students in colleges, universities and high schools as well.”9
To intimidate Stokely Carmichael, the FBI contacted his mother to warn
her of a fabricated Black Panther plot to kill her son. Carmichael dissolved his alliance with the Panthers and left the country for Africa.
In September, Newton was sentenced to two to fifteen years for manslaughter. Soon after, Cleaver’s release on parole was overturned, and he was ordered to return to jail in sixty days. At the end of November, he too left the United States.
November also marked the beginning of a vicious FBI campaign to provoke a gang-style war between the San Diego chapter of the Panthers and a rival group, the United Slaves, known as US. Learning of tensions between the two groups, the bureau worked vigorously to inflame hostilities that culminated in several killings.
In January 1969, two Panthers were killed by US members in an incident on the UCLA campus, but in March the two groups attempted to forge a peace accord. Reporting on an April 2, 1969, “friendly confrontation between US and the BPP,” the San Diego field office told FBI headquarters that neither side showed any weapons and that the two groups tried to negotiate their differences.10 Refusing to let the peace process proceed, however, the San Diego office mailed the Panthers a series of cartoons, approved by headquarters, that ridiculed them and appeared to come from US. Within days, the fragile truce between the two groups broke down, violence resumed, and in May another Black Panther was killed.
The San Diego office continued to provoke the situation for months, and boasted to headquarters of the success of its efforts: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continue to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego … [I]t is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.”11
One of the most unsettling of COINTELPRO tactics, the use of agents provocateurs, also played a significant role in the war against the Black Panthers. In New York, a member who was either an FBI agent or an informer reportedly made an unsolicited gift of sixty sticks of dynamite, resulting in the arrest of thirteen Panthers on charges of conspiring to bomb public places. In other instances involving Panthers in New York and Indiana, agents provocateurs purportedly instigated burglaries and robberies, supplying weapons, maps, and getaway cars.