Objective: Neutralize
We have seen, earlier in this chapter, how the FBI was willing, way back in the 1950s, to violate the alleged constitutional rights of Black religious groups and leaders. If the FBI was willing to go to such lengths to undermine groups such as these, how did the agency regard the constitutional rights of Black militants?
As we shall see, the FBI fought them with a viciousness that has few parallels and with a lawlessness that is shocking. The misperception exists that the FBI did not cross the proverbial line, but only solicited violence. The FBI, in fact, solicited, instigated, aided, and abetted the murder of Black political opponents. This seemingly extraordinary claim is made by none other than a twenty- year veteran of the FBI, M. Wesley Swearingen:
Soon after I had been assigned to the Los Angeles racial squad, I was told by a fellow agent, Joel Ash, that another on the squad, Nick Galt, had arranged for Galt's informers in the United Slaves [known popularly as the US organization] to assassinate Alprentice Carter, the Panthers' Los Angeles minister of defense, and John Huggins, the deputy minister of information. Following Galt's instructions, informants George Stiner and Larry Stiner shot them to death on the UCLA campus on January 17, 1969.
I had thought Joel Ash had been kidding me because this was beyond any corruption or wrongdoing that I had witnessed or heard of by FBI agents.
I later reviewed the Los Angeles files and verified that the Stiner brothers were FBI informants .... Hoover wanted the Panthers in jail or dead. That was why he had ordered biweekly reports from the field about the campaign against the Black Panther Party. [35]
According to Swearingen, the FBI "engineered" the Stiner brothers' prison break in 1974 and has protected them to the present (or disposed of them). [36]
The Stiner brothers were but rwo of the snitches the FBI employed to make Hoover's objective to see "the Panthers in jail or dead" a reality.
The Snitch Game
Has there ever been a social movement that tried to transform the status quo that was not undermined by the use (one may even say misuse) of snitches? As we have seen in the long, tortured history of slave rebellions, snitches often sold out their fellows and betrayed communal liberation efforts for their own petty interests or because of their servile needs to please "Massa." That compulsion did not end when the formal institution of slavery ended, and it continues into the present era. During the radical 1960s, the reality of governmental infiltration into organizations and collectives was ever-present.
Nor did radicals and revolutionaries only have to live with the silent, hidden monitoring of their activities by an unknown observer. For the very nature of the "intelligence" enterprise was its lack of neutrality and its nakedly martial character. It was, in essence, a form of social, political, and economic warfare -- an active campaign of State intrusion and antagonism, with clear objectives: to, in words drawn from FBI files, "disrupt," "discredit," and "neutralize" radical and especially Black nationalist (in COINTELPRO-ese "Black Hate") groups. In practice, this meant any group that disagreed with prevailing government policies on war, civil rights, Black empowerment, poverty, women's rights, and so forth.
What does this mean in the real world, where terms like neutralize have a ... well, neutral, meaning?
If American history is any indication, bureaucratic terms and phrases often obscure far more than they reveal when they relate to State actions and intentions. In this context, where radical was but a synonym for subversive (or, in the now dated argot of the era, Communist-inspired), one who was deemed radical was considered a State enemy and could be treated accordingly.
An informant was often far more than one who merely provided the State with information on those classified as targets. His (or her) job was often to disrupt the normal functioning of organizations with a variety of tactics -- creating dissension, lying, trickery, misdirection, and, if all else failed, violence (the elimination of targets by internal and external means).
The First Snitch
Before the Black Panther Party had been in existence for a year, a young man joined who would be the first of many who would be swayed from defending the Party's program and interests and be persuaded to disrupt them instead.
Several courses shy of his law degree, Earl Anthony claimed to be the "eighth member" of the Party, when it was a tiny, regional group that could fill an efficiency apartment. [37]
When Anthony reported to his draft board in Van Nuys, California, he did so adorned in full BPP uniform and regalia. There he read a statement that warned, in no uncertain terms, that to draft him into the Vietnam War meant an eruption of a battlefield rebellion by a man who described himself as a "Communist" and a sworn member of "the Armed Revolutionary Black Panther Party." [38] Lest they missed his message, he became rather explicit:
If they do send me to Vietnam, I will shoot my lieutenant and sergeant in the head once we get into the field, and escape over to the North Vietnamese. So I am telling the draft board ...Hell, no, I won't go ... " [39]
The five middle-aged white men on his draft board thought that perhaps Mr. Anthony was not the ideal candidate for the war then raging in Indochina and quickly dismissed him with no more questions.
Shortly after joining the Party, Anthony met two friends from law school who told him the people he was around were "Communists," as if to warn him. While Anthony didn't have to worry about the Vietnam War, his erstwhile "friends" from the FBI were another matter.
A couple of weeks later, near the end of August, I was paid a surprise visited [sic] to my San Francisco apartment by Robert O'Connor and Ron Kizenski. No longer were we playing the "buddy buddy" rules. They were all business this time. They came right to the point: I was under investigation for the bombing of the Van Nuys draft board. I was stunned. Not only did I know nothing about the bombing, I hadn't even been told or heard on the news that the place had been bombed.
Of course they said they didn't believe me, but would offer me a deal. They would not charge me if I would become an informant for the FBI inside the Black Panther Party. I started laughing, and instantly O'Connor threw a right fist upside my jaw, knocking me against the wall. Kizenski grabbed me, and O'Connor threw a series of rights and lefts, knocking me unconscious.
When I regained consciousness, they were still there, sitting down with guns drawn on me. Kizenski said something about them being Vietnam vets and that they didn't like my "smartass" attitude. They proposed their deal to me again. They would get the charges of bombing my draft board dropped, because no one was killed, if I became an FBI informant-agent-provocateur inside the Black Panther Party.
I agreed and as far as I know, became the first of dozens of Black Panthers who were to accept the same type of deal from the COINTELPRO division. Still others became local police informants. There were soon so many of us that we were informing on each other. [40]
Anthony claims he was sent down to organize the Los Angeles chapter of the BPP and was instructed by his handlers at the FBI to exacerbate discord between the newly organized Panther chapter and the US organization.
When rumors of his complicity led to charges of snitching for the FBI, Anthony hastily left the organization and began his government- supported career as author and playwright. The government sought to use him as an influential figure in the Black cultural scene, both as informant and as spokesman.
The path to informant/agent provocateur was frequently similar to Anthony's case. People facing serious jail terms came to an accommodation with the FBI and entered into a devil's bargain with the State. And as the evidence now overwhelmingly proves, these people didn't merely name names; many of them were asked, instructed, and ordered to cause serious damage to their organizations, and some snitches were government-supported psychopaths, who acted in ways that resulted in destruction and death.
George Sams (a.k.a. "Madman")
Imagine a case where a man viciously tortures and kills another man, and the torturer becomes the State's prime witness. Now imagine in a case holding the very real threat of death in the electric chair, the man testifies against even those who were neither present nor aware of what was happening. It sounds absurd, yet on an early morning in May 1969, the New Haven dailies hit with explosive headlines blaring "8 Panthers Held in Murder Plot." [41]
George Sams, claiming to represent the Central Committee and traveling from branch to branch, appeared in New Haven and accused a new Panther, Alex Rackley, of being an informant. Sams killed Rackley, beating, burning, scalding, and eventually shooting the man over this charge. In fact, it was Sams who was an informant. It wouldn't be long before he would appear in court, pointing the finger of guilt at Bobby Seale, the Party's Chairman, and Ericka Huggins, the grieving widow of Jon Huggins, the Party's Deputy Minister of Information in LA.
According to scholar and playwright Donald Freed, Sams's mysterious appearances across the nation seemed to presage predawn raids by heavily armed city, state, and federal police forces. But for some strange reason, Freed notes, "Sams was never caught; he always managed to leave before the raids were made." In Chicago, Sams reportedly "walked, armed, through the police and FBI lines." [42]
On the stand, however, Sams seemed, well, not just unconvincing, but strangely incoherent. Under examination by defense attorney, Charles Garry, Sams seemed unduly confrontational and somewhat given to going off on tangents:
Q: How old are you, Sir?
A: What did you say, Mr. Garry? What did you say?
Q: May the question be read back?
A: ... Today I became 25 years old.
Q: ... Before May 19, 1969, weren't you told by Mr. Seale that you are not to be around any of the Panther headquarters?
A: No, Sir.
Q: As a matter of fact, isn't it a fact, Sir, that you always made sure that you were never around when Mr. Seale was around any part of the party functions?
DA: I'm going to object to this.
THE COURT: Sustained.
Q: And isn't it true that on the nineteenth of May, 1969, you didn't go near Mr. Seale because you were afraid that Mr. Seale would know that you were there? .. Now, you said you first went to New York around the 12th of May?
A: Somewhere around the last of April; around the 12th of May ... [Garry shows him McLucas transcript.] ... Late April or May, I'm not sure.
Q: There's not a word in there about "late April" is there?
A: It could have been.
Q: You show me where it says "late April."
A: I'll tell you what, you look around somewhere else, Mr. Garry, and you will find it ... you are asking me specifically what happened, second-for-second ... I didn't keep up with the days, you know.
Q: Didn't you used to use heroin?
A: When I was about twelve, yes.
Q: Is it true that you said, "I have every intention of destroying the Party, the Party, period?"
A: No, Sir.
Q: So, if it's in this tape recording of yours, that's an incorrect transcription, is it?
THE WITNESS: Could I have some water?
Q: Are you taking Thorazine?
A: I don't know, Mr. Garry. I just go up to the Medic room and tell them, you know, describe to the doctor that I can't sleep, I'm suffering from some migraine headaches. And the doctor prescribes something for me, I don't go into asking him what he's giving me. And if he give me any drugs, and if it's too powerful -- I think I have it in the record to the institution that I don't want any drugs. So the doctor just give me something to go to sleep. They don't work.
THE WITNESS: ... I have nicknames, like Crazy George, Madman, Detroit George -- several names -- I had the name Dingee Swahoo, which was an African name.
THE COURT: Dingee what?
THE WITNESS: Dingee Swahoo.
THE COURT: All right.
THE WITNESS: It's an African name, and I had the name that Chairman Bobby and David Hilliard gave me, which was Madman No. 1, which was in San Francisco.... [43]
In a matter of minutes, Sams, the state's star witness, had admitted that he might be using the powerful mind-bending psychotropic medication Thorazine, offered a dizzying array of aliases, [44] and would, within moments, launch into a bizarre attack on Garry, which, when the attorney invites his response, claims that Garry is a secret member of the Party's highest executive body, the Central Committee. [45]
Sams did not help his case when he added that some of the other names he was known by were, "No. 1 Agent," "Rats," and "Snitch." [46]
This, in a torture-murder case, was the best the State could offer.
Before the trial had ended, the elusive Huey P. Newton would visit New Haven, speak at Yale, and sit in at the trial of his fellow comrades. Huey would ask the people's "pardon" for "our inexperience" for even allowing Sams in their presence and lamented the fact that one as ill as he was couldn't even get true psychological treatment in a society "as deprave? as America." He did not hate the man, Newton explained; rather, he pitied him. [47]
Seale was acquitted and Huggins's trial resulted in a hung jury as she would have been acquitted by ten of the jurors. Having performed so poorly and failed in this attempt to cripple the Black Panther Party, Sams was sentenced to life in prison for the torture-murder of Alex Rackley.
Louis Tackwood
Few snitches played the extended, double-edged role of Agent/ Double Agent as did Louis Tackwood. As an informant formally deployed by the local Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS), Tackwood had his hands in over a dozen area cases and worked to imprison and entrap many on the periphery of the Black Panther Party. The CCS was the LAPD equivalent of the Red Squad; a sort of local COINTELPRO unit. While not a Party member, like Sams or Anthony, he served to destabilize support groups.
Unlike Anthony, his predecessor, Louis came from a broken, utterly poor family. Raised by his grandmother in Louisiana, his family joined the swelling exodus from the South to the North and the West. Poverty contributed to his lumpen survival choices, and he began adulthood as an active gangster. As he entered into a life of petty crime, he learned he had the gift of gab -- a quality that would come in handy in the dark and deceitful world of domestic spycraft as an informant agent provocateur for the LAPD.
Tackwood provides some insight into the complex characters that are sometimes drawn to the snitch game: their attraction to officialdom and their concomitant revulsion at their betrayal of their peers. When at the height of his powers, Tackwood became, what must be a rarity in his chosen field, a double agent who tried to play both sides of the fence -- snitch on the movement and snitch on the cops. That said, Tackwood took a perverse pleasure and pride in the role he played for the CCS. As he describes his introduction to the CCS, he reveals his greed and, indeed, his "professional jealousy" at other snitches:
My first meeting was held at the Glass House [Tackwood's name for CCS HQ in Central LA] on the third floor when I met the head man in charge of a new department called Criminal Conspiracy Section. His name is Lieutenant Keel. His partner was a Sgt. Sherrett. Before they started talking, they gave me a hundred dollars. Lt. Keel said, "Listen, man, you're just the man we want. You have all the experience we need. Stop working for S.I.I. [Tackwood originally informed for the LAPD's Special Identity and Investigations unit], and come to work for us." I said, "Well, yeah, the money looks good. Who are you?" Keel said, "Criminal Conspiracy Section." I found out later that's just what they're doing too. They spend all their time cooking up criminal conspiracies against militants, particularly groups like the Panthers, Angela Davis, and people like that. [48]
As an SII snitch, Tackwood had worked on a variety of cases, but as a CCS operative, his targets became the leading Black activist figures in California -- the entire state -- wherever his expertise was in demand. According to Tackwood, the role he performed exceeded the usual snitch-informant gig:
I served as a key instrument to these conspiracies, as did Melvin Smith and lots of others. They elevated a select number of informers to the level of agents. They no longer called us informers but special agents who were paid a lot of money for our assignments. One of the early agents to go to work for the special department was Melvin Smith, better known as Cotton, third man in command of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers. Supposedly, the man in charge of weapons, yeah, he was their weapons expert. He's the one who brought the automatic weapon to the Panther office the day before the raid. It was in his hands all the time when the shootout took place.
A select group; that's what we were. We were an elite corps. Everything looked great. [49]
When Tackwood nonchalantly strolled into the offices of radicals affiliated with a group calling itself the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee (CRIC) and openly confessed to his role in conspiracies involving radical and revolutionary political groups in California, their minds were blown. They actually couldn't bring themselves to believe the guy (given the FBI's actions, people were quite paranoid). They suspected, given the times, that their tall, lean, Afroed Black visitor was trying to set them up for a bust. Though they taped his claims he sensed they didn't believe him, so he promptly picked up the phone, dialed the Glass House, and spoke conspiratorially with an LAPD sergeant -- they laughed about one of their recent capers.
Still unconvinced, the radicals contacted the press, which had the resources and contacts to check the man's stories out. Shortly thereafter, they heard back from their press contacts (for Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times) that this guy was the genuine article. One press investigator found a parole officer's report that declared Tackwood was a reliable police informant; another traced his long criminal record, and marveled at the short time served. His name turned up in a slew of cases, not only those of political activists and revolutionaries, but average, everyday cases, with some of the "convicted" on the state's Death Row.
Why did he come to CRIC? Why now? It seemed that a recent police raid on Black Panther offices was one important factor. The December 8, 1969 raid was an urban war that lasted for hours. Tackwood, looking at the treatment of "Cotton" Smith, armed with the weapon that justified the raid, believed that the police tried to kill Smith, as well as Deputy Defense Minister Geronimo ji-Jaga and all the other Panther leaders during the raid. Tackwood reasoned that if the police would kill one of their highest placed agents, like Cotton, then he would fare little better when they wanted to make him disappear.
In any event, Tackwood's timing was exquisite: the LA District Attorney was trying the caged Panthers for their roles in the December 1969 raid, and was presenting Melvin "Cotton" Smith as a witness as if he had a genuine change of heart, and wasn't, in fact, a paid police informant placed in the Party to destroy it from within. When defense lawyers for the Panther 13 received transcripts of Tackwood's revelations about Cotton, the case against them collapsed like a punctured balloon. The jury acquitted the Panthers of all major charges.
When the CCS learned their prize pigeon had sung to the movement, they hatched an elaborate plan to bring him back to their nest. They simply busted him. They knew that a snitch's greatest fear was prison, and so they left him sitting in jail for several days until he figured out the message.
After three days, they came to him with a form of redemption: set up his confederates in CRIC by claiming that they conspired to steal police documents. Not just any documents. They wanted him to testify that they were stealing LAPD identification papers to use to kill a number of cops. As Tackwood had crossed them, they reasoned, they would use him to double-cross his new found allies at CRIC. To make the ruse work, they had to set up others to give the alleged conspiracy legitimacy. Tackwood, ever the opportunist, seemed to get into the groove:
That night around eleven o'clock, C.C.S. dropped me off at Newton Street [an LA police precinct]. There were only a few people there that time of night. I walked in and tell the cat I work for C.C.S., give him my code name, the whole shot, and I needed some money. The guy goes through all the motions, calls C.C.S., everything. They tell him to give me everything I need.
No matter what it took, they should go out and arrest these people. Man, the dude snapped to attention when he heard that. There were six cops there just bullshitting on a coffee break. He broke in and told them, "Hey, go with this man."
On the way down to the house, they picked up some more men. They didn't know who was, just that they were to take orders from me. We set it up real nice. Cordoned off both ends of the street and eight came with me.
We walked up to the back apartment building and I knocked. When the lady asked who it was, I said, 'The police." You should hear every apartment door in the building slam shut. So I motion to the cops who came over, cocked their guns, told me to stand back and kicked the door in. We got inside but I didn't know which apartment Roy lived in. There were four of them. So, four cops, guns drawn, line up in front of each door, and bust in. There were some old people in one, two were empty, and Roy was in bed with his old lady.
Cop says, "Your name Roy, dude?"
Dude says, "Yeah."
"Well, you better not breathe." He turns to me and asks, "Is this the one?"
I say, "Yeah," but I don't know, I ain't never seen the dude before.
Cop said, "We're looking for a briefcase and some papers, right? ... " Of course we couldn't find the papers so the cops asked me "What shall we do now?"
"Arrest him," I said. "Handcuff him and take him."
"Her too?"
"No, she ain't the right one." [50]
Of course, there were no papers. Roy was merely a fall guy, a pimp, who had enemies among the police. The CCS plan was coming together, and warrants were being prepared for CRIC members that would demolish their attempts to publicize Tackwood's tales of government perfidy and political conspiracies. But Tackwood, in his own words, crossed them. [51] As a veteran of such proceedings, he knew that one thing was vital: he had to show up in court. Instead, he went to ground, and the case crumbled. The lesson of Cotton was not lost on him; he feared the CCS would betray him, so he flipped first.
The details of his last job, not to mention the lengths to which the police went to retain his services, to frame a pimp they didn't like, or to entrap and frame the CRIC activists, read like a television script. Except, of course, this was not TV. It was real life, a life concocted by State forces employed in political policing and repression, joined with the selfish, twisted motives of the bane of all progressive movements: the snitch. Tackwood was, to be sure, a piece of work, but his achievements would be dramatically, and tragically, exceeded by another member of the snitch club.
William O'Neal
In the history of snitches, informants, and agents provocateurs, William O'Neal stands alone. A young Black man facing relatively minor charges of car theft and impersonating a federal officer, O'Neal was propositioned by Roy Mitchell, a Chicago FBI agent assigned to that city's Racial Matters Squad. Promised a monthly stipend and the dropping of all charges, O'Neal took the bait and made his way to Black Panther Party headquarters at 2350 Madison on the first day it officially opened and promptly submitted his application.
O'Neal was accepted and got in on the ground floor of the chapter's growth and soon emerged as a powerful and trusted cadre, rising to the ironic rank of Director of Security. He was assigned to be Chairman Fred Hampton's personal bodyguard. From this perch of power, the federally paid stool pigeon proceeded to sabotage every chapter activity that he could.
When Hampton was involved in tense, heated talks with members of the vast, well-armed Blackstone Rangers gang and the fledgling BPP was on the brink of effecting a merger that would have radicalized and drafted over three thousand youth into the Party, O'Neal intervened. O'Neal told his paymasters of the talks, and, as we have seen, a COINTELPRO letter was sent to Jeff Fort, then head of the gang claiming "there's supposed to be a hit out on you." [52] Several months later the FBI director continued to sew discord by authorizing the following letter:
Brother Hampton:
Just a word of warning. A Stone friend tells me [name deleted] wants the Panthers and is looking for somebody to get you out of the way. Brother Jeff [Fort] is supposed to be interested. I'm just a black man looking for blacks working together, not more of this gang banging. [53]
Thanks to intelligence provided by O'Neal, the FBI intervened and derailed this peace conference. It was not sufficient for the FBI to prevent these groups from coming together; O'Neal, perhaps in gratitude for a March 11 pay raise, personally instigated an armed clash between the two on April 12, 1969. [54]
Urged on by his handlers, O'Neal tried bolder and far more dangerous ways of sabotaging the BPP. At Mitchell's direction, O'Neal proposed a "security plan" that included nerve gas and the construction of an electric chair for Party backsliders. The Chairman and the Deputy Defense Minister, Bobby Rush, strongly opposed this idea and nixed it. When they were out of the office, O'Neal bullwhipped a Party member whom he accused of being an "informer" against the organization.
By March 1969, O'Neal and his FBI handlers had concocted a plan to acquire an aircraft or a mortar to "bomb City Hall." Again Hampton and Rush rejected his "plan."
Several months later, when FBI agents raided the office on Monroe Street, it was because their agent provocateur had acquired arms illegally and stashed them at the office. Their other justification for the raid was because they were allegedly searching for fugitive (and FBI informant) George Sams. Well-publicized in June 1969, the raid was designed to isolate the BPP and gave the State the excuse to destroy Party property and try to destroy its hold on the radical imagination. At the time of the raids, Chicago's Special Agent in Charge, Marlin Johnson, was receiving directives from Hoover commanding him to order his minions to "destroy what the [BPP] stands for" and "eradicate its 'serve the people' programs." [55]
O'Neal would later provide the FBI with a floor plan of the Black Panther apartment where Hampton, his fiancee, Deborah Johnson, and other Party members slept during the night. Informed by O'Neal that arms were stored there, the FBI and its confederates in the state's Gang Intelligence Unit (GIU), the Illinois version of the Red Squad, had their pretexts for a raid. The FBI would recruit the shooters for this raid, and they had one primary objective -- to kill Fred Hampton. They learned (again through O'Neal) that Hampton was so impressive that he was going to be elevated to the Party's Central Committee in California and be named Chief of Staff in place of David Hilliard. The FBI was determined to scuttle this plan, for they well knew Hampton's organizing abilities.
In the early morning hours of December 4, 1969, the raid would be accomplished: Fred Hampton would be slain, Mark Clark would also be killed, and half a score of other Panthers would be wounded or imprisoned.
In Philadelphia, Captain Reggie called Rosemari Mealy to find out if any members of her radical Quaker commune were traveling to Chicago, and whether several Panthers could join them to represent the chapter in Fred's honor.
A group of us squeezed into a gray Saab and made the long trip to Chicago. Among those en route were Rosemari, OffIcer of the Day Rene Johnson, and myself.
When we arrived at the office, we were walked over to the apartment and saw the holes making the walls look like Swiss cheese. We saw the mattress, caked with blood, where Fred and his fiancee lay that fateful night, the bullet holes lining the walls, tactile markers of government hate.
Before the month had passed, O'Neal was sent his $300 bonus as a reward for a job well-done. [56] After O'Neal's betrayals, the Chicago Black Panther Party chapter, ripped apart by treachery, was never the same, and one of the most promising Panthers in the nation had his destiny torn from him.
In 1990, O'Neal committed suicide by running in front of a speeding car on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago. Hampton had become immortalized into legend as a loving "servant of the People," and O'Neal, as a snitch, was reviled.
Protecting the Traitors
It would be misleading to suggest that snitches somehow got their comeuppance after their startling betrayals of the Party or their people. Truth be told, most did not. Some went on to public careers of influence and power, with none (but the espionage agencies) the wiser to their true identities or their treason to their fellows. Anthony, for example, wrote a book, Picking Up the Gun, that was widely seen as an insider's story that panned the Party as a violent, Communist-funded group. Readers of this tell-all weren't told quite all -- they did not know that the author was an FBI informant and agent provocateur. He wrote and produced several plays that were performed in the Bay Area and New York, yet it is doubtful that his audiences knew the undercover role this Black cultural artist was performing.
George Sams's "life" sentence was decidedly short-lived. He was granted parole after four years in the joint and promptly went out and committed several other violent crimes.
Most snitches remain blacked-out smudges on faded FBI files, unknown to those they betrayed and those presumably closest to them. Anthony, for example, hid his snitch background for decades.
Every Panther, upon acceptance into the organization, was instructed to never speak with the FBI or any other agency. There was simply nothing to talk about. Some Panthers and others on the party's periphery ignored that sage advice and commenced making deals with the devil. Such decisions led to disaster, destruction, and death.
For the centuries-long, hard movement of Black people for liberation, the role of snitches made that trek all the more arduous.
Media Wars
What began in Hoover's fevered imagination quickly took root in local and regional police departments, which viewed the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat" in their respective jurisdictions. With FBI intelligence and assistance, local police began to formulate and execute their own actions against these perceived "threat[s]." There was scarcely a city with a functioning BPP chapter that did not experience trumped-up arrests, police raids, fire fights, and, in some instances, the death or wounding of Party members.
However, what made these raids and attacks acceptable to the public was the role of the American media. In a campaign of demonization and stigmatization, the FBI, working through its media "newsfriendlies," would circulate rumor, slander, innuendo, and lies to further COINTELPRO objectives -- to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the Black Panther Party and similar black nationalist, radical formations. [57] This negative reporting, which projected the Party as racist, violent, or criminal in nature, served to justify virtually any repression that the State could dream up. Such treatment incensed New York Panther Assata Shakur:
What made me maddest was the media treatment of the BPP, which gave the impression that the Party was racist and violent. And it worked. The pigs would burst into a Panther office, shoot first, and ask questions later. The press always reported that the police had "uncovered" a large arsenal of weapons. Later, when the "arsenal" turned out to be a few legally registered rifles and shotguns, the press never printed a word. [58]
While negative media accounts angered Panthers and served to legitimize State attacks on them, the press reports and consequent repression had other, unanticipated effects: it deepened and broadened support among Blacks. Historian Howard Zinn notes that, ''A secret FBI report to President Nixon in 1970 said 'a recent poll indicates that approximately 25% of the black population has a great respect for the Black Panther Party, including 43% of blacks under 21 years of age.'" [59]
A contemporary public opinion poll for the Harris organization revealed far greater support. Asked whether the Panthers gave Black persons an individual sense of pride by standing up for the rights of Blacks, 66 percent agreed. When asked, "Even if you disagree with the views of the Panthers, has the violence against them led you to believe that Black people must stand together to protect themselves?" a whopping 86 percent of black respondents were in agreement. [60]
Although such advances came in result to tremendous loss, they show a significant percentage of Black Americans were becoming open to the positions of the Black Panther Party.
While Blacks may have felt a growing solidarity in the face of the fierce and deadly State repression of the Party, their white fellow citizens did not share their views. Whites saw it as something happening to "them," not to "us." Black feminist scholar Joy James notes:
However, no concerted national outrage emerged in response to the state's violent repression of black insurgency....The lack of concern was partly tied to ignorance and partly the consequence of negative media depictions of black revolutionaries. [61]
James then cites the 1976 Church Committee report:
The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public's perception of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory information to the press, either anonymously or through "friendly" news contacts. [62]
The role of the media has often been overlooked in the police-Panther conflict, especially during the extremely bloody 1968-70 period. By the end of 1970 an estimated twenty-eight armed clashes occurred, and an estimated nineteen Panthers were slain by state forces. [63] The news reports which, no matter the circumstances, inevitably supported the government (consider the murder of Fred Hampton), bespeak a profound conservatism of the press that prevails in spite of any given reporter's political views. Journalism professor Jack Lule, who uses the influence of social and cultural myths to analyze the media comes to a similar conclusion:
Coverage of radical politics thus raises difficult issues. Social institutions -- including the news -- might be under violent attack. Publishers, editors, and reporters, no different from most people who grow up in a society, often share most of society's cultural and political beliefs. How do newspapers respond to people who challenge fundamental beliefs?
Some writers already have looked at this issue. They harshly criticize news coverage of radical politics. They argue that news coverage seeks to delegitimize and disarm perceived threats to social order. They find that although journalists themselves are often seen as politically liberal in their beliefs, the news media are a conservative ideological force. News media serve, in this view, as "agents of social control" who preserve "the status quo by providing unsympathetic coverage to those whose behavior threatens it .... "
Black political leaders in particular attract negative coverage, critics say. The news degrades black activists and situates moderate black leaders on more "legitimate" middle ground. From coverage of Malcolm X to that of the Black Panthers, of Louis Farrakhan, and of Al Sharpton, stories of black leaders who espouse controversial views reflect a troubled relationship among the news, race, and politics. [64]
The acclaimed Black novelist and former journalist Ishmael Reed decries this deep bias in favor of the State, and deep antipathy against African Americans as a kind of "White nationalist journalis[m]." [65]
The role of the American media is reminiscent of that played by the radical press in eighteenth century, pre-Revolutionary France. In that era, the government was said to be comprised of three estates: the monarchy, the nobility, and the elite of the Church. The press was so powerful, so influential, however, that it came to be seen as a branch of government, or, as it was called, the fourth estate.
The American media plays a somewhat similar role by supporting the status quo, no matter what. When the State commits crimes, such acts are not so described, but are referred to as "excesses." While the toll of assassinations, exile, and incarcerations have garnered some attention from radical scholars, there is little research on how FBI, and local police actions, caused activists to be fired, to be denied employment, to lose housing, scholarships, and other social provisions. How many suffered divorce? Suicide?
Jean Seberg is perhaps little known in this age of actress-celebrities like Jennifer "J.Lo" Lopez, or Madonna. Ms. Seberg was an artist of some note in the 1960s, but the FBI was more interested in her political sympathies. When she dared make contributions to the Black Panther defense fund, she earned the twisted ire of the FBI, which launched into a vicious media attack.
Swearingen reports the agency went ballistic when it suspected the actress of having an affair with a high-ranking Panther member. He later reported, in a sworn affidavit, that the racism of his fellow FBI workers was intense, and it compelled them to the unthinkable. "In the view of the Bureau," he later related,
Jean was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, the BPP ... The giving of her white body to a black man was an unbearable thought for many of the white agents. An agent was overheard to say, a few days after I arrived in Los Angeles from New York, "I wonder how she'd like to gobble up my dick while I shove my .38 up that black bastard's ass." [66]
The FBI contacted its media "friendlies" to issue gossip items about her. The Los Angeles Times printed the gossip, and Seberg, who, as the FBI knew, was emotionally unstable, went into a terrible emotional spiral. She was about six months pregnant when she attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills. This caused her to go into labor prematurely and the fetus died. The shattered woman attempted suicide annually around the time of the miscarriage, and finally succeeded in 1979. Her ex-husband, Romaine Gary, later took his own life.
Uncovering COINTELPRO
The American people did not learn about the infamous COINTELPRO violations because of the investigative prowess of the vaunted press. No government agency sounded the alarm on this outrageous and long-standing program, which reveals the government's utter disregard for the Constitution and other laws. The Senate, with all its pomp and ceremony, didn't stop it.
The acronym COINTELPRO would not be known to us today were it not for the efforts of a secret group of radicals who broke into an FBI storage facility in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971. This anonymous group of antiwar and anti-imperialist activists broke in, under cover of night, photocopied the flies that they found there, and later mailed copies to dozens of activists, organizations, and news media. In short, it wasn't "the media" that broke COINTELPRO, but Media.
The group, calling itself the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI, shared an edited representation of their flies with an antiwar periodical called WIN magazine, which devoted an entire issue to the flies, reprinting many of them verbatim. These acts, more than anything else, opened the window of light on the repressive nature of the FBI, the megalomania of Hoover, and the government's secret war against peace and antiwar activists, civil rights organizations, feminists, socialists, Black nationalists, and other social groups.
There are, of course, lessons to be learned from these events. One may not wisely rely on government, nor on other elite, allied agencies, to defend the people from the crimes of government. Further, it takes actions from the outside to reveal what takes place on the inside. This cannot be seriously questioned in light of the Media, Pennsylvania, and the CRIC/Tackwood revelations.
The Media raiders found that the vast majority of FBI efforts were dedicated to the surveillance of political activists, some 40 percent -- the largest single grouping. Thirty percent of the flies were administrative, training, or routine materials; 25 percent of the flies dealt with bank robberies; 20 percent involved murders, rapes, and interstate theft cases; 7 percent dealt with draft resistance- type cases, and 1 percent (1 percent!) dealt with organized crime, primarily gambling-related. [67] This reveals, better than anything, the true nature of the beast.
Consider, as a kind of leitmotif, the case of Dick Gregory, a caustic comedian of the 1960s, who was attracted to the Civil Rights movement and to Martin Luther King. He transformed his performances from racially tinged comedy to socially insightful speeches and once dared to speak out against the violent criminality of the US Mafia. In a Chicago speech, Gregory reportedly stated that the "syndicate" were "the filthiest snakes that exist on this earth." [68] In light of the prominence of the FBI as a major US law enforcement agency, one might think that the heads of the agency would wholeheartedly concur with Gregory's assessment and perhaps even applaud his anticrime sentiments. The Bureau's response, however, was telling.
It came in a memo dated May 5, 1968, where the FBI, calling Gregory a "militant black nationalist," directed its agents to:
Consider the use of this statement in developing a counterintelligence operation to alert [the crime syndicate] La Cosa Nostra (LCN) to Gregory's attack on LCN. It is noted that other speeches by Gregory also contain attacks on the LCN. No counterintelligence action should be taken without Bureau authority. [69]
Affixed to the May memo was a note saying that "Richard Claxton Gregory" had previously referred to the FBI in a derogatory manner (as well as the director, of course). Director Hoover promptly gave his OK to the COINTEL operation, which consisted of anonymous letters routed to various Mafiosi in Chicago, Gregory's hometown. Did the FBI think the Mafia would boycott Gregory's speeches or stop laughing at his jokes?
The FBI, in this and hundreds of other such operations, was fomenting violence between people and hoped that the syndicate would rid them of the "militant black nationalist" who dared to criticize the high lord director.
Senator Walter Mondale put things in frighteningly clear perspective when he opined in the midst of the Church Committee hearings:
We heard that the FBI, to protect the country against those it believed had totalitarian political views, employed the tactics of totalitarian societies against American citizens. We heard that the FBI attempted to destroy one of our greatest leaders in the field of civil rights and then replace him with someone of the FBI's choosing.
From the evidence the committee has obtained, it is clear that the FBI for decades has conducted surveillance over the personal and political activities of millions of Americans. Evidently, no meeting was too small, no group too insignificant to escape their attention ... the FBI created indexes, more commonly called enemies lists, on thousands of Americans, targeted many of the Americans on these lists for special harassment. [70]
One wonders, who were really subversives of American democracy?