A. The Administration's Propaganda War Against the Panthers:

Making the Political CriminalUpon Richard M. Nixon's election as president in 1968, the administration addressed itself, in the words of former White House Counsel John Dean, to the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.

A "White House Enemies List" was drawn up by officials of the Nixon administration. In its original form, this list contained the names of only a few minority political parties or organizations, among them the Panthers, whom the administration linked with "Hughie [sic] Newton," and "George Wallace" of the American Independent Party. Interestingly, though their expressed ideologies were quite opposite, both organizations shared the common feature of having strong grassroots support and active involvement by [their] members, in contrast to the established Democratic and Republican parties. The Enemies List was then incorporated into a detailed plan, commonly known as the Huston Plan, after its White House designated coordinator, Tom Charles Huston. This plan was approved in 1970 by the former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). It advocated blanket presidential authorization for such practices as wiretapping, mail covers, and black-bag jobs or break-ins. Its main purported function was to improve interagency cooperation among the major intelligence agencies. Although this proposed plan was first approved, but allegedly later disapproved by President Nixon because J. Edgar Hoover decided not to continue to cooperate,' the tactics advocated had already been employed by various federal agencies, particularly the FBI, against the Panthers.

Just why the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies focused early on the Party as an "enemy" organization is not difficult to understand. At the start of World War II, President Roosevelt directed the bureau to refocus its resources on priorities it had purportedly given up in 1924—the investigation of political organizations and affiliations. Distinctions between foreign espionage and domestic dissident groups became blurred during the height of the war; in fact, "vigilance and caution grew into xenophobia and distrust of anyone who veered noticeably from the political mainstream."

The Cold War followed, with President Truman's establishment of the Federal Employee Loyalty Program. The bureau, having built up a large contingent of agents to guard the nation's internal security, channeled them into loyalty/security investigations. Thus, the FBI took on officially "the role of a kind of ideological security police, an arbiter of what was inside the boundaries of legitimate political discourse and what [was] outside." In the absence of any effective challenge to this role, the bureau continued, essentially unabated.

Not surprisingly, when the Panthers became publicly visible in 1967 and 1968, the FBI felt justified, if not compelled, to devote their full panoply of resources to investigating the organization. In part, this was in response to the BPP's ideology. As the chief of the FBI's counterintelligence program admitted in describing the genesis of the program within the bureau that concentrated on the Panthers:

We were trying first to develop intelligence so we would know what                     they were doing [and] second, to contain the threat . . . . To stop the                   spread of communism, to stop the effectiveness of the Communist                     Party as a vehicle of Soviet intelligence, propaganda and agitation.

A more flamboyant assessment was provided by Edward Miller, former assistant director of the FBI in charge of the Intelligence Division, upon his retirement in 1974:

Rome lasted for six hundred years, and we are just coming on to our                 two-hundredth. That doesn't mean that we have four hundred to go.                     We have to step back and look at ourselves protectively. . . . How                       much of this dissent and revolution talk can we really stand in a                         healthy country? Revolutions always start in a small way. ...                               Economic conditions are bad; the credibility of government is low.                     These are the things that the home-grown revolutionary is                                 monitoring very closely. The FBI's attention must be focused on these                 various situations. If it weren't, the Bureau wouldn't be doing its job                     for the American people.... The American people don't want to have                   to fool around with this kind of thing and worry about it; they don't                       want to have to worry about the security of their country. . . . We                       must be able to find out what stage the revolution is in.

The FBI was also aware of and disturbed by the Panther's efforts to build community institutions. Indeed, the one survival program that seemed most laudatory—that of providing free breakfasts to children—was pinpointed by J. Edgar Hoover as the "real longrange threat to American society. The ostensible reason for this was that children participating in the program were being propagandized, which simply meant they were taught ideas, or an ideology, that] the FBI and Hoover disliked. Yet Hoover was not so naive as to believe an overt ideological war was any longer sufficient to garner the support or noninterference necessary for the bureau to destroy the Panthers. A better rationale or cover for the public would have to be employed. This new cover for secret police operations was, as the Huston Plan suggested, a crusade against criminals and terrorists. Now, the administration would fight "crime," not ideologies.

This technique for destroying controversial political organizations is, of course, not new:

History should teach us . . . that in times of high emotional                                 excitement, minority parties and groups which advocate extremely                     unpopular social or governmental innovations will always be typed as                 criminal gangs and attempts will always be made to drive them out.

Internal FBI and other police agency documents make clear this objective of pinning the label "criminal" on the BPP and its leaders, and trying to link criminal activity to the Party's efforts at getting support for various survival programs. A 1974 memorandum to the director of the FBI from the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office stated that the local FBI office

has continued to follow Newton's and his associates' activities. ". . .                     Primarily, the . . . office has been pursuing Hobbs Act and/or ITAR-                  Extortion cases on Newton and/or his associates. Although                                 investigations to date, including contacts with other law enforcement                   agencies," . . . has failed to develop information indicating that                           Newton and his associates are extorting funds from businesses. . . .                   This office is of the opinion that Newton is or has been extorting                         funds from legitimate businesses. . . .

In addition to the contacts noted above [i.e., the Alcohol, Tobacco,                     Tax and Firearms Section of the Department of Justice in Oakland,                     California, the Oakland Police Department, the Berkeley Police                         Department and various informants], the San Francisco Office is                       selectively contacting pimps and narcotics pushers in the Oakland                     area in an attempt to develop further intelligence and positive                             information concerning possible Federal violations on the part of                         Newton and his associates.

This matter will continue to receive vigorous investigative attention.

Interestingly, the bureau and others seem to feel that any contribution from a business, whether considered legitimate or not, to the BPP survival programs could not be voluntary; it would have to come from extortion. Despite a failure to obtain any evidence of extortion, the bureau continued to hold the opinion that it took place and to try to develop information for a Hobbs' Act prosecution. In 1973, for instance, the assistant attorney general who figured prominently in the Watergate investigations, Henry E. Peterson, wrote the acting director of the FBI regarding Newton and the BPP:

During the course of filming a movie in Oakland, California, Harvey                   Bernhard [a film director], was contacted by Huey Newton and Bobby                 Seale who threatened to picket the filming site unless a $5,000                           contribution was made to the Black Panther Party. We note that                         Bernhard now states that while he gave $5,000 to Newton, he does                     not feel that he was extorted in any way and that he did not wish to                     testify.

In light of this, and considering that Max Julian [an actor in the film],                   who was present when Bernhard met Newton, cannot recall any                         discussion of money or picketing, there is insufficient evidence to                     warrant prosecution and further investigation is not warranted.

Extortion was not, of course, the only crime federal law enforcement agencies tried to pin on the BPP. In his book Agency of Fear, Epstein described how high-level intelligence officers in the Nixon administration used a narcotics cover to expand domestic counterintelligence operations:

Under the aegis of a "war on heroin," a series of new offices were                     set up, by executive order, such as the Office of National Narcotics                   Intelligence, which, it was hoped, would provide the president with                     investigative agencies having the potential to assume the functions of                 "the Plumbers" on a far grander scale. According to the White House                 scenario, these new investigative functions would be legitimized by                     the need to eradicate the evil of drug addiction.

The Nixon administration's exploitation of the narcotics menace to justify expansion of federal investigative agencies achieved extraordinary success:

Between 1968 and 1974, the federal budget for enforcing narcotics                   laws rose from $3 million to more than $224 million—a seventyfold                     increase. And this in turn gave the president an opportunity to create                 a series of highly unorthodox federal agencies.

The utility of a narcotics cover appears in numerous internal law enforcement documents concerning the BPP. Various agencies claim within their reports, in fact, to be investigating narcotics use by Panther leaders, especially Huey Newton. When, for example, Newton and some close friends took a one-week Caribbean cruise for a vacation, the FBI sent at least one clandestine agent, who submitted the following report:

[An unidentified informant] stated that his company has recently                         experienced a heavy increase in bookings aboard the "Starward" [the                 cruise ship taken] by Blacks, and he suspicions [sic] that this                             increase is due in part to the availability of narcotics at Porte Prince                   [sic] and Port Antonio. He stated that his suspicions have been                           buttressed by the recent confiscation of several pieces of luggage                     filled with narcotics from a "Starward" passenger.

Inasmuch as reliable sources have identified Newton as a user of                       cocaine and he is possibly the user of other narcotics, will alert                         customs personnel to be on the lookout for narcotics in the                                 possession of Newton and any of his party upon their return to                           Miami.

Not content merely to alert Customs, the FBI noted that "the information has been disseminated to State Department and CIA. Copies of attached being furnished to the Department (Internal Security and General Crimes Section) and Secret Service."

Indeed, in April 1973, the FBI requested that "all San Francisco agents be aware of either the purchase or use of cocaine by Huey Newton. Any information obtained in this regard should be immediately furnished to both the OPD [Oakland Police Department] and the appropriate Federal Narcotics agency." Six months later, the bureau seemed less interested in Newton's possible use of cocaine than they were about narcotics dealers he might have been hitting-up for contributions to community survival programs.

Source reports from contacts with various and unidentified Negro dope dealers that the big time dope dealers in the Berkeley and Oakland area are out to get Huey Newton. Source reports that Huey is apparently ripping off certain dealers, pimps and whores for large amounts of money and the talk is that "they" are going to get Huey. Source was instructed to determine some hard facts concerning these rumors and to report same immediately.B. The Superagency Approach to Crushing DissentBy 1973, this process of employing the narcotics and crime covers reached its climax with the creation of a new intelligence super-agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency. At the time of its formation, the DEA employed more than 4,000 agents and analysts— including some fifty-three former (or detached) CIA agents and a dozen counterintelligence experts from the military or other intelligence agencies. The DEA had the authority "to request wiretaps and no-knock warrants, and to submit targets to the Internal Revenue Service." With its contingent of former CIA and counterintelligence agents, it had the talent to enter residences surreptitiously, distribute "black" (or misleading) information, plant phony evidence, and conduct even more extreme clandestine assignments.

The origin of DEA and its intended purpose are explained by Epstein as follows:

According to [those] familiar with the plan, [G. Gordon] Liddy                             proposed . . . to detach agents and specialists who could be relied                     upon by the White House from the BNDD [Bureau of Narcotics and                   Dangerous Drugs], the IRS, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms                         division, and the Bureau of Customs. This new office would operate                   directly out of the executive office of the president. The beauty of the                 Liddy plan was its simplicity: it did not even need approval from                         Congress. The president could create such an office by executive                     decree, and order all other agencies of the government to cooperate                 by supplying liaisons and agents. Congress would not even have to                     appropriate funds, according to those familiar with the Liddy plan:                     The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which was                   located in John Mitchell's Department of Justice, could funnel monies                 via local police departments to finance these new strike forces.                           The new office would have . . . wiretappers from the BNDD; Customs                 agents, with their unique "search authority"; IRS agents who could                     feed the names of suspects into the IRS's target-selection committee                 for a grueling audit; and CIA agents for "the more extraordinary                         missions." In addition, since it would control grants from LEAA, this                   new office could mobilize support from state and local police forces                   areas in which it desired to operate.

The most important feature of the Liddy plan, however, was that the White House agents would act under the cloak of combating the drug menace. Since public fears were being excited about this deadly threat to the children of American citizens and their property, few would oppose vigorous measures even if its agents were occasionally caught in such excesses as placing an unauthorized wiretap. On the contrary, if the dread of drugs could be maintained, the public, Congress, and the press would probably applaud such determined actions. Krogh and the White House strategists immediately saw the advantages to having the new office operate its agents under the emblem of a heroin crusade ... and Liddy's option paper, much modified in form to remove any embarrassing illegalities, was sent to the president with the recommendations of Krogh and Ehrlichman.

Finally, in December 1971, the president ordered Ehrlichman and                     Krogh to create the permanent White House-controlled investigative                   unit envisioned in the option paper drawn up by Liddy. The new unit                   was to be known as the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement.

On January 28, 1972, the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), the permanent investigative force which ostensibly would operate against narcotics traffickers, was officially created by an executive order of the President:

Since there was virtually no precedent for an agency like the Office                   of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement, [ODALE director Myles J.]                       Ambrose had to proceed step by step, in assembling his strike                           forces. The first step was to appoint regional directors who would                       superintend and select the federal agents and local police on each                     strike force in each of the thirty-three target cities he selected. . . .                     Fifty other lawyers, many of whom Ambrose knew personally, were                   deployed in instantly created field offices of the new organization.                     Four hundred investigators were requisitioned from the Bureau of                       Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Bureau of Customs, and                     Ambrose requested more than a hundred liaisons from the Internal                     Revenue Service, as well as specialists from other agencies of the                     government. This was all accomplished during the first thirty days of                   existence of this new office, in what Ambrose himself referred to as a                 "monumental feat or organization."

. . . The new strike forces had little resemblance to more conventional                 law-enforcement forces. These highly unorthodox units, which were                   being controlled from the White House through the president's special                 consultant Myles Ambrose, included not only trained narcotics and                     customs officers but also Immigration and Naturalization Service                       officers; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms control agents; probation                     officers; state troopers; and local police officers. . . . With the                           authority of court-authorized no-knock warrants and wiretaps they                     could strike at will in any of the target cities and against virtually                         anyone selected as a target. By March 1972, the strike forces had                     become operational.

There was some resistance to Law Enforcement Assistance Administration officials to using LEAA money to finance ODALE operations. They argued that Congress never intended for LEAA grants to be used to bypass the appropriations process:

So with White House assistance, the new office established a series                   of local organizations, with such names as "Research Associates,"                     through which grants could be made by LEAA. The money was then                   channeled back to selected strike forces, with these organizations                     acting, in effect, as money conduits.

The California conduit for these laundered funds was the Organized Crime and Criminal Intelligence Branch (OCCIB) of the State Department of Justice, which had already been set up in 1970 by California Attorney General Evelle Younger. A report circulated by the OCCIB in 1972 identified among its prime targets the Black Panther Party.

The creation of a new superagency to direct the counterintelligence activities against the BPP and other dissident groups was an indication of how badly the federal government wanted to destroy the Panthers. The successful extent of coordination between law enforcement agencies intent on getting the BPP is not yet clear, largely because documents showing this direction have yet to be discovered. Still, the general method of operation described by Epstein appears to have been employed against the Party, at least if one focuses on just three agencies for which some documented information is available: the FBI, IRS, and CIA.C. FBI Declares War on Panthers:

COINTELPROWithin one year of the formation of the Party, the FBI formed a special counterintelligence program dubbed COINTELPRO. The purpose of this program was, in the FBI's own words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists." A specific purpose of COINTELPRO was to prevent the rise of a "Messiah," a charismatic Black leader who might "unify and electrify" Black people. Martin Luther King, Jr., was named as a potential Messiah in the FBI's own secret memorandum establishing COINTELPRO, but after the assassination of King in 1968, the FBI shifted its focus to the Party and its leadership, particularly Huey P. Newton.

J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, publicly stated that the Party constituted "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country . . ." of any organization. Of the 295 documented actions taken by COINTELPRO alone to disrupt Black groups, 233—or 79 percent—were specifically directed toward destruction of the Party. Over $100 million of taxpayers' money was expended for COINTELPRO; over $7 million of it allocated for 1976 alone to pay off informants and provocateurs, twice the amount allocated in the same period by the FBI to pay organized crime informants. Indeed, while COINTELPRO ostensibly targeted five domestic organizations—which the Bureau dubbed, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, White Hate Groups, Black Nationalist Hate Groups (e.g., the Panthers), and the New Left—it was Blacks, and the Panthers in particular, who received the brunt of the damage. As the Senate Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations found,

The White Hate COINTELPRO also used comparatively few                               techniques which carried a risk of serious physical, emotional, or                       economic damage to the targets, while the Black Nationalist                               COINTELPRO used such techniques extensively.

The vast arsenal of techniques employed by the bureau against the BPP were tried and tested over the years in foreign espionage. As William C. Sullivan, former assistant to the director, stated:

This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was                             dangerous at times. No holds were barred. . . . We have used [these                 techniques] against Soviet agents. They have used [them] against us.                 . . . [The same methods were] brought home against any organization                 against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a                     rough, tough business.

Specifically, the FBI engaged in or encouraged a variety of actions intended to cause (and in fact causing) deaths of BPP members, loss of membership and community support, draining of revenues from the Party, false arrests of members and supporters, and defamatory discrediting of constructive Party programs and leaders. What follows is an illustrative highlighting of some of these unlawful actions undertaken by the bureau against the BPP.

1. Creating Dissension Within the Panthers:

On Snitch-Jackets, Provocateurs, Bad Media, and Other Techniques

A major goal of COINTELPRO was to sow dissension within the Party. A 1970 memorandum from Headquarters to the San Francisco field office of the FBI, for example, proposed:

A wide variety of alleged authentic police or FBI material could be                     carefully selected or prepared for furnishing to the Panthers.                             Reports, blind memoranda, LHMs [letterhead memoranda] and other                   alleged police or FBI documents could be prepared pinpointing                         Panthers as police or FBI informants; ridiculing or discrediting                           Panther leaders through their ineptness or personal escapades;                         espousing personal philosophies and promoting factionalism among                   BPP members; indicating electronic coverage where none exists;                       outlining fictitious plans for police raids or other counteractions;                         revealing misuse or misappropriation of Panther funds, pointing out                   instances of political disruptive material and disinformation; etc. The                   nature of the disruptive material and disinformation "leaked" would                     only be limited by the collection ability of your sources and the need                   to insure the protection of their security.

Effective implementation of this proposal could not help but disrupt                     and confuse Panther activities. Even if they were to suspect FBI or                     police involvement, they would be unable to ignore factual material                     brought to their attention through this channel. The operation would                     afford us a continuing means to furnish the Panther leadership true                   information which is to our interest that they know and                                       disinformation which, in their interest, they cannot ignore.

Obviously, falsely labeling people as informants in any organization carries with it a serious potential risk to the reputation and, in some situations, safety of that person. This is especially true if the combined counterintelligence techniques employed convince the organization that their friends have been imprisoned or harmed because of the targeted informant. Fully aware of this obvious fact, the bureau nonetheless rationalized the placing of "snitch jackets" on innocent people:

You have to be able to make decisions and I am sure that labeling                     somebody as an informant, that you'd want to make certain that it                       served a good purpose before you did it and not do it haphazardly....                 It is a serious thing. . . . As far as I am aware, in the Black extremist                   area, by using that technique, no one was killed. I am sure of that.

When asked whether the absence of any deaths was the result of "luck or planning," this same bureau official, George C. Moore, then chief of the Racial Intelligence Section, answered, "Oh, it just happened that way, I am sure." The certitude of Moore's assertion is unfortunately belied by the bureau's own confidential memoranda, more than one of which claimed that the Party murdered "members it suspected of being police informants." Indeed, the FBI worked closely with Connecticut authorities in trying to convict two Party leaders, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, of conspiracy to murder Alex Rackley, an alleged informant. Seale and Huggins were not convicted, but the government's chief witness against them, the person who admittedly participated in Rackley's killing, appears from facts disclosed during and after the trial to have been an agent or informant. At the very least, this person's immediate enrollment in an Ivy League institution after the murder trial, and subsequent employment by the administration of an eastern university, raises serious questions. In any event, the use of snitch-jackets by the bureau was widespread. The Senate Select Committee reports several instances of this technique without any apparent follow-up as to the consequences to the persons wrongly jacketed. Among the instances cited was one in San Diego where a Black Panther leader was arrested by the local police with four other members of the BPP. The others were released, but the leader remained in custody. Headquarters authorized the field office to circulate the rumor that the leader "is the last to be released" because "he is cooperating with and has made a deal with the Los Angeles Police Department to furnish them information concerning the BBP." The Target of the first proposal then received an anonymous phone call stating that his own arrest was caused by a rival leader.

Discrediting Newton

Leaders of the BPP were frequently targeted as snitches or sell-outs by the FBI in an effort to discredit or bring harm to them, especially Huey Newton. Upon Newton's release from prison in 1970, for instance, after a court of appeal reversed his conviction for manslaughter in the alleged shooting of an Oakland policeman, a memorandum from the FBI director instructed FBI field offices across the country to formulate COINTELPRO actions directed against Newton. FBI headquarters would direct the campaign; its contours were defined as follows:

To demythicise [sic] Newton, to hold him up to ridicule, and to tarnish                 his image among BPP members can serve to weaken BPP solidarity                 and disrupt its revolutionary and violent aims. [COINTELPRO actions]                 should have the 3-pronged effect of creating divisiveness among BPP                 members concerning Newton, treat him in a flippant and irreverent                     manner, and insinuate that he has been cooperating with police to                     gain his release from prison.

Within a week, the New York FBI field office had drawn up three phony letters, which attempted to discredit Newton. One message, to be mailed to the New York office of the Black Panther Party by the San Francisco FBI field office, read as follows:

Brothers, I am employed by the State of California and have been                     close to Huey Newton while he was in jail. Let me warn you that this                   pretty nigger may very well be working for pig Reagan. I don't know                   why he was set free but I am suspicious. I got this idea because he                   had privileges in jail like the trustees get. He had a lot of privacy                         most prisoners don't get. I don't think all his private meetings were                       for sex. I am suspicious of him.

Don't tell Newton too much if he starts asking you questions—it may                   go right back to the pigs.

Power to the People

FBI headquarters regarded this anonymous letter as "excellent," but cautioned "Take usual precautions to insure letters cannot be traced to Bureau. Advise Bureau and interested offices of positive results achieved."

The Philadelphia FBI field office prepared and sent to Newton a fictitious Black Panther Party directive, supposedly prepared by the Philadelphia Black Panther office, which questioned Newton's leadership abilities; accompanying it was a cover letter purportedly from an anonymous Party supporter accusing the Philadelphia chapter of "slandering its leaders in private." FBI headquarters, in approving this operation, noted that prior COINTELPRO action which "anonymously advised the national headquarters that food, clothing and drugs collected for BPP community programs were being stolen by BPP members" had resulted in criticism of the Philadelphia chapter by the national office, transfer of members, "and the national office has even considered closing the Philadelphia chapter." The memorandum concluded, "we want to keep this dissension going."

The Los Angeles FBI office suggested that a death threat against Newton be sent to Black Panther leader David Hilliard, purportedly from a contract killer. FBI headquarters stopped this action, however, in the belief that if Newton were to be murdered then, the letter might be traced to the bureau by postal authorities.

When Angela Davis, then one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, was arrested in New York City in mid October 1970 and charged with conspiracy in the Marin County Courthouse incident, the FBI falsely tried to cast Newton as the fingerman:

In view of the fact that there is suspicion in the Negro [sic]                                 community that DAVIS was "set up," NYO suggests that HUEY                           NEWTON ... be cast in the light as "fingerman." If such a ploy could                   be successfully carried out it might result in disruption in the Black                     Nationalist field as well as divorcing BPP from CPUSA and Militant                     New Left groups.

One handwritten letter was sent to Ebony magazine by the Chicago FBI field office, "mailed from a Negro [sic] as follows:

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

As of this writing, our lovely Sister Angela languishes in jail and her                   chances of freedom seem remote. She's got to pay the man, right?                   But the question I put to you is: Who did the money pay?

You know and I know the pigs can't come up with a Black in a Black                   community just by driving around the streets and hassling the                             Brothers. I tell you that Sister Davis would still be free if her capture                   was left to the federal pigs alone. Of course, it was not that way at all.                 There was bread—lots of pure cash rye—put into an eager Black                       hand which in turn twisted the knife of treachery in our Sister's back.

Now, the big question is who? Who was the cat who dishonored his                   skin and took the 30 pieces of silver?

Some of the west coast cats are looking hard at Brother Newton. Shit,                 you say, Huey would never sell out to pig country. He's a dedicated                   Nationalist, leader of the Brothers and Sisters and a cat with real                       soul. Maybe it's bullshit, but let's look at Huey a little closer. He gets                     sprung from a stiff rap in August. The man suddenly turns kind and                   sets our Brother free. In that same month Sister Angela is among the                 missing as the result of a frame the pigs laid on her. What did Huey                   give for the sunlight and flowers? Or better still, what did the man give                 sweet Huey? How come Huey's size 12 mouth has been zippered                       since our Sister's bust? Nothing, he says. Absolutely nothing. Not one                 appeal for justice. No TV, no papers, no radio, no nothing. He got                       five grand, so the cats say. It's enough to make a man wonder.                         Wouldn't be surprised if Huey didn't split the scene soon. I, for one,                   will be most interested.

A Friend of Sister Angela

Another handwritten letter was mailed to the Village Voice newspaper by the New York FBI field office:

Sister Angela is in jail. Poindexter is free. Huey Newton is free. David                 P. is a dumb-head and a hop-head. Forget him. But Huey is smart.                   Gets along well with the MAN. The question is: Did this cat bank five                   big bills lately ... as a gift from the federal pigs?

Concerned Brother

The bureau did not miss any chance to further its disinformation campaign. Later, in the fall of 1970, the San Francisco FBI field office sent an unsigned letter, purportedly from a "white revolutionary," to Newton criticizing the Party-sponsored Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention: "You," the letter concluded, "must be held responsible for this fiasco and it is due to your total incompetence for selecting stupid lazy niggers to do the job and you and your whole party have set the revolution back five years." When the Howard University student newspaper printed a letter signed "Concerned Students of Howard University," which was critical of Huey Newton and the Party, the San Francisco FBI field office mailed Xerox copies to seventeen newspapers in northern California; the letter had been prepared and sent to the student newspaper in the first place by the Washington, D.C., FBI field office.

When Newton's conviction for allegedly shooting a policeman was reversed in 1970, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover immediately requested official authorization from Attorney General John Mitchell for "a microphone surveillance and a telephone surveillance at apartment 25A, 1200 Lakeshore, Oakland"—Huey Newton's new residence. Hoover considered it "likely that high-level party-conferences will be held at this location," and he reminded Mitchell "that existing telephone surveillance on certain Black Panther officers, all of which have been authorized by you, have provided extremely valuable information on Black Panther Party involvement in foreign matters and plans for violent acts against top officials of this country and foreign diplomatic personnel." (The ending clause, clumsily tacked on the sentence, was the requisite "national security" justification for covert action.) Hoover's request concluded with the observation that "trespass will be involved with respect to the microphone surveillance."

Mitchell approved the request, and San Francisco FBI agents paid the building engineer, Roger DuClot, to accompany them in breaking into Newton's apartment to install the microphone in the wall.

But the FBI was not content with surveillance. On November 24, 1970, the San Francisco FBI field office proposed an additional COINTELPRO operation concerning Newton's new apartment. The field office proposed a media campaign which would characterize the apartment as a "luxurious lakeshore" penthouse, far more elegant than "the ghetto-like BPP 'pads' and community centers" utilized by the Party. However, the field office agreed to refrain "presently" from leaking "this information to cooperative news sources" because of a "pending special investigative technique [i.e., the 'bug' and wiretaps]."

Once the installation of the surveillance devices had been completed, the FBI gave the "plush penthouse" story to one of the bureau's key media "assets," reporter Ed Montgomery of the San Francisco Examiner. Shortly, Montgomery's FBI-furnished article was featured on the front page of the Examiner. Pleased with this quick success, the San Francisco field office mailed copies of the feature article, anonymously, to "all BPP offices across the United States and to three BPP contacts in Europe." Additional copies were mailed to newspaper editors in all cities where the BPP was active.

To bolster the innuendos of lavish living and misuse of Party funds, the FBI sent a fictitious letter from a national Black Panther Party officer to Party chapters in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The message, mailed from Oakland, read in part:

Comrades:

Too many of your leaders have now turned this movement into                           something to line their own pockets and have little regard for the man                 on the street selling "The Black Panther." Ask the members of your                     chapter coming to the national where the Comrade Commander and                   the Chief of Staff live. Huey Newton lives miles from another nigger                     and you'll never find him in National Headquarters.

If you're lucky you can see him buying drinks for white freaks in                       Oakland supper clubs. ...

In addition, FBI Headquarters formulated a COINTELPRO plan to "embarrass BPP leader Huey Newton through use of a fictitious bank account, indicating misappropriations of BPP funds." This plan required that:

a fictitious bank account record be created in the name of HUEY P.                   NEWTON through an appropriate bank which will cooperate with the                   Bureau confidentially. A photostat of a false ledger card could be                       prepared and mailed to national headquarters anonymously along                       with an appropriate letter condemning NEWTON. The account should                 show regular sizable deposits over a period of several years and                       have a sizable balance existing.

Beginning April 1, 1971, and for months thereafter, the FBI paid "$540 per month . . . for the rental of apartment 25B, 1200 Lakeshore, Oakland, California." In this apartment, adjacent to the one in which Newton was living, the FBI placed an undercover agent with instructions to keep Newton under physical surveillance, as well as monitoring the electronic eavesdropping devices. Subsequently, hardly a day passed when Newton was not followed or observed by a plainclothes agent on all of his travels to and from the apartment building.

One of the undercover agents placed in apartment 25B was Don Roberto Stinnette, who was described (in an FBI case report on Newton) as "involved with local drug traffic." Stinnette, who professed to be on parole from a California prison, remained in the apartment for several months while he spied on Newton, his associates, and guests.

On November 18, 1972, Newton's wife, Gwen Fountaine Newton, discovered several men burglarizing and ransacking their apartment when she returned unexpectedly:

After leaving the apartment with Huey, I returned with Huey's niece,                   Deborah, because I had forgotten something. I entered to find three                   men robbing the apartment. They held me at gunpoint. Their pistols                     had silencers on them. Huey's documents and other papers were                       strewn about on the floor.

Files and records, along with clothes and heavy furniture, were taken by these men from the apartment—a closed, supposedly secure complex with a doorman and basement garage that could be entered only with the aid of an apartment-supplied electronic garage-door opener. How and why did these men enter this complex, burglarize the penthouse apartment, and leave undetected with so much stolen property? The Party believes that the stolen records and materials were actually moved next door during the robbery to the apartment of the FBI agent or informant. Later, when it was convenient to go unnoticed, the materials were quietly but openly moved out in crates and boxes from an art exhibit supposedly held in this same agent's apartment.

Literally no tactic was too bizarre, unconscionable, or extreme for government intelligence officials. On Saturday morning, February 18, 1973, at 5:30 a.m., a squad of Oakland police officers conducted a raid on the twenty-fifth floor of Huey Newton's apartment building. For cover, they had obtained a warrant, "authorized for night service," for the arrest of Don Roberto Stinnette for unpaid traffic tickets. The police team proceeded to engage in a shootout with Stinnette, who was equipped with a semiautomatic rifle, in the hall outside Newton's apartment. Newton refused to take the bait to open his door. Surprisingly, neither Stinnette nor police were injured. Later, the media reported the news of gunfire at the "swank apartment . . . next door to Black Panther leader Huey Newton's." But the press had missed what was perhaps the real story: That the police and undercover agent had staged the entire shootout in hopes that Newton could be drawn out of his apartment where he could be shot.

It is not difficult to divine the intended effect of these FBI actions, or just why the bureau felt they might, through the aggregate of activity, neutralize the Party's founder. In the words of one observer:

Do you remember what it is like to have one friend mad at you,                         against you, or even an enemy, or someone out to get you as may                     have happened occasionally when you were a kid? But how many of                 us have this baring experience now? Occasionally someone may be                   after our job or promotion, but not our life or our freedom. We cannot                 even imagine what it is like to have one or all of the major                                   investigatory agencies against us. To have phones always tapped. To                 have no one able to know you without that person also becoming a                     public enemy. To be watched for minute traffic violations every time                   you drive to the store. To be under constant observation. To never                     know who might be a paid informer or a fake next door neighbor. And                 in the midst of this, to have a developing community strained by the                   very pressures around you, around your friends, around a vision of                   the people which is unbearable to our present society.

Fostering a Newton-Cleaver Split

In March 1970, the FBI zeroed in on Eldridge Cleaver, then in exile in Algiers after he had been told to leave Cuba. The bureau learned that the high-strung Cleaver had "accepted as bonafide" a fictitious letter "stating that BPP leaders in California were seeking to undercut his influence."

For the next year, FBI field offices supplied Cleaver with a steady stream of messages containing erroneous information about various Black Panther Party leaders and activities, especially about Huey Newton. After his release from prison in August 1970, Cleaver led a Black Panther Party-sponsored delegation of American activists to North Korea and North Vietnam. After the conclusion of the tour, "the Los Angeles FBI field office was asked to prepare an anonymous letter to Cleaver criticizing Newton for not aggressively obtaining BPP press coverage of the BPP's sponsorship of the trip."

In December 1970, with the adoption of the Key Black Extremist program, the FBI increased its COINTELPRO efforts to turn Cleaver against Newton. The Bureau issued instructions to:

write numerous letters to Cleaver criticizing Newton for his lack of                       leadership. It is felt that, if Cleaver received a sufficient number of                     complaints regarding Newton it might . . . create dissension that later                 could be more fully exploited.

One letter to Cleaver, written to appear as if it had come from Connie Matthews, then Newton's personal secretary, read in part:

I know you have not been told what has been happening lately. . . .                     Things around headquarters are dreadfully disorganized with the                       comrade commander not making proper decisions. The newspaper is                 in a shambles. No one knows who is in charge. The foreign                               department gets no support. Brothers and sisters are accused of all                   sorts of things... .

I am disturbed because I, myself, do not know which way to turn. . . .                 If only you were here to inject some strength into the movement, or to                 give some advice. One of two steps must be taken soon and both are                 drastic. We must either get rid of the supreme commander or get rid                 of the disloyal members . . . Huey is really all we have right now and                   we can't let him down, regardless of how poorly he is acting, unless                   you feel otherwise.

More flattery came from "Algonquin J. Fuller, Youth Against War and Fascism, New York," supposedly one of Cleaver's white admirers:

Let me tell you what has happened to our brothers in the Party since                 you have left and that "Pretty Nigger Newton" in his funky clothes has                 been running things... .

Brother Eldridge, to me as an outsider but one who believes in the                     revolution, it seems that the Panthers need a leader in America who                   will bring the Party back to the People.

Brother Newton has failed you and the Party. The Panthers do not                     need a "day time revolutionary, a night time party goer and African                     fashion model as a leader." They need the leadership which only you                 can supply.

The New York FBI field office mailed another fictitious letter to Cleaver, supposedly from the "New York Panther 21," in order to "further aggravate the strained relationship between Newton and Cleaver":

As you are aware, we of the Panther 21 have always been loyal to                     the Party and continue to feel a close allegiance to you and the                         ideology of the party which has been developed mainly through your                 efforts... .

We know that you have never let us down and have always inspired                   us through your participation in the vanguard party. As the leading                     theoretician of the party's philosophy and as brother among brother,                   we urge you to make your influence felt. We think that The Rage                       [i.e., Cleaver] is the only person strong enough to pull this                                 factionalized party back together... .

You are our remaining hope in our struggle to fight oppression within                 and without the Party.

By late January 1971, the bureau's COINTELPRO campaign had begun to achieve favorable results. Cleaver was responding to the prompting of the disinformation campaign. One bureau memorandum reported that Cleaver considered one of the fictitious letters to contain "good information about the Party." Another COINTELPRO report ebulliently noted that "Cleaver has never previously disclosed to BPP officials the receipt of prior COINTELPRO letters."

Now was the time for the bureau to "more fully exploit" the dissension it had fostered. FBI headquarters directed the field office to intensify the campaign against the Black Panther Party:

The present chaotic situation within the BPP must be exploited and                     recipients must maintain the present high level of counter-intelligence                 activity. You should each give this matter priority attention and                           immediately furnish Bureau recommendations . . . designated to                         further aggravate the dissension within BPP leadership.

On February 2, 1971, FBI headquarters directed each of twenty-nine field offices to submit within eight days a proposal to disrupt local Black Panther Party chapters and the Party's national headquarters in Oakland. The bureau command believed its four-yearlong war against Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party was nearing victory. The situation, field office supervisors were reminded, offers an exceptional opportunity to further disrupt, aggravate and possibly neutralize this organization through counterintelligence. In light of above developments this program has been intensified . . . and selected offices should ... increase measurably the pressure on the BPP and its leaders.

For three solid weeks, a barrage of anonymous letters flowed from FBI field offices in response to the urging from FBI headquarters. The messages became more and more vicious. On February 19, 1971, a false letter, allegedly from a Black Panther Party member in the Bay Area, was mailed to Don Cox, Cleaver's companion in Algiers. The letter intimated that the recent disappearance and presumed death of Black Panther leader Fred Bennett was the result of Party factionalism.

On February 24, an urgent teletype message from the FBI director authorized the most daring step in the campaign—a falsified message to Cleaver from a member of the Party's Central Committee. A letter over the forged signature of Elbert "Big Man" Howard, editor of The Black Panther newspaper, told Cleaver:

Eldridge,

John Seale told me Huey talked to you Friday and what he had to                       say. I am disgusted with things here and the fact that you are being                   ignored. I am loyal to the Party and it makes me mad to learn that                       Huey now has to lie to you. I am referring to his fancy apartment                       which he refers to as the throne. I think you should know that he                         picked the place out himself, not the Central Committee, and the high                 rent is from Party funds and not paid by anyone else. Many of the                     others are upset about this waste of money. It is needed for other                       Party work here and also in Algeria. It seems the least Huey could do                 is furnish you the money and live with the rest of us. Since Huey will                   lie to you about this, you can see how it is with him. You would be                     amazed at what is actually happening.

I wish there was some way I could get in touch with you but in view of                 Huey's orders it is not possible. You should really know what's                           happening and statements made about you. I can't risk a call as it                       would mean certain expulsion. You should think a great deal before                   sending Kathleen. If I could talk to you I could tell you why I don't                       think you should.

Big Man 83

Eldridge Cleaver apparently believed the letter to be legitimate. Huey Newton telephoned Algiers to ask Cleaver to participate in a long-distance telephone hook-up on a San Francisco television talk show; Cleaver agreed to the plan. Three hours later, when the TV station's call to Algiers went through, Cleaver launched into a furious criticism of the Black Panther Party's Central Committee, and demanded that Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard be removed from his post, and attacked the breakfast program as reformist.

Cleaver had regained his place in the spotlight, if only for a moment. When the Central Committee expelled him from the Black Panther Party for his behavior, Cleaver announced that the "real" Black Panther Party would thereafter be directed from Algiers. Like an ultra-left sorcerer's apprentice with a gift of verbal magic, Cleaver frenetically tried to coalesce his own followers with transatlantic exhortations for immediate guerrilla warfare.

FBI officials were elated. In mid-March, FBI headquarters declared its COINTELPRO operation aimed at "aggravating dissension" between Newton and Cleaver a success. New instructions for the field offices were promulgated:

Since the differences between Newton and Cleaver now appear to be                 irreconcilable, no further counter-intelligence activity in this regard                     will be undertaken at this time and now new targets must be                               established.

David Halliard and Egbert "Big Man" Howard of National                                     Headquarters and Bob Rush of Chicago B.P. Chapter are likely                         future targets... .

Hilliard's key position at National Headquarters makes him an                             outstanding target. Howard and Rush are also key Panther                                 functionaries . . . making them prime targets.

The Black Panther newspaper dated April 17, 1971, the last issue Party member Samuel Napper was to distribute before his murder by alleged Cleaver supporters, carried Huey Newton's assessment of the Eldridge Cleaver episode and the difficulties it had brought upon the Party:

I had asked Eldridge Cleaver to join the Party a number of times. But                 he did not join until after the confrontation with the police in front of                     the office of Ramparts magazine, where the police were afraid to go                   for their guns. Without my knowledge, he took this as the Revolution                   and the Party. But in our basic program it was not until Point 7 that                     we mentioned the gun, and this was intentional. We were trying to                     build a political vehicle through which the people could express their                   revolutionary desires. We recognized that no party or organization                     can make the revolution, only the people can. All we could do was act                 as a guide to the people, because revolution is a process, and                           because the process moves in a dialectical manner . . .

When Eldridge joined the Party it was after the police confrontations,                 which left him fixated with the "either-or" attitude. This was that                           either the community picked up the gun with the Party or else they                     were cowards and there was no place for them. . . . Sometimes there                 are those who express personal problems in political terms, and if                       they are eloquent, then these personal problems can sound very                       political. We charge Eldridge Cleaver with this. Much of it is probably                 beyond his control, because it is so personal... . Under the                               influence of Eldridge Cleaver the Party gave the community no                           alternate for dealing with us, except by picking up the gun... .

Eldridge Cleaver influenced us to isolate ourselves from the Black community, so that it was war between the oppressor and the Black Panther Party, not war between the oppressor and the oppressed community.

2. Creating Discord Between the BPP and Other Black Groups:

Murder and Mayhem from Chicago to California.

Chicago and Fred Hampton

The Chicago office of the FBI, under the direction of Marlin Johnson, responded energetically to the COINTELPRO directions from headquarters. Soon after receipt of the memorandum instructing "recipient offices . . . to submit imaginative and hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP," they began sending letters to the leadership of a Chicago street gang called the Blackstone Rangers, or P-Stone Nation, telling them that the Panthers wanted to take away their territory. By December of 1968, this activity had escalated. The Chicago office reported in a memorandum to headquarters that Jeff Fort, the head of the Rangers, had said that he would "take care of" anyone saying bad things about him. Chicago recommended that the bureau write Fort an anonymous letter saying that several Panthers were spreading rumors about him.

By January 1970, the FBI's tactics became more straightforward. The Chicago office suggested sending Fort a letter telling him that there was a "hit" out for him from the Panthers. This effort, the FBI hoped, would occasion Fort to take retaliatory action which would disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against its leadership. Fred Hampton was then the head of the Chicago office of the Panthers. The memorandum explained why a similar letter was not being sent to the Panthers:

Consideration has been given to a similar letter to the BPP, alleging a                 Ranger plot against the BPP leadership; however, it is not felt this                       would be productive, principally since the BPP at present is not                         believed as violence-prone as the Rangers, to whom violent type                         activity—shooting, and the like—is second nature.

The bureau's own internal memoranda make it clear that, whatever their public rhetoric, their goal was to promote, rather than prevent, violence. Fred Hampton became a prime target for this FBI-directed violence.

Hampton was only 18 when he became head of the Illinois chapter of the Panthers. He was an extraordinary leader—a brilliant and charismatic speaker—with an exceptional ability to deal with people and inspire confidence. His energy led the Chicago chapter of the Panthers to be one of the most effective. Five different breakfast programs were begun on Chicago's West Side, and a free medical center was begun in a neighborhood which had an infant mortality rate more than twice that of White Chicago. Under his direction, the Party also began a door-to-door program of health care which included testing for sickle cell anemia and blood drives for Cook County Hospital, which served much of the Black community. During the winter, the Party organized an emergency heat program, which kept pressure on the landlords to repair furnaces and boilers. The community was beginning to deal with its problems, and an atmosphere of optimism and commitment was growing.

Hampton was relentless; he could be found bustling around the Panther headquarters, out in the streets talking to and organizing people, or at one of an increasing number of speaking engagements throughout the Midwest. By the summer of 1969, he was talking to thousands of people in the course of a month. He was becoming a national figure both inside and outside the Party, and it was being suggested that he be brought into the national BPP leadership.

On March 4, 1968, the Chicago office of the FBI received a memorandum advising them to keep close track of those Black leaders on the "Rabble Rouser Index" who might be future targets of the COINTELPRO. On March 7, 1968, an airtel was sent back to headquarters from Chicago stating that Fred Hampton was "in the RRI Sources assigned. Liaison being maintained with Maywood Police Department."

The FBI assigned an informer to Hampton; the Chicago office sent many memoranda to headquarters on him, and his travel was closely watched. By September, headquarters was pressing for intensified investigations into the leadership of the Party, and by this time, Hampton was being listed in FBI memoranda as one of the BPP's leadership.

In response, the bureau introduced a new informer into the Panther leadership—William O'Neal, who had joined the Panthers in late 1968, after being asked to do so by FBI Special Agent Roy Martin Mitchell. Besides his role as informer, O'Neal was also the classic agent provocateur. He at one point devised an outrageous plan to blow up City Hall, but was soon told to forget it by the Panther leadership. His most infamous invention, which was almost immediately dismantled, was a homemade electric chair, which he, ironically enough, planned to use to interrogate possible infiltrators into the Party.

During the period from 1969 to 1970, O'Neal received over $17,000 from the FBI. In return, he provided the FBI with almost daily information concerning the activities and, in particular, the leadership of the Party. He became chief of security for the BPP, and in February of 1969, O'Neal became Hampton's personal bodyguard. That same month, Mitchell wrote a memorandum asking the bureau to raise O'Neal's pay from $300 to $600 a month. And O'Neal was not alone; he was only one of several informers which the FBI had planted in the BPP.

O'Neal's role became more prominent as the FBI became more and more aggressive in its activities against the BPP. In June of 1969, O'Neal's reports were used as an excuse for a raid on the Panther office in Chicago. Under the pretext of looking for a fugitive, the police surrounded the office, almost causing a shootout. The fugitive, who later turned out to be an FBI informer, was not found; but several Panthers were arrested, and the office [was] ransacked.

In mid-November, FBI Agent Mitchell and informer O'Neal met. O'Neal told Mitchell that Hampton had just returned from a meeting in California with the national leadership and that he would become BPP chief of staff if Hilliard went to jail. O'Neal also informed Mitchell that Hampton's court date was coming up and that Hampton seemed to be implying that he would not go to jail again and that the Party would have to survive without his being around on a daily basis. This was an indication that Hampton might go underground. O'Neal also reported that there might be a drastic purge in the Panther Party in Chicago, expelling all members but Hampton and Rush. Any one of these factors might have given the bureau a sense of urgency in moving against Hampton. And the recent killing of two police officers by Black people may have led the FBI to believe it could now get the police to do what it had failed to get the Rangers to do. Mitchell apparently asked O'Neal to get him the floor plan for the apartment where Fred was living because when the two met again on November 9, Mitchell sketched out a diagram from O'Neal's description of the apartment, including a detail labeled "Fred's bed."

O'Neal also told Mitchell that there were weapons in the house, but according to all FBI documents, he said that the weapons had been legally purchased. O'Neal's deposition, taken years later, noted that there was nothing unusual about the fact that there [were] guns in the house. An internal bureau memorandum indicates how unexceptional this information was:

No [word deleted] matter is being opened in the Chicago office                           concerning this matter inasmuch as information indicates the                             weapons were apparently legally purchased under the terms of                           existing Firearms laws, possession of some is apparently rampant                     throughout BPP members and apartment rent is paid with BPP funds.

Mitchell had known that the Panthers had guns, but had never asked very much about it. However, on this occasion, Mitchell was particularly interested. He asked exactly what guns were in the house and also when Fred Hampton was usually there. O'Neal provided a list of weapons and confirmed that Hampton both worked and lived in the apartment.

Armed with the information about the weapons, the floor plan, and the fact that Hampton lived there, Mitchell began to peddle the raid. According to his own testimony, he met on the night of November 19 with people from the Gang Intelligence Division of the Chicago Police Department, and they talked about the possibility of a raid. In a November 21 memorandum from Mitchell to Marlin Johnson, the head of the Chicago FBI office, Mitchell communicated the floor plan of 2337 Monroe Street and informed Johnson that he had already given this information to both the Chicago Police Department and the state attorney's office.

By December 3, the Chicago office of the FBI was able to advise Washington that the local authorities were "currently planning a positive course of action relative to this information." In other words, when the Blackstone Rangers failed to take the bait, the FBI enlisted the state attorney's office to carry out the job for them.

At the same time, O'Neal met with Mitchell and then wandered back over to the Panther office and finally over to 2337 Monroe to eat dinner with Fred Hampton, Deborah Johnson, and several others who were then in the apartment. Meanwhile, the fourteen-man squad of the Illinois State Police, which was to carry out the raid, was being assembled by the State Attorney's Office.

By 3:00 a.m., the police raid squad was being briefed. The floor plan, which the FBI's Mitchell had provided, was on the board, and the search warrant which was based on FBI informer O'Neal's information was on hand. The men were armed with machine guns and other heavy weapons; they had been hand-picked, and they were being psychologically prepared for a combat mission.

At 2337 Monroe Street, nine people were asleep in the four-room apartment when suddenly the doors opened and a hail of bullets tore through the walls, the beds, and the occupants. After nine minutes, the screams had stopped; the volleys had ended, and silence had once again descended on the apartment, where minutes before the police had been screaming, "We got 'em, we got 'em."

Fred Hampton lay dead on a blood-soaked bed. He had barely moved from where he had lain asleep. According to later testimony by both an FBI informant and the occupants of the apartment, it is probable that he had been drugged. Deborah Johnson, a BPP member, stated that he had fallen asleep while talking on the phone earlier in the evening. Maria Fischer, an FBI and Chicago Police Department informant in the BPP, said that the FBI asked her to drug Hampton before the raid so that he wouldn't resist. He did not resist; he never woke up.

Mark Clark, 17 years old, was dead also. He had been seated in the living room on a chair. He now lay on the floor. Five more people were wounded. Four others escaped without injury.

Ninety bullets had been shot into the apartment in a period of less than ten minutes. According to the federal grand jury report, only one of those shots had been fired by a Panther.

Thirty-one of the ninety shots entered the bedroom where Hampton slept. He had been shot four times—in an arm and a shoulder, and twice in the head. Three other people had lain on the same bed during the nine-minute hail of bullets, yet none of them had been hurt. Deborah Johnson, then eight months pregnant with Fred Hampton's child, has said that minutes after the firing stopped, and after she had been taken from the bedroom to the kitchen, she heard two single shots and then a policeman say, "Now he's good and dead." An independent commission headed by Roy Williams and Ramsey Clark concluded that "the probability is that Hampton was alone in the bed when shot."

Immediately following the raid, a series of urgent teletypes were sent from Chicago to Washington, D.C., which gave details of the events of December 4. The first of these teletypes was quick to inform headquarters that the police had "positively identified Hampton as being killed." What followed were a series of almost hourly bulletins reporting that the area was calm.

Obviously pleased with the results, Marlin Johnson sent the following memorandum to FBI headquarters asking that William O'Neal receive a special bonus:

A detailed inventory of the weapons and also a detailed floor plan of                   the apartment were furnished to local authorities. In addition, the                       identities of BPP members utilizing the apartment at the above                           address were furnished. This information was not available from                         any other source and subsequently proved to be of tremendous value                 in that it subsequently saved injury and possible death to officers                       participating in a raid at the address on the morning of 12/4/69. The                   raid was based on the information furnished by informant. . .. During                 the resistance by the BPP members at the time of the raid ... Fred                     Hampton was killed. It is felt that this information is of considerable                     value in consideration of a special payment for informant requested                   in the Chicago letter."

On December 11, 1969, the Chicago office received the following airtel:

Authority is granted to make captioned informant special payment of                   $300 over and above presently authorized levels of payment for                         uniquely valuable services which he rendered over the past several                     months.

Carter and Huggins: A Case of FBI Assassination?

The public is well aware, after the publicity given the Senate Select Committee report in 1976, of the bureau's efforts to create dissension between the BPP and other Black groups. Besides the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago, the other principal Black group that reportedly clashed with the Panthers in response to Bureau counterintelligence activities was the United Slaves (US), which was founded by Ron Karenga in Los Angeles. The impression given from official investigations is that the FBI merely took advantage of an existing state of gang warfare between the two organizations. This was supposedly accomplished by the sending of false death threats and derogatory cartoons in the name of one organization to another.

There is no doubt that the bureau desired violence to occur between the two organizations. In 1970, for instance, after four BPP members had already been killed by alleged members of US, the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office wrote to FBI Headquarters:

The Los Angeles Division is aware of the mutually hostile feelings                       harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to                           capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that US,                     Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and                         location of BPP activities in order that the two organizations might be                 brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her                       due course.

To be sure, promoting violence for political reasons is a serious enough charge to be leveled and proved against a federal agency charged by law with investigating crimes and preventing criminal conduct. Much more serious, however, is the recently discovered evidence suggesting that the FBI participated in the murders of two Panthers, John Huggins and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969, helped to cover up their role, and sought to pin the blame on United Slaves.

The main source for this information is a former Black informant for the FBI named D'Arthard Perry, also known as Ed Riggs and, according to him, [by] the code name "Othello" by bureau officials with whom he dealt. Perry claims that he was first recruited into working as an informant for the FBI in 1968 after being discharged from the army. Economic need and the treat of having his state probation revoked if he failed to cooperate with the bureau were the principal reasons he offers for agreeing to work with the bureau. Though he was recruited while attending Sacramento State College, Perry reported directly to three Los Angeles FBI agents: Brandon Cleary, Will Heaton, and Michael Quinn. He was instructed to join the Party, which he did, and initially report on its activities. Soon, however, he was requested to assume a more active role by stealing phone-address books of members for copying by the bureau, providing floor lay outs of Panther offices, and even stealing the infamous coloring book draft that the Party had scrapped, but the FBI doctored and circulated in the Party's name.

After successfully completing and receiving increasing pay for these tasks, Othello was instructed by the FBI to assist in promoting discord between members of US and the Party in Los Angeles. He did so by, on at least one occasion, beating up a US member to give the impression it was sanctioned by the Party.

On January 17, 1969, Perry was instructed by Cleary and Heaton to go to Campbell Hall at UCLA. There a debate was to occur between the Panthers and US concerning the direction of the Black studies program on campus. Huggins and Carter were the main representatives of the Panthers. What happened then, is best explained in Perry's words:

I arrived there in the late morning and observed many members of                     the Black Panther Party and US organization present in the room as                   well as other people not identified with either organization.

I observed the situation in the cafeteria—which seemed to be nothing                 more than a meeting and left for a short time to go to a parking lot                       located near the building. The parking lot is reached by proceeding                   down a pathway, across a street and then to the parking lot.

Shortly after my arrival in the parking lot I heard shots from the                           direction of Campbell Hall.

Within a few minutes I observed George Stiner, Larry Stiner, and                       Claude Hubert also known as Chuchessa, jump into a 1967 or 1968                   light tan or white, four-door Chevrolet driven by Brandon Cleary of                     the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I saw this car drive away from                     the parking lot of Campbell Hall. I left the campus on foot and                             immediately went to FBI headquarters by bus. I inquired as to the                       whereabouts of Brandon Cleary at this time, and, was told he was not                 available. I am informed and believe that the four-door Chevrolet                         described above was the property of a man called "Jomo," a known                   member of the US organization, now deceased.

I recognized George Stiner, Larry Stiner, and Claude Hubert from                     seeing them prior to this date on the 14th floor of the Federal Bureau                 of Investigation building on several occasions in the company of                         Brandon Cleary, the man I had seen drive them away from the                           Campbell Hall area.

I had been told to give a report within twenty-four hours of the                           incident to my supervising agent, Will Heaton, on the 14th floor of the                 Wilshire Blvd. Federal Bureau of Investigation building.

A few hours later, I went to the building and met with my supervising agent, Will Heaton. While in his company, I observed George Stiner, Larry Stiner, and Claude Hubert in the company of Brandon Cleary on the 14th floor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation building. I asked Cleary, "what was happening" and was told that there had been a "fuck up—no one was to be killed by `our' people." I also learned that the car that had been driven by Cleary was taken from the place Jomo Shambulia had parked it and returned to the same parking space after the incident. I also learned that it was Claude Hubert who fired the shot that killed John Jerome Huggins and the same Claude Hubert who fired the shot that killed Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and not George or Larry Stiner.

Through information and belief, I have knowledge that George Stiner                   and Larry Stiner were Intelligence Gatherers for the Federal Bureau                   of Investigation and were working for Brandon Cleary and others                       when John Jerome Huggins and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter were                     murdered. I am informed and believe that Claude Hubert was on                         January 17, 1969 at the time he reportedly executed John Jerome                     Huggins and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, an agent in the service of                   the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Los Angeles office. I am further                   informed that this same Claude Hubert was subsequently                                   transferred to an east coast office of the Federal Bureau of                               Investigation, specifically New York, New York.

The Stiner brothers, after reportedly surrendering themselves to the police, were tried and convicted of the murders of Carter and Huggins. They were sentenced to San Quentin, a maximum security prison. Four years later, they were, as model prisoners, transferred to the minimum security section of the prison. They were then both allowed a conjugal visit. At which time, they escaped and have not been heard from to this date. Hubert has also never been apprehended.

3. Discrediting Constructive Party Programs

The FBI was most disturbed by the Panthers' survival programs providing community service. The popular free breakfast program, in which the party provided free hot breakfasts to children in Black communities throughout the United States, was, as already noted, a particular thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. Finding little to criticize about the program objectively, the Bureau decided to destroy it.

The tactics employed to ruin the breakfast program illustrate the lengths to which the bureau would go. In 1969, for instance, party leaders rejected a so-called "comic book," without captions or words, that was drawn by an alleged party member. It depicted police as caricature pigs and was submitted by the member to party leaders for possible purposes of political propaganda. After its rejection by party leaders, however, an informant for the FBI stole one of the few drafts of this proposed publication and delivered it to the FBI. Thereupon the FBI added captions advocating violence, printed thousands of copies bearing the Party's name, and circulated them throughout the country, particularly to merchants and businesses who contributed to the breakfast program. Those who received these so-called Panther "comics" were falsely told and led to believe by the FBI that they were given out by the Panthers to children participating in the breakfast programs. Not surprisingly, many merchants who supported the program withdrew from it, as did others who had lent their support.

Churches assisting the Panthers in the breakfast program were also harassed by the FBI in order to deter them from continuing support. In San Diego, an FBI official placed telephone calls and wrote anonymous letters to the Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of the Catholic Church in 1969 falsely claiming to be parishioners upset about the priest's support of the breakfast program. Within one month of these calls, this priest was transferred from the San Diego diocese to the state of New Mexico. The FBI reported in an internal memorandum that the priest had been neutralized and that the breakfast program in San Diego has been destroyed.

Huey Newton noted of another constructive Party program: "Our Intercommunal News Service and weekly paper The Black Panther, have become central in the Black Panther survival programs." The FBI apparently agreed, stating in a 1970 headquarters memorandum to field offices, that:

The Black Panther Party newspaper is one of the most effective                         propaganda operations of the BPP.

Distribution of this newspaper is increasing at a regular rate thereby                   influencing a greater number individuals in the United States along                     the Black extremist lines.

Each recipient submit by 6/5/70 proposed counter-intelligence                           measures which will hinder the vicious propaganda being spread by                   the BPP.

The BPP newspaper has a circulation in excess of 100,000 and has                   reached the height of 139,000. It is the voice of the BPP and if it                       could be effectively hindered, it would result in helping to cripple the                   BPP. Deadline being set in view of the need to receive                                       recommendations for the purpose of taking appropriate action                           expeditiously.

The San Diego field office responded by noting that, while the BPP newspaper presumably had the same legal immunity from tax laws as other newspapers, three California might be selectively used against The Black Panther. One was a state tax on printing equipment; the second, a "rarely used transportation tax law"; and the third, a law prohibiting business in a residential area.

In addition, the San Diego field office suggested spraying the newspaper printing room with a foul-smelling chemical:

The Bureau may also wish to consider the utilization of "Skatol,"                         which is a chemical agent in powdered form and when applied to a                     particular surface emits an extremely noxious odor rendering the                       premises surrounding the point of application uninhabitable.                               Utilization of such a chemical of course would be dependent upon                     whether an entry could be achieved into the area which is utilized for                 the production of The Black Panther

Finally, the San Diego division also thought that threats from another radical organization against the newspaper might convince the BPP to cease publication:

Another possibility which the Bureau may wish to consider would be                   the composition and mailing of numerous letters to BPP Headquarters                 from various points throughout the country on stationary [sic]                             containing the national emblem of the Minutemen organization. These                 letters, in several different forms, would all have the common theme of                 warning the Black Panthers to cease publication or drastic measures                 would be taken by the Minutemen organization.

Utilization of the Minutemen organization through direction of                             informants within that group would also be a very effective measure                   for the disruption of the publication of this newspaper.

The San Francisco field office submitted an analysis of the local Black Panther printing schedules and circulation. It discouraged disruption of nationwide distribution because the airline which had contracted with the Panthers might lose business or face a lawsuit and recommended instead

a vigorous inquiry by the Internal Revenue Service to have The Black                 Panther report their income from the sale of over 100,000 papers                       each week. Perhaps the Bureau through liaison at SOG [seat of                         government] could suggest such a course of action. It is noted that                     Internal Revenue Service at San Francisco is receiving copies of                       Black Panther Party funds and letterhead memoranda.

It is requested that the Bureau give consideration to discussion with                   Internal Revenue Service requesting financial records and income tax                 return for The Black Panther.

On another occasion, however, FBI agents contacted United Airlines officials and inquired about the rates being charged for transporting The Black Panther newspaper. A Bureau memorandum states that the BPP was being charged "the general rate" for printed material, but that in the future it would be forced to pay the "full legal rate allowable for newspaper shipment." The memorandum continued:

Officials advise this increase . . . means approximately a forty                           percent increase. Officials agree to determine consignor in San                         Francisco and from this determine consignees throughout the United                 States so that it can impose full legal tariff. They believe the                               airlines are due the differences in freight tariffs as noted above for                     the past six to eight months, and are considering discussions with                       their legal staff concerning suit for recovery of deficit. . . . [T]hey                       estimate that in New York alone will exceed ten thousand dollars.

In August 1970, the New York field office reported that it was considering plans

directed against (1) the production of the BPP newspaper; (2) the                     distribution of that newspaper and (3) the use of information                               contained in particular issues for topical counter-intelligence                             proposals.

The NYO [New York Office] realizes the financial benefits coming to                   the BPP through the sale of their newspaper.

Continued efforts will be made to derive logical and practical plans to                 thwart this crucial BPP operation.D. Internal Revenue Service and Selective Enforcement

of Tax Laws Against the PanthersThe first notice the Panthers had that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may be interested in their affairs was in 1969-1970, when the Committee on Internal Security of the House of Representatives held a series of hearings about the Party. At one of these hearings, a congressman inquired as to the tax status of the Party and what the IRS knew about its financial affairs, specifically whether the Party filed tax returns or paid taxes. The answer was that since the Pant hers were a political party, just as the Democrats Republicans, they had no obligation to file returns or pay taxes. Party leaders and their counsel believed that because political party was nowhere defined in IRS regulations, the government had no basis for treating them differently from the major established political parties. The government, particularly IRS, indicated no explicit disagreement with this view.

In fact, however, IRS was already being responsive to the concerns of the administration and others about the Panthers. On July 18, 1968, the assistant commissioner of the IRS directed a memorandum to officers within the agency announcing that:

A Committee is being established to coordinate activities in all                           Compliance Divisions involving ideological, militant, subversive,                           radical, and similar type organizations; to collect basic intelligence                     data; and to insure that the requirements of the Internal Revenue                       Code concerning such organizations have been complied with. It is                   expected that the Committee will function indefinitely.

The first meeting of this committee, called the Activist Organizations Committee, and later ironically named the Special Services, or SS, group, emphasized its mission:

This is an extremely important and sensitive matter in which the                         highest levels of government are interested and in which at least three                 Congressional committees are currently conducting investigations. In                 addition, the Internal Security Division, Department of Justice, and                     the Federal Bureau of Investigation have files on many of these                         organizations.

The secretive nature of the committee was also spelled out in this organizational meeting:

... [I]ts [i.e., the SS group's] activities should be disclosed generally                   only to those persons who need to know, because of its semi-                            secretive nature. Indeed, action is being taken to obtain top secret                     clearance for the full-time Committee's members. Our files will be                       protected with usual intelligence type security. We do not want the                     news media to be alerted to what we are attempting to do or how we                   are operating because the disclosure of such information might                         embarrass the Administration or adversely affect the Service                             operations in this area or those of other Federal agencies or                             Congressional Committees.

In essence then, the IRS formed a covert group within the agency for the purpose of selecting out organizations for special enforcement of the tax laws solely on the basis of their political beliefs. While the SS group focused its investigatory and enforcement efforts against a wide variety of organizations and individuals, it is clear that the Panthers and its leaders were singled out for special attention.

The Party was one of the original twenty-two organizations named by the SS group on March 25, 1969, for investigation to determine "the sources of their funds, the names of ... contributors, whether the contributions given . . . have been deducted as charitable contributions, [and] what we [i.e., IRS] can find out generally about the funds of these organizations." An early briefing paper from the chairman of the SS group, who held a top secret security clearance, to another government official named only the Party and described it as a "highly structured" organization, with allegedly thousands of soldiers, about whom the SS "identified" approximately five hundred names holding "upper-structure positions" in the Party. When the SS group met on July 29, 1969, they were "furnished several charts concerning the Black Panthers . . . and offered additional material" by a staff member of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. Even when the SS was formally phased-out, and its substantive operations transferred to other divisions of IRS, the Party was singled out, to wit: "Background, status and briefing papers on BPP investigation discussed and materials left with Mr. Willsey."

The BPP first learned that it was an overt target of the IRS in 1974 when several administrative summonses were served on third parties seeking information about the Party, its leaders, and contributors. One summons was served on the Bank of America in Oakland, California, for all records, whether open or closed accounts, relating to "Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party, Free Huey or Defense Fund for Huey P. Newton, and the Huey P. Newton Campaign Account." Another was issued to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., in New York, for all books and records relating to the transcribed conversation between Newton and Harvard professor Erik H. Erikson, which conversation was published as a book entitled In Search of Common Ground; a third was served on Playboy Enterprises, Inc., in Chicago, Illinois, demanding "all books and records pertaining to Huey P. Newton interview conducted by Mr. Lee Lockwood ... [including] the transcript of the interview in its whole."

The tactic of serving third parties with summonses instead of the BPP directly made it more difficult for the Party to assert any right to privacy of the records. Indeed, there was no legal obligation on those served with summonses even to notify the Party; it learned of them either fortuitously or because those served communicated voluntarily with the Party. In any event, in 1974, the BPP promptly challenged this practice of IRS in federal district court. Though the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed without prejudice, only to be refiled in 1976 in Washington, D.C., as part of the Party's omnibus civil rights lawsuit against numerous federal agencies, it had the immediate effect of deterring IRS from serving additional summonses on third parties possessing information about the Party.

In addition to the serving of summonses on third parties, IRS also audited Party leaders and contributors. Newton, for example, received formal notice of a tax deficiency assessment by IRS in the Alameda County jail within one week of his return to the United States from Cuba in July 1977.143 In fact, while Newton was temporarily incarcerated by Immigration authorities in Toronto, Canada, en route from exile in Cuba, IRS considered obtaining a Canadian address for pursuit of a civil assessment action.

Discovery in the Party's federal lawsuit shows that when police and the Alameda district attorney searched Newton's residence after he had voluntarily turned himself into the police in connection with assault charges in 1974, the district attorney telephoned IRS agents, who came to Newton's home and examined his personal papers and files in the hope of finding some evidence of a tax violation. No less than four IRS agents spent six hours in Newton's apartment with microfilm equipment, rummaging through his personal files searching for evidence of any crime for which he might be charged. The agents were so intent on obtaining a conviction against Newton on any grounds that they were careful to rationalize their search in internal memoranda in the event there were subsequent legal challenges to the admissibility of whatever evidence they might use for prosecution:

It was my understanding that, if while executing a legal search,                           evidence of another crime is discovered, it would be permissible to                     seize it. (Note: Normally I would have copied such discovered                           evidence, but inasmuch as we were there and had been instructed by                 the police they did not want it copied, we were obliged not to).

Ultimately, after expending tens of thousands of taxpayers' dollars to investigate the Party, its leaders, and contributors, the agency concluded there was no evidence warranting criminal charges, and the proposed civil assessment against Newton for past tax years was settled in 1979.E. CIAWhen the CIA was formed in 1947, the statute creating it, the National Security Act, provided that the agency shall have no police, subpoena, law enforcement powers, or internal security functions." The Huston Plan, as already noted, proposed ignoring this injunction. Though the Huston Plan was allegedly never formally adopted, it now appears that the CIA did place operatives in the street, kept extensive files on United States citizens, infiltrated political organizations, and pulled COINTELPRO types of stunts. Most infamous, of course, is the CIA's admission that it provided "technical assistance" in 1971 to its former employee, E. Howard Hunt, when he led the White House "plumbers" in a burglary of the office of the psychiatrist who once treated Daniel Ellsberg, the man who disclosed the Pentagon papers.

In 1975, the Rockerfeller Commission investigated abuses by the CIA and concluded that the agency exceeded its authority. The Senate Select Committee reported in 1976 that the CIA had a program of domestic spying, which primarily consisted of mail-covers—i.e., opening and copying the mail of targeted political persons—and intelligence gathering on dissidents. Neither official investigation discussed in any way what the New York Times disclosed in 1978: The CIA "recruited American Blacks in the late 1960's and early 1970's to spy on members of the Black Panther Party, both in the United States and in Africa."150 Spying was not, however, solely for the purpose of gathering information about the Party:

One longtime CIA operative with direct knowledge of the spying said,                 however, that there was an additional goal in the case of the Black                     Panthers living abroad: to "neutralize" them; "to try and get them in                     trouble with local authorities wherever they could.

The kinds of activities engaged in by the FBI to neutralize the Party, as has been shown, span the gamut of illegal dirty tricks, not stopping even at murder. Direct evidence of CIA dirty tricks used against the Panthers is, however, sparse. Neither the presidential commission nor the Senate committee revealed any information about tactics directed at the Panthers. Perhaps this was a cover-up in complicity with the committees, or maybe the CIA just acted as a law unto itself, unaccountable to Congress or the president in disclosing or explaining its actions. When the New York Times asked for an explanation of this hiatus in the government investigations, it was told by one former CIA official that the reason the committees didn't learn about these anti-Panther activities was because

They didn't ask. We treated the Senate inquiry as an adversary                         proceeding. Had they asked, we would have dug out the answers.

Undoubtedly, the CIA possessed much incriminating information to dig out. When the BPP filed its federal civil rights lawsuit against, inter alia, the CIA in 1976, agency officials submitted affidavits to the court suggesting the extent of its recorded activities with respect to the Party:

Apart from cases where it is not possible to perform a record search                 . . . progress has seen made in identifying .. . several thousand                         documents relating . . . to the Black Panther Party.

Another CIA official testified that ". . . certain portions [of the Party's discovery request] can be addressed at the present time. This is being done. However, a significant proportion of documents recovered to date bear classification markings indicating that their contents include information which must be protected in the interests of national security."

Perhaps because the CIA equates national security with protection of its own image, the documents sought will never be revealed.

"A [Rockefeller] Commission investigator acknowledged [that] the report [i.e., Rockefeller Commission report] did not [also] mention that between 150 and 200 CIA domestic files on Black dissidents had been destroyed before the Commission's inquiry." Of those documents the CIA has admitted exist, only a couple of hundred pages, at most, have been produced in the past four years in response to the Party's formal litigation discovery efforts. Many of these pages are replete with extensive white-outs or black-outs—i.e., deletion of so-called classified material—and are, therefore, uninformative. Nonetheless, those few pages produced reveal that within the United States, the CIA infiltrated the Party with informants and attended meetings and public functions in order to identify Party members by taking their photographs and compiling information on them. Overseas activities of the CIA focused on Panthers in Africa and included one operative who became the owner of a small hotel where Party supporters and associates lodged. The hotel's annual deficit was even made up by the CIA.

The likelihood that the truth about CIA efforts to neutralize the Party will never be fully known is great. Aside from the admitted destruction by the CIA of files concerning the BPP and failure to respond to civil discovery efforts, one man who had first-hand knowledge of the operation noted, "If they i.e., CIA had gotten exposed, then it would have been the CIA versus the Black Panthers and all Black Americans—they've had a lot of Americans against them. The agency would have been exposed, open to attack."