Report: FBI informant armed and trained Black Panthers Richard Aoki?

[Kushnology]

A video published Monday by the Center for Investigative Reporting reveals that the man responsible for arming and training members of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s did so while acting as a federal informant.
According to reporter Seth Rosenfeld, Richard Aoki was approached by FBI agent Burney Threadgill Jr. in the late 1950s, around the time he was graduating high school, and developed into a source into the activities of various political groups during the following decade.
“I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just go to some of the meetings and tell me who’s there and what they talked about?’” Threadgill is quoted as saying. “Very pleasant little guy. He always wore dark glasses.”

Aoki, who committed suicide in 2009 after working as an educator for 25 years following his involvement with the party, has been remembered for his activism. He was the subject of the biography Samurai Among Panthers: On Race, Resistance And A Pardoxical Life, which traced his ascent within the organization, where he became the highest-ranking non-black member of the party.

Rosenfeld wrote that he discovered Aoki’s double-identity while researching a book of his own, scheduled for release this week. He also noted that Aoki disputed the allegation during a 2007 interview, saying he thought Rosenfeld was mistaken before adding, “People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.” Aoki did, however, admit to “cutting a deal” with military authorities while serving in the U.S. Army, sealing the criminal record he had amassed in his youth.

Aoki would go on to serve in the Army reserves, during which time, Rosenfeld writes, he filed reports to Threadgill detailing his involvement in groups like the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Young Socialist Alliance and the Vietnam Day Committee. By the time Aoki met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, when Newton and Seale were developing what would become the Black Panther Party’s 10-point program, Aoki had been assigned to another agent.

In his interview with Rosenfeld, Aoki said he provided weapons and training to the Panthers.

“I had a little collection, and Bobby and Huey knew about it, and so when the party was formed, I decided to turn it over to the group,” Aoki said. “And so when you see the guys out there marching and everything, I’m somewhat responsible for the military slant to the organization’s public image.”

Watch Rosenfeld’s report in its entirety below.

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Asante sana Kush, I'm not sure enough evidence has been presented so far to implicate Richard Aoki as an informant for the fbi imho, we all know how the feds fabricate, lie and deceive.

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"My Initial Thoughts on the Richard Aoki Controversy
by Scott Kurashige on Monday, August 20, 2012 at 11:33am ·

The story of Richard Aoki being an FBI informant is all over the web. The published stories are drawing simple conclusions that need to be questioned and scrutinized. The stories are based on an article for the Center for Investigative Reporting by Seth Rosenfeld, who has just released a 720-page book on FBI efforts to disrupt radical activism.



I’m not afraid to learn new things. As a historian, I want to get to the truth, and I won’t evade contradictions. I want to see the records and the draw the best possible conclusions. However, there is clearly more to this story than what’s out there right now.



Here’s what we ALREADY knew: 1) In the aftermath of WWII, young Japanese Americans were a bundle of contradictions—still facing intense racism but also being embraced as a model minority. Richard embodied this contradiction—he was a stellar student but also got into fights and trouble with the law. He joined the army in the 1950s ready to be a gung-ho soldier but left soon after and later was a part of many radical groups in the 1960s. 2) The FBI infiltrated and disrupted many civil rights, Black Power and left wing groups in the era of J. Edgar Hoover. One tactic used was to have agent provocateurs spur radical groups to violence to justify the state using repression against it. Although Hoover’s COINTELPRO was ended, the FBI and police are still spying on and trying to undermine activist groups today. 3) Richard Aoki supplied the Panthers with guns. The Panthers advocated armed self-defense in the age of intense police brutality and a time when most in the black community saw the cops as an occupying army. The Panthers inspired wide support from the community for their militant opposition to white supremacy AND their survival programs. The Panthers were heavily infiltrated and got into many violent clashes with the state that devastated their ranks and led to increased internal dissension.



So what exactly is NEW about this story: 1) Rosenfeld says he dug up records saying that Aoki—around the time he graduated from high school in the 1950s--was commissioned by an FBI agent named Burney Threadgill to give reports on the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. This was at a time when Aoki does not claim to have any radical political consciousness and had been put in a compromised position by getting into trouble with law enforcement. Let’s accept this for now and accept that this is historically significant. But let’s keep it in context. It’s the height of the Cold War and both the CP and SWP would have been viewed by the public as fringe groups—moreover, they had little mass appeal to young people of color at this time. We know from here that Richard went on to join the army. 2) Rosenfeld has one document from 1967 that identifies Aoki as an FBI informant. It spells his middle name wrong. It does not say whether he is still actively on the FBI payroll. It doesn’t specify that Aoki did anything to aid the FBI’s work against the Panthers. Note that Hoover has yet to declare war on the Panthers at this time and is more concerned about SNCC and MLK. And to keep things in perspective, Geronimo Pratt will be fighting for the US military in Vietnam winning two Purple Hearts until 1968. 3) That’s it—at least all that’s on the internet right now. Everything else is speculation based on connecting dots that we already knew existed.



SETH ROSENFELD’S NARRATIVE



Again, we can’t draw definitive conclusions, yet. What we can saw is that Rosenfeld has not provided any evidence that Aoki was actively working to undermine the Panthers on behalf of the FBI.



What Rosenfeld says is that Aoki supplied the Panthers with guns and that the Panthers were undermined by violent clashes with the state. But these are things we ALREADY knew. All this story is doing is tapping into the simplistic white liberal narrative of the 1960s. The story goes like this: all the activism in the early 1960s was wholesome, nonviolent, and integrated but then the late 1960s was dominated by urban rebellions, violent militants, and black separatists who undermined all the achievements of the early 1960s and provoked a white middle-class backlash that led to Nixon, Reagan, and now the Tea Party. In the minds of white conservatives and liberals, the Panthers have always symbolized the turn toward the so-called bad activism of the late 60s (and of course conservatives never embraced the "good" early 60s and many liberals were slow to embrace them). The only twist to the story is that Rosenfeld wants to use Aoki to say the FBI was the source of the violent turn—and now after years of Aoki being largely unknown, he is almost being portrayed as the single figure who influenced the “extremist” turn in Bay Area activism. (The FBI certainly provoked violence--it's just not clear that it did so through Aoki.)



The simple story of the 1960s—already ripped to shreds by many, many historians—takes everything out of context, as if the US liberals didn’t push Vietnam and the Cold War, as if white suburbanites weren’t already against civil rights and integration, as if there wasn’t a Third World movement for liberation that led US communities of color to see themselves as fighting a war against internal colonialism. By the mid-to-late 1960s, MLK had declared the US government to be world’s greatest purveyor of violence and activists from the center-left to the far-left were looking for ways to transform the street force of the rebellions into disciplined, political organization. The Panthers heightened the political contradictions and the physical confrontations with the police and the state to unprecedented levels. Just as Fanon wrote, they tapped into a sense among the people that white supremacy and imperialism were breeding militant opposition. Aoki provided Huey and Bobby with some of the theoretical readings that guided them when they were Merritt College students and then helped them get guns. But what the white liberals refuse to accept is that young African Americans—sent to die in Vietnam, abused by the occupying force of the police, denied jobs from the shrinking industrial economy, watching nonviolent protestors repeatedly lynched, beaten, and jailed, and portrayed as the enemy by whites guarding their segregated suburbs—did not need any outside force to convince them that America was so rotten at its core that it was time to either burn the whole thing down or organize to overthrow the ruling class. All the liberals could do at this point in history was try to co-opt the insurgent movements in order to preserve their hold on power. Meanwhile the right wing went after the movements with savage ferocity.



Where does Richard Aoki fit into this? My best guess based on the available evidence is that Aoki—like millions of other young people of all races and especially people of color—developed a new identity during the mid-to-late 1960s, renouncing earlier attempts to fit into America and moving instead to be a Third World revolutionary. Had he previously worked for the FBI, he would of course have been tormented by this for the rest of his life. And it’s possible if this ever came out that he would have been discredited (fairly or unfairly) by his movement peers—if it came out during the FBI-heightened internal Panther wars of the late 1960s he might have been killed. Remember that one outrageous tactic COINTELPRO used to discredit Panther members and spur infighting was to send bogus mailings to other Panthers “outing” FBI informants within the BPP!



The idea that Aoki gave Huey and Bobby guns at the direction of the FBI does not make sense—at least not based on the evidence provided at this point. Aoki met Huey and Bobby when they were community college students and before the Panthers were a significant force—there was nothing for the FBI to disrupt at that point. Aoki also helped them do serious reading and study—something FBI informants would not have bothered with. We know that the FBI knew who Aoki was in 1967 but have no evidence that Aoki was doing anything for the FBI. Look at the Timeline provided with the Center for Investigative Reporting story—there’s no there there.



What other evidence does Rosenfeld provide? a) Aoki gave the Panthers guns--we already knew this; b) Former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen says he reviewed Rosenfeld’s records and concluded Aoki was probably an FBI informant. Swearingen is an important witness in general—he has renounced his former work with the FBI and sought to undermine COINTELPRO (giving testimony to help acquit Geronimo). But Swearingen does not say he had any connection to Aoki—the only FBI agent Rosenfeld interviewed with a connection to Aoki says he stopped working with Aoki with 1965 (and is there any report from the FBI agent who supposedly took over the Aoki relationship after 1965?). Swearingen, like Aoki, is rife with contradiction. It’s good for him to generally renounce COINTELPRO but he offers no insight one way or the other in this case. EXCEPT that is, to offer this ludicrous comment:



“Someone like Aoki is perfect to be in a Black Panther Party, because I understand he is Japanese,” he said. “Hey, nobody is going to guess – he’s in the Black Panther Party; nobody is going to guess that he might be an informant.”



Who in their right mind would think that a Japanese American would be the perfect person to infiltrate the Panthers? You would immediately stick at out and arouse suspicion as to why you were there and where your loyalties really lay. Again, there are better experts than me on this, but my best guess is that given Aoki’s history and identity that he went out of his way to be an extra-loyal and extra-committed member of the Black Panther Party and lots of testimony I’ve read substantiates this.



Swearingen, on this specific point, clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, has no real knowledge of Aoki, and has never heard of the model minority (as in you mean to tell me that at the same time the media is pushing the image of Japanese Americans as a model minority the Black Panther are going to think they are THE model black militant?). Rosenfeld is playing up his “testimony” in an opportunistic way. Then Rosenfeld and Swearingen say the FBI is withholding further documentation—ok, that’s probably true but that’s also probably because the evidence generally implicates the FBI in nefarious acts against the Panthers rather than offering more specific evidence implicating Aoki.



The story goes even further to say that Richard promoted violence in the Third World Liberation Front at Berkeley and even suggests his singular presence shifted the whole Bay Area left toward militancy. No doubt the TWLF was born out of militancy, but Aoki would have hardly been alone here--though perhaps he may have been more into "offing the pigs" if he had previously been under their spell. But all Asian American movement activists were trying to be more militant in order to counter the dominant trend of the model minority rather than impress the FBI. And if Aoki had such a big impact on the whole Bay Area it’s quite strange that San Francisco State’s TWLF strike erupted into much bigger clashes with law enforcement than UC Berkeley did—but again, the story is so much more simpler when we forget about Reagan’s and Hayakawa’s role in deploying excessive policing and state repression to put down an educational social movement.



But let’s remember that Rosenfeld is probably some kind of liberal, so let’s conclude by bringing the scrutiny back where it belongs in this case. White liberals don’t want to believe that there was an organic drive toward militancy and armed resistance in the age of Third World liberation: the spirit of the Tet Offensive was in the air and the rebellion was against not only the right-wing ruling class but also against liberalism and the "revisionist" Old Left. Richard Aoki clearly had a soldier's mentality—Geronimo Pratt fought for the US government and switched sides. Aoki seemingly did the same though allegedly under far more controversial circumstances. Perhaps that was the symbol he left when laying his US army uniform alongside his Black Panther Party uniform before he died. If this is the case, then Aoki’s story is part of a long line of people of color drafted to fight American wars (in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and yes, US cities) but forced by their own experience to question the whole enterprise of US imperialism.



Aoki remains a historically intriguing figure. Personally, I have not studied or written much about Aoki and only knew him in passing—mostly in his later years when he was connected to the RCP and my own radical politics had moved well away from the “agitation and confrontation” approach to movement building. We need a general rethinking of the role of militancy and armed self-defense in movement building, and I always say we need to read more MLK. But the fact that we are even discussing Aoki under these questionable circumstances demonstrates how much more Asian Americans are a subject of US history than we were not long ago, so we might as well use this as a teachable moment. At the same time, it’s probably true that we rush too quickly to create icons rather than embrace internal contradiction as the source of true knowledge and change.



These are quick and incomplete reflections. I don’t know where this story will end. What I do know is that people need to take it in a different direction than the one it’s headed on right now."

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This article comes to us courtesy of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

By Seth Rosenfeld

The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training - which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s - was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report.

One of the Bay Area's most prominent radical activists of the era, Richard Masato Aoki was known as a fierce militant who touted his street-fighting abilities. He was a member of several radical groups before joining and arming the Panthers, whose members received international notoriety for brandishing weapons during patrols of the Oakland police and a protest at the state Legislature.

Aoki went on to work for 25 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator at the Peralta Community College District, and after his suicide in 2009, he was revered as a fearless radical.

But unbeknownst to his fellow activists, Aoki had served as an FBI intelligence informant, covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him.

That agent, Burney Threadgill Jr., recalled that he approached Aoki in the late 1950s, about the time Aoki was graduating from Berkeley High School. He asked Aoki if he would join left-wing groups and report to the FBI.

"He was my informant. I developed him," Threadgill said in an interview. "He was one of the best sources we had."

The former agent said he asked Aoki how he felt about the Soviet Union, and the young man replied that he had no interest in communism.

"I said, 'Well, why don't you just go to some of the meetings and tell me who's there and what they talked about?' Very pleasant little guy. He always wore dark glasses," Threadgill recalled.

Aoki's work for the FBI, which has never been reported, was uncovered and verified during research for the book, "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power." The book, based on research spanning three decades, will be published tomorrow by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In a tape-recorded interview for the book in 2007, two years before he committed suicide, Aoki was asked if he had been an FBI informant. Aoki's first response was a long silence. He then replied, " 'Oh,' is all I can say."

Later during the same interview, Aoki contended the information wasn't true.

Asked if this reporter was mistaken that Aoki had been an informant, Aoki said, "I think you are," but added: "People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer."

However, the FBI later released records about Aoki in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. A Nov. 16, 1967, intelligence report on the Black Panthers lists Aoki as an "informant" with the code number "T-2."

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on Aoki, citing litigation seeking additional records about him under the Freedom of Information Act.

Since his death - Aoki shot himself at his Berkeley home after a long illness - his legend has grown. In a 2009 feature-length documentary film, "Aoki," and a 2012 biography, "Samurai Among Panthers," he is portrayed as a militant radical leader. Neither mentions that he had worked with the FBI.

Harvey Dong, who was a fellow activist and close friend, said last week that he had never heard that Aoki was an informant.

"It's definitely something that is shocking to hear," said Dong, who was the executor of Aoki's estate. "I mean, that's a big surprise to me."

Dong recalled that Aoki tended to "compartmentalize" the different parts of his life. Before he shot himself, Dong said, Aoki had laid out in his apartment two neatly pressed uniforms: One was the black leather jacket, beret and dark trousers of the Black Panthers. The other was his U.S. Army regimental.

In Berkeley in the late 1960s, Aoki wore slicked-back hair, sported sunglasses even at night and spoke with a ghetto patois. His fierce demeanor intimidated even his fellow radicals, several of them have said.

"He had swagger up to the moon," former Berkeley activist Victoria Wong recalled at his memorial.

From gangs to the military

Aoki was born in San Leandro in 1938, the first of two sons. He was 4 when his family was interned at Topaz, Utah, with thousands of other Japanese Americans during World War II.

After the war, Aoki grew up in West Oakland, in an area that had been known as Little Yokohama before becoming a low-income black community. He joined a gang and became a tough street fighter who as an adult would boast, "I was the baddest Oriental come out of West Oakland."

He shoplifted, burgled homes and stole car parts for "the midnight auto supply business," he told Berkeley's KPFA radio in a 2006 interview. Oakland police repeatedly arrested him for "mostly petty-type stuff," he said in the 2007 interview. Still, he graduated from Herbert Hoover Junior High School as co-valedictorian.

But the internment during World War II had shattered his family, Aoki had said. His father became a gangster and abandoned his family, and his mother won custody of her sons and moved them to Berkeley. Aoki did well academically at Berkeley High School and became president of the Stamp and Coin Club. However, he assaulted another student in the hallway and, as he recalled, "beat him half to death."

Three days after graduating from high school in January 1957, Aoki reported for duty at Fort Ord, near Monterey. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army the prior year, at age 17. He acknowledged in the 2007 interview that he had "cut a deal" in which military authorities arranged for his criminal record to be sealed.

Aoki said he had hoped to become the army's first Asian American general, but he served only about a year on active duty and seven more in the reserves before being honorably discharged as a sergeant.

Although he saw no combat, he became a firearms expert. "I got to play with all the toys I wanted to play with when I was growing up," he told KPFA. "Pistols, rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers."

Being in the reserves left Aoki a lot of free time, and he became deeply involved in left-wing political organizations at the behest of the FBI, retired FBI agent Threadgill said during a series of interviews before his death in 2005.

"The activities that he got involved in was because of us using him as an informant," he said.

Threadgill recalled that he first approached Aoki after a bureau wiretap on the home phone of Saul and Billie Wachter, local members of the Communist Party, picked up Aoki talking to fellow Berkeley High classmate Doug Wachter.

At first, Aoki gathered information about the Communist Party, Threadgill said. But Aoki soon focused on the Socialist Workers Party and its youth affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance, also targets of an intensive FBI domestic security investigation.

By spring 1962, Aoki had been elected to the Berkeley Young Socialist Alliance's executive council, FBI records show. That December, he became a member of the Oakland-Berkeley branch of the Socialist Workers Party, where he served as the representative to Bay Area civil rights groups. He also was on the steering committee of the Committee to Uphold the Right to Travel.

In 1965, Aoki joined the Vietnam Day Committee, an influential anti-war group based in Berkeley, and worked on its international committee as liaison to foreign anti-war activists.

All along, Aoki met regularly with his FBI handler. Aoki also filed reports by phone, Threadgill said.

"I'd call him and say, 'When do you want to get together?' " Threadgill recalled. "I'd say, 'I'll meet you on the street corner at so-and-so and so on.' I would park a couple of blocks away and get out and go and sit down and talk to him."

Arming the Black Panthers

Threadgill worked with Aoki through mid-1965, when he moved to another FBI office and turned Aoki over to a fellow agent. Aoki was well positioned to inform on a wide range of political activists.

Aoki attended Merritt College in Oakland, where he met Huey Newton, a pre-law student, and Bobby Seale, an engineering student, who were in a political group called the Soul Students Advisory Council.

In fall 1966, Aoki transferred to UC Berkeley as a junior in sociology. That October, Seale and Newton took a draft of their 10-point program for what would become the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to Aoki's Berkeley apartment and discussed it over drinks. The platform called for improved housing, education, full employment, the release of incarcerated black men, a halt to "the robbery by the capitalists of our black community" and an "immediate end to police brutality."

Soon after, Aoki gave the Panthers some of their first guns. As Seale recalled in his memoir, "Seize the Time."

"Late in November 1966, we went to a Third World brother we knew, a Japanese radical cat. He had guns ... .357 Magnums, 22's, 9mm's, what have you. ... We told him that if he was a real revolutionary he better go on and give them up to us because we needed them now to begin educating the people to wage a revolutionary struggle. So he gave us an M-1 and a 9mm."

In early 1967, Aoki joined the Black Panther Party and gave them more guns, Seale wrote. Aoki also gave Panther recruits weapons training, he said in the 2007 interview.

"I had a little collection, and Bobby and Huey knew about it, and so when the party was formed, I decided to turn it over to the group," Aoki said in the interview. "And so when you see the guys out there marching and everything, I'm somewhat responsible for the military slant to the organization's public image."

In early 1967, the Panthers displayed guns during their "community patrols" of Oakland police and also that May 2, when they visited the state Legislature to protest a bill.

Although carrying weapons was legal at the time, there is little doubt their presence contributed to fatal confrontations between the Panthers and the police.

On Oct. 28, 1967, Newton was in a shootout that wounded Oakland Officer Herbert Heanes and killed Officer John Frey. On April 6, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver and five other Panthers were involved in a firefight with Oakland police. Cleaver and two officers were wounded, and Panther Bobby Hutton was killed.

During the period Aoki was arming the Panthers, he also was informing for the FBI. The FBI report that lists him as informant T-2 says that in May 1967, he reported on the Panthers.

None of the released FBI reports mention that Aoki gave guns to the Panthers.

FBI's reliance on informants

M. Wesley Swearingen, a retired FBI agent who has criticized unlawful bureau surveillance activities under the late Director J. Edgar Hoover, reviewed some of the FBI's records. He concluded in a sworn declaration - filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records on Aoki - that Aoki had been an informant.

Swearingen served in the FBI from 1951 to 1977, and worked on a squad that investigated the Panthers.

"Someone like Aoki is perfect to be in a Black Panther Party, because I understand he is Japanese," he said. "Hey, nobody is going to guess - he's in the Black Panther Party; nobody is going to guess that he might be an informant."

Swearingen also said the FBI certainly must have additional records concerning Aoki, including special informant files.

"Aoki wouldn't even have to be a member of the party. If he just knew Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, if he went out to lunch with them every day, they would have a main file," he said. "But to say they don't have a main file is ludicrous."

In the 1990s, testimony from Swearingen helped to vacate the murder conviction of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a Black Panther leader in Los Angeles. Evidence showed that the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department had failed to disclose that a key witness against Pratt was a longtime FBI informant named Julius C. Butler. Pratt later won a civil suit for wrongful imprisonment, with the City of Los Angeles paying Pratt $2.75 million and the FBI paying him $1.75 million.

During the late '60s and early '70s, the FBI sought to disrupt and "neutralize" the Black Panthers under COINTELPRO, the bureau's secret counterintelligence program to stifle dissent, according to reports by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

As part of COINTELPRO, the committee found, the FBI used informants to gather intelligence leading to the weapons arrests of Panthers in Chicago, Detroit, San Diego and Washington. By the end of 1969, at least 28 Panthers had been killed in gunfights with police and many more arrested on weapons charges, according to news accounts.

Hoover declared in late 1968 that the Panthers, who by now had chapters across the nation, posed "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." He cited their radical philosophy and armed confrontations with police.

Although Aoki later would boast of his role with the Panthers, he was secretive about his relations with them at the time, explaining in the 2007 interview that he feared being expelled from UC Berkeley if his activities were known.

In early 1969, Aoki emerged as a leader of the Third World Liberation Front strike at UC Berkeley, which demanded more ethnic studies courses. He advocated violent tactics, according to interviews with him and Manuel Delgado, another strike leader.

Scores of students and police were injured during the three-month confrontation, which became the campus's most violent strike to date. Gov. Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency and sent the National Guard to quell the violence.

At a memorial service for Aoki at Wheeler Hall in May 2009, Seale, of the Black Panthers, and other activists hailed Aoki as a "fearless leader and servant of the people." In a phone conversation last week, Seale expressed surprise at hearing that Aoki was an informant and declined to comment further.

Seth Rosenfeld was an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle and has won the George Polk Award and other journalism honors.

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Richard Aoki: Snitch Jacketing 2.0? A brief note on the allegations (Community Voices)
Carlos A. Rivera-... Mon, 20 Aug at 5:23pm


So we wake up on Monday, August 20 2012, to find out Richard Aoki is alleged to have been a long time informant of the FBI. A serious allegation, needless to say. Aoki's military training, access to weapons, ethnic origin, and charisma, where critical components in the development of the practice of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, its views on internationalism, its views on armed struggle, and its approach to ethnic groups other than Black Americans.

To cast him in the light of a snitch shakes the very foundations of one of the most important, successful, and tragic examples of revolutionary organizing in the second half of the 20th century in the United States of America. It opens wounds of anti-Asian bigotry among Black revolutionaries, questions the internationalist instincts of the BPP, and in general pushes the ever present question of a security culture to the forefront. It also forces us to revisit COINTELPRO, and its current incantations as an existing force, rather than a painful memory of a long-gone era.

While there is much to be said, my intent in this brief note is to put forward some rather incomplete initial thoughts - while approaching what I feel and view as the most critical areas to evaluate.

Snitch Jacketing 2.0

"Snitch Jacketing" is a classic counter-intelligence practice, in which people who are not informants are named as informants either via "leaks" or via other actual informants, in order to de-stabilize the targetted individual or the targetted group. It is historically extremely effective, and hence has been used time and time again.

Perhaps one of the most famous examples in the western world was the Provisional Irish Republican Army Supergrass Affairs, where a number of lesser figures were accused and sometimes even executed of being informants, while the actual informants remained free. It was an terribly effective tactic: it paralyzed entire units of the PIRA and other groups, while leading to large scale arrests of dozens of activists and Volunteers.

Snitch jacketing, however, has been losing effectiveness because of the information society and also because it generated a culture within certain corners of the revolutionary movement in which the fear of informants is such, that the State has no need to deploy it: then groups themselves perpetuate a paranoid style of politics that neutralizes them.

The contemporary State hence has modified the age-old technique into something we can call Snitch Jackecting 2.0. It utilizes the existing history to create a panoptical paranoia on the target, and this needs to be fed from time to time with fresh kills, to keep the tree of fear and uncertainty watered.

Sure, there is a need for a security culture - but those who make an unaccountable claim to posses this truth are in fact playing into the Snitch Jacketing 2.0 game: the idea is to envelop and paralyze movements, and this is best done when movements are much more preocuppied about security than politics.

The reality is, we do not know if Richard Aoki was an informant. And the timing for this information to emerge now is highly suspect in the context of a global uprising, and the events in Anaheim. I can see a thread of critique from the right and from the State of what Aoki in the positive sense was a symbol of: uncompromising anti-imperialist internationalism. That is, a political line that remains as valid now as it was then, and remains equally dangerous to those in the State - and in the right and in the left - to whom anti-imperialism and internationalism are bad ideas. On the right, the defense of white supremacy and empire is of importance, and in the left, the identitarian self-ghettoization and the pacifist liberalism find an advantage in the pushing of this myth. Even on the left that is not identitarian or pacifist there are already sectarian rumbles, full of the wounds of another era, that take advatange of the uncertainty to promote sectarian explanations for Aoki's move from Trotskyism to a form of Third Worldism.

We do not know it to be true. That is the main point to make at this point. Those who give credence to this information to further political points, or those who assume a superficial agnosticism to do the same are playing precisely into this game. In a sense, so am I - but I will claim that thise self-conciousness becomes a direct attack on this emerging form of Snitch Jacketing, and I put it forward on the hopes it helps minimize the impact of the information at hand.

But what if it is true?

This recalls the Malinovsky Affair from Bolshevik times. Roman Malinovsky was a leader of the Bolsheviks - a member of the Central Committee and leader of the Bolshevik group in the Duma, as well as a protege of V.I. Lenin. He was also an informant of the Czar's secret service - and responsible for the exile and jailing, one by one, of all of the Bolshevik leadership between 1910-1914. Lenin, when confronted with this information, took it in stride: "If he is a provocateur, the police gained less from it than our Party did."

He finally met his demise at the orders of Zinoviev, when he tried to rejoin the victorious Petrograd Soviet in 1918.

Aoki is dead. He can neither confirm nor deny this information - nor can we evaluate him as a living participant in the revolutionary movement, and much less provide some sort of justice.

We can, however, at the very least, judge as Lenin did, if the movement or the State gained more in this situation. I offer that the balance lies with the movement. His contributions - in practice and as a symbol, are much more important and central than any snitching he might or might not have done. This is an extremely important point to raise in breaking the encirclement of the counter-intelligence effort.



We do not know it to be true.

And we can also see - in a movement destroyed to a large extent by paranoia, snitch jacketing, and self-consuming inner-struggles in which accusing of snitching was a prime weapon, that often the instincts of the movement are wrong: snitching is much less effective than the allergic reaction to its possibility as way to disrupt movements. Thus, countless of innoncent people were branded as snitches - some of them in violent ways - who weren't. The emergence of the Great Rectification in the Communist Party of the Philippines comes to mind as an example of what goes wrong when this snitch jacketing gains a foothold: it nearly killed the movement from within. The CPP understood this before the fatal blow was delivered, but only did so after one of the most painful and self-destructive periods of its history. There are too many lessons there to illustrate - but it is a prime example of what is wrong in letting a normal part of revolutionary politics, which is the presence of snitches, become the primary preocupation of a movement over the political struggle.

It remains to be seen if these allegations are true or not. But what we can do now is reflect upon the historic effect of snitch jacketing, and put this allegation on that light. And if we take it to be true, to also but this in the context of the larger historic role. This is not a time for a simplistic perspective, but rather one informed by a nuanced and historical perspective on what in means to be a revolutionary in the USA today, and what it meant then.

Put simply, Richard Aoki is much more than a snitch, if he was one.

And thus, even if true, the allegations should be a footnote in his history. Not to mention, that in spite of ample opportunity to do so, these allegations were never made public while he was alive. That is highly suspect in itself - in the context of Anaheim, the Oakland Commune, and other mass resistances in the greater Bay Area of California, the political scene in which Aoiki always stood out as an icon of a certain brand of cross-ethnic internationalism. As white supremacy suffers a demographic challenge, as whites become a minority themselves, this is of extreme historic importance: divide and conquer is a tool of power much older and powerful than snitch jacketing ever was.

Lets not lose ourselves in the footnote, and forget the main text.

[XXPANTHAXX]

fbi files released on Richard Aoki
https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...ument/p272/a17
Download the .PDF File Here Richard Aoki fbi file