The FBI’s war on the left

AMERICAN JOURNALIST Seth Rosenfeld has released a book alleging that Richard Aoki, a Japanese American member of the Black Panther Party and leading member of the 1969 Third World Liberation Front at the University of California Berkeley, was for nearly 10 ten years an FBI informant.

Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power alleges that Aoki may have provided the FBI with information on a number of leftist organizations including the Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party and the Panthers.

Rosenfeld's claim is based on four pieces of information documented in his book: interviews with the now-deceased FBI agent Burney Threadgill, Jr., who claimed to have "developed" Aoki as an informant; a November 16, 1967, FBI document Rosenfeld claims identifies Aoki as an informant and designates him with the temporary code number "T-2;" an interview with FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen, who supports the contention that Aoki was an agent; and an interview with Aoki in which he denied the allegation, but makes vague and cryptic statements whose meanings are difficult to decipher.

It should be said at the start that Rosenfeld's evidence is inconclusive. The single document which he argues shows Aoki to be an agent is ambiguous. Rosenfeld's book offers almost no evidence that Aoki provided significant information to the FBI about any of the movement activity in which he participated. Elbert "Big Man" Howard, one of the six original Panthers, recently refuted the charges against Aoki. Aoki himself committed suicide in 2009 after a long illness.

Yet the allegations against Aoki demand to be taken seriously by activists and revolutionaries. If true, Aoki could have contributed information to the FBI that would have caused significant damage to the political work of his comrades and possibly gotten them killed.

The FBI murdered 28 members of the Black Panther Party in 1969 alone. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were slaughtered by police in cold blood in their Chicago apartment because of information provided by FBI informant William O'Neill.

Black Panther members like Marshall Conway remain in prison to this day for activities supporters say were the result of frame-ups by COINTELPRO, the notorious FBI counterintelligence program used against the Panthers and other radical organizations. A successful lawsuit by the Socialist Workers Party against the FBI disclosed that, at one point in the 1960s, approximately 10 percent of members were FBI informants.

COINTELPRO used racist smear tactics to try to discredit African Americans John Franklin and Clifton DeBerry when they ran for public office on the SWP ticket, sending fabricated letters supposedly penned by white members to African American comrades in order to try to destroy racial and organizational solidarity.

IF THE Aoki allegations are true, they would also betray a long history of anti-racist activists who were central to the building of an anti-imperialist left during and after the Second World War and who, as a result, were constantly targeted by the state.

W.E.B. Du Bois criticized the U.S. government for placing Japanese Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War (Aoki and his family were themselves interned) and was later indicted and charged with being an unregistered agent for a foreign government.

Japanese American Yuri Kochiyama, whose family was also placed in a concentration camp, became a close ally and friend of Malcolm X and was under FBI investigation in the 1960s. In addition to Aoki, Guy Kurose and Lee Lew-Lee were Asian Americans who joined with the Black Panthers at the height of state repression against the group.

The Third World Liberation Front at UC Berkeley was a broad anti-imperialist alliance of Chicano, Native American, Asian American and African American students, many from poor and working-class backgrounds, all of whom were monitored by the FBI. In addition to Aoki, it included Harvey Dong, Charles Brown, Don Davis, Carl Mack Jr., Manuel Delgado, Ysidro Macias and LaNada Means. These activists successfully challenged institutional racism in higher education to build ethnic studies programs while advancing an anti-imperialist critique of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

Indeed, while its role in 1960s attacks on Panthers, socialists and communists is best known, the FBI built its enormous repressive apparatus largely out of a desire to control radical racial minorities and immigrants much earlier.

During the era of the First World War, the Bureau of Investigation, precursor of the FBI, monitored and harassed socialist Hubert Harrison, born in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and helped to destroy Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. During the 1920s, the Bureau kept files on Jamaican poet Claude McKay because of his affiliation with the left nationalist African Blood Brotherhood and political work in the Soviet Union.

As Diane Fujino points out in her excellent biography of Yuri Kochiyama, the Bureau began carrying out surveillance of Japanese Americans in the U.S. in the early 1930s, a full decade before Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into the First World War.

The predecessor to COINTELPRO was the FBI's RACON (Racial Conditions in the United States), a nationwide surveillance and infiltration program that generated xenophobic pamphlets about "Japanese Racial Agitation Among American Negroes" during the Second World War. During the 1950s, Japanese and Chinese were often suspected by the FBI of being "fifth column" subversives.

After the explosion of U.S. ethnic self-determination movements in the 1960s, FBI agent Doug Durham infiltrated the American Indian Movement chapter in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1970s and used the technique of "snitch-jacketing"--spreading rumors that a movement activist was an FBI informant--against activist Anna Mae Aquash before she was murdered on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

THE ALLEGATIONS against Aoki also recall the current role of the FBI in the ongoing widespread surveillance, entrapment and frame-up of Muslims, Arabs and non-whites as part of the U.S. "war on terror."

In October 2009, FBI agents shot and killed Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, the leader of the Masjid El-Haqq mosque, at a Dearborn, Mich., warehouse. The raid was conducted based on information provided by FBI informants.

In 2011, an Orange County, Calif., mosque sued the FBI after it discovered that Craig Monteilh, posing as a French Syrian named Farouk Aziz, was an FBI confidential informant who had been secretly videotaping mosque services and recording conversations in an effort to entrap potential "radical" Muslims. Monteilh later acknowledged he was encouraged to have sex with women to garner information and called the scheme in which he was involved "all about entrapment."

Just two weeks ago, a federal judge threw out a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Council on American-Islamic Relations against the FBI on the grounds of "state secrets privilege." The FBI has also gathered information on Bay Area Muslims through a "Community Outreach" program that has been challenged by the ACLU.

Finally, the New York City Police surveillance program against Muslims carried out partly with federal funds shows how FBI tactics have become routine police procedure in the wake of 9/11.

Rosenfeld's book, and the subsequent debate about Aoki's status, should compel activists and revolutionaries to remember with fresh force the incessant violence perpetrated by the state against movements for social justice. More importantly, they should renew our dedication to building broad interracial alliances against Islamophobia, imperialist militarism, exploitation of workers, sexism, homophobia and racist attacks on people of color.

This constitutes our best weapon against capitalism and its coercive state apparatus. Only a united, multiracial working-class movement organized publicly, with confidence and standing in solidarity, can stand up to and put down dirty tricks that will inevitably be used to try and hold it back.