When a Celebrated Activist Turns Out To Be an FBI Informant
Monday, 05 November 2012 16:11
By Trevor Griffey, Truthout | News Analysis
Civil rights activist and Black Panther Party member Richard Aoki. (Photo: oso / flickr)
Richard Aoki was a well-known activist in the San Francisco Bay Area - celebrated for his role as one of only a handful of Asian American members of the Black Panther Party, a leader in UC Berkeley’s Third World Liberation Front in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a mentor to a generation of left-leaning activists.
So when the journalist Seth Rosenfeld alleged in August 2012 that Aoki was an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Rosenfeld shocked Aoki’s family, friends, and allies. He also sought to shake up how we tell black freedom movement history by playing up the fact that Aoki provided the founders of the Black Panther Party (BPP) with their first guns. In the process, Rosenfeld raised important questions about what it is that informants do and what it means when an ally in struggles against government racism and police repression turns out to be an informant for the government.
Rosenfeld’s allegations were surprising in part because they followed on the heels of the creation of two recent celebratory histories of Richard Aoki’s life. Aoki died in March 2009. In November of that year, activist filmmakers released a history of his work with documentary film, Aoki. And in April, 2012, University of Minnesota Press published a scholarly, 496 page biography of Aoki titled Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life.
Only four months after the publication of Samurai Among Panthers, Rosenfeld alleged in an August 20 news article that "the man who armed the Black Panthers was FBI informant, records show."
Rosenfeld tread gently on the revered figure’s memory. Having chosen not to share his research with activists or historians beforehand, he announced that "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." Rosenfeld described asking Aoki directly, during an oral history interview, whether he had been an informant (Aoki denied it). And Rosenfeld twice mentioned in his story that Aoki committed suicide in 2009. Could Aoki have committed suicide out of fear that Rosenfeld would expose him? Rosenfeld didn’t speculate overtly about Aoki’s decision. But he seemed to raise the issue by paying significant attention to the way that Aoki died (something few others have dwelled upon).
When Rosenfeld published this file (FBI Headquarters file 134-10010, or 134-HQ-10010 for short) in response to his critics on September 7, with the story "FBI files reveal new details about informant who armed Black Panthers," he conclusively proved (in my opinion) that Aoki was an informant for the FBI. The only question that remains is what kind of informant Aoki was.
In what follows, I offer a close reading of FBI documents to explain how and why they prove that Aoki was an informant. I also use the documents to draw attention to potential ambiguities in the relationship between Aoki and the FBI, to raise questions that can only be answered with further research and to identify documents whose declassification might help us better understand Aoki’s dual role as informant and activist.
"Informant T-2"
When Seth Rosenfeld first alleged that Aoki was an FBI informant, Rosenfeld had two compelling pieces of evidence. His biggest scoop was that former FBI Agent Burney Threadgill Jr. reportedly told him that Threadgill developed Aoki as an informant in the early 1960s, and that "he was one of the best sources we had." FBI agents rarely if ever disclose the identities of their informants, so the fact that Rosenfeld got Threadgill to go on the record with such information before Threadgill passed away in 2005 is remarkable.
But Rosenfeld still needed corroboration of Threadgill’s claim. And he seemed to find that in a single page of a single FBI document on the Black Panther Party. According to Rosenfeld’s article, "a Nov. 16, 1967, intelligence report on the Black Panthers lists Aoki as an ‘informant’ with the code number 'T-2.' "
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