『The FBI Couldn't Infiltrate the Black Panther Party's Leadership. So They Impersonated It.』のカバーアート

The FBI Couldn't Infiltrate the Black Panther Party's Leadership. So They Impersonated It.

The FBI Couldn't Infiltrate the Black Panther Party's Leadership. So They Impersonated It.

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On February twenty-sixth, 1971, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver spoke on television for the last time. The FBI had spent nearly a year writing letters. Within seven weeks, two Panthers were dead and thirty to forty percent of the Party's membership walked out. The Party never recovered.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence documented the operation in 1976. FBI headquarters had deployed twenty-nine field offices to forge letters in the names of Newton's own inner circle — his personal secretary, his newspaper editor — designed to make Cleaver believe Newton was mocking him from behind the walls of a penthouse the FBI called "the throne." A January twenty-eighth, 1971 internal evaluation credited the Bureau's counterintelligence program for the chaos inside the Party and issued a directive: "The present chaotic situation within the Black Panther Party must be exploited."

The FBI began the wedge program in March 1970. George C. Moore, Chief of the FBI's Racial Intelligence Section, documented the approach in a memo to William Sullivan dated May fourteenth, 1970: forged and anonymous letters as the primary tool. A September sixteenth, 1970 airtel from Director Hoover authorized outright lies as content, calling it "immaterial" whether the claims were factual.

The Church Committee reproduced two of the letters in full. One was forged over the signature of Elbert "Big Man" Howard, editor of the Black Panther newspaper. It told Cleaver that Newton "now has to lie to you" about his $650-a-month penthouse — "which he refers to as the throne." The second was written to appear as a letter from Connie Matthews, Newton's personal secretary, telling Cleaver: "We must either get rid of the Supreme Commander or get rid of the disloyal members."

By mid-March 1971, the San Francisco field office reported to headquarters that the Black Panther Party's fortunes were "at a low ebb." The confrontation had already happened. J. Edgar Hoover died on May second, 1972. He was never charged with anything.

Chapters
0:00 The Setup
1:32 What the Black Panther Party Built
3:01 The First Approach: US Organization
4:34 The FBI Moves Inside
6:22 The Letters Keep Coming
9:23 The Two Letters the Church Committee Reproduced
11:18 February 26, 1971 — The Broadcast
12:26 Robert Webb
13:03 Samuel Napier
14:08 Aftermath
15:35 The Pattern

Featuring: Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, J. Edgar Hoover, David Hilliard, Connie Matthews, Elbert "Big Man" Howard, Samuel Napier, Robert Webb, Kathleen Cleaver, Don Cox, George C. Moore, William Sullivan, Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael, Jeff Fort, Dhoruba bin Wahad

Sources:
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers (South End Press, 1990)
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire (University of California Press, 2013)
Black History Declassified investigates the specific mechanisms, documents, and people behind the persecution of Black Americans who built extraordinary things.
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