A THREAT OF THE
FIRST MAGNITUDE

A THREAT OF THE
FIRST MAGNITUDE:

FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration
from the Communist Party to the
Revolutionary Union – 1962-1974

Aaron J Leonard & Conor A Gallagher

In memory of Kevin,
Bill, Peter & Craig

PREFACE

When we began work on Heavy Radicals in the spring of 2012, we felt we could assemble enough information to publish a reasonable first pass of the history of the largest American Maoist grouping to emerge from the long Sixties, the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party. As things turned out that book explored not only the political vicissitudes of attempting to be the agent of Maoist communism in the US, but also dealt with – and had to deal with – the intertwined campaign by the FBI to monitor, staunch, and hold the potential to destroy it.

In tapping into the FBI’s campaign against the RU/RCP we unearthed a bounty of documents which made clear that the larger legacy of what the Bureau did in that period has not been fully explored. On the surface it appears the FBI in the Sixties and Seventies is a subject that has been plowed over and then over again, with little new to learn. What we found, however, was quite the opposite. Beyond the “usual suspects” – the Black Panther Party, the Weatherman, a few key individuals and celebrities – a whole other realm remained untouched. Such groups as the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, the Progressive Labor Party, and the Revolutionary Union, have been relegated to the margins, yet in many respects “that is where the bodies are buried.” We learned this early in our research, where once we pulled on the “Revolutionary Union” thread it revealed, among other things, the FBI’s efforts against Students for Democratic Society, how the Bureau fed stories to trusted media contacts to target organizations and individuals, and of their “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party,” a group we now know was a vehicle for Bureau operations against the CPUSA, the Progressive Labor Party, the Revolutionary Union, the Weathermen, and others.¹

From the standpoint of the research-writer there appears to be no particular rhyme or reason to what the government will release and when. Certain things that seem to have long since passed their shelf life are held onto for dear life, while other seemingly highly sensitive documents are freely given. For example, Leibel Bergman, the key founder of the RU and former member of the CPUSA, has the largest file – running many thousands of pages – yet to date we have received only select sections from his FBI Newark Office file and pages from the Bureau’s Ottawa legal attaché file, all in all numbering less than two-hundred pages. Yet the file on one of the highest RU leaders in the mid-Seventies, Mickey Jarvis, was released relatively quickly, including duplicate versions from different FBI field offices, one set with many redactions, another with relatively few, which gave us insights into highly secret operations. In other cases we were told certain RU files were destroyed, only to find the information we sought in the files of other field offices.² We also discovered among the FBI’s extensive records on the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO) – which for a period in the early Seventies was a close ally of the RU and potential partner in forming a new Party – key details on an informant operating within the RU.³

What has been striking in our research was the relative ease with which we have uncovered things the government continues to try and keep secret under the justification of protecting “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations.”⁴ The major barrier to disclosure has not been government intransigence – there are so many secrets squirreled away in so many corners it is nearly impossible for anyone to keep track of them all – but rather the ability to know what to ask for and how to make sense of material that is released.

This last point is perhaps the most challenging. The initial aim of this project was to tell the story of FBI counterintelligence, specifically the method and execution of counterintelligence in relation to the RU and others in the New Communist Movement. As we started to digest the trove of documents, however, we realized there was another more important story to tell. The critical element flowing through the bulk of what we received was not an amorphous “counterintelligence,” but rather the meticulous detail and intimate insights garnered from informant reports. Surveillance, wiretapping, break-ins, poison-pen letters, and the like were important – and seem to have received most of the media and popular attention – yet it was only when the Bureau had well-placed informants that they seemed to be firing on all cylinders. Their ability to carry out a proper counterintelligence operation aimed at disrupting, if not destroying, a group largely hinged on the kind of intelligence only an informant could supply. And here we came to understand it was not just any informant – of which there were scores, or in the case of the CPUSA, hundreds. The most important informants for the Bureau were those that had penetrated to the very top of the groups that concerned them. This was not accidental, but the result of precise planning and what looks to have been a successful doctrine on the part of the Bureau that evolved over many years.

There is in this the matter of how much credibility to afford the FBI’s files. As Arthur Eckstein noted in his recent book on the Weathermen – a work relevant especially because of its examination of a huge cache of previously secret documents – released FBI internal memos and missives were not written for public consumption, but instead for the internal operations of the Bureau. This was the FBI talking with its own. In order to have any kind of effectiveness they needed to be truthful, to the degree they had hold of the truth, to one another.⁵ Saying that, we have the added benefit of ample documentation from government reports, press accounts, personal memoirs, and other sources to confirm, question, or disregard the Bureau’s version of events.

In contrast to the view of a certain acceptance of these reports is one that argues extreme skepticism. The FBI, with its technical capability and legacy of deceit, could have manipulated and forged hundreds if not thousands of pages of records to such a degree that what has been released cannot be believed. Those making this claim – such as in the case of Richard Aoki – have not produced evidence to prove such an extraordinary charge, leaving then the difference between what is “possible” and what is demonstrable. Further, such an incredulous view tends to give credit to the FBI for things they have not accomplished and leave those that they have unexamined.

In looking at this, and assessing what we have learned, many of our assumptions about the period have been upended. There were it seems consequential forces operating in the shadows – not the sole or necessarily determinant driver of events, but forces that played a much bigger role than has previously been acknowledged. What will be revealed as even more secrets from that period finally come out from the shadows is an open question, one we look forward to exploring in the bright light of day.

Aaron J Leonard & Conor A Gallagher
May 2017

INTRODUCTION

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE & INFORMANTS

Members of a group will seldom learn that an FBI intelligence informant has been in their midst or has copied their records for the FBI because intelligence investigations almost invariably do not result in prosecutions.

— Church Committee Report, Book III.¹

Extreme care must be taken in the use or dissemination of this information to paraphrase it so as to not reveal the identity of the informant.

— FBI, Report on Cleveland Branch of the Revolutionary Union, 1974.²

A MEETING IN CHICAGO

Gerald Kirk had an appointment to get to. Kirk, a twenty-year-old African-American student and recent recruit of the Communist Party USA, had received a call the night before inviting him to meet. The caller, who Kirk did not know, instructed him to meet at 8pm at the Hyde Park Theater in Chicago. Kirk followed the instructions precisely and at the appointed hour a blue 1961 Chevrolet pulled up. Kirk got in.

The driver, a man in his fifties named “Herb,” quickly got down to business. He told Kirk that he too was a member of the Communist Party and had been for thirty years. He said that “he welcomed the chance to talk to a young man who was interested in true revolutionary practice.” He explained that he was part of something called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, a group working within the Communist Party USA to build “a true Marxist Leninist Party” – the current CP being anti-revolutionary, carrying out a revisionist line. The Ad Hoc Committee, according to Herb, had formed in order “to develop a new line” that would follow the revolutionary teachings of MAO Zedong. In order to do this, they were recruiting people from within the Communist Party itself. Herb then got to the point of why he had asked for a meeting – would Kirk be interested in joining him? Specifically, would he be willing to work with “the blacks in the ghetto, on the University of Chicago campus,” and with the anti-war leader, Rennie Davis? Kirk was non-committal. He told the older man he would need to think about it, but knew already it was a nonstarter. Along with being a student, campus activist, and Communist cadre, he was also busy… working as an FBI informant. Unbeknownst to Kirk, however, he was not alone in this. “Herb” himself was an informant.³ More than that, the organization he claimed to represent was a super-secret, whole-cloth construction of the FBI, created explicitly to disrupt the Communist Party USA in Chicago. Kirk, it seems, had been approached in furtherance of that cause.

THE FBI & COUNTERINTEllIGENCE

When Gerald Kirk met “Herb” (“Herb” Block [Bureau quotes], according to the document) in the spring of 1968 the FBI had been in the business of domestic intelligence, and the critical element of informant penetration, for over fifty years. Through those years they sharpened their methodology to a razor’s edge, specifically in countering domestic subversion.

The history of this is consequential. In 1908 the Attorney General, Charles J. Bonaparte, established the Bureau of Investigation, an agency charged with “investigating” – investigation being the catchall euphemism for aggressively targeting – “suspected anarchists, Bolsheviks, socialists, and other radicals.” The Bureau’s first major undertaking in this regard came in 1919 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, along with the twenty-four-year-old Justice Department attorney J. Edgar Hoover, oversaw a campaign between November 1919 and January 1920 aimed at foreign-born radicals, commonly known as the Palmer Raids.⁴ Thousands of people were taken into custody in the ensuing raids carried out throughout the country. While the aim of deporting thousands fell short – in the end hundreds were deported – the ability to round up entire populations of dissidents, and the implicit tracking and monitoring involved in being able to execute such an initiative, was successfully accomplished.⁵

While the Palmer Raids targeted immigrants, anarchists, and communists, far and away the Bureau’s chief target throughout the twentieth century was the Communist Party USA. The CPUSA had arisen with the Russian Revolution and it was that group’s support of the Soviet Union that was at once its source of strength and its undoing. It was also the focus of Hoover’s life-long obsession – the influence of foreign powers within the borders of the United States. How this all played out left marks deep and lasting.

While the CPUSA had weathered no small amount of repression in the Twenties – including the Palmer Raids – by the mid-1930s they had attained, if not a level of legitimacy, at least room to maneuver through its “Popular Front” – its anti-fascist stance. This all came undone with the 1939 signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Germany, which saw the Party sharply at odds with the geopolitical imperative of the US government. One sharp consequence of that was that the group’s leader, Earl Browder, was jailed in October 1939, ostensibly for a passport violation.⁶

Browder’s imprisonment underscored the tenuous position the Party occupied. As long as it was not fundamentally challenging US power or its global interests there was a level of tolerance of its existence. If it did challenge those interests all bets were off. This can be seen starkly in the fact that while Browder was released in 1943 after the CP shifted its policy in the wake of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, when the Grand Alliance of the US, England, and the USSR evaporated with the Cold War, the CPUSA again came into the crosshairs of the Justice Department.⁷ This time eleven of their top leaders – Browder by then had been expelled from the CPUSA – were arrested and put on trial and then imprisoned (a few fled abroad) for subversion under the Smith Act. That trial in 1949 heralded what would be the worst decade for the Communist Party.⁸

The FBI effort against the CPUSA was conducted under the organizational rubric of an “internal security” investigation, or “IS” in FBI shorthand. The internal security investigation – like others – was a far-reaching undertaking which included aggressive surveillance, high and low harassment, compiling lists for their Security Index of those slated for apprehension and detainment in the event of a “national emergency,” and informant penetration.

The Bureau’s Internal Security investigations were essentially counterintelligence operations. Broadly speaking, counterintelligence or “CI” – as those who deploy it refer to it – is defined as coordinated efforts to counter strategic threats, particularly those posed by foreign powers.⁹ Here’s how the CIA has defined the term:

Counterintelligence is both an activity and its product. The product is reliable information about all those enemies of a country who attack it by stealth. Some of these enemies are professional intelligence officers and the agents who serve them. Others act under cover to promote subversion or insurrection rather than espionage or counterintelligence. Still others may be non-Communists or anti-Communists who employ the same underground tactics to try to take by stealth and force what they cannot gain through winning the open allegiance of a free people.¹⁰

FBI Inventory sheet of Revolutionary Union surveillance photos and documents

Credit: FBI-Newark Revolutionary Union Photo Album

While today the focus of much of CI is anti-terrorism, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the element of anti-subversion was pronounced. It is not surprising then that when the Bureau was most aggressively targeting the CPUSA they established something they specifically named the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. While this was something that would later be expanded to include four other sections – “Black extremists,” the Socialist Workers Party, the New Left, and the Klan – the CPUSA COINTELPRO was the first and most long-lasting.¹¹

Still, COINTELPRO and counterintelligence were two different things, and the latter was much more fundamental to the Bureau’s work. Indeed, according to the Bureau “about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period” (they do not say which fifteen years) were associated with the nominal COINTELPROs.¹² While it is possible that in its white-hot years, COINTELPRO may have commanded a larger footprint, it is still dwarfed by the agency’s other activity.

INFORMANTS – THE KEY LINK

When the Church Committee investigating US intelligence activity issued its final report in 1976, they placed the section dealing with informants in the center of their report, yet by their own estimate that section described the most significant activity the Bureau had undertaken. Here is how they assessed things:

The paid and directed informant is the most extensively used technique in FBI domestic intelligence investigations. Informants were used in 85 percent of the domestic intelligence investigations analyzed in a recent study by the General Accounting Office.¹³

The report went on to note that by comparison electronic surveillance was used in only five percent of the cases studied.¹⁴ Given that, it seems no exaggeration to say that if counterintelligence was the essence of FBI activity, then informant penetration was the key element of counterintelligence.

The use of informants against the Communist Party USA is a good measure of this. The informant penetration against that organization from the 1950s into the 1960s was at the level of fourhundred informants and greater, this despite the fact that the group was hemorrhaging members from the 1950s onward. By the early Sixties the CP had only several thousand members, but they still had hundreds of informants. Likewise, the Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical student organization of the Sixties, is estimated to have had at least one informant in every chapter – the number of SDS chapters at their peak in 1968, reaching threehundred – and some chapters had multiple informants.¹⁵

Looked at another way, organizations could have been built of FBI informants – and in some cases the Bureau did exactly that – albeit made up of very small numbers. This was the case, for example, of the Red Star Cadre in Florida and the Red Collective in New Orleans¹⁶ – the former group was run by an informant named Joe Burton, who later went public with his FBI affiliation; the latter entity was exposed through court proceedings.¹⁷ One of the advantages of this particular model is the way organizations could speak up for individuals, lending a “radical” legitimacy that may or may not exist. This can be seen in the “reference” letter written by FBI informant Jill Schafer to someone in Florida who was doing due diligence on Joe Burton:

Our collective has been acquainted with Joe and several other persons connected with Red Star Cadre since June 1972. We find his background to be beyond reproach, with anti-imperialist activities and sentiments going back for many years.¹⁸

While such “notional” collectives – and their ability to validate informants as revolutionaries – were able to accomplish certain things, their effort paled in comparison to another Bureau effort. This was an initiative to undermine the CPUSA through something called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, which was in fact created by an FBI Special Agent named Herbert K. Stallings. Stallings actually wrote a number of ostensible “pro-Chinese Communist Party” bulletins, called the Ad Hoc Bulletin – something to be discussed in depth a bit further in this volume.

It is the case that much of the history of political repression in the Sixties revolves around the FBI and its formal COINTELPRO programs: the black-bag jobs, poison-pen letters, schemes of deception to isolate and tar individual reputations, etc. So much has been written about this topic that for many it stands as the activity of the Bureau, or least its most significant activity. What has not been explored sufficiently is the matter of informants, and not just any informants, but those that got to the very top of their target organizations. These were people who were in leadership, and in turn were positioned to greatly impact the operation, direction, and lives of the members of these groups. That the Bureau was able to do this and do it repeatedly challenges many standing notions of the FBI, including that of the over-eager button-down and largely ineffective government bureaucrat. Instead there was a highly effective coterie within the Bureau with a great degree of political sophistication proceeding from a strategic plan.

It also argues against the caricature of the FBI – or of J. Edgar Hoover, who has come to be the stand-in for the wider organization in this period – as a coarse, overzealous opponent of everything related to dissent. While a characterization not without truth, it misses a bigger point. Hoover’s reign coincided with the appearance of the communist project of the twentieth century; his tenure was thus anchored and informed by larger historic circumstances. His death, ironically, came right at a time when the world’s largest communist country, Maoist China, was in the process of reversing course – symbolized by Nixon’s visit to that country in 1972. The Bureau he had led, by the end of the Seventies, was being impelled in other directions. There was, in other words, rhyme and reason amid the overreach and irrationality.

As for the groups that were the FBI targets, their response is instructive. Beyond the combination of disbelief, denial, and even acceptance of the Bureau’s assaults, was a mistaken view that a correct political line, the supremacy of their ideals, was sufficient to withstand the attacks – if not in the short run, then in the long. How that worked in practice is a lesson in repeated failure, one with historic precedent.

PRELUDE

THE SHADOW OF ROMAN MALINOVSKY

A person who is flabby and shaky on questions of theory, who has a narrow outlook, who pleads the spontaneity of the masses as an excuse for his own sluggishness... and who is inexperienced and clumsy in his own professional art – the art of combating the political police – such a man is not a revolutionary, but a wretched amateur!

— Lenin, What Is To Be Done?¹

I never could see through that scoundrel Malinovsky.

— Lenin letter to Maxim Gorky²

Roman Malinovsky was many things – a tailor’s assistant, a political activist, a petty criminal, and a military veteran. Beyond that, however, he was something far more consequential. He was a Tsarist police agent – perhaps one of the most important informants of the twentieth century – penetrating Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, a group that prided itself on its ability to operate under conditions of the harshest repression. In that respect, Roman Malinovsky was a bellwether for infiltrators who would come later.

It all began on May 13, 1910, after Malinovsky was arrested for engaging in revolutionary political activity. In the course of his interrogation the police gave him a choice: he could be sentenced to hard labor in a prison camp or garner a salary as a police agent against the Russian revolutionary workers’ movement, specifically Lenin’s Bolsheviks. He chose the latter.

Malinovsky’s initial value to police was in facilitating the kind of damage only a well-placed informant can cause. He provided “the police with lists of pseudonyms, numbers of forged passports, locations of party meetings and storage places for illegal literature.”³ His value increased exponentially as he rose higher in the ranks of the Bolshevik party. In January 1912, he attended the group’s Sixth Party Conference in Prague where he met and impressed Lenin as a strong revolutionary. In the wake of that meeting, and on Lenin’s recommendation, he was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee.

Bolshevik informant Roman Malinovsky

As his star rose he also became the Russian representative to the International Socialist Bureau. Aiding him in this – tacitly or not – was his wife, Stefani A. Malinovskaya, who became the publisher of Pravda, the Bolshevik’s main (legal) newspaper.⁴

There was one other position of considerable consequence that Malinovsky achieved in this period. He was assigned to the Party’s three-man “provocation commission” – a body established by Lenin “to forestall further arrests.” In other words, the police agent was tasked with aiding the Bolsheviks in ferreting out police informants.⁵

His crowning achievement, however, came in the fall of 1913 when he was picked as the Bolshevik deputy to the Fourth State Duma – Russia’s newly created parliament – thus becoming the group’s most important public representative. Malinovsky’s presence in the Duma was an intelligence coup for the political police. The police chief himself was in charge of the situation, meeting with their agent directly and only in the private rooms of high-end restaurants.⁶ To smooth his Duma duties, the Police Ministry insured that Malinovsky got a “Certificate of Good Repute” from authorities from his native province.⁷ They also – with the exception of Josef Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov, who were sent to exile on Malinovsky’s denunciation – reined in his denouncing work in order to minimize the potential for exposure. He did, however, continue to pass along organizational information on the Bolsheviks.⁸

As successful as he was, Malinovsky’s time as a leading Bolshevik would come to an abrupt end in May 1914, when he handed in his resignation for his Duma position. Quickly after, pistol in hand, he went missing. His resignation and disappearance in turn created a crisis for the Bolsheviks. Not only had they lost their key representative in the Duma, they now had to defend themselves against a flurry of printed suspicions by the Menshevik faction of the party. The Mensheviks were charging – correctly – that Malinovsky was a secret police agent.⁹

Rather than confront the crisis head on, Lenin went on the defensive, attacking Malinovsky’s accusers. In one of the few official references to Malinovsky in Soviet literature he wrote, “It makes one blush with shame to see people using a man’s private misfortune in their struggle against a hostile political trend.”¹⁰ Regardless, the Bolsheviks themselves would convene their own committee to weigh the allegations against Malinovsky. Their verdict was as swift as it was self-serving. Lenin, in a note to G.I. Petrovsky, wrote, “No need to expel him. He has removed himself. Condemned. Political suicide. What other punishment can there be?”¹¹ The Bolsheviks nonetheless held the line and “[u]nanimously confirmed the charges of provocation were absolute nonsense.”¹²

Had there not been a revolution in 1917 it is conceivable that Malinovsky’s work with the police would have remained a fervent rumor awaiting actual evidence. That was not, however, the case. There was a revolution in February 1917 and the police archives were forced open, supplying definitive evidence of Malinovsky’s police role. As a result, Alexander Kerensky, the Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government, initiated an investigation, specifically creating the “Extraordinary Investigatory Commission” to look fully into the matter.¹³

In the course of the inquiry one of those called to testify was no less than Lenin, who had a defensive explanation at the ready. He told the Commission that “intelligent people” in the Okhrana must have “stood behind [Malinovsky], directing his every political step, because he could not have pursued such a subtle course of action on his own.”¹⁴ Lenin’s explanation aside, it would be forty-five years before his appearance was acknowledged by Soviet authorities, this in the 1962 edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, where it was mentioned only in the endnotes. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union to get the full record of Lenin’s testimony revealed.¹⁵

As things turned out the Kerensky government itself was shortlived, being replaced in the wake of the Bolshevik’s storming of the Winter Palace by Lenin’s party. Because of this the “Malinovsky Affair” took one final bizarre turn. Malinovsky, for reasons clear only to him, returned to Russia in March 1918 in the wake of the Brest-Livstok Treaty that signaled the exit of Russia from World War I. During the war Malinovsky had been imprisoned in a German POW camp – this before the opening of the police archives – and was still in Lenin’s favor to the degree that he was doing Bolshevik agitation while imprisoned. Regardless, on his return he was arrested, put on trial – where his former police handlers were called to testify against him – and convicted. Things moved swiftly from there. Found guilty of “injuring and discrediting the revolution and its leaders,” he was quickly executed along with his police handlers.

In one respect the Malinovsky Affair had a definitive conclusion, but it hardly settled things. Instead myriad questions remained, not the least of which was how was it possible that the Bolsheviks, whose organizational principles were in no small part predicated on preventing infiltration, could have a police agent at the very top of their organization. The reasons of course are many and nuanced, not the least of which was the Bolsheviks’ imperative to recruit politically astute workers and transform them into professional revolutionaries. In this respect Malinovsky “was exactly the type of revolutionary Lenin expected to emerge from the proletariat, but rarely did.” Put another way, Malinovsky was a man of the proletariat, and given the doctrine of the Bolsheviks, he was the embodiment of their theoretical arguments about the capacity of the proletariat to lead the revolution.¹⁶

Fooled as they had been, there remained the matter of what lessons the group took from the experience. In this respect, the Bolsheviks did not do well. Rather than confront things as they were, Lenin, writing in his seminal work Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, attempted to recast defeat and humiliation as something beneficial:

With one hand, Malinovsky sent scores and scores of the finest Bolsheviks to penal servitude and death; he was obliged, with the other, to assist in the education of scores and scores of thousands of new Bolsheviks through the medium of the legal press.¹⁷

In Lenin’s view Malinovsky may have been bad, but he also did good. Leaving aside the tightrope the Okhrana was walking in facilitating Bolshevik work in order to protect their informant – and there has been speculation that Malinovsky’s role in the Duma was ended for that reason – such an assertion stands against the havoc he wrought on the Bolshevik organization and the scars it left on those who would go on to lead the Soviet state.¹⁸ Beyond that, Lenin’s assessment left its mark on succeeding generations who would confront their own Malinovskys.

CHAPTER ONE

MORRIS CHILDS & HIS HANDLERS

There is a saying in the book of Sun Wu Tzu, the great military scientist of ancient China, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat”.

— MAO Zedong¹

You’ve got to learn to think like they think.

— Morris Childs²

There had been a time in Morris Childs’s life when he had been a genuine communist, but that was before he became a renegade. Childs, born Moishe Chilovsky, had joined the Communist Party when he was nineteen years old. By the mid-1920s he caught the attention of Earl Browder, who would be the Communist Party USA’s General Secretary during its peak years in the 1930s and early 1940s, putting Childs on a favored course.

In his role as an up-and-coming prospect, Childs was sent to the Lenin School in the Soviet Union in 1929 for political training, then throughout the Thirties and into the Forties he held various positions of responsibility. Most significantly, in the mid 1930s he was re-assigned from his base in Milwaukee to Chicago where he was elevated to the Party’s Central Committee.³

In similar fashion his younger and less theory-oriented brother, Jackob “Jack” Childs, also joined the Party. Jack Childs initially had been the business manager for the Young Communist League, but at Browder’s suggestion he too was sent to Moscow, in his case for training in “communications and underground tradecraft,” in order to enable him to work as a communist courier.⁴ This role would serve him well as he too came to work for the FBI; essentially as the US Party’s bag-man for Soviet money earmarked for the American CP. As important a role as Jack had, however, it was Morris who would ascend to a position at the very top of the Party, putting him in a commanding and unprecedented position as an informant.

The fate of the Childs brothers was one intimately related to their ostensible mentor, Earl Browder, and this would be highly fraught. Browder’s time as leader of the CPUSA, which had reached a pinnacle in the years of World War II, took an abrupt turn as that war was coming to a conclusion.

The particular circumstances of Browder’s downfall – and the cascading chain of events that led Morris Childs to the FBI – had to do with the Soviet Union’s assessment toward the end of World War II that Browder’s approach to communism in the United States – that it was “Twentieth Century Americanism” – along with his corresponding organizational views, would not be tolerated. The machinery of his removal was set in motion through a polemic by French Communist, Jacques Duclos, later published in the Daily Worker, that challenged Browder’s American exceptionalist notions and took him to task for dissolving the Communist Party and turning it into the Communist Political Association.⁵ The fallout of that polemic and the underlying change in Soviet policy toward their American “comrades” led to a campaign against “Browderism” and a sharp left turn in the CPUSA. The most powerful figure in the CPUSA during the years when it was at its largest and most influential was no more. Browder was expelled in 1946.

Ironically, Morris Childs was initially buoyed by these events; in fact, he was picked to head the Daily Worker – despite his lack of journalistic experience. Less than two years later, however, it all came undone. In short order he suffered a severe heart attack, was ousted from his editorial post and stood accused of the pariah ideology of “Browderism.” The efforts against Childs were part of a larger internal purge in the Party that historian Maurice Isserman explains drove “hundreds out of the party and some into the arms of the FBI.”⁶ In Childs’ case he was impelled toward the FBI after his wife left him, taking their son with her, he suffered a second heart attack, and, as a persona non grata in the Party, he had no other emotional or financial support.⁷

ASSAULT ON THE CPUSA

The ousting of Browder and the internal struggle in the CPUSA coincided with the onset of a highly dangerous period in the Cold War. The Party, which had attained peak membership levels near 79,000 during the war and was operating more or less as an ally to the US government due to its support of the Soviet Union, instead found itself an organization assaulted from every angle – just shy of being declared illegal.⁸

In 1949 their leadership was brought to trial on charges of advocating the overthrow of the US government under the Smith Act. Their fate was sealed when the Supreme Court in 1951 rejected the appeal in that case.⁹ They were in turn ordered to begin serving their sentences; seven of them reported as ordered, but four others, Gus Hall, Henry Winston, Gilbert Green, and Robert G. Thompson, did not.¹⁰ This was part of the Party’s response to the repression, which involved activating its plan to move key elements of their organization underground. The decision, as Isserman notes, “removed hundreds of trusted and experienced activists – precisely those who should have been representing the Communists’ public face in those difficult years – and removed them from effective activity.”¹¹ The recruitment of Morris and Jack Childs was another, albeit unintended, consequence of this move underground.

TOPLEV

The Bureau, which had supplied informants for the trial of the top Communists, waded into the post-Smith Act turmoil, forming squads in New York and Chicago to ferret out cadre who had gone underground. John Barron – whose book on Operation SOLO was written with the cooperation and from the point of view of Morris Childs, his partner and wife Eva, and many of his FBI handlers – tells of how the “squads began the hunt by analyzing investigative and intelligence files to ascertain with whom [CP fugitives] Hall, Gates, Thompson, and Green most frequently associated.”¹² Once the review was complete they set about trying to identify which former or inactive party members had links to the men. The program was called TOPLEV, Bureau shorthand for Top Level, and was begun in September 1951.¹³ The crowning achievement of TOPLEV was the recruitment of Jack and Morris Childs, who in turn would become the core of the decades-long project the Bureau code-named Operation SOLO.

JACK CHILDS

What led the Bureau to Morris Childs was the TOPLEV agents’ approach to his younger brother Jack, who had also been closely identified with Earl Browder and was on the outs with the larger CP. The Bureau, thinking he might be able to lead them to the underground Communists, planned to “interview” him. When agents approached him near his home, rather than telling them to get lost, Childs offered to assist them. Specifically, he suggested that they contact his brother Morris, who he felt could be especially helpful.

The encounter with Jack paved the way for a later meeting between Morris and the FBI agent, Carl N. Freyman.¹⁴ Jack had instructed the Bureau to approach Morris cautiously and with sophistication and respect – Freyman apparently fit the bill. It was his approach to Morris that sealed the deal; the two men hit it off on both an intellectual, and for Childs at least, personal level.

To strengthen their leverage over him, the Bureau took advantage of Childs’ health vulnerability and arranged for him to be treated at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. As Freyman later said, “[h] e cost us a lot of money at the time, but he was worth it.”¹⁵

One thing of interest in this regard is that in order to cover their tracks, specifically to explain where the money came from to cover Morris Childs’s considerable medical expenses, Jack concocted a fiction, which he spread among his former comrades. He told them that his brother’s treatment was paid for by the contributions of Party members. As he confided to his FBI handlers and Barron, “Almost none of these assholes will contribute a dime. But no one will ever say he didn’t contribute.”¹⁶ The subterfuge was apparently successful.

It was in this way Childs became CG-5824S*. The “CG” indicated his home base of Chicago, the “S” indicated that he was a security informant, and the asterisk indicated he would not risk being exposed by being called to testify in court – the number itself was a unique identifier. Jack Childs, based in New York, was given the internal FBI moniker of NY694S*.¹⁷

Communist Party informant Morris Childs

As Morris Childs’ health improved he began reaching out to his old comrades with the aim of returning to the Party’s good graces. He and Jack were both eventually welcomed back and ultimately given significant responsibility. Morris in particular was given the task of “deepening contacts with the Canadian Communist Party and through it, the Soviet Union.”¹⁸ This would lead to a level of influence and insight beyond the wildest dreams of the Bureau. In the course of his informant career Morris Childs would come to be on a first-name basis with Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Suslov (head of the Ideological Department of the Soviet Central Committee), and Boris Ponomarev (head of the International Department of the Soviet Central Committee), as well as meeting with MAO Zedong and Chou En Lai.¹⁹

THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT

Childs’ tenure as a Bureau informant coincided with the fraying and ultimate unraveling of relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. In this they were there from the start, obtaining a copy of Khrushchev’s historic 1956 speech denouncing Stalin – separate from the CIA, which also obtained a copy.²⁰ It was that speech that set the Soviet Union on a schismatic path with their Chinese comrades.

In one of his trips to China, as relations between the two countries were worsening, Childs actually met with MAO Zedong. He would report that a key issue for the Chinese was the Soviets abandoning their support of China’s nuclear research. However there was more. According to Childs, Mao’s view was that the “unprincipled and opportunistic Soviets thought only in terms of five year plans; the Chinese thought ahead a hundred years, nay a thousand years.”²¹ While the accuracy of that quote rests on Morris Childs’ memory – channeled through John Barron’s uncited work – it is consistent with Mao’s approach in that period. MAO was arguing for the communist horizon as the gauge, in opposition to material gains of the Soviets as the critical “metric.” As the Sixties reached a fevered pitch, it was Mao’s theoretical sweep that was a pole of attraction for young radicals worldwide – and as we will see posed new challenges for the FBI and its intelligence apparatus.

Along with his talks with the Chinese, Childs was able to keep the US government apprised of what was happening in Cuba, specifically in regard to the Sino-Soviet dispute. One report Childs submitted noted that Fidel Castro was generally on board with the Soviets’ position, “particularly as such policy concerns the CPC.” However he was having some difficulty selling this position internally because of “pressure exerted upon him by individuals in his own leadership.” In other words, the communism propounded by MAO was exerting influence in Cuba that was not fully under Castro’s control.²²

Information of such a critical nature was then passed up to the highest levels of the US government. One memorandum in the released SOLO file – dealing with a potential reversal in the Sino-Soviet split that came to naught – instructed quite specifically that it be distributed to “the White House, the Acting Attorney General, the Secretary of State Rusk and Director McCone of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”²³ All of this points to a much more nuanced understanding – based on this intelligence – of the internal workings of the Soviet Union on the part of the US government than that which has been widely propagated.

Childs was also passing on intelligence about how the Chinese Communists were attempting to manifest their ideological break with the Soviets in organizational form. The Chinese, he reported, aimed to split “off from five to ten people from each fraternal party” and then recognize the splinters as a legitimate Communist Party, as was the case in Brazil, Chile, Belgium, and Switzerland.²⁴ This also included, it would appear, the United States, where by 1962 there was a group formed of former CPUSA members, initially called the Progressive Labor Movement and later the Progressive Labor Party.

Childs included reports on such matters, if somewhat tangentially, giving insights into the concerns of the leaders of the US Communist Party. For example, one SOLO report describes CPUSA head Gus Hall’s concern about China Books and Periodicals in San Francisco. Hall describes the operation “as being possibly the most lavish promoter and distributor of Chinese [communist] literature in the United States.” He then talked specifically about a pamphlet titled “Which Path – Cowardice or the Teachings of MAO-Tse-tung?” As the SOLO report recounts, “Hall stated the pamphlet was published under the auspices of ‘Hammer And Steel,’ a publication edited by Homer Bates Chase.” Chase was a former CP’er who been expelled from the Party in 1961 for “advocating the liquidation of the CPUSA and for anti-Party activities.”²⁵

The SOLO reports continued coming in well past the initial break with the Soviets, including during the period of the Cultural Revolution. Because Childs was given access to internal reports of the Soviets, who in turn had their own personnel gathering intelligence, he was able to offer unique and informed insights:

On August 20, 1966 the street on which the Soviet embassy is located was renamed ‘Struggle Against Revisionism.’ Buildings, fences, and roads all around were covered in anti-Soviet slogans in the most extreme language such as ‘Sweep out the revisionist dogs and devils’ or ‘Revenge on everything when the time comes.’²⁶

The language is consistent with the language MAO and others at the forefront of the Cultural Revolution were invoking.

All of which gave the Bureau and those tasked with following pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese forces within the United States an abundance of intelligence – richer in many regards than what the CIA or NSA could gather because it was information from a former leading Party cadre who was fully conversant with the nuanced and specific language of Marxism-Leninism. This was a bounty of intelligence that would in turn be put to good use by the Bureau as the decade unfolded.

THE SECRET OF OPERATION SOLO

The FBI kept a lock on the SOLO initiative, successfully keeping it from public exposure while Jack Childs was alive and while Morris Childs was still working for them. There were delicate moments however. For example, things ventured into dangerous territory for the FBI during the Church Committee hearings in 1976, when the matter of Martin Luther King and two of his advisers, Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts “Jack” Odell, both with ties to the CPUSA, came up. Levison had a longstanding history with the CP’s financial operations; Odell, who was African-American, by 1962 had been put in charge of the New York office of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)²⁷.

Because of Childs, the Bureau had a good estimate of who was active in the CP and knew a fair amount about these two men. However, because his role was still that of an active informant, his identity was jealously guarded – the Bureau knew things, but could not say how they knew things. In Bureau parlance this would reveal “sensitive investigative techniques.”²⁸ As the Church Committee looked into the matter, the FBI’s Assistance Director in Charge of Intelligence, Raymond Wannall, met with Church Committee members to attempt to keep the SOLO operation secret. He informed the Committee members that pursuing the King advisers risked destroying “the most important of all American espionage agents.” When Senator Frank Church asked them to explain, they showed him a picture of Morris Childs sitting with Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin and proceeded to outline the SOLO operation. According to Barron – whose sources were Childs’ FBI handlers – Church is reported to have said, “I only wish the American people could know. This certainly would open their eyes. It has opened mine.”²⁹ While Barron does not offer a citation for this passage, the final report from the Church Committee bears out his account. Specifically, the two King advisers are not referred to by name in the report, instead they are referenced obliquely as Adviser A and Adviser B.³⁰ It would be another six years before a book written by David Garrow began to peel the lid off of the connection between King, Levison, Odell, and Operation SOLO.³¹

That incident, however, underscores the peculiarity of Operation SOLO, likely the most secret and successful operation the FBI conducted during the Cold War. For the FBI, SOLO is something they were proud of, but given it was such a closely held secret, very little documentation on it was public.

Even when word first started coming out about it, it was met with considerable skepticism. For example, when the New York Review of Books reviewed Barron’s book the critic, Theodore Draper, felt compelled to conduct his own fact checking. Specifically he reached out to Henry Kissinger, whom Barron had claimed in his book was particularly happy with SOLO. According to Draper, Kissinger contradicted Barron’s claims, saying, “[a]lthough I was sympathetic to FBI intelligence operations, I have no recollection of the quotations attributed to me or of the specific events to which the quotations refer [i.e. acknowledging the benefits of SOLO].” As a result of Kissinger’s non-denial, Draper concluded, “[i]f Kissinger had said all the things attributed to him,” he would presumably have remembered saying, “What you are doing is fabulous. You have opened a window not only into the Kremlin, but into the minds of the men in the Kremlin.”³² The point of the review was that Barron’s version was not particularly credible.

With the release of many of the SOLO files, however, it is clear that the incident Barron recounts is credible:

The major accomplishment of this unit evolves from a case entitled ‘SOLO, IS-C. [Internal Security-Communist].’ An indication of the quality of information developed from this case is the fact that on two occasions personal letters of appreciation for information furnished were received from Dr. Henry A. Kissinger at The White House. Due to the sensitive nature of this case it will be orally discussed with the Inspector.³³

While the passage does not invoke the word “fabulous,” it makes clear Kissinger was on record as being pleased with the operation. That he would not admit it, even years after the fact, only underscores – leaving aside Kissinger’s track record for truth-telling – what a closely held secret it was.

FREYMAN, STALLINGS & COINTELPRO CHICAGO

In March 1954 the FBI sat down to write a report taking stock of TOPLEV – the results, they concluded, were good. The report noted that 601 people had been contacted in the operation, resulting in thirty new informants and confidential sources.³⁴ Keen to continue their success, they suggested pushing out. Specifically they requested that certain relevant field offices submit a “background sketch of six top Communists who would be of the most investigative value to [the] Bureau as informants.” In turn they would review the list to determine if “there is some common factor in both the agent's and subject’s backgrounds which could be used as an aid for instituting interviews with the subject.”³⁵ The particular methodology they proposed was not fanciful; it corresponded with the biggest success they had up to that point, the recruiting of Morris Childs by way of their agent Carl N. Freyman.

FREYMAN

Carl N. Freyman was born in 1916 in Le Mars, Iowa. After graduating from the University of Iowa law school he opened a law office in Le Mars, but left the business at the outbreak of World War II to join the Navy. Given his poor eyesight, however, he was deemed ineligible, leading him instead to join the FBI – because he had a background in law and was able to speak German and Spanish, the Bureau was happy to have him.³⁶ Freyman’s initial posting was in the Bureau’s Newark Office, but he was eventually transferred to Chicago.

In Chicago his career thrived to the point where he became the security supervisor of the COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) for that office. This was of some consequence. While New York was always the strongest base for the Communist Party, Chicago, because of the industry concentrated there, was a critical focus of the Party’s activity. As result it also was a key center for the Bureau’s efforts against that group, Operation SOLO arguably being the quintessence of that undertaking.

Freyman was an FBI intellectual, particularly in his understanding of communism, something the Bureau openly acknowledged, specifically noting his “excellent grasp of Communist theory” in his personnel file.³⁷ That file also contained a commendation from no less than J. Edgar Hoover, citing Freyman’s “superb job” in preparing an analysis titled “History and Development of the Sino-Soviet Rift.”³⁸

As for his handling of Morris Childs, the Bureau, with some satisfaction, recorded that because of Freyman’s work, “[t]his informant is currently operating at the highest levels of the CP at the international, national and local levels.” They noted Freyman’s specific skills in doing this.

[D]uring the pertinent period the responsible personnel have successfully maintained this level of operation through an extremely close relationship with the informant and by anticipating all the problems and pitfalls which might or could occur in the maintenance of this operation.³⁹

Given all that, it seems that just as Morris Childs was a one-of-akind informant, Carl Freyman was also unique among FBI agents. There was, however, someone working under Freyman, who arguably was at least equal in skill to him – Herbert K. Stallings.

STALLINGS

Herbert Stallings, because he was not associated – at least publicly – with Operation SOLO, does not appear in the public record. He is however a critical character and appears at key times in formerly secret FBI documents.

FBI Special Agent Herbert K. Stallings in 1970, from his FBI personnel file.

Born in March 1924, he apparently lived most of his life in Illinois. His key years in the Bureau were spent assigned to the Chicago office – with Carl Freyman serving for a time as his supervisor. Stallings’ focus, like Freyman’s, was initially the Communist Party USA, specifically the implementation of the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Program against the CPUSA in the Chicago Office. The aim of COINTELPRO-CPUSA was “the disruption and neutralization of the CPUSA both as an organization and as to its individual leaders and members.”⁴⁰ In this Stallings brought the full measure of his intellectual capabilities and energy. Unlike Freyman, who retired in 1965, Stallings was active in the Chicago office well into the 1970s. As a result, his energies would be directed against the New Communist Movement, including the largest Maoist group to emerge in this movement, the Revolutionary Union.

There was another person of note assigned to the Chicago office worth mentioning, that being Marlin Johnson. Johnson had been instrumental in the early phase of the SOLO investigation and helped establish a mail-order business that served as a cover for Morris Childs, to facilitate his liaisons with the Soviets, ostensibly as a “businessman.”⁴¹ Like Stallings, Johnson was assigned to the Chicago office throughout the Sixties. In fact, by 1969 he had become the Special Agent in Charge of the office. As a result of that position he was the ultimate authority during the Bureau’s COINTELPRO initiatives aimed at the Chicago Black Panther Party; initiatives that included sending a poison-pen letter to Jeff Fort to try and instigate violence between the Panthers and Blackstone Rangers. Even more consequential, Johnson’s office was responsible for passing along a floor plan, which FBI informant William O’Neal had supplied, of Panther leader Fred Hampton’s apartment. It was this plan that gave the Chicago police an overview for the pre-dawn raid on Hampton’s apartment where they shot him and co-Panther Mark Clark as they were sleeping.⁴²

Freyman, Stallings, and the others in the Chicago office would recruit and manage informants and craft measures that would have far-reaching effects. As a result, the Chicago field office would play an outsize role, not only in the effort against the CPUSA, but also in efforts aimed at the ostensibly Maoist Progressive Labor Party, as well as later groups that would come to constitute the New Communist Movement. The full import of those efforts is a matter that has yet to be fully understood. However, as can be seen by the impact of Jack and Morris Childs and, as we will see, an organizational entity set up by that office to destabilize the CPUSA and others, those efforts were highly sophisticated and far-reaching.

Letter from SA Stallings to J. Edgar Hoover.

The FBI had in Morris Childs someone trained in Marxism-Leninism, and in that sense he was a highly effective counterintelligence instrument. Childs could parse out the dual levels that those who ascribed to the pro-Soviet communist philosophy operated under, the theoretical as well as the practical. The Bureau would later claim that as his value as a liaison with the leaders in the Soviet Union advanced, he was largely not called on to supply domestic intelligence information. As Barron writes:

During the late 1950s the FBI retargeted SOLO, aiming it at the Soviet Union rather than the American Communist Party. Morris and Jack continued, passively and incidentally, to gather information about party activities, especially those that might illuminate secret Soviet actions and intentions.⁴³

Just how “passive and incidental” their domestic work was is an open question, though there is evidence that it was significant.

Regardless, Childs’ political and theoretical sophistication dovetailed with the FBI’s larger counterintelligence initiatives aimed at the Communist Party and others. In this there is one operation in particular, one still shrouded in a great deal of mystery, that stands out.

CHAPTER TWO

THE FBI’S MAOIST SECT

Little is known about the Ad Hoc Committee. Some claimed it was a secret faction within the CPUSA in Chicago.

— Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online (2016)¹

A specific example of the ability of SA Stallings is the fictitious counterintelligence “Ad Hoc Bulletin,” ostensibly published by the also fictitious Ad Hoc Committee.

— FBI Personnel File of Carl N. Freyman²

Sometime in the late fall / early winter of 1962, a document began circulating among members of the Communist Party USA based in the Chicago area, titled “Whither the Party of Lenin.” The document was a broadside against Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, denouncing his “shameful retreat” in the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The two-page statement closed with a call to action: “Comrades: The time has come to throw off the shackles of revisionism and return to the Revolutionary Principles of Lenin, Stalin and Mao.” The paper was signed “The Ad Hoc Committee for Scientific Socialist Line.”³ Anyone receiving the broadside was thus on notice that there was a pole within the pro-Soviet party proclaiming itself “anti-revisionist” (not softening the revolutionary principles of communism) that was tilting toward China and Maoism.

While polemics passing back and forth within old left formations was nothing novel, there was in this something of note. It was not the work of factionally inclined CP comrades, but rather something springing from the counter-intelligence imagination of the FBI.

THE CP’S LEGACY OF INFILTRATION

At its peak in 1944 the Communist Party of the United States had just shy of 80,000 members.⁴ Throughout the 1950s there would be a precipitous drop: 25,000 in 1952, 11,000 in 1957, and 5,000 in 1962. While cadre were hemorrhaging from the group, FBI informant penetration remained more-or-less constant. In 1958 they had 408 active CP members serving as informants; in 1962 they reported 431.⁵ Yet even with all this the Bureau was not content. While informants were critical in supplying a steady stream of information, and in the case of Morris and Jack Childs, supplying information on a geopolitical level, the Bureau saw its mission against the CP as being proactive. Specifically they sought at every turn to undermine, destabilize, and ideally to destroy the CPUSA.

This comes through in their discussion of the circulation of the “Wither the Party of Lenin” document. The FBI, keenly aware that the Sino-Soviet schism in 1962 was at a critical juncture, outlined the objective of the document as being “to take advantage of recent international events to frustrate the Communist Party (CP).” Specifically the Bureau hoped to leverage the dissension existing in the CP. They noted that in the Chicago area there were a group of “hard-core ‘Stalinists’” who had been “at odds with the CPUSA leadership since the Twentieth Congress of the CP-Soviet Union at which Khrushchev denounced Stalin.” Those in this group “are extremely militant and they hold the view that peaceful co-existence with capitalism is a sell-out of Marxism-Leninism.”⁶ This was the target demographic for their new disruptive program.

In launching the “Wither” document, the Bureau gave considerable thought to appearances; specifically they instructed that it “be prepared on plain white bond, mimeographed in a ‘home-spun style.’ It was then to be mailed anonymously to [CP] Club Chairmen.”

It is the hope of this office that the statement will reopen the factional struggle within the district which will not only keep the Party in a state of disunity but will also embarrass the local CP leaders in the eyes of National leadership, because of their inability to control the members.⁷

From this initial effort sprang the ongoing Ad Hoc Committee initiative that would continue well into the 1970s.

The story of the Ad Hoc Committee (AHC) is one that has been locked away for over fifty years. David Irish Sullivan, who had been part of the Maoist organization the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party in the Seventies – and who passed away in 2009 – was on the trail of the AHC in the early 1980s. In reviewing his files it is quite clear he was suspicious of the AHC, but lacked a “smoking gun” – direct evidence to be able to say this was a whole-cloth initiative of the FBI. For reasons that remain unknown Sullivan never published anything about the group. Instead his files were donated to NYU’s Tamiment Library. His findings were only discovered in researching the book Heavy Radicals in 2013.⁸ The actual smoking gun on the AHC is the FBI personnel file of Carl N. Freyman, which was discovered as a result of putting Sullivan’s research together with the related elements in research for the larger history of the RU/RCP. Meantime a Freedom of Information request for the thousands of pages of the AHC file is still forthcoming, pending screening and release from the National Archives.⁹

The Freyman file however is an unparalleled exposition of the Ad Hoc Committee program, at least in its beginnings. Among other things it is a time capsule of the Bureau's work in the critical period of the early Cold War up to the rending point of the Sino-Soviet split. What is abundantly clear in reading the file is that Freyman and his subordinate, Herbert K. Stallings, recognized the opportunity for the Bureau of that schism and took full advantage of the turmoil it was creating in the ranks of domestic communists.

Given the success of “Wither the Party of Lenin,” the Chicago office followed up with five more newsletters, all in relatively short order. The second Bulletin picked up on the theme of the first, charging the American party with being revisionist and slavishly “parroting Moscow’s soft line approach to imperialism.” It also called out the Kennedy Administration as a “fascist type administration,” one which the CP was making accommodation with. The paper called on the Party to return to its revolutionary principles, and called on CP members to “vigorously oppose the leadership policies of the CPUSA and [for members] to demand a return to a militant and uncompromising struggle against imperialism.”¹⁰ Read on its face the document comes across as a radical, even revolutionary statement – such was the paradox of confluent interests between the Bureau and actual radicals.

The publication of this particular bulletin are [sic] still being heard in the Party today. It came to the attention of the Party leadership in early March, 1963, when a leader received a copy of the bulletin and immediately displayed it to another leader. They were concerned with how widely this bulletin had been circulated and offered the opinion that it ‘was prepared from within the Party with assistance from without,’ meaning that the Party leadership believed that someone in the Party prepared the bulletin with the help of persons outside, perhaps members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) or other radical groups.¹¹

In other words, the CP’s leaders leapt to the conclusion that outside left political forces were responsible. It is revealing as to the internal life of the CPUSA – and this is no doubt true for other Marxist-Leninist forces – that they did not at first assume there were forces more hostile to them than Trotskyists.

The FBI’s “Maoist” Ad Hoc Committee Bulletin 1963, for their part, the FBI was satisfied with the results:

While the first two Bulletins were composed of original content, the third consisted entirely of a reprint of a Renmin Ribao (the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party) editorial, specifically one that attacked the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.¹² The bulletin framed the reprint “as a public service” for Communist collectives, suggesting “these issues be raised and discussed at club meetings.¹³

The Bureau, in taking stock of their accomplishments, reported that three CPUSA members were expelled because of the dissension caused by the bulletins. In the Chicago area the Party “was bogged down because of the resulting controversy” and national Party leaders were concerned about the bulletin. The situation led to “one local leader” writing a letter to the membership to defend against “allegations concerning him that appeared in the bulletin.”¹⁴

As the bulletins circulated the Bureau further reported:

[REDACTED] has possibly been expelled secretly. She no longer submits her club dues to the Party office. Other Party members have resigned or stopped attending meetings or have joined left wing caucuses. The number in this category is unknown; however, there are six in a caucus headed by [REDACTED] out of the Railroad Club alone. It has also been reported that other individuals have quit the Party over the expulsion. There were also a number of people in the Nationality Section of the Party who are – 12 – sympathetic to [REDACTED] who are no longer attending meetings of the CP. We feel that the total loss to the CP in expulsions, resignations, and those boycotting meetings could number approximately 25.¹⁵

Because of the initial success, the Bureau proceeded to expand their AHC program. In doing so they cross-referenced it with other initiatives they were carrying out in order to attain maximum disruptive leverage. For example in May 1965 they reported on a “Dear Comrade” letter that had been circulated in the Northwest District of the CP (NWDCP) – which also invoked a pro-Maoist position, and criticized the leadership there as revisionist. The letter:

[E]xerted a disruptive effect of a very substantial nature on the NWDCP, USA. It is to be noted that this factionalism conservatively involves twenty CP members who have provided substantial revenue for the Party in the past and have made other numerous contributions to the Party.¹⁶

The Bureau suggested that, “In order to take advantage of this break-through, it is believed that the facilities of the Ad Hoc Committee (AHC) apparatus can be utilized and Seattle will submit its recommendations under that caption.”¹⁷

Similarly in Philadelphia, the FBI orchestrated the distribution of “[Gus] Hall Must Fall” cards at that city’s May Day Rally in 1966. Giving insight into their methodology the Bureau “paid two ‘vagrants’ $1” to get them out among the crowd. They also sought to make it seem that the Progressive Labor Party – formed by two former CP members that came to support Mao’s China – were behind this as a way of furthering the schismatic disruption:

Philadelphia plans to distribute these cards at the CP convention in Philadelphia. New York was instructed to obtain PLP envelopes for use in mailing a few cards to some CP members in Philadelphia in an effort to make the CP think this is the work of PLP. New York does not yet have these envelopes, but expects to obtain them through and informant.¹⁸

This is of particular note because the Bureau would later leverage political divisions between PLP and groups in the New Communist Movement for its disruptive aims – this makes clear a certain history in this regard. That aside, this activity was cross-referenced with the AHC program – with documentation of it being sent to the requisite file because, according to the FBI, “the ‘Hall Must Fall’ cards parallel the line of the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, USA.”¹⁹

As the above quote describes, the FBI changed the AHC name from the vague “Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line” into the more organizationally oriented “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party.” While a good deal remains unknown in this regard, it is clear that building a new Marxist-Leninist Party was not the objective of the initiative; rather it was in disrupting, if not wrecking, existing organizations.²⁰

While Herbert Stallings was the creative force behind the AHC program, the Bureau had other resources in understanding the CPUSA that went beyond the considerable expertise of their FBI Special Agent. Specifically they had Morris Childs, security informant CG-5824S*.

Evidence of how Childs’s information impacted the larger FBI domestic security operations can be seen in the file of Vicki Garvin, a former CP member who in the early Sixties had moved to China to teach. Garvin would later return to the US to, among other things, be with her husband Leibel Bergman, the founder of the Revolutionary Union.

There is in Garvin’s FBI file a memo from December 1964 that bears out Childs’ informing. Beginning with the blaring warning that “EXTREME CAUTION MUST BE EXERCISED WITH RESPECT TO DISSEMINATION OF INFO HEREIN,” it explains that “CG 5824-S” had learned from a “top functionary of the CP” that:

VICKI GARVIN, an American Negro; is present in Peking, China, where she is working. GARVIN reportedly is pro-Chinese and supports the position of the CP of China in its current ideological difference with the CP of the Soviet Union.²¹

There was a small but significant community of Americans who had gone to China in the aftermath of the break with the Soviets, among them people such as Sidney Rittenberg, Leibel Bergman, Robert F. Williams, and Mabel Williams. This report indicates that the US government was getting information on at least on one of them from its highly placed CPUSA source.²²

The full scope of intelligence Childs was forwarding about Americans living in China is unknown. It is also unclear to what degree he actually contributed to the Ad Hoc Committee project. There is evidence, however, that Childs was at a minimum keeping up on the work of the Ad Hoc Committee. Among his papers donated to the J. Edgar Hoover Institute in Cleveland – and somewhat confusingly on special loan to Stanford University’s [Herbert] Hoover Institute – is a set of the Ad Hoc Bulletins dating between the years 1963 through 1971. The bulletins offer a fairly complete picture of the evolution of this entity during those years.

THE AHC AND THE NUANCES OF BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION

As time goes by the Ad Hoc Bulletins go from a more bare-bones “Marxist-Leninist” assessment one might garner from reading the popular Chinese and Soviet English-language press – which SA Stallings was likely doing – to more nuanced political tracts. All in all, it suggests the editorial input of someone more deeply schooled in Marxist-Leninist theory, i.e. someone like Morris Childs, or perhaps one or another CP cadre working with the Bureau. This is especially striking in regard to the matter of Black people in the United States – or what communists refer to as the Black national question. This is something that would come to be extremely contentious with the development of the New Communist Movement circa 1972-1974, and what was being written in the AHC bulletins reads as something of a bellwether of the contested debates that would come.

Most striking in this regard is the way the bulletins, without explanation, effect a 180-degree turn on a matter those enmeshed in the thinking of communist politics would consider critical.

Specifically there is in the December 1967 bulletin an article titled “Afro-American Liberation-Mainspring for Social Change.” The article, written by the “full executive committee” of the AHC – if there was such a thing – has the tone of an insider and veteran communist. They write for example that “Browderism was creeping into the upper echelons of the Party and there are inescapable evidences which suggest that the theoretical foundations of the National Question was understood by only a handful of Party leaders.”²³ The paper then proceeds to unambiguously proclaim:

We discount the concept that nationalism and the Right [sic] to self-determination for the oppressed means discord among the races. On the contrary it can lead to the greatest harmony and unity among all peoples.

Their conclusion was that the self-determination slogan, “should occupy a central place in the liberation struggles against imperialist oppression.”²⁴

Little more than three years later, in April 1971, another Bulletin, entitled “National-Colonial Questions – Black Liberation in America,” says something quite different:

We are opposed to the resurrection of the slogan for the Right of Self-Determination, not because the essence of the slogan – the absolute right of the Black nation to determine its own destiny is wrong – but because of the possibility of confusing it with past programs which were only partly correct.²⁵

Had they referenced the earlier position this could be read as a corrective, but that is not what they did. Instead they fully reversed their stand on Self-Determination; from one that promoted “the greatest harmony” to it being at best “only partly correct.” For a careful reader this could have raised a red flag as to what this group was all about, but it appears to have flown past unnoticed. This is not especially surprising given the secretiveness of the AHC and the primitive technology of the day; crosschecking would not be an easy matter unless one had access to the entire catalogue of secret bulletins.

Regardless, these passages are noteworthy not so much in the political gymnastics displayed on a highly contentious political issue, but in exemplifying the ability to put forward a sophisticated political position in such a way as to cause a great deal of confusion if not disruption.

This, as we will see in a subsequent chapter (see Chapter Nine), was on particular display in 1973 when the AHC again weighed in on the Black National Question, this time one that more corresponded with their 1967 position – and this was in the context of the New Communist Movement attempting to unify a number of groups comprised of what were known as “Third World” communists (including African American revolutionaries, Puerto Rican, Chinese and other Asian people in the US).²⁶

What comes through is how the FBI used their AHC apparatus for maximum leverage surrounding a particularly complex and contentious issue. The evidence of this can be seen in one the following COINTELPRO memo regarding the Revolutionary Union:

[W]e note the suggestion in re SP Airtel [message sent via airmail] which suggests that we can slightly alter RU [Revolutionary Union] publications, have them reproduced by the laboratory and distributed in great numbers to Marxists, Black militants, SDS, left publications, etc. we can distort the political line of the RU and, in fact, turn it into a revisionist line in a subtle manner.²⁷

That memo closed with the exultant note that it “is Chicago’s view that this is an outstanding technique with maximum disruptive potential and we suggest that it be implemented as soon as possible.” The memo notably was directed to the “AHC” file.

GERALD KIRK TALKS TO CONGRESS

In 1970, Du Bois Club and Communist Party member-cum-FBI informant Gerald Wayne Kirk testified in front of Congress offering insights into his work as a spy among campus activists at the University of Chicago, but also, in a confusing way, the Ad Hoc Committee:

Mr. Norpel. | How would you characterize the Progressive Labor Party?
Mr. Kirk. | A Maoist-oriented group receiving at least word support from the ad hoc committee for a Marxist-Leninist party. This ad hoc committee for a Marxist-Leninist party receives mail and sends out mail to people through box offices [PO boxes].²⁸

Kirk is then asked about the connection of the AHC to the Progressive Labor Party, the group formed by two expelled CPUSA members, Mortimer Scheer and Milton Rosen. Scheer and Rosen started the Progressive Labor Movement in 1961 and it was transformed into the Progressive Labor Party in 1965.²⁹ The Chinese Communist Party initially saw it as a group upholding MAO in the United States – though by 1969 the relationship was fraying and would soon end. Kirk, as a member of the CPUSA, albeit an informant, draws a straight line from the AHC to PLP:

Mr. Norpel.
Are you saying this ad hoc committee is a front of the Progressive Labor Party?

Mr. Kirk.
I believe the Progressive Labor Party is a front for the ad hoc committee. I will give you a piece of information I got from the ad hoc committee. I also met a man from the ad hoc committee for a Marxist-Leninist party whose name may be an alias, he encouraged me if I wished to join to make up my mind yes or no. Once I joined, I would have to do quite a bit of work. And he said the Progressive Labor Party was some of their people, but many of the Progressive Labor Party just didn’t know that. The Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party came to my attention: as a result of some FBI agents who had heard of it, and wanted me to get in contact with them.

Mr. Norpel.
What is the name of this individual to which you just referred?³⁰

Kirk could not remember the name, but it is clearly the man “Herb” who was referenced at the beginning of this book. Kirk appears to verify this in his testimony, saying he was an older man, “Jewish, ruddy complexion, wore glasses.” He also says that he drove a blue 1963 Chevrolet station wagon and that he met him in front of the Hyde Park Theater. What is intriguing is what he says next:

Mr. Kirk:
He told me that the Progressive Labor Party and the Worker’s Student Alliance, as I said before were offshoots of' the Ad Hoc Committee, and the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party had many who were still members of the CPUSA but were trying to move the CPUSA toward [a] Maoist position.³¹

The man “Herb” also told Kirk that if the CPUSA ever learned who the AHC members were they “would purge them” and that is one of the reasons according to Kirk that “the FBI asked me to keep in touch with this man.” Kirk instead demurred because “I was trying to solidify my position in the CPUSA so naturally couldn't take the chance.” He ended his discussion of the AHC repeating the ties of the AHC to PLP:

I mention this Ad Hoc Committee simply because this man who was representative of it, told me the Progressive Labor Party was an offshoot of, their effort efforts within the CPUSA to move CPUSA to a Marxist-Leninist position in in terms of Maoism, and he told me that I wouldn't have to join the Progressive Labor Party because I was in much too an important position in the CPUSA. He obviously knew that, because he was in the CPUSA himself.³²

It is not at all clear to what degree Kirk’s portrayal of the link between the AHC and PLP is fiction or an actuality – any speculation can reasonably veer in several directions – he is, after all, recounting things from the standpoint of the CPUSA, which previously attributed the Ad Hoc Bulletins to the Socialist Workers Party. Saying that, what is clear is that the meeting he described was real and lines up evenly with an FBI informant report – literally written by the informant and delivered to FBI SA Richard J. Cott, in April 1968. That meeting with Kirk was called at the request of someone called Herb Block – if there is any truth in that name; he is identified in the memo as “Herb” Block, the last name not in quotes. The only discrepancy between Kirk’s account and Block’s, and it is slight, is that “Herb” says he met Kirk in a Blue 1961 Chevrolet station wagon, rather than a 1963 model.³³ In other words there may be some truth in Kirk’s assessment.

There are a few more salient details on the incident worth recounting. The memo pertaining to the meeting pointedly references it under the subject head “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party.” Also, along with stipulating copies of the report be sent to the CP’s Illinois files, the Bureau’s CP COINTELPRO file, it is also routed to the prominent anti-war activist, Rennie Davis’s file. In the latter, as the report noted, “Herb” had asked Kirk if he would join the Committee to “work with RENNE DAVIS [sic], the blacks in the ghetto and on the U. Chicago campus.”³⁴ There is, however, no mention in Herb’s memo of the Progressive Labor Party.

On the whole, the story Kirk tells is intriguing, suggesting some type of organizational interpenetration between the “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party” and the Progressive Labor Party. Given the similar “line” of the two groups, i.e. “anti-revisionist, anti-Soviet, Pro Chinese,” this is not surprising. What is surprising is one group is real, the other a concoction – albeit one apparently with recruits oblivious to the group’s origins and true mandate.

THE AD HOC COMMITTEE’S PO BOX

Copies of the AHC Bulletin contained a Chicago Post Office box address at the bottom of the newsletter. Unfortunately for anyone writing to the AHC, their correspondence was not going to the proto-Maoist group. This can be seen in the following extract from the file of someone who naively responded to an AHC ad in a left publication (see document 4):

Confidential Informant T-1, who has furnished reliable information in the past advised that on 11/8/67 (date) that the captioned individual was in current communication with an organization which circulates communist literature which is ‘anti-revisionist’ and anti-Soviet Union, but which espouses a Marxist-Leninist line of the Communist Party of China.³⁵

The file entry included two attachments, the letter to the Ad Hoc Committee requesting literature advertised in the National Guardian, and the envelope the letter was sent in. The FBI memo included a notation that a determination needed to be made about whether or not to open a security investigation on the person requesting the material. Apparently anyone writing to the “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party” was actually writing to the FBI, who in turn assumed the writer was grist for a new security investigation.

AHC & THE WEATHERMAN

A further sense of the utilization of the AHC can be seen in UC Maryland Professor Arthur Eckstein’s book on the Weathermen. In it he recounts an incident in which a “fifty-five-year-old leader of a pro-Chinese Communist group” – who was in fact an FBI informant – had a meeting with two Weathermen, Jeff Jones and Bill Ayers, in early 1970, before the group they were part of went underground.³⁶ In the course of the meeting the informant communicated that the Chinese Communists were looking to be kept abreast of what the Weatherman were doing. In return, Eckstein writes, “The Weathermen sent greetings to the Chinese Communist Party.” However, they appear to have begged off from the offer – including an inducement of the $500 from the Chinese government the informant claimed to be on offer. Significantly, the report of this meeting appears in a document called “History of Radical Political Thought” authored by Herbert K. Stallings. All of which suggests the middle-age Maoist, who was in fact an informant, was likely doing the work of the Ad Hoc Committee – attempting to get intelligence from the Weatherman under the guise of setting up a link with them and the Chinese. When asked about this incident many years later, Bill Ayers said he did not remember the meeting or “anything of the kind.”³⁷ Who this “Maoist” was is unclear, but he does generally match the description of the FBI’s “Herb” Block.

It is unknown how David Sullivan, the former RU/RCP cadre who investigated this matter, obtained that particular memo, though the most likely explanation was that it resulted from an early Freedom of Information request. What is most striking about it, however, is its total lack of redaction – suggesting whoever released it was not aware of what they were releasing.

In all this a fuller explanation awaits further evidence. What exactly the Ad Hoc Committee engaged in during its twenty-plusyear history remains largely a secret. The initial request for records under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that it will be several years before fuller information is released. This was followed up by a letter from the National Archives reversing that timetable and instead saying that the “File must be withheld in full” because it would “disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations.”³⁸ A subsequent request, which included evidence that the AHC operation had already been made public via the Freyman file, was more forthcoming:

[T]he Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party is in fact the subject of this file. The main file comprises 62 sections and has an estimated 15,500 pages, compiled as part of a security investigation conducted by the FBI between September 1964 and December 1984. In addition, there are also numerous enclosures and bulky exhibits associated with the file.³⁹

There are also regional files for the AHC, including a Chicago file that the National Archives reports is 17,500 pages long, which contains fifty-six sections, thirty-one subsections, and covers the period January 1965 through December 1980. There is, in short, a massive amount of information on the AHC waiting to be analyzed – though it will be many years before it is fully available.⁴⁰ Fortunately, certain elements have already been revealed, such as in what has been outlined above and in relation to material obtained on Leibel Bergman.

THE AD HOC COMMITTEE & LEIBEL BERGMAN

Leibel Bergman was a long-time member of the Communist Party, having joined the group in 1937, and long a subject of FBI attention. After he left the Party he continued to attract a great amount of government scrutiny. For example, he had defiantly testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960 and had been considered for indictment under the still operative Smith Act, this before traveling to China to live between 1963-1967 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Because of this and his ties in China, he was considered a Chinese Communist agent by the US government.

When Bergman returned to the United States he joined with a number of Communist Party and Progressive Labor Party veterans, as well as a grouping of young radicals, to found the Maoist organization the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, later named the Revolutionary Union.⁴¹ The level of attention on his activity in regard to the BARU or RU was extensive. Yet, while Bergman’s FBI file is by all estimates the largest of any of those requested in researching the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party, to date little has been released. As a result there is very little information available on Bergman before the RU period.

There are some notable exceptions. For example, he shows up in the files of FBI informant Richard Aoki, documenting his relationship with the Progressive Labor Party. One report from 1962, from an informant identified only as SF T-31, says that Bergman spoke at a Bay Area Progressive Labor [BAPL] meeting and “Identified himself as Chairman of the BAPL movement.” That same report, this time referencing an informant SF T-67, reported that in the period between June 1959 and December 1962, Bergman had been charged with factionalism inside the CPUSA. As a result he had been barred from holding an official position. The report also notes that in May 1964, Bergman and Laurence Harris (who would co-found the Revolutionary Union along with Bergman and others) “have quit the BAPL.”⁴² What this makes clear is that Bergman was being watched during his brief tenure in the Progressive Labor Party. Given the FBI’s initiative in the Ad Hoc Committee, Bergman (and Harris) would have been well on the radar in regard to those efforts – exactly how well is yet to be revealed.

The first specific mention we have of Bergman and the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party comes in June 1968 in a report on Bergman and possibly Chris Milton, an early RU member who had lived in China as a teenager in the mid-Sixties.⁴³ That report is concerned with efforts to help draft resisters get to Canada. It is unclear exactly why the AHC is listed on the “send to file” routing information at the bottom of the report, but it does establish a connection between Bergman and the FBI and the AHC just at the point that the RU was forming. More directly, however, we have the following contained in the FBI file of one of the original RU members, Robert Fitch:

BERGMAN has stated that he is in contact with a clandestine, pro-Peking group within the CPUSA, in Chicago, which group has established contact with a similar group within the CP, Soviet Union. BERGMAN speaks highly of this Chicago group.⁴⁴

Here, not only is the group claiming to be working within the CPUSA, but claims it has ties with Maoists in the Soviet Union itself – an intriguing claim that unfortunately is not further elaborated on.

By 1971, it is fully established that Bergman is interacting with the AHC – which he believes to be a legitimate entity. A March 1971 memo bears the instruction (in all caps) that “no mention of the Ad Hoc Committee should be made in reports or communications for dissemination to outside agencies.” While most of the memo is redacted to the point of meaninglessness, there are two exceptions. On the second page, again in all caps, it outlines how:

In view of the fact that Bergman is an extremely important person and his relationship with the Ad Hoc, which is a very sensitive counterintelligence operation, is a trusting one, New York and Newark are requested to exercise discretion in any of the cases concerning the above.⁴⁵

The only fragment of discernible content has to do with Bergman’s views on the Black Panther Party. Specifically, Bergman tells whoever supplied the FBI with information for the report, i.e. an informer, that Black people need a revolutionary Party, but that “the Panthers don’t have it.”

A far more revealing memo of the “trusting” relationship Bergman had with the AHC is contained in the file of Bergman’s partner and wife, Vicki Garvin, from November 1973. Again it is headlined with the caution that “the following information is not to be used in any report,” because it “would identify sources involved.”⁴⁶ What follows is an extensive report on what appears to have been a dinner party between Leibel Bergman and Vicki Garvin and two “friends” from Chicago. Among other things Bergman discusses with his guests is the current state of the Revolutionary Union, the challenges it was facing, and the problems it was confronting. He also discusses difficulties he is having with a Black comrade in the RU leadership who he worries might be working with law enforcement – of which more later.

At the conclusion of the report, we learn of Bergman’s views on the Communist Party USA in such a way to suggest the person he is talking with is quite familiar with that group – if not a member themselves. It is an extremely revealing exchange.

BERGMAN demonstrated a good deal of knowledge with respect to Party activities and an intensive discussion ensued on the internal problems such as the Jewish and Black questions. He was, however, not too current on changes within the party and specifically asked source to furnish him reports from [REDACTED] [.] At one point he asked source what CPUSA claimed its membership to be? Source said 14,000, to which BERGMAN replied ‘Maybe 10,000 but certainly not 14,000.’ BERGMAN mentioned he had been called by CP theoretician HERB APTHEKER [,] but refused to talk to him.⁴⁷

As the conversation continued the matter of the schism between the Soviet Union and China came up, with Bergman saying, “the Soviet Union was ‘our’ number one enemy.” He then told the informant, “since [REDACTED] [the informer] is the only one who has access to internal CPUSA information it is especially important that [REDACTED] [he] remain within the Party. By implication BERGMAN affirmed the correctness of the [REDACTED] [informant’s] role.”⁴⁸

There is also a section in this report where the other informant – likely a woman and perhaps the wife of the man – “talks” with Vicki Garvin and is able to solicit her opinion on some of the Americans she knew in China, including Robert Williams. The informant reported that Garvin did not like him; “VICKI stated he was a pompous, arrogant ‘bourgeoisie’ who was so domineering that his family lived in constant fear of him.” Whether this was Garvin’s actual view or the informant’s, or a hybrid, is unclear. What is clear is that the two informants were collecting valuable specific information that would be otherwise unavailable.

At the conclusion of the report the writer reflects on what has been accomplished, noting that contact with Bergman “is most encouraging,” giving the Bureau operation “a current perspective.” It then emphasizes the importance of the Ad Hoc operation: “the informants again proved their individual and collective worth,” this “in direct confrontation with a leading pro-Chicom figure.” This is made clear when it explains that. “Bergman expressed a desire to see sources again when he comes to Chicago [thus suggesting their base of operation], consequently no request was made to establish any other liaison with RU leaders in Chicago.”⁴⁹ Specifically – albeit in a highly redacted passage – the Bureau outline how they saw using this intelligence:

[s]ources are privy to information otherwise not obtainable. Sources, and their organization, [REDACTED] Bergman but not in competition with him either organizationally, as OL is with RU or personally as [REDACTED], the [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are for RU leadership.⁵⁰

The section ends with a note and a caution:

The benefits of this status are enormous and substantiate the potential of the operation as high level. The [REDACTED, (identities?)] of the informants must be viewed as a key to our continued success. Any step which would detract from this status or [REDACTED] must be carefully reviewed.⁵¹

Finally, the closing paragraph explains how the aura of secrecy, along with Bergman’s proprietary view of this contact, would help them. They write, Bergman “is such an egotist that only he would control such contacts; that in no instance could they perceive BERGMAN allowing a separate cover liaison.”⁵² The fact that the AHC remained undetected for so long would seem testament to that assessment.

CHAPTER THREE

RICHARD AOKI – THE RElIABlE SOURCE

My joining the Black Panther Party was about being in the right place at the right time – or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it.

— Richard Aoki¹

He was one of the best sources we had. Oh yeah he was a character.

— Former FBI SA Bernie Threadgill²

The eager recruit was going through the standard operating procedure. There was the haircut, the issuing of fatigues, the medical exam, and of course the paperwork. With the latter a particular form stood out, “The Statement of Personal History.” Among its questions was a Cold War standard – “Are you now or have you ever been” a member of the Communist Party? In all earnestness, he answered “No.” Then for the follow-up question, have you ever associated with communists? He displayed a surfeit of honesty answering, “Yes.” When instructed to elaborate he proceeded to list the names of eight people he had met in high school whom he thought had ties to the Communist Party. He dutifully included the name of a girl he had “taken out on a date.”³ Such was the way that Richard Aoki inaugurated his role as a government informant; modest in comparison to what would come, but a solid beginning.

In 2012, Seth Rosenfeld published Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, a book about California governor Ronald Reagan, UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr, and Free Speech Movement spokesman Mario Savio. Within the multiple chapters of his far-ranging story was a sub-section detailing the exploits of Richard Matsui Aoki, a relatively minor character in Sixties history, but someone who had been gaining esteem among a new generation of political activists, especially Asian-Americans.

Aoki had been at different times a member of the Young Socialist Alliance, a “secret” member of the Black Panther Party, and a leader in the strike on the campus of UC Berkeley that led to the establishment of an Ethnic Studies department. In the course of his research Rosenfeld stumbled across the fact that Aoki had also been a government informant. The book release, coming on the heels of a glowing Aoki documentary and the publication of a sympathetic academic monograph, set off a minor firestorm. Among Aoki’s friends and old comrades there was a wave of outrage. His defenders argued that it could not be true, Aoki’s commitment to the radical causes he was associated with was genuine and Rosenfeld’s claims were self-serving, he was just trying to sell books.⁴ Aoki himself was unable to respond, having committed suicide in 2009 in the aftermath of a stroke.

Initially Rosenfeld’s evidence was spare; Aoki’s name appearing as an informant in a single FOIA document, corroboration from his first FBI handler, Bernie Threadgill, and Aoki’s less than convincing denial. Over the course of the ensuing weeks, the FBI was compelled – Rosenfeld had sued them for access – to release more documents. Those documents came in two significant sections, the first a release of two-hundred pages within weeks of the book’s release, the latter a release of thousands, coming months later. After the first release, Aoki’s defenders held their ground. His biographer, Diane Fujino, along with long-time friend, musician, and Asian-American activist, Fred Ho, were especially vocal. Ho was more unilaterally dismissive of the evidence, while Fujino was a bit more careful, saying that “rather than take the FBI files at face value, they [the files] require more scrutiny.”⁵ With the release of the full Aoki informant file, which totaled well over three-thousand pages, the defense of Aoki gave way to defensive statements along the lines that perhaps Aoki was an informant, but that his allegiance over time had shifted. Harvey Dong, the executor of Aoki’s estate, and someone himself that Aoki informed on,⁶ offered a non-rebuttal rebuttal, saying, “The documents themselves show that he did not fully cooperate with his FBI handlers.”⁷ All in all it was a cringe-inducing episode. Well-intentioned people passionately defending an old comrade, friend, or a person they had unwittingly conferred their academic prestige on, who was in reality a highly mendacious Bureau informant who had misled and deceived some of them for decades.

Amid the controversy of “is he or isn’t he,” an important opportunity was being missed. Here was an informant who had operated for seventeen years, penetrating some of the most famous organizations of the Sixties. Now there was documentary evidence laid out in meticulous detail, available for all to see – and it needs to pointed out that even without the released FBI material, there were glaring contradictions in Aoki’s own narrative – yet instead of welcoming the chance to get at the truth it was opposed with not a little success by arguments that aimed to freeze the Aoki myth to the time before the revelations.

THE MAKING OF AN INFORMANT

Richard Aoki’s early life started with a stark rebuke from the United States government. At the age of four, he along with his brother, mother, and father were interred at Topaz Utah in the Spring of 1942, as a result of Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 that mandated the deportation of Japanese-Americans in “military areas” of the United States to concentration camps.⁸ This would have a lasting impact on Aoki.

In 1945, on release from Topaz, Aoki moved with his father and brother – their mother and father had separated in the camp – and settled in Oakland, California. It was there that Richard attended Berkeley High School and met some of the people that would ultimately lead him in the direction he took.

According to Aoki, one of the most important experiences in his life was his time spent in the US Army. It is also a time about which he was significantly – and demonstrably – deceptive. Counter to his radical persona, Aoki – even later in life – expressed affection for the US military. He had enlisted in the Army while still in high school, but had to wait on active enlistment until he graduated. While he signed up as a medic to mollify his parents, he secretly planned to transfer to the infantry – “I wanted to be a career soldier, I wanted to become the first Japanese American General in the United States Army.”⁹ Like many other aspects of his time in the Army, how he planned to become a general when he had enlisted, not as a full-time soldier, but in the reserves, is not something he explained.

He does offer an explanation about why, after eight years, he decided to leave. In his telling it was because of the stories he was hearing about Vietnam. It is worth recounting this in some detail because it is revealing the way in which Aoki constructed and held to a certain narrative that if actually looked at critically would have raised questions regardless of any FBI documents. As Aoki described things in a 2008 interview:

I began talking with buddies that were coming back from Vietnam in the early stages who had been advisers, they were telling me stories I couldn’t believe, zippoing villages... going into villages and burning the whole damn place down. And wiping out women and children, and this was years before My Lai... and I said wait a minute that doesn’t sound kosher to me.¹⁰

Because of this, when it came time for him to re-enlist, he informed the clerk that he was not going to sign up for another eight years. The clerk, alarmed by this news, called Aoki’s colonel in the middle of the night, leading to the officer trying to convince Aoki to change his mind; not only offering him extra money, but also saying he could get him into Green Beret training.¹¹ Aoki told a similar story to Diane Fujino, with a few pointed differences. He was more candid about his military service, making clear he had been in the Reserves – a branch of the military that at the time served one weekend a month and two weeks a year – rather than having the full-time commitment of an active duty soldier. With Fujino he wholly omits the story of waking his colonel, instead saying the Army offered him direct admission to Officer Candidate School, assignment to the 101st Airborne Division (not the Green Berets), and a signing bonus of $3,500; all of which he declined because “I had acquired moral opposition to the Vietnam War.”¹²

There are, however, things he omits in both the 2008 interview and in his interview with Fujino. Leaving aside the specious claim that he was morally opposed to Vietnam in 1964 – before that war had actually become Vietnam – Aoki was not going to be sent there.¹³ Aoki had an official status of “Non-inductable”; being a Reservist in the Sixties meant automatic deferment from full-time induction and being sent overseas, something it is hard to imagine he was not aware of – though he never mentions this.¹⁴

The bigger conflict in his story, however, is that by 1964, while still in the US Army Reserves, he had become an FBI informant, infiltrating the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance. As such his loyalties were firmly aligned with the US government, not its opponents.

Aoki’s military service is the critical piece in understanding how the Bureau recruited him. In Seth Rosenfeld’s book retired FBI agent and Aoki’s initial handler, Bernie Threadgill, claimed that Aoki came to their attention after his voice turned up on an FBI wiretap; specifically when he was speaking to classmate Doug Wachter, whose parents were in the Communist Party.¹⁵ As interesting and seemingly credulous as Threadgill’s story is, it is not true. Aoki’s recruitment was much more mundane.

Specifically, the revelations in his Army personal statement prompted the military to conduct a follow-up interview. In that interview, Aoki offered more specifics on the people he knew and why he thought they were Communists – information that was later outlined in an FBI memo:

He first came to the attention of the San Francisco [FBI] Office in 1957, at which time CIC [Counterintelligence Corp US Army] advised that Aoki, while serving as a Private, Company C, Reserve Forces at Regiment, Fort Ord, California, gave a statement to the Army officials to the effect that he attended some Labor Youth League (LYL) sponsored socials while attending Berkeley High School, Berkeley, California in 1956, and was acquainted with several fellow students whom he considered to be LYL members.¹⁶

It is noteworthy that the apparent “standard operating procedure” for the military was to forward such intelligence to the FBI. It is also noteworthy that the Bureau – unlike many of the radicals Aoki worked with – did not take him at his word. Instead they fully vetted him. In doing so they did not immediately adopt him as an informant, citing a number of questions that would need to be answered before they would agree to proceed:

Your letter does not disclose results of your field search, efforts to obtain information regarding his reliability, stability, general reputation, present and past employment and check of local credit and arrest records.¹⁷

It concludes by saying, “once you have done this your request will be given further consideration.”¹⁸ As things developed these matters were cleared up and Aoki was brought fully on board as a paid informant.

INFORMING ON THE TROTSKYISTS

While Threadgill’s recollections of Aoki’s recruitment do not match the documentary record, his memory of what he wanted him to do does line up. After approaching Aoki and asking him how he felt about the Soviet Union, Aoki told him he had no interest in communism. Threadgill then suggested, “Well, why don’t you go to some of the meetings and tell me who’s there and what they talked about?”¹⁹ For the next seven years he did exactly that.

According to Aoki he did not join the Socialist Workers Party or any other organization until he was out of the Army because “I didn’t feel free to join anything until October ’64 when I got my honorable discharge.”²⁰ In the 2009 documentary Aoki, the film makes an abrupt jump from his speaking about his decision to not reenlist in the Army to his talking about how he then “got to meet some people who were, what we would call the old-left, communist, Trotskyites, social-democrats, primarily in the union movement.” He then says, “I’m bringing up the date real fast because there were a lot of things happening in the world.”²¹ The film then moves to Diane Fujino talking about the state of the world and how Aoki “became politically conscious and radicalized.”²² The events are arranged in such a way to suggest Aoki “became political” after leaving the Army. This is not what happened.

Instead, beginning in 1960 and accelerating in 1962, Aoki was consistently attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. His reports came frequently, systematically listing the names of everyone attending meetings and giving a capsule description of what went on. By the fall of 1962 the FBI was reporting that “Informant continues to report on 75 security subjects.”²³ He also appeared to have advanced quickly in the organization, to the point where by the following year the Bureau reported that “[A]s of Sept 10, 1963, Richard Aoki is a member of the SWP.”²⁴

While later in his life he obscured this, his association with the SWP was an open fact. The student newspaper of Oakland City College (later Merritt College) ran a story on his Trotskyist activity in 1964. Under the headline “Revolutionary Socialist Leads New Club” it explained, “Richard Aoki, who calls himself a ‘revolutionary socialist,’ was elected temporary chairman of the new Socialist Discussion Club.”²⁵ The article, appearing a full seven months before his discharge from his Reserve obligation, makes clear that being in the Army and being active politically was not – contrary to his claims to the opposite – a conflict.

While Aoki did not attempt to conceal his YSA/SWP membership while in the military, he does appear to have broadened his informant activity once he was discharged. By the fall of 1965 the Bureau was recording that “[i]nformant currently participates in Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) in a leadership capacity.”²⁶ The following year things expanded:

Informant regularly attends and reports on weekly meetings in Oakland - Berkeley Branch of the SWP. He maintains personal contact with SWP and YSA members in the Oakland - Berkeley area. He has furnished information of value concerning PLP [Progressive Labor Party]. He has attended and reported on numbers meetings and functions of VDC. [Vietnam Day Committee]²⁷

Along with all this he also gave the FBI information on the Students for a Democratic Society, as well as groups opposing the war in Vietnam.²⁸

Here a word needs to be said about Aoki’s motivation. Aside from Threadgill’s remarks about Aoki’s anti-communism, a more nuanced understanding of what impelled him is likely lost to history. It is the case, however, that the stipend the Bureau gave Aoki was not inconsequential. While he worked numerous jobs, some full- and others part-time, while informing, he garnered a consistent income from the Bureau of around $150 a month, along with another $50 or so for expenses – or $1500 in 2016 dollars. Further insight into his motivation are offered in the following from 1962:

The informant contends that he is satisfied with his situation [of having a modest income from the Bureau] because he feels that his services are in the best interests of his country and that whatever service he is able to perform for this Bureau, he only expects a small amount of remuneration.²⁹

While money does not appear to have been the primary motivation, it did subsidize his career aspirations in attending college, but the main drive appears to have been the desire to do something “patriotic” – along with stoking his considerable ego, much on display in his myriad interviews.

Nonetheless, his tenure in the Socialist Workers Party does not seem to have been smooth. In December 1964 he was put on six months’ probation for “general misconduct.”³⁰ At issue were his missing meetings, to the point where his comrades told him, “It was unfair to other members of [the] YSA for him to enjoy membership in the Local, yet not attend meetings.” Aoki claimed that his job, which ran from 4pm to midnight, six days a week, was the reason. Being put on probation appears to have rattled him, as he reported to the FBI that he hoped he would not be asked to resign.³¹

Despite the missed meetings, he was still cataloging a fair amount about the Trotskyists. One FBI review notes that he had passed on information on “55 security subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Among them were members of the Trotskyists group he was part of, as well members of the Communist Party Youth Group, the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and the Afro American Student Association.³²

All the while he did this, however, he maintained his goal of moving his academic career forward:

Informant claims that he is saving a considerable amount of money, which he is earning at the present time, and after another semester at Merritt College he hopes to be able to discontinue his current employment and enroll at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, for his last two years of schooling. Informant feels that once he is enrolled at the UC he will be in a good position to assist the Bureau in its investigations of any subversive elements.³³

Aoki did eventually enroll in UC Berkeley, which would come to be fateful in numerous ways. Before then, however, his membership in the SWP would end and he would briefly become part of one of the most prominent radical organizations to arise in the United States in the Sixties.

INFORMING ON THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY

To the degree he is known today, Richard Aoki is seen as one of the few non-Black members to have joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, later the Black Panther Party. While there is firm evidence of his having been involved in the origins of the group, specifically through his friendship with Panther founder Huey P. Newton and his acquaintance with Bobby Seale, the nature of his membership and activity with the Panthers beyond that is shrouded in mystery, mythology, and exaggeration, all which served to obscure his actual role.

In Subversives, Rosenfeld writes that Richard Aoki “armed the Black Panthers.” Quoting Aoki, he writes, “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.” Likewise, Rosenfeld recounts how Bobby Seale in his 1971 history of the Panthers describes how there was a “Japanese radical cat” that “had guns for a motherfucker.”³⁴

Rosenfeld’s news hook made for good headlines, but did not really break much new ground on the matter of weapons and the early Black Panthers. The group’s raison d’être was its armed patrols. Aoki handing over weapons (at Newton's request), along with Newton and Seale fundraising through selling Quotations from Chairman MAO Zedong (the Little Red Book), was how they initially were able to obtain arms for these patrols. It also needs to be noted that in conducting these patrols they were operating within the law, utilizing a legal loophole that allowed the public carrying of firearms. This was before passage of the Mulford Act, a law that the Panthers protested, vaulting them to national attention with their armed protest in the State Capitol in Sacramento in 1967.³⁵ In other words, things appear to be what they were – the guns were needed and were used for patrolling the police. In fact, Seale recounts Aoki’s resistance to their using guns, explaining that his reaction to the patrols was, “you’re gonna get your goddam asses killed...” – suggesting Aoki made the loan with reservations.³⁶

Saying that, Aoki’s military mindset, which he promoted among the Panthers, was highly problematic for a radical organization, making them more vulnerable to counter moves by law enforcement. In one interview Aoki bragged that, “I’m somewhat responsible for the military slant to the organization’s public image.”³⁷ Aoki himself loved guns – in a way that was either ignorant or reckless. In one interview toward the end of his life he gleefully recounts how while in the Army they let him fire a particularly powerful weapon and says, “I almost had an orgasm.” It is the kind of thing one might hear from a twenty-year-old recruit who has never been in combat – yet Aoki tells the story as a middle-age man.³⁸

It is also clear from the documentary record that Aoki played at least a consultative role in the initial politics of the Panthers. Both Seale and Aoki recount how Newton showed him the draft of the Panther Ten-Point program for review and he approved it.³⁹ Along with this, Aoki says that it is he who introduced them to the communist politics of MAO Zedong, “[t]he Maoist twist, I kind of threw that one in. I said so far the most advanced Marxists I have run across are the Maoists in China.”⁴⁰ His FBI file tends to back up the claim:

Only RICHARD MITSUI AOKI, HUEY PERCY NEWTON AND BOBBY GEORGE SEALE were fully informed on the political philosophies of the organization. With the possible exception of ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, the San Francisco Branch Captain of the BPPSD, none of the other activist members appeared knowledgeable of or interested in the political philosophies of the organization expounded by the top leadership. [Informant report, 10/25/67]⁴¹

Because of his Trotskyist political training, his initial position in the BPPSD was that of “Minister of Education,” a fact that Aoki and later Panthers appear to have forgotten, ignored, or gotten confused in the subsequent mythology. This can be seen in the following from May 1, 1967:

In early 1967, the exact date not known, RICHARD MATSUI AOKI of Berkeley, California, as a former Oakland City College student, was drawn into the BPPSD and had the title Minister of Education bestowed upon him. NEWTON AND SEALE knew AOKI to be a scholar of the classic writings on revolution by such former black militants as FRANTZ FANON, MARCUS GARVEY, MALCOLM X LITTLE and W.E.B. Du BOIS.⁴²

Regardless, that position did not last long and gave way to Aoki’s status as a “secret member” for which he is more known. The FBI documents suggest that that status may have something to do with his ongoing membership – and informing – on the SWP. In talking with Diane Fujino, with whom he was more upfront about his SWP membership, Aoki claims that his SWP leaders

[w]ere stunned by what I was doing as a member of the BPP. They went into executive session, came back, and said that I would be asked to be placed out of my assignment as the resident on the Negro Question. They wanted me to work on something else.⁴³

When asked why, they told him that “it could lead to some heavy duty stuff and then if my SWP membership is revealed, it might not reflect well on the SWP.” In other words, the group wanted distance between themselves and the BPP organizationally and politically. As a result, according to what he told Fujino, he went to Huey Newton and told him about his conundrum. Newton in turn told him he had no problem with him being in both the Black Panther Party and the Socialist Workers Party. Given that the SWP was telling him he could not be in both, Aoki then claimed, “I wrote my letter of resignation and hand-delivered it to the SWP leadership.”⁴⁴

As with many of Aoki’s stories this does not appear to be what actually happened. Instead the FBI reports show Aoki attempting to keep a foot in two different doors. Specifically in June 1967 the FBI was reporting that Aoki had been suspended from SWP and he was working to get reinstated, and doing this by cutting his ties with the Panthers.

Informant has been ordered by the SWP organizer to resign from SWP and the Executive Committee of the Oakland Berkeley Branch of the SWP. Informant has complied with these orders which were given by the organizer because he feared that informant might be arrested as have many other members of the BPPSD. Informant was also ordered to slowly decrease his activity with the BPPSD. Informant is in the process of complying with this instruction. Informant has been further instructed to attend classes and functions other than business meetings of the SWP. Informant is to remain close to and in contact with the SWP organizer. SF 2496-8 [the FBI code assigned to Aoki’s informant file] anticipates that he will be reinstated as a full-fledged SWP member in the Fall of 1967.⁴⁵

As for Newton being comfortable with Aoki being in both organizations, that too is suspect. The FBI, writing in April 1967, reported that the Panthers “discouraged dual membership and sought not to be identified with the Communist Party USA, the SWP, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), or any other organizations having left wing tendencies.”⁴⁶ Perhaps Newton was making an exception in Aoki’s case, one the SWP was not willing to make – he is no longer alive to clarify this. It is, however, possible that Aoki lied to Newton just as he lied to Fujino.

As things turned out it did not matter; Aoki ended up effectively expelled from the SWP anyways and in a diminished role in the BPP. An FBI evaluation in June 1968 reports that Aoki retained “the rank of Captain in the Black Panther Party (BPP)” and that “informant functions as a secret member of the BPP.” Meantime his attempts to conciliate the SWP failed and Aoki had “terminated efforts to regain entrance to the SWP.”⁴⁷

All of this was done in the context of his informing on the Panthers. One gets a sense reading the Bureau reports of the specific value of Aoki and his serendipitous presence among the Panthers in a period when the Bureau was racing to catch up with the phenomena – before the fever years of the “Black Extremist” COINTELPRO aimed at the BPP hit its full stride between 1968 and 1971.⁴⁸ For example, the following from May 1967 tells of a rally at UC Berkeley:

The speakers included Barbara Arthur who was introduced as cochairman of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPPSD) (NOTE: She is not co-chairman but is a member of the steering committee according to Rich Aoki) She spoke about the facts surrounding the death of Denzil Dowell.⁴⁹

Here one sees Aoki offering a corrective for the Bureau about the leadership structure of the Panthers, something that could not be garnered by just sending an agent out to listen to speeches.

Aoki also shows up in a report concerning Huey P. Newton. Specifically right after Newton had been arrested for a confrontation with police, which ended with the killing of Oakland Police officer John Frey – leading to Newton’s jailing and trial for murder. In the wake of the shootout the FBI was trying to determine who owned the car Newton had been driving. While they knew the vehicle was registered to Laverne Williams in Oakland, they did not know why Newton had access to that particular car. The answer came in intelligence supplied by Aoki who reported that as “of October 1967, Huey Percy Newton was living with Laverne Edith Williams at 5939 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland.”⁵⁰

All in all the Bureau was happy with what they were getting, writing that Aoki “has materially assisted the Bureau in keeping abreast of developments with this notorious organization.” In turn his intelligence was “disseminated to local law enforcement agencies” and deemed of “considerable value.”⁵¹

It seems fair to conclude that without the information supplied by Richard Aoki the FBI would have had a less clear picture of the Black Panthers and their leadership, especially in the critical formative period of the end of 1966 into the fall of 1967 – before there were other informants in place to pick up the slack. As is clear in the history of the Panthers, the information the Bureau collected went hand in hand with an unprecedented repressive onslaught leveled at that organization.

STRIKE FOR ETHNIC STUDIES AT UC BERKELEY

For all the focus on Aoki as a member of the Panthers it appears his most active tenure there was short and his commitment spotty. By early 1968, little more than a year after the Panthers formed, he appeared to be moving on. The description of his activity in February 1968 suggests he was redirecting his efforts toward activity at UC Berkeley where he was going to school:

Informant is a member of the Executive Committee of the Tri-Continental Progressive Students Association (TCPSA). He is liaison representative of TCPSA to the Afro-American Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley. As a former Minister of Education and retaining the rank of Captain in the Black Panther Party (BPP), informant functions as a secret member of the BPP. Informant continues on the editorial staff of the magazine, Black Politics. He reports on activities of members of the SWP, YSA and members of Student Black Nationalist and new left organizations at the University of California, Berkeley.⁵²

He continued to keep the Bureau apprised of the BPP – literally “phoning it in” in some cases. Thus we see in a report from April 1969 that “a man who identified himself as Richard Aoki” called the BPP national headquarters and asked for Panther leader David Hilliard. Hilliard was not in, but he was able to speak with June Hilliard [David Hilliard’s brother]. The reason he called is that he wanted to “know whether BOBBY [Seale?] was going to turn himself in.”⁵³

Aoki says of this period that he “had been working on life-anddeath issues with the Black Panthers and I was getting tired out by the political stuff by then.”⁵⁴ More probable is that his ardor for informing was waning as his academic career approached a new phase. In actuality the entire course of his tenure as an informant coincided with either attending or making plans to enroll in college. Now, having received his Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology, he was matriculated in a Master’s program in Social Work at UC Berkeley.⁵⁵

As things developed, however, he again found himself “in the right place at the right time.” Specifically at ground zero of what would turn out to be the longest and most violent student strike in UC Berkeley history. The focus of the strike was the demand for a department of Ethnic Studies.⁵⁶

The UC strike occurred in the wake of a similar confrontation at San Francisco State – an outpouring that had been met with especially harsh government and police repression. At the center of the UC Berkeley strike were four groups: the Afro-American Students Union, the Mexican-American Student Confederation, the Native American Students United and the Asian-American Political Alliance – who joined in the umbrella organization, the Third World Liberation Front, or TWLF.⁵⁷ The TWLF in turn had a leadership consisting of Manuel Ruben Delgado, Jim Nabors, LaNada Means, and Richard Aoki. As the Bureau noted, Aoki was “in [an] excellent position to keep the Bureau informed.”⁵⁸ Over the course of the ten-week strike students leafleted, picketed, and occupied buildings to advance their demands; the university in turn repeatedly called out the police, leading to escalating confrontations and violence.

A flavor of events comes through in one FBI report describing how a demonstrator “threw a home-made tear gas canister into a group of law enforcement officers in front of Sproul Hall.” That was not particularly unusual for the time. What was, was the fact that the police “were not wearing gas masks and the tear gas caused both officers and demonstrators to disperse quickly.”⁵⁹ Things escalated to the point that toward the end of the strike, California Governor Ronald Reagan dispatched the National Guard to campus.⁶⁰ As a result of this the strikers and especially their leaders were targeted for disciplinary action by the school, along with facing arrest. What jumps out in this is how Richard Aoki, a known and visible leader of the strike, was relatively immune from arrest and punishment.

In discussing this period, Aoki presents things in such a way to suggest he was arrested multiple times. Thus we hear vague assertions such as “during a period of time when about a hundred of us were arraigned,” or “another time when we were arrested,” and “I remember one time I got thrown in jail”⁶¹ (emphasis added). Rather than multiple arrests, however, Aoki appears to have been arrested only once – and in that instance he was not punished.

In contrast to Aoki’s sketchy memory, fellow strike leader Manuel Delgado is much clearer. In his memoir he recounts how he had been arrested four times during the strike and Jim Nabors had been arrested three times. LaNada Means and Richard Aoki were both arrested only one time.⁶²

Diane Fujino’s conversations with Aoki – which now have the value of putting him on record on a number of things – included a discussion of his “arrests” during the strike. In discussing this she picks up on contradictions in his account to the point of researching the matter, but relegates any skepticism to footnotes rather than follow-up. Thus regarding his claim to multiple arrests, she writes:

It’s difficult to verify the number of times Aoki was arrested during the strike. No other arrests of Aoki are mentioned in local newspapers. Misdemeanors remain on court records for only seven years; plus Aoki indicated that his criminal records were sealed. No felonies were listed under his name in the Alameda County court records.⁶³

The obvious question would seem to be why Aoki – unlike Manuel Delgado – could not recall something as eventful as how many times he was arrested. That said, the reason Fujino could not find any arrests beyond the one, felony or otherwise, is because there weren’t any. The background check the FBI conducted in 1961 showed that up to that point, he had never before been arrested. The only thing they uncovered was a speeding ticket.⁶⁴ As for his claim that his records were “sealed,” that itself should have raised the question: Why?

The one arrest Aoki does describe – his only one during the strike – has its own unexamined peculiarities. He says that he was thrown into a holding cell with a group of thirty men and that the bailiff on depositing him there said, “Here is an Oriental Communist student from Berkeley” – the implication being he was trying to rouse the prisoners against him.⁶⁵ Aoki then explains how he turned this provocation around by talking to his cellmates about his radicalism. He then, for reasons he does not explain, says that when lunch came, “I started a little ruckus over food. They threw me in solitary, the hole.” Leaving aside Aoki’s claim of being put in the “hole” in a county lock-up while awaiting arraignment (is there such a thing?), what is not interrogated is why, given everything that happened that day, did he choose that moment to create a disturbance over jail food? Given we now know he was an informant, an obvious explanation is that he was trying to get away from his fellow prisoners in order to call his FBI handlers.

Richard Aoki being arrested at the entrance of UC Berkeley, February 18, 1969

Credit: Lonnie Wilson/Oakland Tribune
Oakland Tribune Company ©2016 All Rights Reserved

Fortunately we have more than Aoki’s words as insights. Specifically we have the FBI, who were very concerned with the arrest, telling their agents to closely follow the “informant’s arrest on 2/18/69” and to “insure that he does not disclose his relationship with the Bureau and to insure that his informant status is not compromised.” They also give – or restate – his marching orders for his behavior during the strike:

Insure that informant clearly understands that he is not to initiate or participate in activities which result in personal or property damage and should not place himself in a position where he is subject to arrest if at all possible. While it is realized that informant must openly associate with element seeking to promote agitation in order to be in a position to obtain information concerning planned acts of violence, you must be constantly alert to balance informant's activities in this regard against the undesirable results of having informant actually participate in such violence and thus leave himself open to prosecution.⁶⁶

This further confirms this was Aoki’s only – and likely unintentional – arrest during the strike. Beyond that it shows that the Bureau wanted their informant free of legal constraints that would compromise his ability to be an informant.

Beyond Aoki’s arrest during the strike, there is one other area rife with contradiction, specifically his treatment by authorities in the aftermath of the strike. The short version is this: Aoki got a full pass. His comrades were not as lucky; LaNada Means was suspended from UC Berkeley for two semesters, while Jim Nabors and Manuel Delgado were expelled. Aoki – as we learn in another footnote in Fujino’s book – was not punished.⁶⁷ Specifically Willis A. Shotwell, the coordinator of facilities and regulations, wrote a letter to the Committee on Student Conduct about Aoki’s case and found “insufficient evidence to make a finding of guilty – no penalty.”⁶⁸ Aoki, the Chair of the Asian American Political Alliance, an iconic leader and one of the strike’s fiercest advocates, came out the other side with his academic career at UC Berkeley fully intact.

AFTERMATH

After the strike ended Richard Aoki was awarded his Master’s Degree in Social Work and was beginning his transition to working in academia. In turn he was giving less of his time to the Bureau.

SF-2469-R has just obtained a Master’s Degree in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). He has been active in the formation of a new department of Asian Studies at UCB and expects to obtain employment by the University as an Assistant Program Coordinator for the new department as a lecturer. Due to the demands of his academic pursuit the informant furnished little information subsequent to April 15, 1970.⁶⁹

According to Aoki, he was “burned out”:

I was on automatic pilot. Academically I was on my way to completing the requirements for my master’s degree. Then the big split in the BPP hit, I’d been away from the party and I didn’t see it coming. Then I had my personal life and plans.⁷⁰

Aoki’s story is again contradicted by actual events, specifically that the split in the Black Panther Party was still a year in the future, when Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver publicly feuded in March 1971 after Cleaver confronted Newton via telephone during a TV taping.⁷¹ Beyond that detail is the odd fact that Aoki, who claimed to be a radical of the first order, effectively retired from the revolution in early 1970 – hardly an ebb year of political struggle.

Regardless, from that point on his reports dwindle from a trickle to a drip, albeit a wide-ranging drip; consistent with how deeply he had ingratiated himself among movement forces in the Bay Area. One of his last FBI progress reports gives the sweep of this:

In July 1975, information on whereabouts of AIM activist ROLAND Knox and BPP member PAUL MORGAN. In September 1975, information on current activity of former BPP Minister of Finance Melvin Newton. Evaluation of current leadership of BPP. Information on whereabouts and activity of SHARON KAPPLEMAN, an aboveground supporter of Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. In October 1975, information on whereabouts and occupations of two former BPP activists.⁷²

The report also noted one other particular disturbing development. Aoki, the report stated, would be teaching a new college course in Asian Studies and as a result was expected to “be in contact with radical Asian organizations such as I Wor Kuen to gather and present course material and should be able to obtain information of value.”⁷³ Aoki the government informant, who had supplied a steady stream of information on the UC Berkeley strike, would now leverage the academic position he gained as a result of that struggle to supply the government with information.

Nonetheless, by 1976 the Bureau was reporting that Aoki’s request for “up to $150 a month” was denied because his productivity “does not warrant payments in the amount requested.” One exception to the dearth of reports was in September 1976, when he informed the Bureau that the “Revolutionary Communist Party is actively recruiting members and seeking to become influential within Asian activist organization in the San Francisco Bay Area.”⁷⁴ The RCP, which had grown out of the Revolutionary Union, had by that time recruited a number of veterans from the Berkeley Strike along with absorbing a number of people from the Asian organization, Wei Min She.

In October 1977 the Bureau officially dropped Aoki as an informant. Their explanation is illustrative:

He desired to discontinue seeking information for the FBI because he believed that this was inconsistent with his present career and objectives as a student counselor and instructor at a junior college in Oakland, California. Source advised that he is not willing to testify in open court or before administrative hearing boards if such testimony would reveal his past connection with the FBI. This would alienate him from associates and friends and would cause him great trouble in his relationships with students as a student counselor.⁷⁵

For seventeen years Aoki had been aggressively informing for the FBI, but he now wanted to cease informing and live the quiet life of an academic. He did this, however, with a caveat; he wanted to maintain the lie that had been his life up to that point.

FALLOUT

Richard Aoki is clearly a success story for the FBI, one compounded by the knee-jerk response of his defenders. In this, Aoki’s outing and the reaction conjures up images of the Malinovsky Affair of almost a hundred years earlier. The late political activist Fred Ho, much in the way Lenin argued about Malinovsky, said that even if Aoki had been an agent it didn’t really matter, “surely [he] was a piss-poor one because what he contributed to the movement is enormously greater than anything he could have detracted or derailed.”⁷⁶ Ho does not then give an account – a balance sheet if you will – of how Aoki was able to do more good than harm over the many years of his informing, only this vague assertion. Ceding some ground, others have argued that Aoki may have done bad things, but he became genuinely enamored of the Left he had formerly spied on. To this it can be said that it is possible that Aoki convinced himself that on some level he played, or could play later in life, a positive role – we will likely never know his thinking on this. Regardless, it matters little; the truism that it is not what you think, but what you do, applies.

In the key years of 1957 to 1977, Richard Aoki was an aggressive government informant doing incalculable harm to those he came in contact with. The FBI, with their frequent and comprehensive assessments, attest to the considerable value Aoki was to them for a very long time. That he never took responsibility for that speaks volumes about his moral and ethical character. And here is the irony. Not only did he not take responsibility, he deliberately hid his past and assumed a role as deceptive in his latter life as the one he assumed while he was young. In turn he made a mockery of those that rose to defend him – many of whom were actually deserving of the respect he claimed for himself.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE INFILTRATION OF AMERICA’S MAOISTS

Betty Goff also recommended that instead of taking a person into the RU too quickly, the individuals should be worked with for a period of time and then this person should be discussed with the collective before he is admitted. The Local Exec approved this.

— FBI report of RU Local Executive Committee meeting on recruitment¹

I became a member of the Revolutionary Union in an effort to further my husband’s position into a higher leadership body of the organization so that we could acquire more information, so I allowed him to recruit me, in other words.

— Bureau informant Betty Goff, testifying to Congress²

Sometime between February and March 1968, the Revolutionary Union, a pro-Maoist group, was formed in the Bay Area – it would be a group the FBI would dedicate an incredible amount of attention to over the course of the next ten years.

The RU cohered some of the most talented radicals in the Bay Area at the time. It aimed at nothing less than assuming the role of the pro-Chinese representative in the US, a mantel the Progressive Labor Party held, but by 1968 it was beginning to renounce. The RU, initially known as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, was an amalgam of Berkeley Free Speech veterans, ex-Communist Party members, and recent exiles from PLP itself. An early report by the Bureau described the core of the new group – people like Larry Harris, Vern Baun, Gertrude and Dick Harris – as “[o]ld-time Stalinists of the 1930s who believe in and advocate the STALIN brand of communism of the 1930s.” These veterans were said to “advocate the use of force and violence in general” and “typify the classic conception of the communist in black coat and slouch hat hiding behind the bushes with a lighted bomb.”³

The Bureau in turn noted the paradox of campus youth attracted to what these veteran communists were putting forward:

They advocate a type of communism practiced long before the general membership of the RU were born and the youthful members consider this ancient history and have no conception of what they are talking about. However these men have the ability to meet these youth on the youth’s level of political awareness.⁴

The quickness in which the concept of the Revolutionary Union took hold and then expanded into a nationwide organization was testament to this fact.

FROM PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY TO REVOLUTIONARY UNION

The founding core of the RU consisted of a number of people who had passed first through the Communist Party then through the Progressive Labor Party. Richard Aoki – who had his hand in nearly every aspect of the Left in the Bay Area – reported that one of the RU founders, Larry Harris, dropped out of the CPUSA in 1959, and by 1964 was the treasurer for PLP in the Bay Area.⁵ Aoki also reported in May 1964 that Leibel Bergman – of whom more shortly – and Harris had quit PLP, though no reason is given.⁶

Another founding RU member, and later leader of the RU in the Bay Area, Gertrude Alexander, had her own relationship with PLP. Based in Buffalo while she was in the CPUSA in the Fifties, both she and her husband Richard (Dick) were in the meeting where one of the future PLP founders, Mortimer Scheer, was expelled. At issue in that meeting for Scheer and two others, according to a Bureau informant, was how to deal with compliance of the Internal Security Act of 1950 – a measure that strengthened laws against espionage and a gave wider latitude for investigations into what the government deemed subversive activities, including the promotion of communism.⁷ Scheer put forward a position that the group should circumvent the law by dissolving the CPUSA and forming a new organization. The CP’s leadership not only rejected that proposal, but also expelled those advocating it. The Alexanders, who questioned Scheer’s expulsion, were not expelled themselves, but it marked the end of their tenure with the CP – they would soon join Scheer’s organization.⁸ Also joining Bergman, Harris, and the Alexanders was Vern Buan – another former CP member. Baun was a close comrade of Leibel Bergman’s – he had been called along with Bergman to testify in front of HUAC in 1960. There was one other person of note in this group of old timers who came through PLP, Darrell Grover. Grover, as we will see, appears to have been a very problematic addition to the RU.

The key person in the formation of the Revolutionary Union, however, was Leibel Bergman. Bergman was a mathematician, a forger’s helper, father, veteran of the CPUSA, and a founding member of PLP. As such Bergman was a high-profile target of the FBI. The government’s cognizance of Bergman can be seen in an informant report from March 1957, noting that he “was an active leader in the San Francisco County Communist Party” and had been “a CP member for 20 years.”⁹

The Bureau was not just watching and reporting on Bergman though. In 1960 Bergman was called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee at hearings held in San Francisco. His testimony occurred on the day of the “HUAC riots” – in reality a police assault on demonstrators, many from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State along with trade union activists and CP supporters. The demonstrators were expelled from City Hall by way of fire hoses – much in the way that fire hoses had been used on Civil Rights protestors in the South.¹⁰

Bergman, along with Vern Baun, testified that day. The hearings appeared to be part of a wider effort aimed at Bergman as seen by a later statement by the FBI agent in charge of the “Bergman Investigation,” David Ryan:

Q  When you say [Bergman] was a possible subject of Smith Act prosecution and referred to the Department of Justice, you are referring back to the period of the prior --prior to 1958, are you not?

A  No. He was under consideration for prosecution under the Smith Act in 1963.

Q  And that was a recommendation passed along with the FBI to the Department in 1963?

A  It was pending the Department of Justice at the time, I believe.

Q  As of 1963?

A  Yes.¹¹

As things turned out, Bergman had left the country before any action was taken against him, traveling to the People’s Republic of China where he would serve as an American expert between 1965 and 1967.¹² The Bureau, however, kept tabs on Bergman, particularly on his return.

[H]is reason for returning to the United States was that he had promised his friends, the Chinese, that he would do a job for them which was the selection of a youth cadre to be trained and held in reserve for China’s future utilization.¹³

According to the FBI, Bergman was seeking “the most promising youth in the United States who recognize the correctness of the Chinese position and desire to participate in bringing true Marxism-Leninism to the United States.”¹⁴ While written from the Bureau’s anti-Communist bias, this account – which would be restated in later reports dealing with Bergman – is consistent with what actually happened and the recollections of at least one of the young founding members.¹⁵

That the FBI knew such things was because Bergman, and the group he was forming, was already clearly in their sights. Specifically, from the time that it was twenty-odd members in early 1968 to its rapid expansion between 1969 and 1970, the FBI had very specific knowledge. They knew of the internal debates over whether to uphold Stalin, whether to launch polemics against the Progressive Labor Party, and how the group was relating to the Black Panther Party – all of this before the Revolutionary Union had even publicly surfaced.¹⁶

They also had intimate knowledge of how the RU was relating to Students for a Democratic Society as it worked its way through its crisis-wracked final year; one report described how the RU’s Bob Avakian “hardly made any of the NIC [National Interim Committee] meetings,” though he had been “instructed to relate closely to the SDS” – Avakian in turn offered the excuse that he “was not informed of one NIC meeting – and the other NIC meeting he was informed too late to get there.”¹⁷

Early on as well, they were aware of the strained relationship between Avakian and Mike Klonsky, the SDS National Secretary in 1968-69 – Klonsky would go on to lead the second largest New Communist Group, the October League. In one memo on the differences the RU was having with their comrade Marv Treiger – who had been a member of the CPUSA before joining the RU – on the Black National Question, they report Avakian as saying that Treiger and Klonsky “are living together and that TREIGER is probably now being influenced by KLONSKY.”¹⁸ As things developed this would be important information for the Bureau.

That the Bureau knew such things at such an early point was due to their early success in penetrating the group – including at very high levels. In this three people stand out, two who would later come out publicly as working for the Bureau, and one who never did.

THE “CONTRIBUTIONS” OF LARRY & BETTY GOFF

In the fall of 1969, the ostensibly working-class revolutionary Larry Goff joined the Radical Action Movement at San Jose State, one of the campuses where the RU was active. From there he joined the Bill Haywood Collective (also an RU-organized group at San Jose State) before being recruited into the RU in the spring of 1970.¹⁹ After being approved for membership, Goff was instructed to leave the student movement and obtain a factory job at the Food Machinery Corporation in San Jose – a chemical company that had Defense Department contracts.²⁰ After his recruitment he in turn recruited his wife Betty, the purpose of which was more than just another set of eyes and ears for the FBI, as is made clear by Betty’s testimony:

I became a member of the Revolutionary Union in an effort to further my husband's position into a higher leadership body of the organization so that we could acquire more information, so I allowed him to recruit me.

At that time he was in what they call a workers collective. He then became a chairman of that collective and moved on up to the local executive committee and after that he was able to attend central committee meetings.²¹

The fact that Goff was promoted to chair of his collective, the San Jose Workers Collective #1, aka the Eighth Route Army Collective, also put him on the Local Executive Committee. Despite the promotions, he seemed at times to be at odds with the rest of his comrades:

All members present, except GOFF, said that the working people that have been interviewed by members of the collective concerning the demonstration [against Nixon in October 1970] had stated that they (the working people) wished that they had also been there to throw a brick at NIXON.

LARRY said that 99 per cent of the people that he talked to at FMC thought that the demonstration was a very immoral act and that they were against it.²²

Outside of “organizing” his own wife, Goff did not appear to be a particularly successful organizer or recruiter within the rapidly growing organization. On the contrary, he always had an excuse, which reads as almost comic in hindsight, to explain away his lack of success:

LARRY said that the two guys that had been in his caucus at FMC had quit because he had raised their political consciousness to the point where they realized that they were getting screwed by the bosses so they quit and are looking for work elsewhere.²³

When not invoking the problem of him being so good at his work that he caused setbacks, he also blustered about his need for discretion, saying at one point that “he had been labeled a trouble maker and instigator at his company” and as a result would have to “play it cool for a while.”²⁴

Still, Larry and Betty Goff had something in short supply within the RU, a “working-class” background – which was a key focus of the RU at the time. As internal “Local Exec Notes” of 10/16/70 put it, “[t]he major topic on the agenda was how to ‘proletarianize’ the organization here in San Jose ... Part of proletarianizing the organization is recruiting more working class cadre and raising them to leadership positions.”²⁵ Interestingly, that same RU document suggested that “special consideration be given to women” being put in leadership positions. Not surprisingly Betty – a dyed-in-the-wool evangelical Christian and FBI informant – would be elevated to the Local Executive only a few weeks after this document was distributed. In many respects the Goffs were made to order for the RU – which in hindsight should have raised more questions than it did.

Larry & Betty Goff testify to Congress, October 21, 1971

Credit: Charles Gorry / Associated Press

There was another area in which the RU’s ambitions were ripe fodder for the FBI’s machinations. When recruiting new people, the RU sought to “pay special attention to their special interests and skills.”²⁶ So when Larry enrolled at San Jose State to take classes in police science, it did not raise alarms. Instead, combined with his “proletarian” background, it made him the perfect candidate for the local Security Committee, which he joined in October 1970.²⁷ In this way an informant was tasked with the responsibility of preventing infiltration of the RU.

Goff also acquired one other skill:

I was studying to be a gunsmith at that time and I did this for a very important reason in the organization because they would bring guns that needed to be repaired and at that time I would take off serial numbers and make ballistic tests and turn them in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.²⁸

In fact, both Goffs were placed on the five-person Proficiency Committee for San Jose. That Committee’s purpose was to teach RU members how to use a variety of guns. Having the Goffs on that committee had other benefits as well. As Betty made clear: “we conducted a survey… everyone had to turn in to their collectives a report … of how many guns there were in their houses where they lived and what type of weapons they were.”²⁹

The Goffs’ tenure in the group corresponded with the first true crisis that rocked the young RU. Their presence allowed the FBI a front-row seat not only into a critical internal struggle, but the methods the RU dispatched to try and avoid detection.

On the morning of a late October weekend, two RU members drove a car to the residences of Barry and Mary Lou Greenberg. There the car received a packet containing a map, directions, and “security instructions,” along with a code word required for admission to the RU Central Committee meeting later that day. Following those instructions, the car drove to San Francisco and eventually gained entrance and settled into the meeting:

At this time BRUCE FRANKLIN took over the Chair. He had one page that they had left out of the main report, which was numbered. People couldn't leave their seats as they got this paper because it had a lot of information in it that, for security reasons, they couldn't take a chance that it would get away. This paper related to guerrilla warfare that all comrades in the organization should be thinking about. All comrades should begin to practice illegal procedures of any type, anything that would be illegal, to overcome their fear fro [sic] greater and more extensive illegal work. They were supposed to start illegal work. That, in general, was BRUCE FRANKLIN’s paper.³⁰

The first person to speak in response to Franklin’s paper was Larry Harris: “He gave a twenty minute speech of why he thought the paper was absolutely insane and was really, really wrong.”³¹ The ensuing disagreement would end up splitting the nascent organization into two and it would send Larry and Betty Goff scrambling to decide which piece to align with.

THE GOFFS AFTER FRANKLIN

The Goffs’ behavior throughout the course of what came to be known as the Franklin struggle is illuminating. The prospect of the group splitting into two, one they had invested a good deal of effort in infiltrating and in which they were methodically working their way up in the hierarchy, put them in a difficult position. How would they best serve the FBI as a channel of information given not one, but two organizations to report on? The level of conflict and vacillation comes through in a meeting where Larry’s possible departure to the Franklin fragment is debated:

During the discussions when LARRY GOFF was present, BETTY GOFF strongly backed her husband's position[,] but when LARRY was not present, BETTY changed her tune and was against his position. Although she appears to be staying [with] the RU, BETTY appears to have some strong differences with the RU.³²

To address this the couple employed a Solomon-like resolution. An FBI report from December 18, 1970 describes a meeting of three RU leaders, Barry Greenberg, Darrell Grover, and Leibel Bergman, discussing the situation with Larry Goff. Greenberg reported that Goff:

[H]ad done a complete flip-flop and was quitting the RU to join forces with BRUCE FRANKLIN. The people meeting agreed that Bergman should attempt to talk with Goff to keep him in the RU, an attempt that proved unsuccessful.³³

All of which is hardly surprising. Bergman was arguing based on political principal while Larry Goff’s criteria was something else entirely. Soon after Larry Goff shows up in a report on his new organization that would come to be called the Venceremos Organization, based on Franklin’s people merging with a pre-existing group of Chicanos called Venceremos [Spanish for “overcome” or “we will win”].

The political terms of the Franklin rift were largely – though not entirely – over the matter of political violence and whether or not the time had come to initiate such, at least on some level. The reports from Goff from inside the Venceremos Organization are a window into how the group was trying to find its way after the destructive debate in the RU. They are also instructive of how an FBI informant was attempting to up the ante and laying the basis for serious legal recriminations for those in the new entity.

In one report Larry Goff – who at the time was still working at the FMC Corporation in San Jose, offers a provocative proposal:

During the discussion, LARRY GOFF mentioned the possibility of blowing up tanks at FMC [along with chemicals, the company produced amphibious vehicles] where he works in order to create a rallying point for people at FMC. GOFF stated that prior efforts to organize a workers collective appeared unproductive and indicated this was one of his reasons for joining forces with the FRANKLIN Group.³⁴

How exactly “blowing up tanks” would further organize a “workers collective” is not something the report addressed, but it is an indication of the provocative role Goff was playing – which he attempted to sanitize on leaving the RU and coming out publicly as an informant.

There is also a report – likely originating from Goff – that talked about the organization of the new group. After recounting how one person would be the group’s tactical leader at demonstrations and everyone would be subject to his orders, it describes – from the informant’s perspective – the realm of the group’s activity, “actions to defend the Panthers,” as well as “when to off pigs, wreck cars, and other related activities.” At the same time, from a defensive standpoint, Larry Goff was tasked with helping leadership “set up the standard operating procedure for defending the homes of members.”³⁵

In hindsight, those in this group who argued that the time for initiating and supporting political violence in the US had arrived, come across as projecting a fair amount of bluster – if dangerous bluster. Practically however, much of what the organization did – with one notable incident that would come later – appears to be not much different from what they had done while still in the Revolutionary Union. That the Bureau had an informant in there on the ground floor and that this informant decided to pull out early on, suggests the FBI considered the RU to be the more considerable prey.³⁶ A later report by the House Committee on Internal Security made this clear:

The Goffs offered the opinion that, of the two groups, the RU is the much more dangerous because of its long-range plans for revolution, the secrecy and subterfuge of its operations, and its concentration on building a “mass line” among the working classes. The Goffs feel that the Venceremos group is composed of individuals ready to engage in unorthodox and unwise activities and is more immediately dangerous in terms of terrorism and violence, but that Venceremos will divulge its planned activity and, as a result, its member’s will be arrested or killed before Venceremos can present a long-range threat.³⁷

Given that assessment what Larry Goff did next is not as surprising.

BETTY GOFF CARRIES ON

Unbeknownst to them, the Goffs were the subjects of an evaluation by yet another informant. In a report dated January 11, 1971 that informant offered the following:

LARRY GOFF is now working for a gunsmith and apparently lives on money that is sent him from his parents. BETTY GOFF sometimes indicates that her membership in the RU is something she became involved in and was not ready for. She indicates that she feels like she is in a trap and she does not appear genuinely sympathetic toward the RU.³⁸

Leaving aside the curious detail of Larry getting money from his parents – something of a red flag for a working-class stiff with a family – whatever crisis Betty was having did not lead her to immediately drop out.

Rather than the challenges of the Franklin split being the conduit leading to Betty and Larry ending their political tenure in Maoist politics altogether, Larry Goff instead announced to his Venceremos comrades that “he intended to leave the Venceremos and once again align himself with the RU.” In this he offered the rationale that he had left the RU “because BARRY and MARY LOU GREENBERG had had ‘no practice,’” but that now, “BARRY, and MARY LOU are beginning to come around.” He also explained that because Betty had stayed in the RU it “had caused marital difficulties.” As a result, because he “wants to save his marriage” and because there were “satisfactory changes within the RU,” he wanted back in.³⁹

Before doing so, however, things took one last surreal turn. One of the more paranoid in Larry’s Venceremos circle had earlier accused a number of his comrades, including Goff, “of being FBI Agents.” As Goff was about to exit the meeting, he took the opportunity to address the accusations. Turning to his accuser he said, “I hear you think I am a pig Agent. I would like to know your reasons.” In response the comrade responded, “he didn't have any,” that it “was just something that he felt,” but that “he had ways of finding out.” Goff in turn responded, “I don't care what you or anyone else thinks about me being a pig. I think my practice speaks for itself.”⁴⁰ At that point the chair of the meeting told the accuser that he “would have to keep his mouth shut or get kicked out of the collective,” and that “LARRY had thoroughly been checked out.”⁴¹ Larry Goff then left to return to the RU.

Goff’s return was greatly smoothed by his wife, who had been laying the groundwork by presenting the RU with a list of options, one that reads more like an ultimatum:

BETTY told the Local Exec that she and LARRY had been having some terrible fights, mainly because of the fact that LARRY was over with the Venceremos, and BETTY was with the RU. BETTY said it came down to one of three alternatives: (1) That Larry would have to come back to the RU. (2) That Betty would have to go to the Venceremos. (3) Both of them would have to quit everything.⁴²

She also made an impassioned plea for her husband’s return. She said he “had made a confession” to her that he wanted to come back into the RU. He also told her, “When he had left he thought he had good reasons, but realizes now he was not thinking too clearly.”

The Local Exec discussed this and finally decided that if LARRY comes back to the RU, he could keep up his gun-smithing, but would have to do some other kind of mass work. He would also have to give a strong self-criticism and make everyone understand clearly what he has done and that he realizes his mistakes. It was also pointed out that he could not come back into the RU as a collective chairman.⁴³

In this account, Goff’s work as a gunsmith had a certain premium, beyond any of his perceived leadership skills. That aside, the irony – or absurdity – is that one of the few people raising questions about how genuine Goff was, amid his wild gyrations between a disposition toward political violence and one pegged toward strategic political organizing, was a person who thought almost everyone was working with the FBI.

THE GOFFS’ EXIT

Despite all their maneuvering, the Goffs were not long for the RU after the Franklin split. Betty, at that point, was head of her collective and Larry had been reassigned to a non-leadership position. However, the two were having difficulty keeping up with the demands of RU membership – the constant meetings, the study, the mass work, and everything else.

Soon other problems intervened. On March 8, 1971 the RU demonstrated on San Jose City College in for International Women’s Day. Barry Greenberg, who along with his wife Mary Lou – both of whom were leaders of the San Jose RU – were supposed to attend the demonstration. Unknown to them Larry Goff had informed the police, resulting in Barry Greenberg’s arrest. In the wake of that the Greenbergs appear to have finally become suspicious of Goff to the point that they decided to confront Larry directly.

To get at the root of things they invited him to their home where they began to question him – making clear he was under suspicion. Using the pretext of needing to go out to make a call, Goff left and never returned. In this way he ended his relationship with the RU. Eventually Larry and Betty publicly acknowledged they had been working as Bureau informants when testifying in front of Congress – amid much press – in October 1971.⁴⁴ All told, the Goffs had been active in the RU for less than two years.⁴⁵

CALLING THE COPS

There is with the Goffs one final incident involving Betty that not only points to her role as an informant, but to the presence and identity of the third informant in the San Jose RU.

Embedded in the San Jose RU file are two reports, one written on January 14, 1971 – the day after a particular incident – and one written on January 25 describing the same. Here is the first:

During the meeting it was noted that a robbery was taking place at the gasoline station across the street and DARRELL GROVER and [Name redacted by author] went to the aid of the proprietor and the robber took off at their approach. [Name redacted by author] was somewhat perturbed when GROVER asked her to call the police and didn't think she should do so but GROVER told her to call the police because this was a fellow worker getting ripped off.⁴⁶

The second report contains more on the content of the meeting, referring to Darrell Grover’s view on the Franklins: “DARRELL GROVER pointed out that even though the FRANKLINs were off the main political line they were still revolutionary and the RU should maintain contact with them, at least to some degree.” It then describes the robbery in a bit more detail:

[T]here was a strong-arm robbery at the Payless Gas Station across the street. A black man was trying to break in and rob the attendant at the station at knife point.⁴⁷

According to the report, Darrell Grover and another RU member went to help the gas station attendant, while another RU member phoned the police. As the two approached the station the man with the knife ran off. In turn they left as the police arrived and then returned to the group and discussed the incident.⁴⁸

In the aftermath of the incident the participants agreed that helping in this situation “was a good application of mass line,” specifically, “they were glad that the robber got away but that it was right to support the attendant since he is a worker and the RU should always support the workers over the lumpen [criminal] element.”

The two cadre most vocal in this discussion, according to the reports, were Betty Goff and Darrell Grover:

GROVER said it was right to call the police [sic] that it was their job to intervene. GOFF said that it was within mass line because the worker would have more confidence if he knew that the good communists had called the police.⁴⁹

The robbery, it should be noted, was significant enough that it appeared on page one in the San Jose Mercury News – though no mention is made of the RU men.

There are a couple of noteworthy things here. First, it is rather remarkable that a grouping of Revolutionary Union members would interrupt a secret meeting to call the police – and this appears to have happened at the insistence of Darrell Grover. The second is that the two reports, with their different perspectives and level of political sophistication, strongly suggest two sources. One of those would have been Betty Goff, a known FBI informant. Given the detail and perspective, the most likely source of the second report would be Darrell Grover.

WHO WAS DARRELL GROVER?

After Larry Goff left the RU and testified in front of Congress he was asked, “[w]ho personally recruited you into the Revolutionary Union?” His answer was, “I can’t mention his name at this time because he is not publicly known.”⁵⁰ This was a curious response given the whole point of his appearance was to name names, something he freely did in the rest of his testimony.

Who his recruiter might have been, while a matter of speculation, suggests someone associated with the RU during this period, that at the same time never appears in the later public record related to this group. The best match in this is Darrell Grover. Grover is not named in any of Goff’s testimony – which is especially odd given the Goffs attended meetings with him and knew him to be a leader in the RU. Grover also worked at China Books and Periodicals, a high-profile position in a group set on keeping a low-profile, yet his name is never mentioned publicly by the FBI or in public Congressional testimony. Grover’s name also never shows up in the non-public notes of the Congressional investigator tasked with researching the RU – though there is a reference to a secret informant they were allowed access to. Finally, Grover is not mentioned in the 255-page Congressional report, America’s Maoists, which aimed to publicly identify every known member of the RU and the Venceremos Organization – including printing pictures of those they had photos of. Who, then, was Darrell Grover?

Darrell Donnel Grover was born March 8, 1934, at Port Chicago, California (he died on January 16, 1988).⁵¹ We know that he was, at one point, a member of the Progressive Labor Party – and perhaps also had been in the CPUSA. Grover joined the RU early on, his name first appearing in an informant report dated September 11, 1968, which states that he was working in the RU San Francisco collective. It also noted that Grover “continues to lead the educational classes,” a point that comes up repeatedly in the reports tracking his tenure in the RU.⁵²

Grover was also the RU’s first treasurer, a detail that offers the first clue that he was also the likely RU inaugural informant. The very first report from the RU informant appeared on July 25, 1968. In it there is a list of twenty people thought to be RU members, but it does not contain Grover’s name. A second report from August 15, 1968 identifies the informant as the RU’s treasurer, stating, “Source himself acts as treasurer,” but that report also does not contain Grover’s name.⁵³ From September on, however, Grover’s name begins to appear in these reports. As a result we learn that on October 1, 1968 the San Francisco local has approximately $100 in its coffers and that “this money is kept in the bank account of the treasurer, DARRELL GROVER.”⁵⁴ That the source in one report is revealed as the treasurer, and the treasurer as the later report stipulates is Darrell Grover, appears to have been an oversight by those at the FBI charged with obscuring the informant’s identity, which would be an inadvertent exposure to be sure, but by no means the only one.

Grover appears to also have had a personal relationship with Henry Noyes, the ex-CPUSA member who started China Books and Periodicals and ran the store in San Francisco. That relationship is made clear in the following:

About two weeks ago NOYES asked source if he would like to go to China next year in connection with the upcoming 20th Anniversary celebration, indicating that he could make arrangements for such travel. Since NOYES is leaving town in September in connection with his annual cross-country selling trip, he asked DARRELL GROVER to help out in the shop on a part time basis while he is away, and GROVER agreed. NOYES did not indicate just how he could make arrangements for travel to China.⁵⁵

This report is remarkable not only in showing the relationship between Grover, the RU and China Books, but, in what appears to be a faux pas by the redacting team at the FBI, it refers to the “source” at the beginning and then proceeds to name Darrell Grover throughout. The implication – leaving aside the possibility of an extremely oblique construction of the report – is that the person being asked to fill in for Noyes is also the person being invited to travel to China, i.e. Darrell Grover. It was also reported at that time that Grover would begin working part-time in China Books and Periodicals.⁵⁶ And indeed by December reports indicate that Grover was working full-time and has been “excused from any activity in relation to the San Francisco State situation,” because he is “working late during the pre-Christmas season” – all of which suggests his part-time job had turned into a full-time one.⁵⁷ In other words the RU had one of their cadre working in China Books and if that cadre were an FBI informant, the Bureau also had someone working in China Books.

At some point Grover moved from San Francisco to San Jose, borne out in a report from January 1969 in which Bruce Franklin suggested that Grover move to the east San Jose area to work with a potential new recruit.⁵⁸ Grover was thus in San Jose at the time that Larry Goff – who would not disclose to Congress who recruited him – was brought him into the RU.

Meantime Grover continued his contributions in the political education of the group, giving a presentation on the Maoist conception of the Mass Line:

DARRELL GROVER gave an exposition of the true line as revealed in MAO’s tract on the experience in the anti-Japanese war wherein MAO indicates that one must work with any and all groups to whatever extent possible in order to defeat imperialism. BRUCE FRANKLIN was very impressed with GROVER’s explanation and commended him.⁵⁹

Here we learn of the sophistication and intelligence of Darrell Grover and his approval by a leading RU member. Were the informant describing one of their targets, this passage, while interesting, hardly seems relevant – and it is an anomaly for these type of reports. However, if the informant were speaking about himself, i.e. if Grover wanted to show his level of sophistication and approbation within the group to his FBI handlers, then including it in a report makes a good deal of sense.

ATTACKING THE PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY

All in all, Grover appears to have been seen as a capable and reliable comrade. By March 1969 he shows up as being on the group’s Executive Committee.⁶⁰ He also notably played a role in the debate on whether or not to publicly attack the Progressive Labor Party.

By 1969 the Progressive Labor Party was at once at the center of the radical movement in the United States, particularly in Students for a Democratic Society, and at the same time was taking positions against support of the Black Panther Party and the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, as well as moving toward denouncing MAO Zedong as a “revisionist.” It was this last position that created an opening for the formation of the Revolutionary Union – and if an informant report from one of the first RU meetings is to be believed – it was at least initially their raison d’être:

Leibel Bergman was vehement in his condemnation of PL and argued strongly that it is necessary to attack and destroy PL as being the party in the United States, which represents the Chinese Communist line.⁶¹

Bruce Franklin, while not the only one in opposition to this position, does seem to have been one of the last holdouts. As one report noted, “BRUCE FRANKLIN feels that the attack on PL is a sectarian matter and could only end up in a continuing polemic against the PL.” In this Grover played a role of swinging him over; “DARRELL GROVER lead [sic] a discussion on Progressive Labor,” and in that meeting he squared off against Bruce Franklin who was “defending PL on the grounds that he feels very strongly against the attack on PL.”⁶²

In the end, all of the RU united on targeting Progressive Labor with its inaugural publication, The Red Papers. Here the FBI was very much on top of the situation, not the least of which because of their agent in the RU. For example, they suggested that they “forward copies [of Red Papers] to one or several of the addresses listed in the PL publication,” with the aim of “additional disruption” – disruption being the operative phrase.⁶³

By June 1969 there was a schism in SDS, which involved an attempt to expel PLP from the group, with the result being that group’s destruction. To this day the entire matter of PLP’s expulsion from SDS is still discussed by those few still familiar with it as if everything was as it appeared; a highly doctrinal group that was alienating young radicals, needed to be confronted and isolated in order for true radicalism – or Marxism-Leninism (Maoism) to have purchase.

What has become clear in researching this work however – with the discovery of the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party and the Bureau’s moves to split apart groups based on doctrinal differences and the possibility that a former PLP member in the RU, who was also perhaps an FBI informant, was one of the people pushing for the attack on PLP – is that the controversy that swirled around Progressive Labor Party in the 1968-1969 period contains more than meets the eye.

TELLTALE SIGNS

The problem for the informant in the early RU is that he was very good and his reports were quite detailed. While those reports attempt to conceal the identity of the author there is so much information being accumulated and conveyed that it becomes highly difficult to fully obscure the identity of the source. It is also the case that the person writing the reports likely took solace in the fact that these were secret internal FBI reports not meant to see the light of day. In that respect we see Darrell Grover showing up in meetings where there is no mention of anyone else there but him and the person being reported on.

On 3/10/69, DARRELL GROVER met with LEIBEL BERGMAN at his home on 14th Street. The entire time was taken up with a discussion of BRUCE FRANKLIN's opposition to the paper attacking PL.⁶⁴

There appears here to be no one else in attendance. This points then to the informant being Grover – Bergman himself was subject to extraordinary Bureau attention and was certainly not the source.

Similarly, in another discussion on the Progressive Labor Party, we learn:

Grover led a discussion on Progressive Labor. BRUCE FRANKLIN defended PL on the grounds that he feels very strongly against the attack on PL. In a personal conversation the previous week, BRUCE FRANKLIN mentioned that [Name redacted by author] of San Diego is either close to PL or has just joined PL and that this is one of the reasons why he, himself, does not want to attack PL.⁶⁵

The statement that “Grover led a discussion” segueing to reference to a “personal conversation,” rather than “the informant had a personal conversation,” logically suggests Grover is the source of the information in this report.

Reinforcing this, a report a week later again references a one-onone meeting with Franklin:

DARRELL GROVER met again with BRUCE FRANKLIN on the evening of 3/13/69, at which time FRANKLIN said that the Peninsula Group had met on the evening of 3/12/69 and that the entire meeting was devoted to the attack on PL.⁶⁶

Again the most logical explanation – short of electronic surveillance, which the FBI would have stipulated as a “sensitive technique” – is that Grover is reporting on his meeting with Franklin.

Not only are there meetings where only two RU people seem to be present, there are instances where the reporter appears to be the only one present:

DARRELL GROVER visited RALPH [REDACTED] on September 14, 1969 at 3051 Market Street [in] which flat is reached by the middle door. There is a whole group of radicals living in the flat, including CONNIE, girlfriend of FRANK [REDACTED]. It is understood that [Ralph] and GROVER discussed Los Sieta and [Ralph] indicated that he will come down to San Jose to do some propaganda work for the Los Sieta. [Full names redacted by author]⁶⁷

Leaving the use of the passive voice aside (“it is understood that Ralph and Grover discussed”), reporting on the location of the apartment door would most likely be a matter between the informant/visitor and the door, and in that respect Grover was the visitor, not Ralph, i.e. Grover would be the most likely informant.

Even less ambiguous is this:

DARRELL GROVER also indicated that on September 14, 1969, he had visited at CHRIS MILTON’s place at 21st and Yorke. JOHN [REDACTED] and JAN [REDACTED] were at CHRIS’ place. JAN and [John] appeared to be overly-friendly as they were observed kissing in the kitchen. [Full names redacted by author]⁶⁸

Who else but Darrell Grover would have been in a position to “observe” the couple kissing and then be compelled to report it to the FBI?

LAURA LEI COLLINS

Laura Lei Collins had joined the RU early, but by 1971 was becoming disenchanted. In a report dated March 24, 1971, the Bureau reported on developments with Collins – drawing on information from an informant – that they felt might work to their advantage.

On 3/3/71, [REDACTED] reporting on the San Jose RU Workers Collective meeting of 2/28/71, advised that at that meeting LAURA COLLINS engaged in a long self-criticism. During her discussion COLLINS brought out deep personal problems and indicated that she had had a very unhappy background. Source advised that COLLINS appears to be really bored with the whole revolutionary bit and while she has a lot of hangups caused by her home life, she appears to be a stable, sincere and searching individual. [REDACTED] said the Collective desires that LAURA live in a more communal environment, however, she wants to live alone in order to find herself. Source stated that COLLINS definitely appears to be in over her head in the movement and during her self-criticism period indicated that she has very difficult time studying Marxism-Leninism.⁶⁹

The report – which is not interested in Collins’ situation from a compassionate standpoint – then gets down to business: “It is his [emphasis added] opinion that COLLINS might be open to an approach by the FBI.” The thinking being that, “detailed information will be obtained concerning membership and activities of San Jose RU.”⁷⁰ Laura Collins, it should be noted, was in the same collective as Darrell Grover. While it is possible this report came from Larry Goff, both he and Betty had left the RU by the time this report was submitted.⁷¹

The FBI took the report to heart and moved on the suggestion, approaching Collins multiple times, but was stymied when her response was consistent, in that “she had nothing to say.” In the end the Bureau assessed that “subject has not changed her position regarding contact by the FBI therefore, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted,” thus closing the matter. Collins passed away in 2008 so cannot offer her insights into this, but regardless the documents at hand outline a certain methodology – using an informant’s inside information to identify potential “weak links” to expand the Bureau’s informant base.⁷²

The final piece of evidence pointing to Grover as being the informant comes in the form of an injury. By the fall of 1970 Grover had been responsible for the San Jose “proficiency committee” – which according to the government involved preparing RU members “in the skills necessary for armed struggle.”⁷³ However, Grover was forced to relinquish that responsibility after an accident:

Due to the fact that DARRELL GROVER has had both hands burned in a fire in his apartment, [Name redacted by author] from the Workers Collective #1 will be helping GROVER on the Proficiency Committee.⁷⁴

In another report, this one documenting their informant supplying public leaflets to the Bureau, we learn the following:

Due to extensive burns on both hands [emphasis added] source was unable to locate attached among his effects prior to this time.⁷⁵

Much in the way the Bureau appear to out Grover over the matter of his being the RU treasurer, they seem to out him once again here.

WHO RECRUITED GROVER?

There are two names that come up again and again in reports that reference Darrell Grover and the informant on the RU’s Executive Committee – Special Agent Harrison P. Fox and Special Agent Bertram Worthington. In reviewing Worthington’s personnel file, released subsequent to a Freedom of Information request, a few details stand out.

One is an incentive award Worthington was given in early 1969 “for outstanding performance based on development of live informants.” According to the memo, Worthington, through a “sensitive technique” (FBI-speak usually indicating a wiretap, microphone, or break-in),

identified a contact [REDACTED]. He and SA [REDACTED] [SA Fox?] contacted this individual [REDACTED] overcame his reluctance to cooperate and convinced him in spite of his fear for his life to furnish information on a continuing basis. Through expert direction this individual is now approved as [REDACTED].⁷⁶

Along with his skill in developing informants, Worthington was also given the rating of “fair to good” by the Bureau for his foreign-language abilities in Toishan, Chinese and Cantonese, Chinese.⁷⁷ While the record is not conclusive enough to say whether Worthington recruited Grover, the dates of his commendation, the secrecy in which the informant was handled, and the Chinese interests do line up. That, along with the fact that Worthington was the informant’s handler throughout the time he was reporting to the FBI, suggest he recruited Grover.

GROVER’S EXIT

It is unclear the exact date that Darrell Grover stopped working with the RU, though reports mentioning him obtained for this book end after January 27, 1971.⁷⁸ Meanwhile Larry and Betty Sue Goff left the RU in the early spring of 1971 and by October of that year were testifying in front of Congress about their informant activities. That testimony in turn was incorporated into the 1972 report issued by the House Internal Security Committee titled America’s Maoists: The Revolutionary Union/The Venceremos Organization. The Chief Counsel for that Committee was Donald J. Sanders, and his chief investigator was Robert M. Horner. Amid Sanders’ papers is a letter about the RU investigation from Horner to Sanders. In it Horner writes, “I was informed officially on August 17 [1972] that a former high level informant in the RU will be made available to us.” The meeting, however, was subject to conditions:

1.  The informant will definitely not testify personally because of fear for his public safety.

2. The interview must be conducted in the presence of the Government agent who handled him;

3. The informant will be introduced to our investigator under an alias and will not be furnished [sic] his true name;

4. The report of the interview will be made available to the Government agency and the informant for review and the deletion of any sensitive material before we use it.⁷⁹

Was the informant they were invited to meet Darrell Grover? The secrecy stipulated and description of the person having been a former high-level informant seems to fit.

There is more information to be found in Grover’s FBI file, currently held by the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). According to NARA, “Grover was active in various front groups and was associated with student elements at the University of California, Berkeley prior to joining the Revolutionary Union.” As we have shown, he was also a member of the Progressive Labor Party before joining the RU. His file is estimated at around one-thousand pages and was compiled “as part of a security investigation conducted by the FBI between June 1961 and March 1972.”⁸⁰ Once that file is released, certain things may become clearer.

CHAPTER FIVE

DON WRIGHT’S RISE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY UNION

Wright spoke on military strategy … he criticized Avakian as a revisionist because Avakian maintains that the proletariat is not prepared for armed struggle.

— FBI report, 1971¹

For whatever reasons, DH [Wright] did decide to become a part of the RU, and in fact after a certain while he became a leader within the RU.

— Bob Avakian²

Don Wright presented himself as a Black Marxist-Leninist. He was said to have been in the Black Panther Party and had been part of a radical faction of the Communist Party before becoming a committed Maoist.³ Some of those who got to know him said that his background was in the US military, where he worked in intelligence – an odd fit for a Black revolutionary. As to his CP ties, they appear to be in the Ad Hoc Committee, hardly adding to a solid Maoist pedigree. While there are many mysteries about Don Wright, one thing is clear – he was not what he appeared to be on the surface. Just what he was, is a knot to disentangle.

Donald Herbert Wright was born in Illinois on September 3, 1938. To those who met him in the early Seventies, he claimed to have been a member of the Black Panther Party, presumably in Chicago. He also said he had some type of ties to the Communist Party USA. No evidence has yet been found for either. While evidence of his association with the CP proper is lacking, there is evidence that he was part of – or claimed to have been part of – a “super-secret” faction allegedly operating within the CPUSA. According to Bob Avakian, Wright came to the RU through Leibel Bergman:

From back before Leibel had left the Communist Party in the late ‘50s, he had known this guy, DH. Within the CP some sort of caucus, or a sort of semi-secret group, had formed that was supposed to be more radical than the CP itself. And this guy DH [Wright] had been part of this grouping in a loose sense, even while he had also been part of the Chicago area Panthers for a while. DH’s father had been in the CP, and Leibel had known his father, and, so when we went to Chicago, DH was one of the people we met with.⁴

Avakian’s description of the group, though anecdotal and vague, sounds like the Ad Hoc Committee. That Avakian says Wright was part of it “in a loose sense” suggests Wright himself had been sketchy about his ties to the group, leaving the ability to check up on his story to yield similar vague results.

By all accounts Don Wright was a Black nationalist with contempt for white radicals. Why he sought a home in the Revolutionary Union ought to have raised bigger questions for the group than it did, but the group convinced itself they could accommodate him; or in Bob Avakian’s case felt they could, through political discourse, disabuse him of him of certain notions:

I remember DH saying, ‘Well, no white person can tell me that they know more than I do about the Black experience and what it means to be Black in the US – or even that they know as much about it as I do.’ This was directed at me.⁵

In response Avakian argued, “Well if you’re talking about perceptual knowledge, I agree; if you’re talking about conceptual knowledge, I don’t agree.” At which point he describes that “the temperature in the room went down about twenty-five degrees.”⁶ This was just one disagreement between Avakian and Wright, who appear to have had a contentious relationship that worsened over time.

Bob Avakian says Don Wright joined during the RU’s national tour in the summer of 1970, which corresponds to the RU’s Maywood FBI file – the area in Chicago where Wright was based. That file begins in September 1970,⁷ which means that Don Wright joined the RU just before a crucial struggle broke out over the matter of political violence centered around Bruce Franklin and his supporters.⁸

That dispute over armed struggle led to the group’s main base in the Bay Area bifurcating in December 1970. The same issues were, however, debated in the RU’s emerging Midwest collectives and it was there that Wright would plant his feet firmly in two places; defending the desirability of political violence while at the same time signing on to the Revolutionary Union’s position of strategic patience. In spite of such a contradiction, Wright would soon rise in the organization’s ranks.

TAKING SIDES

While the Franklin struggle had split the RU in the Bay Area, cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans, which had recently aligned with the RU, were still in play. Because of this, both sides of the debate sent representatives to these areas in an effort to rally people to their sides after the formal split occurred.

First came Bruce Franklin, who visited Chicago on December 15 to hold meetings with the RU cadre. There is an extensive FBI report on this meeting that shows that a Bureau informant attended the meeting and reported back:

FRANKLIN said a definite split had occurred in RU last weekend. He said he pulled out of RU. He said his position was a minority one on Political Committee (PC) [a smaller body selected by the Central Committee] of RU. The source said that FRANKLIN is definitely starting a new organization although it is only in the projection stage at this point.⁹

According to the informant, “FRANKLIN is for armed struggle now. He wants to place the gun before politics.” Along with this he had serious differences with the rest of the RU:

He castigated other PC [Political Committee] members, specifically AVAKIAN and [Barry] GREENBERG for merely debating the issues.

Surveillance Photo of Bob Avakian & Barry Greenberg, 1969

Credit: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Internal Security, America's Maoists - The Revolutionary Union, The Venceremos Organization.

He criticized BOB AVAKIAN who held a press conference after a recent FBI raid on his collective in search of a fugitive. FRANKLIN said AVAKIAN disavowed Weatherman tactics and said he did not support the violent acts of Weatherman. FRANKLIN said AVAKIAN's reaction typified his non-struggle attitudes.¹⁰

The report also outlined other matters at issue such as “The National Question,” with Franklin arguing that “Blacks and other third world peoples are fighting US imperialism and this is the main world contradiction” and that the “Black Panther Party (BPP) is the main vanguard in this fight.” According to the informant, Franklin is “‘heavily into the BPP’ and claims to have a great deal of support from the BPP.”¹¹ All in all, the report – to the degree one accepts the informant’s interpretation – gives a front-row seat to Bruce Franklin trying to swing folks in Chicago around to his way of thinking and what that thinking actually was.Not to leave all the initiative to Bruce Franklin; Bob Avakian and Mary Lou Greenberg landed in Chicago three days later to argue their case. The two held a four-hour meeting with the Chicago RU collective members, with the informant again submitting a report to the FBI:

[I]t is obvious that a real RU split has occurred. AVAKIAN and GREENBERG indicated that FRANKLIN's forces in the San Francisco Bay Area might number 100 which they claim is a minority of RU. AVAKIAN and GREENBERG accused FRANKLIN of plotting to quit the RU for the last six months. They accuse FRANKLIN of ‘Weathermanism’ of acting childishly by his toying with guns and of hurling epithets at them.¹²

The informant’s view was that “the RU split is basically and essentially over personal animosity” that was “shrouded in a revolutionary façade based on a difference line.” The report goes on to outline the key differences, isolating issues around armed struggle, democratic centralism, and the national and woman questions. The informant “predicted that in about a month’s time the victor, if such there will be, in the RU split will become known.”¹³ All of which was true. Meantime the matter of which way people in the Midwest would go was yet to be decided.

THE FBI’S SOURCE AT THE MIDwEST MEETING

In the aftermath of these meetings the Midwest collective set about adopting their own position on the debate that had split the RU. The Midwest collectives would ultimately align with the RU’s position, but only after a series of meetings locally and with the RU’s Central Committee.

The process of the Midwest coming to terms with the RU position is fully documented, and despite redactions, reveals much about the informant’s identity. For example, the following is of the informant’s travel plans to the RU regional meeting in advance of a national RU meeting:

Source leaving a.m., 1/29/71, in 1970 blue Ford Fairlane, 2 door, bearing 1970 Colorado plates [Author redaction]. Expects to arrive about 2:00 p.m. Source anticipates real RU meeting not to start until Saturday, 1/30/71, in a.m. He will be accompanied by personal friend, GERRY LYLES, black male, aged 30, 2/12”, medium build, full beard and goatee.¹⁴

That the informant gave the Bureau very specific documentation of his travel plans in advance offers clues to his identity. For example, the first thing of note here is that Don Wright and his family were from Colorado, which might explain the Colorado license plates. More telling, however, is his travel partner, Gerry Lyles.

In his memoir, Bob Avakian recalls a good deal about Don Wright, though he obscures his identity by referring to him only by his nickname, DH. Writing in 2005, Avakian is obviously looking back at Wright warily, though he presents that the political content of Wright’s behavior is the most consequential thing about him. Regardless, one anecdote stands out. In it he describes an incident in which Wright and two of his friends came to his apartment in Chicago for a night of drinking. In Avakian’s recollection he said the aim was to “get me drunk to see what would come out of me,” because Wright “liked to probe for people’s weaknesses.” The two friends Avakian identifies are someone nicknamed “Home Before Dark” and “this guy Jerry who’d been in the Panthers.”¹⁵ It seems reasonable to infer that “Jerry” and Gerry Lyles are the same person.

That taken into account, beyond the travel plans, there is a followup memo that offers further clues as to who the informant is. The memo, in order to protect the source’s identity, stipulates that the missive would be “datelined Washington DC to protect the security of the source, an Ad Hoc informant.” The memo is in turn classified “Secret” because, “if divulged, could expose a highly sensitive Bureau run intelligence Operation.”¹⁶ It also dutifully lists the attendees at the bottom of the cover sheet with their Bureau file numbers so they could be filed appropriately. There is, however, one name redacted from that list, under the Chicago members. At the same time the memo itself lists all the attendees; the one name in the memo not listed at the bottom is Don Wright.¹⁷

BEFORE THE CENTRAl COMMITTEE MEETING

After the regional meeting the Midwest sent an emissary to the Bay Area to put forward their position and prepare for a full Central Committee meeting. Part of his responsibility in making the trip was to

insist that the next RU Central Committee meeting be held at a Midwest location. According to the source, Midwestern RU people strongly feel that RU’s having been dominated by San Francisco Bay area people has loosened the organization’s effectiveness and contributed to a parochialism and narrowness. This parochialism is manifest in RU's viewing California as a microcosm of the entire United States which is an idea emphatically rejected by the Midwestern RU delegates.¹⁸

This appears to have been the first step in an effort that would ultimately lead to the RU relocating their leadership core to Chicago – a move that held a myriad number of negative consequences.

While the Midwest representative (also the source) was in the Bay Area, they did something to suggest their identity when they visited China Books and Periodicals to talk to “Mrs. Noyes” – a reference likely to Henry Noyes’ wife, Henry Noyes being the person who ran China Books in San Francisco. The informant then reported, “She asked about the work of the Ad Hoc Committee in Chicago and inquired after the health of the old Russian gentleman [REDACTED].”¹⁹ Who exactly the “old Russian gentleman” is, is not clear, but that Noyes did not name him is consistent with the aura of security built around the AHC, as well as a clue as to their being actual person(s) operating as representative(s) of the AHC. That Noyes had this conversation with the person from the Midwest, who would have been familiar with the AHC, suggests that it was Don Wright – himself a purported AHC alumni – that she talked to. If that is not enough, the report contains one last bit of information: “[REDACTED] returned via Denver, where he had personal business to attend.”²⁰ Denver, as has been noted, was where Wright’s family lived.

CENTRAl COMMITTEE MEETING, MARCH 1971

As a result of the work of the Midwest emissary/informant, the Revolutionary Union did in fact hold its next National Central Committee meeting in Chicago. The informant also managed to get the following included in the plans for the meeting: “With reluctance the GREENBERGs and AVAKIAN agreed that criticism of the RU leadership would be allowed if specific charges were brought up.”

Further, the informant got Avakian and the Greenbergs to agree to the regions represented at the meeting selecting their own delegates, and that the regions would have equal voting power (seven votes each for the West Coast, East Coast, and Midwest, with one vote each for Southern California and the Northwest, though those regions do not appear to have sent representatives). Lastly, the informant was able to get agreement that regional leaders would not be the automatic delegates – an essential point as Wright was not the top leader in Chicago.²¹

Along with delegates from the Bay Area, the meeting included cadre from Detroit and Eastern Pennsylvania, and newly recruited cadre who had emerged from a collective in Antioch, Ohio. The meeting was wide-ranging and contentious and despite the Bureau’s best efforts at obscuring their informant’s identity, the narrative is revelatory:

Then [REDACTED] spoke on the national question. He said nowhere is there class unity in America. For example, though blacks and white work together in a plant that does not mean they have a proletarian unity. Blacks have a higher class consciousness because they have been disbarred from unions in the past. Blacks are doubly oppressed in the community and the work place. [REDACTED] posited the main contradiction is between American imperialism and its internal colonies thus making the national question primary.²²

All redactions aside, this certainly sounds like someone inclined toward Black nationalism – a nationalism Don Wright would come to invoke in more and more destructive ways.

Turning to the matter of military struggle, there was a discussion centered on the position paper on the military question prepared by the Midwest – Wright had given that report at the regional meeting but was not slotted to present on that subject at the Central Committee meeting. However, according to the Bureau report, because one of the Midwestern people had to leave early, it fell to “the source” to explain their position. That source sounds very much like Don Wright. In doing so he put forward a position quite similar to that of Bruce Franklin, to the point that other attendees asked for clarification:

They wanted the source to explain the difference between the Midwest and FRANKLIN. The source said that FRANKLIN calls for urban protracted guerrilla war to achieve revolution, however, he has no methods for carrying this out. FRANKLIN calls for guerrillas now. How are they to be recruited, motivated, trained, developed? FRANKLIN says armed struggle exists in the US now. The source disagreed. FRANKLIN’s attitude is ‘off the pig.’ This, the source said accomplishes nothing but alienation.²³

Wright’s name does not appear in the narrative of the report, though the other attendees appear to be freely referenced. Further Wright’s name does not appear in the routing section on the cover memo, but there is a single redaction under the Chicago members – the FBI again points to Wright as being their informant.

This becomes amplified as “the source” explains in fairly sophisticated military terms that before effectively initiating protracted urban guerrilla war certain prior conditions were needed to be in place: “an underground apparatus which engages in agitprop, infiltration of enemy and rival organizations, intelligence and security cells, escape and evasion nets, building of a logistical system, and mass organizations.” That the source chose to make a point on “infiltration” is certainly ironic. Regardless, the other attendees were largely unconvinced that the argument was all that different from the one made by those that had recently left the RU; “[m]ost of the delegates could see little difference between the Midwest position and that of Bruce Franklin.”²⁴ If indeed Don Wright’s background was military intelligence, as some have reported, this would help explain the technical sophistication of the presentation.²⁵

The meeting then heard from both the informant and Leibel Bergman on the League for Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit and New York – an organization that would figure prominently in a later crisis to grip the RU.

[REDACTED] gave a report on the League of Black Revolutionary Workers. He described their history, work practice and methods as used in Detroit and told how they were trying to organize in Chicago. BERGMAN gave a report on the League in New York City saying that it was an all black group with a small number of cadre who are not yet ready to develop into a mass organization. BERGMAN indicated he knew some of the League people in New York City and praised the organization's methods and obviously looked to it as an up and coming organization.²⁶

Elements of the League – including those that became the International Black Worker Congress after a split in 1971 – would become a key group in the RU’s effort to form a multinational Party. That the informant had ties there from the very beginning was a portent of things to come.

It is noteworthy in this meeting that along with the informant’s problematic position on armed struggle there appears to also have been a fair amount of tension revolving around the West Coast leadership in general and Bob Avakian in particular. Bill Hinton, the China expert and author of Fanshen, having recently joined the RU, criticized Bob Avakian for “big shottism” after himself having been criticized by Avakian. Another comrade complained that Avakian was arrogant and “delivered ‘3 years speeches.’”²⁷ Avakian’s response is revelatory especially to the acrimony between himself and the informant:

When AVAKIAN’s turn for self-criticism came he said, “I don’t want to speak.” Delegates demanded he do. He said he had been guilty of too much ego. He stated that ‘even though [REDACTED] thinks I am full of ___, I do not consider myself the Lenin of America.’²⁸

The report recalls that two months earlier the source had been in the Bay Area and that “AVAKIAN received [REDACTED] with some hostility and [REDACTED] argued with AVAKIAN about his pontificating and accused AVAKIAN of considering himself the ‘LENIN of America.’”²⁹ As noted earlier, the Midwest representative in this case was likely Don Wright.

Beyond this the Midwest delegation, with the informant in the lead, had some rather sharp criticism of the state of the RU, including how it handled the Franklin matter; five of the delegates criticized the leadership for allowing the split. They also criticized it for:

[B]eing located too far away and thus out of touch. [REDACTED] complimented the leadership for ‘winning the paper war’ saying he had never seen ‘such a paper happy outfit in his life.’ He said the delegation did not view BRUCE FRANKLIN as some mad Machiavellian upon whose shoulders all blame rests.³⁰

The redaction – given other names are not omitted – is likely the source. Perhaps to soften things, and keep a place for himself in the existing group, it says, “[REDACTED] complimented the leadership for attempting to mend their arrogant and bureaucratic ways and for allowing some change and flexibility in their positions.”³¹

While this version is the account of an informant, events described in that report line up well with another account – though not referred to directly as such – by Bob Avakian in his memoir:

As the struggle with the Franklins had come to a head, we had a meeting with a broader grouping of people in the RU from different parts of the country. Most of them hadn’t really been deeply involved in this struggle and a number of them tended to adopt the same kind of attitude ‘Oh, this is just a big ego trip, and you should criticize yourself for splitting the organization.’³²

Avakian goes on to say that in the end they were able to convince people that there were fundamental political issues at stake with real consequences.³³ On the surface his argument appears sound, but he minimizes the “personality conflicts” which we now know were undergirded by the presence of an FBI informant exerting considerable power. Things were far more fraught than Avakian appreciated.

This is especially noteworthy given that there was not just one FBI informant reporting on this Central Committee meeting, but two, as can be seen in a memo contained in Leibel Bergman’s file from the FBIs Newark office – Bergman was living in Newark at the time:

A source who has furnished reliable information in the past, advised that in mid-March of 1971 twenty-five RU members from across the country met in Chicago at the National Central Committee (NCC) meeting … A debate developed, according to a second source who has furnished reliable information in the past, over the question of military struggle. Members of the Midwest Delegation criticized the theories of [REDACTED].³⁴

The memo goes on to highlight events at the meeting alternating between the two sources. While Don Wright appears to be one of the sources, the identity of the second is unclear. The reporting of two informants on such an important meeting underscores that the FBI’s success in penetrating the RU was not limited to one highly placed person – but others. How many and to what extent is unclear – though evidence suggests there were no more than a few at lesser leading levels – the complete picture awaits further disclosure.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the National Central Committee elected a National Interim Committee, a standing committee consisting of nine members that was to meet before the next Central Committee meeting. In theory this was a temporary grouping subordinate to the National Central Committee, but in reality it was a grouping that met more frequently. The Midwest representatives included two women, one from Detroit, the other from Chicago, who are both named. The other Chicago representative – presumably, as we will see below, Don Wright – is not named. Instead they are identified only by their FBI informant code: CG 7262-S.³⁵

MOVING RU HEADQUARTERS TO THE HOME OF THE AD HOC COMMITTEE

People in the Midwest, with the informant playing a role, pushed to get the RU to relocate its leadership to the Chicago area. This was a point made during the Central Committee meeting and it had also been made during the Midwest “emissary” visit to the Bay Area. The push would soon reap results, with the RU relocating its headquarters to Chicago.

A sense of the difficulty for those leaving the Bay Area, specifically Leibel Bergman, Bob Avakian, Barry and Mary Lou Greenberg, can be seen in an anecdote from Avakian. In his memoir Avakian recounts his arrival in Chicago. He tells of showing up at Don Wright’s apartment sometime in the evening, but Wright, who seemed to be home with the lights on, did not open his door. He writes, “DH let me wander around in the streets in this kind of frankly desperate situation for hours [because] he had a woman with him and didn’t want to be bothered letting me in.”³⁶ That might be what happened and most likely is what Wright told Avakian, but given everything we know about him the explanation needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless, the story is exemplary of the relative isolation of Avakian and the other leaders who had moved to a place far from where their family, friends, and long-standing political ties were located.

The bigger problem for the RU leadership was the level of disruption to the organization as result of moving their best people from an area in which they were strongest to one where they had only a tentative foothold. The results were not good:

The San Francisco/Bay Area RU, which was the original RU organization, has been the largest and best organized of the RU Regions until the past year and is now racked with disorganization, lack of purpose and some hostility toward the national leadership. The Chicago Area RU which is relatively new, having been organized July, 1972, has been a most notable disappointment to the Secretariat.³⁷

The report did note one area that was doing well: “New York/Philadelphia RU Region, recently consolidated under [REDACTED] of New York, is the only bright spot among RU’s organizational endeavors.”³⁸ The redaction is likely reference to Michael “Mickey” Jarvis, the key leader in the New York area, who would eventually occupy a leading seat on the RU’s secretariat and become vicechairman of the later Revolutionary Communist Party.

Not only was the move disruptive for the RU’s emerging organization, it had the problematic consequence of putting them squarely in the heart of the Bureau’s most advanced counterintelligence division. It was Chicago where the FBI’s most successful operations against the Communist Party were headquartered; Operation Solo was centered in Chicago. It was also home base for Herbert K. Stallings, the FBI agent who had designed and implemented the anti-CPUSA Ad Hoc Committee program. Chicago was also the home office of SA John McCaffrey.³⁹

JOHN WILEY MCCAFFREY

In his 2014 obituary, former Special Agent John McCaffrey is the picture of a contented retiree, a man in his senior years with a pleasant smile and an approachable disposition; the obituary pointed out that he was “a proud volunteer at the National Gallery of Art and National Air and Space Museum.”⁴⁰ The write-up, which mentions only in brief his twenty-three-year stint with the FBI, belies the work McCaffrey undertook in his prime.

Agent McCaffrey, by all indications, was the FBI handler for the Bureau’s main Chicago informant – whom abundant evidence points to having been Don Wright. For example, McCaffrey’s name appears prominently in one synopsis of the March 1971 Central Committee meeting: “[REDACTED] [the informant] attended the NCC [National Central Committee] and related the comments herein to SA JOHN W. MCCAFFREY on 3/16/71.”⁴¹

McCaffrey’s personnel file is heavily redacted. As a result, there are no jaw-dropping revelations, but there is evidence that reinforces what is already suspected. For example, McCaffrey’s file has two letters of commendation from J. Edgar Hoover and one from Hoover’s successor Clarence Kelly. Hoover’s letter of May 1971 deals with his success in recruiting and managing an important informant:

It is a pleasure to commend you for your adroit and effective handling of an important source of information to the FBI in the security field. I know you utilized aggressiveness, tact and patience in contacting this individual in order that the best possible results could be achieved.⁴²

The wording suggests that McCaffrey had the type of disposition that could work well with a fairly volatile personality.

There is also another bit in McCaffrey’s file that points to Don Wright. One heavily redacted page, for example, reads, “this informant was utilized in several efforts,” and continues noting that the Bureau was made aware “not only by the Denver office but by SA MCCAFFREY in Chicago.” The mention of the Denver office is relevant insofar as Wright’s roots were in that city.⁴³

The remainder of the file concerns McCaffrey’s time in the Chicago office – he would be reassigned to a headquarters-training unit in March 1973 because of his expertise in counterintelligence.⁴⁴ One entry notes that “our informant under the direction of SA MCCAFFREY will be in a position to effect unique counterintelligence achievements.”⁴⁵ Another describes McCaffrey’s work on “a highly complex and sensitive counter-intelligence operation” that involved “handling of multiple informants.” The assignment was such that McCaffrey needed to “keep abreast of changing international and domestic situation on a continuing basis. Much study concerning these matters has been done by him on his own time.”⁴⁶ Significantly, as a result of that assignment he was exempted from usual Bureau rules. “In view of the special nature of this sensitive counterintelligence program he does not handle cases which after a period of investigation are then closed.”⁴⁷

One other salient fact to be garnered from McCaffrey’s file is that he and Herbert K. Stallings – the inventor of the Ad Hoc Committee – are repeatedly listed together in reports.⁴⁸ Not only are they linked in McCaffrey’s personnel file, but they also show up in a report from one of the rare Leibel Bergman files released. That particular report stipulates that the information was “furnished by SAs John W. McCaffrey and Herbert K. Stallings on 5/4/70.”⁴⁹ The subject head of the memo is “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, USA,” and it is a report of a meeting between Leibel Bergman and two informants who met with him in the Bay Area. According to the report Bergman gave the couple a detailed briefing on the state of the RU, how big it was at that point (one-hundred-and-twenty people), how many copies of the Red Papers had been distributed, and how the group was expanding into places like Waukegan, Illinois, Carbondale, Illinois and Antioch, Ohio.⁵⁰ In other words, the Ad Hoc Committee charade was being used against Bergman directly in 1970 and the two agents who were on top of the situation were Stallings and McCaffrey.

There is one other detail in McCaffrey’s file that makes a connection to the wider Chicago counterintelligence program. McCaffrey’s supervisor in Chicago was SA James A. Fox. Agent Fox had been put in charge of supervising the highly important Operation SOLO and its key informant Morris Childs in 1971.⁵¹ In other words, the Chicago Field Office was responsible for Operation Solo and the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, and had substantial responsibility for the infiltration of the Revolutionary Union, and as we have seen these initiatives had a fair amount of interpenetration. Fortuitously for them – or perhaps by design – the national RU leadership was now headquartered in Chicago.

THE INFORMANT VISITS CHINA

Even with the dissension and squabbles with Bob Avakian and others in RU leadership, Don Wright, “for whatever reason,” in Avakian’s view, found himself firmly within the ranks of the RU’s leading cadre. Consistent with his leadership role, when the group sent a delegation to China in the fall of 1971, a few months before Nixon’s February 1972 visit, Wright was part of that delegation.

The Bureau, aware of the planned RU trip, was interested in information on a woman named Susan Frank who was doing work with the US China Friendship Association in New York. As a result, the FBI again appears to tip its hand as to who their informant was:

LEIBEL BERGMAN, AKA; IS-RU disclosed CG___S planned to accompany BERGMAN to mainland China in September 1971. It is likely source, upon travel to China, will meet subject thereat [sic] and, if not acquainted, become sufficiently acquainted with her and have some knowledge of her activities while in China and perhaps be able to furnish some indication of subject’s mission on the mainland.⁵²

In Bureau parlance, an informant code is determined by the initials corresponding to the FBI field office, a number, and then and “S” for security informant. Given that, CG ____ S indicates a Chicago Security informant, with the actual number omitted. As described above, when the FBI reported on the RU’s newly constituted National Interim Committee the Chicago representative is listed only as CG 7262-S, so that would be the likely code from the key Chicago informant.

Further, as to what the identity of the person might be, there were three RU cadre who went to China from Chicago: Bob Avakian, Mary Lou Greenberg and Don Wright. There has never been evidence that Greenberg or Avakian were informants and both continue to be active with the RCP. That leaves only Wright.

GROWING UNITY – TIGHTER ORGANIZATION

The Revolutionary Union in 1972 remained an organization on the rise. Not only was it expanding nationally, by mid-1972 it was establishing closer ties with like-minded organizations in key areas of the country. Among them was the Young Lords Party – which had transformed from its gang-based origins in Chicago into a political organization that was embracing Marxist-Leninism. By 1972 the FBI was reporting that YLP had “established close ties with the Revolutionary Union and the I Wor Kuen – an Asian, Maoist-inclined formation active in New York’s Chinatown.”⁵³ Relations between the RU and the YLP were such that when the YLP held its first and (only) Party Congress in June 1972, security for the event was provided by YLP cadre along with members of the RU and I Wor Kuen.⁵⁴ Additionally, Bob Avakian gave a speech at the Party Congress, which resulted in the Young Lords becoming the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization.⁵⁵ All in all the prospects of further unity among the groups looked good.

Don Wright, Bob Avakian, Mary Lou Greenberg and unidentified Chinese man in China, Fall 1971

At the same time the RU was tightening up its organization. A good deal of study, discussion and attention was given to the Marxist-Leninist concept of democratic-centralism, particularly the need for a strong central leadership. In a meeting in mid-September 1972, the National Interim Committee – a grouping with considerable initiative that met more frequently than its Central Committee – codified their decision, which had created a secretariat, a group of four people tasked with running the day-to-day operations of the group. The secretariat, based in Chicago, constituted the group’s most influential leaders. It included the veteran leaders from the Bay Area, Bob Avakian, Barry Greenberg, and Mary Lou Greenberg. The fourth member was Don Wright.⁵⁶

CHAPTER SIX

THE FBI’S REPRESENTATIVE ON THE NATIONAL LIAISON COMMITTEE

Let’s not make it more complicated by adding the factor of myself, as a white communist, being the RU representative. Let’s let DH [Wright] represent the RU and put forward our line.

— Bob Avakian, 2005¹

In order to capitalize on [REDACTED] being black, he was given primary responsibility of “liaison with other revolutionary organizations” at the insistence of [REDACTED].

— FBI informant report, September 1973²

By 1973 most of the better-known groups that held appeal in the radical movement had been battered, diminished, and/or destroyed. The Black Panther Party had called their remaining adherents nationwide to relocate to Oakland where they would concentrate on reformist and electoral politics.³ The Weatherman, fully underground, had dwindled to a few dozen members.⁴ As for the Progressive Labor Party, their stand at the end of the Sixties against the Black Panther Party and the National Liberation Front had reduced it to a small, if hardcore, group of adherents.

By contrast the Revolutionary Union, with its relatively sophisticated political and organizational model – and affiliation with China – was expanding nationwide, joining individuals and collectives around its Maoist banner. While the radical movement as a whole was ebbing, it was an ebb that still counted many thousands who had become politically active in the previous decade, one with a revolutionary edge that stood as a stark rebuke to the staid, slow-moving Communist Party USA. There was the potential, it seemed – regardless of how illusory it stands in hindsight – for a new revolutionary party to develop in the United States. In this respect, the RU was the critical force in cohering the disparate organizations and individuals – including many African-American, Latin, and Asian activists – into a single multi-national communist party. It was a time for the RU when everything seemed to be before it. However, at the core of their top leadership was someone who had an agenda that aimed to pull things in another direction entirely.

COMRADE ORGANIZATIONS

In the latter part of 1972 the RU joined in what they referred to as a “liaison” relationship with three other groups. The objective was to initiate joint work to lay the basis for a new multi-national communist Party. At that moment the RU was far and away the largest group and growing.⁵ The other groups the RU sought to join with were smaller in number and geographical footprint, but were distinguished by their concentration of “Third World” revolutionaries, i.e. the International Black Workers Congress, the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (formerly the Young Lords Party), and I Wor Kuen.

INTERNATIONAL BlACK WORKERS CONGRESS

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, in their famous ten-point program, starts with the declaration that “We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community”; it was a demand firmly situated within the outlook of Black nationalism.⁶ In contrast the International Black Workers Congress was inclined more toward a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary political program. Point one of the their program makes this clear: “Workers’ control of the means of work and production, transportation services and communication facilities so that the exploitation of labor will cease...”⁷ The FBI in turn took note, routinely describing the group as one looking to “further the revolutionary struggle in the US and other parts of the world,” albeit one with a more revolutionary nationalist tilt, i.e. looking to join together “many existing organizations, and to build unity among the revolutionary Third World Forces.”⁸

The International Black Workers Congress grew out of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), which was formed in 1969 in Detroit. The League had incubated out of actions by Black autoworkers in Detroit. As a way of expanding nationally, the League in turn created the International Black Workers Congress (IBWC or BWC), with James Forman, the former leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, as its driving force.⁹ As the group went forward it more and more confronted internal conflicts, which by the middle of 1971 lead the IBWC to split from the League and establish itself as a separate organization.¹⁰

At its peak the IBWC appears to have never surpassed fourhundred members, if that – the number of attendees at its founding convention in the fall of 1971 – and it appears to have been shrinking from its inception.¹¹ By September 1972, when the group sponsored a “Black Freedom Convention,” the number of attendees was down to 369, a number that included representatives from sixty different organizations, i.e. not all were part of BWC.¹²

While the group’s successes were remarkable, not the least of which was the realization of a group of “class-conscious” black workers emerging from the Sixties tumult, there is unfortunately another legacy to the LRBW/IBWC. This was an entity that throughout its brief history was wracked by internal dissension and division, leading to multiple splits. In that respect, by 1972, its worst days lay in front of it. It was against this backdrop that the group entered into a liaison relationship with the RU, with the complicating factor of the FBI being fully enmeshed in the process.

YOUNG LORDS PARTY / PUERTO RICAN REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS ORGANIZATION

By the early 1970s the Young Lords Party that had evolved out of the street gang the Young Lords Organization in Chicago had transformed into a new communist entity called the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization. The group was especially influential as it developed in New York with ties to and a certain influence among the Puerto Rican community more broadly. This was based on activity they took against proposed layoffs and cutbacks in services at a city hospital and the takeover of a church in Spanish Harlem which they turned into a community center for services such as free breakfast and health programs, education, and an introduction to the outlook of the YLP.¹³ In this they also boldly raised the matter of independence for Puerto Rico from domination by the United States.¹⁴

For a short period of time this led to a huge increase in membership. How large is a matter of speculation. According to an anecdotal assessment by former Minister of Education, Pablo Guzman, “I tallied our New York members at the end of 1970, and we had grown to more than a thousand, with storefront offices in El Barrio, the Lower East Side, and the South Bronx. We had branches in Newark-Hoboken, Bridgeport, Philadelphia and Puerto Rico.”¹⁵

While the Chicago Young Lords had their roots as a street gang, the Young Lords Party in New York did not. The group’s leadership core in New York was composed largely of students from places such as SUNY Old Westbury and Columbia University.¹⁶ As Guzman remarked, “To this day people think the New York group was a gang because of that name, we never were, and except for Felipe Luciano [one of the few New Yorkers who had been in a gang],” Guzman adds, with some humor, “we walked lightly around the Chicago boys.” In fact, by 1970 the Lords group in New York split from Chicago, “because we felt they hadn’t overcome being a gang.”¹⁷

The Young Lords Party’s rise – like many groups from that era – was as rapid as was its decline. By the early Seventies they were already shrinking, and as the mid-Seventies approached the group dwindled to perhaps a hundred members. It had by then become the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO), changing its name at a Party convention held in July 1972. The newly renamed organization was wracked by internal divisions, which would later assume extreme expressions. Still, in the early Seventies they had a radical prestige, resolve, and cohesion that made them an important force in the larger movement.

There was, however, one other problematic element that imposed itself on the group. In 1973, Gloria Fontanez, the leader of PRRWO’s nine-person Central Committee, married the Revolutionary Union’s Don Wright.¹⁸

I WOR KUEN & RICHARD AOKI

The fourth organization in the National Liaison Committee was a group of Asian-American radicals called I Wor Kuen, meaning “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” named after the peasant rebels of the Boxer Rebellion.¹⁹ The group that would be involved with the National Liaison Committee came about as a merger of the Red Guards in San Francisco and I Wor Kuen in New York’s Chinatown. IWK was modeling itself after the Black Panther Party and as a result undertook various community service projects as a way of expanding its influence.²⁰ The group in New York focused its worked in Chinatown doing draft counseling and anti-tuberculosis health care work, and supported the Peoples Republic of China.²¹

As for the West Coast Red Guards, the Bureau had an abundance of intelligence on them through their long-time informant Richard Aoki. Aoki’s Bureau file is replete with references to Alex Hing, a leader of the Red Guards. Hing was apparently on such good terms with Aoki that he invited him to visit North Korea in 1970, an invitation Aoki declined.²²

Aoki also was keeping the Bureau apprised of connections between Asian-American activists on the two coasts. One entry in his file from February 1970, citing information from the San Francisco informant SF 2496-R (Aoki), reported that a New York activist had “contacted RICHARD Aoki member of the Asian-American Political Alliance; and ALEX HING, Minister of Education and Information for the Red Guard.” The reason for reaching out is that they wanted Hing to come New York in order “to form a liaison between Asian-American activist groups on the east and west coasts.”²³ This does appear to be what happened, with the eventual merger between the Red Guards and I Wor Kuen.

Despite the merger, the Red Guards come across as a tiny organization. A 1969 a report set them at fifteen members; another report from 1971 noted that they “did not have a store front and [were] comprised of only a handful of members.”

As for IWK in New York, Aoki was reporting on them as well. The cover sheet of a July 1971 report identifies informant T-5 as being SF 2469-R (again, Aoki), and offers the following:

The I WOR KUEN is the equivalent of the Red Guard in the New York City area and consists of left-wing survivors of the Asian-American Political Alliance. Membership is estimated to be approximately twelve to fifteen individuals who are principally US citizens of Chinese ancestry.²⁴

Whatever the relative strength of the group – or lack thereof – the fact that Alex Hing and other contacts of Richard Aoki’s were being reported on to the FBI gave the Bureau an advantage in regard to their actions, though the full scope of how they leveraged this is unclear.

THE NLC

The actual membership of the NLC was a closely held secret, with none of the principal groups revealing who the representatives were. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts to shroud this information in secrecy, the FBI knew very well who comprised that grouping:

The NLC was established in mid-1972 at the insistence of LEIBEL BERGMAN, and had a representative from RU [REDACTED], PRRWO (GLORIA FONTANEZ), IBWC (MIKE HAMLIN and later DAN BROWN) and IWK (CAROLYN WONG). IWK withdrew from the NLC during the summer of 1973.²⁵

The simplest explanation for their knowing things so precisely would be because they had an informant assigned to that grouping. Given the redaction in the above description, that informant likely would have been the RU representative, which as we will see was Don Wright.

DON WRIGHT ON THE NATIONAL LIAISON COMMITTEE

By early 1973 Don Wright had managed to push his way into a leading position in the RU in a way that appears neither genteel nor comradely. According to Bureau documents the process in fact had a disruptive effect inside the RU leadership.

Wright’s opening came from the fact that he was a Black man in a situation in which the RU, an overwhelmingly white organization, was trying to fuse with “Third World” revolutionaries. This was something the Bureau – via their informant – was keenly aware of. As they reported, “[REDACTED] felt that a black in the RU leadership body would enhance RU’s influence with blacks and other minorities.”²⁶ As we will see, the name redacted is likely that of Bob Avakian, who wanted Wright in that position.

Wright’s ascent in turn appears to have been accomplished by pushing Leibel Bergman out of the RU’s leading core; a situation that seems to have not sat well with Bergman. This can be seen in the following from the FBI: “The inclusion of an ‘outsider’ in the highest leadership body of RU was not looked upon kindly by [REDACTED] who felt this lofty position was rightly theirs alone.”²⁷ The redaction here likely refers to Bergman. Another report describes how “Leibel Bergman was sulking because he did not play a larger role. His ideas were also defeated on several occasions.”²⁸ The level of detail, and the tone, is illuminating and highly suggestive that it came from the person who would have replaced Bergman, again Don Wright.

Things did not stop there, as can be seen below – and here we take the liberty of filling in the most logical redacted blanks:

In order to capitalize on [REDACTED] [Wright] being black, he was given the primary responsibility of liaison with other revolutionary organizations at the insistence of [REDACTED] [Avakian] … responsibility for such liaison had been the task of [REDACTED] [Bergman] in the past and he was very disturbed when replaced by [REDACTED] [Wright]. This caused a basic dislike of [REDACTED] [Wright] which has continued to the present time.²⁹

Bob Avakian in his memoir makes the process of identifying the redactions simpler. In discussing who to have as the RU representative on the NLC, he writes, “Let’s let DH represent the RU and put forward our line.” He does not describe Bergman’s reaction, but explains that “Leibel, interestingly enough, was opposed to this.”³⁰

Even with Avakian’s support of Wright there was wariness. As the informant reported, “Both [REDACTED] [Bergman?] and [REDACTED] [Avakian?] were also concerned that if [REDACTED] [Wright] was particularly successful” in his interactions with other revolutionary organizations, he might in turn build his own power base and “become a threat to their leadership and influence.”³¹ In other words, Avakian and others in the top leadership, at least in the informant and FBI’s view, were worried about Wright’s ambitions – and this comes out in later internal RU bulletins, corroborating the FBI version.³² All of which suggests a potentially volatile situation, which indeed it was.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE NEVER-ENDING CAMPAIGN AGAINST JAMES FORMAN

Peking, July 23 (HSINHUA) – Chang Chun-chiao, member of the political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, this evening met with James Forman, leader, and Muhammad Kenyatta and Mrs. Helen Jones, members, of the delegation of the Black Workers Congress from the United States and had a cordial conversation with them.

— Hsinhua (Official Chinese Press Agency) Report, July 1971¹

Subject is a Key Black Extremist who once held a leadership position in the violence-prone Student national [sic] Coordinating Committee. He now resides in New York City and is involved in organizing blacks in the labor movement. To this end he has recently traveled abroad and met with foreign communist leaders.

— FBI Report, August 17, 1971²

There was an odd moment during the testimony of Gerald Kirk – the FBI Communist Party informant – when he appeared before Congress in 1970. Kirk was recounting what he learned when he attended the National Conference of New Politics held on Labor Day weekend in 1967, when the following exchange occurred:

Mr. Norpel
Would you continue on then with what happened in the convention, as you recall it?

Mr. Kirk:
Well, there were several speeches amply covered by all the press. The one speech that struck me was by James Forman, who had been an informant – off the record please.

Senator Thurmond:
(Discussion Off the record.)³
Off the Record

This was an astonishing comment, stating that James Forman, a widely known and respected activist, was some type of informant. It was highly provocative to say the least, yet it remained unexplained, in the public record. Whether Kirk was giving voice to rumor, had been deliberately fed or was feeding misinformation, or was simply confused, is a matter for speculation. His statement however, was not an outlier. It fits a pattern of the government’s efforts aimed at Forman that carried through to his interactions with the RU and Don Wright.

James Rufus Forman was an internationally famous African-American activist whose notoriety came from his work with the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and that organization’s efforts against the white-supremacist power structure in the South in the early 1960s – Forman himself had been the group’s Executive Secretary in the critical years of 1964-1966. He was also for a short while aligned with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPPSD), but by the early 1970s his radicalism had transformed toward an exploration of Maoism and communism, and in this regard he was instrumental in the creation of the International Black Workers Congress.

Given all this, he was deemed by the FBI to be a “Key Black Extremist.” Just what that meant can be seen in a 1968 memo scolding the New York Bureau office when they temporarily lost track of Forman:

The Bureau recognizes the fact that there will be instances when subject will travel without your sources knowing of his plans in advance. However, the goal of your intensified investigation and coverage of Forman should be to place sources close enough to him to ensure that you will constantly be apprised of his contacts, activities and travel plans.⁴

As the FBI explained, “[S]ubject is a key black extremist and is to be afforded coverage pursuant to this status”; in other words, Forman was not to be let out of their sight.⁵

As part of this they aggressively monitored, and apparently intervened, in Forman’s relationship with the Black Panther Party. Specifically they seem to have had a hand in a highly influential article in the New York Times in the fall of 1968:

Members of the Black Panthers walked into James Forman’s office at the committee on Fifth Avenue in late July, according to Federal Authorities. One of them produced a pistol and put it into Mr. Forman’s mouth. He squeezed the trigger three times.⁶

The article went on to say that Forman suffered from a “nervous stomach” and was “so upset” after the incident that he had to go on vacation. This would be the basis for a standing myth on why Forman parted company from the BPP.⁷

What is interesting is that the FBI reports on Forman from the time of this incident offer a different, more ambiguous picture. The reports on Forman, who was under non-stop FBI surveillance, suggest heated, even threatening meetings between Forman and the Panthers, but nothing like the Times version. Here is the chronology:

On July 19, 1968, JAMES FORMAN, together with a person believed to be ELDRIDGE CLEAVER of the BPP, were observed arriving at SNCC Headquarters, 100 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, by Special Agent (SAS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).⁸

Two days later it is reported:

JAMES FORMAN announced July 22, 1968, that he was resigning from BPP and severing all association with that group.⁹

And finally, there is an account that seems compiled based on an informant report:

On or about July 23, 1968, JAMES FORMAN, while at SNCC Headquarters, was confronted by a number of BPP members. The members and FORMAN disagreed and they decided to split up. One BPP member became quite angry and tried to attack FORMAN, but he was restrained. Later, FORMAN advised that some BPP members had ‘jammed’ him in an elevator the previous day. There has been a definite split between FORMAN of SNCC and the BPP.¹⁰

The last version suggests some type of confrontation, but not the “gun in the mouth” story reported in the Times. That version does show up in a later FBI account, but it is based on a third-person account.¹¹ Forman himself claimed that the Times account was false. However he also writes, “There had been serious differences between SNCC and the Panthers, some nearly involving gunplay” – hardly putting the matter to rest.¹²

Missing in all of these tellings and later analysis are the Bureau’s actual aims against Forman. Specifically, based on the incident at the SNCC office, the Bureau had made plans to approach Forman to become an informant:

FORMAN will be interviewed in accordance with existing instructions relating to interviews of subjects of Bureau investigations. It is noted that FORMAN is subject of Bufile 100-443566. If this individual is cooperative, Bureau authority will he requested for recontact relative to directing his activities.¹³

The basis for their approach was Forman’s fear of the Black Panthers:

The NYO desires to interview FORMAN at this time because of the great pressure being placed on him as the leader of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee by members of the Black Panther Party For Self Defense. The BPPSD members are currently in NY attempting, to force a merger of the both groups. Reliable sources have reported that FORMAN is intimidated by the BPPSD and is in fear of his life because of their behavior and attitude. Reliable sources state that FORMAN has recently resigned his position as Foreign Minister of the BPPSD to insure the merger does not occur and to insure his personal safety through disassociation with BPPSD members.¹⁴

There was however, a wild card. As dedicated as Forman was to the cause of social justice and later to revolutionary Marxism, he did this as he battled emotional problems – which forced him to seek psychiatric help at times, including admission to a psychiatric institution. Forman himself was quite upfront about this; his memoir opens with a riveting and disturbing story of his time as a freshman at the University of Southern California. One evening, exiting the library, he was approached by a Los Angeles Police cruiser and accused of being a “robbery suspect.” In short order he was taken into custody, beaten, and interrogated in an effort to get him to confess to something he had no association to whatsoever. In the wake of the rage and humiliation of that incident Forman describes how “my nerves snapped and those bright white lights [during the interrogation] seared my mind asunder.” In other words, he appears to have had what was called at the time a nervous breakdown.¹⁵

The Bureau appears to have been aware of Forman’s health problems. Specifically, in the wake of the fallout with the Panthers, they knew Forman had problems to the point where he was admitted to Gracie Square Hospital in Manhattan – a psychiatric hospital.¹⁶ As a result the Bureau assessed they needed to put the idea of approaching him to be an informant on hold.

In view of the above the NYO does not plan to attempt interview of FORMAN as requested in reNYlet [Recent New York Letter]. Reevaluation of FORMAN's condition will be secured, his position and influence in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee determined and the possibility of his complete neutralization in the Black Nationalist Movement will be weighed in view of recent developments and prior to again requesting Bureau authority to interview subject.¹⁷

It is noteworthy that “neutralization” in this context meant the target was no longer politically viable. That aside, the reports the Bureau was getting on Forman’s condition appear to have been quite detailed:

Forman continues his irrational behavior pattern. His speech contains unusual references to cats and he believes that law enforcement agents had wired a cat for sound in Oakland, California during his visit there this past summer in connect with Black Panther Party Business. Currently he exhibits fear of cats.¹⁸

The memo then concludes that because he appeared to be leaving SNCC and because of his “erratic behavior” it was their feeling that “Forman’s effectiveness has been neutralized.” Further, they write that, “His development as a source could add nothing not currently available” through two other sources – whose names were redacted.¹⁹

Unfortunately for the Bureau that was not the end of James Forman, who rebounded and by the beginning of the 1970s was active in the League of Revolutionary Workers and an offshoot organization, the International Black Workers Congress. As a result, he again shows up in the FBI files as “a key black extremist” who “is to be afforded coverage pursuant to his status.”²⁰ This in turn led to renewed efforts to neutralize him.

While the Bureau by then appear to have abandoned efforts to “flip” Forman, they do report trying another tack, suggesting falsely that Forman was already working with government authorities. They did this in the form of drafting a letter indicating Forman was working for the City of New York as a consultant helping quell rebellious activity among Black people. The letter – which was to be written on City of New York stationery with handwriting at the bottom signed by “A black brother,” who worked for the City – was to read in part:

He has provided on a continuing and regular basis current analysis of what might be described as potentially explosive situations in various geographical agreasg [sic] of the City and within certain groups familiar to him … His assistance in term of control of potentially troublesome elements has been invaluable in our estimation.²¹

The idea was to circulate the letter in advance of the August 1971 meeting of the International Black Workers Congress, though the Bureau later said it should be sent afterward.

It is unclear if that letter was sent, but its construction, along with the earlier proposal of turning Forman into an informant – internal FBI memos on Forman in the Summer of 1968 actually contain the subject line “Probationary Racial Informant” – and the slip of the tongue by Gerald Kirk in front of Congress (and the world), all point to a concerted effort to undermine Forman’s effectiveness by attempting to turn him into an informant, or failing that, fraudulently claiming he was already working as one.

THE EXPULSION OF JAMES FORMAN

Given all that, James Forman’s relationship with the Revolutionary Union and Don Wright is something that cannot be understood solely on the basis of surface interactions. This is especially true in Forman’s unceremonious expulsion in 1973 from the group he was instrumental in forming, the Black Workers Congress – an event which took place in the midst of the work of the National Liaison Committee.²²

Forman was kicked out of the IBWC in April 1973, when national chairman Mike Hamlin and other Central Committee members of that group moved against him, issuing a forty-three-page paper in which they claimed that Forman was guilty of substituting “petty bourgeois ideology for proletarian ideology.”²³ They also claimed Forman had “opportunistically destroyed the League [League of Revolutionary Black Workers] doing the work of the bourgeoisie” – the last point being a matter of political criminality, rather than just hubris and incompetence.²⁴ To what degree the IBWC’s grievances with Forman were political, personal, or something else, remains shrouded in a great deal of mystery. Similarly, what role the RU, through desire or manipulation, had in Forman’s expulsion is also enmeshed in confusion.

With the RU, Forman and the group seemed at the start to have gotten on well. He even wrote from time to time for the RU’s paper in Detroit, Peoples Voice. Also, Forman, who was dividing his time between New York and Detroit, met regularly with someone who appears to be Leibel Bergman. An FBI report describes how the two “were eager to meet with the other,” holding long political discussions with each “trying to obtain information from or influence the other, with neither being successful” – a description that also offers insight into why Bergman would have been annoyed at Don Wright taking over the larger liaison with the IBWC, something that had largely been his responsibility.²⁵

That aside, one issue the RU leadership had with Forman was the matter of what role the October League and forces around the Guardian newspaper – which was playing a major role in giving voice to the New Communist Movement – would have in a new Party. According to FBI reports – and they were based on their highly placed informant – Forman was less inclined toward the RU’s position that had evolved against aligning with OL.

[D]ifferences developed when “leading forces” in the RU attempted to isolate the OL [October League] and individuals associated with “The Guardian” from the “core” of the proposed new Communist Party. Forman apparently was unsuccessful in his contention that the OL and “The Guardian” should be included in any effort to form the nuclei of a new Communist Party.²⁶

In other words, Forman wanted the October League and Guardian included at the core of a merger, but the RU did not.

Of course, there is a matter of how the Bureau knew Forman’s position. In this case it was because they had obtained, from one of their informants, a twenty-seven-page letter written by him, challenging his expulsion. In this they were keen for feedback on any impact of the letter, with a particular focus:

[R]ecipients should question appropriate informants and sources knowledgeable of the IBWC and the RU to determine their knowledge of the internal dispute within the IBWC based upon the activities of ‘leading forces’ in the RU. Any information relating to past, present or future IBWC plans to consolidate or merge with the OL or the RU should be developed.²⁷

The Bureau’s concern about those groups merging needs to be understood in the context of what we know to be an emphasis they had in that period. As their informant, who later went public with his mission, James Burton explained:

The major purpose of my assignment from 1972 to 1974 was to develop a position of contact and trust within other left-wing political groups in this country, to prevent their cooperative action, specifically the merger of the Revolutionary Union (RU) and the October League (OL).²⁸

The FBI’s interest in Forman’s post-IBWC expulsion letter, especially in regard to the marginalizing of the October League and the Guardian from the NLC process, is highly intriguing given the FBI’s apparent interest in halting any merger between RU and OL.

The irony is, if Forman’s letter is to be believed, the FBI and the RU by that time had shared objectives:

[REDACTED] has long wanted to dominate IBWC and include them, as a subordinate, in the new ‘party.’ FORMAN did not agree with many RU policies and was very much against any alliance with RU, which would make IBWC subject to the dictates of RU. This situation led to [REDACTED] whom FORMAN described as ‘leading national forces in RU’ involving himself with some of the lesser leaders of IBWC to bring about the ouster of FORMAN.²⁹

While it is not clear exactly who is being talked about, the most logical person would be Leibel Bergman – who had a longstanding relationship with the IBWC in New York where Forman was based. Given the report notes that the “tactic used to bring about the expulsion of FORMAN” was not known, but that “the source doubts … influence was strong enough to bring about FORMAN’s demise on his own,” this suggests it was not Don Wright; had it been him he likely would have known how Forman was forced out.

Regardless, what seems to be the case – at least in the FBI report – is that the Revolutionary Union was happy with Forman’s expulsion. As the Bureau wrote, “[the] leading national force” (the Revolutionary Union person) and “his protégé [REDACTED] are known to have been particularly elated at FORMAN’s expulsion as they believed that RU could then move in and exert its influence in and eventually dominate IBWC.”³⁰

Beyond the possible RU leadership satisfaction with this outcome, for the FBI, Forman’s expulsion would seem something they would have celebrated. A fuller understanding of this episode – and the convoluted aims and agendas of the numerous and disparate forces – awaits further clarifying evidence. It was however the case that James Forman, who had been a key force in the IBWC and its efforts to extend its influence, was no longer a player on the scene.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE WRECKING OF THE NATIONAL LIAISON COMMITTEE

Wright has also played an extremely negative role especially in recent months in harming relations between our organization and the other “liaison” organizations. The fact is that in the past few months, relations between ourselves and these other organizations have deteriorated considerably … there has been a “campaign” on the part of al [sic] least some of the leadership of the other two organizations to brand our organization as “racist” and “national chauvinist.”

— “On the indefinite suspension of DH Wright,” Revolutionary Union, Fall 1973¹

You are requested to promptly submit full details to specific activities and charges which resulted in the suspension of Wright … Based on available information, FBIHQ believes Wright must respond promptly to the RU action.

— Director FBI to Chicago FBI, December 1973²

IWK LEAVES THE NLC

James Forman’s exit taken into account, the NLC was facing other challenges. In that respect, I Wor Kuen, which had always been the weakest force within the NLC, dropped out of the formation midway through its life. The RU/RCP later offered that their leaving was a result of resistance to going among the working class, “especially the industrial proletariat, and their constant retreat to work exclusively in Chinatown – and not much of that, to be frank.”³ For their part IWK claimed the RU was using the NLC “to strengthen the RU’s forces while trying to split, factionalize, and smash the organizations in the NLC if they would not accept the RU as the ‘center’” – a critique that echoes Forman’s.⁴ While the entire matter remains murky, certain information is now available in the released IWK FBI file.

Specifically, in late 1972 the RU was navigating a dispute with IWK over recruitment, with IWK accusing the RU of “stealing” its members. That controversy occurred at a point when the RU had good relations with IWK; however, the RU also exercised considerable influence over another group of Asian-American radicals, Wei Min She, and this appears to have been a point of contention:

Members of IWK were very critical of RU for stealing some of their members. IWK accused the RU of controlling an organization called Wei Min Chih [sic] of San Francisco by having 15 secret RU members secretly doing the RU's bidding while ostensibly carrying out the Wei Min Chih line. RU leaders heatedly denied that RU members did control such an organization.⁵

What the specific complaint was and how things were proceeding is unclear. The FBI file does however describe an attempt to smooth things over. To do this the RU sent a leading member for a visit to the Bay Area. That representative, however, needed FBI approval to make the trip. In other words, it was their informant:

Authority granted [REDACTED] to travel to San Francisco for approximately ten days commencing October seventeen next so he as [REDACTED] may mediate internal problems within I Wor Kuen. Informant may be advanced two hundred dollars for expenses of this travel.⁶

The trip was in fact carried out and two informants confirmed as such to the Bureau. The first is described below:

A source, who has provided reliable information in the past, advised on November 2, 1972, that the Revolutionary Union (RU) National Office sent a representative from Chicago Illinois, to San Francisco, California, during the period between October 18 and November 1.⁷

The other informant was described a few lines later, “A second reliable source identified [REDACTED] a member of the RU National Office Secretariat.” The FBI had only one person on the RU secretariat – a group comprised of Bob Avakian, Barry Greenberg, Mary Lou Greenberg, and Don Wright, and all evidence points to that informant being Don Wright.⁸ Given everything we know of Wright’s subsequent behavior in the NLC, he was likely the worst choice to try and keep IWK in the fold. Saying that, what ultimately led to IWK leaving is not at all clear – what is, is that they left the NLC.⁹

While things with IWK lead to a break, relations between the remaining groups seemed to be intact. At a meeting between the RU and PRRWO held in May 1973, the Bureau reported that the “consensus of those participating was that at some future date, PRRWO would merge into the yet to be formed Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.”¹⁰ In this was the caveat that “forming of such a party is not now deemed possible or warranted.” The reason being both PRRWO and the RU felt there was a need to first “organize the masses and raise the political consciousness of the working class.” The problem they would soon confront, however, was that the October League (OL) – who they no longer held any prospect of joining with to be in such a party – “strictly adheres to the position of the Chinese Communists, which advocates the forming of the Party ‘now.’”¹¹ This would light a fire under the RU.

THE RACE TO FORM A PARTY

By the fall of 1973, the chances of a wider merger of the various elements of the New Communist Movement were at an end. IWK had discontinued “its relations with RU.” Meanwhile the October League, despite the RU’s “numerous overtures,” had not responded to the RU contacts about discussing a merger between the two groups.¹² The RU’s relations with OL in the few years that group existed had gone from bad, to better, to bad again in rapid order – something the FBI was both aware of, and had likely played a role in. In this way, rather than the situation being one of a merger of all, it transformed into one of competition to see who wouldget there first.

According to information the informant was supplying, OL’s plans included possibly merging with I Wor Kuen and “remnants of the International Black Workers Congress (IBWC) currently located on the West Coast, and the organization being formed around the Guardian newspaper in New York.” In this telling “OL is expected to announce the formation of their ‘Party’ in early 1974.”¹³ The RU, intent on heading them off, proceeded apace with its own plans. All in all, given the FBI’s operating imperative, this must have been a welcome development.

The RU’s newfound urgency toward Party-building, at least from FBI reports, was because the prospect of not doing so soon would risk their losing the Chinese franchise. At one point the Bureau reported that certain RU leaders “fear the emergence of the OL and feel that if OL is first to announce the formation of the party, RU will lose some of its clout with the CHICOMs.¹⁴ In a more fleshed out report – one that puts forward certain assumptions about the RU getting finances from China that are not elaborated on – they write:

During the Trip [sic] in April 1973, to the Peoples Republic of China [REDACTED], one of the primary purposes was to obtain financial support for RU from the PRC. This financial support was not forthcoming and it was felt by the RU leadership at that time, that among the reasons for the Chicoms to withhold financial support was that they were concerned that RU had not taken any positive action with regard to building the new Communist Party (ML) and indicated they were in support of the October League’s (OL) position calling for building the party.¹⁵

China was indeed intent in that period on having organized forces that represented their position. A sense of their strategy comes through via an account by the FBI’s man in the CPUSA, Morris Childs. Childs described how his close contact in the Soviet Union, the Secretariat member Boris Ponomarev, characterized the Chinese strategy as the Sino-Soviet schism was unfolding:

The Chinese Communist Party has its strategic plan to split all the communist parties and establish communist parties under its leadership. They seek to split off from five to ten people and then call them a Party. Already we have examples of this in Brazil, Chile, Belgium, Switzerland and other countries.¹⁶

Don Wright, Leibel Bergman, and William Hinton meet Zhou Enlai in China, Fall 1971

By the mid-Seventies relations between the Chinese and the Soviets had degenerated badly and the Chinese were attempting to build a worldwide-united front against the country they felt was “the main danger” to the people of the world – not the least of those people being the people of China – the Soviet Union. This would ultimately be an issue that led the RU to lose their Chinese franchise, but in the early Seventies they very much wanted to maintain it – and ceding to the pressure from the Chinese to form a party made sense.

As a result, the RU felt they needed to, and could, go forward in merging with the PRRWO, the remainder of the IBWC, “and some 50 loose collectives throughout the US,”¹⁷ which could include the collective in Tampa (Red Star Cadre) and a collective in Louisiana (not further identified but likely the Red Collective). The last two groupings were significant in that they were entities made up wholly of FBI informants – the Red Star Cadre being a James Burton concoction, and the one in Louisiana being the base of Jill and Gi Schafer.¹⁸

It should be noted that with the Tampa group the RU appears to have had their suspicions. A letter in the Bureau’s “Red Star Cadre” file to their informant Joe Burton from “Jane” in the RU in Atlanta states their decision not to work with Burton, given there is not enough political unity “between our 2 organization to warrant continued contact.” The reason given, suggesting the RU was not really comfortable with Burton, was his “uncritical attitude” about something he did “at Westinghouse.” It also noted that he seemed “more interested in relating stories” about an October League member” – something consistent with Burton’s FBI task of heading off unity between RU and OL.¹⁹

Regardless, the RU estimated it would take six months to a year to “lay the necessary groundwork before they could announce the formation of the Party.” With this, as the informant noted, it would constitute

a radical departure from its previous position that now is not the time to form the party, a position espoused in Red Papers, their national newspaper ‘Revolution,’ and during a debate with OL leader MIKE KLONSKY at recent forums sponsored by the Guardian newspaper in New York.²⁰

The RU nonetheless felt they could pivot with minimum disruption. Part of this was based on their overall numerical strength as the FBI – using their informant’s information – reported: “[REDACTED] RU [REDACTED] estimates OL’s national membership at approximately 150 members while RU claims approximately 700 members nationally.”²¹ As things developed, laying the “groundwork” and the shift in their position regarding Party-building was the least of their problems.

DON WRIGHT IN NEW YORK

As the RU pushed ahead, Don Wright spoke publicly for the RU on the need for a new party. One particular FBI memo contained a cover sheet dutifully noting, “During the period between 5/18 and 5/22 DONALD H. WRIGHT [REDACTED], Illinois was in New York City. Wright had been in New York to speak on the ‘National Question’ at a forum in New York on May 12, 1973.” That same memo fails to list Don Wright at the bottom of the report where it itemizes which files to send the report to; instead there is a redacted space.²² In other words the Bureau – as in other cases cited in this work – dutifully redacted the name of their informant from the bottom of the memo to obscure his identity – but failed to redact Wright’s name from the body of the memo points to his being that informant.

That noted, as the summer of 1973 turned to fall, efforts to merge the core groups of the National Liaison Committee into a single entity seemed to be proceeding apace. There was a sense among those in the know – and only a select number of cadre in the affected organizations were aware of the NLC – that things were moving solidly ahead, or as an RU bulletin noted, there was a “growing ideological unity in the liaison committee.”²³ Leibel Bergman was particularly optimistic, as notes of a later interview testified, things reaching the point to where the “Liaison committee made and approved a Party unity motion.”²⁴ Events would soon show this to be naive optimism. Working in the background was a deliberate effort to undermine the existing unity by inserting divisive power and racial politics. The key in all this was Don Wright.

WRIGHT, THE RU & THE AHC

Clear signs of trouble showed up in the summer in a meeting with some of the group’s Black cadre, a meeting held ostensibly to get a bead on the feeling among the Black RU members. The meeting, not surprisingly, was led by Don Wright, who used it to put forward his own position, and then, according to the RU, bring that position back to the other RU leaders as the thinking of the Black members. Wright presented this in the form of a report, writing, among other things, that those cadre who work best with white RU cadre “have the least ties with the mainstream of Black people.” He also argued that “The development of Black struggle is concretely advanced under Black leadership,” and that “the Black M/L organization will be the vanguard of the Black working class; but Black cadre in a Multinational org. must also be part and parcel of the class struggle within the Black nation together with Black formations.”²⁵ Stripping off the rhetoric, this was a call for the need of a separate organization for Black communists, or at the very least having all of the RU’s Black cadre under his command; not a unique position within elements of the New Communist Movement, but a notion antithetical to what the Revolutionary Union was actually trying to do at the moment. It was a clue to the fraught position Wright was actually putting forward in the NLC.

Wright’s position not surprisingly meshed with that of his apparent alumni in the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party. In September 1973 the AHC submitted a short letter to the Guardian in which they weighed in – unsolicited – on the matter of Party-building. Like Wright they too talked about the difficulties for Black communists working in a largely white organization. They wrote that their “practice” in Chicago showed that “politically advanced comrades,” whether Black or white, are able to work together well organizationally, but that “at the rank-and-file level parallel structures are necessary.” In other words, “Blacks must work with Blacks, Latins with Latins, whites with whites.” The letter goes on to declare “That Black people are in the revolutionary vanguard” and that “Black nationalism, if guided by proletarian ideology, will contribute greatly to the struggles of all peoples.” The letter concludes by opposing the formation of a new communist party at the moment.

Flier for Guardian newspaper for 1973 “Party Building” forum

Credit: FBI Michael Jarvis File

[T]he time for building a multinational party has not yet come. Since Blacks are more advanced politically than whites (as are Latins, American Indians, etc.), the amalgamation of all groups in one party would result in fragmentation, disunity and the rapid dissolution of such a party. Racism is still so strong as to separate all but the most revolutionary of comrades.²⁶

At the time of this letter the “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party” had ostensibly been in existence for ten years, without any evidence of moves to form the party suggested by their name, nor were they organizationally part of any of the moves in this period – something that ought to have been a red flag for the New Communist Movement; where was the AHC in these Party-building efforts? It is also the case that this “group” – through its Ad Hoc Bulletins – had a track record of putting forward an array of contradictory positions, albeit written with a high degree of political sophistication, on the matter of Black people of the United States (see Chapter Three). Their absence of political principal, of course, was undergirded by the fact that they were an FBI initiative. Put another way, whatever they wrote needed to be understood from the standpoint of what would advance the aims of the FBI, not what would advance the New Communist Movement. That their position and Don Wright’s were the same would seem to be the most important consistent thing about them.

Whether or not the AHC developed an organizational coterie beyond the FBI’s machinations and the role that may have played, is a matter for further discovery – though the efforts of “Herb” show clearly the “AHC” was recruiting people they thought to be genuine communists. Regardless, the extreme secrecy on the AHC’s part makes it nearly impossible to establish what this might have been, short of former adherents coming forward or the release of the thousands of pages of FBI files. Saying that, what any such genuine members thought they honestly contributed to the revolutionary cause under such circumstances would seem to be beside the point. The FBI had established an elegant stealth vehicle for undermining the Communist Party and its Maoist counterparts and all the evidence points to it having done its job well.

UNRAVELING

Despite everything, as late as September 16, 1973, Party-building efforts appeared to be on track to the point where a celebratory party was thrown to launch the newspaper, The New York Worker. In attendance were Don Wright, Bob Avakian, the New York RU leader Mickey Jarvis, and the PRRWO’s leader Gloria Fontanez. Fontanez in fact took the opportunity to proclaim that “The line of RU and PRRWO was one.”²⁷

Sometime between late September and October, however, things changed. It was at that point that the Bureau abruptly reported that “[REDACTED] has been ousted from his responsibility for liaison with other revolutionary organization and has been replaced by [REDACTED].”²⁸ It is nearly impossible to read this any other way than that Don Wright was replaced in his position, most likely by Leibel Bergman. Obviously some type of crisis had occurred and Wright’s tenure on the NLC was brought to an unceremonious end.

Clues as to what had happened can be seen in a Bureau report which outlines the RU’s worries about Wright. Specifically – and we supply in the second bracket the logical name – “[REDACTED] [Wright] was severely criticized at the RU meeting on 10/6-7/3” for “holding back the rest of the NLC”:

1. [REDACTED] [Wright’s] close association and influence with other revolutionary organizations developed while [REDACTED] [he] was responsible for liaison with those groups.

2.  During August 1973 [REDACTED] [Wright] held meetings with other [REDACTED] [Black] members of RU from throughout the US

3. They fear [REDACTED] [Wright’s marriage to Fontanez] of the PRRWO was a move to solidify [REDACTED] [his] position with their strongest ally in forming the new Party.²⁹

In other words: Wright’s position as the RU’s NLC representative, his conduct in the Black Cadre meeting, and his marriage to Gloria Fontanez were all issues of criticism. All in all, the RU appears pointedly wary of Wright’s actions, to the point that they saw him building his own power base.

While Wright was removed as the RU NLC representative, he appears to have continued in his position for a brief time in RU leadership.

At the same time the RU attempted damage control, calling a meeting in early November with the PRRWO and the IBWC. It was in those meetings that the damage Wright had wrought became obvious. The meetings, taking place over two days, included four high-level members of the RU, including Don Wright, as well as two representatives each from the International Black Workers Congress and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization. During the meetings the RU representatives argued their case, saying they were ready to “go ahead with plans to form the party if the PRRWO and IBWC would agree to join with RU in that effort.” Rather than agreeing the response was that “PRRWO and IBWC do not believe the time is right and indicated they would not join a party now.” The RU appear to have been blindsided, the FBI pointedly reporting that “they thought the two organizations would be eager to join with RU in this matter.”³⁰ This in turn led to a heated “after-meeting” where Wright was accused of “[s]abotaging the meeting by influencing the IBWC and PRRWO to oppose the party building proposal.” He was also “accused of attempting to establish [REDACTED] [his] own power base to take over [REDACTED] RU through [REDACTED] [his] influence with PRRWO.”³¹

While Wright’s name is redacted from these documents it is hard to conceive of who else would have been the target. Indeed the RU/RCP would later construct a summation of the collapse of the NLC and refer to “an enlarged meeting discussion of the full proposal was then held, which was in fact the last meeting of the NLC.”³² Wright in turn defended himself, saying that the “[I]BWC have felt alienated by RU, and have always felt that RU has acted in an elitist manner in their dealings with others.”³³

The most logical interpretation in all this is that the RU felt Wright was aiming to build his own power-base by insinuating himself into and influencing the leadership of the IBWC, rallying the RU’s Black cadre to his position, and attempting to swing the PRRWO to his control, including by leveraging his position through his marriage to Gloria Fontanez – derailing the RU’s Party-building plan in the process. What the end game of this particular scenario might have been is a matter for speculation, but that Wright accomplished all he did, in opposition to what the RU was trying to accomplish, is nothing short of stunning.

FIST FIGHTS IN THE SECRETARIAT

By November, however, the RU was more or less onto Wright’s game and wanted to confront him – to what good end is anyone’s guess. Regardless, here there is the benefit of two versions of the culmination, one from an internal Revolutionary Union document, the other from a meticulous – if highly redacted – FBI report. It is worth quoting both versions at length for the detail they offer. The RU claims:

A member of the Secretariat started the meeting by attempting to lay out the general feeling Secretariat members had that, in fact Wright was responsible for much of the deterioration of relations, that in fact, he had not upheld democratic centralism (in certain cases which was known – and have been cited already in this paper – and in other where if [sic] was strongly suspected). But this comrade hardly got a few minutes into putting things on the table, when Wright shouted that he was not going to be put on ‘trial’, and refused to let the comrade finish laying out his views. He charged that this comrade, in particular, was a ‘racist’ and ‘egotist,’ a ‘punk,’ and that he had no line, and only used Marxists-Leninist terms to ‘cover up bullshit’ and that he was responsible for the deterioration of relations, not Wright.³⁴

Given Wright’s earlier sparring with Bob Avakian, it seems reasonable to project that the person opening the meeting – and the target of Wright’s invective – was Avakian. Regardless, the account continues:

When another comrade, a Latino, tried to take the discussion back to politics, “Wright immediately interrupted him, yelling, ‘shut up Blanquito (little white boy).’ And when this comrade attempted to continue despite this provocation, Wright came across the room cursing at him, stood over him, and as soon as the other comrade stood up, Wright jumped on him and knocked him down.³⁵

According to the RU, the remainder of the meeting consisted of Wright repeatedly interrupting attempts at discussions “with the same tactics, twice more starting fights with other comrade [sic], and threatening them.” Failing to establish any kind of lasting decorum, the meeting was ended.³⁶

Thanks to the FBI we have another version of the meeting. That report dates the confrontation as happening on November 15, 1973, in the Chicago suburb of Maywood (logical identities are in brackets; the original document can be viewed in the appendix):

At this meeting the other participants began to criticize [Wright] severely. [Avakian] accused [Wright] of being responsible for the deterioration of relations with other groups. [Wright] shouted that [he] was not going to be put ‘on trial’, refused to let [Avakian] continue [his] criticism, and called [Avakian] a [‘racist’ and ‘egotist,’ a ‘punk,’]. [Unknown] then attempted to continue the meeting when [Wright] made a move toward [him] to stop the proceedings. When [the Latino comrade] attempted to force [Wright] to sit down and continue hearing the charges against [him] [the Latino comrade] and [Wright] got into a fist fight which resulted in [the Latino comrade] being rendered prostrate. [A Secretariat member] immediately came to the aid of [their] fallen comrade, but was [himself] quickly neutralized by [Wright], who then returned to [his] confrontation with [the Latino comrade]. [REDACTED] [Barry Greenberg?] then entered the bout and was [himself] rendered powerless to stop the fray. During this entire episode [REDACTED] [Marylou Greenberg?] remained a constant observer, offering only verbal support to [REDACTED] [her] fallen cohorts. With [REDACTED] now controlling the floor, [REDACTED] unleashed a severely critical evaluation of the ability of the others and adjourned the meeting.³⁷

Even with the redactions it is clear this is a version of events from the standpoint of the FBI’s source/informant – who would have to be one of the people in the room – embellished with not a little bravado about his physical ability. We know from the Bureau that the Secretariat consisted of Don Wright, Barry Greenberg, Mary Lou Greenberg, and Bob Avakian, and that a Latino man, who was a party cadre and member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, had recently been assigned to the national office in Chicago.³⁸ Given all that, it is hard to see the source/informant as being anyone other than Don Wright.

THE FALLOUT

What followed was a flurry of activity. In the wake of this meeting Wright was suspended – and would soon be expelled from the RU. The RU, attempting to regain its footing, wrote a bulletin stating its position on the nature of the new communist party and the role of Black, Puerto Rican, and other non-white ethnicities and nationalities within it – the bulletin would be highly controversial, making matters much worse for the RU. It was nonetheless circulated throughout the organization as well as within the IBWC and PRRWO.

The RU document, technically “RU National Bulletin 13,” was subtitled, “Build the Leading Role of the Working Class: Merge the National and Class Struggle.” It was a document charging off in a wholly different direction from that put forward by Wright. For the RU things were now clear in ways they had not been. As they wrote, the “national question today is in essence a proletarian question.”

So, are we reversing ourselves and saying with Progressive Labor that ‘all nationalism is reactionary?’ No. But, in the final analysis, all nationalism is – nationalism. And all nationalism, even the most progressive, is, in the final analysis, bourgeois ideology. It is the ideology of ‘my nationality first’ which reflects and serves the interests of the bourgeoisie of the particular nationality.³⁹

Unfortunately for the RU, a sizable number of those who had come through the Sixties – people they had wanted to join them in a new party formation – saw things otherwise. For them the struggles of Black and other Third World peoples were not something to be folded so fully into proletarian politics. There would as a result be considerable push back.

The Bulletin also called for turning the Wright incident – which could reasonably be called a calamity – into something positive. They did this by invoking the Maoist mantra: “turn a bad thing, into a good thing.” Noting that Wright’s “opportunist line and his wrecking and conspiring were a very bad thing,” something which had done “real, though only temporary damage to the revolutionary movement,” it was nonetheless possible that, by “grasping more firmly the correct line, style of work and methods of leadership in opposition this his opportunism, we can make real leaps forward.”⁴⁰ Unfortunately for the RU the damage lived outside such Marxist bromides.

This was something the Bureau was keenly aware of, as a report on an RU leadership meeting makes clear:

[The RU held a meeting] to discuss how to deal with WRIGHT’s recent ouster [after his suspension] and the criticism which is bound to come because of it. The RU leadership reportedly sees the ouster of WRIGHT as a further complication to the defense of NB# 13. It was generally expected that RU's defense of their ousting WRIGHT must be set forth from an ideological standpoint and extreme care must be taken not to make the ouster appear to be for personal or racially motivated reasons.⁴¹

Put another way, while publicly the RU framed this as a matter of “political line,” the reality was far more fraught. The problem of course is that this was something known not just by the RU leadership, but also by the FBI.

LEVERAGING THE FALLOUT

Immediately after Wright’s suspension then expulsion, the FBI was crafting plans to maximize the damage. In a highly revealing move they fired off a memo stating that “FBIHQ believes Wright must respond promptly [emphasis added] to the RU action and the following suggestions are set forth to assist you.”⁴² Pointedly they do not refer to Wright as someone external to them, but someone to whom they are giving orders.

As for what they had in mind, this comes through in what they write about the RU’s National Bulletin 13. They note that it will “cause problems for RU,” and that the IBWC and PRRWO had already “expressed deep disapproval” and were in turn preparing a response. In this they “reportedly have sought help from WRIGHT,” a task the FBI confidently note that “Wright will reportedly agree” to undertake.⁴³ The FBI’s confidence that Wright would agree to help is yet another indication as to who he was working for. Likewise another missive makes clear that they are fully involved in accentuating things:

Wright’s expulsion from RU and contents of National Bulletin #13, ‘Merge the National and Class Struggle’ have not been well received by IBWC, PRRWO and other Third World organizations who view these as acts of racism and contrary to RU’s previous positions on Black nationalism. Source has been instructed to exploit current dissension within RU and other organizations.⁴⁴

Here the Bureau was pushing to break away some RU members as a result of the controversy, noting that “[REDACTED] [Wright] could attract a substantial following from defecting RU members.”⁴⁵ To that end Wright was slotted to travel to New York in order to get in touch with the PRRWO and IBWC. He was also set to travel to the Bay Area “to meet with [REDACTED] who are among dissident RU members in the Bay Area.”⁴⁶ In this Wright was capitalizing on the ill effects of NB 13 in certain quarters of the RU.

NB #13 is also not being well received by rank and file RU members. Black RU members in New York reportedly have accepted NB #13, but Bay Area blacks are disgusted.... [REDACTED] [Avakian?] traveled to the San Francisco area during the Christmas holidays to visit his parents, but during this visit so much dissatisfaction had surfaced in the Bay area over NB #13 that [REDACTED] held a forum for RU members to attempt to explain the bulletin and satisfy the dissenters.⁴⁷

As things developed, the damage to the RU’s relations with the IBWC and PRRWO was considerable. On October 25, 1974, almost a year after Wright had been kicked out of the RU, the head of the FBI’s Internal Security Section, R.L. (Robert Lynn) Shackelford, wrote an extensive memo to Assistant Director W.R (Walter Raymond) Wannall, giving an overview. Wannall and Shackelford it should be noted stood at the top of the FBI hierarchy in the mid-Seventies, with Shackelford in charge of the Internal Security Section and Wannall as Assistant Director in charge of the Intelligence Division, which included supervising Operation SOLO – something very much still active.⁴⁸ Notably, the memo gives an estimated membership of the RU, saying that it had at that point between seven-hundred and eight-hundred members – an indication of its relative strength in relation to similar groups. That aside, the memo outlined the state of things since Wright’s exit. The level of political nuance in the memo is striking:

Surveillance photo of RU demonstrators at Atlantic City Steelworkers Convention, September, 1974

Credit: FBI-Newark Revolutionary Union Photo Album

RU places blacks and other minorities on equal footing with whites, without any special considerations, and believes the black nationalistic beliefs of the IBWC are alien to communism. The IBWC and PRRWO believe black and third world people should hold a special position and be the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle and both organizations support the right of self-determination in the form of separation for blacks and third world nations.⁴⁹

The memo continues, referencing the polemics being passed back and forth, “Lengthy documents have been written by the RU and IBWC, each accusing the other of various Marxist-Leninist heresies.” It then pointedly writes that “the split is actually the result of a personality conflict between the leaders of these organizations, which is compounded by racial animosity.” It is however its conclusions that are the most telling: “This split isolates the RU from US minorities blacks, and Puerto Ricans. As a result, RU has suffered defections from both black and white members. The RU has lost its black leadership, [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and is suffering internal dissension.”⁵⁰ That dissension included dissatisfaction with the group’s Chicago leadership, which they felt “has become a very closed group which acts unilaterally” and “has taken several positions recently which many consider racist.” Tipping off as to where they were getting their information, the report noted:

It was felt by both WRIGHT and [REDACTED] that since RU moved its Headquarters to the Chicago area there had been no positive action or leadership taken by the Secretariat, that in fact, RU nationally has, become fragmented and disorganized.⁵¹

It is unclear if the redaction in the above is an RU informant or someone else. Regardless, assessing the state of the Secretariat – the secret leadership body of the RU – would likely only come from someone who had sat on that body, in this case Don Wright.

The RU would later claim that the fallout from Wright’s expulsion lead to a “small split” by a “small clique.”⁵² This appears to be a euphemism invoked to minimize things. Not only did a number of their cadre from the Detroit area leave the group, it also lost a fair number of cadre in the Bay Area, who did not agree to go along with the change in position.⁵³ Coming so soon after the Franklin schism of two years before, it is understandable why the group would want to downplay this, but given everything roiling around this, the internal turmoil, the book-length polemic that was published as Red Papers 6, the loss of a significant section of cadre – particularly Black cadre of which there were never very many – and the isolating nature of their new position, this was a significant blow to the group. Regardless, what followed was an RU even more committed to proceeding with forming a new party, though not the party they had envisioned only a few months before – not just the merging of RU-IBWC-PRRWO, but for a time the October League and perhaps others. Had this been successful, such a party would have been a more formidable force, cohering the bulk of those that had emerged from the Sixties that had embraced Maoism. Instead what followed were years of pronounced sectarianism, culminating in the collapse – mainly because of the shifts in the global situation – of the New Communist Movement as a whole.⁵⁴

WRIGHT IS GONE, BUT NOT THE AHC

Don Wright was suspended indefinitely from the RU on November 19 or 20, 1973.⁵⁵ On November 15, Leibel Bergman and his wife Vicki Garvin hosted two guests at their apartment in Newark. During the course of the evening Bergman was expansive on a number of issues relevant to the current RU, including trouble he was having with a “black comrade” (brackets contain logical identifiers):

He described [Wright] as having become a Black militant … Later, when they were alone, Bergman asked [if Wright] could be an ‘agent?’ Source did not think so because the role of an agent is to be cooperative and conciliatory with his target whereas [Wright was not]. Also, having known [Wright, he] doubted [he] could become an informant for the opposition. Bergman replied, ‘I guess you are right.’⁵⁶

As outlined in Chapter Three, this discussion took place with someone Bergman trusted implicitly – someone who claimed to personally know Wright. It appears to be Bergman’s “secret contact” in the Ad Hoc Committee; someone he felt confident enough with that he was willing to share his suspicions of an RU Secretariat member.⁵⁷

WHAT THEN OF DON WRIGHT?

In discussing the National Liaison Committee in Heavy Radicals, it was noted that, “Identifying the informant short of a confession or Bureau gaffe is an uphill slog.” Given the amount of evidence now accrued in the matter of Don Wright, that slog has become considerably easier.

In the forty-three years since Wright was expelled from the Revolutionary Union, there has been – among those interested in such things – an abundance of speculation as to Wright’s aims, including whether or not he was working for the government. In that time, at least two of the top leaders in the RU who worked most closely with him, Leibel Bergman and Bob Avakian, raised suspicions. Bergman not only raised his suspicions to an FBI informant at the time, but also appears to have engaged in efforts to establish this in talking with former RU/RCP member David Sullivan in an interview.⁵⁸ Bob Avakian, in his 2005 memoir, while never making a direct accusation, repeatedly and pointedly suggests Wright’s motives were suspect – despite framing the matter through the lens of political line and ideology. This is beyond those who worked with Wright on lesser levels who were either suspicious or convinced of his having some kind of relationship with the government.⁵⁹

For its part, the Bureau claims Wright’s files were systematically destroyed at the beginning of 1989 – a claim that raises its own questions.⁶⁰ As for the Ad Hoc Committee and information on Wright’s links to it, files are part of the National Archives backlog that are many years away from release.

That said, there is a mountain of information on Wright in the FBI files already released that point time and again to his having been their informant. Despite their best efforts, the FBI faced a mighty challenge in trying to obscure their informant’s identity, because he was at the top of the Revolutionary Union's leadership and his actions are substantially documented. As a result, there are instances where Wright’s name must appear, but at the same time the “informant” must be obscured. Further, Wright’s name or a description of him consistently shows up in documents destined to be filed in categories and cabinets germane to other areas such as the Chicago RU, the Ad Hoc Committee, the National Liaison Committee, and PRWWO – purging him entirely from their files is a Herculean task. As a result, the more documents released, the more difficult it becomes to read them in any other way than that Don Wright was their informant.

It is striking then, that after all this time we still cannot to a certainty say who Don Wright was. Perhaps – because of the acrimony Wright himself helped generate – it was not possible for the groups to cooperatively pursue this at the time. However, in the ensuing years it would seem that the collective knowledge of the RU and their former allies would have been a sufficient pool to draw on to answer this question – or at least move closer to an answer. Yet there appears to have never been such an effort, or if there was, the findings were never shared, leading to the same result. Instead what was given were assumptions that did not rise above the level of gossip, coupled with a deadening amount of ink aimed at reconciling the conflict Wright was at the center of, in contentious sectarian political terms.

Leaving aside the fact that Wright embodied actual political contradictions – none of this dispenses with the problem that were he an FBI informant that would be a “political” problem of a very different kind. Yet rather than resolve that mystery, the aggrieved parties were more intent on making it disappear, thus kicking the can down the road for future activists to disentangle and leaving them vulnerable to fall victim to similar methods.

CHAPTER NINE

AFTERMATH

The RCP, RSB, and its front groups, identified as the VVAW, UWOC, and USCPFA, represent a threat to the internal security of the United States of the first magnitude.

— FBI, 1976¹

We began to convince ourselves that we were the greatest threat to American imperialism. We were down to about 40 people.

— Richie Perez, PRRWO²

THE NEW COMMUNIST MOVEMENT

In 1976 the FBI declared the recently formed Revolutionary Communist Party – formed out of the Revolutionary Union – a threat of the first magnitude to the United States. That assessment, while containing the hyperbole necessary for the government to justify the legal and extra-legal operations against the organization, was not without substance. As the largest Maoist entity to emerge out of the upheaval of the previous decade, the RU/RCP was a relatively large, disciplined, national organization, with ties to the largest communist country in the world. The irony is that the Bureau’s assessment was written three days before the death of Mao.

Mao’s death marked the definite end to the viability of the New Communist Movement. However, the collapse of the National Liaison Committee that preceded had already marked the end of that movement’s ascent.

RU Anti-Nixon Demonstration, Washington DC, 1974

Credit: Craig Simpson & Sue Redding, Spark Images

The collapse was followed by a dizzying array of events; groups splintering, allying, seeming to ascend only to splinter again. At the same time the FBI – which had locked on to the New Communist Movement as the most important threat confronting the republic – found itself under an unprecedented scrutiny, subject to constraints unthinkable just a few years earlier. Both entities were entering a far different world than the one that had locked them in confrontation in the previous decade. They would come out the other side either in tatters, if at all, or fundamentally different from what they had been up to that moment.

THE DESCENT OF THE PRRWO

In the aftermath of the breaking apart of the National Liaison Committee, both the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization and the Black Workers Congress, in 1974, joined with the Communist League in something called the National Continuation Committee. The undertaking did not make it to the end of the year.³

Next up, in the fall of 1975, the PRRWO joined with the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL), a primarily Black organization, the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), a mainly East Coast Asian organization, and the August 29th Movement (ATM), a Chicano organization based in California, New Mexico, and Colorado. Together they called themselves the “Revolutionary Wing.” That entity too lasted less than a year.⁴

In its wake, the PRRWO, under the leadership of Gloria Fontanez, “split into two armed factions and violence became its own end.” One of the consequences was that two prominent PRRWO members, Richie Perez and Diana Caballero – a married couple – were kidnapped by an opposing faction and tortured.⁵ Perez described the incident:

Now is my turn to experience the kind of interrogation that we’ve done with other people. But this time, it takes a twist that I was not prepared for – I’m accused of being a police agent. I’m being told that I got to confess, that if I don’t cooperate, my wife will be killed. This begins a night of interrogation and physical beatings. Overpowering everyone there was pretty much out of the question; in addition, I still didn’t know where my wife was. It was a very long night, and the beating was relatively severe.⁶

Perez, in recounting his story, pointedly notes that “the most enthusiastic participants, among our leadership was Gloria Fontanez Wright [she took Don Wright’s name following their marriage], who changed her name a number of times.” In that respect, it is worth noting a Bureau report, issued in the aftermath of the NLC collapse: “[Don] WRIGHT does appear to have maintained an excellent rapport with IBWC and PRRWO leaders in New York City and could be expected to capitalize on his influence with these organizations once he moves to New York, which is expected to be within the next few months.”⁷ In other words, Wright was slotted to move back to New York to live with his wife. Wright did indeed live with Fontanez after leaving the RU, a period of time worthy of further exploration.⁸

Regardless, the internal violence in the PRRWO accelerated the corrosion and diminishment of the group. By June 1976 the FBI was recommending that the investigation of the PRRWO be closed – both in light of new restrictive Attorney General Guidelines and because “an informant who was close to captioned organization has advised that the organization no longer has a headquarters.” That informant also reported that PRRWO’s newspaper, Palante, had not appeared for several months and that “PRRWO is currently not giving any indication that it is active in NYC.”⁹

IBWC SPLITS FOUR WAYS

The Black Workers Congress, which at its apex had never been more than several hundred people, if that, continued to lose membership throughout the Seventies. It too would not last long. In 1975 it split, not into two, but four factions: the Revolutionary Workers Congress, the Revolutionary Bloc, the Workers Congress (Marxist-Leninist), and the Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee (MLOC).¹⁰ Ironically, the Revolutionary Workers Congress (RWC) and its small membership would finally reconcile with the now formed (from the RU) Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. The RCP in turn proclaimed the RWC to be the “the most significant of the organizations that survived a series of splits within the BWC.”¹¹ The obvious question in that respect would seem: Why if the differences were so intractable between the two groups in 1973, were they not so in 1977? Of course the principals involved would argue that it was ultimately a matter of line and a certain “coming around” in the thinking of the former IBWC comrades; however one does have to wonder to what degree the discussions with the former IBWC comrades were made a good deal easier without the presence of Don Wright. Regardless, within months of the RWC joining, the RCP itself broke into two in what would be its final schism over the matter of China after MAO Zedong.

OCTOBER LEAGUE/CPML

The schism in the Revolutionary Communist Party and the shift in direction in what had been Mao’s China created a certain moment in the sun for the RCP’s long-time nemesis, the October League. By 1977, the OL had transformed itself into the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) and was now recognized by China as the communist party in the US. It was unfortunately for them a matter of getting to the party as it was ending. The October League/CPML leader Mike Klonsky did garner a photo opportunity, sitting at a banquet table in the Peoples’ Republic with Hua Guofeng, Mao’s ostensible successor, in 1977. However, Hua would soon be removed from power – accused of too closely adhering to “whatever” MAO had argued. By 1979 Deng Xiaoping would assume the reins of power and China would embark on a starkly different path than the one it had previously traveled. Soon after Deng’s ascent the Chinese effectively withdrew their recognition of CPML. What ensued in telescoped fashion was a hemorrhaging of members. By the end of 1981 the group was no more – though some of its cadre would continue on joining other formations.¹²

FROM RU-RCP TO RCP/RWH

After Don Wright was purged from their ranks, the Revolutionary Union went forward in its efforts to form a single multi-national Party, but those efforts were severely constrained by the positions they had adopted coming off the Wright episode. In 1975 they declared themselves the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA – an effort unaccompanied by the fusing of any other organizations into their own, aside from Bay-Area-based Wei Min She, a Maoist Asian-American organization.

At the same time their hold on the “China franchise” slipped away as they refused to fall uncritically in line with the position the Chinese put forward that the Soviet Union was the “main danger” of a new world war, ultimately more dangerous than the United States.¹³ While the RCP for a time jumped through hoops in an effort to reconcile China’s pro-US foreign policy with their own position as domestic communist revolutionaries, it was a losing battle. The entire question became moot with the death of MAO in September 1976 and China’s ensuing rapid reconciliation with Western capitalism.

Over the course of little more than two years, the RCP would go from the largest Maoist organization in the US, holding the China franchise, to an organization split in two, one side being the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters which sought to hold onto the vanishing socialism in China, and the RCP, which doggedly held the position that the four politburo radicals (the Gang of Four) were the true representatives of socialism and Maoism in China – their arrest constituting a defeat of the socialist project in that country. Amid much sound and fury, the two sides, and the wider New Communist Movement, debated all this. Meanwhile China moved deliberately toward a market economy and a geopolitical alliance with the United States.¹⁴

The RCP soldiered on however, losing members throughout the late Seventies and taking a particular hit in the aftermath of their undertaking on May 1, 1980, which was to have rallied ten-thousand workers to “take history into our hands,” but rallied less than one-thousand nationwide instead. Under Bob Avakian’s unquestioned – and exalted – leadership, it maintained a hardcore of diminishing cadre that kept the group going, which still exists as a small ultra-left sect.

CLOSING SHOP ON DOMESTIC SECURITY INVESTIGATIONS

Ironically the FBI – which had mounted massive investigations on these groups and launched extreme efforts to ensure they would not unite – was effectively forced to close up shop on their domestic security operations as they had been constituted for much of the twentieth century.

By 1976 the FBI was subject to an extraordinary amount of attention. Gone were the days when J. Edgar Hoover had carte blanche to undertake any investigation he saw fit, under any justification. The new attorney general, Edward Levi, in the wake of the extensive Congressional hearings, set out new guidelines that went into effect in April 1976, that set limits on domestic security investigations. Mere advocacy of violence in the abstract was no longer sufficient for the FBI to snap into action; instead the FBI could commence a full domestic security investigation only on the basis of “specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that an individual or group is or may be engaged in activities which involve the use of force or violence.”¹⁵

They also set guidelines on “factors to be evaluated in using informants.” Specifically they outlined instructions for informants “and the steps to be taken in the event the FBI learned that an informant used in investigating criminal activity had violated the instructions or learned of the commission of a crime.” Informants were not being abandoned, but it was outlined that “special care be taken not only to minimize [the use of informants] but also to ensure that individual rights [were] not infringed and that the government itself did not become a violator of the law.” Here the matter was not so much a moral one, but that of restoring credibility to a badly damaged system. Nonetheless it was not ethereal. The Bureau went from 21,414 open investigations in July 1973 to 4,868 in March 1976. By May 1978, it was said that the Bureau was “practically out of the domestic security field,” an overstatement to be sure, and things would change over time, but things were significantly different.¹⁶

For the Revolutionary Communist Party the implications were immediate and far-reaching – though the group itself was oblivious to the change. The FBI began instructing its various Field Offices to begin closing down its domestic security investigation against the RCP. A missive to their Albany Field Office is exemplary of the orders going out:

For the information of recipients, the full domestic security investigation of the RCP is being discontinued because the activities of the organization no longer fall within the current Attorney General's Guidelines governing domestic security investigations. Although in the past the RCP has encouraged its membership to acquire weapons and engage in firearms training, the RCP has discontinued this practice. Since June 1976, when the Statue of Liberty was taken over by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and supported by the RCP, there have been no reported incidents where force or violence was used or the violation of Federal law resulted for the purpose of overthrowing the Government.¹⁷

As for as what this meant, the orders were unambiguous. Investigations based solely on membership were to be stopped and “[i]nformants reporting on the activities of the RCP should be redirected to report on the activities of organizations and individuals who are of investigatory interest to this Bureau.” Those informants the Bureau could not justify redirecting were to be “discontinued.”¹⁸

This corresponds to the instructions the FBI was issuing to its various field offices. For example, in August 1976 they closed their investigation on Jan Ford, who was the RCP leader in Seattle.

FORD has maintained a proprietary interest in the Portland chapter, and wields some regional control over its policies, particularly in expressing concern for any members who engage in any criminal activities, advocate violence, or in any other way ‘cause trouble’. He has recently urged the ousting [of] a member of the Tacoma chapter, despite-that member’s long tenure, because of the ‘trouble making label.’¹⁹

The conclusion offered by the FBI was firm: “In view of the above, this investigation is being closed at Seattle.”²⁰

Ironically, the RCP was about to head in a different direction from that outlined in Ford’s file. The remains of the RCP mounted an effort to make a political statement against the new Chinese Premier, Deng Xiaoping, when he visited Washington in January 1979. The subsequent demonstration saw the group attempt to create an international incident in which various objects were to be tossed at the Premier and the President, Jimmy Carter. Contrary to their plan they were directed away from the White House lawn and instead let lose their objects against the sizable police contingent that was tracking the march. The result was a bloody melee, one that lasted minutes, but made national news. It saddled the Party and its leaders with considerable legal troubles that would take years to resolve.

It is notable that, given the changes the government instituted, the FBI does appear to have been caught off-guard. This can be seen in the following testimony assessing the effect of the Levi Guidelines. The Chief Counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism asked the Chief of the Interior Department’s US Park Service, Lynn Herring, about instances of the government being called up short, specifically if they knew about the Deng demonstration:

We were caught completely by surprise. Most of these participants were carrying water-soaked handkerchiefs and missiles. They carried clubs with railroad flares affixed to the ends and bags of marbles that they used against our horse-mounted officers to hinder the effectiveness – of the horses. The demonstrators threw rocks, bottles, fish hooks, fish hook weights, and metal fragments. They had nails made which were soldered together like stars, so that regardless of the direction that they were thrown, you would be pierced with a pointed nail. We also discovered two Molotov cocktail pipe bombs which did not ignite during the attack. In this particular incident, we also had many officers who were injured.²¹

For their part the RCP characterized their actions as self-defense against an unprovoked police attack, one that aimed to silence the political message of the demonstration. Regardless, seventy-eight of the demonstrators had been arrested. Initially they were charged with misdemeanors, but over the course of the next couple of days the government leveled felony charges – and targeted the group’s leader, Bob Avakian, with multiple felonies. Though those charges were ultimately dropped, the change in tack from misdemeanor to felony does appear consistent with the government being caught offguard and initially not clear on how to respond. Further, Freedom of Information requests relating to the RCP that have been satisfied in the period after 1977 show a stark diminishment in results. While there are notes of prior arrests, copies of flyers, and letters from concerned citizens, there are not detailed informant reports, reports on meetings, surveillance reports, or political assessments that would accompany a major domestic security investigation.

THE FELT-MILLER TRIAL

The Levi Guidelines represented the high watermark in the government’s effort to constrain the reach of the FBI. For the few years they were in place they appear to have led to a severe curtailment of the Bureau’s overall reach. It was a very peculiar time in the history of the Bureau, one that would not last long.

The elements of reversal had been set in motion almost as soon as the rules fully took hold. This can be seen in the investigation and prosecution of W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, two FBI agents who sat at the top of the Bureau hierarchy in the Seventies. In April 1978, Felt and Miller, along with former FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, were indicted, charged with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens. Gray’s case never went to trial and was dropped for lack of evidence in December 1980.²²

Felt, the former Associate Director, and Miller, the former Assistant Director of the Intelligence Division, were brought to trial in 1980, and charged with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of their targets.²³ They each faced ten years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. Much of the trial revolved around the authorization of illegal break-ins and wiretaps of the Weather Underground in the 1972-73 period, though there was also extensive testimony on the so-called “Bergman Investigation,” leveled against Leibel Bergman, which included what the Bureau called “sensitive techniques” (break-ins and illegal wiretaps).²⁴ The two were convicted in December of that year and fined the modest sums of $5,000 and $3,500 respectively. However in March 1981 President Ronald Reagan granted the two full and unconditional pardons.

The middling penalty followed by the pardon made clear that the ruling apparatus was not going to punish the FBI at any leading level for doing their work. The guiding sentiment is perhaps best expressed in a comment made in a 1971 Congressional hearing by Representative Frank T. Bow of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Department of State, Justice, Commerce, and the Judiciary. The occasion was testimony by J. Edgar Hoover, about the FBI budget:

Mr. Director, I again appreciate your testimony. It is a pleasure to have you here. We have great confidence in you and your associates. I think we sleep a little better at night because of your efforts.²⁵

The statement reflects a largely unspoken assessment of the role of the FBI in this highly contentious period. In that respect, it goes a long way in explaining why so many of the Bureau’s secrets, even after all this time and so many scandals and revelations, remain hidden.

CONCLUSION

Perhaps the most remarkable thing discovered in writing this book is how little was known about a certain type of Bureau informant. While there is a good amount of literature on things like electronic surveillance, illegal break-ins, and poison-pen letters, the matter of informants as a strategic counterintelligence tool – the centerpiece of the Bureau’s internal security efforts – is by comparison a desert. Even when informants are discussed they are too often relegated to the incendiary provocateur, the snitch revealed at trial, or the stealthy infiltrator who gets his comrades secretly fired or arrested. Yet people such as Morris Childs, Richard Aoki, and, we assume, Darrell Grover and Don Wright, were far more than this. They were people who insinuated themselves into positions of responsibility and remained there for years if not decades, never letting on who they really were. Because of this there were no Oprah moments, no opportunities to ask, “Why did you do it?” Instead they took many secrets to their graves.

In this the FBI needs to be given credit for a level of sophistication beyond what reasonable people would expect. Not only were certain of their operations well-thought-out, they appear to have maintained a culture of secrecy that never “spilled the beans,” despite the internal conflicts, external pressure, and media scrutiny. As the Communist veteran and Bureau informant Morris Childs remarked, “The Bureau as a whole is the most dedicated organization I’ve ever known, maybe with the exception of the early Bolsheviks.”¹

The problem, however, is that what they undertook crossed legal, ethical, and moral lines. The way these informants inserted themselves into the lives of the groups – which largely existed within the laws of the time – the level of confidence they built, including at the most intimate levels, is shocking. Morris Childs channeled his anger after his falling out with the CPUSA into a lifelong effort of betraying every trust and friendship he had developed up to that time. Richard Aoki’s legacy is one of informing on anyone he came close to, people who respected him and called him a friend. Compounding this, he maintained the lie in order to retain bragging rights about his “revolutionary” past. Darrell Grover appears to have trained some of the most radical youth of their generation in Marxism, only to turn around and report them to the FBI… as Marxists. Larry and Betty Goff had four young children who they effectively used as a cover as they pretended to be communists, handling weapons and suggesting plots such as “blowing up tanks.” Don Wright is said to have broken up Gloria Fontanez’s existing relationship with a leading member of the PRRWO as the precursor to his marrying her – something he in turn appears to have used to advance his overall agenda.² Such things go beyond the intelligence-gathering that they were ostensibly tasked with. William Sullivan, the FBI official who was in charge of the Domestic Intelligence Division during the height of the COINTELPRO era, in his testimony to Congress described plainly the Bureau’s – and by extension the informant’s – method: “This is a rough, tough, dirty business…”³ Sullivan’s candor, while insightful, does not excuse the morally bankrupt character of such activity.

In contrast to the FBI’s professionalism, the organizations most impacted by their actions stand as highly unsophisticated. For all their savvy – and some were better than others – and allowing for inexperience, any efforts to isolate informants before they “gave away the farm” or worse were largely a failure. True, Betty and Larry Goff were under suspicion toward the end, but they had a good couple of years before that meant anything. With Morris Childs, Richard Aoki, and we presume Don Wright and Darrell Grover, none of them were ever identified as informants when it mattered. As for the Ad Hoc Committee – which was a conduit for the Bureau’s informant work and much else – to this day it is an unknown quantity despite having operated for over twenty years. In working on this book some people familiar with the intricacies of the New Communist Movement on hearing of the true nature of the AHC responded with incredulity, to the effect that the FBI simply could not be sophisticated enough to write the Ad Hoc Bulletins — particularly the later ones.⁴ While it is possible that the later AHC Bulletins had the input of former communists, everything discovered in this work shows that the FBI was able to swim comfortably in the waters of Marxist nuance – whether they used surrogates or their own personnel to do this would seem to be beside the point.

Tellingly, a key element in the FBI’s success was the role of the top leaders of the target organizations. Here there appears to have been a complete failure on the part of people such as Gus Hall, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Leibel Bergman, Bruce Franklin, Bob Avakian, and others to properly vet the people they were investing with critical organizational responsibilities. Further, this failure was compounded by not taking responsibility for the results after the fact and drawing appropriate lessons. As a result, these leaders put in jeopardy not only themselves, but also those who had entrusted them to lead. Ironically there were always rumors and at times even investigations – or in the case of the Black Panthers, actions – against individuals suspected of being informants. Not surprisingly none of those suspects actually were informants, only adding to the Bureau’s effective disruption.⁵

No small part of the problem for these organizations was that they held to a hard hierarchal model that made it exceedingly difficult to disinterestedly monitor and review people at the top, thereby putting successful informants in a position of intelligence and influence and in the position to be able protect their position. Were these groups more democratically inclined a free-for-all of internal suspicion would destroy them as surely as the presence of an informant, so that hardly seems the answer. This was a sticky problem, but to the fault of the organizations it was a problem that was not – as far as this research has uncovered – interrogated on its actual terms. Determining who might be a highly-placed informant was going to be difficult – as the research here is testament to – but these groups were not even asking the right questions, in fact their modus operandi was in many ways that they did not want to know; better to attribute such problems to other causes. Much in the way Lenin purged Malinovsky from Soviet history, they dealt with the problem by erasing or redefining it.

In the course of speaking about our book Heavy Radicals, a question that was repeatedly posed was: “With the Internet, the proliferation of myriad social media and digital information, isn’t the government’s ability to garner intelligence limited only by available bandwidth?” In response we pointed out that while Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and others have revealed a hidden universe that exists in digital information – and redefined the boundaries of what can be garnered electronically – it does not negate the fundamental need for “human intelligence,” the need for informants. The FBI on its website makes this plain, noting that the use of informants not only remains “lawful and often essential,” but that using them “may involve an element of deception, intrusion into the privacy of individuals, or cooperation with persons whose reliability and motivation may be open to question.”⁶ In fact, informants have been and continue to be used by the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies against environmental activists, anti-globalization forces, anti-police brutality activists, and others.⁷

While things today are more complex – with a profusion of forces holding to varying agendas, some antithetical to a liberatory vision – this does not dispense with the fact that certain governmental forces and others continue elements of counterintelligence against progressive and radical political opposition. The success of those who stand against the ravages of the status quo and strive for a freer and more just world is in no small way dependent on learning the lessons of the past. It is with that in mind that we offer this work.

EPILOGUE

MORRIS CHILDS

Morris Childs remained an active FBI informant, making his last mission to Moscow in 1977, after which he maintained long-distance contact with the Soviets until 1980. His brother Jack died in 1980. Morris died in June 1991.¹

Meanwhile the story of SOLO – never revealed while active – began to leak out in 1981, in relation to a book by Robert Garrow and his investigation of Stanley Levinson, a former CPUSA member who worked with Martin Luther King in the early 1960s. The revelations of SOLO revolved around King’s associations with suspected members of the Communist Party and as a result the far more consequential story of the Childs brothers was relegated to an auxiliary role.² It is a story, in many ways, which remains to be told.

THE AD HOC COMMITTEE FOR A MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY

Every piece of evidence obtained on the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party suggests that the entity had a significant impact on the myriad individuals and organization it was leveled against in its twenty-year run. Technically called case file 100-HQ442715, the file related to the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, also known as the Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line, is massive. According to a representative at the National Archives:

The main file comprises 62 sections and has an estimated 15,500 pages, compiled as part of a security investigation conducted by the FBI between September 1964 and December 1984. In addition, there are also numerous enclosures and bulky exhibits associated with the files.³

That is twenty years of intensive FBI counterintelligence that extends past the point of the shutting down of COINTELPRO and the restrictive guidelines put in place for domestic security investigations. What is contained in the files needs to be made available to begin to contextualize and understand long-ago events and quite possibly rewrite the history of that time. Notification of when those files might be forthcoming is pending.⁴

RICHARD AOKI

In 2005 Richard Aoki suffered a stroke, but fought to recover, continuing to speak about his time with the Black Panther Party and maintaining the façade that he had been a revolutionary activist. In July 2009, then seventy years old, Aoki was reported to have passed away as a result of complications from kidney failure. Much like the rest of his life, that too turned out to not to be true; Aoki had in fact died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Coming at the time of the release of a documentary on his life and before the posthumous release of Diane Fujino’s biography it served at first blush as a sad coda to what was seen as a life of struggle and commitment to the oppressed. Three years later Seth Rosenfeld released his book revealing that Aoki’s true legacy was that of an FBI informant and that everything about his life would need to be reevaluated.

LARRY AND BETTY GOFF

The Goffs’ tenure as Bureau informants appears to have been only a temporary sidetrack from their true calling of evangelism. On leaving the RU Larry joined the Leemore, California police department.⁵ From there he and Betty moved from the Bay Area and founded the Goff Ministries in Lubbock, Texas. There was no reply to a request for an interview from the couple.

DARRELL GROVER

Darrell Donnel Grover died in 1988 in Alameda, California. In March 2015 the National Archives responded to an FOIA request by Conor Gallagher noting that it was now in the “second-tier” queue for processing and that they are “currently processing requests received in March 2012.⁶ When those files arrive there ought to be more to say about Grover and his relationship with the Bureau.

DON WRIGHT

Don Wright died in Colorado on November 8, 2008 at the age of seventy. While the FBI claims his files were destroyed, he is sufficiently referenced and cross-referenced in files they have released. Once the FBI releases versions of those records where Wright’s name is no longer redacted, if they ever do, a much clearer picture of his relationship with the Bureau will present itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Avakian, Bob, From Ike To Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist: a Memoir. Chicago: Insight Press, 2005.

Barron, John. Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin. New York: Regnery Publishing, 1996.

Bergman, Leibel. I Cannot See Their Faces & Keep Silent. Saint Paul: Prometheus Press, 1946.
———. Will We Remember. Friends of Leibel Bergman, 1984.

Bloom, Joshua and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Delgado, Ruben. The Last Chicano: A Mexican American Experience. Bloomington: Author House, 2009.

De Leon, David (ed.). Leaders From the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism. Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London, New York: Verso Books, 2002.

Elwood, Ralph Carter. Roman Malinovsky, A Life Without a Cause. Newton, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977.

Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, Second Printing 2000.

Frazier, Robeson Taj. The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Fujino, Diane C. Samurai among Panthers Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Garrow, David. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.

Georgakas, Dan and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. Chicago: Haymarket, 2012.

Hass, Jeffrey. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011.

Ho, Fred (ed.). Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.

Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On: The American Communist Party During the Second World War. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.

Leonard, Aaron J. and Conor A. Gallagher. Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists: Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980. London: Zero Books, 2015.

Lenin, V.I. Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975.

Martelle, Scott. The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Meisner, Maurice. The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

———. Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic, Third Edition 3rd Edition. New York: Free Press, 1999.

Pearson, Hugh. Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. New York: Perseus Books, 1995.

Rosenfeld, Seth. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Rudd, Mark. Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS: The Rise and Development of Students for Democratic Society. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. New York: Vintage, 1970.

Teiwes, Fredrick C. and Warren Sun. The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2008.

Tremblay, Darren E. The US Domestic Intelligence Enterprise: History, Development, and Operations. Abingdon, UK: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, 2015.

Weiner, Timothy. Enemies: A History of the FBI. New York: Random House, 2012.

PAMPHLETS AND MAJOR PERIODICAL SOURCES

Black Workers Congress. “Manifesto of the Black Workers Congress.” Detroit: BWC, 1970.

The Communist, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall/Winter 1977. Chicago: Revolutionary Communist Party, 1977.

Klingel, Bill and Joanne Psihountas. Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Chicago: RCP Publications, 1978.

Progressive Labor Party. Revolution Today. Exposition Press, 1970.

Revolutionary Union. “China’s Foreign Policy: A Leninist Policy.” 1972.

———. “Red Papers 4: Proletarian Revolution vs. Revolutionary Adventurism.” 1972.

———. “Red Papers 5: National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution in the US.” 1972.

———. “Red Papers 6: Build the Leadership of the Proletariat and its Party.” 1974.

GOVERNMENT SOURCES

Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Records: The Vault [vault.fbi. gov]. COINTELPRO: New Left (Various), 1968-1970.

U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Internal Security. America's Maoists - The Revolutionary Union, The Venceremos Organization. Ninety-Second Congress, Second Session. U.S.A. Congress. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1972.

———. Progressive Labor Party. Ninety-Second Congress. First Session, April 13, 14 and November 18, 1971. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1972.

———. Investigation of Attempts to Subvert the United States Armed Services, Part 1. Ninety-Second Congress, First Session. Hearings, October 20, 21, 22, 27, and 28, 1971. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1972.

U.S. House of Representatives, United States Subcommittee on Un-American Activities. Hearings H.R. 12047, H.R. 14925, H.R. 16175, H.R. 171401714,0. AND H.R. 171794 to Make Punishable Assistance to Enemies of U.S. in Times of Undeclared War. Friday, August 19, 1966. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1966.

U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities. “Communist Activities in the Buffalo, N.Y. Area,” Eighty-Eighth Congress, Second Session. April 29 and 30, 1964. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1964.

———. The Northern California District of the Communist Party of California: Structure — Objectives — Leadership. Eighty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, Part 2, May 13, 1960. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1960.

U.S. Senate, Committee of the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary. Threats to the Peaceful Observance of the Bicentennial. Ninety-Fourth Congress. Second Session, June 18, 1976. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1976.

———. Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization: A Staff Study. Ninety-Fourth Congress. Second Session. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1976.

U.S. Senate. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Actives. 94th Congress. Senate Report. 2d Session fI No. 94-755. “Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.” Book III, April 23, 1976. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1976.

U.S. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws. Ninety-First Congress, Second Session Part 3, March 11, 1970. Testimony of Gerald Kirk.

COURT PAPERS

Deposition, ACLU v. City of Chicago et al. 1980, David Ryan, Washington DC April 10, 1980. Sullivan TAM.528 Box 8, Folder 46.

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern District. American Civil Liberties Union et al., Plaintiff v. City of Chicago et al. Defendants. Joseph A. Burton Affidavit. July 22, 1980.

FILM & VIDEO FOOTAGE

Aoki Film. “AOKI: Full Length Richard Aoki Documentary” (2009). Published January 21, 2014.

Peralta Colleges. “Richard Aoki: Committed Revolutionary or FBI Informant? Part 1.” YouTube Video, starting at 15:34. September 13, 2012.

APPENDIX

SELECT FBI DOCUMENTS

Note: The outlined redactions were made by the FBI, solid redactions were made by the authors.

CONTENTS

Document 1: | FBI memo and inaugural bulletin of the “Ad Hoc Committee,” then called the “Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line.”
Document 2: | Article in the Oakland City College Newspaper (Later Merritt College), in 1962, describing Richard Aoki’s role in the campus’s Socialist Discussion Club.
Document 3: | An FBI report based on information from informant Morris Childs (codename 5824-S*), on African-American activist Victoria Garvin’s activity in the People Republic of China.
Document 4: | FBI report on letter sent to AHC by PLP and later RU member Bob Fitch.
Document 5: | Early report referencing the Ad Hoc Committee and Leibel Bergman.
Document 6: | Report from an early RU informant, which describes him (source) as treasurer of San Francisco RU branch.
Document 7: | Later report from the RU informant describing Darrell Grover as the treasurer for the San Francisco RU.
Document 8: | Informant Larry Goff’s report to the FBI on how he was directed to a meeting to discuss the RU struggle over the military strategy for revolution.
Document 9: | Informant report, apparently from Larry Goff, noting that Darrell Grover has seriously burned his hands in a fire.
Document 10: | FBI report indicating their informant has seriously burned his hands.
Document 11: | FBI report on RU Midwest regional meeting – indicating informant drove a car with Colorado plates (Don Wright’s home state), and would be traveling with his friend “Gerry.”
Document 12: | Informant report on incident during meeting in which Darrell Grover initiated a call to police to intervene in a robbery they witnessed.
Document 13: | FBI memo on distribution of report on RU Midwest Regional meeting indicating special care to protect “an Ad Hoc informant.”
Document 14: | FBI report on the RU Midwest Regional meeting discussing the split in the RU, overall military strategy, and Don Wright’s criticism of Bob Avakian.
Document 15: | Report on RU National Central Committee from March 1971 indicating informant in place and another criticism of Avakian by Don Wright.
Document 16: | Report on RU National Central Committee from March 1971 indicating two sources reporting on the meeting.
Document 17: | Letter by FBI informant Jill Schaefer recommending another FBI informant, Joe Burton, testifying that his background is “beyond reproach.”
Document 18: | FBI document describing a Black RU member being assigned to the National Liaison Committee and the debate within the RU.
Document 19: | The FBI’s account of Don Wright’s final RU meeting, where a fist fight broke out.
Document 20: | Leibel Bergman & Vicki Garvin’s meeting/social evening with likely Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party informants.
Document 21: | Urgent FBI Airtel (i.e. sent via airmail) stating Don Wright must “promptly respond” in the wake of his suspension from the Revolutionary Union.
Document 22: | FBI memo discussing James Forman’s letter in response to his expulsion from IBWC.
Document 23: | FBI Summary of the RU and IBWC’s relationship.
Document 24: | FBI memo discussing Don Wright’s expulsion from the RU and its aftermath.
Document 25: | Memo by senior FBI officials on the failed efforts to merge the RU, BWC, and PRRWO

Document 1
FBI memo and inaugural bulletin of the “Ad Hoc Committee,” then called the “Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line.”

Document 2
Article in the Oakland City College Newspaper (Later Merritt College), in 1962, describing Richard Aoki’s role in the campus’s Socialist Discussion Club.

Document 3
Informant Morris Childs (codename 5824-S*), on African-American activist Victoria Garvin’s activity in the People Republic of China.

Document 4
FBI report on letter sent to AHC by PLP and later RU member Bob Fitch.

Document 5
Early report referencing the Ad Hoc Committee and Leibel Bergman.

Document 6
Report from an early RU informant, which describes him (source) as treasurer of San Francisco RU branch.

Document 7
Later report from the RU informant describing Darrell Grover as the treasurer for the San Francisco RU.

Document 8
Informant Larry Goff’s report to the FBI on how he was directed to a meeting to discuss the RU struggle over the military strategy for revolution.

Document 9
Informant report, apparently from Larry Goff, noting that Darrell Grover has seriously burned his hands in a fire.

Document 10
FBI report indicating their informant has seriously burned his hands.

Document 11
FBI report on RU Midwest regional meeting – indicating informant drove a car with Colorado plates (Don Wright’s home state), and would be traveling with his friend “Gerry.”

Document 12
Informant report on incident during meeting in which Darrell Grover initiated a call to police to intervene in a robbery they witnessed.

Document 13
FBI memo on distribution of report on RU Midwest Regional meeting indicating special care to protect “an Ad Hoc informant.”

Document 14
FBI report on the RU Midwest Regional meeting discussing the split in the RU, overall military strategy, and Don Wright’s criticism of Bob Avakian.

Document 15
Report on RU National Central Committee from March 1971 indicating informant in place and another criticism of Avakian by Don Wright.

Document 16
Report on RU National Central Committee from March 1971 indicating three sources with two reporting directly on the CC meeting.

Document 17
Letter by FBI informant Jill Schaefer recommending another FBI informant, Joe Burton, testifying that his background is “beyond reproach.”

Document 18
FBI document describing a Black RU member being assigned to the National Liaison Committee and the debate within the RU.

Document 19
The FBI’s account of Don Wright’s final RU meeting, where a fist fight broke out.

Document 20
Leibel Bergman & Vicki Garvin’s meeting/social evening with likely Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party informants.

Document 21
Urgent FBI Airtel (i.e. sent via airmail) stating Don Wright must “promptly respond” in the wake of his suspension from the Revolutionary Union.

Document 22
FBI memo discussing James Forman’s letter in response to his expulsion from IBWC.

Document 23
FBI Summary of the RU and IBWC’s relationship.

Document 24
FBI memo discussing Don Wright’s expulsion from the RU and its aftermath.

Document 25
Memo by senior FBI officials on the failed efforts to merge the RU, BWC, and PRRWO.

ENDNOTES

PREFACE

1     Leonard, Aaron J. and Conor A. Gallagher. Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists. Zero Books, UK, 2015. Chapter 2, “SDS, the RU & the FBI,” 34-57.

2     Key files were sent to any FBI field office for cities that had an open investigation of the RU – as a result we were able to crossreference FBI files on individuals with FBI files of the local field offices (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago) and even files focused solely on FBI collectives (the San Francisco labor collective, the San Jose Collective, the Richmond collective, the Maywood collective, among others) – all of which yielded a great deal of insight.

3     We reviewed in excess of 16,000 pages of released FBI documents for this volume, of which over 7,000 pages were material obtained exclusively through our FOIA requests.

4     FOIA.gov website, accessed 8/3/2016. https://www.foia.gov/faq.html

5     Eckstein, Arthur. Bad Moon Rising: How the Weathermen Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2016. 6-7.

INTRODUCTION: COUNTERINTELLIGENCE & INFORMANTS

1     “Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence and the Rights of Americans. Book III, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” April 23 (under authority of the order of April 14) 1976, US Government Printing Office, Washington 1976, 231.

2     Clerk, Garry M. Miller to SAC Cleveland, Subject: Revolutionary Union, January 29, 1974. David Irish Sullivan, FBI file 10033481, 86.

3     Richard J. Ott to SAC Chicago, Subject AD-HOC COMMITTEE FOR A MARXIST-LENIST PARTY, IS-C. Report received from [REDACTED] CG 7015-S 4/17/1968. From the David Sullivan, US Maoism collection. NYU-Tamiment Library. TAM.527, Box 23 Folders: 5-6.

4     FBI Website. “A Bite Out of History: The Palmer Raids. 12/28/2007: https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2007/december/palmer_122807
Also, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Compliance with the Attorney General's Investigative Guidelines [REDACTED] Special Report September 2005.” Office of the Inspector General, accessed, 10/12/2016: https://oig.justice.gov/special/0509/chapter2.htm

5     Constitutional Rights Foundation website. “The Palmer "Red Raids,” accessed 8/5/2016: http://www.crf-usa.org/america-responds-to-terrorism/the-palmer-red-raids.html

6     Fulton, William. “Browder Jailed By US In False Passport Case.” Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1939.

7     For more see Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On: The American Communist Party During the Second World War. Chapter Four “The Yanks Aren’t Coming.” Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 1982.

8     Compliance with the Attorney General’s Investigative Guidelines. Also, see Isserman, Chapter Five.

9     Central Intelligence website. “Strategic Counterintelligence: What Is It and What Should We Do About It?,” accessed 10/12/2017: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-studyof-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol51no2/strategic-counterintelligence.html

10   Central Intelligence Agency. “The Anatomy of Counterintelligence.” APPROVED FOR RELEASE 1994, CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM, 2 JULY 96. CIA website, accessed August 5, 2016: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol13no1/html/v13i1a02p_0001.htm

11   Ibid.

12   FBI Records: The Vault-Cointelpro, website accessed 10/12/2016. “Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.” https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

13   “Church Report, Book III,” 228.

14   Ibid.

15   Colliers, Barnard L. "S.D.S. Scores Big Gains But Faces Many Problems: S. D. S., Though It Scored Several ‘Victories,’ Faces Potentially Grave Crises." The New York Times, May 5, 1969. Also see Mark Rudd’s website. “The Death of SDS.” http://www.markrudd.com/?sds-and-weather/the-death-of-sds.html

16   “US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern District. American Civil Liberties Union et al., Plaintiff v. City of Chicago et. al. Defendants. Joseph A. Burton Affidavit. July 22, 1980. p. 2. David Sullivan Maoism Collection TAM.527, Box 23, folders 5-6. Also “SAC New Orleans, to Director FBI, 12/21/73. Revolutionary Union IS-RU cc: Chicago. Schafer Bureau File 100-HQ-471704, 2.”

17   Crewdson, John M. “Judge Says F.B.I. Withheld Data on Indians.” The New York Times. April 5, 1975, 16.

18   Letter from Jill Schafer to Tampa, FL, March 4, 1973, Red Star Cadre, FBI File 100-3388, 241.

PRELUDE: THE SHADOW OF
ROMAN MALINOVSKY

1     Lenin, V.I. What Is To Be Done?: Burning Question of our Movement, IV, The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the Revolutionaries: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iv.htm

2     Elwood, Ralph Carter. "The Malinovskii Affair: Ά Very Fishy Business'," Revolutionary Russia XI: 1 (1998), 1-16.

3     Elwood, Ralph Carter. Roman Malinovsky, A Life Without a Cause. Newton, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977, 33.

4     A Life Without a Cause, 53.

5     A Life Without a Cause, 32.

6     A Life Without a Cause, 36.

7     Wolfe, Bertram D. “Lenin and the Agent Provocateur Malinovsky.” The Russian Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn, 1945), pp. 49-69

8     Ibid..

9     Life Without a Cause, 11.

10   V.I. Lenin. “The Liquidators and Malinovsky’s Biography.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/22. htm

11   V. I. Lenin, 344, To: G. I. PETROVSKY, Written after May 25, 1914, First published in 1962 in Istorichesky Arkhiv, No. 1. Sent from Poronin to St. Petersburg. Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1977], Moscow, Volume 43, 403-404. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/00gip.htm

12   “Fishy Business,” 96-99.

13   Elwood, R.C. “Lenin's Testimony to the Extraordinary Investigatory Commission.” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue, Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 41, No. 3/4, (SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1999), 260-64.

14   Ibid.

15   Ibid.

16   Author email interview with R. Carter Elwood 10/30/2015.

17   Lenin, V.I., Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch05. htm

18   “Lenin's Testimony,” 264.

CHAPTER ONE: MORRIS CHILDS & HIS HANDLERS

1     Mao Zedong. “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War.” December 1936: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_12.htm

2     Barron, John. Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin. Regnery Publishing, New York, 1996, 11.

3     Operation Solo, 29.

4     Operation Solo, 25.

5     Paul Costello, Paul. “Anti-Revisionist Communism in the United States, 1945-1950.” First Published: Theoretical Review No. 11, July-August 1979, 10-17: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1946-1956/costello01.htm

6     Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On: The American Communist Party During the Second World War. Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 1982, 247.

7     Operation Solo, 40-41.

8     Isserman, 205.

9     Eleven of them, Benjamin Davis, Eugene Dennis, Gilbert Green, Gus Hall, Irving Potash, Jack Satchel, Robert G. Thomson, John Williamson, Henry Winston, and Carl Winter, were convicted. William Z. Foster was not tried with the others because of this health. Martelle, Scott. The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick 2011, 238.

10   Martelle, 243.

11   Isserman, 247.

12   Operation Solo, 40-41.

13   TOPLEV 68, 81. https://archive.org/details/ernie1241_cpusa

14   Resources: Operation SOLO files- FBI History website

15   McLaughlin, Amy. “Operation solo: Espionage mission led to secret friendship between FBI agent and communist spy.” Chicago Daily Herald, Mar 25, 1999.

16   Operation Solo, 48.

17   Operation Solo, 51.

18   A Byte Out of History, “Going SOLO: Communist Agent Tells All.” FBI Website. August 2, 2011. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/byte-out-of-history-communist-agent-tells-all

19   Operation Solo, 17

20   Operation Solo, 54.

21   Operation Solo, 60.

22   SAC New York, to Director, FBI, Subject SOLO, IS-C. 11/26/63. SOLO Section 49, p. 30. https://vault.fbi.gov/solo

23   From F.J. Baumgardner to W.C. Sullivan. Subject SOLO, Internal Security, Communist. November 2, 1964. SOLO Section 58, p. 7. https://vault.fbi.gov/solo

24   “Sino-Soviet Relations” December 11, 1963. SOLO Section 49, p. 12. https://vault.fbi.gov/solo

25   From F.J. Baumgardner to W.C. Sullivan. October 7, 1963. FBI Solo Files.

26   Operation Solo, 130.

27   Garrow, David. “The FBI and Martin Luther King.” The Atlantic Monthly. July-August, 2002, 80-88.

28   Operation Solo, 270.

29   Operation Solo, 271-272.

30   Intelligence and the Rights of Americans. Book III. See for example p. 95.

31   Garrow, David. FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr: From "Solo" to Memphis. W.W. Norton, New York, 1981.

32   Draper, Theodore H. “Our Man in Moscow.” New York Review of Books. May 9, 1996.

33   Report on Inspection of Domestic Intelligence Division (FBI) 1973, p. 56.

34   Mr. A.H. Belmont to Mr. F. J. Baumgardner. Subject: Communist Party USA Development of Top-Level Security Informants (TOPLEV), Internal Security-C. March 15, 1954. TOPLEV 68. Ernie Lazar FOIA Collection, p. 81. https://archive.org/details/ernie1241_cpusa

35   To Director, FBI From: Special Agent [REDACTED]. Employee Suggestion. 2/9/54. TOPLEV 67. Ernie Lazar FOIA Collection, p. 1. https://archive.org/details/ernie1241_cpusa

36   Thurber, John. “Carl N. Freyman; FBI Spy Recruiter, Handler.” Los Angeles Times. June 11, 2001.

37   Carl N Freyman FBI personnel file. Ernie Lazar FOIA Collection: FBI Employee Requests. FBI Employees: Freyman, Carl N.-4, 14. https://ia601805.us.archive.org/20/items/foia_Freyman_Carl_N.-4/Freyman_Carl_N.-4_text.pdf ”

38   Freyman personnel file, Hoover to Freyman. 1/21/64, 113.

39   Freyman personnel file, Freyman Recommendation for Incentive Award. 1/18/1963, 61.

40   Ibid.

41   Operation Solo, 86.

42   Hass, Jeffrey. “The Assassination of Fred Hampton by the FBI and Chicago Police, Forty Years Later.” Monthly Review. New York, December 2009 (Volume 61, Number 7). http://monthlyreview.org/2009/12/01/the-assassination-of-fred-hampton-by-the-fbi-and-chicago-police-forty-years-later/

43   Operation Solo, 262.

CHAPTER TWO: THE FBI’S MAOIST SECT

1     Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line. US Anti-Revisionism: Third Wave, 1960-1970 - Index Page. Accessed Dec 20, 2016. http://marxists.catbull.com/history/erol/1960-1970/index.htm#adcmlp

2     Freyman FBI personnel file, 116.

3     SAC, Chicago, to Director, FBI. Subject COMMUNIST PARTY USA, COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM—IS-C. 11/20/62. “Wither the Party of Lenin.”

4     Ernie Lazar website of CPUSA Documents. CPUSA 1. “Membership of the Communist Party USA, 1919-1954.” From: FBI monograph, “Membership of the Communist Party USA, 1919-1954,” May 1955, p. iii. https://sites.google.com/site/xrt013/cpusa1

5     Ernie Lazar website of CPUSA Documents. CPUSA 1, FBI, 1962 Inspection Report. Memo to Mr. Tolson Re: Inspection-Domestic Intelligence. https://sites.google.com/site/xrt013/ cpusa1

6     SAC, Chicago, to Director, FBI. Subject COMMUNIST PARTY USA, COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM—IS-C. 11/20/62.

7     Ibid.

8     Darren E. Tremblay’s, The US Domestic Intelligence Enterprise: History, Development, and Operations, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis: Abingdon, UK, 2015 – released after Heavy Radicals – also discusses the AHC, based on evidence from Freyman’s file and the Congressional testimony of FBI informant Gerald Kirk.

9     Martha Wagner Murphy, Chief, Special Access/FOIA Staff National Archives, to Conor Gallagher, August 4, 2014.

10   “Freyman Personnel File.” SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI. 1/22/64, 128-145.

11   Ibid.

12   “Ad Hoc Bulletin.” April 1963. Morris Childs Material Folder 264. Ad Hoc Bulletin, 1963-1971. J. Edgar Hoover Foundation Museum, on loan to Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Reel 25.

13   “Freyman Personnel File.” SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI. 1/22/64, 128-145.

14   Freyman Personnel File.” Addendum-Domestic Intelligence Division, 1/28/1964, 116.

15   Freyman Personnel File.” 140.

16   From SAC Seattle, to Director, FBI. “Communist Party USA, Counterintelligence Program, IS-C. 5/10/65.

17   Ibid.

18   SAC, New York to Director, FBI. Subject “Communist Party, USA. Counterintelligence Program. IS-C. 5/13/66.

19   Ibid.

20   SAC, Los Angeles to Director, FBI. Subject “Communist Party, USA. Counterintelligence Program. IS-C. 11/15/67. “It is also suggested that Chicago may wish to take advantage of this statement in regard to the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, USA.”

21   SAC, New York To Director, FBI. Subject: Victoria Holmes Garvin aka SM-C 3/29/65. Victoria Holmes Garvin File, 100-HQ-379895, 313.

22   For more see Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination, Duke University Press: Durham, 2015.

23   Ad Hoc Bulletin.” Vol. 4. No. 8, December 1966. Morris Childs Material Folder, 264. Reel 25.

24   Ibid.

25   Ibid.

26   Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, Letter to the Guardian on the Guardian Forums. The Guardian, September 5, 1973. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1960-1970/adhoc5.htm

27   Airtel, SAC Chicago, to Director FBI, “Counterintelligence and Special Operation (Nationalities Intelligence) 5/13/69. David Sullivan US Maoism Collection.

28   Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary. United States Senate. Ninety-First Congress, Second Session Part 3, March 11, 1970. Testimony of Gerald Kirk, 234-235.

29   US House of Representatives, Committee on Internal Security. “Progressive Labor Party,” Hearings Before the Committee On Internal Security House of Representatives Ninety-Second Congress. First Session, April 13, 14 and November 18, 1971. Washington: US Government Printing Office. 1972, 4052.

30   Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary. United States Senate. Ninety-First Congress, Second Session Part 3, March 11, 1970. Testimony of Gerald Kirk, 234-235.

31   Ibid.

32   Ibid.

33   Richard J. Ott to SAC Chicago, Subject AD-HOC COMMITTEE FOR A MARXIST-LENIST PARTY, IS-C. Report received from [informant] CG 7015-S 4/17/1968. From the David Sullivan US Maoism Collection, NYU-Tamiment Library. TAM.527, Box 23 Folders: 5-6.

34   Ibid.

35   SAC Chicago to SAC San Francisco. Subject, Bob Fitch 11/15/68. Bob Fitch FBI file 10A0-443800, 155-159.

36   Eckstein, Arthur. Bad Moon Rising: How the Weathermen Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution, Yale University Press: New Haven, 2016, 108.

37   Author email exchange with Bill Ayers, September 9, 2015.

38   Martha Wagner Murphy Chief, Special Access/FOIA Staff National Archives, to Conor Gallagher, August 4, 2014.

39   Robert Reed, Archivist, National Archives. To Aaron Leonard, June 1, 2015.

40   Email from Noah Shankin NARA to Conor Gallagher, August 10, 2016.

41   For more on Bergman see Leonard & Gallagher, Heavy Radicals. Chapter Two, Foundations.

42   Report of SA Wilbert H. Kehe, October 29, 1964. Title: Communist Influence in Racial Matters. FBI Vault. Aoki Part 1, 255. https://vault.fbi.gov/richard-m.-aoki

43   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI. Subject: [REDACTED]. 6/18/68. Bergman Ottawa file 100-OTT-3413.

44   Informant report, 8/6/68 "Information re “’Red Union’ and individuals associated therewith.” Bob Fitch FBI file 10A0-443800, 211.

45   SAC Chicago to Director, FBI. 3/16/71. Leibel Bergman Newark File. 105-23027

46   SAC, Chicago to Director, FBI. Subject: [REDACTED]. 11/27/73. Victoria Holmes Garvin file, 100-HQ-379895, 662-668.

47   Ibid.

48   Ibid.

49   Ibid.

50   Ibid.

51   Ibid.

52   SAC, Chicago to Director, FBI. Subject: [REDACTED]. 11/27/73. “Holmes Garvin File, 100-HQ-379895, p. 668.

CHAPTER THREE: RICHARD AOKI –
THE RELIABLE SOURCE

1     Fujino, Diane C. Samurai among Panthers Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2012, 127.

2     Rosenfeld. Seth. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 421.

3     Richard Aoki, Statement of Personal History, US Army, 29 March 1957. FBI Richard Aoki file. Aoki Part 12, 38.

4     “Fred Ho refutes the claim that Richard Aoki was an FBI informant.” San Francisco Bay View, August 21, 2012. “It is implied by the calumnious assertions by journalist Seth Rosenfeld – whose book is opportunistically coming out today.” Accessed August 14, 2016. http://sfbayview.com/2012/08/fred-ho-refutes-the-claim-that-richard-aoki-was-an-fbi-informant/A
Diane C. Fujino, “Where's the evidence Aoki was FBI informant?” SF Gate, August, 22, 2012. “I also questioned Rosenfeld's motives. Rosenfeld's piece, published the day before the release of his own book, gained him widespread media and public attention that surely will augment sales.” Accessed August 14, 2016. http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Where-s-the-evidence-Aoki-was-FBI-informant-3808396.php

5     In Defense Of Richard Aoki: Prof. Diane Fujino Speaks To College of Ethnic Studies@SFSU, Published September 13, 2012, (Clip 1) at 7:00. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSVQAAtCW28.

6     FBI Report of James A. Sherriff, Report on the Asian American Political Alliance 1/29/70. FBI Aoki Files Section 2-3, 285 & 291. “SF T-1 is SF 2496S ‘[Aoki] …’ SF T1 on September 29, 1969 classified these leaders as follows… According to SF-T1 Harvey Dong occupies a middle position between militant and moderate.”

7     Rosenfeld, Seth. “New FBI files show wide range of Black Panther informant’s activities.” Website, Reveal: From the Center for Investigative Reporting. June 9, 2015. Accessed August 14, 2016. https://www.revealnews.org/article/new-fbi-files-show-wide-range-of-black-panther-informants-activities/

8     Samurai, 10.

9     Peralta Colleges. “Richard Aoki: Committed Revolutionary or FBI Informant? Part 1.” YouTube Video, starting at 15:34. September 13, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRtmVMpv9xk

10   Aoki / Peralta, Starting at 23:00.

11   Ibid.

12   Samurai, 90.

13   See for example “Vietnam War Allied Troop Levels 1960-73. Website accessed 7/28/2016. http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm

14   From SA Burney Threadgill to SAC San Francisco, Subject SF 2496, 11/1/61. Aoki Part 12, 98. Also see “United States v. Eichstaedt, 285 F. Supp. 476 (N.D. Cal. 1967)” “Upon petitioner's enlistment in the Army Reserve, he obtained a 1-D from his Selective Service Board as deferment from induction and he remains deferred so long as he satisfactorily performs his Army Reserve obligations.” http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/285/476/1906988/

15   Subversives, 421.

16   SAC San Francisco to Director, FBI, Subject: Richard Matsui Aoki, aka Richard Ford, SF 2473 PSI, 3/6/61. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 12, 57.

17   Ibid.

18   Ibid.

19   Subversives, 421-423.

20   Samurai, 105.

21   Aoki Film. “AOKI: Full Length Richard Aoki Documentary” (2009). Published January 21, 2014. Starting at 20:00-22:00. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqF2fLGjf9U.Aoki20-22min

22   Aoki Film, starting at 23:00.

23   SAC San Francisco to Director, FBI, Subject: SF 2946 S, 10/29/62. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 13, 52.

24   Report of SA [REDACTED]. October 23, 1963. Title “Committee to Uphold the Right to Travel.” FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 127. https://vault.fbi.gov/richard-m.-aoki

25   Hart, Judy. “‘Revolutionary Socialist’ Leads New Club.” The Tower, 2-26-64. Oakland City College. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 11, 302. https://vault.fbi.gov/richard-m.-aoki

26   SAC San Francisco to Director FBI, 10/29/65. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 14, 49.

27   Ibid.

28   SAC San Francisco to Director FBI, 11/2/66. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 14, 220.

29   SAC San Francisco to Director FBI, 7/19/62. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 13, document 14.

30   SA [REDACTED] to SAC San Francisco, 1/18/65. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 13, 150.

31   SAC San Francisco to Director FBI, 1/11/65. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 13, 145-146.

32   Ibid.

33   SAC San Francisco to Director FBI, 4/19/63. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 13, 137.

34   Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time. Black Classic Press: Baltimore, 1991, 77.

35   “The Secret History of Guns.” The Atlantic Online. Website accessed 7/28/2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/

36   Aoki Films, starting at 42:00.

37   Subversives, 423.

38   Aoki Films. Starting at 19:54 minutes.

39   Aoki Films. Starting at 41:00.

40   Peralta Colleges. “Richard Aoki: Committed Revolutionary or FBI Informant? Part 2.” YouTube Video, starting at 15:07. Posted September 13, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkzYPGYMorw

41   Report of Wilbert J. Weiskirch 11/16/67, “Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPPSD): The Vault.” Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 612.

42   Ibid.

43   Samurai, 146.

44   Ibid.

45   SAC San Francisco, to Direction FBI, SF 2496-S 6/30/67. The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 16, 12-14.

46   Report of Wilbert J. Weiskirch 11/16/67, “Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPPSD): The Vault.” Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 600.

47   SAC San Francisco, to Direction FBI, SF 2496-S 6/30/67. The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 16, 65.

48   See FBI “The Vault” COINTELPRO. https://vault.fbi.gov/cointelpro/cointel-pro-black-extremists/cointelpro-black-extremistspart-01-of/view

49   Informant Report “Rally on Sproul Steps UC Berkeley, Sponsored by YSA.” The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki, Aoki Section 15 p 149.

50   Report of Wilbert J. Weiskirch 11/16/67, “Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPPSD): The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 638. Report references SF-T-1, “SF-T1 is SF 2496 S,” i.e. Richard Aoki, (577).

51   SAC San Francisco, to Direction FBI, SF 2496-S 6/30/67. The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 16, 14.

52   SAC San Francisco, to Direction FBI, SF 2496-S 6/24/68. The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 16, 65.

53   From SAC [REDACTED] to SAC, Subject: Richard Aoki. 4/17/69. The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 15, 3.

54   Samurai, 187.

55   Samurai, 207.

56   The Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley: History. Website accessed 7/28/2016. http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/about/history

57   Kelly Rayburn, Kelly and Kristin Bender. Oakland Tribune “The Third World Strike at 40.” Posted on, www.eastbaytimes. com, 3/20/2009. http://www.eastbaytimes.com/localnews/ci_11911233

58   SAC San Francisco to Director FBI, 3/7/69. “SF 2496 R” FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 15, 21.

59   Memo: University of California, Berkeley (UCB). Third World Liberation Front (TWLF).” February 27, 1969. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 466.

60   Rayburn & Bender.

61   Samurai, 194-195.

62   Delgado, Ruben. The Last Chicano: A Mexican American Experience. Author House, Bloomington: 2009, 195.

63   Samurai, footnote 25, 370.

64   From SA Burney Threadgill, Jr. to SAC San Francisco, 7/18/61. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 12, 79.

65   Samurai, 195-96.

66   From Director FBI to SAC San Francisco. Subject SF 2496 R, 3/5/69. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 15, 30.

67   FBI memo, “Student Agitational Activities at the University of California, Berkeley, California, Fall and Winter Quarters, 1968-1969. April 18, 1969.” FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 2-3, 198.

68   Samurai, 371.

69   SAC San Francisco to Director, FBI. Subject SF 2496 R, 6/30/70. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 6-8, 265.

70   Samurai, 207.

71   Caldwell, Earl. “Newton‐Cleaver Clash Puts Party's Future in Doubt.” New York Times, March 7, 1971.

72   SAC, San Francisco, to Director FBI, 1/5/76. Richard Aoki FBI release, Sections 6-8, 313-314.

73   Ibid.

74   Teletype From San Francisco, to Director FBI, Sept. 28, 1976. Richard Aoki FBI release, Sections 6-8, 311.

75   From San Francisco, to Director FBI, Subject SF 2496IA, 10/13/77. Richard Aoki FBI release, Sections 6-8, 324.

76   “Fred Ho refutes the claim that Richard Aoki was an FBI informant.” San Francisco Bay View, National Black Newspaper. August 21, 2012. http://sfbayview.com/2012/08/fred-ho-refutes-the-claim-that-richard-aoki-was-an-fbi-informant/

CHAPTER FOUR: THE INFILTRATION
OF AMERICA’S MAOISTS

1     SA William R. Sanford, II to SAC, San Francisco, Subject: Revolutionary Union IS-RU, 1/4/71/. FBI Revolutionary Union, San Jose, San Jose Collective, 100-SF-65249 Section 4, 71.

2     US House of Representatives, Committee on Internal Security. Investigation of Attempts to Subvert the United States Armed Services, Part 1. Hearings Before the House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session. Hearings, October 20, 21, 22, 27, and 28, 1971. Washington: US Government Printing Office 1972, 6427.

3     SAC San Francisco to Director FBI. Subject: Revolutionary Union, aka Red Union IS-CH. 8/15/68. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 309.

4     Ibid.

5     Report of SA [REDACTED]. October 23, 1963. Title “Committee to Uphold the Right to Travel. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, document pp. 131 & 151.

6     Ibid.

7     Gilder-Lehman Institute of America History, website, accessed 10/6/2016. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/postwar-politics-and-origins-cold-war/timeline-terms/internal-security-act-1950

8     “Communist Activities in the Buffalo, N.Y. Area.” Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Eighth Congress, Second Session. April 29 and 30, 1964. US Government Printing Office, 1964, 1517 & 1520.

9     Report of [REDACTED], Title: Revolutionary Union, 10/17/68, citing informant SF T-7, 3/25/57. FBI File 1224450-0 -100-LA-72077 - 100-LA-72077-Section 01, 67.

10   The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) Hearing and Riot of 1960: “I was there...”. Found SF website, accessed July 29, 2016. http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=TheHouseUn-AmericanActivitiesCommittee(HUAC)_Hearing_and_Riot_of_1960

11   Deposition, ACLU v. City of Chicago et al 1980, David Ryan, Washington DC April 10, 1980. p 138. Sullivan TAM.528 Box 8, Folder 46.

12   Will We Remember? Friends of Leibel Bergman, 1984.

13   Memo, San Francisco FBI, Title: [REDACTED], 11/29/1968/. From FBI, Bergman-1238854-105-NK-23027 Sec. 1, 36.

14   Ibid.

15   Author conversation with close acquaintance of Leibel Bergman, winter 2015.

16   For more see Leonard and Gallagher, Heavy Radicals, “Chapter Two: SDS, the RU, and the FBI.”

17   FBI informant report on RU executive committee meeting, September 12 1969. FBI file on Jonathan Zatkin, 100-66311, 18.

18   Ibid.

19   America’s Maoists, 26.

20   America’s Maoists, 27. For details on FMC see website FMC. com. http://www.fmc.com/AboutFMC/CorporateOverview/ FMCHistory/Biographies.aspx

21   Goff testimony, 6427. Originally the next level above the Local Executive Committee was the Central Committee but following the October 1970 Central Committee meeting the RU restructured itself renaming this body the Regional Central Committee and deeming the level above that a real National Central Committee as opposed to a “Bay Area CC with a few invited guests from outside the Bay Area.” Internal RU document, FBI File 100-SF65249 Sec. 3, 79.

22   FBI File 100-SF65249 Sec. 3, 21.

23   Informant Report, From: [REDACTED], Received By SA Bert Worthington and SA H. Fox. Description: SJRU Workers Collective #1 meeting on 11/13/70. Date Prepared 11/23/70, FBI File SF, 100-65251, 148-149.

24   SA William R Sanford to SAC San Francisco, Description: Eight Route Army Collective meeting, 11/5/70. Date of Report 11/7/70. FBI File SF, 100-65251, Section 3, 22.

25   Informant Report, From: [REDACTED], Received By SA Bert Worthington and SA H. Fox. Description: Local Exec. Notes 10/16 passed out at Workers Collective SJRU meeting 10/24/70 also “Summary of CC meeting.” Date Prepared 11/10/70, FBI File SF, 100-65251, Section 3, 74-75.

26   Ibid.

27   America’s Maoists, 27 & 53.

28   Goff testimony, 6433.

29   Ibid.

30   Informant Report, From: [REDACTED], Furnished by SA Bert Worthington to SAC San Francisco. Description: “RU Political Committee Report Rec’d at San Jose RU Local Exec Meeting 11/3/70.” Date Prepared 11/10/70, FBI File SF, 100-65251, Section 3, 89.

31   Ibid.

32   FBI San Jose RU File 100-6 San Jose RU File 100-65249 Sec. 4, 40-41.

33   Ibid.

34   Ibid.

35   SA William R. Sanford, II, to SAC San Francisco. Transcribed informant report, “Collective meeting of San Jose RU group which has split from RU, San Jose, CA,” 12/28/70. FBI San Jose RU File 100-6 San Jose RU File 100-65249 Sec. 4, 48.

36   For a fuller discussion of the Venceremos Organization see Heavy Radicals, Chapter Four: “Protracted War or Protracted Struggle.”

37   America’s Maoists, 95.

38   FBI Informant on RU Executive Committee Meeting, September 12 1969. FBI file on Jonathan Zatkin file, 100-66311, 156.

39   Goff’s reference to practice would be invoking Maoist jargon of “revolutionary practice” or working among the masses–though his statements here on their own are rather meaningless. SA William R. Sanford, II, to SAC San Francisco. Re: Venceremos IS-RU “Meeting of the Venceremos Collective, San Jose, RU.” FBI San Jose RU File 100-6 San Jose RU File 100-65249 Sec. 4, 145.

40   Ibid.

41   Ibid.

42   SA William R. Sanford, II, to SAC San Francisco. Re: RU, San Jose, IS-RU “San Jose RU Local Executive meeting, 1/14/71.” FBI San Jose RU File 100-6 San Jose RU File 100-65249 Sec. 4, 160.

43   Ibid.

44   America’s Maoists, 28-29.

45   Goff testimony, 6424.

46   Transcribed informant report. “SJRU Workers Collective meeting 1/13/71.” FBI San Jose RU File 100-6 San Jose RU File 100-65249 Sec. 4, 132.

47   SA William R. Sanford, II, to SAC San Francisco. Transcribed information report. “Meeting of the Eight Route Army Collective, San Jose RU, 1/3/71.” 1/22/71. San Jose RU File 100-65249 Sec. 4, 154.

48   Ibid.

49   Ibid.

50   Goff Testimony, 6430.

51   Robert Reed, Archivist, Special Access and FOIA Staff, NARA RE: FBI case file 100-SF-47339. Correspondence to Conor Gallagher, March 30, 2015. “My initial assessment confirms that Darrell Grover, born March 8, 1934, at Port Chicago, California, is the subject of this file.”

52   From SA Harrison P. Fox, To SAC, San Francisco. Area Meeting of the Red Union held 9/8/68. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 288.

53   SAC San Francisco to Director FBI. Subject: Revolutionary Union, aka Red Union IS-CH. 8/15/68. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 309.

54   Informant Report. Received By H.P. Fox & Bertram Worthington. “Identity of RU Members” 9/25/68. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 277.

55   SAC San Francisco. From, Harrison. P. Fox, “Area meeting of Red Union,” 9/8/68. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 292.

56   Informant Report. Received By H.P. Fox & Bertram Worthington, “Identity of RU Members,” 9/25/68. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 277.

57   Informant Report. Received By S.A. Bert Worthington, SA Harrison P. Fox. “Palo Alto RU meeting 1/8/69, Birthday Party for Mao, 12-26-68,” 1/20/69. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 238.

58   Informant Report. Received By S.A. Bertram Worthington. “SF local RU meeting-general RU info.” 12/24/68. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 228.

59   Transcribed Informant Report. Received By S.A. Bertram Worthington & H.P Fox. “RU area meeting 2/23/69 PARW meeting 2/26/69.” FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 173.

60   Informant Report. Received By S.A. Bertram Worthington & H. Fox. “Exec. Com. meetings 3/2 and 3/9, PARU meeting 3/5/69.” 3/14/69. FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 163.

61   “RU Executive Committee Meeting, San Francisco, California, 2/23/69. Report dated, March 3, 1969. Bureau file, Steve Hamilton, 100-445639, 172.

62   Informant Report. Received By S.A. Bertram Worthington & H. Fox. “Exec. Comm. meeting of RU 3/19/69 & other contacts.” FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 128.

63   SAC, San Francisco (100-61281) to Director, FBI (105-184369). “Revolutionary Union.” April 30, 1969.

64   Informant Report. Received By S.A. Bertram Worthington & H. Fox. “Exec. Comm. meeting of RU 3/19/69 & other contacts.” FBI Steven Charles Hamilton File, 100-54195, 128-130.

65   Ibid.

66   Ibid.

67   Informant report. Received By S.A. Bertram Worthington & H. Fox. “SJRU meeting 9/11/69, ‘Maverick’ meeting 9/16/69.” 9/19/69. FBI file on Jonathan Zatkin file, 100-66311, 25.

68   Ibid.

69   Report from Bert Worthington. “Laura Lei Collins Code name Millie.” 3/24/71. FBI Laura Lei Collins File, 100-461984, 5-6.

70   Report from Bert Worthington. “Laura Lei Collins Code name Millie.” 3/24/71. FBI Laura Lei Collins File, 100-461984, 5-6.

71   Informant Report Received from REDACTED, to SA Bert Worthington, H. Fox, SJRU Workers Collective Meeting 1/30, 31/71, Prepared 2/10/71. FBI 100-SF-65249, p 288-290.

72   SAC San Francisco, to Director, FBI, Subject: Laura Lei Collins, Code Name Millie, SM - RU. 7/19/74. FBI Laura Lei Collins File, 100-461984, 36-37.

73   America’s Maoists, 30.

74   Transcribed informant report. Received from SA Bert Worthington and SA H. Fox. “SJRU Workers Collective #1 meeting on 11/13/70.” 11/8/70. FBI San Jose RU file, 100-SF-65249 Section 3, 16.

75   Transcribed informant report. Received from SA Bertram Worthington and SA Harrison P. Fox. “Four page throwaway received from RU member [REDACTED] who was distributing them, on 10/29/70 at San Jose Demonstration against President NIXON.” 11/25/70. FBI San Jose RU file, 100-SF-65249 Section 3, 111.

76   Memorandum, Mr. R.D. Cotter to Mr. W. C. Sullivan, Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU), Internal Security—RU, March 14, 1969. Bureau Personnel File Bertram Worthington 1332861, Section Two, 171.

77   Bertram Worthington, Performance Rating 4/1/68-3/31/69. Bureau Personnel File Bertram Worthington 1332861, Section Two, 185.

78   Transcribed informant report. Received from SA William R. Sanford. “San Jose RU Local Executive Meeting on 1/26/71. 2/8/71. 100-SF-65249 Section 4, 328.

79   Robert M. Horner to Donald G. Sanders, Chief Counsel, Re: Revolutionary Union. August 17, 1973. University Archives, University of Missouri, Columbia. C.22/9/1 Box 7 FF21.

80   Robert Reed to Conor Gallagher.

CHAPTER FIVE: DON WRIGHT’S RISE IN THE
REVOLUTIONARY UNION

1     SAC Chicago to Director, FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union IS - RU, 2/10/1971. FBI Cincinnati File, 100-18684, 10.

2     Avakian, Bob. From Ike To Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist: a Memoir. Chicago: Insight Press, 2005, 228.

3     Author interview with former RU member, May 2012.

4     Ike to Mao, 227.

5     Ibid.

6     Ibid.

7     Ike to Mao, p. 275. It is of note that the Maywood records consists of twenty-two files totaling one-hundred pages, of which only nineteen pages are not in some way redacted. The earliest file is dated September 24, 1970 and the final one November 29, 1971, which states that the Maywood collective broke up, though the RU would maintain a Chicago area presence long after that.

8     Wright may have been in contact with the RU as early as 1968. In what is likely the first memo written by the Bureau regarding the RU, it states "Pertinent information developed through [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and Chicago informants should be incorporated, paraphrased as necessary, into the RU report and reports on RU members." Director, FBI to SAC, San Francisco, “Revolutionary Union, aka Red Union, Internal Security - RU. August 29, 1968.” Bureau File, Steve Hamilton 100-445639. Document release p. 300. For a full discussion of the struggle with Bruce Franklin see Heavy Radicals, Chapter Four: “Protracted War or Protracted Struggle.”

9     SAC Chicago, to Director FBI Subject: IS-RU 12/17/70. FBI Maywood RU File 100-50161, 34.

10   Ibid.

11   Ibid.

12   SAC Chicago, to Director FBI Subject: IS-RU 12/23/70. FBI Maywood RU File 100-50161, 46.

13   Ibid.

14   Airtel SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI Subject Revolutionary Union IS - RU, 1/28/1971. FBI Cincinnati File 100-18684, p. 3.

15   Ike to Mao. 263.

16   Airtel. SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI Subject Revolutionary Union IS - RU, 2/10/71. FBI Cincinnati File 100-18684, 6.

17   SAC Chicago, to Acting Director, FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) IS-RU 3/6/73. FBI file on Michael Jarvis 100-154229, Vol. 6 ,7 & 13.

18   Airtel. SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI Subject Revolutionary Union IS - RU, 2/10/1971. FBI Cincinnati File 100-18684, 13.

19   Airtel, From SAC Chicago to Director, FBI, 3/1/71. Revolutionary Union (RU), Internal Security-RU. FBI File on San Jose RU 100-65251, 166-169.

20   Ibid. A duplicate copy of that report – obtained earlier – pointedly redacted the city name and gender of the emissary.

21   Airtel, SAC, Chicago to Director FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union, IS-RU, 3/19/71. FBI Cincinnati File 100-18684, 25-31.

22   Ibid.

23   Ibid.

24   Ibid.

25   Wright's position tended to shift from meeting to meeting, consistent only in its militaristic bent. At the Central Committee meeting in October 1970, a report that appears to reference it states: “[He] maintained that the RU can’t field a people's army overnight, however, RU had to start someplace and that means urban guerrilla warfare. [REDACTED] contended that any self respecting revolutionary group east of the Mississippi must talk of armed struggle or else brand itself a farce.” SAC Chicago, to Director FBI, “Revolutionary Union (RU Internal Security — RU,” 10/21/70. FBI 100-CI-18684 Sec.1 & 2, 212. Six weeks earlier at the Midwest Regional meeting he criticized Bruce Franklin “for his notion of military strategy... as essentially self-defense.” Revolutionary Union-Midwest Regional Meeting, February 10 1971. 105-184369, 10.

26   Ibid.

27   Airtel, SAC Chicago, to Director FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union 3/1971. FBI Maywood RU file 100-50161, 28-30.

28   Ibid.

29   Ibid.

30   Ibid.

31   Ibid.

32   Ike to Mao, 251.

33   Ike to Mao, 251.

34   SAC Chicago, to Director FBI, 3/25/71. Subject: Revolutionary Union RU-IS, Leibel Bergman Newark FBI file, 1238854-105-NK-2307-Sec 1, 128-130.

35   “CG 7262-S from Chicago,” referred to in Airtel, SAC, Chicago to Director FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union, IS-RU, 3/19/71. FBI Cincinnati File 100-18684, 20 & 27.

36   Ike to Mao, 262.

37   Airtel SAC Chicago [REDACTED] to Director, FBI [REDACTED]. Revolutionary Union (RU), Internal Security, 1/21/74. FBI Maywood RU File 100-50161, 92.

38   Ibid.

39   “Freyman Personnel File.”

40   Dignity Mercy Funeral Homes website. John W. McCaffrey. October 26, 1935-October 23, 2014.

41   File Review and Summary Clerk Regina T. Jankowski. Subject Steve Charles Hamilton, December 26, 1972. Bureau file, LA 100- 68370, 52.

42   J. Edgar Hoover to Mr. McCaffrey, 5/5/1971 FBI John W. McCaffrey FBI Personnel file, 96.

43   Memorandum, SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI, John Wylie McCaffrey. 4/23/71. FBI John W. McCaffrey FBI Personnel file, 98.

44   Mr. E. S. Miller, to T.J. Smith. Organization IS-3 Section, 3/21/73. FBI John W. McCaffrey FBI Personnel file, 147.

45   SAC, Chicago, to Director, FBI, SA John Wylie McCaffrey. John W. McCaffrey FBI Personnel file, 102.

46   Performance Rating, John Wylie McCaffrey. April 1, 1972-December 29, 1972. John W. McCaffrey FBI Personnel file, 140.

47   H.N. Bassett to Mr. Callahan. Subject John Wylie McCaffrey. John W. McCaffrey FBI Personnel file, 129.

48   McCaffrey: 55, 78, 103, 120.

49   From SAC, Chicago to Director, FBI, Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, USA. Internal Security-ch (Research Section). 5/6/70. David Sullivan Maoism Collection TAM.527, Box 23, folders 5-6.

50   Ibid.

51   Memorandum From SAC, Chicago, To Acting Director, FBI. Subject: John Wylie McCaffrey, Richard H. Nachtsheim, Herbert K. Stallings, James M. Fox, 5/24/72. John W. McCaffrey FBI Personnel file, 119.

52   SAC New York to Director, Subject: Susan Heiligman Frank, 11/1/71, Author’s AHC Compilation file, 42.

53   To: Acting Director, FBI, From: SAC, New York 12/12/72, PRRWO I, 647.

54   Nov. 20 1972 Report Of [REDACTED], RE: Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO) Formerly Young Lords Party (YLP) (report p. 66).

55   Resolutions and Speeches, 1st Congress, Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (Young Lords Party), Revolutionary Union, Speech presented by Bob Avakian. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/prrwo-1/ru.htm

56   SAC Chicago, to Acting Director, FBI, “Revolutionary Union (RU) IS-RU,” 9/27/72. YLP-PRRWO I, 516.

CHAPTER SIX: THE FBI’S REPRESENTATIVE ON
THE NATIONAL LIAISON COMMITTEE

1     Ike to Mao, 275.

2     Airtel, SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI. Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) IS-RU, Sep. 14, 1973. FBI PRRWO File Part II. 105-205390, 84.

3     Bloom, Joshua and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013, 380.

4     “One estimate puts thirty-five people underground during the 1972-73 time frame a count endorsed by several alumni.” Burroughs, Bryan. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. Penguin Press, New York, 2015, 218.

5     In 1971 J Edgar Hoover, discussing the RU, did not give a specific number for membership, writing instead that it was, “not large, perhaps several hundred.” “Mao’s Red Shadow, Reprinted in the Boston Globe, August 18, 1971. By September 1976 the FBI reported “The current membership of the RCP is now approximately 650,” though they also noted that the Revolutionary Student Brigade had 500 members and VVAW 100—without offering what percentage of those groups would have been RCP cadre. Similarly they do not estimate RCP membership in US China People Friendship Association. The RCP never publicly acknowledged or estimated membership numbers.

6     Marxist History: USA: Black Panther Party. The Ten-Point Program. http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/blackpanthers/1966/10/15.htm

7     Manifesto of the Black Workers Congress. Black Workers Congress, Detroit, 1970. http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/bwc-manifesto.pdf

8     “Report of [REDACTED]. Title: Victoria Holmes Garvin. 10/25/72. Bureau file, Victoria Holmes Garvin, 100-NK-37220, 458.

9     Georgakas, Dan. Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. Haymarket Books, Chicago. 2012, pp. 131-147.

10   Ibid.

11   De Leon, David (Ed.). Leaders From the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, London, 1994. 99.

12   “Black Convention: Black Workers Freedom Convention Committee of Atlanta.” Great Speckled Bird, Sept. 18, 1972. Also, Detroit I Do Mind Dying, “By its own estimates BWC never had a formal membership of more than 500—little more than the number that attended the founding convention,” 143. Given only 400 attended the founding and a year later drew only 369 to a meeting that included other organizations, the 500 figure seems inflated. By 1972 the group would likely have been less than 300 members.

13   D.B. “Marxism, Nationalism and the Task of Party Building History and Lessons of the National Liaison Committee.” The Communist, Theoretical Journal of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall/Winter 1977. http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-2/ru-nlc.htm

14   Ibid.

15   Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez, The Puerto Rican Movement: Voice From the Diaspora, Temple University Press Philadelphia 1998, 157.

16   The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization. Committee of the Judiciary United States Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws. James O. Eastland, Chair. March 1976. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1976. Also The Guardian. “YLP Congress transforms party into workers group.” July 12, 1972. http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/ylp-cong.htm

17   Torres & Velázquez, 157.

18   “Interview with former RU comrade 7/2013.” Excerpt From: Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher. Heavy Radicals. iBooks.

19   US Anti-Revisionism. “The New Communist Movement: The Movement Proliferates.” http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/

20   “Youths in Chinatown Open Health Fair.” Special to the NY Times. AUG. 1, 1971. http://www.nytimes.com/1971/08/01/archives/youths-in-chinatown-open-health-fair.html

21   I Wor Kuen. “History of I Wor Kuen.” Published: In the pamphlet, Statements on the Founding of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist), 1978. http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/iwk-history.htm

22   SAC San Francisco to Director, FBI, Subject: Masamichi, Komata, aka Masemici, Omata, Teumasa, Hatano, SM-ANA (New Left-Foreign Influence -Japan), 6/5/70. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 441.

23   SAC San Francisco to Director, FBI, Subject: Red Guard aka IS-CH (Inlet), 2/5/70 FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 658.

24   FBI Report. 7/30/71 Title: Red Guard. FBI Records: The Vault. Richard Matsui Aoki. Aoki Part 1, 674.

25   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI 12/10/73, Subject Revolutionary Union IS-RU, (Mickey Jarvis file). 100-154729, 296.

26   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) IS-RU, Sept 14, 1973. “Power Struggle By RU Leaders.” FBI PRRWO File Part II. 105-205390, 84.

27   Ibid.

28   Ibid.

29   Ibid.

30   Ike to Mao, 275.

31   “RU Power Struggle.”

32   “On the Expulsion of DH Wright” Revolutionary Union. 1973. NYU - Tamiment Archives. TAM 527. David Sullivan US Maoism Collection. Box: 23, Folder 4.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE NEVER-ENDING
CAMPAIGN AGAINST JAMES FORMAN

1     July 23, 1971, Hsinhua News Report, James Forman FBI file, Department of Special Collections and Archives James R. Forman Library Collection, Queens College Library. Series III, FBI Files, Boxes 22-25 & 28. Author compilation, 84.

2     SAC New York to Director, FBI, JAMES RUFUS FORMAN, EXTREMIST MATTERS-SNCC, KEY BLACK EXSTREMIST, August 17, 1971, 89.

3     Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate. Ninety-First Congress, Second Session Part 3, March 11, 1970. Testimony of Gerald Kirk, 153.

4     Airtel, Director, FBI to SAC New York, James Rufus Forman, SM-SNCC BUDED 2/23/68. Queens College (New York, N.Y.) Department of Special Collections and Archives James R. Forman Library Collection, Queens College Library. Series III, FBI Files, Boxes 22-25 & 28.

5     Teletype, New York to Director, Attn. Domestic Intelligence, 4/2/71. Queens College (New York, N.Y.) Department of Special Collections and Archives James R. Forman Library Collection, Queens College Library. Series III, FBI Files, Boxes 22-25 & 28.

6     Fraser, Gerald, C. “SNCC in Decline After 8 Years in the Lead.” New York Times, October 7, 1968.

7     See for example Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, 163. Or Ward Churchill, in an account that attempts to debunk the story, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party.” http://propagandhi.com/wpcontent/empires/Ward_Churchill.pdf

8     FBI Report, James Rufus Forman, September 9, 1968. Report Made by [REDACTED]. Archives James R. Forman Library Collection.

9     FBI Report, James Rufus Forman, August 9, 1968. Report Made by [REDACTED]. Archives James R. Forman Library Collection.

10   Ibid.

11   FBI Memo “James Rufus Forman.” May 6, 1969, Memo page, 27. James R. Forman Library Collection, “James Foreman was deathly afraid of the Black Panthers. He stated this fear stemmed from the reported incident in Forman’s office where a gun was thrust into Foreman’s mouth by a Black Panther.”

12   Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press. Seattle, Second Printing 2000, 522-523. Forman also writes that he called Cleaver the day the story of the alleged gun incident appeared in the New York Times (in October 1968), saying that this seemed to be a divisive plot on the part of the government and that both he and the Panthers should publicly disavow the Times’ claim. Cleaver agreed and said he would call back though as Forman writes, “Cleaver never called me back, and that became the last time I spoke to him.”

13   SAC, New York, to Director, FBI, Subject: James Rufus Forman, Probationary Racial Informant, 7/24/68, James R. Forman Library Collection.

14   Ibid.

15   The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 79-80.

16   SAC to New York to Director, FBI, Subject: James Rufus Forman, Probationary Racial Informant, 8/8/68, James R. Forman Library Collection.

17   Ibid.

18   SAC to New York to Director, FBI, Subject: James Rufus Forman, Probationary Racial Informant, 10/28/68, James R. Forman Library Collection.

19   Ibid.

20   Teletype. New York to Director [FBI] Attn: Domestic Intelligence Division, Pittsburgh. 4//2/71, James R. Forman Library Collection.

21   SAC, New York, to Director, FBI, COINTELPRO, Black Extremists, RM, 7/30/71, James R. Forman Library Collection.

22   Martin, Douglas. “James Forman Dies at 76; Was Pioneer in Civil Rights.” New York Times. January 12, 2005.

23   Black Workers Congress, “Class Struggle and the Black Liberation Struggle: Who Will Lead?” April 1973. http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/bwc-who.htm

24   Detroit I Do Mind Dying, 145-146.

25   Memorandum SAC Chicago [REDACTED], Director, FBI [REDACTED]. Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) Internal Security-RU, 1/31/74. Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, Section 25, 121.

26   SAC Chicago [REDACTED], Director, FBI [REDACTED]. Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) Internal Security-RU, 12/6/73. Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, Section 25, 2-4.

27   Ibid.

28   US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern District. American Civil Liberties Union et al., Plaintiff v. City of Chicago et. al. Defendants. Joseph A. Burton Affidavit. July 22, 1980. p. 2. David Sullivan Maoism Collection TAM.527, Box 23, folders 5-6.

29   Memorandum SAC Chicago [REDACTED], Director, FBI [REDACTED]. Subject” Revolutionary Union (RU) Internal Security-RU, 1/31/74. Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, Section 25, 121-124.

30   Ibid.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE WRECKING OF THE
NATIONAL LIAISON COMMITTEE

1     “NB #13, “On the indefinite suspension of D.H. Wright and his history in our organization.” RU Internal Bulletin, David Sullivan US Maoism Collection. TAM 527 Box: 23 Folder 4.

2     To SAC, Chicago, From: Director, Subject: Revolutionary Union, 12/07/73: Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, Section 25, 34.

3     “Marxism, Nationalism and the Task of Party Building.”

4     I Wor Kuen. “History of I Wor Kuen.” Published: In the pamphlet, Statements on the Founding of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist), 1978.

5     SAC, San Francisco, to Acting Director, FBI, Subject “I Wor Kuen, IS—CH” 8/18/72. . FBI 260140-0-105-201874 Rev 25-AUG-14 - Section 4 [I Wor Kuen], 126.

6     Acting Director, FBI to SAC’s Chicago, Subject: Revolutionary Union, 10/13/72. FBI 260140-0-105-201874 Rev 25-AUG-14 - Section 4 [I Wor Kuen], 164.

7     SAC Chicago, to Acting Director, FBI Subject: Revolutionary Union IS-RU, 11/10/72.

8     Ibid.

9     “History of I Wor Kuen.”

10   SAC Chicago, to Acting Director, FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) IS-RU 6/5/73. FBI file on Michael Jarvis 100-154229, Vol. 6, 175-177.

11   Ibid.

12   Ibid.

13   Ibid. The same report gives an update on the state of Bruce Franklin, late of the RU, and his organization: “The above source advised that RU is aware that Venceremos Organization (VO) had publicly announced they were disbanding, but RU expects them to form a new group or move into an already established organization. The source was not aware of information recently provided by San Francisco that VO may try to align itself with the Cleaver faction of the Black Panther Party (BPP). RU feels that OL may attempt to absorb VO remnants into the OL’s ‘Party,’ but RU does not want ex-VO activists.”

14   Ibid.

15   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI, Sept. 14, 1973, PRRWO II, 86.

16   Solo, 136.

17   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI 10/16/73, Subject Revolutionary Union IS-RU, (Mickey Jarvis file). 100-154729v.6, 263.

18   For more see, Heavy Radicals, 204-205.

19   Jane from the Revolutionary Union to James Burton. Postmark July 4, 1974. FBI Red Star Cadre file 100-3388, 54.

20   SAC Chicago, to Acting Director, FBI, Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) IS-RU 1/16/73. FBI file on Michael Jarvis 100-154229, Vol. 6, 176.

21   Ibid.

22   Ibid

23   NB 13, “On the indefinite suspension of DH Wright.”

24   Notes on discussion with Leibel Bergman by David Sullivan. David Sullivan US Maoism Collection, TAM.527, Box 8 Folder 45. “Liaison cite made + approved a Party-unity motion.”

25   NB 13, “On the indefinite suspension of DH Wright.”

26   Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party. Letter to the Guardian on the Guardian Forums First Published: The Guardian, September 5, 1973. https://www.marxists.org/history/ erol/1960-1970/ad-hoc5.htm

27   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI 10/16/73, Subject Revolutionary Union IS-RU, (Mickey Jarvis file). 100-154729v.6, 178-199.

28   Ibid.

29   Ibid.

30   Ibid.

31   Ibid.

32   “Marxism, Nationalism and the Task of Party Building.”

33   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI 10/16/73, Subject Revolutionary Union IS-RU, (Mickey Jarvis file). 100-154729v.6, 196.

34   “NB #13, On the indefinite suspension of D.H. Wright,” 28.

35   Ibid.

36   Ibid.

37   SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI 12/10/73 Subject: Revolutionary Union IS-RU. FBI Michael Jarvis. 100-154729, 213-216.

38   Ibid. Also, author interview with former RU/RCP member, May 2012.

39   Revolutionary Union. “Red Papers 6: Build the Leadership of the Proletariat and its Party.” National Bulletin #13: Build the Leading Role of the Working Class: Merge the National and Class Struggles. http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-2/rp-6/section3.htm|

40   Ibid.

41   SAC, Chicago [REDACTED] to Director, FBI [REDACTED], 2/22/74. FBI RU File, 100-CG-27305, 194.

42   SAC, Chicago, From: Director, Subject: Revolutionary Union, 12/07/73: Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, Section 25, 34.

43   SAC, Chicago [REDACTED] to Director, FBI [REDACTED], 1/17/74. Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, 72.

44   Teletype - Urgent To Director FBI, [REDACTED]. From, Chicago SAC, 1/9/1974. FBI File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, 36.

45   Airtel From SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI 12/10/73 Subject Revolutionary Union IS-RU FBI file Michael Jarvis, 100-154729, 266.

46   Teletype - Urgent To Director FBI, [REDACTED] SACs New York and San Francisco, From Chicago SAC. 1/9/1974. Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, 36.

47   Chicago SAC [Redacted] to Director FBI [Redacted] 1/17/1974. Subject Revolutionary Union Internal Security, FBI File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, 72.

48   Bredemeir, Kenneth. “Ex-FBI Officials Lose Bid for Trial Dismissal.” Washington Post, December 1, 1978. “W. Raymond Wannall, assistant FBI Director” - Obituary. Washington Post, February 9, 2011.

49   R.L. Shackleford to W. R. Wannall. Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) Internal Security. 10/25/74. PRRWO FBI file, Section, 878-879.

50   Ibid.

51   From SAC Chicago [REDACTED] to Director, FBI [REDACTED]. Subject: Revolutionary Union, Internal Security 1/21/74 Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, Section 25, 93.

52   Klingel, Bill and Joanne Psihountas, leading members of the Central Committee of the RCP. “Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA”. First Published: October 1978. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/rcp-history.htm

53   Hamilton, Steve. “On the History of the Revolutionary Union (Part II).” First Published: Theoretical Review No. 14, January-February 1980. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton2.htm

54   Thanks to Bruce Bernstein, for assisting in this analysis.

55   Airtel From SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI 11/20/73 Subject Revolutionary Union IS-RU. FBI file Michael Jarvis, 100-154729, 280.

56   SAC, Chicago to Director, FBI. Subject: [REDACTED]. 11/27/73. Victoria Holmes Garvin file, 100-HQ-379895, 662-668.

57   SAC Chicago to Director, FBI. Subject: [REDACTED]. 11/27/73. Bureau file, Victoria Holmes Garvin, 100-NK-37220, 664.

58   Notes on discussion with Leibel Bergman by David Sullivan. David Sullivan US Maoism Collection, TAM.527, Box 8, Folder 45.

59   Author interviews with former RCP member, Spring 2012, Summer 2013, and Summer 2015.

60   The FBI file retention procedures stipulate files to be retained (Permanent) and those that can be destroyed (Destroy): “Permanent; multi sectional files—Permanent; all cases that correlate with HQ multi sectional cases—Permanent; all cases that correlate with HQ files with 18 or more serials—Permanent; all cases that correlate with the HQ informational sample— Permanent; all information cases—Permanent; all cases with an institution or organization as the subject—Permanent; all other—Destroy.” To clarify what this means all 100 multisectional files (roughly any files more than 250 pages) are to be retained by the National Archives and record Administration. It is hard to imagine Wright’s file falling below that standard.

CHAPTER NINE: AFTERMATH

1     “FBI, Chicago Illinois, “Revolutionary Communist Party.” September 6, 1976. David Sullivan US.

2     Jeff Chang’s Blog. “Can’t Stop. Won’t Stop.” Friday, April 2nd, 2004. “A Tribute To Richie Perez.” Blog accessed August 1, 2016. http://cantstopwontstop.com/blog/richie_perez/

3     I Wor Kuen. “The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization and the National Continuations Committee” First Published: in a supplement to the IWK newspaper Getting Together, February 1977. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-2/iwk-prrwo-2.htm

4     US Anti-Revisionism. “The New Communist Movement: Collapse and Aftermath.” https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/index.htm

5     Jeff Chang’s Blog.

6     Perez, Iris. Interview With Richie Perez. CENTRO Journal 7, Volume xxi Number 2, Fall 2009, 142-157.

7     SAC Chicago, to Director, FBI. Subject: Revolutionary Union (RU) Internal Security. Jan 31 1974. Chicago RU File 100-CG-27305 of the Revolutionary Union, 123.

8     Author conversation, and with thanks, to Professor Johanna Fernandez, July 2015.

9     From ADIC, New York to Director, FBI. Subject: Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO) IS-PRRWO, 6/8/76, 950.

10   U.S. Anti-Revisionism. The New Communist Movement: Party Building Efforts Continue, 1975-1977. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/

11   “Marxism, Nationalism and the Task of Party Building.”

12   Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London, New York: Verso Books, 2002, 255-256.

13   “Soviet Social Imperialism. Most Dangerous Source of War.” A Commentary by a Hsinhua Correspondent. Peking Review, January 30, 1976. https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1976/PR1976-05.pdf

14   For background see Fredrick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun. The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2008. Maurice Meisner. The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996 and Maurice Meisner, Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic, Third Edition 3rd Edition. Free Press: New York, 1999.

15   The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Compliance with the Attorney General’s Investigative Guidelines [REDACTED], Special Report. Office of the Inspector General, September 2005. https://oig.justice.gov/special/0509/chapter2.htm#58

16   Ibid.

17   Director FBI to SAC Albany. Subject: Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Domestic Security, 5/5/78. FBI Albany RU file 105-8480, 21.

18   Ibid.

19   SAC Seattle, to Director, FBI. Subject: Jan Raymond Ford, SMRCP, 8/18/76. FBI file Jan Raymond Ford 100-HQ-451882, 27.

20   Ibid.

21   Domestic Security (Levi) Guidelines. Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session on The Domestic Investigation Guidelines, June 24, 25; August 11 and 12, 1982. US Government Printing Office, 1993, 157.

22   Kiernan, Laura, A. “FBI Ex-Aides' Trial: Fight Over Memos.” The Washington Post, Oct 14, 1980; pg. A1.

23   Ibid.

24   Levi Guidelines Hearings, 76.

25   “How to Win Friends on Capitol Hill.” The Washington Post, Jun 13, 1971, p. B6.

CONCLUSION

1     Operation Solo, 256.

2     Author interview with veteran RU / RCP member July 2012.

3     “Church Report, Book III,” 7.

4     Author exchange with veterans of the New Communist Movement. Winter 2015.

5     See for example Shadow of the Panther regarding the case of Alex Rackley. Also The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham and the San Quentin Massacre in regard to Fay Stender. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996. Also author interview with former RCP comrade, incorrectly suspected of being an informant. July 2012.

6     FBI.gov, FAQ “What is the FBI’s police on the use of informants.” https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/what-is-the-fbis-policy-onthe-use-of-informants

7     See for example, Eveline Lubbers, Secret Maneuvers in the Dark: Corporate and Police Spying on Activists, Pluto Press, 2012. There have also been in the wake 9/11 a number of domestic terrorism investigations in the U.S. where the main conduit of activity has been the informant themself. Trevor Aaronson, “Terrorists for the FBI: Inside the bureau’s secret network that surveils and entraps Americans.” Mother Jones. September/October 2011. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants

EPILOGUE

1     Operation Solo, 301.

2     Garrow, David. FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr: From “Solo“ to Memphis. W.W. Norton, New York. 1981.

3     Robert Reed, NARA, to Aaron Leonard. June 1, 2015.

4     Ibid.

5     America’s Maoists, 38.

6     NARA to Aaron Leonard.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Conor and I would like to thank the many kind and wise souls who aided in this work. To David Allen for his encouragement and support. To Lincoln Bergman for his vast knowledge and experience. To Mat Callahan and Dennis O’Neill for their continued and heartfelt support of our project. To David Pugh for his key insights allowing us to understand the Revolutionary Union and the Revolutionary Communist Party. To the Tamiment Library and the staff who make it such a treasure. To the staff of the National Archives for their vital assistance. To the Queens College Library and their critical files on James Forman. To the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and their files on Morris Childs and the Ad Hoc Committee. To the late David Sullivan for his pursuit of the truth on Don Wright and the Ad Hoc Committee. To Professor Johanna Fernandez for taking the time to talk and her insights on the Young Lords Party. To Ron Jacobs for his valuable assistance. To Kim Elliot, Kaitlin McNabb at Rabble.ca, Leslie Thatcher, formerly of Truthout, and Rick Shenkman of the History News Network, who have been unstinting in publishing things others will not. To the numerous independent bookstores that welcomed Conor and I to talk about Heavy Radicals, allowing us to engage and be challenged by their patrons, and to those who came to our programs and presentations for their probing questions and invaluable insights. To Allen Yee and Ashvi Dave for taking the time to read our manuscript and their helpful and thoughtful insights. To Doug Lain for his support of our first book. To Tariq Goddard for taking a chance on us only to turn around and take another chance. To the team at Repeater Books for their thoughtful and crucial work that brought this book to fruition. To Susanna Kearney for her generosity in supplying a writing sanctuary. Finally to Emily Paige, Jarina De Marco, Amawta De Marco, and to Irka Mateo, their love gives me cause for hope.

In the end, though, this book, its facts, analysis, and any shortcomings are mine.

Aaron J. Leonard

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A Repeater Books paperback original 2018
1

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright © Aaron J Leonard and Conor A Gallagher 2017

Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher assert the moral right to be
identified as the authors of this work.

Cover design: Johnny Bull
Typography and typesetting: Josse Pickard
Typefaces: Univers/Minion Pro

ISBN: 978-1-910924-70-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-910924-72-3

Printed and bound in Denmark

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.