True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 141: Snitch City
Aired: 2021-03-05
Duration: 01:07:06


=== Graduating to COINTELPRO (04:46) ===

[00:00:00]  Do you think COINTELPRO was like something you graduated to?
[00:00:03]  Like you weren't pro yet?
[00:00:05]  You're COINTEL amateur.
[00:00:06]  Yeah.
[00:00:07]  Yeah.
[00:00:08]  I mean, junior varsity.
[00:00:10]  Here's the thing.
[00:00:12]  You start in high school, you know, you try to make the team.
[00:00:15]  You start snitching on your fucking be like, listen, I saw him cheating on the test earlier.
[00:00:19]  Like, you know, I think she's been late.
[00:00:22]  I don't think, I don't think actually Jimmy's actually sick today.
[00:00:26]  You know, then you graduate and, you know, you, you know, you start buying dime bags of fucking Coke.
[00:00:31]  And then, you know, you call the cops and you're like, please arrest this guy.
[00:00:34]  And they're like, that's too far.
[00:00:35]  I don't know where Hemlock is.
[00:00:38]  And then eventually, you know, you work your way up a little.
[00:00:41]  You start snitching more and more.
[00:00:43]  And yeah, you can make the professionals.
[00:00:45]  Absolutely.
[00:00:47]  Do you think that that still exists now?
[00:00:49]  What's your take?
[00:00:50]  Snitching?
[00:00:51]  No, not snitching.
[00:00:52]  Like a COINTELPRO program.
[00:00:55]  Yeah.
[00:00:56]  Well, I mean, I think it's kind of like in the way that we were talking about earlier this morning is that like, yeah, absolutely.
[00:01:04]  Yeah.
[00:01:04]  But also like just the fact it's the fact that everyone just uses the internet and like their cell phones all the time, it's like you are always on a tapped line.
[00:01:12]  And so like a lot of the work is basically like it can be automated.
[00:01:16]  But like, I mean, do I think that like are like tensions exploited and stuff like, you know, poison letters written, all that kind of stuff?
[00:01:24]  I mean, probably to some extent, but like also people who are involved in radical politics in America are so mentally fucking insane that like you can just wait till someone reveals that they have like an adult baby loving fetish or whatever and you're good.
[00:02:03]  Hello again, Liz.
[00:02:07]  What?
[00:02:07]  You don't like this?
[00:02:08]  I just thought about doing like a baby voice and being an adult baby adult baby way Rio.
[00:02:14]  Wait, what the fuck?
[00:02:16]  You just said I couldn't say that.
[00:02:19]  I know, but then I couldn't stop laughing thinking about it.
[00:02:22]  Can you do it?
[00:02:24]  No.
[00:02:25]  I can start.
[00:02:30]  Okay, shut it down.
[00:02:31]  Start it over.
[00:02:32]  No, no, welcome.
[00:02:35]  So nice dude.
[00:02:36]  I don't know what voice I'm doing.
[00:02:38]  Welcome.
[00:02:40]  I don't think I could do it.
[00:02:41]  No, please do it.
[00:02:42]  Please, I'm not.
[00:02:43]  I'm not.
[00:02:43]  I'm not.
[00:02:44]  Look, I just dropped my phone.
[00:02:44]  I'm not talking anymore until you do it.
[00:02:47]  Hello.
[00:02:49]  Keep going.
[00:02:50]  Keep going.
[00:02:52]  I'm Wiz.
[00:02:54]  I'm Boise.
[00:02:56]  What, John, by Wong?
[00:02:58]  How do you do that?
[00:02:59]  I don't know why.
[00:03:01]  Poor Usa.
[00:03:04]  We can't use any of this.
[00:03:06]  We have to use all of this.
[00:03:06]  We have to use all of this.
[00:03:09]  Okay.
[00:03:09]  Hello.
[00:03:09]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:10]  I'm Brace.
[00:03:11]  We are joined by adult baby producer Young Chomsky, who is just a widow baby who's so helpless in his big diaper on his back.
[00:03:18]  How you go to stand up again?
[00:03:24]  Who does the music for this one, Liz?
[00:03:26]  We'll talk about it later.
[00:03:28]  Okay.
[00:03:28]  Good, everyone.
[00:03:29]  Hello.
[00:03:29]  Welcome.
[00:03:30]  Hi.
[00:03:31]  Truan.
[00:03:32]  Welcome to Two An.
[00:03:34]  Okay, let's just stop it.
[00:03:36]  Okay, yeah.
[00:03:37]  Well, we, yeah.
[00:03:38]  I don't know why we went that direction with the episode we have planned today.
[00:03:44]  Yeah, that is, believe me, we actually have two like scholars on.
[00:03:47]  It's like a serious interview.
[00:03:48]  Very serious people.
[00:03:50]  It's a serious subject.
[00:03:51]  We are talking about Cohen Telpro.
[00:03:54]  We are talking about Cohen Telpro and the Chicago Red Squad, the murder of Fred Hampton, and how some of the stuff maybe isn't like you think.
[00:04:04]  Why are you still laughing?
[00:04:05]  Now I'm doing the regular voice.
[00:04:06]  This is how I talk.
[00:04:08]  No, I'm thinking of Flood.
[00:04:10]  No, no, Liz.
[00:04:12]  No, no, shut it down.
[00:04:14]  Anyways, please, Liz is, she's not even on screen anymore.
[00:04:17]  Please enjoy our interview with Aaron Leonard and Connor Gallagher.
[00:04:34]  All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Quantico.
[00:04:37]  We have with us today Aaron Leonard and Connor Gallagher.
[00:04:42]  Aaron is the author of several books about FBI repression.

=== Chairman Fred Hampton's Murder (06:28) ===

[00:04:47]  And they are both educators, and they are here to help educate us on what exactly went down with this whole Cohen Telpro thing, the murder of Fred Hampton, the Red Squads of the Chicago Police Department, and essentially what came out of that murder in 1969 and the context surrounding it.
[00:05:08]  So welcome to the show.
[00:05:09]  I think we should start off with talking about the actual murder itself, because this movie just came out, you know, Judas and the Black Messiah.
[00:05:19]  Fred Hampton, of course, a very popular sort of figure in American mythology.
[00:05:24]  But I think for those maybe who aren't super familiar with it, what are the circumstances surrounding Chairman Fred Hampton's murder?
[00:05:32]  Well, first, Liz, Brace, good to talk to you actually once again.
[00:05:39]  Pleasure to have you back.
[00:05:41]  So just on Fred Hampton, so he's 21 years old.
[00:05:45]  He's a rising figure in the Black Panther Party in Illinois.
[00:05:50]  He's deputy chairman, and then he becomes the chairman of the Chicago chapter.
[00:05:57]  You know, the panthers in Chicago really only get started at the end of 1968.
[00:06:03]  Uh, so Hampton's tenure is is very brief, but he is uh a very good speaker, very effective speaker and, you know, compared to uh the cohort of uh orators, if you will, of the Black panthers, he's exceptional.
[00:06:19]  Uh, he is early on a target of the Chicago police and the FBI.
[00:06:27]  He's arrested at one point for the looting of an ice cream truck.
[00:06:32]  He's actually convicted.
[00:06:34]  There's debate about whether or not he actually had anything to do with it, but the government authorities were happy to convict him and slap a two to five year sentence on him.
[00:06:47]  He'd actually served some time, was let out pending appeal, and two weeks before he died, the appeal was rejected.
[00:06:55]  So he was confronting returning to prison.
[00:06:59]  If people have seen Judas and the Black Messiah, I mean, the film is accurate in a lot of ways, but as a historian or maybe just as somebody who's studying this stuff, I'm starting to realize that films like this, because I watched this film and the Chicago 7, that they offer a lot of details, but this whole based on fact is take it with a grain of salt.
[00:07:25]  If you're watching something based on fact, it means if you really want to know what happened, you're going to have to read some things, which is not to say don't enjoy the movie, don't be influenced by the power of these films, but don't view them as history.
[00:07:42]  I mean, sad to say, history requires a bit more work than just sitting and taking in a film for two hours, which also wants to interface with your emotions.
[00:07:53]  So Hampton is a rising star, but he's also facing jail, and he's a target of the state authorities.
[00:08:01]  The Chicago police are out for blood because two of their officers are killed in mid-November in a shootout.
[00:08:10]  One of the Black Panthers is killed as well, Jake Winters.
[00:08:14]  So the story this FBI William O'Neill tells, and I guess I tend to give it some credence, is that the Chicago police wanted revenge.
[00:08:26]  Police, unlike the FBI, can tend to be a little bit more Wild West when it comes to doing their stuff.
[00:08:36]  So the Chicago police plan a raid for the early morning hours of December 4th.
[00:08:42]  15 of them approach a house where the Black Panthers are staying.
[00:08:48]  There's nine people in there.
[00:08:50]  The house is actually just a couple blocks from the Black Panther headquarters.
[00:08:54]  I believe the Students for Democratic Society office is in the same neighborhood.
[00:09:00]  Some of your Chicago listeners can probably point on a map where all this is.
[00:09:05]  So the police come in.
[00:09:08]  They claim they're fired on.
[00:09:10]  You know, they're not.
[00:09:11]  90 shots are fired.
[00:09:13]  One shot comes from the Black Panther side.
[00:09:18]  Mark Clark, who is from Peoria, Illinois, he's a Black Panther.
[00:09:22]  He's killed.
[00:09:24]  early on.
[00:09:25]  The police spend 10 minutes in the house shooting people.
[00:09:30]  People are wounded.
[00:09:32]  Fred Hampton is murdered.
[00:09:35]  Fred Hampton is laying in bed with his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson.
[00:09:41]  Johnson actually talks about, I mean, if you actually read her testimony, I mean, the reports have been, well, Hampton never woke up.
[00:09:49]  But actually, if you read through even what Deborah Johnson was saying within a year of this, she says, I don't think he woke up.
[00:09:58]  So the question of whether or not he was conscious is open, although it reads like he was having trouble waking up, which suggests perhaps he had been drugged.
[00:10:10]  There's conflicting toxicology reports.
[00:10:13]  Hampton is dead.
[00:10:15]  There's a famous picture of the Chicago police carrying him out, and one of them has this just evil smirk, and another is kind of like, seems to be happy.
[00:10:25]  I mean, it's celebration time for the Chicago police and celebration for the FBI.
[00:10:31]  The FBI give their informant a $300 bonus.
[00:10:35]  And in the document, you know, I just got in Roy Mitchell's file, they give the FBI handler of the informant a bonus of $200.
[00:10:45]  So the FBI is celebrating, as are the Chicago police, this young black man has been murdered in his bed, full of promise.
[00:10:53]  And it's like they're celebrating.
[00:10:55]  As for people who look to someone like Hampton and supported him, there is outrage and there's grief.
[00:11:05]  And that's where really the story just starts.
[00:11:07]  And here we are in 2021 and we are still telling this story.
[00:11:13]  And still trying to put the pieces together.

=== FBI's Illicit Undermining (10:57) ===

[00:11:15]  It seems like a lot of your work, your research around this is really focused on, you know, okay, these are the things we know from a myriad of sources, but there's so much we still don't know, right?
[00:11:28]  We don't really know how much the, you know, or how exactly the cops, the local cops were working with the FBI, how much the FBI is responsible for here versus the Chicago police.
[00:11:43]  A lot of that is up for debate.
[00:11:45]  And for some people, maybe this sounds, I don't know, not unimportant, but maybe not the most, the biggest part of the story, the biggest thing to focus on in the story.
[00:11:56]  But it's actually pretty interesting, you know, trying to tease out exactly how local police worked with the FBI to infiltrate and spy on and break apart, you know, growing radicalism.
[00:12:10]  I mean, here in this case in Chicago.
[00:12:12]  Yeah, I wonder, Connor, to Liz's point, maybe you could talk about what exactly the black nationalist COINTELPRO hate was, because I think understanding that is critical to understanding then interfacing with local red squads.
[00:12:27]  Yeah.
[00:12:27]  So before we're talking before we're on air about sort of what people think they know about COINTELPRO, and there's been a lot of sort of common wisdom that's been handed down that actually isn't entirely correct.
[00:12:39]  And some of this is understandable since initially we only found out about COINTELPRO when some activists broke into the media Pennsylvania FBI office, stole some of those FBI files and alerted the world to what was actually going on with the FBI.
[00:12:54]  And as over time, people have accumulated more files, but we're still largely, I feel, working on sort of a partial picture.
[00:13:02]  And that partial picture, that first draft at some point became sort of the template or the Bible.
[00:13:07]  And part of what we've been trying to do is fill in some of those pieces, right?
[00:13:11]  So part of mentioning like the Red Squads, which are sort of, for shorthand, they're basically sort of the police intelligence units within like city police, right?
[00:13:21]  And then there's the FBI, which is a national organization.
[00:13:24]  And there's two implications of that.
[00:13:26]  One is how they're functioning, local versus national, but then there's also a much different sophistication.
[00:13:32]  And this is to your point, this might seem like just sort of getting into details that aren't very important, but it is actually worth understanding how these things work differently, right?
[00:13:43]  Because when I look at the murder of Fred Hampton, I sort of see a cop solution to a Panther problem and not an FBI solution to a Panther problem in the sense of the FBI is much more sophisticated in what they're doing.
[00:13:57]  And so I think activists can sometimes pat themselves on the back for going to a protest or a meeting and saying, oh, there's the police undercover.
[00:14:06]  And I think they sort of have the same attitude with the FBI.
[00:14:11]  But as we've uncovered, wrote about in the first two books of Heavy Radicals and Threat First Magnitude is Chicago especially was incredibly sophisticated.
[00:14:22]  This is the area where they developed a fake communist organization.
[00:14:26]  And when I say develop fake communist organization, I'm talking about developing full propaganda, sophisticated, knowledgeable in the scene, able to speak the language, able to convince international communist leaders around the world that they're a real group based on their writings.
[00:14:42]  And so, And if and look, we've had access to look at some FBI files.
[00:14:47]  I've had access to look at some police files from some places like Chicago and Portland.
[00:14:52]  And there's just a world of difference.
[00:14:54]  Everything with the police is really about brute force to solve any problem.
[00:14:58]  There's not sophistication, right?
[00:15:00]  And we can see this specifically in the example of Chicago, right?
[00:15:04]  Because the police, when the police come in and do a raid, they will essentially come in full force, firing.
[00:15:12]  One point, they even set a Panther office on fire.
[00:15:15]  And the FBI, there's this bizarre paradox with the FBI.
[00:15:19]  If Hoover is so obsessed with the law, he's willing to break the law to catch lawbreakers.
[00:15:24]  And so he's really obsessed by doing things by the book, even while he's illegally undermining people at the same time.
[00:15:30]  Sounds very strange.
[00:15:32]  And so there actually was a raid by the FBI in the same year as a police raid in 69.
[00:15:39]  But the FBI, no shots were fired on each side.
[00:15:42]  And the FBI, and this also shows how the FBI does things.
[00:15:45]  They had the pretext to do this because there is this, their claim that a FBI, I mean, a Black Panther who was on the run, who had from New York, had come through the Chicago office.
[00:16:01]  That essentially makes it a federal case.
[00:16:03]  The FBI then had a claim to raid.
[00:16:05]  Whereas the Chicago police, the only reason they need to raid the Chicago Panther office is they wake up that morning.
[00:16:11]  So there is definitely this thing of trying to do things by the book at the same time as they're illegally undermining this organization.
[00:16:18]  And the whole reason of what a bunch of people were arrested in that July raid by the FBI, but why didn't any arrests come from it?
[00:16:26]  Because all the charges had to be dropped.
[00:16:28]  And the reason the charges dropped is because the FBI didn't want to reveal who their agent was that they got the information from.
[00:16:33]  Because for the FBI, that's actually much more important to them, is gaining information and keeping tabs on people.
[00:16:39]  And we now know that person who was giving the information was almost likely William O'Neill.
[00:16:44]  Whereas the police don't really care about things so sophisticated as what is the top leadership saying?
[00:16:49]  What are the divisions, right?
[00:16:51]  Because the FBI had been doing this for decades.
[00:16:53]  They'd started Cointel Pro in 1956.
[00:16:57]  And by the late 60s, they've opened Cointel Pro against what they call black extremists or black hate groups.
[00:17:04]  And so they had developed much more sophisticated techniques and they realized how important information was.
[00:17:09]  And that so much so that they did not want to risk outing their informant just to get eight Panthers arrested.
[00:17:18]  So when we say opened a COINTELPRO, just for our listeners, what exactly do we mean when we say that?
[00:17:23]  Because, you know, I think, again, COINTELPRO gets, has kind of been memed into being this sort of catch-all for what was actually a bunch of maybe specific instances and now, you know, arguably is just general practice among the feds.
[00:17:40]  But when we say like opened a COINTELPRO, what do we mean exactly when we say that?
[00:17:46]  Yeah, so I want to tackle that because I was actually looking back at Ward Churchill and Jim Vanderall's Vander Waals book on agents of repression.
[00:17:57]  And they actually have this definition right at the top, regardless of its precise technical meaning in Bureau Ease.
[00:18:06]  COINTELPRO is now used as a descriptor covering the whole series of sustained and systematic campaigns directed by the Bureau against a wide array of selected domestic political organizations, individuals.
[00:18:24]  So, you know, I read that and I was a little appalled because basically Ward Churchill and Jim Vanderal are saying, well, it doesn't matter what the FBI thinks COINTELPRO.
[00:18:35]  Here's what people think it is.
[00:18:37]  And we're going to write a book based on that.
[00:18:40]  You know, look, I mean, the spirit and their intentions, I'm certainly not questioning them.
[00:18:46]  You know, the book was helpful for me in terms of spurring me to dig further.
[00:18:51]  That said, COINTELPRO was something very specific.
[00:18:55]  Counterintelligence is when you try to undermine your enemy.
[00:18:59]  Intelligence is when you try to understand your enemy.
[00:19:03]  And the FBI was doing both things.
[00:19:06]  The counterintelligence program proper against black extremists had five points.
[00:19:12]  If people watch Judas and the Black Messiah, they hear Martin Sheen as J. Edgar Hoover saying the Panthers are a bigger threat than China and the USSR, which is the actual inverse of the way J. Edgar Hoover thought of things.
[00:19:27]  He thought the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists were the biggest threat to U.S. national security.
[00:19:34]  He was always looking for foreign ties in investigating domestic surveillance.
[00:19:41]  Famously so.
[00:19:42]  The COINTELPRO Black hate is five points.
[00:19:45]  I'm not going to outline them all, but they don't want organizations to work together.
[00:19:50]  They don't want youth to be influenced by these groups.
[00:19:55]  And they don't want a black messiah.
[00:19:58]  And when they say black messiah, they have something very specific in mind.
[00:20:02]  Elijah Mohammed, Malcolm X, had he lived, Martin Luther King, if he had taken a radical turn, people who literally led and influenced thousands of people.
[00:20:13]  The best example is what they did to Kwame Touré, Stokely Carmichael, who was seen as a black messiah.
[00:20:22]  He was literally hounded out of the country.
[00:20:25]  Most of these, well, I'll save that point.
[00:20:29]  So it's very specific.
[00:20:30]  And Liz, what a COINTELPRO is, it's an idea which they write up in a memo.
[00:20:38]  And we have this in this article we're currently running in Jacobin.
[00:20:42]  They wanted to do a counterintelligence program against Fred Hampton.
[00:20:46]  It's one of the few times you, it's actually the only time I've heard of a specific effort aimed at Hampton.
[00:20:54]  And I actually, Connor, I actually just discovered a document where it's, this COINTELPRO is aimed at Fred Hampton and redacted.
[00:21:02]  The redacted name is actually Bobby Rush, who's the Chicago.
[00:21:07]  Minister of Defense.
[00:21:08]  The COINTELPRO is basically this.
[00:21:12]  You know, Fred Hampton may be moved to the Oakland office, which is the national headquarters of the Panthers.
[00:21:18]  You know, we don't want that to happen.
[00:21:20]  Here's what we can do to make trouble for him.
[00:21:23]  We're going to send a letter to Oakland saying essentially, you know, Hampton's been throwing his weight around.
[00:21:30]  He recently suspended a group of us Panthers.
[00:21:33]  He's been talking shit about you out there.
[00:21:36]  You know, he's saying the only time the national leadership wants to hear from Chicago is when they need money.
[00:21:42]  So the letter was proposed.
[00:21:44]  It was never sent because Hampton was murdered before it was sent, which kind of raises the big elephant in the room, which is that if the FBI had actually thought that they were going to kill Fred Hampton, why would they be pursuing this letter?
[00:21:58]  Now, of course, they could have just been dealing on two tracks.
[00:22:01]  And I'm not saying the FBI might have not had a much more intimate understanding of circumstances that would lead to the killing of Fred Hampton.
[00:22:11]  They may have.

=== Activist Perceptions of COINTELPRO (15:34) ===

[00:22:12]  The evidence, I don't think, is there.
[00:22:15]  And the evidence is actually kind of important.
[00:22:18]  And one last point is, as we were talking before we went live, the details do matter.
[00:22:26]  Because if you're dealing with, you think, an omnipotent FBI that's able to kill people and get away with it, keep it secret for 51 years so that the wider American public, if you will, doesn't know about it.
[00:22:40]  Well, that's one thing.
[00:22:41]  But if you actually look under the hood at the actual details and mechanics, you see a lot of other things going on.
[00:22:48]  Connor's point in particular about not wanting to expose methods and resources is one of the reasons we don't know a lot of this.
[00:22:56]  So, you know, I'll stop on that point.
[00:23:09]  So I just I just want to add something because it is actually it might seem mundane and some activists might have this opinion of what does it matter if it all falls under the FBI's umbrella?
[00:23:20]  But there is a difference between intelligence, counterintelligence, as Aaron was just speaking to.
[00:23:26]  And it's actually important because, I mean, one sort of shorthand oversimplification is when the FBI is listening, that's intelligence.
[00:23:34]  And when they're talking, that's counterintelligence.
[00:23:37]  Because there's this idea of like splits and divisions that have been created by groups.
[00:23:42]  A lot of that is the famous poison pen letters or they're making fake flyers or like the fake coloring books and all that stuff did damage.
[00:23:50]  But what's worth remembering is majority of material they sent from one group to another anonymously was actually real material, but that had polemics or sort of criticisms of other groups.
[00:24:03]  And that they themselves organized under intelligence because they were essentially sharing what was public information.
[00:24:08]  They were just sort of pushing it in the direction of saying, hey, this group just wrote an essay about why you're a revisionist group and not a bunch of real communists.
[00:24:16]  So it's actually important to realize that these divisions weren't just manufactured out of thin air by the FBI.
[00:24:22]  They were actually playing on existing divisions because the first attempt of something like this, they tried with the Communist Party, this thing called Operation Hoodwink, where they tried to essentially, this is a cointel operation where they essentially tried to pit the local La Costa Nostra against the Communist Party with the idea that the FBI didn't particularly like either one of them.
[00:24:42]  And if they could knock each other out, that would be great.
[00:24:44]  But it didn't really work that well because they, well, they didn't, while the La Costa Nostra and the Communist Party didn't like each other very much, they weren't actually sort of politically on the same page so that their divisions matter very much.
[00:24:58]  And they learned from the fact that after two years of that operation, they basically shut it down.
[00:25:02]  And then it became a lot more sophisticated where you have the things of like, when they find out about disagreements between Huey Newton and Elders Cleaver, they're like, oh, here's something we can actually work with.
[00:25:12]  So it's not that they invented these divisions between Cleaver and Newton.
[00:25:15]  They found them out and then they pushed them as much as they could.
[00:25:18]  So yeah, that's sort of what it seemed like to me is that COINTELPRO, these agents were really expert and essentially gathering intelligence on the people that, of course, they're spying on and then exploiting that intelligence, which I guess is the purpose of gathering it in the first place.
[00:25:36]  The Communist Party versus the Mafia would be a fantastic battle, but I think that mostly played out in Italy rather than America.
[00:25:46]  But yeah, Aaron, you wanted to add something, right?
[00:25:48]  Well, yeah.
[00:25:49]  So, you know, Connor and I wrote this book.
[00:25:52]  So, okay, so this is a plug for the book, but this is not a shameless plug.
[00:25:56]  This is a relevant plug.
[00:25:58]  We wrote this book, A Threat of the First Magnitude, in which we attempted to understand the infiltration methods historically, and particularly of the FBI.
[00:26:12]  And if you do that, you know, you begin to understand that the FBI, you know, they're able to do, you know, walk and chew gum at the same time, right?
[00:26:24]  At first, they have a whole criminal division, but then they had a whole national security focus.
[00:26:32]  But one of the things they wanted to do was to get informants into organizations early on and get them in a position to be promoted.
[00:26:41]  And the thing is, is if you just focus on Fred Hampton as a black messiah murdered by the FBI, you're only going to understand a little bit of the picture.
[00:26:52]  You know, for example, William O'Neill joined the Panthers as it was forming.
[00:26:57]  So he was on the ground floor, which put him in a position of more trust.
[00:27:02]  As the group is forming, it's not vetting people in the same way as when it's got a little bit of clout and it's more and more worried about infiltrators coming in.
[00:27:13]  You tend to trust the people who come in at the beginning.
[00:27:16]  And even if you don't, a lot of times you're too busy.
[00:27:21]  O'Neill comes in early.
[00:27:22]  Okay, first he gets himself up to the position of head of security.
[00:27:27]  I just discovered, you know, the FBI has been forced to release a bunch of documents because of the JFK 1992 investigation, congressional ruling.
[00:27:39]  There's this 1,636-page document dump on Fred Hampton that I don't think anybody's read.
[00:27:47]  You know, people kind of figured, I mean, a bit of aside, there's this notion that people know everything.
[00:27:54]  And among a certain type of activist, there's a notion that they know more than the FBI.
[00:28:01]  I think I used to be one of those people.
[00:28:04]  And I've learned that I don't know a lot about the FBI.
[00:28:09]  In fact, they're a little bit different than what I thought they were.
[00:28:12]  Liz and I were actually talking about this this morning, I think in basically those precise terms.
[00:28:17]  Well, it's a good talk people to have.
[00:28:20]  Mao Setong, one of my old favorites, said you should have tactical, strategic contempt and tactical respect.
[00:28:30]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:28:31]  Well, the FBI certainly had that for the Soviets, you would say.
[00:28:35]  Yeah, and the Chinese.
[00:28:37]  For sure.
[00:28:38]  But back to O'Neill.
[00:28:39]  So he comes in on the ground floor.
[00:28:40]  He becomes head of security.
[00:28:42]  You know, I just discovered a document in this 1600-page dump where he was director of operations of the Illinois chapter by July 1969.
[00:28:55]  He didn't want to continue as a head of security.
[00:28:59]  And my sense was it was too fraught.
[00:29:01]  Too many people pointing fingers.
[00:29:03]  And he didn't want to get in the midst of that.
[00:29:04]  So he actually got promoted.
[00:29:07]  You know, and that's beyond what we say in the article of he thought he might get promoted if Bobby Rush, who was facing a weapons possession charge, went to prison.
[00:29:18]  So O'Neill is actually rising up the ranks.
[00:29:21]  He's not just, he's not just a provocateur, which I think people want to say, oh, he was just set this up and he made Kool-Aid with Barbitu.
[00:29:30]  Sometimes people say it's just like a bodyguard.
[00:29:33]  Yeah, it's much more complicated than that.
[00:29:35]  And there is more to learn.
[00:29:37]  The other thing I just got a note from a colleague today is Bobby Rush is pushing on the representative, the congressional representative from Chicago is pushing on releasing all documents relating to the Hampton thing.
[00:29:54]  My personal view is, you know, you can't just ask for the Fred Hampton files.
[00:29:59]  You've got to ask for the Chicago COINTEL profiles.
[00:30:02]  And I suspect there's a hornet's nest of interesting stuff there, which probably for another episode.
[00:30:09]  But Chicago is, it's, you know, and Connor can speak to this.
[00:30:13]  It's like it's a certain headquarters and a hotbed for counterintelligence operations.
[00:30:20]  Why do you think that is?
[00:30:22]  Or what kind of makes Chicago like special in this way when you think about, you know, in the history of this program?
[00:30:29]  I think it probably evolved out of their efforts against the Communist Party.
[00:30:34]  I think it might have been somewhat accidental.
[00:30:37]  Morris Childs, right?
[00:30:38]  Connor, correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:30:40]  Morris Childs is this former communist who flips in the mid-50s and becomes an FBI informant.
[00:30:48]  He becomes Gus Hall's bagman traveling back and forth to the Soviet Union.
[00:30:55]  And him and his brother.
[00:30:57]  Yeah, Jack, right?
[00:31:00]  But I think Morris is in Chicago.
[00:31:02]  He's recruited there.
[00:31:03]  And it's such a coup that I think a lot of things developed further.
[00:31:06]  And plus, Chicago is central, so it's easy.
[00:31:11]  Right, of course.
[00:31:12]  Before the internet, getting from here to there was not so easy.
[00:31:16]  So going from New York to L.A. is one thing, going from New York to Chicago is another.
[00:31:21]  A little bit of speculation on my part, but Carl Freeman headed up the Chicago Counterintelligence Office.
[00:31:29]  He's the guy who recruited this guy, Morris Childs, and he had a deputy who actually started a lot of efforts against the Communist Party and members of the new communist movement.
[00:31:43]  So, you know, that's the other thing about Fred Hampton is it's all Fred Hampton Black Panthers.
[00:31:49]  I'm actually curious about Fred Hampton Students for a Democratic Society, Fred Hampton, Young Lords Party, Fred Hampton Rising Up Angry, you know, because he's working with all these different parties.
[00:32:02]  I was about to say, I was about to say, I mean, Chicago, famously the site of the first, and I would say probably only really, you know, dangerous iteration of the Rainbow Coalition because, you know, it had long been a site of this certain kind of white organizing, I guess you could say.
[00:32:21]  You would join there, you would ERAP, and then a lot of those efforts try to translate into like the Young Patriots organization.
[00:32:28]  And you had, I mean, they show this very kind of, you know, they don't really elaborate it on the movie.
[00:32:34]  They show like Fred Hampton going to like a church with a Confederate flag in it.
[00:32:39]  But they don't show, I mean, the Young Patriots were not like a Confederate organization.
[00:32:43]  I mean, they had Third World Liberation in their charter.
[00:32:46]  I mean, their charter was just the Black Panther 10 points.
[00:32:49]  Maybe they made it 11 points or something like that.
[00:32:52]  But, you know, you had this really sort of at the time, unique mix of organizing across like both racial and neighborhood lines.
[00:33:01]  I mean, because that's, I mean, often how it turns out, you know, you live in the same neighborhood as people of your race.
[00:33:07]  And you had this sort of joint effort by Fred Hampton and these, you know, and leaders of these other organizations.
[00:33:13]  The Young Patriots, the guys from that organization love the names.
[00:33:16]  There's one guy named Junebug Boykins, which is just like classic name for a guy like that.
[00:33:22]  You know, these guys have these fucking kind of poppy doors.
[00:33:25]  Chicago.
[00:33:26]  Yeah.
[00:33:26]  It's, I mean, yeah.
[00:33:28]  And Preacher Man, which I think is another great name.
[00:33:31]  I think that guy actually spoke at this big 69 conference that the Panthers had in Oakland.
[00:33:36]  I actually got William Fesperman's FBI file, and that's Preacher Man.
[00:33:41]  The FBI was very concerned with him.
[00:33:43]  And one of the objectives of COINTELPRO was to keep organizations from joining together.
[00:33:49]  So if you want to understand what was going on against Hampton, probably you should look at the interactions of these organizations because there would be COINTELPROs to try to split people apart.
[00:34:01]  That's actually the first point in that document that you guys got from this FOIA dump.
[00:34:07]  In the goals section, it says, number one, prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.
[00:34:11]  In unity, there is strength, a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness.
[00:34:16]  That's a good way to phrase it there.
[00:34:18]  An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step towards a real Mau Mau in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.
[00:34:24]  Of course, the Young Patriots and the Young Lords famously not black organizations, but the line of thinking remains the same, is that there was this coalition effort.
[00:34:34]  And this wasn't, you know, just like, you know, some SDS kids being like, you know, we're friends with the Black Panthers, you know, in Indianapolis or whatever.
[00:34:42]  I mean, these were actual sort of neighborhood proletarian groups.
[00:34:47]  And that, I think that also in the popular narrative is why Hampton was killed.
[00:34:53]  Like that's, that's sort of how I sort of understood it vaguely for a while is that like, well, Fred Hampton was bringing together the Rainbow Coalition and, you know, they marked him because he fucking, he was hanging out with, you know, guys in cowboy hats and, you know, guys in different colored berets.
[00:35:12]  You know, the truth is different than that, but like certainly, I was talking to Liz about this this morning is that like, I don't think that there is any way that Hampton could have survived the late 60s to early 70s, whether that means he would have been driven insane, put in prison, driven into exile, or killed.
[00:35:27]  I mean, I think there's essentially no way that he would have made it.
[00:35:31]  I mean, the moment he sort of became who he became, he was a doomed man.
[00:35:36]  But I think the important thing to know is that like a doomed man doesn't just mean you're executed.
[00:35:42]  It could mean you're driven out of the country.
[00:35:44]  And back then, you know, there was a much bigger deal.
[00:35:46]  It's a lot harder to talk to your comrades back in America from Algeria, for instance, when you're having to write them letters and maybe making a very expensive phone call.
[00:35:54]  And so I think that like there was essentially no way Hampton would have survived in any sense, even if he hadn't been killed in 69.
[00:36:03]  Well, just to respond, I don't know, Connor, if you want to jump in on that or anything, but because it's an interesting thought experiment of, you know, the counterfactual had Hampton lived.
[00:36:13]  I mean, one thing I, again, a new document I just discovered is Hampton was being considered to take David Hillier's spot in the National Office of the Black Panthers if David Hilliard had gone to prison.
[00:36:28]  Well, David Hilliard didn't go to prison until 1971, so that was probably a non-starter.
[00:36:35]  But a lot of these, you know, the people who did survive that period basically either, you know, did like Eldridge Cleaver and came back and, you know, attempted to reintegrate in society in kind of humiliating ways, or they, you know, they tended to walk both sides of the.
[00:36:54]  Kind of with Eldridge Cleaver.
[00:36:56]  I know that's a bit of an understatement.
[00:36:57]  Eldridge Cleaver's reintegration in society is an exercise in humiliation.
[00:37:02]  The cod piece pants?
[00:37:04]  I knew the cod piece pants would come up.
[00:37:08]  But, you know, like James Foreman.
[00:37:11]  James Foreman is instructive as someone else.
[00:37:13]  James Foreman, unlike John Lewis, was also, who had also been a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, actually became part of the Black Workers Congress.
[00:37:25]  He became a Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, ended up not working out, but the people who really wanted to cross the bridge into the 70s had to get with and stay political, had to get with some kind of organization with more of a strategic view.
[00:37:44]  You just can't be out there, you know, in this.

=== Richard Aoki's Fascinating Story (09:04) ===

[00:37:47]  Connor's described this really well, this escalating dynamic of raid self-defense, raid self-defense, which becomes more and more murderous.
[00:37:58]  It's unsustainable.
[00:38:00]  I don't know, Connor, I mean, maybe you can talk some more about, you know, crossing that bridge and the difference between the outlook in 1969 and what people had to do to go ahead.
[00:38:14]  Well, I mean, I think part of this speaks to what we were talking before of like Cointel Pro and intelligence and that's all sort of merged together.
[00:38:22]  And I think there's also a similar thing of there's kind of this crude, vulgar Marxism that exists among a lot of activists today that sort of this state is and is this nice cohesive thing where everything works very cooperatively and in like a very well-oiled conspiracy.
[00:38:38]  And it's far messier and complicated than that.
[00:38:41]  I mean, I was alluding to that before, talking about how much different the Red Squads were versus the FBI.
[00:38:47]  Now, and to the point about what Hampton survived this is, In one sense, I think the FBI thought they had Hampton.
[00:38:54]  I think the impression I get from reading is they thought they had him boxed in with the ice cream truck thing.
[00:39:00]  And that was essentially going to push him out of the way.
[00:39:03]  Because for the FBI, there's a number of things you can do.
[00:39:06]  They also did snitchjacking, which essentially was essentially trying to discredit people.
[00:39:10]  And so, you know, by the end, you have some people in the Panther Party saying that Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Tarai, one of those people identified as a potential black messiah.
[00:39:21]  Well, you had people in the Panther saying he was a CI agent by the end, right?
[00:39:25]  So there's many ways they can go to do this.
[00:39:28]  In fact, part of why this movie exists, part of why we're talking about it is I don't want to minimize the horrific murder of Hampton and Clark, but it makes much more out of people when they become martyrs than if you can discredit.
[00:39:43]  I mean, I'm sure the FBI is much happier with the way Huey Newton died than the way Fred Hampton died.
[00:39:50]  Absolutely.
[00:39:50]  Yeah.
[00:39:51]  And so there's many ways for the FBI to discredit people.
[00:39:54]  And they potentially use lots of methods.
[00:39:57]  When they found out about typically male members' infidelities, they would try to make a point of sending anonymous letters, things like that.
[00:40:06]  So there's many ways they have to undermine people.
[00:40:10]  And I'm not saying, oh, the FBI wouldn't kill people because they're somehow above that.
[00:40:14]  I just think that they're almost more ruthless and more strategic in realizing how much more valuable it is to discredit people, to snitchjacket people, to make people suspicious of each other.
[00:40:26]  Because I think without a doubt, if you interview anyone who's familiar with the Black Panther Party, no one's in better standing than Fred Hampton.
[00:40:33]  Yeah.
[00:40:35]  Few kind of, like I was saying, like few came out of that like unscathed or with their reputations, their lives or, you know, their ability to operate legally intact.
[00:40:44]  I mean, that's, that's the thing is like the FBI in this case, I mean, it's a national federal organization.
[00:40:50]  They have the long view, right?
[00:40:51]  And they have the interests of national security, sort of their interests of national security, which I guess are the interests of U.S. national security first and foremost in their minds.
[00:41:01]  Whereas these local organizations, I mean, they were directly involved in these like shootouts with the Panthers and stuff like this.
[00:41:06]  And so there's sort of a smaller way of looking at it.
[00:41:10]  Now, I think with these fusion centers and this integration with local PDs, I mean, look at New York Police Department's fucking intelligence division would probably make most countries, you know, military intelligence blush.
[00:41:23]  But at the time, especially, I mean, this is Chicago PD, famously one of the most fucking pigheaded.
[00:41:30]  You know, not to be.
[00:41:32]  No, they were always on the up and up.
[00:41:34]  Nothing mobbed up about that town.
[00:41:36]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:41:36]  Just straight shooters left.
[00:41:38]  One thing we discovered is the Chicago Red Squad, which went through an iteration of various names.
[00:41:49]  They destroyed thousands of pages of records when they were confronting being sued in the mid-70s.
[00:41:56]  You know, Connor actually went to Chicago when we were working on, I think, the second book, The Threat of First Magnitude.
[00:42:02]  He actually went in and looked at the files and we were actually pretty disappointed.
[00:42:07]  I mean, they show you pictures.
[00:42:09]  I mean, it seems like they were very good with their cameras.
[00:42:12]  But as far as sophisticated intelligence about who people were, where they came from, what their political inclinations were, it wasn't as interesting.
[00:42:22]  But the police were confronting a series of lawsuits by activists in the mid-70s, and they just destroyed thousands and thousands of pages.
[00:42:33]  Now, within that would be the gang intelligence unit, which was all over the Black Panther Party.
[00:42:39]  So some of that stuff is just gone.
[00:42:41]  But then again, we've discovered agencies say things have been destroyed, and it turns out they haven't, which is why, you know, it's good to ask these questions and push on this because one may discover there's actual stuff to learn.
[00:42:57]  And actually, learning it is extremely helpful.
[00:43:00]  Not because it's, you know, it sakes historical curiosity.
[00:43:06]  It does.
[00:43:06]  And that's, you know, I guess satisfying, but because the methodology, you know, methodologies, tried and true methods that work tend to get passed down.
[00:43:18]  Things that are disasters tend to get abandoned, which is why, you know, if you look at any intelligence agency, they're loath to reveal systems and methods, or there's a particular phrase they have.
[00:43:33]  But, you know, to the degree you can understand.
[00:43:36]  We still get denied files based on that, which means that the things they've been using for, let's see, at this point, 60 years are still effective because we don't actually understand them fully.
[00:43:47]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:48]  I mean, that's why they're also usually loath to release lists of informants and stuff like that, right?
[00:43:52]  Like, I mean, a lot of those people are probably, first of all, still alive.
[00:43:56]  But it can show just how, like, what kind of people they target with these things.
[00:44:01]  I mean, that's something that I think is so astounding about a lot of the stuff you read about in the 60s is how many people were informants.
[00:44:09]  I remember, I remember when I was 19, I can't remember the guy's first name is, but his last name, and speaking of the Black Panthers, a guy named Aoki in Berkeley, I believe it was, who was, I believe, the originator of the phrase, yellow peril supports black power.
[00:44:25]  You know, he had been a big booster of the Panthers, you know, sort of like a, you know, did a lot of work in the Asian community and, you know, got the Panthers guns.
[00:44:34]  And it turns out he had been a fucking, you know, an informant for decades.
[00:44:39]  Well, so Richard Aoki's, you know, fascinating story.
[00:44:43]  We actually have a whole chapter of him on him because in our second book, because he, the left did not want to confront the fact that Richard Aoki was an informant.
[00:44:56]  I mean, initially, Seth Rosenfeld had come up with three or four bits of evidence.
[00:45:02]  Then the FBI released 200 pages.
[00:45:05]  And a lot of people said, well, they could have been manufactured, which, I mean, like the FBI has that much free time to create a 200-page paper trail, but just to- Somehow that seems like more work than them just recruiting an informant for like 30 years.
[00:45:23]  It does kind of defy logic.
[00:45:25]  So we, you know, we did a whole chapter and we didn't just take the FBI documents.
[00:45:29]  We actually showed Richard Aoki's own statements, you know, where he claims, well, I was in the Army and I didn't feel comfortable, you know, associating with leftists.
[00:45:39]  And then there's a picture from the Merrick College newspaper where Richard Aoki does this kind of Austin Powers moment.
[00:45:49]  Remember when Austin Powers is going through security and it's like, oh, no, man, you know, that's not my bag, the penis and larger thing.
[00:45:56]  Yeah, Like, you know, penis enlarger, that's my bag.
[00:46:02]  Well, so Richard Aoki says, well, I didn't feel comfortable being a socialist while I was in the army.
[00:46:07]  And we have this college newspaper while he's still in the reserve saying, I'm Richard Aoki and I'm a socialist.
[00:46:13]  So, you know, he was actually doing two things at once.
[00:46:16]  You know, this is Aoki doing, revealing himself.
[00:46:20]  This is not the FBI, you know, so people just were woefully blind, which is, you know, again, it goes to, you know, if you do a little digging, I mean, you know, Connor and I, we don't have a huge legal budget, which is to say we don't have a legal budget.
[00:46:37]  You know, we just, and Connor made this point last week.
[00:46:40]  It's like, people have just stopped looking.
[00:46:43]  You know, there's this assumption that we know.
[00:46:45]  And yeah.
[00:46:46]  I actually hope other people start doing this work because there's quite a lot of it to do.

=== FBI's Targeting of Activists (15:30) ===

[00:46:52]  And, you know, it ought to give us a picture of the Black Panther Party in Chicago and what was going at them and quite a few other things.
[00:47:00]  And even Brace what you just said about the NYPD and its intelligence division.
[00:47:06]  I think more needs to be done now on how they're operating.
[00:47:11]  Like I say, people who are legally engaged in challenging the status quo need to understand how they're going to be undermined by authorities who, because they take it as their mandate to protect the status quo, They're going to, you know, sometimes use some pretty vicious methods to clamp down.
[00:47:29]  I want to really just quickly return to something you brought up earlier, which is at a point in the movie, you talk about how it's Martin Sheen, right?
[00:47:50]  Yeah, his portrayal of Hoover, where he says that, you know, he's not worried about the Soviets or the Chinese.
[00:47:55]  He's worried about the Panthers, and how that was actually like really not true.
[00:47:58]  That the FBI, I mean, the FBI very much was worried about the Soviets and the Chinese, which is why they were, I mean, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I feel like this is an important part of the story that often gets not told, I think, for political reasons, which is that a big thing the FBI was worried about was the possibility of ties of the Panthers to the Chinese and to the Soviets.
[00:48:22]  And there being, you know, more and more, you know, as these groups, domestic groups start linking up and forming coalitions, that they're more and more likely to either already have, you know, Soviets or Maoists in their ranks, or they're more likely to then go outside of the US and form more coalitions internationally, which was a huge concern.
[00:48:47]  I think that was like the primary concern for the FBI.
[00:48:49]  Yeah, it's because the Black Panthers, we're still trying to understand who their associations were.
[00:48:58]  They were hooked into the wider left.
[00:49:01]  And there was real concern about both pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet communists.
[00:49:08]  And, you know, you know how the left is.
[00:49:10]  As soon as there's like a happening organization, everybody's in there, you know, trying to, you know, push their particular agenda and stuff.
[00:49:19]  And that was no less true with the Black Panthers.
[00:49:24]  But as far as the Hoover statement at the opening, I mean, it's been said, well, you know, the Black Panthers are the biggest threat to the national security of the United States.
[00:49:35]  We've actually had a little trouble tracing down that quote exactly, but I think the spirit of it is probably accurate.
[00:49:42]  But it's in a very particular time of 1967, 1968, the long, hot summer 1967, the killing of MLK and every city in the country erupting.
[00:49:54]  But priorities shift.
[00:49:56]  You know, the title of our second book is A Threat of the First Magnitude, because the FBI in 1975, 76 actually issued a statement.
[00:50:07]  It's self-serving, but they talk about the Revolutionary Union, Revolutionary Communist Party as a threat of the first magnitude to the internal security of the United States.
[00:50:17]  Why?
[00:50:17]  Because the RU was so huge and influential?
[00:50:20]  No.
[00:50:21]  But because it was perceived to have the Chinese communist franchise.
[00:50:26]  I mean, I just posted a picture on Facebook of the RU delegation, you know, meeting with a Chinese representative.
[00:50:36]  You know, Pablo Guzman is there from the Young Lords Party.
[00:50:41]  He was actually part of the delegation at the time.
[00:50:44]  But Label Bergman, who had helped form the RU, when he was on trial, or he wasn't on trial, but when Mark Felt, Deep Throat, was on trial in 1980 for these break-ins against the Weathermen, they also had to testify about the surveillance done against Label Bergman, who's this old guard communist who helped form this Maoist Revolutionary Union.
[00:51:08]  So the head of the Bergman investigation is on stand, this S.A. Ryan, Special Agent Ryan.
[00:51:16]  And the prosecutor is asking him, well, how big do you think that the label Bergman file is?
[00:51:23]  And Ryan doesn't want to answer it.
[00:51:25]  But the prosecutor is basically holding his hand up like three feet, four foot, five foot.
[00:51:32]  You know, in other words, the investigation on Bergman is enormous, which I think gets to, you know, the reason you haven't heard about it is because it was ongoing in the mid-70s when the church committee was meeting.
[00:51:44]  But these organized groups, and like them or not, and there's a lot to dislike, like progressive labor or the revolutionary union, were a much bigger focus ongoing for the FBI.
[00:51:57]  The Black Panthers were seriously a problem for them.
[00:52:01]  You know, that level of organization, disruption, the manifesto-like power of the group was something they were going after.
[00:52:08]  The murder of Fred Hampton is integrally related to that.
[00:52:13]  But it's part of a wider tumult going on in the 60s that is a lot of different forces in play, which I won't try to encapsulate.
[00:52:24]  But yeah, the foreign counterintelligence aspect is huge in this.
[00:52:30]  And it's pretty instrumental or critical in understanding what was actually going on.
[00:52:36]  Yeah, I was just going to add on that.
[00:52:38]  Because this is another one of those things that everyone knows about COINTELPRO, but actually isn't true, is people have it really fixated on the civil rights movement as its main focus.
[00:52:49]  And partially why that is because the amount of COINTELPROs that were opened at that point.
[00:52:55]  As we mentioned before, it started in 1956.
[00:52:58]  It was targeting the Communist Party.
[00:53:00]  And by 1971, when Cointel Pro is forced to close, no one would consider the Communist Party a revolutionary organization, right?
[00:53:08]  But the FBI still has that investigation going.
[00:53:11]  Why?
[00:53:11]  because they're worried not so much about the Communist Party leading a revolution, but its connection to the Soviet Union.
[00:53:19]  We know that the FBI had been monitoring the Socialist Workers Party since 1941, possibly earlier.
[00:53:26]  But when do they open the Cointelpro?
[00:53:28]  After they get their connection to Cuba.
[00:53:30]  So they open that very shortly afterwards, like in 1960, 61, right?
[00:53:35]  And then we also look at these other things of, oh, if anything, we need to sort of understand how the FBI saw putting this together, right?
[00:53:45]  Like probably the most famous example of Cointel Pro documents that people talk about is Martin Luther King, right?
[00:53:52]  Those are actually in the communist files because there's sort of been this thing of, oh, what a lot of the left has done to sort of try to discredit or point out the exaggerations and the folly of the FBI is sort of the left has partially disowned some of its own radical legacy, which I think is not very helpful.
[00:54:14]  And so like, oh, Hoover thought there was a communist under every bed and in every closet.
[00:54:18]  And he thought, oh, MLK was a communist.
[00:54:20]  What paranoid meant?
[00:54:21]  He didn't think MLK was a communist.
[00:54:23]  He was worried about communist influence over MLK's grouping and his organizations.
[00:54:29]  He doesn't actually think King's a communist, and that's what he's worried about.
[00:54:32]  That's what he's worried about, these things of like, who's the FBI hooking up with?
[00:54:36]  Oh, Communist Party is providing a lawyer to Black Panther members.
[00:54:41]  Everyone wants to talk about Angela Davis.
[00:54:44]  Everyone conveniently leaves out that she was a Communist Party member.
[00:54:47]  And this is really the FBI's concern is how this all connects to communism.
[00:54:52]  And now, a lot of things people point to is relation of Hoover's racism, and I'm sure he was quite racist.
[00:54:58]  But if anything, that led him to somewhat underestimate the agency and independence and autonomy of Black people in this regard, right?
[00:55:06]  So it really takes sort of the long, hot summer for them to realize, like, oh, this is its own cointel pro.
[00:55:11]  Like everything basically up to that point, they really thought was the influence of communist groupings in one way or another, or communist front group or communist adjacent group.
[00:55:18]  They really didn't understand the Black Liberation Movement as its own thing until all these riots had popped up all over 1967.
[00:55:26]  And they thought, oh, this is not just communism.
[00:55:29]  Yeah, I think that's a good point.
[00:55:30]  I mean, King especially was pretty careful at times to like disassociate himself with people who were, let's say, closer to the communist movement.
[00:55:40]  And of course, I think sort of the there are many, many, many battles fought over King's legacy.
[00:55:47]  And that is sort of one of them.
[00:55:49]  And now he's recast by a lot of people as sort of like a democratic socialist, blah, blah.
[00:55:53]  I mean, and the fact is, you're right, like he, you know, was nowhere near being a communist, but there were communists present in that movement.
[00:55:59]  And, you know, specifically in the civil rights movement, we saw a lot of members of the SNCC go towards the Black Panthers or go towards the Communist Party.
[00:56:09]  And one of those people, I think, being Stokely Carmichael, I think he was in the SNCC, and he was kicked out of the country essentially.
[00:56:17]  I think we got to wrap up soon.
[00:56:18]  And I was just wondering, for my last question, what do you guys hope that people can get out of these new FOIA documents and sort of this more nuanced way of looking at the murder of Fred Hampton and the general surveillance of the Panthers in Illinois?
[00:56:33]  Off of some of what we've been saying before, is we should stop assuming we know the whole story.
[00:56:39]  So I think one thing it's worth doing is I think there can be a very convenient thing of certain activists when the FBI document reveals the FBI doing something bad, we believe that document.
[00:56:53]  And when the FBI reports on something that maybe doesn't look so favorably on someone we hold in high esteem, well, that's obviously a manufactured document to make us create division and sow paranoia or distrust among each other.
[00:57:09]  And you can't really have it both ways.
[00:57:11]  I'm not saying that everything that's in an FBI document is accurate.
[00:57:14]  Obviously, they're getting information from informants.
[00:57:16]  Sometimes foremans exaggerate to try to boost their credibility or maybe to get a higher bonus.
[00:57:24]  But these are historical documents and they need to be taken as such.
[00:57:28]  And just like any historical document, they should be scrutinized.
[00:57:30]  I mean, this is the point of Aoki, right?
[00:57:33]  When we came to the conclusion around Aoki, it wasn't the FBI's information by itself.
[00:57:38]  It was that.
[00:57:38]  Then it made us go look at the historical record, looking at what Aoki himself had said in his own words, and then matching this all up, right?
[00:57:46]  Because in relation to figuring out who informants were, at least in the Revolutionary Union, which we've written about, it took us a long time and we were very careful about this.
[00:57:58]  So for one, people should stop throwing around terms like, oh, this person's an activist.
[00:58:02]  I mean, this person's an informant.
[00:58:03]  This person's an agent.
[00:58:04]  This person's a pig.
[00:58:06]  The fact that people think agent and informant are interchangeable is already a problem.
[00:58:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:11]  But people should really look at these documents because, for one, people think they have the whole understanding of these things laid out, right?
[00:58:20]  But if we actually learn more about who were informants and who were not informants, we think, oh, this whole direction the party went in was influenced by the FBI as opposed to the organization itself.
[00:58:32]  It should force us at least to assess this.
[00:58:35]  Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out that way.
[00:58:37]  A number of people have dug their heels in over the Aoki example and come up with all sorts of excuses about what he did or didn't do.
[00:58:45]  And none of it has actually really been confronting the evidence in front of it.
[00:58:49]  And so There is very much like there was the initial wave of documents that were stolen in the, when activists broke into media Pennsylvania and we learned something, and then there were sort of some books around it, YAYS.
[00:59:03]  And then mostly what people have done since we've done research on this is they have sort of focused on a particular area in relation to their research.
[00:59:11]  And it might seem uh surprising, but we actually really don't have a full sense of Cointel PRO yet and what it exactly did and what didn't you know.
[00:59:20]  Maybe we will find they had a larger hand in Fred Hamptonsburg than we thought, but right now we don't actually have the evidence to make that claim and there's a lot of things that we think we know that we actually don't know.
[00:59:31]  And the other side of that, there's all sorts of stuff they've gotten away with that because we haven't even bothered to dig and look into it.
[00:59:38]  So uh Aaron, do you want to add more to that?
[00:59:41]  Yeah, I mean the.
[00:59:42]  That's a good point, because in the uh, A Threat Of The First Magnitude book, we we make the point that a lot of these informants never got exposed.
[00:59:50]  Richard Aoke wouldn't have got exposed unless Seth Rosenfeld accidentally got this document.
[00:59:57]  Not only did he, you know, accidentally get exposed.
[01:00:00]  I think people were willing to let it lay.
[01:00:03]  You know, it was push people pushing back against Roosenfeld that led Roosenfeld to finally get all the documents out.
[01:00:10]  I wanted to make a different point.
[01:00:12]  There's a certain fetishization about uh coin Telpro.
[01:00:16]  It's the uh, you know, it's the uh the, the huge golem aimed at, you know, 60s activists, and it's responsible for everything.
[01:00:26]  Um, and then you look at the bread and butter work of the FBI, which was basically collecting lists.
[01:00:32]  You know, I just finished the Jakarta Method recently and they talked about how the CIA shared lists with the Indonesian security forces to execute the communists.
[01:00:43]  Well, in the United States they were compiling lists, first a custodial detention list in the 40s under Franklin Roosevelt, then a security index renamed under most of the Hoover years and later named the Administrative Index.
[01:01:00]  Now, you know, just to uh introduce a historical yeah, there you go, a historical counterfactual.
[01:01:07]  Had there been some kind of uh military confrontation between the United States and China uh, in the 60s, or the United States and the Soviets.
[01:01:17]  And that list was basically, that list would be something the executive would go to if they wanted to round people up.
[01:01:27]  Had tens of thousands of people been put in camps, we would be looking at COINTELPRO a little different.
[01:01:34]  We would have been looking at it as, oh, well, they had this COINTELPRO thing, but they also had this security index thing.
[01:01:40]  Now, that didn't happen in, you know, because it didn't happen, we can say it wasn't going to happen.
[01:01:47]  But, you know, that was the bread and butter was the FBI every day, you know, they wake up and like, who do we have to go and find out where they live today?
[01:01:56]  Which gives you a sense of, you know, the political police, if you will, in the United States.
[01:02:02]  I mean, they're actually out there operating and compiling lists of people that they think are threats.
[01:02:08]  They're doing it in 2021.
[01:02:10]  I mean, and it's an element of a larger array of, you know, media vilification, you know, low-level law enforcement harassment, harassment at demonstrations.

=== Political Police in 2021 (03:14) ===

[01:02:22]  I mean, it's, and understanding it as a whole is going to, you know, leave you in a much better position to not be made unnecessarily vulnerable.
[01:02:30]  That's why we have to understand what was done to Fred Hampton.
[01:02:33]  Bad things, awful things were done to him.
[01:02:36]  But I think what Connor and I are understanding is it wasn't quite what we thought it was.
[01:02:42]  It doesn't make it any less awful, but as they say, the devil is in the details.
[01:02:50]  Well, thank you guys so much for joining us, despite our numerous technical difficulties, which, of course, are part of a long-term NSA surveillance program against me that makes my computer take a really long time to start up and then sometimes makes me actually swear too much when I talk to Liz on the phone.
[01:03:08]  But yeah, so again, just to reiterate, we got Aaron Leonard and Connor Gallagher here.
[01:03:15]  They are the authors of Threat of the First Magnitude, Heavy Radicals, the FBI's Secret War on America's Maoist, which killed every Maoist in America but me, and the Folk Singers and the Bureau.
[01:03:26]  Thank you so much for joining us, fellas.
[01:03:28]  Pleasure.
[01:03:29]  Thank you.
[01:03:30]  Thanks, guys.
[01:03:43]  Well, that was a great interview that we did in Justice 2 by pretending to be babies for five minutes before it, but hopefully they don't listen.
[01:03:50]  I don't know why we did that.
[01:03:50]  I feel bad.
[01:03:52]  It's okay.
[01:03:52]  I always just assume.
[01:03:53]  It really did make me laugh.
[01:03:55]  Yeah.
[01:03:56]  Crying laugh.
[01:03:57]  Here's the thing.
[01:03:58]  You can't stop a woman from laughing.
[01:04:01]  Women be laughing.
[01:04:02]  Women be what?
[01:04:04]  Women be laughing.
[01:04:05]  No.
[01:04:07]  I would also recommend checking out there.
[01:04:09]  We did a previous episode with Just Aaron about the Folk Singers and the Bureau.
[01:04:14]  That was good.
[01:04:16]  Also, I believe a former member of the Revolutionary Union, which is classic, always good to have in.
[01:04:22]  Another good background on that is reading the book Revolution in the Air.
[01:04:25]  Fantastic book.
[01:04:26]  Can't remember who fucking wrote it, but some asshole did.
[01:04:29]  It's always good learning too about just, I mean, driving home.
[01:04:33]  When we're talking about the difference between the Chicago PD and the feds, like it's not to, I mean, the Chicago PD, it's like they're just like muscle goons, you know, like beating the beaten.
[01:04:42]  That's what they're there for, right?
[01:04:44]  And the FBI, it's just like the kind of organized bureaucrats.
[01:04:49]  It's really, it's really important to understand the difference there because they, I mean, they work in tandem as much as they kind of hate each other and have their own, you know, disagreements and TIFs and, you know, turf wars and whatever.
[01:05:05]  Like they do like totally work in tandem and you know, very much did on the Panthers for sure.
[01:05:12]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:05:13]  Absolutely.
[01:05:14]  And the group Young Patriots I was talking about earlier too, there's a good, there's a really good book about them called Hillbilly Nationalist Urban Race Rebels and Black Power by Amy Sawney and James Tracy, who I think teaches at San Francisco City College, but maybe I'm wrong.
[01:05:32]  But they're all there.
[01:05:33]  Chicago in the late 60s, a fascinating fucking place.

=== Mayor's Hot Mic Moment (01:29) ===

[01:05:36]  Chicago in 2021, not very fascinating, but still a place.
[01:05:41]  That mayor seems real.
[01:05:42]  What's the deal with her?
[01:05:44]  She seems to be very popular in a big.
[01:05:47]  Did you see there was like she got caught on a hot mic?
[01:05:49]  I thought she was unpopular.
[01:05:50]  She's highly unpopular, but there's a she always looks like she's caught, she got caught in headlights.
[01:05:56]  Yeah, there's a, there's, she got caught in a hot mic the other day being like, Jesus fucking Christ, after like a city council member was talking, which I thought was really funny.
[01:06:03]  That's actually pretty funny.
[01:06:04]  But no, she saw, like, even the people who were like defending her by being like, look, it's like, you know, we got a black lesbian mayor, like, no, she fucking sucks now.
[01:06:12]  Um, but yeah, she's all rommed up, isn't she?
[01:06:14]  Oh, she's all rommed up.
[01:06:16]  Well, yeah, I mean, every mayor of Chicago is a rom.
[01:06:19]  Yeah, it's Chicago.
[01:06:21]  We gotta find any more daily cousins or something to get in there.
[01:06:26]  Yeah, nothing good can come out of there.
[01:06:28]  No, no, no, no.
[01:06:30]  Well, I'm just kidding.
[01:06:31]  I love Chicago.
[01:06:31]  Wonderful city.
[01:06:32]  Much of my family lives there.
[01:06:34]  And my name is Bryce.
[01:06:37]  I'm Liz.
[01:06:38]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:06:40]  We should give a shout out.
[01:06:42]  Music in this episode done by Kyle Dixon.
[01:06:45]  And this has been Shernan.
[01:06:46]  We will see you next time.
[01:06:48]  Bye-bye.
[01:06:50]  Jefferson Shannon, Jeffrey Lexter Jefferson, Jeffrey Lexter Johnson, Jeffrey Lexington's got short, Jeff,