Rev Left Radio - Revisiting the Assassination of Fred Hampton: New FOIA Docs, COINTELPRO, and the "Black Messiah"

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

In this episode, Breht welcomes Aaron J. Leonard back on the show, this time with his co-author Conor Gallagher, to discuss new FOIA documents they recently received regarding the FBI agent assigned to Fred Hampton, the informant who helped in the efforts to assassinate Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, what the left gets wrong in their understanding of COINTELPRO, and reactions to the new film on Fred Hampton "Judas and the Black Messiah". Check out Aaron and Conor's books: A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists   Previous Rev Left episode on Fred Hampton here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/fred-hampton   Outro Music: "Fight For You" by H.E.R. ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I have a really interesting sort of episode that was put it together at the last minute because of the time-sensitive nature of what we came across. I have back on the show, Aaron Leonard, from our Heavy Radicals episode and our folk artist, Communist Party, and FBI episode. And he's here with his co-author on Heavy Radicals, as well as a second book that I've never had a chance to do an episode on a threat of the first magnitude, and that is Connor Gallagher. So Aaron and Connor recently, I think it was Aaron, that reached out, filed a FOIA request

years and years ago regarding the Cointel program, regarding Fred Hampton, etc. And I think it was in 2015, and only in December, actually December 4th of 2020, the 51st anniversary of Fred Hampton's assassination, he finally got back some of the documents he had been looking for. And he came to Rev. Left to open up. that FOIA document and share some of the stuff that he learned. It doesn't radically alter the picture of the Fred Hampton assassination, but it does give us more insights. And throughout this episode, we do the important job of complicating simplistic narratives that people might have

about the Cointel program. I think it's really important to do that, as they say throughout this episode, we have to understand the way that such programs as the Cointel Pro operate and how they actually do it, not fall into some sort of simplistic, elementary understanding of these things, if we ever hope to be able to move for a better world, for social justice, because the moment that people move towards an organization of power that can make a better, more just, more egalitarian society rooted around values of justice and truth, organizations like the FBI, like police departments, and like the CIA, will come down on those people and those organizations. So I think this is really interesting, especially in light of the new film Judas and the Black Messiah,

which we talk about towards the end of this discussion, to just have a revisiting of the Fred Hampton assassination, some new evidence about it, some clearing up of some sort of sloppy understandings regarding Cointel Pro, and much more. It's a really wonderful conversation. I always enjoy talking with Aaron, and this time we actually got to have Connor on as well, which is a real honor. I also want to remind listeners, some of you may know this, but we did a whole episode on Fred Hampton, charting out the entire story in great detail. If you haven't heard that episode, I'll link to it in the show notes. So this will be sort of a revisitation of the assassination of Fred Hampton, but we do have that entire full episode on Fred Hampton that if you haven't heard, I'll

definitely link to and you can go check out as well. Really quickly, I do just want to mention because I don't get a chance to say it on the episode that I watched Judas and the Black Messiah. It is a work of drama. I think it did a good job at humanizing the story of humanizing of Fred Hampton, I thought that they were going to whitewash out the socialism and the radical politics as much as they could. And they didn't to a large extent, but it is also important to remember that it's a work of art, not a work of history necessarily. And that point is made in this conversation as well at the end of the conversation when we talk about our thought on the film. It was heartbreaking, though, because the Fred Hampton story is a heartbreaking story.

I love Fred Hampton and what he stood for and seeing that the history, the history. The that I knew happened in the abstract, seeing it play out in dramatized form, it broke my heart all over again. And by the end of it, me and my wife were both in tears and it's just a testament to how fucking tragic the loss of Fred Hampton was and how just absolutely brutal and cruel and unjust this government can be, which I know I'm not breaking any news to people listening into this show, but we're seeing it now with what's going on in Texas, just this absolute barbarity when it comes to this failed state that we know is the United States of America. Something has to change. And people like Fred Hampton, they point in the direction of the change

that we need. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Aaron and Connor on new FOIA documents and the assassination of Fred Hampton. Enjoy it. Yeah, my name is Aaron Leonard. I'm a writer and historian based in Los Angeles. I've been doing research on repression and radicalism in the second half of the 20th century. I've written several books. The first two were collaborations. I'm actually focused on U.S. Maoism with Connor Gallagher, who I will introduce now.

Hi, this is Connor Gallagher. As Aaron mentioned, we both worked on two books related to FBI infiltration and monitoring of U.S. Maoism, with heavy radicals, as well as the second book, There of a First Magnitude, and continuing to do research related to Cointel Pro and post-World War II communist groups in the U.S. Absolutely. Well, it's an honor to have both of you on. Rev. Left listeners will be familiar with Aaron. We've had Aaron on a couple times to discuss the book you worked on together with Connor, Heavy Radicals, as well as the new book on folk artists, the Communist Party and the FBI. Connors is new to the show, so welcome. But let's go ahead and dive into it. And the reason that we're going to have this conversation today is mostly in part or in entirety, the fact that you had access to some new FOIA documents. So maybe that's the best place to start this conversation off. Could you tell us about your FOIA request, what new information you discovered recently in some of those documents and sort of why it's important? Yeah, well, I was researching events in Chicago in 1969, because so much was

happening there. The last SDS students for a Democratic Society convention, the trial of the Chicago 8, which turned into the Chicago 7, the weatherman in the days of rage, and of course, the murder of Fred Hampton on December 4th. One of the files I asked for was for Special Agent Roy Martin Mitchell, who I knew was the handler of William O'Neill, who was a key FBI informant and played a pretty critical role in the murder of Fred Hampton. So this was four or five years ago that I filed and I had kind of, you know, you file these things and you either get stuff or you wait or you never get things. But I went to my mailbox on December 4th, which is the anniversary of Hampton's killing. And there was a compact disc from the FBI with the file of

Roy Martin Mitchell, which had a number of very interesting things, some of which I'll talk about later. But among them was a letter directly to Special Agent Mitchell from Jay Edgar Hoover, written within a week of the murder of Fred Hampton, basically giving him an incentive bonus of $200 for valuable work related to the Black Panther Party. So that actually was another critical piece of evidence in the murder of Fred Hampton that showed that the FBI, you played a significant role in that operation. So that's, uh, that's kind of the background. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about who these actors were. Um, now the movie we're going to talk about at the end here, Judas and the Black Messiah just came out. A lot of people

are talking about that. So people who have seen that movie or who are familiar with the Fred Hampton story will probably know who these figures are, but just to sort of remind people and to, to elaborate on what you discovered. Can you talk a bit about who Roy Martin Mitchell was, who William O'Neill was and sort of how they came to work together initially? Yeah, well, Roy Mitchell's an FBI agent, and he's a special agent, so he's a rank-and-file investigation. He's not in leadership hierarchy. Basically, he becomes aware that William O'Neill had crossed state lines in a stolen car, making him subject to federal laws. According to William O'Neill, who this really wonderful resource, eye on the prize, the filmmaker interviewed

a lot of these key sources from the Black Freedom Movement, both the King era and the Black Liberation era. But he interviews William O'Neill, and O'Neill recounts how Mitchell approached him and said, you know, I know you did it, but it's no big thing. I'm sure we can work it out. And, you know, I think a few months passed before I heard from him again. And one day I got a call and he told me that it was payback time. He said, I want you to go and see if you can join the Black Panther Party.

And if you can, give me a call. And then O'Neill actually does go and join the Panthers. He's one of the first Panthers in the Chicago chapter in the officially sanctioned chapter. You know, Connor can talk more about kind of the relevance of that in terms of the Bureau's doctrine and stuff. But getting O'Neill in early is very significant. Yeah. So one of the things we began to get an understanding of with the first book, Heavy Rackles, but especially much more with for the first magnitude is we began to realize largely, I think,

how we've understood the FBI and its Cointel program is mostly been incorrect in the sense of, we essentially relied largely on the media files that were taken in 1971, right? That sort of blew open Quintel Pro. Media, Pennsylvania. Yeah, sorry, media Pennsylvania to avoid Confucian. And so those are largely what we based our understanding of Quinto Pro on, right? And so in the earliest books, use those because that was all that was available. And while people have requested FBI files for different areas of research,

it hasn't really been pulled together to figure out what we understand now that there's so many more files available. We really begin to understand is the way the FBI targets organizations is they essentially try to get in very early to any organization they see as a threat, get in on the ground floor, and that way it's much easier to get up into positions of leadership. And we've seen this also with other groups in Chicago, right? So in Chicago actually was probably the most sophisticated area the FBI was doing work because this is the area in which the FBI created a fake Maoist organization, the ad hoc committee, Marxist, Leninist party, and pretended to be a communist force in the movement and doing this under the cover of being a secret group within the Communist Party. And they built up a lot of credibility this way, right? So they had a fair amount of experience doing this, and they began to realize that it's easiest to get into leadership positions if you get into positions early. Hence, this would be the reason they would be trying to start a new chapter somewhere, right?

If you start a new chapter, then it's much easier to be in the leadership, then it's much easier to be in touch with something like national leadership. And this is the doctrine they really developed, hence William O'Neill. Now, William O'Neill is obviously telling this story many years later as recollection, but the most likely thing, is he probably went down, in some accounts say he went down the first day, the Plath Panthers actually opened their Illinois office, which would make sense, right? Because here is now an opening to say, oh, here's a reason why this person who doesn't actually know any of these people would have a reason to actually get in contact with them. Yeah, so to add to that, right? So there's this doctrine the Bureau has about trying to get people in on the ground floor. So, you know,

I don't think Connor and I had been plugged into the Hampton issue too much until this thing landed in the mailbox, and then, you know, one thing leads to another, and you really want to understand it. I discovered a couple weeks ago there's this huge document dump put up by the FBI as a result of a law that was passed by Congress in 92 to disclose all the information related to the JFK and MLK killing. murders. So there's like all this stuff that somehow tangentially related to those cases. I found this 1600 page document that details a lot of what the FBI was doing against the Chicago Black Panther Party. And it has quite a number of reports from Roy Mitchell reporting on what he's learning, including what he's learning from an informant. O'Neill's name is still redacted. in these. But one of the things I've found is that O'Neill is reporting, or at least we believe it's O'Neill is reporting, that he's being put in line to take over Bobby Rush's position as

Minister of Defense if Bobby Rush goes to prison. You know, this is like in May, 1969. You know, I don't think anybody knows this. I've never seen this anywhere. And I mean, it literally says Hampton is allegedly considering approaching O'Neill to see if he will take over his acting minister of defense if Rush goes to jail. At the time, Bobby Rush was facing jail for possession of an unregistered weapon, which was one of the major ways the FBI wanted to go after, you know, a certain kind of radical, any kind of legal means. You know, they would leverage that. But, you know, The prospect of O'Neill actually moving up the hierarchy is suggested here. I don't want to make more of it than what it is, but it is, you know, significant,

especially since, you know, we detail in our book a threat of the first magnitude, this character Don Wright, an African-American man in Chicago who claims to have been in the Black Panther Party. And he gets up into the central committee and then the secretariat of this Maoist group, the Revolutionary Union. So, you know, I mean, the FBI is very much locked in on the Black Panthers at this point. And, you know, they don't have resources in place because it's all starting very new. But O'Neill is there in the ground floor. And I don't think it's been quite appreciated just how strategic he was. And of course, his role in the killing is, it's both appalling, but it's also critical.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is really important to just reemphasize is that the common understanding, even on the left, is when you think about co-intel pro, when you think about infiltration and informants, you think about it sort of an organization is built up, they get momentum behind them, and then the FBI starts putting people in. But this whole idea of working from the ground floor, even creating organizations wholesale in order to command the entire sort of leadership structure from the floor up from the very beginning, I think. is really important to think about. And so, yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. Another thing that you mentioned that I wanted to talk a little bit about, because I think this is also not very well known, is the Red Squad. So what was the Red Squad? How did it relate to the FBI's Cointel program? And what was its overall relationship to the repression of the Black Panther Party, specifically, obviously in Chicago? So the Red Squad is just sort of a shorthand term for what we could call sort of the secret police or the political police within police departments in various cities, right?

So within Chicago, they had the largest one, and it was quite brutal, right? And so what you realize is, even though the FBI might give information from the police or get information to police, they actually tend to work in very different ways. For example, if you look at the files related to the Chicago Red Squad, it's much too much cruder. It's much more simple. They're not doing the sort of intelligence gathering in the way that the FBI does, right? They're just getting sort of basic ideas of this person, this group at this location. It's not actually, if you look at the FBI files in comparison, it's much more sophisticated in terms of here's what this person said, here's what that person said,

here's where we think there's differences, here's where we think we can push and maybe create some division between these leaders. Here's where we see tensions between this group in another group and maybe we can actually create a division between these groups. There's nothing like that. And I think that's partially reflected in the approach that the Chicago police would take versus the FBI. And there's actually an interesting contrast of this is while the Panthers get more in the crosshairs of the police as well as the FBI in Chicago, we can see the approach

are quite different. Right. So in June of 1969, the FBI carries out a raid on the Chicago Panther office. They do this under the cover of essentially they're looking for a panther who's a fugitive and theoretically since he's crossed state lines, this would make it a federal case. So this is often how the FBI will do something, right? They're very much looking for a legal pretext to carry out their agenda. The police don't seem to be that concerned with all the legal pretext of things, right? They're much. more kicking in doors. And then you compare that to the type of raids they would carry on. That would very much end up with like shootouts, the famous case of them actually arresting Panthers and then setting the office on fire and claiming it came from a stray bullet that somehow happened after Panthers had already been arrested. So we can see these difference in approach. The FBI really is concerned about thoughts and ideology. You know, and we'll get to this later when we talk about the Messiah. So there is information that the FBI,

I will share with the Chicago police and going the other way direction too. But what's interesting is, as Aaron mentioned, the case of a D.H. Wright, Don Wright, with the RU, is I actually found his file in the Chicago Red Squad files, and they have no idea he's an FBI informant. It's very clear the FBI is not sharing information about who their informants are with the police at all. Yeah, and just to add that on the Red Squad in Chicago, I think one of the takeaways I have from getting this new file and this piece that Connor and I are working on finalizing is there's an awful lot more we don't know than we think. It's my sense when people talk about Fred Hampton, they speak of it from the standpoint of, well, you know, we know everything, and maybe some people have never

been initiated into all the details, and here they are. I think it's our view that there is, I use the word, a universe of information that's not known. One thing, for example, I mean, I just stumbled across this yesterday. You know, Connor talked about he actually went to Chicago and looked at the Chicago Police subversive activities unit files. They're held in a museum. You can't really quote them. You can look at them, but unless you have permission, you can't really reference them.

unless, of course, somebody's passed away, such as the case of Don Wright. So, you know, it's really constrained, but then I came across this yesterday. In the fall of 1974, the Red Squad destroyed 105,000 individual and 1,300 organizational files when it learned that the alliance to end repression was filing a lawsuit. So, in other words, you know, who killed Fred Hampton? Well, it seems like the Chicago Police Department and the FBI work together to create that, you know, awful event. And there is an awful lot about the role of the Chicago police intelligence that potentially we do not know. And, you know, they did work in concert.

So that's the thing. And then the other thing we don't know is muckrock, who do a lot of trying to get information. information, you know, dislodge from the FBI. They're waiting on William O'Neill's file, but the FBI is charging them huge amounts of money to get it. We don't have the FBI file of Marlon Johnson, who is the station chief in Chicago. So, you know, all of these things will tell us much more about this case. And, you know, just a word, it's like, and I think it's going to get more complicated before it gets simpler. But that's okay. You know, I'd rather understand it as it actually was than to have a kind of a pat version.

But I did want to include that on the intelligence stuff. It's just shocking that so much is just missing. And it's not even being looked for because there's an assumption we already know. Yeah. I just want to add one thing on that raid, which is with that FBI raid, besides the fact that it was vastly different in terms of compared to the police ones, there were eight people arrested, but all their charges were dropped. And why were their charges dropped?

because the FBI didn't want to reveal who their informant was. They really valued how important it was having informant constantly providing information, whereas the Chicago police seemed to be much more brutal, kick-ass, get people in jail, occasionally put bullets in people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And yeah, that is incredibly important to understand that. And, you know, with this film and stuff, and just with the retelling of the story, which we've done on this show as well,

there is a tendency to sort of feel like we more or less know the whole story and the fact that this is an open-ended thing, more documents are inevitably going to come out, I think is a very important thing to keep in mind. And that's true for multiple agencies. I mean, we just did an episode on another show recently on MK Ultra. And everything we know about MK Ultra, which is a CIA program, was a CIA program, it comes from a very slim amount of documents that survived a purging of documents when the CIA knew that these documents could possibly come out. So everything we know about the MK Ultra is a fraction of the actual documentation that once existed on it. Now, we'll probably never have access.

to those files, but it just speaks to this larger point that there is much more that we don't know when it comes to all of this. And that's always something that's worth keeping in mind. This might be a naive question, but before we move on, does the Red Squad in some form still exist? Is it something that multiple, if you know this, I don't know if you know this or not, multiple police stations around the country still have something analogous to a Red Squad? I lived in New York City for almost 40 years. So that's my point of reference. reference. After 9-11, they gave a lot more power to their intelligence division. I mean, they actually brought in some old CIA people to work in it. You know, this was the post-9-11 world. So, and it was, you know, it was reconstructed from the ruins of the old Red Squad. I mean, you can't underestimate what a calamity it was for a lot of these institutions in the mid-70s into the early 80s when it started getting, exposed, you know, what they were doing, which was in blatant violation to, you know, set legal

laws. I know in New York, there was a consent decree called the Hanshoe decision that, you know, revealed all the records. I think Abby Hoffman and a bunch of other people were involved in it, and it, you know, limited what the NYPD could do, and the NYPD was always straining against those limits. And I think post-9-11, it was able to take things further, I think, in the contemporary era, I think you're going to see this even more. You know, right now, it seems like white supremacist, white extremists are in the metaphorical crosshairs. But, you know, there's a whole thing of a history of establishing laws against a pariah

group and then using it against people who are, you know, more or less, you know, well, not more or less, who are actually engaging in protected, you know, speech activities and such. So to answer your question, yes, but it's not the same. And it kind of goes back to the thing you said earlier. It's, you know, I don't have any evidence. The FBI is doing Cointel Pro like they did. But you can be sure that these methods, you know, are being, you know, instituted. Actually, you know, it's funny. The Naval War College actually has our second book, a threat of the first magnitude in their library, which I take is, I guess, a compliment. but I'm not sure.

Interesting for sure. I think one thing is part of help understand this, even if we don't know exactly what's going on right now in relation to these, because for one, it's not a coordinated federal thing like the FBI is. I think part of it is the word coin tell pro gets thrown around in ways that this can be slightly misleading and confusing. So there's a difference actually between intelligence gathering and counterintelligence. And maybe we can get into that later, but are they gathering intelligence?

Yes. Are they doing counterintelligence? I don't know that I would exactly classify even some of the most brutal Red Squad stuff is counterintelligence, just because I actually don't think it's as sophisticated as that. I think it's just more violence and brutal. It's much more arresting people on flimsy charges, incredibly trumped up charges, throwing people in jail, jacking people up, brutalizing them, shootouts, and all these sort of things. The FBI is much more concerned about much more big-pictures, things in terms of dividing groups,

creating fissures between leadership, trying to undermine groups in the eyes of possible followers. I see. I see. Yeah, and speaking to the trumped-up charges aspect of police departments, you know, Fred Hampton was well known. He got locked up for ostensibly stealing $70 worth of ice cream and was initially sentenced, I think, to two to five years, depending on. on the appeal process. So that just speaks to that point for sure. But moving on, can you talk a little bit about the FBI documents regarding black nationalist hate groups and their fears surrounding a black Messiah, what that stood for in their minds as a fear that they had? All right. So there's a couple of things on this. So one is there's a little confusion around this

because initially when we first found out about this document, it was very heavily redacted. So we didn't actually know who was referencing. But now later on, the document, has come out unredacted. We actually know who he was talking about, right? Can I just put in a note here? There were two documents released. One, I believe, in late 67 and one in March, 1968. The counterintelligence program had been developed against the Communist Party, but as the 60s started to unfold, the FBI established something called counterintelligence against black nationalist hate groups. And they had two memos.

And the second memo is the famous one that mentions a black Messiah. And I think that's what Connor is speaking to here. Yeah. So this is the Barts, 1968, and essentially identifies part of the other thing is it also mentioned that these people that aspire to. Well, I'll get into a second, who the FBI is most worried about. But they essentially identify Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad. And they said Malcolm X would be this type of person, but he was already dead.

And essentially, the thing is they're not that worried about Laj Muhammad because they think he's old. King, they think only if he actually changes and, quote unquote, loses the obedience of sort of the white audience. The person he's actually concerned about is Stokely Carmichael, and that's the one he actually identifies. And this all partially comes from actually understanding a coin toper, right? So when we say coin tilbro, it's often uses this big umbrella term, but these are actually specific programs with specific targets, right? So it starts in 1956 targeting the Communist Party, and then there's a second one opened up, and that's around Puerto Rican independence.

There's a third one opened up that's around the Socialist Workers Party. And the key to understanding these is it's not that they weren't maintaining tabs on these people, sometimes they had phone taps, sometimes they had intelligence gathering, sometimes they had informants. But to actually understand what makes point out of difference, it's actually an attempt to consciously disrupt these organizations, possibly from uniting with organizations or sort of destroying them from within. And this is important because sometimes people think, oh, like a phone tap is counterintelligence.

And that's not counterintelligence. That's just intelligence. And so like an example of this would be one of the earlier things the FBI tried, which they would sort of use some of these techniques later was they'd had a Quinto Pro that they started against the Communist Party in 1956. And in 1966, they tried this thing within that. Quinto Pro called Operation Hoodwink, where they essentially try to pit the Communist Party against the New York Mafia and other aspects of other mafias, right?

So they basically called in operation of the CP against the La Costa Nose, right? And their idea was by having both these groups that they weren't crazy about, and obviously the mob doesn't really like communists, they thought they could sort of create tension, right? So they did things like poison pen letters, where they do something like write a letter that the claim was written by the CP that essentially blamed the Costa Nosa for a bombing at a Communist Party headquarters, right? Now, it wasn't actually very successful because the Communist Party didn't take the bait, but this is where they sort of began to practice and do these things. And the important thing is that Cointill Pro is really much more anchored in how terrorized and fearful they were of Communists, right? They've been keeping tabs on Socialist Workers Party as early as 41, but they developed the Cointill Pro in 60.

Why? Because now they feel like they have a connection to Cuba, right? Because if you actually look at a lot of the early Quinto pros and you get familiar with the filing number, a lot of it comes under 105, which is what they basically deem as foreign counterintelligence, right? It's the idea that they're terrified that not only these people communists, but they have connections to the Soviet Union, they have connections to Cuba. When they really got their fear of the new left, it had to be with the fact that they were connection to like China, right? And so even when we, and even though they would we end up opening a coin to pro against black nationalist hate groups, as they deemed it, or black nationalists, as we would call it, in 1968. Even a lot of that is still very much connected to the FBI's fear of communies, right? So when we actually talk most famously about the Cointel Pro documents relayed to Martin Luther King, those are actually within the CP Cointel Pro because the FBI was really concerned about Communist Party's infiltration into the Southern and the SCLC, right? And so sometimes people take this as, oh, Hoover's just paranoid, oh, he thinks everyone's a red.

He didn't think King was a red. He was actually concerned that communists were infiltrating these other groups. And part of this is because I think many people on the left have gotten very defensive about some things of the past. And there's a certain amount of people taking the red bait, as it were, is if you look at every important struggle in 20th century, communists were integral and involved in every single one of it. And people sort of just want to be like, oh, no, Hoover's paranoid. Oh, he thinks there's reds under the beds and there's reds in every closet. And it's sort of as, and because of people trying to go that route, people sort of undermine actually the role that communists have played in all important struggles in the 20th century. And that's what, who was concerned.

He didn't actually think King was a communist. He was concerned about the influence communists would have on people like King. And that's why he's worried about someone like that, possibly rising to national influence and actually being. uniting and electrifying force. Fascinating. I want to jump on that, too, because look, I just finally got around to reading the Jakarta method. And I think your listeners, you know, would appreciate the perspective.

You know, Cointel Pro has become shorthand for the FBI in the 60s. Cointel Pro was a fraction of what they did. And it's very sensational. I mean, you know, they did this next. stuff to Gene Seaberg. They, you know, they tried to start a gang war between the Chicago Panthers and Hampton. They did a letter to King, which, you know, some have interpreted is trying to get him to kill himself. I mean, this is pretty awful stuff. But, you know, the Jakarta method outlines the lists, right? The list of communists that are made in Indonesia,

in Chile, in Brazil, sometimes with the help of the CIA. Well, the FBI, a lot of the FBI, A lot of what they're doing is compiling lists in the United States, list of communists, list of key black extremists, list of agitators. Now, these lists were meant, they were actionable things. They were meant to actually round people up in the event of a, you know, justifiable in their terms, national emergency. That did not happen. Now, had that happened, I think we would be talking about the FBI's work in the, in this period,

from a different perspective, and probably we'd be a little bit more, have a little bit different context of the Cointel Pro stuff. And I'm not minimizing how terrible it was, but to say that it was peace in a larger effort of, you know, aggressive defense of national security in which, you know, there were no holds barred in the words of the former director for national security, William Sullivan. And, you know, in other words, Cointel Pro, because of it, it's so fantastic, tends to draw people's attention. But I would, I would encourage people to take, you know, an overall picture of it and stuff, because that's actually going to be more helpful in navigating, you know, the challenges for people who are engaged in legal

activity of dissent and such today. Yeah, another great corrective, absolutely. So I know on Rev Left that we've done an entire episode on Fred Hampton, which I'll definitely link to in the show notes for anybody listening who hasn't heard that yet. But can you remind us of how the assassination of Fred Hampton went down and what that reveals about the FBI and the Chicago Police Department? Yeah, you know, like so in reviewing it, it seems like Jacobi Williams wrote a book about the Illinois Black Panther Party, which has some helpful stuff in it. He makes a point that a little too often the Chicago police are under emphasized in their role. I mean, it seems, this actually comes out in the movie, too. It seems like in the middle of November, there's a shootout.

I mean, you know, Connor kind of made a point, well, Connor made a very good point in a conversation we were having not long ago about, and maybe he can elaborate on it later, but the escalating violence between the Black Panthers and the Chicago police. and law enforcement in general. I mean, they were caught in a certain loop that was extremely volatile and dangerous, but two panthers are killed in the middle of November. One of them is actually shot point blank.

The sense is the cop is on the ground, he's wounded, he's suffering, and some people have interpreted it as almost a mercy killing by this, I'm sorry, I forget the man's name, is the character Winter in the film. Jake Winters is the Panther gets killed, and the two officers that killed are Gahooley and Rappaport. Yeah.

So, you know, William O'Neill and his denouement on the thing says that the raid on Panther headquarters was in retaliation for that, that the Chicago police wanted blood, and they wanted to get the leader of the Chicago Panthers. It's a compelling version, as I say, you know, it's, you know, nobody's on record as saying as such. But with the sanctioning of the Illinois Attorney General Edward Hanrahan, I believe that's his title, there is a rating party. Let's see, I have the numbers.

I don't want to lead people astray. I think it's 15 police go in. There are nine Panthers in the apartment. everybody's asleep. It's in the early morning hours, the pre-dawn hours. They go in, 90 shots are fired. It goes on from anywhere to 10 to 15 minutes, depending on whose version you read. Two Panthers are killed. Mark Clark, who is a young panther from, I believe, Peoria, Illinois, and Fred Hampton, who is the chairman of the group. Hampton appears to have been wounded or, you know, it's not even clear he's dead. You hear some cross talk from the cops and, you know,

you hear some shots and the cop says he's good and dead now, I believe, is to quote. So it's, it appears to be an actual execution. Of the 90 shots fired, only one comes from the Black Panthers, although the police initially claimed it was a firefight. And this is where, you know, it's, you know, what the FBI know, what did the FBI know and when did they know it? I mean, they issue these memos. They are very happy about William O'Neill and the work he's doing for Roy Mitchell. In June of that year, Mitchell is also commended for his work with a key informant. So, you know, do the FBI know that the Chicago police are going in there to murder Fred Hampton? We don't know that. Are they happy that Fred Hampton is dead?

Yes, they are. And it's really pretty sick when you think about it. I mean, we don't know if it's the, you know, whatever. You know, I'm kind of losing my train of thought. So, right? So Hampton is killed. And then the whole thing starts to come unwound. The Panthers actually secure the apartment,

show that some of the things that were supposed to be bullet, holes or actually nail holes. It becomes clear that the police, you know, did all the firing. And, you know, Hampton is dead. Hampton at that point was actually confronting going back to prison. I mean, he had actually been convicted on the charge of looting the ice cream truck. His appeal had been denied. He was facing two to five years in prison, which, and the other thing, yeah, this is going back to my train of thought. What I discovered is, I think there's a memo from November, I'm going to say, 29th. When we publish this article, we're going to put the documents up to. The FBI actually had a formal co-intel pro operation aimed at Fred Hampton set to go a week or two before he was killed.

You know, a co-intel pro was like you had to draft the idea, it had to go up to chain of command, it had to be approved, and then it could be done. And what they wanted to do was Hampton was being called to move to Oakland because his speaking skills were such that the National Black Panthers wanted to, you know, use that to grow their organization. But the Chicago branch was suffering from some discipline issues. There had been a meeting in which Hampton had unilaterally said, okay, everybody's purged. And, you know, really that meant everybody was suspended. So the FBI came up with this scheme of writing a letter allegedly from an angry Chicago Panther to the Oakland headquarters saying, you know, we're getting sick and tired of Hampton, you know, pushing his weight around. And, you know, the point being is to try to sabotage him moving out west. That actually speaks against, you know, a whole scenario of the FBI, you know, being from the very first out to get Hampton killed, which is not to say, yes,

know, it's not possible. It's possible whoever proposed this co-intel pro wasn't in the loop on some things. But it is, as I say, a piece of evidence that merits further looking into and does raise larger questions around, you know, what we do and don't know. Yeah. For one thing, the raid was actually supposed to happen earlier. So that would have actually been before, that would have been much closer to the time after the death of the, officers, right? So the earliest, it might probably goes back to us. The earliest

I could find of sort of trumped up charges that the police were going after the Panthers with was February 1969. This is essentially where four Panthers rent four hotel rooms and they have some sort of meeting and so then I have they put like 15 people

in there and then they're essentially arrested like 13 of them arrested on this trumped up charge of not like ripping off an in keeper because supposedly too many people in the room. And these are the sort of ridiculous trumped-up charges, right? And these things just sort of escalate to the point of June 10th, you have like the morning of you have a trio of police raids.

The police are getting more and more brutal. Now, one of the key turning points will be in July, 16th, 9th, 6, 69. This will be when a panther, Larry Robertson, is shot three times, and then two officers are also wounded. And the police obviously take this as an insult, as an affront, the idea that they've been harassing these Panthers for a month, and now some of the fellow officers are wounded. That means they only intensify the pressure on the Panthers. And that's when we then get this period where it starts being shootouts at the office. And the police just give claims that seem rather implausible, like police were driving by a Panther office and they started a shootout.

It seems like a pretty bad idea to start a shoot up from your own office. or like a sniper went after them and the sniper was on top of the panther office. And these just become excuses, it seems like, for the police to launch more brutality in trying to deal with the panthers, right? And at the same time, the FBI is, as Aaron just mentioned, is trying to develop things like these cointel programs where they can essentially push Hampton out of the way. They also seem to be given the impression that when Hampton is going to have to go back to jail

on the, you know, the $71 ice cream charge, as we'll call it, they more or less seem to think that he's going to be at least somewhat out of the way. And they're sort of happy with that as a solution, whereas once we get the killings of officers Gouli and Rappaport, as well as the killings of Winters, the Panther member, that's when the police seem to be determined that they are going to basically just bring all hell down on the Panthers. and there will be blood to pay for the fact that two officers are dead. Yeah, and the story from the Chicago Police Department after the fact

I think testifies to that in relation to these other sort of events where they're saying, you know, the snipers are shooting at us or we're just driving by and get shot at. I mean, the Chicago Police Department's, their story after the fact was that this was a mutual shootout and not an ambush and bombardment by the Chicago police, which forensics later made very clear, I mean, 99 of those bullets out of 100. of those bullets were fired from the Chicago Police Department directly.

So, yeah, it all matches up for sure. Now, I want to move into the end of this conversation, but focusing on this new film because, you know, now we have an idea of the documents, of some of the actions of the Chicago Police Department and the FBI. And this is all depicted dramatically in the new film Judas and the Black Messiah. So I was really curious as to what both of your thoughts are on the film, what they got right, what they got wrong, and just your overall takeaway. Yeah, I'm not sure Connor's seen it.

He's, uh... Yeah, it's, I'm in Shanghai and it's not playing over here. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I have seen a, but just one thing to add in. I don't know. Sure. You know, I mean, we are arguing that, that there are more things to learn, but that is not to say, you know, there are not certain things we know.

You know, we know William O'Neill gave, and this is in the film, and it's accurate to a degree, gave the Chicago, Well, William O'Neill gave a floor plan to his FBI handler, Roy Mitchell. It's actually not the first floor plan he gave to Mitchell, by the way. I think he helped in the other raids. But he gave a floor plan to Mitchell, and Mitchell passed that on to the Chicago police. The attorneys, Jeff Haas and Flint Taylor, they fought like mad to get even that amount of evidence out, you know, by bringing a civil suit, you know, to their credit. And that's why we know that, that William O'Neill essentially helped that raid, you know, be accomplished.

So in that sense, William O'Neill has blood on his hands, Roy Mitchell has blood on his hands, and Jake or Hoover have blood on his hands. Regardless of what they thought was going to happen or what they didn't think was going to happen, you know, they were complicit. The fact that Hoover gave a bonus to both, well, I don't know if Hoover gave the bonus to O'Neill. O'Neill was given $300 bonus through the FBI hierarchy. Mitchell was given a $200 bonus, you know, and a nice letter from Hoover himself. The fact that, you know, two black men are dead and that Hoover wants to give money to the people who are instrumental in them being killed is just, it's just monstrous, you know, regardless of what he did or didn't know.

So I want to make that clear. As far as the film, you know, the film is very powerful. I think there's a lot to be recommended there. I'm not going to go into a whole critique because it's a thing that requires a good deal more thought and, you know, in methodological discerning than I'm able to do right now. I will say, though, I would urge people to watch the film as a dramatic piece of art, not as piece of history. there's quite a bit there that's accurate. There's quite a bit that's not accurate. But it was

occurring to me, you know, two things. Fred Hampton as a Messiah. I think the first point needs to be made is there's kind of a logical question mark here. It's like, why would Fred Hampton be the guy that you murder? Why wouldn't it be Huey Newton or Eldridge Cleaver or David Hilliard or Bobby Seal. You know, the film actually has a little thing at the end, and you can see it's actually defensive. They have the Hoover character saying, oh, well, you know, Huey was, we can't let Fred go to jail because Huey was in jail and he became famous and Eldridge was in jail and

he became a famous writer. And, you know, that's all true. But, you know, they were still around. You know, they were still around when Fred Hampton was murdered. So it's kind of like that argument on its own. doesn't really satisfy the thing. But I think the bigger point I had is, first, there is no Messiah. There's nobody who's going to come down from heaven and lead us out of all of this.

There are going to be better leaders, you know, hopefully strong leaders. But the other thing is, and this is kind of, you know, almost a personal note, I guess. But, you know, I've worked with the RCP for a long time. And I got to tell you that leaders and, you know, what, Maoists used to call, you know, and I'm a lapsed Maoist. I'm not there anymore. But leaders in the masses are dialectically intertwined. And if you skew the dialected towards special leaders, problems often ensue. So, you know, I don't think canonizing anybody in particular is really what we ought to be doing. We ought to be, you know, recognizing people who have special qualities and

skills and make sure that they're not made vulnerable, you know, because they do tend to be targets. But at the same time, I think, you know, this whole, particularly when you think of countries like the former Soviet Union and China and the whole cult of personality around those figures, you know, it never turns out well. So, you know, a bit of sobriety around that. That said, you know, I think the fact that people love Fred Hampton and love represented, this young dynamic leader who was willing to be theoretical, you know, in challenging things. I think that's a wonderful thing for people to really, you know, acknowledge and, you know, historically appreciate in such. But the film as a whole, you know, it's, you know, it's a drama,

right? It's, and some of the things are drawn very simplistically. It's the evil FBI. and the, you know, courageous Black Panthers and the ambivalent, conflicted, informant. And I don't think that's quite how real life goes, but people will disagree with me. Yeah. No, and I think your point about the dialectical relationship between the people and the leaders is something that Fred Hampton himself

would completely be the first one to agree with. You know, he was never someone who put himself above and beyond others. He was always saying that he is inexorably intertwined with the community, the people, the masses that he represented. So I think that's a very important point in any time on any side of the spectrum, but specifically on the left where, you know, whether the leader wants it or not, there is a cult of personality. It never goes well. And I think that's something that we could always take away from this as well. Before we wrap up here, though, is there anything else that either one of you want to say before we leave this conversation,

anything you really want to ensure maybe that listeners take away from this overall conversation in an episode? I had this point at the top, and there is no evidence that the murder of Fred Hampton was a co-intel pro-operation in the sense of a proposal being a made, approved, and carried out. Those who describe it as such, and it's pretty much out there, and I don't think we'll ever win the debate. I think people are going to forever feel that it's that way, but those describing it as such are actually misapprehending what Cointel Pro was. And that doesn't mean that the FBI doesn't have blood on its hand. It does. And this new evidence shows this definitively. But the reason I'm even making a point about this is that we need to understand Cointel Pro and the larger work of the

FBI because it is a template for domestic repression. You know, understanding it incorrectly is only going to heighten the vulnerability to tried and true methods for people who are engaged in legal dissent or legal efforts for social justice. You know, it's, you know, we need to be, well, you know, as they say, we need to be smart people, you know, and that go for easy answers. So if anything from listening to Connor and I, who, you know, look, we're still wrestling with this. And I can't speak for Connor, but I know my thinking on this continues to, you know, change. evolve sometimes or radically transformed but it's you know based on digging into and trying to get at this stuff and a certain sense of like outrage that these secrets are still being hidden

how dare they yeah how dare they do these things and still keep it secret to be on a mission to get that out well that's that's not such a bad mission absolutely Connor yeah I'll just sort of piggybacking off that yeah I think it's really important to I think we need to be quite self-critical, I mean, among people who, like, see justice and want to get to the truth here, about what we do and actually don't know. As I mentioned, like, we found out about Cointill Pro in 71, Blackstock wrote a book about it in 75. That was mostly focused on CWP. Churchill wrote his book, which hasn't been updated since 1888, also, I think, have some problems. But leaving that aside, aside from that and a few other books, I don't want to give out a whole book list here, there's not been enough work done.

I think that actually honors the people who took that risk of the break-in in media-vensylvania and actually unearthed this incredibly important thing. I feel a little bit like we've kind of wasted this. I mean, we should really be trying to do everything we can to get as much of this information as possible, right? There is this question being hidden, but there's also a thing on us, right? They're not just going to give it to us. And I think we really need to pull this apart, right?

Because the FBI was meticulously documenting this. And there's two aspects. One is we actually need to figure out more of what the FBI, what did and didn't know. But also, it actually tells us a lot more about what is going on in terms of this information, right? Because what actually, because they were having informants in all these places and they were giving daily reports, is there's actually all this historical information that, you know, we've sort of lost, right? And back to this Messiah point for a second, right, is I think we need to actually deal with the reality of what we, did and did not accomplish what our strengths and weaknesses are, right?

Because initially when these things around Martin Luther King's extramarital affairs came around, right, a person that was close to him, his name is Skatesmanville. He basically got trashed in the press. And now we all know it's true. It doesn't take away the point of what he did or didn't accomplish or what he was fighting for, right? We just need to actually have a realistic thing. And I think sometimes, like getting back to this Messiah boy in Hoover used the term, but I think also there is too much among certain people.

If we want to put all our hopes in this person or this group, it's the idea that we romanticize it in the way that that's somehow going to solve things or free us. And there's a lot of hard work we have to do. I mean, I'm principally talking from the perspective of someone who's doing this as a historian, but there's just a lot of work to be done to actually figure out these things. And I think whenever we think, oh, yeah, I already know that and we don't actually have evidence. We always get ourselves in trouble and we start thinking things that actually aren't true. Yeah, absolutely. And I applaud both of you for that commitment to realism, to being fact-based, evidence-based, and to really having the right understanding so that you can move in the right way,

given that correct understanding. Before we wrap up, though, could you just remind us really quick? Because I think this is important about the break-in, about how these documents were ultimately sort of released to the public, because I think that's a point that often gets obscured as well in these discussions. Yeah, there was a, I forget the exact name. There's a great PBS special, and Betty Metzger, has a book called The Burglary, but it was essentially a group of Catholic pacifists who broke into the resident field office in Media, Pennsylvania, the FBI.

This was back when the FBI had these little hole-in-the-wall offices because, you know, they needed to have their reach everywhere. Media is, I believe, a suburb of Philadelphia. I'm not sure what the closest city is. But this group of activists broke into this, you know, is basically in a strip wall. They went in and they stole a bunch of FBI files, and a few of the files had this letterhead or this subject line saying counterintelligence program. I don't think that actually revealed the Hampton thing per se, but some journalists picked up

on those documents, which were distributed, eventually forced the FBI to release documents on the counterintelligence program, and then the whole thing came unwound. for another day, we need to put that all in historical context. I mean, it came unwound in the context of the defeat in Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, these brave souls basically put it all on the line to reveal these documents. And that's why we know some of these secrets that, you know, otherwise I think the FBI would have burned before anybody, you know, ever knew about them. Yeah, it basically gave us a guide to be able to understand what to look for in future files.

by, like, being able to understand, like, the order numbers and file numbers and these sort of things. Absolutely fascinating. So it was an act of civil disobedience that even opened up this closet in the first place. Thank you both for coming on for doing this in such short notice. You both do great work. The FOIA request that you have and bring to light and bring to my audience as well is deeply appreciated.

I love both of the books that you've worked on and everything you do independently. Before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find your work and your upcoming article in the related documents? Well, so the two books to look for in particular on this are heavy radicals and a threat of the first magnitude. If you go to my website, Connor and my work is there. It's Aaron Leonard.net, a-A-A-R-O-N-E-O-N-A-R-N-E-O-N-R-D dot net. You can find a bunch of information there.

We've submitted the article to a publication, but haven't gotten. confirmation so I don't I don't want to name them because I don't want to I don't want to embarrass myself you know but but when it runs Brett I'll be sure to let you know so you can maybe put attach a link to this broadcast absolutely yeah the moment that comes out I'll I'll link to it in the show notes I'll update it and I'll get the word out Connor where can we find you nowhere because the country's absolutely apphorrent handling COVID has made it so I don't get any Nehraf files anymore. So then the country occasionally gets back to something that looks like a functioning country.

I might be able to get files again and give you guys some articles. Awesome. All right. Well, until then, thank you both for coming on and we'll definitely have you back anytime. You know, you have a home here at Revlin. Okay, thanks for having a spread. Oh All the smoke

All the smoke in the air feel the hate when they stare All the pain that we bear Oh you better beware There girls don't play bear All we got is a prayer. It was all in their plans. Wash the blood from your hands.

Freedom from our brothers. Freedom because they judge us. Freedom from the others. Freedom from the leaders and keeping us. Freedom gonna keep us strong. Freedom if you just don't own. Freedom ain't free at all. I'm gonna see you to do.

There's no one, there's no one like you Long as I'm standing we could never lose I'm always, always fight for you I'm always always fight for you mental institution causing so much confusion seems the only solution is a new evolution we can't take it no more no it can't be ignored when they knock down your door will you be ready for one Freedom because it needs us Free from help to see us

Freedom won't you free us Freedom doesn't hang from the trees Freedom from injustice Freedom from corruption That ain't for destruction And you know they're gonna see it through There's no one, there's no one like you As I'm standing

We could never love I will never lose I'm always always fight for you I will always always fight for you I'm always fight for you

for you I'm for you. I don't know for you. I don't know what I'm Oh, don't know. Tum-tun-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-to-do-do-to-do. Oh, oh, oh.

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