In the mid-1970s, when we were reporters at Rolling Stone, Lowell Bergman and I decided to take an in-depth look into the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to disrupt the Black Panther Party.
In a 1967 memorandum, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had stated that the program’s intent was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.”
By September 1968, the Panthers had emerged as the leading edge of the black power movement in the U.S. A key FBI memo solicited suggestions from its field agents for new ways to “create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders, steps to neutralize all organizational efforts of the (Panthers), as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each other’s sources of finances, suspicion concerning their respective spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement.”
In another memo, in July 1969, Hoover declared that the Panthers were “without question the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
Starting late in 1968, there were numerous police raids on Panther offices around the country, sometimes including federal law enforcement officials. Several Panther leaders were killed or wounded, many others were sent to prison, or fled into exile.
In the course of gathering documents under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing Panthers and ex-Panthers, including Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown, Bergman and I were able to document hundreds of actions taken by FBI agents in pursuit of Hoover’s stated goals.
Many of these involved “disinformation,” sending letters purportedly from Cleaver to Huey Newton, for example, or vice versa, promoting the growing paranoia and distrust that was driving the two leaders toward an eventual split.
I interviewed Elaine Brown during this period. She was the acting head of the party while Newton was in exile in Cuba. She was smart, articulate and projected a sense of power.
“The government didn’t succeed in destroying us,” Brown told me. “We survived…These motherfuckers intended to kill every one of us. But it’s too late now. Our ideas are out there –- they cannot be erased from the minds of the people.”
After months of work, Bergman and I produced a story that presented an exhaustive catalogue of the federal government’s war against the Panthers. We also noted that the FBI’s relentless attempts to disrupt the organization “encouraged local police departments to harass the group” as well.
But the process of reviewing a huge number of law enforcement files had also exposed to us evidence suggesting there was a sinister side to the Panthers, including internecine violence that had nothing to do with government provocation but was more like ruthless gang activity.
In 1977, once we had founded the Center for Investigative Reporting and opened an office in Oakland, we received numerous complaints from people in that community that the Panthers were by then “out of control.” Several Panther sources stated that Newton in particular was wreaking havoc inside the inner-city neighborhoods by committing random violent assaults, often fueled by consuming alcohol and cocaine at the same time.
We decided that CIR should look into these allegations, and the result in 1978 was a long investigative article called “The Party’s Over,” by a courageous Berkeley journalist, Kate Coleman, and a veteran police reporter, Paul Avery, published in New Times magazine.
(Avery was later portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 Hollywood movie “Zodiac” for his work on the unsolved case of a notorious serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
Their article, “The Party’s Over,” documented dozens of violent incidents caused by Newton and his “security squad” against members of the party who had provoked Newton’s wrath, as well as non-party members, including a prostitute he killed, a tailor he pistol-whipped to the verge of death, and other random victims of his rage.
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