On Richard Aoki
Say it ain’t so.
When the news broke that beloved radical activist and former Black Panther Richard Aoki may have been working as an FBI informant, I was floored. I had the same reaction as Phil, over at Angry Asian Man:
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this.
Granted, Aoki, who committed suicide in 2009, is not around to verify, deny, or explain these claims–claims that will no doubt help to sell the crap out of this new book. I’m not willing to accept this bombshell just like that, especially based on one article that happens to be written by Seth Rosenfeld, the same guy who wrote the book making these claims.
We’re also talking about the FBI, who definitely aren’t amateurs when it comes to shady discrediting tactics. It’s not hard to believe that there are holdovers from that era who would go to these lengths to tarnish Aoki’s legacy. Hell no. Not buying this. Need more information.
So I went looking for all the information I could find–and what remains is frustratingly inconclusive. Here’s a quick walkthrough of FOIA requests, COINTELPRO, other informants, and why the truth in these situations is so hard to find.
Here are the allegations. The discovery was made by one Seth Rosenfeld, who has spent the past decade looking at government infiltration into radical student groups. According to SF Weekly:
Nearly 10 years ago, local journalist Seth Rosenfeld garnered fame for his scathing series “The Campus Files: Reagan, Hoover, and the UC Red Scare,” which uncovered the FBI’s conspiracy to harass UC Berkeley students and faculty during the Cold War. It also detailed the FBI’s role in the firing of the college’s then-president, Clark Kerr, because government officials didn’t agree with his politics.
It took court orders for the FBI to turn records over to Rosenfeld, who wrote the series for the San Francisco Chronicle. And now the famed journalist is taking the FBI back to court, demanding the agency release more records for a book he is writing.
But this time Rosenfeld wants “any and all records” pertaining to Richard Masato Aoki, the infamous militant activist who was at the center of of the civil rights movement around Berkeley in the 1960s.
So it would appear that Rosenfeld stumbled across information on Aoki in his research for other projects. It’s possible–history is complicated. So Rosenfeld kept digging. The fruits of his labor are in a thoughtful piece on the Center for Investigative Reporting’s website. One of the major points:
But unbeknownst to his fellow activists, Aoki had served as an FBI intelligence informant, covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him.
That agent, Burney Threadgill Jr., recalled that he approached Aoki in the late 1950s, about the time Aoki was graduating from Berkeley High School. He asked Aoki if he would join left-wing groups and report to the FBI.
Aoki is listed in an FBI report on the Black Panther Party as an “informant” with the code number “T-2.”
“He was my informant. I developed him,” Threadgill said in an interview. “He was one of the best sources we had.”
The former agent said he asked Aoki how he felt about the Soviet Union, and the young man replied that he had no interest in communism.
“I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just go to some of the meetings and tell me who’s there and what they talked about?’ Very pleasant little guy. He always wore dark glasses,” Threadgill recalled.
According to Rosenfeld, Aoki started out reporting on other types of organizations, before moving into the Panthers. FBI records show that he did inform on the Panthers activities in May of 1967. Rosenfeld had the opportunity to ask Aoki about his involvement, and describes the exchange.
In a tape-recorded interview for the book in 2007, two years before he committed suicide, Aoki was asked if he had been an FBI informant. Aoki’s first response was a long silence. He then replied, “ ‘Oh,’ is all I can say.”
Later during the same interview, Aoki contended the information wasn’t true.
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