Street roots
12
Dec. 7, 2012
The FBI’s spy vs. spy posture with counterculture
BY M IK E W O LD
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
n Oct. 1, 1964, a student on the
Berkeley campus of the University
of California set up a table to
distribute literature about civil rights. He
was arrested by the police — there had been
a ban on political activities on campus since
the 1940s — but before
he could be removed,
hundreds and then
thousands of students
surrounded the police
car. The confrontation
developed into an all-
night protest and only
ended when the
students, intimidated
by 500 police
threatening to
Subversives: The forcefully remove them
FBI’s War on
from the area and
Student Radicals, encouraged by
and Reagan’s
concessions offered by
Rise to Power
the university, agreed
by Seth Rosenfeld t0 a compromise, it
was the first major
protest on the
Berkeley campus in history. By the end of
the school year, students had won the right
to organize political events on campus in
time to create the first massive protests
against the escalation of American
involvement in Vietnam.
The radical student movement had a
powerful enemy: J. Edgar Hoover, director
of the Bureau of Investigation since 1924; it
became the FBI in 1935. Starting in the
1930s, Hoover used illegal and covert
surveillance as well as dirty tricks against
anyone the FBI suspected of being
“subversive” - a wide-ranging category that
included Communist Party members and
many others. At one time about 10 percent
of the members of the Socialist Workers
Party were FBI informants. Anyone who
questioned government foreign policy or
racial segregation was likely to end up with
an FBI file.
As Berkeley became an epicenter of the
student movement, Hoover set out to
contain, sabotage and repress the
movement. Part of his solution was to
facilitate the election of Ronald Reagan in
1968 as governor of California. One of the
cornerstones of Reagan’s campaign was
repressing the movement on UC campuses.
Sound like a conspiracy theory? Author
Seth Rosenfeld anchors “Subversives” in
300,000 pages of FBI files released after
successive court cases. Among numerous
revelations, the files document Reagan’s
O
activities as an FBI informant from his days
as president of the Screen Actors Guild in
the 1950s. The FBI provided quid pro quo
for his cooperation, such as investigating
Reagan’s estranged daughter, downplaying
in public reports the Mafia involvement of
Reagan’s adopted son and feeding Reagan
useful information for his political career.
The files also document Hoover’s secret
campaign to get Clark Kerr, the liberal head
of the UC system, fired because Hoover
saw Kerr as a compromiser who was only
encouraging the protestors. Reagan
engineered Kerr’s dismissal at the first
Board of Regents meeting after his election
as governor.
The next year Reagan got the Board of
Regents to reject a student proposal to turn
a university-owned vacant lot into a People’s
Park. “Dorothy Walker, a Berkeley city
planning commissioner, told the governor,
‘The blood of the people of Berkeley will be
on your hands.’ ‘Fine,’ Reagan replied. ... ‘I’ll
wash it off with Boraxo,’ ” referencing a
soap advertised on “Death Valley Days,” a
TV show he hosted.
In the 1969 confrontation that followed,
an innocent bystander was killed, another
was permanently blinded and at least 50
other civilians - some protestors, some not
— were injured by police shotgun blasts of
birdshot and buckshot.
Rosenfeld follows three figures in the
history of Berkeley protest: Reagan, Kerr
and Mario Savio, a major leader of the first
student protests in 1964. Each represents a
different political current: Savio, the
increasing radicalization of the student body
and its alienation from the political process;
Kerr, the mainstream liberal with a
commitment to civil liberties but also an
acceptance of what he saw as political
reality; and Reagan, the conservative.
Rosenfeld finds parallels in their
personalities and interests, but the device
can’t quite hold the story together: Savio’s
intense involvement in the movement was
short-lived, and he abhorred the idea of
being a “leadership figure,” believing it
antithetical to participatory democracy.
Reagan went on to become president of
the United States; Kerr immediately found
another job with the Carnegie Foundation;
and Savio, in part because of ongoing FBI
harassment, had a hard time finding a job
for a number of years.
The history is fascinating. Rosenfeld
draws on many sources, not just FBI files, to
give insight into the hows and whys behind
the Berkeley movement alongside ongoing
FBI surveillance. The reader can get lost in
the complexity of the story. Rosenfeld often
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Richard Aoki: Asian American
Black Panther or FBI informant?
BY M IK E W O LD
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
It wasn’t a great surprise when the FBI files
reviewed by Seth Rosenfeld for "Subversives"
showed that Ronald Reagan was an FBI informant:
He'd been accused of that before. But a section in
Rosenfeld's book about Richard Aoki, the only
Asian American to have a major leadership role in
the Black Panthers, had
a more explosive
impact: It appeared that
Aoki had been a paid
informant long before
his involvement with
the Panthers and also
into his years as a
respected teacher and
Richard Aoki at
Black Panther
The initial reaction
among Aoki's former
comrades and colleagues
was one of denial. Aoki
was remembered as a
militant, uncompromising
Rosenfeld had inflated the information in the files
or
however, 221 pages of FBI files on Aoki were
considered an invaluable informant by the bureau.
In 1972, the agent supervising him even reminded
him to report the payments he'd received from the
FBI on his IRS tax return.
Aoki sounds-tetb^epiiom e otwiddSoQ^
revolutionary cool: He wore sunglasses most of the
time, even at night, and spoke the language of the
black Oakland neighborhood where he'd grown
up. He sometimes suggested escalation of protest
actions. At one point, he proposed that students
raid local National Guard armories to get weapons,
introduces chapters with climactic events
and then goes back in time to explain how
they happened. The book could benefit
from a chronological table showing the
relationship of various protests and
meetings.
The detailed revelations of FBI
surveillance raise important issues about
how police powers can be abused in the
the Panthers, furnishing them guns from his own
collection. Before joining the Panthers, he had
provided the FBI information on the youth groups
of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers
Party, among others.
There's nothing in the heavily redacted files to
suggest that Aoki was an agent provocateur, nor is
there information about exactly what he told the
FBI. Nevertheless, his influence within the Panthers
raises questions about whether the FBI knew what
kinds of actions he was encouraging, and, if bureau
members did know, how they reacted.
It could be that Aoki was spying on the FBI ~ a
double agent of sorts. It's also possible that all the
information he fed the bureau was garbage,
although that contradicts the FBI's opinion of his
information.
Fred Ho, a friend of Aoki's, suggested in August
in the online newspaper San Francisco Bay View
that Aoki’s appearance in the released FBI files was
disinformation intended to discredit the
revolutionary movement, As quoted in International
Examiner, a pan-Asian newspaper based in Seattle,
Aoki's biographer Diane Fujino insisted that the
files need to be studied more carefully. "Perhaps,
and the jury is still out on this, Aoki was an FBI
informant in the early '60s at a time when he was
rather conventional.... But he may have gotten
changed in the process of reading and working
with the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist
Workers Party."
None of these explanations seems probable on
its face, but at this point only the FBI knows. Or
maybe no one really knows. Aoki committed
suicide, t o , , «
^Qm^lBosenfeld-----
let him know there was evidence he’d been an
informer. Rosenfeld's report of that interview
makes Aoki sound evasive:" 'People change. It is
complex. Layer upon layer.' When pressed further
for a yes or a no, Aoki again replied indirectly,
saying, 'I'm denying it. Or "no comment" is the
standard response,! think.'"
absence of strong civilian oversight,
especially since many of the safeguards
enacted after Hoover’s death have been
eroded in the past 10 years. Still, the real
interest of the narrative is the story of how
a quiescent campus (or society) can come to
challenge the foundations of power in the
course of a very short time.
Reprinted from Real Change, Seattle, Wash.
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