To the Editor:
As an investigative journalist, Seth Rosenfeld has fought against the FBI’s secrecy and misinformation. It’s disappointing to witness his lack of commitment to transparency and accuracy in his own work.
In his letter (“Author of ‘Subversives’ Responds to Book’s Critics,” The Chronicle, September 23), Mr. Rosenfeld mischaracterizes the issues his critics have raised while ignoring the serious problems with his ongoing story of Richard Aoki’s reported history as an FBI informant. He continues to fight a battle against a straw-man target, portraying himself as a courageous muckraker revealing an inconvenient truth that has prompted angry denials from supporters of Mr. Aoki and a few scholars with their heads in the sand.
While Mr. Rosenfeld has fought a long and arduous battle to uncover FBI files on Mr. Aoki, a key concern of scholars or any serious student of history must be the proper interpretation and contextualization of primary sources. In this regard, Mr. Rosenfeld has not only fallen short; he also has the gall to assert that his reports on Mr. Aoki have always been 100-percent correct while fundamentally changing his story. Indeed, while simultaneously dismissing our concerns as irrelevant, trivial, and personal attacks, he has—only after the publication of his book Subversives—substantially adopted the historical interpretation of myself and other critics.
The paper trail of Mr. Rosenfeld’s errors and transgressions is too obvious to ignore.
First, I have accepted from the beginning that Burney Threadgill’s report that Mr. Aoki was an FBI informant was serious, historically significant, and worthy of further study. This was particularly true because historians have long known that Mr. Aoki was one of the first of his generation of Japanese-Americans coming of age in the 1960s to undergo a radical transformation that led to left-wing politics and an embrace of a “Third World” identity. The matter at hand was how to square the allegation that Mr. Aoki was once an FBI informant with his well-documented history of being a committed social-justice activist. Well before Mr. Rosenfeld, I stated on record that it was not an either/or proposition—i.e., one of several plausible possibilities is that Mr. Aoki got entangled with the FBI in ways he could not escape even as he became deeply and sincerely involved in activism.
In a radio interview on September 7, 2012, Mr. Rosenfeld characterized Mr. Aoki as “a complex person whose life was defined by dualities, whose life was compartmentalized in various ways.” He further asserted that Mr. Aoki “was a very patriotic person but he was also very committed to social justice. And that his having been an informant could perhaps be understood in that context.”
But this represents a dramatic departure from his simplistic caricature of Mr. Aoki as a “violent” militant in Subversives. Indeed, this passage from Page 424 of his book is entirely consistent with the whole of his portrayal of Mr. Aoki: “By any reckoning, the use of guns brought violence, legal trouble, and discredit to the Panthers, all goals of the FBI’s Cointelpro to destroy the organization. Did Aoki help the Panthers fight for justice, or did he set them up?” There is no complexity, no possibility of a dialectical unity of opposites. Mr. Rosenfeld presented readers with a Manichean dichotomy, inviting them to speculate that Mr. Aoki “set up” the Black Panthers in coordination with the FBI despite his own admission that he had absolutely no evidence to warrant such speculation. In order to portray Mr. Aoki as a uniquely violent activist who had a negative impact on the causes he embraced, Mr. Rosenfeld proceeded to discuss the violent police conflicts involving the Black Panthers and the Third World Liberation Front strike for ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley completely divorced from proper historical context. While Mr. Rosenfeld’s report was bound to elicit controversy, he ignited a firestorm with his flawed interpretation and irresponsible speculation.
Second, Mr. Rosenfeld has unnecessarily aroused consternation by presenting contradictory, ambiguous, and manipulated evidence that he has asserted is definitive. He has cited conflicting dates as to when Mr. Aoki first became an informant without explaining this discrepancy or acknowledging the need to reconcile his contradictory sources. He has never publicly explained why he viewed the only document of any kind cited in Subversives ostensibly naming Mr. Aoki as an FBI informant (the “T-2" document) as conclusive evidence when other researchers deemed it ambiguous because the informant’s name appears to be redacted. I was forced to dig through hundreds of court records to find Mr. Rosenfeld’s declarations detailing arguments he neglected to include in the text or footnotes to his book. Furthermore, he characterized Mr. Aoki as an FBI informant during the 1968-69 UC Berkeley strike despite offering no evidence in his book substantiating Mr. Aoki’s having any relationship to the FBI past 1967. Most notoriously, Mr. Rosenfeld clearly doctored the seemingly telling quote from Mr. Aoki: “People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.” He has changed his story about this quote, as well. First he claimed that Mr. Aoki’s “people change” statement could be found “further down” in the interview; now he writes that Mr. Aoki’s words “people change” can be found “in the exchange immediately before the others.” In any event, Mr. Rosenfeld failed to acknowledge that he edited a quote that he deemed to be one of only four critical pieces of evidence, possibly changing the meaning of Mr. Aoki’s words or the context in which he spoke them. Despite saying he would consider doing so over a month ago, he has yet to release the unedited recordings of his interviews with Mr. Aoki.
Third, Mr. Rosenfeld violated the public trust by delaying the release of evidence and concealing it for three weeks while his claims were most hotly debated. It is true that on September 7, 2012, he supplemented his original evidence by presenting over 200 additional pages of FBI documents on Mr. Aoki. But his statement that these pages were only released “after the initial story and video were completed” is grossly misleading. What Mr. Rosenfeld has not disclosed is the fact that the FBI released these documents to him on August 15, 2012—i.e., before his book and his original article on Mr. Aoki were published—and that a federal judge ordered this supplemental release of files on Mr. Aoki on July 2, 2012. (This is clearly specified in court records, including Mr. Rosenfeld’s own motion of September 4, 2012.) Thus, Mr. Rosenfeld knew he had the capacity to produce a book or, at minimum, an article with less ambiguous and more substantial evidence. That he chose not to speaks to his own negligence and his own complicity in attracting criticism. Did his publisher feel it was too expensive to revise a book that was already in production? Was he racing to meet a deadline coinciding with his schedule of book promotions? Did he think no one would question his ambiguous evidence? Why did he not tell The Chronicle about this evidence when he was first questioned? Only Mr. Rosenfeld can answer these questions.
Finally, Mr. Rosenfeld’s reporting on Mr. Aoki has been compromised by dubious research methods. He has necessarily adopted a combative, confrontational stance against the always secretive FBI. But he unnecessarily assumed that same combative, confrontational posture toward those who could have best assisted his attempt to understand Mr. Aoki. Because he deliberately kept his evidence that Mr. Aoki was an informant hidden from the political associates and scholars who best knew him, Mr. Rosenfeld did not discover Mr. Aoki’s complexities and dualities until after Subversives was in print. For instance, Mr. Rosenfeld learned from Mr. Aoki’s executor, Harvey Dong, that Mr. Aoki “compartmentalized” his life. But Mr. Rosenfeld learned this only while making an 11th-hour video to coincide with his book release—a video in which Mr. Rosenfeld captures a shell-shocked Mr. Dong learning of Mr. Rosenfeld’s allegation for the first time on camera. The upshot was that Mr. Rosenfeld preserved his scoop but botched his story. This botched story was published and broadcast extensively through the mainstream media, but for Mr. Rosenfeld’s own benefit it would not have passed academic peer review without substantial revisions and corrections.
In conclusion, I am happy to learn that Mr. Rosenfeld now believes we must studiously examine multiple forms of evidence in order to make sense of Mr. Aoki’s complexities. This is exactly what his scholarly critics, whose primary concern has been to caution against hasty and oversimplified conclusions, have requested. Given the FBI’s court-ordered agreement to release over 4,000 new pages on Mr. Aoki to Mr. Rosenfeld (in two distributions, on September 17 and November 1, 2012), we can expect to wrestle with more complications and more bombshell revelations. But we must read these FBI documents with the caveat from Wesley Swearingen, an ex-FBI agent who directly aided Mr. Rosenfeld with his research and lawsuits against the FBI, that “ghetto informant” reports were routinely forged and falsified and that FBI agents in this era were notoriously corrupt, racist, and lawless. And we must be suspicious of any effort by Mr. Rosenfeld to make sense of these documents without the assistance of critics he has wrongly maligned.
Scott Kurashige
Professor of American Culture and History
Director
Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Mich.