[See clarification and correction of this article.]
Was Richard M. Aoki, an icon of the 1960s protest movement in the Bay Area, an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
That’s the explosive claim made by Seth Rosenfeld, a journalist who has just published Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the product of 31 years of research.
The allegation has angered Asian-American community groups and Bay Area activists of that era, including veterans of the Black Panther Party. Mr. Aoki famously supplied that organization with weapons in 1966 when the Panthers mounted their armed self-defense campaign, saying they needed firearms to stand up against police violence and harassment.
Mr. Rosenfeld goes further, suggesting that Mr. Aoki armed the Black Panthers under direction from federal agents. That claim, if proved, would be of huge significance to scholars who study the protest movements and the history of surveillance. The notion that federal authorities, presumably under orders from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, armed the Black Panthers would place in a new light the violence that followed, including armed confrontations in which police officers and activists were killed.
“If you’re going to make that a central claim of a book, you’re going to be held to a high standard of proof,” says Donna Jean Murch, author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Historians like Ms. Murch, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, say Mr. Rosenfeld’s claim is unsubstantiated and warrants a more rigorous investigation than he gave it.
His allegation came to public attention in August when the San Francisco Chronicle published his article on the subject, timed to the release of his book; Mr. Rosenfeld also released a video report on the Web site of the Center for Investigative Reporting. The charges against Mr. Aoki account for only about 10 pages of the more than 700 in his book, which examines FBI activities concerning the University of California at Berkeley during the cold war. The evidence it relies on includes some 300,000 pages of FBI records released as a result of Mr. Rosenfeld’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
But Mr. Rosenfeld’s critics say that his accusations against Mr. Aoki rely on one former FBI agent, now deceased, who said he was Mr. Aoki’s handler in the years before his political activism, and one FBI document, redacted and, critics say, ambiguous.
More Evidence Needed?
Mr. Rosenfeld writes that Mr. Aoki, as a young man in the late 1950s and early 1960s, passed on information to the FBI on groups whose meetings and other activities he attended. At that time, Mr. Aoki was in trouble with local police for petty crimes. He then spent time in military service where he became a weapons expert, and only later became politically active. He quickly came to prominence after winning the confidence of Black Panther leaders, some of whom he had come to know before the organization was formed, while he and they were enrolled at Merritt College.
As a Japanese-American activist, Mr. Aoki’s acceptance by the Panthers was considered remarkable. He later was a key figure in the student strikes that the Third World Liberation Front organized in 1968 at San Francisco State College and then the University of California at Berkeley. He then worked for many years as a community-college counselor but returned to Bay Area political activism during the first decade of this century, until his death in 2009.
While Mr. Aoki might conceivably have had entanglements with law-enforcement figures early in his adult life, and been singled out as a possible informant by FBI agents, his actions, over all, hardly seem consistent with expectations of how an FBI informant would behave, says Diane C. Fujino, a scholar of Asian-American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her biography of Mr. Aoki, Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press. “Anything is possible, and so I’m open to the truth,” she says. “But I’d need to see substantial evidence.”
Some historians say it does make sense to ask what Mr. Aoki’s role was, exactly: After all, he was able to have a stash of weapons, and to supply the Panthers; some researchers believe the FBI would very likely have been aware of this and yet Mr. Aoki didn’t find himself in any serious legal trouble.
However, the scholars object, that question doesn’t justify the assertion that Mr. Aoki acted as an informant over a long period of time, into the late 1960s and beyond, and even worked to turn protest to violence.
In response, Mr. Rosenfeld says he makes no assertion that Mr. Aoki helped the FBI disrupt political movements. (In an e-mail to The Chronicle, he said would not have time before this article went to print to respond to the specific criticisms that researchers have made about his allegations.) But his book does include such statements as: “Did Aoki help the Panthers fight for justice, or did he set them up? During the same period Aoki was arming the Panthers, he was informing for the FBI,” and “he had given the Black Panthers some of their first guns and weapons training, encouraging them on a course that would contribute to shootouts with police and the organization’s demise.”
The evidence Mr. Rosenfeld presents dates from the period in which Mr. Aoki attended activists’ meetings but before the Black Panther Party was even formed. A key consideration, says Yohuru R. Williams, an associate professor of African-American history at Fairfield University, would be to assess what kind of information he might have provided authorities, and under what circumstances. Mr. Williams, who has written extensively about the Black Panthers, says that Mr. Rosenfeld appears to draw a conclusion based on slight evidence, then projects it forward as a surmise about Mr. Aoki’s role in key events in Panther history.
Mr. Williams, like Scott Kurashige, a professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who specializes in the history of Asian-American political and social activism, criticizes Mr. Rosenfeld for apparently relying on one FBI document, and on his interviews with one former FBI agent, Burney Threadgill Jr., who died in 2005. While Mr. Rosenfeld writes that the FBI document—which has recently circulated among scholars, including Mr. Williams and Mr. Kurashige—identifies Mr. Aoki as an informant, it is in reality far more ambiguous, say the critics.
That Mr. Aoki may have given some information to the FBI is “plausible,” says Mr. Williams, because “anyone who had dealings with any of the organizations that were on the FBI radar, there’s a very good chance you were visited, or that agents would have made contact.”
But the FBI, even this late after the events of that era, almost always conceals the identity of its informants, Mr. Williams says, and the appearance of Mr. Aoki’s name on the document Mr. Rosenfeld has does not prove at all that the bureau was referring to him as such.
“It seems he has chosen to draw the boldest conclusions about Aoki for the period of time when his evidence is weakest,” says Mr. Kurashige.
He and other historians suspect that Mr. Rosenfeld’s FBI source, Mr. Threadgill, may even have been spreading disinformation as a way of discrediting activists. That, note the critics, would be in the spirit of the FBI’s infamous Cointelpro campaign against domestic political organizations from 1956 to 1971.
“When you move into the shadowy world of federal surveillance,” says Mr. Williams, “it creates an unsettling and uncomfortable feeling for scholars, a lot of the time, because you can’t trust what it is you think you’re looking at.”
A Clash of Cultures
In some ways, scholars’ reactions to Mr. Rosenfeld’s work reveal tensions between academe and journalism. For example, his critics say Mr. Rosenfeld’s sourcing is irresponsible. In his San Francisco Chronicle account, Mr. Rosenfeld writes in reference to a taped 2007 interview between himself and Mr. Aoki: “Asked if this reporter was mistaken that Aoki had been an informant, Aoki said, ‘I think you are,’ but added: ‘People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.’” But in Mr. Rosenfeld’s video feature, the words “people change” are not heard on the tape and appear not to have been in that part of the interview.
As other evidence for his case, he cites a second former FBI agent, M. Wesley Swearingen, who made a sworn declaration as part of one of Mr. Rosenfeld’s lawsuits against the FBI, saying he “concluded ... that Aoki had been an informant.” In the video feature, Mr. Swearingen explains that part of his reasoning was that Mr. Aoki could have spied unsuspected in Black Panther ranks because he was “Japanese"—reasoning that Mr. Rosenfeld’s critics disparage as absurd.
What also bothers the critics is that Mr. Rosenfeld does not cite recent books by historians and other scholars—people like them—on topics like surveillance and the role of state “subversion” during the Panther era.
“If this were a scholarly work, it would not survive academic peer review,” says Mr. Kurashige. “I dare say that it would likely fail even a dissertation defense.”
For his part, Mr. Rosenfeld suggests at least one of his critics has selfish motives. In an August 29 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle responding to criticisms Ms. Fujino had published there, he wrote, “Fujino presents herself as an objective scholar, but she is a competing author with a vested interest.”
Clarification (9/11/2012, 12:05 p.m.): This article could be read to say that the journalist Seth Rosenfeld asserts in his book Subversives that Richard M. Aoki, who armed the Black Panthers, did so at the direction of federal agents. Mr. Rosenfeld does claim that Mr. Aoki was an FBI informant but does not state that he armed the Panthers at the FBI’s direction.
Correction (9/18/2012, 3:24 p.m.): The article erroneously states that the book presents as evidence that Mr. Aoki infiltrated the Black Panther Party that he attended activists’ meetings before the Black Panther Party was formed. In fact, Mr. Rosenfeld’s evidence includes an FBI record, dated to November 16, 1967, that identifies Mr. Aoki as informant T-2. The Panthers were formed in late 1966.
