Allegations about Richard Aoki

Cecile Lusby

 Allegations Regarding Richard Aoki – A personal response

Historical Context.

      To describe my connection to Richard Aoki it is necessary to review the shift in American society through the events that opened the 1960s.  If he were here, Richard, who died in 2009, would insist that I place his life and mine in historical and political context. 

1960 – protests of House Un-American Activities Committee in S.F.

1961 – JFK is the first Catholic US president, sit-ins and freedom rides.

1962 – the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee begins to organize.                                  

1963 - The March on Washington, Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech, the KKK’s church bombing in Birmingham, and the assassination of Kennedy.

1964  - the murder of civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Free Speech Movement.

1965 - Anti War demonstrations begin, the Watts Riots in L.A.

     These events changed America and particularly how young people viewed freedom of speech and the movement to bring a measure of freedom to black citizens. Over a short period of time, Americans moved from optimism to disbelief in the government, its military, and the police.

      By the time I met Richard in 1966 we both believed that political change was necessary and that part of that change had to include the way civic officials and police treated black people.  I was 24 in 1966 and had briefly taken part in a community patrol of North Oakland where we walked in pairs to observe police. Since we walked during daylight, we really didn’t see much because danger, both criminal and official, usually comes at night.

The Personal is Political

      A friend at work introduced me to Richard in autumn of 1966, about eight months after my divorce was final. I would see Richard, then 28, in the neighborhood by the Telegraph Co-op, but always at a distance; I waved when I saw him in the bookstore or leaving the Laundromat next to the Co-op. When I had no money, I read standing up by the magazine rack, buying something on payday or when I had change left after my grocery shopping. I bumped into him there and he kidded me for reading the Rolling Stone, but did not scoff at the National Guardian or Ramparts. Richard read everything from Muhammad Speaks, the Black Muslim paper, to tiny socialist periodicals I had never heard of.

      On April 25, 1967 he appeared beside me on the street and handed me the first edition of the Black Panther Party paper saying, “Get yours now, hot off the presses.” I was on my way home, and as he handed over the paper, Richie persisted, wanting to tell me more, stressing that I should read the story of the shooting of Denzel Dowell by a Martinez Sheriff.

     “Where do you live?” Richard asked.

     “Down Ashby another block,” I answered and he said he lived around the corner from me on Stuart. By this time he had me confused because while he was like me, small and intense, he was an Asian-American man who ‘talked black.” He also had a definite strut when he walked. Richard asked if he could visit later to talk more so we could get to know each other. I invited him over the next evening, since I found him articulate and courageous.    

    When he arrived, my two preschoolers were at the kitchen table eating dinner. Since he didn’t really know me or my children, I waited for his reaction, the one I always knew was coming, the change in facial expression I had come to expect even in 1967 when people saw that they were half black. There was no shock on Richie’s face, just a smile. Right away, he won my heart. I hold on to that memory today, now that there is another story about Richard and allegations that stand at odds with my experience.

    When I was with Richard I could almost absorb the movement by osmosis; I was close to the fire.  When he dropped by or took me out for coffee or stood on my back steps for the last puffs of his cigarette, we talked about his ideas. Sometimes he popped by to talk and sometimes he showed up on his rounds trying to help someone in the BPP. He knocked on my door near midnight when I had to go to work the next morning to beg for bail money when the police put Dave Hilliard in jail for unpaid parking tickets. When I got sick, Richie watched the children and mopped the floor.  When we all went out—me, a pale brunette in my mid-twenties with my biracial toddlers and Richie, a Japanese-American, 5’6”, maybe 120 pounds at most, wearing a feathery mustache and his trademark sunglasses, we got second glances even in Berkeley.

     Our romance ended in late 1968, but we stayed friends, visiting every year or two, exchanging birthday cards every November and Christmas cards and phone calls from 1968 to 2008.  Forty years of friendship have kept my spirit from surrendering since August when Seth Rosenfeld brought a new story to the media.

The News from Rosenfeld

        Richard’s name has been in the news since August 20, 2012 after author Seth Rosenfeld’s allegation ‘outed’ him as an FBI informant. My first reaction was shock and quick denial. “Impossible!” I thought. Now weeks later, I have read parts of Rosenfeld’s new book, Subversives, all of Diane Fujino’s compelling 2012 biography of Richard, Samurai Among Panthers, and the 221 plus pages of the FBI files released online after Rosenfeld’s suit under the Freedom of Information Act on September 7, 2012.  Going through those files is frustrating since there are so few words on any page after the agency censored them to protect identities in the cases. Now I find it necessary to step away from Bureau documents and other people’s versions of his life to base my opinion on my own experience. I have read many articles and letters to editors, online blogs, and print media, as I felt obligated to educate myself to achieve the best possible understanding. I know now that Richard was more complex than I ever imagined.

    If you google the name ‘Richard Aoki,’ now, there are multiple sites covering opinion pieces and letters about Rosenfeld’s statement that Richard was an informant as well as his FBI files.  Look for Rosenfeld’s employer, the Center for Independent Reporting as well as Colorlines; they are the easiest sites to access, so you can see for yourself, or try to.

     My research confirms that Richard had an early connection with the FBI, but that something happened in May 1967 that changed him or his role with the FBI­­—something that is not accessible or available to me now online or in print. Until the FBI lets citizens read exactly what that incident was, I am lacking the basic data to make an informed decision. Fred Ho said, “The FBI thought they had their man,” suggesting that Richard was recruited, but did not serve. I believe May 1967 was the point when Richard’s role changed.

Diane Fujino’s account

  Diane Fujino’s Samurai Among Panthers is a flattering biography of Richard. She sat him down for eleven long interviews and the transcriptions are a joy to read. On these pages Richie is alive again, running his program down, talking the same way he always did. Fujino mentions in her endnotes seeing Richard’s FBI files as documentation of the FBI’s interest in his activities. Rosenfeld’s treatment of Richard is less than ten pages long and begins some four hundred pages into his book, Subversives, but his endnotes are amazing (of that, and the mystery of May, 1967, more later).

   The FBI files, censored as they are, do demonstrate a relationship that began in 1961 with recruitment records taking up some ten plus pages and on page 277 there is a last note with Richard refusing to continue in 1977. Asking when a person stops being an informant is like a judge or a lawyer asking a man “When did you stop beating your wife?”—any admission at all, and you’re culpable. 

      There is a case to be made that Richard’s entry into the FBI was a matter of entrapment, and I would like to make that case.

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Richard’s Past

      Richie was three and his baby brother, David only two when the law requiring Japanese- American removal from the Pacific Coast forced the Aoki family to Utah, to the Topaz internment camps in spring, 1942 just before Shozo Aoki was set to graduate UC Berkeley and become a pharmacist. With the death of that dream Shozo grew sullen and then he and his wife separated, Shozo took sole custody and did not arrange for the boys to visit their mother more than eight or ten times in the next decade. He home schooled his sons until relatives notified school attendance officers, sending the Aoki boys to Hoover Junior High School in West Oakland, where Richard was already running the streets of his neighborhood (largely African American since WWII.)

     Once back in West Oakland, Shozo shunned regular employment, preferring what Richard called the life of a small time hustler, a gambler who carried on relationships with the black ladies in his neighborhood.

     After some trouble with juvenile authorities, Richard transferred to Berkeley High and moved into his mother’s tiny apartment, and then Shozo disappeared altogether in 1956.  To be near his old running buddies, Richard took an AC Transit bus near Berkeley High, getting off in West Oakland nearly every afternoon, coming home only to eat and sleep. His mother’s $1.25 an hour wage barely covered rent and groceries, while tests revealed that both Richard and his brother David had IQs over 140. With college out of reach, his mischief continued. Richard stole and got into fights. He had a juvenile record by age 15 or 16. 

     Before Richard’s scheduled graduation in January 1957, he began to consider entering the military, but the barrier facing him was this record.

On p. 420 of Subversives Rosenfeld writes, “Mike Cheng told the author that Aoki had recounted that he had a juvenile record, but a judge said it would be wiped clean if he enlisted in the military.” When I read that passage, I remembered Richie telling me long ago about his record being sealed, and here Rosenfeld’s anecdote confirmed my memory. So there was a deal made before Richard got out of high school at seventeen, before he signed up for six months active duty and seven odd years of active reserves according to the Reserve Forces Act of 1955. The Army gave Richard a second chance as it did for my brother.

      Sometime between the end of high school and the completion of active duty an FBI agent named Burney Threadgill picked up Richard’s voice on a wiretap of the phone of known communists. Eighteen-year-old Richard was talking to the fifteen-year-old son of Saul and Billie Wachter, and in a matter of weeks Threadgill found the other number on the wiretap, called Richard, and made an appointment to talk with him. Rosenfeld writes that Threadgill asked Richard point blank what his interest in the Communist Party was, and Richard, then politically uncommitted, denied any interest in the CP.

 Trapped ?

     This is the scene I want to explore. What could Richard have done at that age? Were there any expressed or implied threats made by Threadgill? When Burney Threadgill asked him to go to visit the Communists and the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Workers Party, was Richard free to say no? Was his military standing at risk?  Could the older man have turned Richard in to the House Un-American Activities Committee for associating with known communists or being a “communist sympathizer? Such things happened in 1957; it was still the McCarthy era and the FBI was the organization that investigated people who had unusual or unpopular ideas.

The Other Party

      There was a reason to begin this writing with the brief list of events in the early 1960s that taken together changed our society. There was an abolition movement to end HUAC’s reign of terror, but that sentiment was rare in 1957. The facts of Burney Threadgill and the FBI wiretap picking up Richard’s voice that year underscore the pressures in Richard’s life and his contradictions in the late 1950s. 

      Why would the FBI use wiretaps to pick up the calls of teenagers in the days before cell phones, when all phones were landlines? What would a teenage Richard have had to say at that time? And who was on the other end of the line?  Rosenfeld identifies the Wachter’s son, Doug Wachter, who had taken on his parents’ CP politics by the time he entered UC. He was an eighteen-year-old sophomore when he received his summons to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco in 1960, and the UC Berkeley Campus was abuzz. Word spread to S.F. State and suddenly both campuses planned a demonstration in San Francisco. On May 13 there was a protest in the Rotunda of City Hall, and when those students refused to disperse, the San Francisco Police turned fire hoses on them where they had assembled on the front steps, hurtling some of the group down the stairs.

      I was at home that evening, 18 years old, watching the news and was shocked see the hoses turned on the young people, especially shocking was the sight of a young woman who went bouncing down those steps in a skirt. This to me was a violation of freedom of speech. The sight upset me, but I saw the outside protesters, I didn’t see Doug Wachter testify inside during the hearings. I became a Politico at that moment, not a beatnik or a hippie.

        Was Richard free to refuse Threadgill’s request that he go to the CP and SWP and report back? The fear that HUAC instilled was very real, and may have influenced, if not determined Richard’s choice to cooperate with the FBI. Maybe he felt his back was against the wall and only became an informant under duress. Perhaps Richard’s loyalty to Threadgill was a twisted kind of gratitude. After all, the other boyon the wiretap, Doug Wachter, was turned in to HUAC.

A Look at the Files

     My method of inquiry has been to try to remember what events listed in the FBI files match my recall of personal or news events in 1967 and 1968, when I was dating Richard. The file includes reports that Richard was busy studying at UC Berkeley 1966 - 68, when he requested postponements because he was too busy. In 1967 there is little to see except one significant handwritten margin note, first dated in May with November jottings squeezed in above. The pages bear the typed date of June 30. I had just started going with Richard at the end of April that year, so I was interested in what happened in May. I found this entry on page 185 on the online Colorlines site displaying the reports, but according to FBI numbering at the lower right of each page, it is “p. AOKI 189.” When I looked to the notes of Nov 1 and 24, I remembered that Richard and I had a bad day that Thanksgiving, November23^rd. Richard showed up after dinner at my father’s house in Richmond in full Panther regalia, drunk and angry. He made quite an impression, and not in a good way. He drove my children and me back to Berkeley, swerving and braking and yelling at other drivers.

    “What’s wrong, Richard?”

    He bumped into a stalled car in front of us, and started to drive up on top of it.   I screamed.

     “Leave me alone,” he said.

     “Let me out then,” I said. The children sat terrified in the back seat, but Richard, his jaw set, backed down, swerved away, and drove on.

     When we finally reached my cottage on Ashby, I jumped out and rushed my crying children inside, locking the door behind me.  I didn’t know what had snapped inside Richard, I hadn’t done anything; He was under the influence before he got to my father’s house. Why had he worn the uniform if he was going to act out in front of my father, my children and me?  What was going on with him? It took weeks before I agreed to see him again. 

     When I saw the dated entries in the FBI files, I verified the date of Thanksgiving, so I know the day after, the 24^th, was a crucial deadline. On November 1^st there was a demand, then an ultimatum of November 24 as the last possible date to submit the report or be discontinued.  Agency language in reports is unclear in that it omits names, so I am guessing at what they wanted in the light of Richard’s extraordinary behavior with me November 23^rd.  If not a demand for supervisors to turn in observations or evaluations of Richard’s ‘reliabilty,’ then the November 1 request may have been a demand that Richard submit a report on the October 28 shootout in Oakland that killed Officer John Frey and wounded Huey Newton, chairman of the Black Panther Party.  I don’t think Richard met that deadline, or at least did not give any useful information.

        There are few entries for 1967, but there are many initials of supervisors beneath handwritten margin notes referring to a report from early May, which would have been the time when my relationship with Richard began. Newspapers on May 3 carried a frontpage photo of Black Panthers carrying guns into the State legislature in Sacramento on May 2^nd.  Richard wasn’t there. Was this the basis for the flurry of initials in Richard’s file? The notes with November dates appear above the May 4 entry.

     There is a regular FBI report format which includes Date, Stability and Reliability, and Indoctrination against Disclosure. On the typed portion under Stability and Reliability, the report states,

“It is believed that he is reliable….there is little indication that this informant will in the future become a source of embarrassment, however, the Bureau’s attention is drawn to information contained in referenced communication of

5/4/67”

     Try as I might I could find nothing more in those files from May. There is a May 4 report, but it has been almost completely redacted. I was eager to find something in Rosenfeld’s source material for his section on Richard, but was stunned when I found this quote on page 641 in the endnotes regarding the text on p. 423.

     “The November 16 report states that Aoki on May 1, 1967 told the FBI about his joining the Panthers.”  FBI #105-165706-22

      Not only was this sentence shocking, but I cannot find anything in the FBI files for November 16.  Rosenfeld goes on to say, “It appears that the FBI released this information to the author inadvertently.” Whether or not it was intentional, it is extraordinary and needs verification for readers. I feel obliged on the basis of all 221 pages of the FBI file to admit that my friend had been pressured into reporting on the CP, the YSA, and the SWP, but I cannot believe he would have informed on his brothers in the Black  Panthers.  Nobody who knew him in the BPP does.

    I believe Richard expected when he walked into the FBI office in San Francisco on May 1^st that he would be let go or identified as crazy then let go.  References to the incident in the later reports are typed under “Stability or Reliability” and a reference to 5/67. I cannot imagine what kind of a dance Richard had done from his 1961 entry until May, 1967, but this could be seen as a revolutionary act of coming clean; He did not talk about anyone but himself. Maybe it was a case of the spy who came in from the cold.  My guess is that Richard tried to exit the agency, but because of the Bureau’s reaction, was unable to make a clean break. Perhaps he had reason to believe that he would be exposed and the working lifespan of an outed FBI informant in late 1960s Oakland would have been short indeed. I have learned the word for this practice today is ‘snitch jacketing.’

   The number of initials on handwritten margin notes dated May and November, 1967 suggest that he was being watched after this incident.  There were check marks next to the category “Reliability.” From the time I first let Richard into my life, he always insisted the FBI was following him. He came by often to use my phone, believing his own phone was tapped. Eldridge Cleaver called and left abrupt messages with me for Richie to call him and when. In an amazing coincidence I also looked at Diane Fujino’s source material, since she refers to the FBI file as if Richard had been observed or investigated by the agency, as he had claimed to me. In Fujino’s endnotes for her biography, Samurai Among Panthers, on p.350 at the end of note #58, she says, “The FBI reported that Aoki resigned from the SWP in spring, 1967 (FBI report, November 16, 1967).  So Fujino also references the date November 16, 1967 in an FBI document. She saw it and says nothing about FBI inadvertence. Does Richard resign from SWP and announce his joining the Black Panthers on the same page or were there two distinct documents on November 16, neither of which is now available online.  Again it is impossible for citizens trying to verify this to succeed.

     I discovered that in the 1950s and 1960s there were 14,000 or 15,000 members of the SWP nationwide, and at the same time the FBI employed some 1,400 informants for the SWP, or one in ten persons in any meeting was an FBI plant.

Against a rush to judgment

    Richard began reporting back to Burney Threadgill about the SWP in 1957, under questionable circumstances, almost certainly he did not freely choose the role of informant, not at age eighteen, not after having his phone tapped talking to “known communists.” Threadgill called this ‘developing’ him: I would use the word ‘coercing.’  Richard began paid service to the FBI in 1961 and then ends his connection to the SWP in spring 1967, after a decade of intense involvement. Richard is on record in Fujino’s book as stating that his differences with the SWP were mainly over their reticence to participate (militarily) in the Black liberation struggle or support the right of self-defense and self-determination for Black people. Richard wrote a paper about his differences with the SWP. He talked to me about his commitment and his willingness to take action. When I began to see Richard he was very vocal about his disappointment with the Socialists Workers Party, and may have grown tired of the dispute.

     It is clear that Richard had begun moving toward the radical left in the early sixties, and whatever he may have said about being apolitical or voting for Richard Nixon in 1960, he studied for years until at some point, he was changed and truly radicalized. Richard was a revolutionary and a Marxist, who may have been persuaded or trapped into the role of an informant supplying reports from the age of eighteen or nineteen.

     Paradoxically, he valued his time in the US Army, and told me he joined to become a man and to learn how to use weapons. He was complicated, sometimes so militant I could have sworn he was crazy, but I had to be clear with myself that my beliefs were different from his, mostly because I had children to raise alone. I could not get arrested or risk losing custody because I could not bear to be without my children. Richard called me a “petty bourgeois vaccilationist.” I laughed when he said that, but he was absolutely serious. He said revolutionaries should not have children. I thought he was paranoid when he continued, announcing that he would never have a child because it might have been taken hostage and he wouldn’t want to make a choice that would compromise his political stance.  It was clear that his loyalties and interests were with the movement, not with domesticity. As his absences became longer, I had to make decisions for my future and for my children. I found another man, married, and seven years later that husband left. Such is life, but Richard and I remained friends.

    I cannot believe Richard would have betrayed the Panthers. He spent the years from 1973 to 1998 working with students as a teacher and college counselor and had been speaking out through those years about his role in the BPP and the Asian American Political Alliance and of the outrages of the internment of Japanese American citizens during WWII.  This was who Richard was; it was his legacy to us. His contributions to the Left are stellar;  hundreds and possibly thousands of people, myself included, credit him with changing their ideals, their understanding of history, and their politics. I believe in the old warning against judging a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.  In spite of the violence in the Black Panther Party, I take a hard line about the violence outside the BPP in the FBI’s co-intelpro practices.  The FBI is our nation’s secret police, and so I doubt whether any of us will be able to read or understand the mystery of Richard Aoki.