Memories of Richard, Revised 2015

Cecile Lusby 2411 words Memories of Richard, Revised 2015 I met Richard Aoki in fall, 1966 but did not see him a second time until late April 1967 when he was passing out the first issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper. “Here it is, hot off the presses,” Richard said. I never doubted the sincerity of his political beliefs, and if Richard liked you, you had a friend for life. Our romance lasted little more than a year, but we stayed friends for forty years. Many radicals in the East Bay name Richard as an influence, as initiating them into revolutionary thinking. So to see the recently released FBI files this year after Seth Rosenfeld of the Center for Independent Reporting finally gained access was devastating. When we first began seeing each other, we talked in my kitchen where Richard smoked and talked politics incessantly. I remember him taking a pen from his jacket pocket and asking for some paper. He quizzed me when I told him about my connections before my short-lived mixed race marriage. My information was pretty old since I had been a working mother from 1963-1967. Richard started up, “So who did you know at San Francisco State?” “I met a lot of kids who were with Don Warden’s Afro-American Association in 1962 and I dated one of the speakers.” Richard had shared that he attended a meeting or two and watched the speeches on Fillmore and on the U.C Berkeley campus. “That’s an old story, the black activist dating white girls. Don’t laugh, but I went to the Black Muslim mosque in Oakland and in the City. Those girls keep their distance, not interested in Asians, I guess. So this guy you were seeing, what were his politics?” “It was an odd mix of Pan-Africanism and Marxism.” So the conversation flowed with Richard taking the time to fold the paper into four sections labeling each Black nationalists, cultural nationalists, Muslims, and one for opportunists or apolitical academics. Richard mentioned the names of young men he knew in San Francisco and in Oakland who had also spoken on street corners, and I added my names. All my friends were involved in the civil rights movement and talked of little else. After an hour or so, the exercise ended and he returned the list on the paper to me. I felt close to him after sharing my memories of radicals and rascals I had known before my life as a mother began. It was exciting in 1967 to talk with an adult, or anyone older than a kindergartner. These were the first few weeks of our romance. As the revelations of his role as an FBI informant were published in 2012. I felt anger, confusion, and regret. I am still uncertain whether he had used or divulged any of my names on the list we worked on, since it was still in my possession. Among the newest items in the FBI files added in 2015 was his report on the history of the Black Panther Party, including the observation that “Only top leadership appeared knowledgeable of or interested in the political philosophy taken from Mao, Robert F. Williams, and Malcolm X Little. (sic)” While the rest of the Left had hopes that our American civil rights movement would produce its own freedom fighters, in this report Richard showed disappointment that the Panthers were not following some foreign brand of socialism : Chinese, Soviet, or Cuban. Richard could and did spend hours talking about the history of Communism and Marxism when he wasn’t talking about Berkeley radicals. He told me he considered UC students bourgeois or apolitical, seeing himself as revolutionary – a lone wolf. The irony is that Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives shows that Richard started very early studying communism and Marxism at the behest of the FBI. He almost surely received money off the record to do his studies and to attend meetings of Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party (YSA and SWP). Before his official hire date as an informant, Richard had been preparing himself to associate with radicals. Once hired in 1961 the typical stipend was about one hundred dollars a month, which would pay rent in mid 1960s in West Berkeley or in the old apartments on south side of campus. The money allowed him to work less and circulate more - study more. He told me he worked nights at a print shop ((Oakland Ink). He introduced me to his co-worker Andy Higashi, so I know he was employed. He also told me when he stayed over on a week-nights that he would have to leave at 6AM to help train the young cadres in West Oakland in the safe handling of weapons. So his life was lived at odd hours. Richard was full of contradictions. He told me he was a conservative when he joined the Army for six months of active duty in 1957 right after his 18th birthday, but was a Radical by the end of 1964. This was the story he gave to everyone, that the US involvement in the War in Viet Nam changed his perspective. Yet the FBI file shows his work as an informant at UC Berkeley’s Viet Nam Day Committee in 1965, as Rosenfeld shows in the endnote #420 page 642. Of course I didn’t know any of this during my relationship with him. My first idea after hearing about Richard’s double life was that he was sincere when he joined the FBI, then was radicalized and continued to play a game of informing. The record shows his failure in 1967 to be at meetings or turn in reports to the FBI. I can remember when he told me his role with the Black Panther Party was coming to a close and that he “had to lay low” immediately after Huey Newton shot Oakland Police officer, John Frey late in October. Richard was trembling when he showed up that night and the next day said he had decided to confine his activism to campus organizing at U C Berkeley in 1968 to prepare for a Third World Department. By the end of summer 1968 we had pretty much stopped seeing each other. He would drop by for a minute to talk about the movement or bring a friend to introduce to me. In the last few years I have sought out some of these friends to question when the reports surfaced about Richard’s work as an FBI informant. One was a young man Richard mentored who was still working at UC Santa Barbara in 2012 when I called to compare notes. I shared that though Richard claimed to hate Eldridge Cleaver, Cleaver called me to leave messages and phone numbers at my place and there was an odd silence on the other end. “He wasn’t supposed to be talking to Eldridge,” the voice said. In the first frantic months after Huey’s arrest October 28, 1967, Eldridge was still a spokesman and a leader until his sudden exile in late 1968. I felt foolish. In the deeply divided Black Panther Party Richard was close enough to the Huey Newton faction that he should have followed directions. Richie made the calls from my phone and needed privacy, telling me the FBI had his home phone bugged, and that the FBI was after him. In his book Subversives Seth Rosenfeld names an FBI agent named Burney Threadgill as the one who recruited or “developed” Richard, using a tape from wiretapping the phone at Doug Wachter’s home. Doug’s Communist parents were being investigated by the FBI at a time when both boys were at Berkeley High. The recording had both Doug Wachter and Richard Aoki in conversation. Richard had had his 18th birthday in November, 1956 just before he graduated high school January 1957, entering a six months period of duty in the US Army active reserves the next month. After the disappearance of their father early in 1956, Richard and his brother were living with their mother who supported the whole family on her $1.50 per hour wage as a laundry worker. His mother was patriotic and happy to see Richard join the Army, and he always told me the army made a man of him. He would have returned home about August, 1957 to stay again with his mother. Threadgill claims to have sent Richard out to study Communist front groups in Berkeley beginning with the Trotsky-ite group, YSA or Young Socialist Alliance. Since I know he resigned from YSA in early 1967, that means he maintained a nearly ten-year association. The FBI hired him as an informant in1961 according the file that readers can see online, with the most recent reports finally added in June 2015. I believe that he began as an informant when young, fairly conservative, and needing money. Threadgill’s recruiting methods may have bordered on blackmail. His juvenile record was expunged and he worked to distance himself from his friendship with Wachter and to prove worthy in the sight of the Agency. Douglas Wachter did not reply to my 2015 inquiry. I began my relationship with Richard Aoki in late April 1967 and we broke up on Thanksgiving, November 23, 1967 after he picked me and my children up at my father’s house, under the influence, perfectly groomed, in a Panther uniform: black pants, leather jacket, and beret. He drove like a mad man, swerving across lanes and bumping into two cars while waiting at red lights. He waved a handgun. He behaved as I had never seen before so that when he dropped us off, I grabbed my children and ran inside. I did not see him for two weeks when he apologized and promised never again, etc., but that his first duty was to the revolution. He promptly asked me for a donation to help pay BPP minister David Hilliard’s parking tickets. I forgave him. When I was looking for 1967 information in Richard’s file, there is a change in May which had been whited out or censored, leaving only a series of dates written in the margin and a demand that Richard submit reports after he reported resigning from the Socialist Workers Party and joining the Black Panthers. On p.189 there were about six different dates and clear evidence that he was not delivering his reports on time, then a final demand under the typed date of 6/30/67 “See my lets 2/27, 4/12, 5/4/67” The recommendation block was empty (redaction or white-out) but there was handwriting above and beside it. “Immediately submit 4 mo. evaluation letter re: cautioned informant. Letter was due 11-1-67. Continued delays of this nature will result in discontinuance of informant.” Under the whited out block was a final date of 11/24/67, the day after Richard’s drunken Thanksgiving drive with me on November 23. Those familiar with ‘discontinuance” threats in the FBI would know it could include the possibility of exposure to the community (snitch jacketing), which to me would mean certain death considering the people Richard was hanging out with. I read this entry as the point where the agency was threatening him, the point where he could do the unthinkable. I had been in denial, thinking that Richard must have done some minor duties for the FBI, but would never have betrayed his comrades in the Black Panthers. He was courageous, always a risk-taker. He once told me he was working on a plan to break into George F. Cake Co, a police supply outfit that provided weapons and technology for police departments throughout California. His scheme was to steal weapons for the Panthers. But there is no risk I can think of equal to that taken by someone who is simultaneously a field marshal in the Black Panther Party and an FBI informant. In June of 2015 Rosenfeld finally received updated FBI files including reports written by Richard (perhaps under his code name “Richard Ford”) previously withheld by the FBI. These reports that could only have been written by him; no one else had such information or knowledge of the BPP or had friendships with Newton and Seale from 1963 on and familiarity with the original issues leading up to the 10 Point Program of the Black Panther Party. In these files there is a thorough, objective description of the formation of the BPP, a full report on Huey P. Newton and a warts-and-all biography of Bobby Seale. Richard gave details like arrest records, his receiving welfare payments, and the separation of Bobby from his first wife. Richard informed on the two men who founded the Panthers. The dates he typed on the reports were Nov. 16 and 30 showing compliance with the deadline of Nov. 24, 1967. I immediately wrote an email to Seth Rosenfeld admitting he was right. I had to read the reports myself to believe it, but yes, Richard had betrayed his comrades. Then I recalled the list Richard and I worked on together, the one he left behind with me. How many other lists might there be? He was intelligent, though I don’t think he had a photographic memory. But had I also given names that he may have used to confirm other information he had? I don’t know if Richard knew then about Cointelpro, the FBI plan to disrupt or destroy radical organizations, but the FBI used information on Bobby Seale’s marriage to harm him and his family. Richard had done damage. I recall the day in December 1968 when Richard dropped by my flat excited to talk about the upcoming Third World Liberation Front Strike at Cal Berkeley. We talked for a minute and then he said, “I meant to come by earlier, but there was another car parked in front of the garage, and I didn’t know whether it would be…right.” “Well I , I ,” I stammered, “there is something I have to tell you, Richard. I’m seeing someone, Dennis is living with me now. He’s kind and he loves the kids.” “I guess it was bound to happen. I should have come around more, but I need to work on campus to make a Third World College. We’ll have a strike next month.” “You didn’t do anything wrong, Richie. You told me from the beginning that politics would always come first. I still want you to be my friend.” We embraced and he left, but I felt so sneaky, as if I had betrayed him.