Richard For Real

Cecile Lusby                                                                                          2638

 words

                                                                                            

Richard For Real

       Can any one story explain a man who lived two lives? Seth Rosenfeld’s book, Subversives revealed in 2012 that Richard Aoki, famous as the first Japanese-American to join the Black Panther Party and well-known leader of the Asian American Political Alliance during the Third World Liberation Strike at UC Berkeley of 1969, was an FBI informant. I have struggled to discover the truth and am still unwilling to believe that the man I knew would ever do anything to betray his comrades in the Black Panthers, but the evidence gathered in Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, does reveal years of his working for the agency through the Socialist Workers Party, the 1964 Vietnam Day Committee, and the 1969 Third World Liberation strike at UCB. His record as a source can be tracked from 1961 – 1977, but I did not find any evidence of his reporting on the Black Panthers.

      So I try to search out my memories and compare them to the revelations of this year. A friend of more than forty years, Richard was my boyfriend in 1967-1968 when we were both in our twenties. When I first read the section on him in Subversives’, I was heartbroken. Initially I didn’t believe any of it, and then the FBI records were posted online with most information whited out and censored. I read Diane Fujino’s more flattering biography of Richard, Samurai Among Panthers in which she mentions his FBI file as a matter of course, as if he had been a suspect being watched all along, not an insider. Richard told me in 1967 that the FBI was following him, so I spent weeks reading and did glean something concrete from these books, but it is impossible to get anything coherent from his redacted FBI file. How can we have a reasonable consideration of facts and documentation in the face of so much secrecy.  Still his friends and students’ stand up for Richard’s character.

    Recent disclosures about his work with the FBI three years after his death in 2009 have been hard for his contemporaries, his students, and for me to accept. During my time with Richard I had been a liberal trying in vain to be a radical, but he was a Maoist revolutionary. Our arguments over political goals and tactics made me realize we could never be together permanently. (1).  He had no sense of caution, particularly not as far as my children were concerned. He told me he had chosen not have children, since they might be taken hostage and he would never compromise his principles.  I took him at his word. I knew my children came first for me while Richard was a bachelor for life.

    I have read that during the TWLF strike he slapped Richard Rodriguez around while four black associates looked on.  On the face of it, the assault was at cross-purposes with the strike’s goals to create a Third World Department, later known as the Ethnic Studies.  There were short tempers and tall stories, divisive rhetoric and exaggeration on all sides, and the Black Panthers were no exception. I suspect now that Richard was doing things so he could be arrested, and I disagree with accusations that he was an agent provocateur whose antics got others arrested. Most of his four arrests were during this strike. I believe that in many cases Richard, the ‘informant’, when he reported, reported primarily on himself and his own activities.

      I met Richard through mutual friends in autumn of 1966, when he was preparing to leave SWP over what he told me was its disregard of the Black liberation movement in the USA. I found him both courageous and conscientious in taking on the struggle of black people as his own. This declaration was his personal position as I first got to know him and I will always believe Richard was sincere in his dedication to the fight for civil rights that led him to the Black Panthers.

      My guess about his FBI history is this: Richard as a teenager needed money. He was living with his mother who supported her two sons on $1.25 an hour in 1957; he had already finished his basic training, so would have needed to avoid a blot on his army record after being caught talking to ‘known communists’ on Threadgill’s wiretap. This was in my estimation the rough beginning of his work with the agency, with a paper trail leading to formal entry as a source for the FBI in 1961. Richard rejected the Communist Party early on over its failure to protest the injustice of exiling Japanese Americans to internment camps in WWII, so he studied the Trotskyist history of the Socialist Workers Party even while he informed on them. The friendship between Richard, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale while they were students at Merritt College 1964-1966 radicalized them all.

        I believe Richard experienced a conversion or a change of heart from a conventional patriotic American to a committed Socialist or Maoist toward the end of his time in the Socialist Workers Party while still in the employ of the FBI. I would guess 1966 as the year as he wrote and presented a paper to the SWP supporting the African American struggle for self-defense, when most civil rights groups still believed in non-violence. He let the FBI know he had resigned from SWP on May 1, 1967 according to Fujino’s notes, and amazingly he let the agency know he was a member of the Black Panther Party on the same day according to Rosenfeld’s endnotes.

    When I looked at Richard’s FBI file online, I quickly saw there was nothing to see on most pages, so I looked at the dates from the years when I was with him (1967-1968) and tried to match up events I remembered to those dates. In a November 1967 entry there was a cluster of initials next to a dated reference to an incident earlier that May. There was a request for a report from him in May, repeated in July, put off again until September, and then a terse demand for a meeting on November 1, with a final extension to November 24. It was pretty clear from the sequence of dates without a reply that the FBI was not getting what it wanted from him.

     November 24 was significant to me because the day before it was Thanksgiving, when Richard showed up in full Panther uniform under the influence to pick me up at my father’s house. He was simply crazy that night, November 23, barking orders, demanding that I gather my things and get the children in his car if I wanted a ride home. I rushed outside to avoid further embarrassment and Richard drove from Richmond to Berkeley like a madman, bumping into two cars along the way. I would not have called him an alcoholic then, just a man who drove while drinking on more than one occasion. When I got home, I rushed my children inside the house, locked the door, and did not speak to him again for weeks. The FBI’s long postponed November 24 deadline would have been the next morning.  I am now certain that his unusual behavior was due to this looming deadline, his unwillingness to inform on the Panthers, and the weight of his resistance bearing down on him the night before the report was due. In other parts of the FBI file there is the statement that Richard revealed on May 1 that he had joined the BPP, but would not disclose anything about anyone but himself and then later avoided the BPP meetings so that he would not have to do even that.

     I recall him as my friend, but a friend I didn’t always understand. I do know Richard’s Maoist convictions isolated him, but he put his shoulder to the wheel when other academics and politicos just talked.  If he informed to the FBI, let someone step forward and cite one consequence of it. He stayed in the Socialist Workers Party for more than five years until he was convinced they did nothing besides studying, talking, and publishing their paper, The Militant. Richard loved to talk about the Left and all of its organizations. And in Berkeley, as they say, every little meaning had a movement all its own. Richard had an encyclopedic memory and could have written a treatise on any or all of these groups and could talk like an expert for hours on beliefs and history of the Left, as he often did at my kitchen table. This chatting is why he was considered a valuable source, an expert for background information.

     Before 1968 the online files show the FBI reprimanded Richard for not reporting in a timely way. Possibly he behaved in a rash manner during the TWLF strike to create a stir, something he could later report to the Agency. Richard cut off his ties to the FBI officially in 1977, saying that his association was at odds with his professional and ethical obligations as a counselor, but there were long periods in that file with no entries.

     That just about brings the story full circle, except for the fact of a childhood spent running the streets with black kids in West Oakland, except for growing up surrounded by African-Americans and joining a street gang, witnessing another world outside the mainstream. Then Richard met Burney Threadgill in 1957, and suddenly there was a chance to make something of himself. Was it opportunism at first or was he intimidated by being caught on tape? Was he really free to refuse to inform? Was he trying to follow in the mysterious footsteps of his father, a man full of contradictions, outraged at the internment, but who taught civics at the Topaz camp in Utah?

      Momo Chang’s December 5, 2012 article in the Eastbay Express also argues that Richard was at first an apolitical kid interested in a career in the armed services. Richard can be tracked as working for the FBI as early as 1961 until he stopped cooperating or reporting in 1967. When talking to his comrades in the Black Panther Party, Richard referred to his studies at UC Berkeley as a pressing obligation to excuse himself from attending meetings.  In her article in the Eastbay Express Momo quoted a statement by Bobby Seale that corresponds to my memories of Richard in 1967-68:

    What we do know is that sometime in late 1967 or 1968, Richard distanced himself from the Panthers at a time when the group was reaching the pinnacle of its popularity and influence. According to Seale, Aoki pulled back from the Panthers in order to remain a student at UC Berkeley. “He says, ‘I can’t operate with you guys right now. Just leave me alone right now…. I’ll get back to you.  They keep harassing my ass and threatening me,” Seale said at a recent community meeting, recalling what Aoki told him at the time. “I didn’t see Richard anymore. You know the next time I saw Richard was when I came out of jail (in 1972).”

    This quote brings back my memory of Richard trembling at the back door on the night after the shootout wounding Huey Newton and killing Officer Frey in October 1967. “I don’t know what will happen now,” he said “I’ve gotta lay low.”  In all the time I knew Richard, I cannot imagine him rushing over to the San Francisco office of the FBI to report on Huey Newton or the BPP. He told me then the FBI was after him, causing him to use the phone at my house, fearing his own was tapped. Bobby Seale’s testimony reassures me that Richard stopped doing anything with the Panthers by early 1968, and I suspect it was because he refused to discuss anything about them to the FBI. Seale’s words further underscore my story of his erratic behavior on Thanksgiving, 1967 and my current belief that he had reached the breaking point just before the decision not to deliver the November 24 report.

     What emerges is an amazing American story of the transformation of a young man who had entered the military as a teenager, completing six months active duty before he was nineteen, one who had managed to have his record as a juvenile offender erased in a deal with the courts in exchange for enlisting in the US Army Active Reserves program.  When Threadgill picked up his voice on a wiretap talking to a fifteen-year-old Doug Wachter, the son of known communists, that connection, once exposed would have ended Richard’s military career. I maintain that this tape explained his compliance with Threadgill from 1957 to 1961. Burney suggested to Richard that if he had no interest in the Communist Party, he could help by going to their meetings and reporting back.

      By 1966 Richard had changed his core beliefs through study, through identification with the Black Liberation movement, and his opposition to the Vietnam War.  He joined the Black Panthers, but a year later retreated to finish his studies at UC Berkeley, participating in both the TWLF and AAPA. It is also clear that he continued with the Agency, reporting on his own activities during the strike, including hitting Richard Rodriguez. Hundreds of thousands of words have been published (48 pages on Google by January, 2013) in the wake of Seth Rosenfeld’s book, most denying that Richard could have worked for the FBI. His friends and students cannot believe it, but I do. I understand the change in him as a progression based on his studies, a point of view that has to be seen as his evolution from conservative to revolutionary, a remarkable outcome based on an education set up and paid for by FBI agent Burney Threadgill.

       The crucial fact is that when Richard joined the Army he was a ‘warts and all’ patriot, ready to serve his country in spite of its faults, namely our historic legacy of racism. Like me, Richard had actually lived in the ghetto. I had a relatively brief two years in San Francisco, but Richard’s earliest memories were of the concentration camp at Topaz, Utah and from 1945-1956 of West Oakland. I believe this lived experience was the factor shaping his political development as a radical.

      It is an amazing trajectory that placed Richard as an early plant for the FBI in the CP and the SWP from 1957 to 1966. He left the SWP at the point when he joined the Panthers in fall 1966 and then, after a crisis of conscience, made a strategic exit from the BPP late in 1967 or early 1968. He worked during TWLF Strike until his graduation from UC Berkeley 1971, probably making less and less frequent reports to the FBI until the mid-1970s.

     I will remember Richard as a friend and a soldier in the only battle that mattered to me in the 1960s and in my entire life. The same hands that slapped Richard Rodriguez around also showed my son how to tie his shoes. As one who met him in 1966 as he moved away from the SWP into the fiery fight for equal rights for African Americans, I knew him as he took on that struggle as his own, and I write as a witness.

1. Richard never admitted any doubts about Chairman Mao. Two books recently published on the Great Famine in China 1958-1962 show how Mao’s policy of forcing peasants to build backyard furnaces to produce steel instead of farming led directly to the famine and starvation of 30 million Chinese. But it was Richard, the believer, who first showed Huey and Bobby the Little Red Book.