CONCLUSION

Perhaps the most remarkable thing discovered in writing this book is how little was known about a certain type of Bureau informant. While there is a good amount of literature on things like electronic surveillance, illegal break-ins, and poison-pen letters, the matter of informants as a strategic counterintelligence tool – the centerpiece of the Bureau’s internal security efforts – is by comparison a desert. Even when informants are discussed they are too often relegated to the incendiary provocateur, the snitch revealed at trial, or the stealthy infiltrator who gets his comrades secretly fired or arrested. Yet people such as Morris Childs, Richard Aoki, and, we assume, Darrell Grover and Don Wright, were far more than this. They were people who insinuated themselves into positions of responsibility and remained there for years if not decades, never letting on who they really were. Because of this there were no Oprah moments, no opportunities to ask, “Why did you do it?” Instead they took many secrets to their graves.

In this the FBI needs to be given credit for a level of sophistication beyond what reasonable people would expect. Not only were certain of their operations well-thought-out, they appear to have maintained a culture of secrecy that never “spilled the beans,” despite the internal conflicts, external pressure, and media scrutiny. As the Communist veteran and Bureau informant Morris Childs remarked, “The Bureau as a whole is the most dedicated organization I’ve ever known, maybe with the exception of the early Bolsheviks.”¹

The problem, however, is that what they undertook crossed legal, ethical, and moral lines. The way these informants inserted themselves into the lives of the groups – which largely existed within the laws of the time – the level of confidence they built, including at the most intimate levels, is shocking. Morris Childs channeled his anger after his falling out with the CPUSA into a lifelong effort of betraying every trust and friendship he had developed up to that time. Richard Aoki’s legacy is one of informing on anyone he came close to, people who respected him and called him a friend. Compounding this, he maintained the lie in order to retain bragging rights about his “revolutionary” past. Darrell Grover appears to have trained some of the most radical youth of their generation in Marxism, only to turn around and report them to the FBI… as Marxists. Larry and Betty Goff had four young children who they effectively used as a cover as they pretended to be communists, handling weapons and suggesting plots such as “blowing up tanks.” Don Wright is said to have broken up Gloria Fontanez’s existing relationship with a leading member of the PRRWO as the precursor to his marrying her – something he in turn appears to have used to advance his overall agenda.² Such things go beyond the intelligence-gathering that they were ostensibly tasked with. William Sullivan, the FBI official who was in charge of the Domestic Intelligence Division during the height of the COINTELPRO era, in his testimony to Congress described plainly the Bureau’s – and by extension the informant’s – method: “This is a rough, tough, dirty business…”³ Sullivan’s candor, while insightful, does not excuse the morally bankrupt character of such activity.

In contrast to the FBI’s professionalism, the organizations most impacted by their actions stand as highly unsophisticated. For all their savvy – and some were better than others – and allowing for inexperience, any efforts to isolate informants before they “gave away the farm” or worse were largely a failure. True, Betty and Larry Goff were under suspicion toward the end, but they had a good couple of years before that meant anything. With Morris Childs, Richard Aoki, and we presume Don Wright and Darrell Grover, none of them were ever identified as informants when it mattered. As for the Ad Hoc Committee – which was a conduit for the Bureau’s informant work and much else – to this day it is an unknown quantity despite having operated for over twenty years. In working on this book some people familiar with the intricacies of the New Communist Movement on hearing of the true nature of the AHC responded with incredulity, to the effect that the FBI simply could not be sophisticated enough to write the Ad Hoc Bulletins — particularly the later ones.⁴ While it is possible that the later AHC Bulletins had the input of former communists, everything discovered in this work shows that the FBI was able to swim comfortably in the waters of Marxist nuance – whether they used surrogates or their own personnel to do this would seem to be beside the point.

Tellingly, a key element in the FBI’s success was the role of the top leaders of the target organizations. Here there appears to have been a complete failure on the part of people such as Gus Hall, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Leibel Bergman, Bruce Franklin, Bob Avakian, and others to properly vet the people they were investing with critical organizational responsibilities. Further, this failure was compounded by not taking responsibility for the results after the fact and drawing appropriate lessons. As a result, these leaders put in jeopardy not only themselves, but also those who had entrusted them to lead. Ironically there were always rumors and at times even investigations – or in the case of the Black Panthers, actions – against individuals suspected of being informants. Not surprisingly none of those suspects actually were informants, only adding to the Bureau’s effective disruption.⁵

No small part of the problem for these organizations was that they held to a hard hierarchal model that made it exceedingly difficult to disinterestedly monitor and review people at the top, thereby putting successful informants in a position of intelligence and influence and in the position to be able protect their position. Were these groups more democratically inclined a free-for-all of internal suspicion would destroy them as surely as the presence of an informant, so that hardly seems the answer. This was a sticky problem, but to the fault of the organizations it was a problem that was not – as far as this research has uncovered – interrogated on its actual terms. Determining who might be a highly-placed informant was going to be difficult – as the research here is testament to – but these groups were not even asking the right questions, in fact their modus operandi was in many ways that they did not want to know; better to attribute such problems to other causes. Much in the way Lenin purged Malinovsky from Soviet history, they dealt with the problem by erasing or redefining it.

In the course of speaking about our book Heavy Radicals, a question that was repeatedly posed was: “With the Internet, the proliferation of myriad social media and digital information, isn’t the government’s ability to garner intelligence limited only by available bandwidth?” In response we pointed out that while Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and others have revealed a hidden universe that exists in digital information – and redefined the boundaries of what can be garnered electronically – it does not negate the fundamental need for “human intelligence,” the need for informants. The FBI on its website makes this plain, noting that the use of informants not only remains “lawful and often essential,” but that using them “may involve an element of deception, intrusion into the privacy of individuals, or cooperation with persons whose reliability and motivation may be open to question.”⁶ In fact, informants have been and continue to be used by the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies against environmental activists, anti-globalization forces, anti-police brutality activists, and others.⁷

While things today are more complex – with a profusion of forces holding to varying agendas, some antithetical to a liberatory vision – this does not dispense with the fact that certain governmental forces and others continue elements of counterintelligence against progressive and radical political opposition. The success of those who stand against the ravages of the status quo and strive for a freer and more just world is in no small way dependent on learning the lessons of the past. It is with that in mind that we offer this work.