23-08-2012, 05:34 PM
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: We begin today's show with explosive new allegations that the man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training was an undercover FBI informant in California. Richard Aoki was an early member of the Panthers and the only Asian American to have a formal position in the party. He was also a member of the Asian American Political Alliance that was involved in the Third World Liberation Front student strike.
The claim that Aoki informed on his colleagues is based on statments made by a former agent of the FBI in a report obtained by investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld, author of the new book, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. Over the last 30 years, Rosenfeld sued the FBI five times to obtain confidential records. He eventually compelled the agency to release more than 250,000 pages from their files.
In this video produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting, Rosenfeld explains how he first stumbled across information about Richard Aoki.
SETH ROSENFELD: A former FBI agent had heard that I was doing research, and he contacted me. His name was Burney Threadgill. And he says, "Hey, I know that guy." And he said, "Aoki was my informant. I developed him."
BURNEY THREADGILL JR.: Oh, yeah, he was a character. He said, "I don't have any interest in communism." And I said, "Well, why don't you just go to some of the meetings and tell me who's there and what they talked about?" So, one thing led to another, and he became a real good informant.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Seth Rosenfeld reports that Aoki may have been covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him. He interviewed Aoki twice in 2007 about those allegations. Here's a clip from their phone conversations, which was recorded with Aoki's permission. After you hear Rosenfeld and Aoki, you will hear a comment from former FBI agent, Wesley Swearingen.
SETH ROSENFELD: I'm wondering if you remember a guy named Burney Threadgill.
RICHARD AOKI: Burney Threadgill?
SETH ROSENFELD: Yeah.
RICHARD AOKI: No, I don't think so.
SETH ROSENFELD: What II was told in my research that during this period of time you actually worked for the FBI.
RICHARD AOKI: They tell you that?
SETH ROSENFELD: Burney told me that.
RICHARD AOKI: He did?
SETH ROSENFELD: He did.
RICHARD AOKI: Oh. That's interesting.
WESLEY SWEARINGEN: Informants were used when I was in the FBI. An informant would report on the inner workings of an organization. They can keep you up to date on the thinking of the leadership of the organization, whether it's going this way, that way. Someone like Aoki is perfect to be in the Black Panther Party, because they understand he's Japanese. Hey, nobody's going to guesshe's in the Black Panther Party. Nobody's going to guess that he might be an informant.
AMY GOODMAN: That was former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen speaking to reporter Seth Rosenfeld. Many of Richard Aoki's friends and colleagues have expressed shock and disbelief about the claim. We'll talk more about this debate in a minute, but first I want to play one more excerpt from Seth Rosenfeld's interview with Aoki in 2007.
SETH ROSENFELD: Am I wrong?
RICHARD AOKI: I think you are.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yeah. So, would you say it's untrue that you ever worked with the FBI or got paid by the FBI?
RICHARD AOKI: I would say it.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yeah. And I'm trying to understand the complexities about it, and Iand I think
RICHARD AOKI: It is complex.
SETH ROSENFELD: I believe it is. And
RICHARD AOKI: Layer upon layer.
AMY GOODMAN: Richard Aoki, speaking in 2007, two years before he committed suicide.
Well, for more about these revelations and what they may mean, we're joined by two guests. In San Fransisco, Seth Rosenfeld is with us, author of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. The 734-page book was released Tuesday and took three decades to complete. Rosenfeld is a reporterwas a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle for almost 25 years, a winner of the George Polk Award.
We'll discuss the rest of his book later, but right now we're also joined from Santa Barbara, California, by Diane Fujino, Aoki's biographer and a professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She's the author of the recent book, Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life. Her article, "Where's the Evidence Aoki Was an FBI Informant?" appears in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Seth Rosenfeld, let's begin with you. Where is the evidence?
SETH ROSENFELD: Good morning.
Well, the evidence takesthere's basically four pieces of evidence, which I've detailed in my book. The first evidence came when I interviewed Burney Threadgill in around 2002, 2003. I had met Burney while I was doing research for my book. As you mentioned, I had obtained thousands of pages of documents from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. And as part of my research, I was contacting former FBI agents and reviewing the records with themexcuse meand reviewing the records with them to make sure that I understood the records and to elicit further information. So I had met with Burney several times for over a period of several months and reviewed many documents with him. And then, one day we were looking at some documents, and Burney said something like, "Hey, I know that guy. He was my informant." Burney had recognized Richard Aoki's name in an FBI document. So Burney proceeded to tell me how he met Richard Aoki and how he developed him as an FBI informant and how Richard Aoki became, according to Burney, one of the best political informants that the FBI had in Northern California in the early 1960s.
Well, I had never heard of Richard Aoki before. So, while I continued the research on my boat, I also began to research who was Richard Aoki, and I read everything I could find about him. I did public records research. I spoke with other people. And then, in 2007, I interviewed him on the telephone. With his permission, I tape-recorded it, and you've heard the comments he made. He denied being an FBI informant, but he also said, "It is complex, layer upon layer. People change." So, I interpreted that as, on the one hand, his denial, but on the other hand, an explanation, perhaps, of what I was asking him about.
I continued to work on the book, and I was also a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. But after Richard Aoki died in 2009, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking any and all records concerning him. The FBI released approximately 1,500 or 2,000 pages. One of the documents that was released was a 1967 FBI report on the Black Panthers. And this report identified Richard Aoki as an informant. It assigned him the code number, T-2, for that report. But I still wanted to find out more about it, so I spoke with a former FBI agent named Wesley Swearingen. Mr. Swearingen had been in the FBI for over 25 years. He had retired honorably. He had later become a critic of the FBI's political surveillance, and particularly he had helped vacate the murder conviction of a Black Panther named Geronimo Pratt. So, Mr. Swearingen was very familiar with the FBI. He examined this record and other records I had, and he came to the same conclusion I did, which was that Richard Aoki had been an FBI informant in the 1960s.
I should add that I did further research in FBI records looking for anything that would be inconsistent, that would challenge my conclusion. And I couldn't find anything that was inconsistent with it. And that's how I reached my conclusion.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Now, Seth Rosenfeld, you also mention that youthat despite the fact that Richard Aoki was a very well-known political activist in the Third World community in the Bay Area, that there were no FBI files or reports on him as a political activist.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, that's one of the remarkable things about the FBI records that were released on Richard Aoki. Here was a person who had been a member of the Young Socialist Alliance and then an officer in the Young Socialist Alliance. He had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He had been a member of the Black Panthers. He had given guns to the Black Panthers. He had been a prominent leader in the Third World strike at Berkeley. And yet, the FBI took the position that it had no files on Richard Aoki himself. The records that were released instead were only about various other organizations that he had been in, such as the Young Socialist Alliance or the Black Panthers. Based on my experience in reviewing many thousands of pages of FBI records over the years, I found it extraordinary that the FBI would have no main file, as they call it, on Richard Aoki.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Now, Diane Fujino, you have written a biography of Richard Aoki. And, of course, in the Bay Area and throughout California, he is known and revered by many in the progressive movement as a pioneering political activist and revolutionary in the Asian-American community. But your response to whatthe revelations of Seth Rosenfeld?
DIANE FUJINO: I was very surprised. After I heardread the San Francisco Chronicle article in Monday's paper, I wentwhen the book was released on Tuesday, I went to the book. It's a very thick book, 734 pages. There's a tremendous amount of research. And I had expected to find a lot more information detailing this accusation that Aoki was an FBI informant. But when I read the book, I was very surprised that there was little more than what's already been said, than what was said already just this morning on this show. And in my mind as a scholar, I remain open to whatever truth is there, but the evidence needs to be substantial, that needs to meet a certain burden of proof, and it did not in this case.
One of the things that Rosenfeld said he has is this one FBI document. I have the same document, also retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act, the 1967 document, and it is the only FBI document that Rosenfeld cites in, you know, multiple pages. I had 150-plus pages of documents released to me from the FBI. And in it, it says that "A supplementary T symbol (SF T-2) was designated for" but the name was left blank. And after that, it is followed in parenthesis by Richard Matsuiwhich is not his middle nameAoki. But it says after that, "for the limited purpose of describing his connections with the organization and characterizing him." And later on, that same page, it talks about characterfor the "characterization of Richard M. Aoki." So it's unclear whether Aoki is the informant in this case. T symbols are used to refer to informants and also to technical sources of information, like wiretaps and microphones. And it's not clear in this case whether Aoki was the informant or whether he was the one being, you know, observed.
AMY GOODMAN: Seth
DIANE FUJINO: The second thing
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, go ahead.
DIANE FUJINO: is that
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Diane.
DIANE FUJINO: The second thingyeah, I wanted to go through the four pieces of information that Rosenfeld cites. And all of this is cited in a single footnote in the back. There's no other elaboration beyond this.
He says that the former FBI agent, Burney Threadgill, was the person who gave him this information. But the same bits of information from Threadgill are recited by Rosenfeld, and there's nothing else elaborated upon this. And heThreadgill says that he approached Aoki in the late '50s at a time when Aoki wasn't even political. And he approached Aoki because Aokihe overheard Aoki's conversation with a high-school classmate, and that classmate's parents were in the Communist Party, apparently, and were under wiretapping surveillance. And it made me think, did this former agent interview or talk to or approach many of this classmate's friends who talked to him on the phone, or was there something about this conversation? And there's just a lot of questions not answered.
Swearingen, another former FBI agent, the only evidencethe only piece of information he has, besides saying Aoki might be an informant, is this idea that because Aoki was Japanese American in the Panthers, that was a perfect place to be an informant. And this makes no sense to me, and to many people, because being Japanese American in the Panthers made one stand out, and it aroused suspicion. And it seems the least likely person to be an informant within the Panthers. And that just isn't something that makes sense to me.
And the final piece of evidence that Rosenfeld uses is Aoki's own response in the interview. And I think that's ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. And if you know Aoki, that was classic Aoki in terms of the way he speaks, with allusion, with caution, withyou didn't see a lot of his wit and humor, but there's a lot of that, as well. And I think that it's inconclusive, and yet very definitive statements were drawn from this inconclusive evidence.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Fujino, he saidAoki said, in response to Seth Rosenfeld's question about whether he worked for the FBI, Aoki responded, "It's complex, layer upon layer." Is there a chance he started out with the FBI and changed? Or do you see this in a very different way?
DIANE FUJINO: Well, I mean, wefrom what, you know, is out there on the FBI, it seems like there were many, many informants in the '60s. and anything is possible. But I don't know. The evidence isn't there for me to be able to make any informed judgment on this. If he did start off as one, this isthis is what I would have liked to have seen before public charges made against somebody of this magnitude, is really specific evidence that goes beyond the things that have been said. What was said today, what was in the journal articleI mean, the San Francisco Chronicle article, is almost the sum total of what is in the book. There's not much beyond that.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Well, I'd like to bring Seth Rosenfeld back in and respond to thisto Diane Fujino's statement that this is really scant evidence. But I'd also like to ask youbecause the interesting thing about police agents or FBI agentsand I'm familiar, having once been in the Young Lords Party, which was under much surveillance by the FBIthat agents tended to be the type of people whoor informants, informants tended to be the type of people who said very little but gathered information. And to that sense, Richard Aoki doesn't fit that profile, because he washe hasthroughout his political career, was known as someone who advanced political theories, was actually very actively involved in shaping the political perspectives and views of the organizations that he was involved in. And to that degree, he doesn't fit the profile of someone who's basically gathering information.
DIANE FUJINO: Yes, and another way
SETH ROSENFELD: Mm-hmm. Well, if I can respond to some points that Professor Fujino made, there were a couple misstatements there. What Burney had told me is that the FBI had a wiretap on the home of some people called the Wachters in the late '50s. The Wachters were members of the Communist Party in the Bay Area at that time. And on that wiretap, they overheard a conversation between their son, Doug Wachter, and Richard Aoki. Doug Wachter and Richard Aoki had been classmates at Berkeley High. After hearing that information, the FBI agent, Burney Threadgill, approached Richard Aoki and asked him if he would be an informant.
Professor Fujino is correct in stating that, at that time in his life, Richard Aoki was not political. In fact, what Burney Threadgill told me was that Richard Aoki told him he had no interest in communism. And Burney further said that Richard Aoki became involved in political activities initially at the request of the FBI. Burney also said that he worked with Richard Aoki as his handler and met with him on a regular basis and received reports from him and paid him, that Richard Aoki provided information on specific groups, such as the socialist groups I mentioned, and that after Burney was transferred to another office in 1965, Richard Aoki was passed along as an informant to another agent.
And I should also clarify Wes Swearingen's statement about Richard Aoki being accepted within radical circles perhaps partly because he was Japanese. That doesn't seem particularly significant now, in modern times, but in the late '60s, somebody coming from a different ethnic background made them seem to be an outsider, and there would be less suspicion that an outsider like that would be working for the government, which in those days, certainly the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, was largely all white, almost totally white and male. So, I believe that's what Wes Swearingen was referring to.
In terms of Richard Aoki's profile, as I mentioned, he starts out not being a political person. He starts attending these meetings. He becomeshe becomes gradually involved. And it's only later in the '60s that he begins to be more active in advocating different political things.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're speaking with Seth Rosenfeld. His book is published this week, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. And Professor Diane Fujino, author of, Samurai Among Panthers. And I want, when we come back, Professor Fujino, to ask you about this term you use called "snitch-jacketing," the government's casting suspicion on the most active activists. Stay with us.
[other half of this part being transcribed]......
The claim that Aoki informed on his colleagues is based on statments made by a former agent of the FBI in a report obtained by investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld, author of the new book, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. Over the last 30 years, Rosenfeld sued the FBI five times to obtain confidential records. He eventually compelled the agency to release more than 250,000 pages from their files.
In this video produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting, Rosenfeld explains how he first stumbled across information about Richard Aoki.
SETH ROSENFELD: A former FBI agent had heard that I was doing research, and he contacted me. His name was Burney Threadgill. And he says, "Hey, I know that guy." And he said, "Aoki was my informant. I developed him."
BURNEY THREADGILL JR.: Oh, yeah, he was a character. He said, "I don't have any interest in communism." And I said, "Well, why don't you just go to some of the meetings and tell me who's there and what they talked about?" So, one thing led to another, and he became a real good informant.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Seth Rosenfeld reports that Aoki may have been covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him. He interviewed Aoki twice in 2007 about those allegations. Here's a clip from their phone conversations, which was recorded with Aoki's permission. After you hear Rosenfeld and Aoki, you will hear a comment from former FBI agent, Wesley Swearingen.
SETH ROSENFELD: I'm wondering if you remember a guy named Burney Threadgill.
RICHARD AOKI: Burney Threadgill?
SETH ROSENFELD: Yeah.
RICHARD AOKI: No, I don't think so.
SETH ROSENFELD: What II was told in my research that during this period of time you actually worked for the FBI.
RICHARD AOKI: They tell you that?
SETH ROSENFELD: Burney told me that.
RICHARD AOKI: He did?
SETH ROSENFELD: He did.
RICHARD AOKI: Oh. That's interesting.
WESLEY SWEARINGEN: Informants were used when I was in the FBI. An informant would report on the inner workings of an organization. They can keep you up to date on the thinking of the leadership of the organization, whether it's going this way, that way. Someone like Aoki is perfect to be in the Black Panther Party, because they understand he's Japanese. Hey, nobody's going to guesshe's in the Black Panther Party. Nobody's going to guess that he might be an informant.
AMY GOODMAN: That was former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen speaking to reporter Seth Rosenfeld. Many of Richard Aoki's friends and colleagues have expressed shock and disbelief about the claim. We'll talk more about this debate in a minute, but first I want to play one more excerpt from Seth Rosenfeld's interview with Aoki in 2007.
SETH ROSENFELD: Am I wrong?
RICHARD AOKI: I think you are.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yeah. So, would you say it's untrue that you ever worked with the FBI or got paid by the FBI?
RICHARD AOKI: I would say it.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yeah. And I'm trying to understand the complexities about it, and Iand I think
RICHARD AOKI: It is complex.
SETH ROSENFELD: I believe it is. And
RICHARD AOKI: Layer upon layer.
AMY GOODMAN: Richard Aoki, speaking in 2007, two years before he committed suicide.
Well, for more about these revelations and what they may mean, we're joined by two guests. In San Fransisco, Seth Rosenfeld is with us, author of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. The 734-page book was released Tuesday and took three decades to complete. Rosenfeld is a reporterwas a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle for almost 25 years, a winner of the George Polk Award.
We'll discuss the rest of his book later, but right now we're also joined from Santa Barbara, California, by Diane Fujino, Aoki's biographer and a professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She's the author of the recent book, Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life. Her article, "Where's the Evidence Aoki Was an FBI Informant?" appears in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Seth Rosenfeld, let's begin with you. Where is the evidence?
SETH ROSENFELD: Good morning.
Well, the evidence takesthere's basically four pieces of evidence, which I've detailed in my book. The first evidence came when I interviewed Burney Threadgill in around 2002, 2003. I had met Burney while I was doing research for my book. As you mentioned, I had obtained thousands of pages of documents from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. And as part of my research, I was contacting former FBI agents and reviewing the records with themexcuse meand reviewing the records with them to make sure that I understood the records and to elicit further information. So I had met with Burney several times for over a period of several months and reviewed many documents with him. And then, one day we were looking at some documents, and Burney said something like, "Hey, I know that guy. He was my informant." Burney had recognized Richard Aoki's name in an FBI document. So Burney proceeded to tell me how he met Richard Aoki and how he developed him as an FBI informant and how Richard Aoki became, according to Burney, one of the best political informants that the FBI had in Northern California in the early 1960s.
Well, I had never heard of Richard Aoki before. So, while I continued the research on my boat, I also began to research who was Richard Aoki, and I read everything I could find about him. I did public records research. I spoke with other people. And then, in 2007, I interviewed him on the telephone. With his permission, I tape-recorded it, and you've heard the comments he made. He denied being an FBI informant, but he also said, "It is complex, layer upon layer. People change." So, I interpreted that as, on the one hand, his denial, but on the other hand, an explanation, perhaps, of what I was asking him about.
I continued to work on the book, and I was also a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. But after Richard Aoki died in 2009, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking any and all records concerning him. The FBI released approximately 1,500 or 2,000 pages. One of the documents that was released was a 1967 FBI report on the Black Panthers. And this report identified Richard Aoki as an informant. It assigned him the code number, T-2, for that report. But I still wanted to find out more about it, so I spoke with a former FBI agent named Wesley Swearingen. Mr. Swearingen had been in the FBI for over 25 years. He had retired honorably. He had later become a critic of the FBI's political surveillance, and particularly he had helped vacate the murder conviction of a Black Panther named Geronimo Pratt. So, Mr. Swearingen was very familiar with the FBI. He examined this record and other records I had, and he came to the same conclusion I did, which was that Richard Aoki had been an FBI informant in the 1960s.
I should add that I did further research in FBI records looking for anything that would be inconsistent, that would challenge my conclusion. And I couldn't find anything that was inconsistent with it. And that's how I reached my conclusion.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Now, Seth Rosenfeld, you also mention that youthat despite the fact that Richard Aoki was a very well-known political activist in the Third World community in the Bay Area, that there were no FBI files or reports on him as a political activist.
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, that's one of the remarkable things about the FBI records that were released on Richard Aoki. Here was a person who had been a member of the Young Socialist Alliance and then an officer in the Young Socialist Alliance. He had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He had been a member of the Black Panthers. He had given guns to the Black Panthers. He had been a prominent leader in the Third World strike at Berkeley. And yet, the FBI took the position that it had no files on Richard Aoki himself. The records that were released instead were only about various other organizations that he had been in, such as the Young Socialist Alliance or the Black Panthers. Based on my experience in reviewing many thousands of pages of FBI records over the years, I found it extraordinary that the FBI would have no main file, as they call it, on Richard Aoki.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Now, Diane Fujino, you have written a biography of Richard Aoki. And, of course, in the Bay Area and throughout California, he is known and revered by many in the progressive movement as a pioneering political activist and revolutionary in the Asian-American community. But your response to whatthe revelations of Seth Rosenfeld?
DIANE FUJINO: I was very surprised. After I heardread the San Francisco Chronicle article in Monday's paper, I wentwhen the book was released on Tuesday, I went to the book. It's a very thick book, 734 pages. There's a tremendous amount of research. And I had expected to find a lot more information detailing this accusation that Aoki was an FBI informant. But when I read the book, I was very surprised that there was little more than what's already been said, than what was said already just this morning on this show. And in my mind as a scholar, I remain open to whatever truth is there, but the evidence needs to be substantial, that needs to meet a certain burden of proof, and it did not in this case.
One of the things that Rosenfeld said he has is this one FBI document. I have the same document, also retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act, the 1967 document, and it is the only FBI document that Rosenfeld cites in, you know, multiple pages. I had 150-plus pages of documents released to me from the FBI. And in it, it says that "A supplementary T symbol (SF T-2) was designated for" but the name was left blank. And after that, it is followed in parenthesis by Richard Matsuiwhich is not his middle nameAoki. But it says after that, "for the limited purpose of describing his connections with the organization and characterizing him." And later on, that same page, it talks about characterfor the "characterization of Richard M. Aoki." So it's unclear whether Aoki is the informant in this case. T symbols are used to refer to informants and also to technical sources of information, like wiretaps and microphones. And it's not clear in this case whether Aoki was the informant or whether he was the one being, you know, observed.
AMY GOODMAN: Seth
DIANE FUJINO: The second thing
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, go ahead.
DIANE FUJINO: is that
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Diane.
DIANE FUJINO: The second thingyeah, I wanted to go through the four pieces of information that Rosenfeld cites. And all of this is cited in a single footnote in the back. There's no other elaboration beyond this.
He says that the former FBI agent, Burney Threadgill, was the person who gave him this information. But the same bits of information from Threadgill are recited by Rosenfeld, and there's nothing else elaborated upon this. And heThreadgill says that he approached Aoki in the late '50s at a time when Aoki wasn't even political. And he approached Aoki because Aokihe overheard Aoki's conversation with a high-school classmate, and that classmate's parents were in the Communist Party, apparently, and were under wiretapping surveillance. And it made me think, did this former agent interview or talk to or approach many of this classmate's friends who talked to him on the phone, or was there something about this conversation? And there's just a lot of questions not answered.
Swearingen, another former FBI agent, the only evidencethe only piece of information he has, besides saying Aoki might be an informant, is this idea that because Aoki was Japanese American in the Panthers, that was a perfect place to be an informant. And this makes no sense to me, and to many people, because being Japanese American in the Panthers made one stand out, and it aroused suspicion. And it seems the least likely person to be an informant within the Panthers. And that just isn't something that makes sense to me.
And the final piece of evidence that Rosenfeld uses is Aoki's own response in the interview. And I think that's ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. And if you know Aoki, that was classic Aoki in terms of the way he speaks, with allusion, with caution, withyou didn't see a lot of his wit and humor, but there's a lot of that, as well. And I think that it's inconclusive, and yet very definitive statements were drawn from this inconclusive evidence.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Fujino, he saidAoki said, in response to Seth Rosenfeld's question about whether he worked for the FBI, Aoki responded, "It's complex, layer upon layer." Is there a chance he started out with the FBI and changed? Or do you see this in a very different way?
DIANE FUJINO: Well, I mean, wefrom what, you know, is out there on the FBI, it seems like there were many, many informants in the '60s. and anything is possible. But I don't know. The evidence isn't there for me to be able to make any informed judgment on this. If he did start off as one, this isthis is what I would have liked to have seen before public charges made against somebody of this magnitude, is really specific evidence that goes beyond the things that have been said. What was said today, what was in the journal articleI mean, the San Francisco Chronicle article, is almost the sum total of what is in the book. There's not much beyond that.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Well, I'd like to bring Seth Rosenfeld back in and respond to thisto Diane Fujino's statement that this is really scant evidence. But I'd also like to ask youbecause the interesting thing about police agents or FBI agentsand I'm familiar, having once been in the Young Lords Party, which was under much surveillance by the FBIthat agents tended to be the type of people whoor informants, informants tended to be the type of people who said very little but gathered information. And to that sense, Richard Aoki doesn't fit that profile, because he washe hasthroughout his political career, was known as someone who advanced political theories, was actually very actively involved in shaping the political perspectives and views of the organizations that he was involved in. And to that degree, he doesn't fit the profile of someone who's basically gathering information.
DIANE FUJINO: Yes, and another way
SETH ROSENFELD: Mm-hmm. Well, if I can respond to some points that Professor Fujino made, there were a couple misstatements there. What Burney had told me is that the FBI had a wiretap on the home of some people called the Wachters in the late '50s. The Wachters were members of the Communist Party in the Bay Area at that time. And on that wiretap, they overheard a conversation between their son, Doug Wachter, and Richard Aoki. Doug Wachter and Richard Aoki had been classmates at Berkeley High. After hearing that information, the FBI agent, Burney Threadgill, approached Richard Aoki and asked him if he would be an informant.
Professor Fujino is correct in stating that, at that time in his life, Richard Aoki was not political. In fact, what Burney Threadgill told me was that Richard Aoki told him he had no interest in communism. And Burney further said that Richard Aoki became involved in political activities initially at the request of the FBI. Burney also said that he worked with Richard Aoki as his handler and met with him on a regular basis and received reports from him and paid him, that Richard Aoki provided information on specific groups, such as the socialist groups I mentioned, and that after Burney was transferred to another office in 1965, Richard Aoki was passed along as an informant to another agent.
And I should also clarify Wes Swearingen's statement about Richard Aoki being accepted within radical circles perhaps partly because he was Japanese. That doesn't seem particularly significant now, in modern times, but in the late '60s, somebody coming from a different ethnic background made them seem to be an outsider, and there would be less suspicion that an outsider like that would be working for the government, which in those days, certainly the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, was largely all white, almost totally white and male. So, I believe that's what Wes Swearingen was referring to.
In terms of Richard Aoki's profile, as I mentioned, he starts out not being a political person. He starts attending these meetings. He becomeshe becomes gradually involved. And it's only later in the '60s that he begins to be more active in advocating different political things.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're speaking with Seth Rosenfeld. His book is published this week, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. And Professor Diane Fujino, author of, Samurai Among Panthers. And I want, when we come back, Professor Fujino, to ask you about this term you use called "snitch-jacketing," the government's casting suspicion on the most active activists. Stay with us.
[other half of this part being transcribed]......
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass