An excerpt from Huey P. Newton's Book War Against the Panthers About Cointelpro
" C. FBI Declares War on Panthers:
COINTELPRO
Within one year of the formation of the Party, the FBI formed a special counterintelligence program dubbed COINTELPRO.29 The purpose of this program was, in the FBI's own words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists."30 A specific purpose of COINTELPRO was to prevent the rise of a "Messiah," a charismatic Black leader who might "unify and electrify" Black people.31 Martin Luther King, Jr., was named as a potential Messiah in the FBI's own secret memorandum establishing COINTELPRO, but after the assassination of King in 1968, the FBI shifted its focus to the Party and its leadership, particularly Huey P. Newton.
J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, publicly stated that the Party constituted "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country . . ." of any organization.32 Of the 295 documented actions taken by COINTELPRO alone to disrupt Black groups, 233—or 79 percent—were specifically directed toward destruction of the Party.33 Over $100 million of taxpayers' money was expended for COINTELPRO; over $7 million of it allocated for 1976 alone to pay off informants and provocateurs, twice the amount allocated in the same period by the FBI to pay organized crime informants.34
Indeed, while COINTELPRO ostensibly targeted five domestic organizations—which the Bureau dubbed, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, White Hate Groups, Black Nationalist Hate Groups (e.g., the Panthers), and the New Left—it was Blacks, and the Panthers in particular, who received the brunt of the damage. As the Senate Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations found,
The White Hate COINTELPRO also used comparatively few techniques which carried a risk of serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets, while the Black Nationalist COINTELPRO used such techniques extensively.35 The vast arsenal of techniques employed by the bureau against the BPP were tried and tested over the years in foreign espionage. As William C. Sullivan, former assistant to the director, stated: This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred. . . . We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents. They have used [them] against us. . . . [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.36
Specifically, the FBI engaged in or encouraged a variety of actions intended to cause (and in fact causing) deaths of BPP members, loss of membership and community support, draining of revenues from the Party, false arrests of members and supporters, and defamatory discrediting of constructive Party programs and leaders. What follows is an illustrative highlighting of some of these unlawful actions undertaken by the bureau against the BPP. "
