FBI Agent Informants within BPP-gctid26059

[aziza]

William O'Neal


(O'Neal drugged Fred Hampton with barbituate laced Kool-Aid. He later committed suicide in the 1980's)

In mid-November 1969 O'Neal provided the FBI with detailed information of Hampton's apartment, including the location of furniture and the bed in which Hampton and his girlfriend slept. An augmented, fourteen-man team of the SAO — Special Prosecutions Unit — was organized for a pre-dawn raid armed with an illegal weapons warrant.

On the evening of December 3, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, which was attended by most members. Afterwards, as was typical, several Panthers retired to the Monroe Street apartment to spend the night, including Hampton and Deborah Johnson, Blair Anderson, Doc Satchell, Harold Bell, Verlina Brewer, Louis Truelock, Brenda Harris, and Mark Clark. Upon arrival, they were met by O'Neal, who had prepared a late dinner which was consumed by the group around midnight. O'Neal left at this point, and, at about 1:30 a.m., Hampton fell asleep in mid-sentence talking to his mother on the telephone. (The Kool Aid was subsequently found to have been laced with the powerful barbiturate, secobarbitol.)

At 4:00 a.m., the heavily armed police team arrived at the site, dividing into two teams, eight for the front of the building and six for the rear. At 4:45, they stormed in the apartment. Mark Clark, asleep in a front room with a shotgun in his lap, was killed instantly, despite firing off a single round — the only shot the Panthers fired. The automatic gunfire converged at the head of the bedroom where Hampton slept. Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and Harold Bell reported hearing the following exchange:

  "That's Fred Hampton."
  "Is he dead?... Bring him out."
  "He's barely alive; he'll make it."

Two shots were heard, which it was later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Deborah Johnson, one officer then said:

  "He's good and dead now."[1]

Hampton's body was dragged into the doorway of the bedroom and left in a pool of blood. The raiders then directed their gunfire towards the remaining Panthers, who were hiding in another bedroom. They were wounded, then beaten and dragged into the street, where they were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder of their assailants. They were held on US$100,000 bail apiece.

(excerpt from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton )

Melvin Cotton Smith


Louis Tackwood


Most dramatically, on December 8, the LAPD deployed its new SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics, a militarized police unit) teams, a warrant, a battering ram, helicopters, a tank, trucks, dynamite, and 400 police officers to raid three L.A. BPP facilities including the Central Ave. headquarters.(37) The raid bore much similarity to the raid against the Chicago BPP led four days prior by the FBI and Chicago police.(38) For instance, the government's plan called for the police to focus gunfire at chapter leader Geronimo Pratt's bed; however, Pratt was sleeping on the floor at the time.(39) But whereas the Chicago raid ended with Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark murdered, the L.A. Panthers, under Geronimo Pratt's leadership, stood their ground. Only after exchanging fire with the police for five hours did the Panthers surrender, alive.(40) Participant Melvin Cotton Smith, security officer for the L.A. branch, was later identified by former government agent Louis Tackwood as a police informant.(41) Louis Tackwood, too, was a government infiltrator of the Southern California BPP.(42) Cotton provided the LAPD and FBI with detailed blueprints of party facilities before the raid. (43) The LAPD's warrant was obtained on the basis of false information provided by the FBI regarding stolen military weapons. The day after the raid, Angela Davis and others set up a vigil outside BPP's Southern California headquarters, during which LAPD attacked, forcing people to flee in all directions.(44)

(excerpt from: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/077.html )

Julius Carl / Julius Butler:

"They arrested Pratt on Dec. 4, 1970.(75) He stood trial in the spring of 1972 at Los Angeles Superior Court on charges of murdering Caroline Olsen, a white schoolteacher, on a Santa Monica tennis court on Dec. 18, 1968.(76) The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of LAPD and FBI informant Julius Carl "Julio" Butler, who at the trial denied being an informant.(77) Butler to this day denies that he was ever an informant, no doubt in part because such an admission would jeopardize his position as chairman of the Board of Trustees of Los Angeles' oldest and most prominent Black church, the First Kmtyw Methodist Episcopal Church (First A.M.E.).(78) Pratt argued, and maintains today, that he was at a BPP meeting in Oakland, 400 miles away from Santa Monica, on the evening of the murder.(79) The FBI's success in isolating Pratt from the BPP prevented Party members, except for Kathleen Cleaver, from testifying on his behalf and corroborating his alibi.(80) Then-FBI agent Wesley Swearingen reports:

"My supervisor and several agents on the racial squad knew that Pratt was innocent because the FBI had wiretap logs proving that Pratt was in the San Francisco area several hours before the shooting of Caroline Olsen and that he was there the day after the murder.

"The Los Angeles office had a wiretap on Panther headquarters in Los Angeles for a two-week period covering the date of December 18, 1968. These wiretap logs could prove that Elmer Pratt was in the San Francisco area on the day Caroline Olsen was shot to death.

"I reviewed the Black Panther Party file that showed that the Los Angeles FBI office had had a wiretap on the Panther office at 4115 South Central Avenue from November 15, 1968 through 2:00 P.M., December 20, 1968. I had worked with wiretap information since 1952, and this was the first time in my twenty-five-year career that I could not find the Panther wiretap logs for the period November 15 through December 20, 1968. Someone had destroyed those logs so there would be no proof that Elmer Pratt had been in the San Francisco area on December 18, 1968. "

(excerpt from: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/077.html )

"Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) was released from prison in June after more than a quarter century behind bars for a crime he did not commit. Yet even after a conservative Orange County judge ruled that the principal witness against geronimo - former L.A. sheriff's deputy Julius "Julio" Butler - had lied on the witness stand, and after the judge overturned the conviction based on the fact that Butler's role as an informant for the FBI, LAPD, and District Attorney's office was withheld from the defense and the jury, still D.A. Gil Garcetti persisted in compounding the injustice by appealing the judge's decision rather than dropping all charges."

(excerpt from: http://www.change-links.org/Pratt.html )

Earl Anthony:

"[Local Cointelpro head Richard] Held quickly took 'credit' for the killings [of Carter and Huggins], and recommended sending more cartoons. This was duly approved and resulted in the wounding of several more Panthers and the death of yet another, Sylvester Bell. In the aftermath, Held again patted himself on the back for such 'success' via internal memoranda."(57)

In 1969, Panther Ronald Freeman was shot by US organization members while selling BPP newspapers.(58) BPP member John Savage was killed by US members in San Diego on May 23. The BPP claimed that Savage had witnessed the Carter and Huggins murders and was killed to prevent him from testifying at the US members' trial.(59) In all, four Panthers were shot and one wounded by US members in 1969.(60)

The theory outlined above suggests that genuine rivalries between two genuine organizations were exacerbated by the FBI to create war between them. On the other end of the spectrum of plausible theories, some suggest that the US organization was not a genuine part of the Black power movement at all, but was in fact an anti-Panther death squad financed by the FBI. Elaine Brown suggests that she believes this was the case, at least after the Campbell Hall killings.(61) Former FBI infiltrator and agent-provocateur Earl Anthony alleges that he knows this to be true:

"When I met with [FBI Agents Robert] O'Connor and [Ron] Kizenski at our designated time [Aug. 6, 1968],...[t]hey said they were tired of the 'Panther shit,' and the FBI had worked out a deal with Karenga where they would supply US with weapons and a master plan to destroy the LA Black Panther Party; and they were hoping to get something like that going in New York."(62)

Anthony's words have proven in the past to be untrustworthy, so this allegation is not worth very much. It is quite possible that he is continuing to spread slanderous disinformation on behalf of the FBI.

What gives some credence, though not proof, to the theory held by Brown and Anthony is that while the more conservative theory holds that the FBI was using each group against the other, the repression faced by the BPP was much more severe than that faced by the US organization. The pattern of killings described above is a case in point. Another is that the FBI opened a conspiracy investigation for Panther Geronimo Pratt for a bank robbery that the FBI knew had been committed by US members.(63)

(excerpt from: http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/mt/mt11bpp.html )