[News] New Documents Suggest J. Edgar Hoover Was Involved in Fred Hampton’s Murder
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Tue Jan 19 10:13:21 EST 2021
https://truthout.org/articles/new-documents-suggest-j-edgar-hoover-was-involved-in-fred-hamptons-murder/
<https://truthout.org/articles/new-documents-suggest-j-edgar-hoover-was-involved-in-fred-hamptons-murder/>
New Documents Suggest J. Edgar Hoover Was Involved in Fred Hampton’s
Murder
# ByFlint Taylor <https://truthout.org/authors/flint-taylor/> &Jeff Haas
<https://truthout.org/authors/jeff-haas/>, January 19, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In March 1976, we sat in a cavernous Chicago courtroom while FBI agent
Roy Martin Mitchell testified in the federal civil rights case that we
and our partners at the People’s Law Office had brought on behalf of the
families of slain Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark
Clark and the seven survivors of the murderous pre-dawn Chicago police
raid on their West Side apartment.
Thanks to the liberation of FBI documents from the Media, Pennsylvania
FBI offices, the revelations of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence Activities and our own hotly contested pretrial battles to
uncover the truth about the raid, we had been able to document the local
FBI’s central role in setting up the raid as part of the Bureau’s secret
and highly illegal COINTELPRO Program
<https://truthout.org/articles/the-assassination-of-fred-hampton-47-years-later/>.
This program had previously targeted Black liberation leaders including
Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown,
Elijah Muhammad and the organizations that they led. As the Senate
Select Committee would later find in its April 1976 report, the FBI had
more recently turned its attention to “destroy[ing] the Black Panther
Party.”
Roy Martin Mitchell was an integral member of the Chicago FBI office’s
Racial Matters Squad and the control agent for a prized “asset”:
informant-provocateur William O’Neal, who was the captain of security of
the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). As such, O’Neal
had ready access to the local BPP chairman, the dynamic Fred Hampton,
who had garnered particular attention from Mitchell, his Racial Matters
Squad and the COINTELPRO program.
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At the time Mitchell testified, we had documentation of the FBI’s secret
role in setting up the raid, including a detailed floor plan of the
Hampton apartment — designating the bed on which Hampton would later be
slain — that Mitchell and O’Neal had drawn up, and which Mitchell had
supplied to the Chicago police raiders and their state’s attorney
supervisors, including Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan,
who utilized this invaluable information to execute the murderous
pre-dawn raid on December 4, 1969.
We also had obtained two other damning FBI documents: a December 3,
1969, document that claimed the impending raid as a COINTELPRO project,
and a post-raid document that set forth the outlines of the conspiracy
to cover up the FBI’s involvement in the raid.
Concluding from the Senate report and the liberated media documents that
the raid and its coverup had to have been approved and ratified at the
highest levels of the Bureau, we had sought, months earlier, to join as
defendants in our suit FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Director of
Domestic Intelligence William C. Sullivan, and George Moore, who, as
boss of the Extremist Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, had
the Black Panther Party directly in his administrative sights. We had
also journeyed to Washington to question Sullivan under oath in a
pre-trial deposition, but his Department of Justice lawyers thwarted our
efforts to probe the Bureau’s knowledge of the raid and COINTELPRO, and
our overtly hostile federal trial judge, J. Sam Perry, acted similarly
by denying our request for relevant documents and to bring Hoover and
his crew on board as defendants.
So it was in March 1976 when Mitchell set about to meticulously slander
Hampton and the BPP through the reports of his informant O’Neal. An
instinctively cautious witness, Mitchell nonetheless made a crucial
mistake, and in the process, revealed that the FBI and its government
lawyers had suppressed 200 volumes of FBI files that pertained to
Hampton, Clark, O’Neal, the seven survivors of the raid, and the FBI’s
cover-up investigation — files that the judge had previously unwittingly
ordered produced.
The government rushed Mitchell off the stand with the judge’s blessing,
and, over the next two months, its lawyers produced (several files at a
time), the 200 volumes of documents. The files contained a great deal of
information relevant to our claims of FBI conspiracy, but the FBI and
its government lawyers, perhaps hoping to stave off the inevitable,
saved the smoking gun for last: a pair of documents to and from the
Bureau in Washington and the Chicago office that were buried in O’Neal’s
personnel file and which requested and obtained for O’Neal a $300 bonus
for furnishing “a detailed floor plan of the apartment” that
“subsequently proved to be of tremendous value” and “was not available
from any other source.”
Incredibly, Judge Perry shrugged off the damning government misconduct,
refused to grant a mistrial and forced us to continue with the trial as
we attempted to read and digest the deluge of documents that we were
receiving on a daily basis.
The trial lurched forward for another 15 months, making it the longest
civil trial in federal court history. Both of us spent time in the
federal lockup for protesting the outrageous rulings of the judge and
the blatant misconduct of the defense. After the jury heard 18 months of
damning evidence, the judge absolved not only Mitchell, O’Neal and their
Chicago bosses, but also State’s Attorney Hanrahan and the 14 raiding
cops who fired more than 90 bullets from a machine gun, a rifle,
shotguns and handguns at the sleeping Panthers by entering a directed
verdict in their favor.
Despite its relevance and our repeated discovery requests, the FBI and
its lawyers never produced Mitchell’s personnel file as part of the 200
volumes, nor were we permitted to recall Mitchell to the witness stand
in order to question him about the O’Neal bonus document and whether he
had also been rewarded for his central role in setting up the raid and
subsequently keeping the FBI’s role under wraps.
Thankfully, the litigation did not end with Judge Perry’s baseless and
vindictive ruling. We appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals,
which rendered a landmark 70-page opinion on April 23, 1979. The Court
of Appeals granted us a new trial, ordered a hearing on the government’s
misconduct and absolved us of our contempt citations. The Court held in
no uncertain terms that we had amassed a powerful record of two
successive police, prosecutorial and FBI conspiracies.
The first conspiracy, which was grounded in the COINTELPRO program and
featured Mitchell and O’Neal’s central roles, encompassed the planning
of the raid and the raid itself, and was designed, as the Court found,
“to subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party and its members,
thereby suppressing … a vital, radical black political organization
<https://casetext.com/case/hampton-v-hanrahan>.” The second conspiracy,
which included the post-raid coverup and legal harassment of the
plaintiffs, was, as the Court further stated, “intended to frustrate any
redress the Plaintiffs might seek and, more importantly, to conceal the
true character of the pre-raid and raid activities of the defendants
involved in the first conspiracy.”
We successfully withstood the defendants’ attempt to have the U.S.
Supreme Court overturn the Court of Appeals’ decision, and the case was
returned to another federal judge for retrial. We pressed for additional
FBI documents to join Hoover and Sullivan (both of whom were deceased),
as well as Moore and several other high-ranking FBI and Department of
Justice officials as defendants, and pursued the misconduct hearing. In
order to avoid judicial condemnation of their suppression of the FBI
files and, as it later turns out, discovery of additional documentation
of the FBI’s role in the raid, the government joined with Cook County
and the City of Chicago to settle our case for what was, at that time,
the largest police violence settlement in federal court history.
At that point, in 1983, after 13 years of litigation, it seemed as if
the historical record was complete and the true narrative of the raid
established: Chicago police officers, under the command of the Cook
County state’s attorney, and at the behest of the FBI and its COINTELPRO
program, targeted BPP leader Fred Hampton, and assassinated him while he
lay asleep as part of a murderous pre-dawn raid during which the police
fired more than 90 shots that also killed Panther Mark Clark and left
several other survivors badly wounded.
And so stood that record, until December 4, 2020, 51 years after the
raid, when historian and writer Aaron Leonard
<https://truthout.org/authors/aaron-leonard/> received from the FBI a
redacted copy of Mitchell’s personnel file in response to his 2015
Freedom of Information Act request.
*Involvement of Hoover and FBI Officials*
The newly released file, containing several hundred pages of FBI memos
and reports, provides substantial evidence that would have contributed
significantly to our examination of Mitchell and his Chicago
supervisors. It also provides the first direct documentation that
Sullivan, Moore and even Hoover were aware of Mitchell and O’Neal’s
Black Panther activities; that they ratified, celebrated and rewarded
O’Neal and Mitchell’s integral roles in the Hampton raid; and that they
were involved in the early stages of the cover-up of the FBI’s
involvement. Here is some of the key information contained in the documents:
* *On June 27, 1969,* in apparent recognition of O’Neal’s role in a
June 1969 FBI raid of the Chicago BPP offices, Hoover commended
Mitchell’s “very capable manner in which [he] performed in a matter
of intense interest to the Bureau in the racial field … and for his
“effective, skillful guidance of a confidential source who furnished
valuable information.”
* *On November 24, 1969*, only days after O’Neal and Mitchell drew up
the Hampton floor plan and initiated Mitchell’s plan to convince the
Chicago Police Department to execute the raid, Chicago Special Agent
in Charge (SAC) Marlin Johnson, who was a defendant in our suit,
sent a memo to Hoover’s desk cataloging O’Neal’s important
BPP-related activities, and recommending O’Neal for an incentive
bonus. O’Neal’s activities are deleted from the document.
* *On December 2, 1969*, while the actual planning for the raid was in
its final stages, Bureau Extremist Division Chief George Moore sent
a memo to Bureau Director of Domestic Intelligence William Sullivan
recommending that Mitchell receive an incentive award for
“outstanding performance in the development of a highly productive
informant in the Black Panther Party.”
* *On December 4, 1969,* only hours after the pre-dawn raid, the
Bureau’s administrative division concurred with Sullivan, Moore and
Johnson that the “performance of SA Mitchell in developing and
guiding informant merits incentive award” in the amount of $200.
* *On December 5, 1969,* SAC Marlin Johnson “advised informant”
(O’Neal) about an unknown topic; the remainder of this paragraph was
redacted from the document, but it seems likely that it was to
inform O’Neal that Johnson would be recommending him for a $300
bonus. Neither Johnson nor O’Neal ever admitted in sworn testimony
that they met or had any discussion with each other on December 5 or
any other time.
* *On December 10*, *1969,* a memo
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZT2nrdNUJ0NfcE1WiO92Q1lch8q9joI0/view>
sent from the personal desk of J. Edgar Hoover to SA Mitchell reads:
“I am certainly pleased to commend you and to advise you that I have
approved an incentive award in the amount of $200 for your
outstanding services in a matter of considerable interest to the FBI
in the racial field.… Through your aggressiveness and skill in
handling a valuable source he is able to furnish information of
great importance to the bureau in this vital area of our operations.
I want you to know of my appreciation of your exemplary efforts.”
* *On December 24, 1969, *Mitchell sent an evaluation of O’Neal to
Hoover stating, “He has been instrumental in the Chicago Office’s
success in handling the Bureau’s interests regarding an extremist
party in the nationalist field.”
* *On November 6, 1970, *Hoover provided Mitchell with another $200
incentive award for his handling of O’Neal, stating: “The manner in
which you have developed and handled a source of information of
great importance to the Bureau in the racial field is certainly
commendable.… A great deal of the information which has been
furnished by this individual has been of material assistance to the
FBI in fulfilling its responsibilities.”
* *On December 11, 1970*, the Chicago FBI office sent a teletype to
the FBI director marked “urgent,” which was initialed in Washington
by George Moore, and discussed a redacted FBI agent’s (most likely
Mitchell’s) potential testimony before a special state grand jury
that was investigating the raid. At this point, O’Neal, Mitchell and
the FBI’s role in the raid was still highly secret, and the teletype
instructed that “any information dealing with [redacted]” — most
likely the FBI’s role — “not to be touched upon” and “if any
questions were asked in this area, [the redacted witness] is to
immediately leave.”
As lawyers who were deeply involved in the Hampton litigation for 13
years, we view these documents as vehicles that would have opened up new
avenues of questioning, led us to additional documents to pursue,
deepened our proof of the assassination and cover-up conspiracies, and
provided compelling proof that the highest level of Bureau officials,
including Hoover, were partners in the conspiracies. As historians who
have extensively written and lectured on the assassination, we welcome
this unexpected trove of documents as further proof that the search for
past truths continues into the future. We hope to assist Aaron Leonard —
who has previously chronicled FBI surveillance and harassment of other
20th-century leftists — in his efforts to compel the FBI to reveal the
redactions in the Mitchell files, and the pursuit of the secrets that
still remain ensconced in the bowels of the FBI files will continue.
This search for historical truths about the government’s repressive
tactics and programs continues to be of crucial importance to this day.
While the official COINTELPRO program was terminated soon after it was
discovered, government attacks on today’s radical movements have
continued and intensified. The use of private security forces such as
TigerSwan at Standing Rock; the utilization of more sophisticated spying
and military technology (including drones, sound canons and concussion
grenades) in Ferguson, Missouri; the targeting of the Movement for Black
Lives as “terrorists” under the heading “Black Identity Extremists”; and
the nationwide violent and coordinated law enforcement attacks on
peaceful Black-led demonstrations in the wake of the murders of George
Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the most recent government-inspired
white supremacist Capitol breach all demonstrate not only that the
government’s repression mechanisms
<https://truthout.org/articles/on-the-48th-anniversary-of-the-fbi-s-black-panther-murders-activists-must-remain-vigilant-but-undeterred/>
are alive and well, but also that law enforcement continues to be
closely aligned with the emboldened forces of the violent and racist far
right. The cold-blooded assassination of Fred Hampton provides an
ongoing and detailed lesson about the illegal and violent lengths to
which the government will resort to in its efforts to destroy social
movements and young leaders of color when they pose a threat to its
white supremacist power and control.
/The authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable work of //Aaron
Leonard/ <http://www.aaronleonard.net/>/, whose dogged pursuit of the
Roy Martin Mitchell file uncovered the newly produced FBI documents
detailed above. /
--
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