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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"><font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="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/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">New Documents Suggest J. Edgar Hoover
Was Involved in Fred Hampton’s Murder</h1>
<div class="entry-meta">
<dl class="dateline">
<li>By<span itemprop="name"><a class="url fn"
href="https://truthout.org/authors/flint-taylor/"
itemprop="url" rel="author"> Flint Taylor</a></span>
&<span itemprop="name"><a class="url fn"
href="https://truthout.org/authors/jeff-haas/"
itemprop="url" rel="author"> Jeff Haas</a></span>, <time
class="published updated meta-data"
datetime="2021-01-19T14:18:19+00:00"
itemprop="datePublished dateCreated"
content="2021-01-19T14:18:19+00:00">January 19, 2021</time>
</li>
</dl>
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<hr>
<div class="content">
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<div id="article-content">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/the-assassination-of-fred-hampton-47-years-later/">COINTELPRO
Program</a>. 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div id="truth-255792" data-callout-id="255396"
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<h2>Don’t miss a beat</h2>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, “<a
href="https://casetext.com/case/hampton-v-hanrahan">to
subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party and its
members, thereby suppressing … a vital, radical black
political organization</a>.” 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And so stood that record, until December 4, 2020, 51
years after the raid, when historian and writer <a
href="https://truthout.org/authors/aaron-leonard/">Aaron
Leonard</a> received from the FBI a redacted copy of
Mitchell’s personnel file in response to his 2015
Freedom of Information Act request.</p>
<h2><strong>Involvement of Hoover and FBI Officials</strong></h2>
<p>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:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>On June 27, 1969,</strong> 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.”</li>
<li><strong>On November 24, 1969</strong>, 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.</li>
<li><strong>On December 2, 1969</strong>, 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.”</li>
<li><strong>On December 4, 1969,</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>On December 5, 1969,</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>On December 10</strong>, <strong>1969,</strong>
a <a
href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZT2nrdNUJ0NfcE1WiO92Q1lch8q9joI0/view">memo</a>
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.”</li>
<li><strong>On December 24, 1969, </strong>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.”</li>
<li><strong>On November 6, 1970, </strong>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.”</li>
<li><strong>On December 11, 1970</strong>, 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.”</li>
</ul>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/on-the-48th-anniversary-of-the-fbi-s-black-panther-murders-activists-must-remain-vigilant-but-undeterred/">repression
mechanisms</a> 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.</p>
<p><em>The authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable
work of </em><a href="http://www.aaronleonard.net/"><em>Aaron
Leonard</em></a><em>, whose dogged pursuit of the
Roy Martin Mitchell file uncovered the newly produced
FBI documents detailed above. </em></p>
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