FBI Informants

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FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:04 pm

American Dream » Fri Jul 26, 2013 2:55 pm wrote:...how do the FBI and other such groups develop deep cover informants for that matter? How much appeals to greed? How much threats of criminal sanction?

What sorts of psychological profiles should they look for? Psychopaths? Addicts?

What else?


Awesome prompt for a Data Dump! I'm on it!

Wikipedia has 46 articles listed under "FBI Informants", a surprising wealth of information.

Another key source: The Attorney General's Guidelines Regarding the Use of Confidential Informants
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:05 pm

Via: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... informants

In addition, for every informant officially listed in the bureau's records, there are as many as three unofficial ones, according to one former high-level FBI official, known in bureau parlance as "hip pockets."

...

Throughout the FBI’s history, informant numbers have been closely guarded secrets. Periodically, however, the bureau has released those figures. A Senate oversight committee in 1975 found the FBI had 1,500 informants. In 1980, officials disclosed there were 2,800. Six years later, following the FBI’s push into drugs and organized crime, the number of bureau informants ballooned to 6,000, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1986. And according to the FBI, the number grew significantly after 9/11. In its fiscal year 2008 budget authorization request, the FBI disclosed that it it had been been working under a November 2004 presidential directive demanding an increase in "human source development and management," and that it needed $12.7 million for a program to keep tabs on its spy network and create software to track and manage informants.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:08 pm

Via: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/21/139836377 ... informants

Terror Probes Have FBI's Informant Numbers Soaring

In today's post 9/11 America, there are 15,000 informants working with the FBI. That's nearly three times as many as there were 25 years ago.

Over the years, when there has been a surge in the number of informants the FBI recruits and uses, there's a specific target in the FBI's sights — first organized crime, then drug smuggling, and now counterterrorism.


Via: http://www.pbs.org/pov/betterthisworld/ ... hp?photo=4

Shortly after the end of WWI, during the Red Scare of the 1950s into the 1970s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) infiltrated and spied on communist and civil rights organizations. Now, today's FBI campaign has been dubbed the "Green Scare" and the target is primarily environmental and animal rights activists. Since 2006, 14 members of the Earth Liberation Front have been convicted in FBI cases that have involved informants. One man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring to bomb one or more targets, including a federal facility for tree genetics, a federal dam and fish hatchery and a cell phone tower.

According to a recent article in The New Yorker, the FBI maintains more than 15,000 informants. These informants can collect evidence that government agents would need court orders to collect. The informants are often paid thousands of dollars — in some cases even hundreds of thousands of dollars — in retainers.

The article states, "In almost every successful case against a large-scale criminal enterprise — from the one against John Gotti's Mob operation to those involving terrorists plotting against New York synagogues and subways — an informant has played a central role."

The U.S. Department of Justice identifies several different classes of informants:

A confidential informant is any individual who provides useful and credible information to a Justice Law Enforcement Agency (JLEA) regarding felonious criminal activities and from whom the JLEA expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information regarding such activities in the future.

Cooperating witnesses differ from confidential informants in that cooperating witnesses agree to testify in legal proceedings and typically have written agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice (usually with an assistant U.S. attorney) that spell out their obligations and their expectations of future judicial or prosecutive consideration.

Sources of information, in contrast, provide information to law enforcement only as a result of legitimate routine access to information or records. The U.S. Department of Justice explains that sources do not collect information by means of criminal association with the subjects of an investigation, while confidential informants and cooperating witnesses often do.

The use of informants has been standard at the FBI since 1961, when J. Edgar Hoover instructed agents to "develop particularly qualified, live sources within the upper echelon of the organized hoodlum element who will be capable of furnishing the quality information" needed to attack organized crime. In 1978, the FBI formed its current criminal informant program, designed to develop a bank of informants who could assist FBI investigations.

Informants, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, "are often uniquely situated to assist the FBI in its most sensitive investigations. They may be involved in criminal activities or enterprises themselves, may be recruited by the FBI because of their access and status and, since they will not testify in court, usually can preserve their anonymity." These sources are approved for use in cases involving organized crime, domestic and international terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs, civil rights, cyber crime, gangs and major theft, among other crimes. While informants are instructed about the limits to their authority, they are authorized to perpetrate some crimes as necessary to their duties and as defined by the department.

The use of such sources has become essential to FBI operations, with informants — including "privileged" informants, such as attorneys, clergy and physicians — supplying short — to long-term services.

However, the use of informants does present certain challenges. Working with informants often means working with people who are themselves engaged in criminal activity. According to Philip B. Heymann, the former deputy attorney general and assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, "some informants are responsible citizens who report suspected criminal activities without any hope of return. In the middle, other informants live in the midst of the criminal underworld and inform largely for cash. Still others, at the other pole, are charged with serious crimes and cooperate with law enforcement officials in return for the hope or promise of leniency."

Informants are not official employees of the FBI, but many receive compensation for their services; they are screened for suitability before they enter into relationships with the FBI and are screened periodically thereafter.

A 2005 report from the Office of the Inspector General investigating FBI compliance with the attorney general's investigative guidelines found significant problems in the FBI's compliance with the guidelines' provisions, including serious shortcomings in the supervision and administration of the criminal informant program. Specifically, it was found that cumbersome paperwork and inadequate support from FBI headquarters and certain field offices led agents either to avoid using informants or to use informants who were not properly registered.

Discussing the role of informants on its website, the FBI writes, "use of informants to assist in the investigation of criminal activity may involve an element of deception, intrusion into the privacy of individuals or cooperation with persons whose reliability and motivation may be open to question. . . . [S]pecial care is taken to carefully evaluate and closely supervise their use so the rights of individuals under investigation are not infringed."

Many defendants in cases that involve informants have accused informants of entrapment, meaning the defendants were not predisposed to commit crimes, nor would they have done so without the influence of the informants. According to NPR counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, not a single entrapment defense since September 11 has been successful.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:13 pm

Via: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -terrorism

How a Radical Leftist Became the FBI's BFF
To many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. To federal agents consumed with busting anarchist terror cells, he was the perfect snitch.

For a few days in September 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters' hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was "a leader who's not looking for a fight, but sure isn't afraid of one either."

The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush's Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they'd come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration's assault on civil liberties.

St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin's big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.

Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an "FBI informant rat loose in Austin."

The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. "If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus," wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. "The simple truth," he wrote on Indymedia.org, "is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Darby's entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the '70s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America's top domestic terror threat.

FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.

But it's Darby's snitching that has provided the most intriguing tale. It's the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby's interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. (Watch the trailer and read our interview with the filmmakers here.)

The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI's blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and he recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) "I feel very morally justified to do the things that I've done," he told me. "I don't know if I could have handled it much differently."

Brandon Michael Darby is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. "He gets in people's minds and can pull you in," Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and anti-war organizer, warned me before I set out to interview him. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."

The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin's slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical-marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park's 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read "Medicine." They later "hooked up," Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.

Some local activists wouldn't work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana's Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn't get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.

It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. "If I'd had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people," he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he'd since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: "There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents."

But Common Ground's approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.

Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. "They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana," he told "This American Life" reporter Michael May. "And I was like, 'I don't think so.'" It turned out armed revolution wasn't really his thing.

Darby's former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground's interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. "He could only see what's in it for him," Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.

The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've replicated every system that I fought against,'" he recalls. "It was fucking bizarre."

By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.

Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. "I talked," he told me. "And it was the fucking weirdest thing." He knew his friends would hate him for what he'd done. (The FBI raided Hamad's home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin's Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)

McKay and Crowder first encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin's Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. "I stated that I wasn't interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much," Darby emailed his FBI handlers. "I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down."

"My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it," fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby's FBI email continued: "I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren't going to be able to fight anybody until they did so." At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: "Look at me, I'm badass. You can be just like me." (Darby insists that this never happened.)

When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group's trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they'd planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. "It started to feel like Darby hadn't amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be," Crowder says. Feeling that Darby's tough talk should be "in some ways, a guide of behavior," they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.

"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them," Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. "I'm just not feeling the vibe on the street," he texted Darby.

"You butt head," Darby shot back. "Text me when you can." He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay's room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.

The feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn't have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.

At South Austin's Strange Brew coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he's now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. "The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities," he explains. Climate change is "a bandwagon" and the EPA should be "strongly limited." Abortion shouldn't be a federal issue.

He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn't defending himself against the left's misrepresentations. "They don't print what I say," Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart's takedown of ACORN, he says, was "completely fucking fair.")

Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. "No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," he says. "And I've quit giving a shit."

The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. "I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence," he tells me. "They are complete fucking liars." As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.

He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it's hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby's ex, says he told her of the idea too.) "The guy was trying to put me in prison," Crow says.

Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: "They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack." Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. "Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I."
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby American Dream » Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:14 pm

I don't have my thoughts fully organized or informed on these issues but here's more questions:

How much are deep cover informants made, not found? In other words, what are the options for systematically training raw recruits to be culturally fluent islamists, anarcho-insurrectionists, animal rights fanatics, "eco-terrorists", militia types, etc.?

A related question would concern who are the bests sorts of people to target for the creation of patsies, too. And the best sorts of techniques to co-opt them...
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:42 pm

Via: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/politics/13fbi.html

F.B.I. Found to Violate Its Informant Rules
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: September 13, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has often violated internal guidelines in its handling of confidential informants, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded Monday.

In nearly 9 of every 10 cases reviewed by the inspector general, guidelines on the handling of confidential informants were violated in ways that risked compromising investigations, according to a 301-page report by the office of Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general at the Justice Department.

The guidelines sometimes permit informants like drug dealers or gang members to commit crimes to further an investigation. But F.B.I. agents sometimes allowed criminal informants to engage in criminal activities without getting needed approval from supervisors or lawyers for such operations, failed to report unauthorized illegal activity, or approved such illegal activity only retroactively, the review found.

Bureau supervisors were often unfamiliar with the rules that applied to the handling of confidential informants - a reflection, the inspector general's report said, of "inadequate training at every level." And when violations were found, bureau agents and supervisors were often not held accountable for missteps, the review found.

The F.B.I. considers the use of confidential informants, who often have criminal ties, to be critical to its ability to penetrate drug trafficking organizations, gangs, gambling operations and terrorist circles.

In 2001, Janet Reno, then the attorney general, imposed toughened requirements on the F.B.I.'s use of informants in the wake of several embarrassing episodes - most notably, its handling of the Boston gangster James Bulger, who fled in 1995 after a bureau agent tipped him off to a pending indictment against him.

In May 2002, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, amended the informant rules as part of a broader restructuring of F.B.I. policies aimed at allowing agents to respond more quickly and flexibly to leads in terrorism and criminal investigations.

The F.B.I. said Monday in response to the inspector general's report that it was working to improve compliance with guidelines for the handling of confidential informants and had already moved to make some internal changes recommended by Mr. Fine's office. Part of the problem, F.B.I. officials acknowledged, was the bureau's continued difficulty in building a modern computer system to help oversee the informant program and ensure better compliance.

"Even before the inspector general's review, we realized that we had to do some re-engineering of our whole human source program," Kevin R. Brock, an assistant F.B.I. director who oversees the program, said in an interview. "We were handling more and more sources, we had more and more regulations that we added on over the years, and we weren't doing the follow-up quality control on our own."

The constant flux "just created a situation where it was tough for the working agent to keep track of all this stuff," Mr. Brock said.

"Agents are failing to do certain things not because of mal-intent but just the press of administrative requirements, and overlooking them," he said.

Beyond the problems in managing confidential informants, the inspector general's review looked at the effect of a number of changes ordered by Mr. Ashcroft in his 2002 revamping of the bureau's investigative guidelines. Among other changes, the new guidelines allowed F.B.I. agents to visit public sites and events, attend mosques and other religious institutions, or peruse the Internet in search of leads in terrorism cases.

The changes relaxed restrictions put in place in the 1970's as a result of F.B.I. abuses in the monitoring of political dissidents, and they have drawn criticism from civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders who say they open the door to investigative abuses.

Critics charged last year that the F.B.I. had abused its expanded powers by monitoring, interviewing and sometimes subpoenaing antiwar protesters and political protesters in advance of the political conventions last summer. The inspector general's office disclosed in its report Monday that it was conducting a separate investigation to determine whether the F.B.I. interrogations of protesters were in fact improper.

The inspector general's review found that there was "widespread recognition" among F.B.I. agents and officials of the constitutional and privacy implications of expanding the bureau's ability to monitor public sites. But the review found that there were "gaps" in how the new policy had been put into effect, raising management concerns.

For instance, agents are "encouraged, but not required" to get the approval of a supervisor before attending a public event or site. And it was not always clear what information the F.B.I. could retain if it did not relate to an investigation.

As a result, "an absence of routine documentation" made it difficult if not impossible to assess how agents were using their new powers and whether those powers were being abused, the report said.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., told the inspector general's office that because agents were not required to get supervisors' approval before visiting public sites, it was "difficult to determine to what extent these authorities have been used," the inspector general's office said. It called on the F.B.I. to consider requiring approval from supervisors and more documentation of public visits to guard against possible abuses.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby semper occultus » Fri Jul 26, 2013 5:51 pm

...reckon Louis Tackwood's probabably my favourite specimen....

Image

Louis E. Tackwood was the liaison man between Karenga and DeFreeze and LAPD's CCS division. Aptly named, the Criminal Conspiracy Section's sole purpose and agenda was to target and destroy black militants and their organizations, through conspiracies involving informers, agent provocateurs, programmed assassins and set-up men. As well as "militant" synthetic terror groups to sabotage and discredit the Afrikan liberation movement in general. Through Tackwood, Ron Karenga and his United Slaves (we should've known they were punks by their Goddamn name alone!) were given their assignments to "Work in opposition to other Black groups within the Black community, which attracted large numbers of Blacks." Karenga was directly ordered to “Curtail the Panther Party’s growth, no matter what the cost, and that no rang-a-tang (CCS slang for US members) —that’s what we called his people— would ever be convicted of murder.” Tackwood also stated that he provided Karenga with assassination orders from the FBI to kill Panther leaders Elmore Geronimo Pratt, and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter.

Why target Carter? The Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party was formed in 1968 by Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter. Carter was the former head of the 5,000-strong Slauson gang and its hard-core unit, the Slauson Renegades, and was known in the area as "the Mayor of the Ghetto". While spending four years in Soledad prison on charges of armed robbery, he became a Muslim and a follower of Malcolm X. In 1967, Carter met Black Panther Party Minister of Defense Huey Newton and immediately became a Panther on the spot. Newton recognized Carter's formidable organization and leadership skills and tasked him with forming and leading the Southern California BPP chapter. In early 1968, he was given the revolutionary position of Deputy Minister of Defense.

On January 17, 1969, Jerome Huggins, 23 and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter 26, were gunned down by Karenga’s men, George P. and Larry Joseph Stiner, Harold Jones, Donald Hawkins and the triggerman Claude "Chuchessa" Hubert. Larry Stiner was wounded in the shoulder from a shot squeezed off by Alprentice Carter, and three of them made their way back to the get-away car driven by their FBI handler Brandon Cleary also known to them as Control One. According to a police agent code-named Othello (most likely either D’Arthard Perry, a.k.a. Ed Riggs or Louis E. Tackwood), Cleary drove three of the assassins back to the FBI building in Los Angeles, where they met in a 14th floor office for debriefing. The FBI then facilitated gunman Claude Hubert’s escape as Hubert was subsequently transferred to an east coast office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in New York City. Hubert has never been apprehended and is believed to be currently living under Bureau cover. As for the Stiner brothers, they were ordered to turn themselves into police whereupon the Bureau would assist them when things quieted down. After their reported surrender, the Stiner brothers were tried and convicted of the murders of Carter and Huggins. They were sentenced to San Quentin, a maximum- security prison. Four years later, as "model prisoners", the two were transferred to the minimum-security section of the prison. The FBI made good on their promise and facilitated their escape in 1974, during a conjugal visit arranged for both. Aided by a black prison guard the two were literally allowed to just walk off, and their handlers in the FBI assisted in providing them safe transit and haven in Guyana, South America. One has to wonder what Larry Stiner knows, and if his services were utilized further in nearby Jonestown, as he was in Guyana during that time. His brother George eventually left Guyana, and his current whereabouts are an FBI secret. Larry however, changed his name to Watani, married, and moved to neighboring Suriname. After civil conflicts threatened his family and great new life, he called his handlers with a request to return to the United States in exchange for granting political asylum for his family. This scumbag traitor and FBI snitch returned in 1994 and was double-crossed by his masters, who arranged for him to finish out his life sentence.

Who was Othello?

Depending on sources, he was either D’Arthard Perry, a.k.a. Ed Riggs, or Louis E. Tackwood. From 1968 to 1975 he was a paid undercover operative for the FBI and committed many of the crimes that the congressional committees and the Justice Department failed to uncover. Othello was the code name given to him by the FBI, who ultimately became so pleased with his performance they gave Othello $2,400 a month in cash payments and expenses, making him one of the bureau's highest-paid (and therefore one of its most valued) operatives. As FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act years later revealed, there were at least 295 FBI operations against black groups up to year 1971; of that total, 233 were specific operations launched against the Black Panthers. The Bureau wound up spending an estimated $7,400,000—much of it on operatives like Othello—and informants and undercover men to wreck the organization. That amount is about double what the FBI was spending to obtain information about organized crime.

Source: http://www.africanholocaust.net/phpBB2/ ... .php?t=180

http://www.scribd.com/doc/63755771/Louis-E-Tackwood-and-the-SLA



Mae's guest is Louis Tackwood, former LAPD informant and co-author of the book "The Glasshouse Tapes- The Story of an Agent Provocateur and the New Police Intelligence Complex "
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby MinM » Fri Jul 26, 2013 6:33 pm

elfismiles » Tue Dec 08, 2009 1:13 pm wrote:Holy Shit! Links at the source:

http://www.infowars.com/fbi-informant-w ... iad-hamad/

FBI informant who stung RNC 2008 anarchists connected to ‘firebomb plot’ on Brave New Books and “suicided” Palestinian activist Riad Hamad

Is Austin-area FBI Informant Brandon Darby, who allegedly provoked anarchists into plotting with ‘molotov cocktails’ at the RNC 2008 connected to plans to “firebomb” patriot bookstore Brave New Books and a sting on “suicided” Palestinian activist Riad Hamad?

Aaron Dykes
Infowars
December 8, 2009

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Flyers circulated across Austin coffeehouses reading “Wanted: Brandon Darby An Informant Rat Loose in Austin.”


AUSTIN, TEXAS — Remember Riad Hamad, the Palestinian man who’s “suicide” left him at the bottom of Lady Bird Lake in Austin with his mouth gagged and arms duct-taped behind his back? (Kurt Nimmo, Did Palestinian Activist Riad Hamad Commit Suicide? )

According to reports, he was observed at meetings with now-outed FBI informant/provocateur Brandon Darby, who admittedly set up two anarchist/leftists from Austin with “molotov cocktails” who were subsequently arrested for alleged plans to attack police cars outside the RNC 2008 in Minnesota in connection with the “RNC Welcoming Committee.”

Since Darby’s exposure as an admitted FBI informant, flyers have been seen in coffeehouses across Austin reading “Wanted: Brandon Darby An Informant Rat Loose in Austin.”

WHAT’S MORE– Scott Crow, anarchist/leftist who formed the Hurricane Katrina relief group “Common Ground Collective” has made a number of interesting connections with fellow member Brandon Darby, whose role in Common Ground may have coincided with his FBI/Police Informant role, which may have begun in 2004, 2005 or 2006.

Scott Crow claims that in 2006, after Brandon Darby was admittedly an FBI informant, Darby attempted to recruit Crow on a plot to “firebomb” Brave New Books of Austin, Texas. Crow writes:

In Darby’s ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ over the years he tried to get numerous people, including myself, to do the things the two men were eventually taken down for. I believe now he tried to set me up in 2006 (after he, according to FBI documents began informing and provoking) to firebomb a bookstore called Brave New Books in Austin. I was NOT interested at all and thought it was stupid. I tried to talk him out of it. The event never happened. He was allowed to change his mind and move on. What if the Feds had raided him at the time?


This astonishing information was brought to my attention by Harlan of Brave New Books, but the connection to Riad Hamad I found only afterwards in Crow’s posts. Harlan writes:

The vitriol that seems to chase Darby to this day is due to the fact that two young activists David McKay and Bradley Crowder have been sentenced to a combined six years in prison for possessing several Molotov cocktails that were to be used during demonstrations at the 2008 Republican National Convention and were convicted in large part through the testimony of Brandon Darby. The possession of the cocktails is not in question, but what seems peculiar is why Darby an older, seasoned activist would agree to take part in a plan to firebomb a flock of police cars at the RNC, according to the FBI, and not just persuade the younger protégés to avoid instigating violent action? According to the defendants, Darby had encouraged the violence and had provoked the younger activists to take this direction, an allegation Darby denies. Darby admits that he was asked by the bureau to be the “eyes and ears” to monitor the small, loose-knit group of activists that included McKay.


Image
Scott Crow (left) with Brandon Darby (right)

Crow initially defended Darby against allegations that he was reporting to the FBI , warning against ‘divisive rumors’ and COINTELPRO, even after claims had spread that he was an FBI informant. After Darby publicly admitted his role as an informant, Crow expressed regret for his support in a post titled “Eating Crow”, and then later expressed several suggestive claims about the extent of Brandon Darby’s political provocateuring in the Austin political scene, as posted on the PM Press.

Darby has appeared on ‘This American Life’/ NPR and in papers like the Austin Chronicle to talk about his background as an activist and his account of how he became an FBI informant through a New Orleans cop– once opposed to his groups’ actions until he was swayed by community relief efforts he witnessed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Or so the story goes…

Crow claims that Darby began contacting the FBI earlier, however, when he traveled to New Orleans in 2004 (prior to Hurricane Katrina) to “see what [the FBI] had on him” in their files. Clearly, in light of certain revelations, this may demonstrate a much longer-lasting relationship inside the FBI.

Brandon Darby has some wild claims, as stated in ‘This American Life,’ that he traveled to Venezuela to convince Chavez to fund their Hurricane Katrina relief effort. While there, he says he was referred to a meeting with the FARC rebels who tried to recruit him to start a revolutionary group ‘in the swamps of Louisiana.’ Darby says he turned them down.

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FBI Informant Brandon Darby claims he went undercover to stop Riad Hamad from ‘recruiting people for ‘terroristic’ like activities. Could Darby have been really entrapping Hamad? Why was Hamad found dead, gagged and duct-taped at the bottom of a lake?


Shortly afterwards, while back in Austin, he admits to having reported to the FBI what he claims was a Palestinian man trying to recruit him for a bombing. This may have been connected to Riad Hamad. Crow mentions the NPR story’s account of the interaction with Riad Hamad:

In the ['This American Life']/NPR story, they mention Darby going undercover to stop a Palestinian peace activist named Riad Hammad [sic] from recruiting people for potentially ‘terroristic’ like activities. They don’t mention that Riad was found dead at the bottom of a river here in Austin under very unusual circumstances which the Feds ruled a suicide, but looked like was done to him. And that there is NO public evidence that anything that Darby is saying is true. I don’t know myself, but Riad cannot defend himself against the accusations.


Scott Crow claims that Brandon Darby introduced him to Riad Hamad and other Palestinians at Green Muse Cafe coffee shop in Austin, telling him that “these were real revolutionaries” and not just “anarchists.”

This inciting rhetoric, which Crow believes was another attempt to provocateur him into revolutionary action/violence was very similar to supposed accounts of Darby’s goading the “Texas 2″ prior to the RNC 2008 that they were ‘weakling vegetarians’ and ‘couldn’t handle potentially violent revolutionary acts at the RNC.’ McKay claims Darby further goaded them to find out if they would take ‘revolutionary’ action or not once the RNC was underway. When he apparently agreed, and stated an apparently unplanned assault on a line of police cars, it led to the bust. Crow writes:

They also don’t mention that when I went to meet Darby at the Green Mews [sic] coffee shop in Austin during this time he was often with Riad and some men he described in excited tones as ‘real revolutionaries’ not activists. He could not wait to tell me, as if I would be impressed. I told him, as always that he needed to watch out for people he didn’t know, but what I didn’t know was working for the Feds. Silly me. So he is bragging about this in a public place, did he entrap Riad for the Feds like Brad and David? I have know idea, but I know that Riad is dead either because he took his own life because he thought someone was after him, or someone else took his life, because they figured there was an informer in their midst. Either of those scenarios are completely sad and scary, and not the world I want to create or be a part of.


Crow points out that Darby’s accounts of when he first contacted the FBI do not add up:

On at least THREE different and unrelated times Darby has stated that it was the FIRST time or reason he contact the FBI. The first was in 2004 when he, according to what he told me and my partner, went to visit the New Orleans office of the FBI to see what they had on him. It sounded SOOOO paranoid. He explained the story in great detail about his visit. The second time was in recent interviews where he has stated he saw that Brad and David were going to do something ‘harmful’ at the RNC in Minneapolis and he had to intervene. And now he is saying that he had to visit the Feds when he saw that Riad Hammad [sic], his friend, was not in fact a school teacher in Austin, but was involved in some other ‘nefarious’ activities. So which is the truth? I know he met commander Bryson of NOPD in Oct/ or Nov. of 2005. He has stated in interviews that Bryson is the one who introduced him to the Feds. Did he begin his work to spy on Common Ground and all of us then? Where is the real Darby?


Crow says that while he knew Brandon Darby for more than six years inside the Austin activist community, his actions were consistently violence-oriented, and with grandstanding, in opposition to the views held by most of the other anarchist members.

For years he advocated ‘blowing things up’ and later using arson. I don’t know if he did, but he sure did try to get other to do it. So was it revolutionary zeal or agent provocateur sh*t straight out of the manual?


Crow states that Darby seemed to merely adopt the rhetoric of various activist groups while differing from their common behaviors (most of the activists were vegan, yet he ate meat; was in favor of dictation over consensus, and ’slept with a lot of women’ and acted in a macho or chauvinistic manner). Crow wrote:

Darby was NOT an anarchist. He actually never claimed to be for the longest time. He disagreed with horizontal organizing and many of the underpinnings of anarchism. He DID however absorb the language, when necessary for interviews or speaking in public. He NEVER absorbed the practice during the 6 years I have known him. He actually was more of a quasi ‘central-democratic’ Marxist. He thought anarchist wasted time, energy and resources. Myself and few excluded of course . He would blurt in the same breath. He aligned himself with what he thought the Black Panther Party central committee would do–whether it was true or not. He didn’t have a liberation or even an anti-oppression analysis, but enough information to get by within radical circles.

He was the only ”’anarchist”’ I have ever known that wanted to ‘overthrow the government’. I debated and argued with him about the impossibilities and reasons why that was a bad idea on so many levels, but he took that message many places to the chagrin and dismay of many radical circles.


Further information is found on the Rag Blog (more)

Harlan at Brave New Books writes:

Why was Darby choosing a bookstore as a target for a direct action? Was his plan a way to ensnare fellow activists in a plot that would eventually be foiled by the heroic FBI? Or was this plan another classic government provocateur attempting to firebomb an actual threat to the FBI and the state, wielding his useful idiots as his accomplices all the while knowing he would be provided the full protection of the FBI? The latter seems justifiably more accurate given the history of the FBI and its long train of abuses using agent provocateurs to carry out its dirty work. One need not look any further than the FBI’s clear infiltration of Elohim City using Timothy McVeigh as their asset. One could also look at the semi-retarded young religious men in Florida that were drafted by the U.S. government through the work of a joint terrorism task force agent who had infiltrated their group and persuaded them to express that they would be willing to help the terrorism task force blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Also, one should never forget that the FBI helped train an informant and provided materials to the informant that were used in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The bombing was allowed to occur with full knowledge of its planning by the FBI. There are loads of other examples that support the notion that the FBI routinely uses agent provocateurs in an effort to undermine its political enemies and swell its rank and budget.

In regrards to Brandon Darby, it is interesting to note that he was committed to seeing the Molotov cocktail bombing through at the RNC. According to the radio show This American Life, that featured Darby and people who knew him, Darby was willing to go ahead with the plan to bomb the police cars with David McKay in the early morning hours but the younger McKay never materialized and the plot was called off. This doesn’t describe the behavior of an innocent observer and sounds more like the actions of an active participant willing to commit an act of terrorism and then scapegoat a pair of useful idiots. So would Darby’s same zeal for terrorism had occurred if there would have been someone that would have been willing to help in Darby’s plan to attack the bookstore? Luckily, we will never know because he was never able to execute his plans


http://www.infowars.com/fbi-informant-w ... iad-hamad/

viewtopic.php?p=303858#p303858

JackRiddler » Fri Jul 26, 2013 5:16 pm wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 26, 2013 3:31 pm wrote:That origin story, in technicolor cinematic glory...

Via: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -terrorism

But Common Ground's approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.

Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. "They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana," he told "This American Life" reporter Michael May. "And I was like, 'I don't think so.'" It turned out armed revolution wasn't really his thing.

Darby's former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground's interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. "He could only see what's in it for him," Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number."

....

By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.

Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. "I talked," he told me. "And it was the fucking weirdest thing." He knew his friends would hate him for what he'd done. (The FBI raided Hamad's home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin's Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)


I missed, or forgot, the above. The Venezuelan-FARC-Louisiana angle is hilarious, but waaaaaaaaay too much. Do you think it is intended as "revelation of the method"?

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36860

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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Jul 29, 2013 4:03 pm

Via: http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html

LONDON—Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example :

"[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control... This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase" – CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.

....

Stratfor has realised that its routine use of secret cash bribes to get information from insiders is risky. In August 2011, Stratfor CEO George Friedman confidentially told his employees : "We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I don’t plan to do the perp walk and I don’t want anyone here doing it either."

...

WikiLeaks has also obtained Stratfor’s list of informants and, in many cases, records of its payoffs, including $1,200 a month paid to the informant "Geronimo" , handled by Stratfor’s Former State Department agent Fred Burton.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Jul 29, 2013 4:28 pm

Via: http://www.northjersey.com/news/Records ... l?page=all

Records show feds used ultra-right radio host for years

They called him "Valhalla."

But it was more than a nickname.

For more than five years, Hal Turner of North Bergen lived a double life.

The public knew him as an ultra-right-wing radio talk show host and Internet blogger with an audience of neo-Nazis and white supremacists attracted to his scorched-earth racism and bare-knuckles bashing of public figures. But to the FBI, and its expanding domestic counter-terror intelligence operations in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Turner was "Valhalla" — his code name as an informant who spied on his own controversial followers.

Turner's clandestine past was confirmed this past summer when he was jailed on charges that he made threats on his blog against three federal judges in Chicago. In court after his arrest, federal prosecutors acknowledged Turner's FBI ties but downplayed his importance and even described him as "unproductive."

But an investigation by The Record — based on government documents, e-mails, court records and almost 20 hours of jailhouse interviews with Turner — shows that federal authorities made frequent use of Turner in its battle against domestic terrorism.

As Turner took to his radio show and blog to say that those who opposed his extremist views deserve to die, he received thousands of dollars from the FBI to report on such groups as the Aryan Nations and the white supremacist National Alliance, and even a member of the Blue Eyed Devils skinhead punk band. Later, he was sent undercover to Brazil where he reported a plot to send non-military supplies to anti-American Iraqi resistance fighters. Sometimes he signed "Valhalla" on his FBI payment receipts instead of his own name.

His dual life of shock jock and informant offers a window into the murky realm of domestic intelligence in the years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks — in particular, the difficult choices for the FBI in penetrating controversial fringe groups with equally controversial informants.

In interviews, conducted before Turner was released on bail, he said the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements and now he feels double-crossed by the bureau after his arrest. The documents reviewed by The Record, however, show repeated instances of federal agents admonishing Turner for his extremism.

Federal prosecutors in Newark and Chicago declined to respond to Turner's claims, as did FBI officials. "We do not comment on matters before the courts and will not address Mr. Turner's allegations in the press," said the FBI's Weysan Dun, who runs the bureau's Newark field office.

Turner's "Valhalla" life will likely be on display this week when he is scheduled to go on trial for his alleged blog threats against three federal appeals court judges in Chicago who upheld a law banning handguns. The trial, originally set for Chicago, was switched to Brooklyn, with a judge flying in from Louisiana.

The trial may have its share of political intrigue. Turner's defense attorney, Michael Orozco, said he plans to subpoena Governor-elect Chris Christie to testify about whether he advised the FBI about Turner while Christie was U.S. attorney in Newark. On Friday, Orozco filed a motion to dismiss the case, accusing the government of "outrageous conduct."

But the center of the court battle will likely be the story of Hal Turner and his FBI connections, which began in 2003 with the Newark-based Joint Terrorism Task Force, and continued on and off until this year.

Rumors of Turner's FBI work surfaced two years ago after unknown Internet hackers electronically broke into his Web site and found e-mails between Turner and an FBI agent. Turner never acknowledged his FBI role until after his arrest in June — and then with a mix of anger and chagrin.

"Imagine my surprise," he wrote in one of several letters from jail to The Record, "when agents from the very FBI that trained and paid me came to my house to arrest me."

In a memo only two years earlier, the FBI said Turner "has proven highly reliable and is in a unique position to provide vital information on multiple subversive domestic organizations." The memo went on to say that Turner's "statistical accomplishments include over 100 subjects identified, over 10 acts of violence prevented and multiple subjects arrested."

"I was not some street snitch," Turner said in one of several lengthy interviews at the Hudson County Jail, where he was kept until the terms of his bail were worked out in October — terms that prevented him from talking to reporters after his release. "I was a deep undercover intelligence operative."


Misgivings on both sides


Whatever his role, one thing is clear: The relationship between Turner and the FBI often was rocky, with both sides cutting ties several times.

In March 2005, Turner abruptly quit. In a letter to his FBI handlers, he cited a "complete failure" by the agency "to achieve the goals for which I began the relationship," the "dismal lack of arrests," the failure to track down a "threat to kill me and my family" and "exploitation" by the FBI "to interfere with content of my Internet Web site."

By June, however, Turner was again on the FBI payroll. The FBI, meanwhile, harbored its own doubts about Turner.

Five days after Turner's March 2005 letter, an internal FBI memo summarized rising concerns that his rhetoric was too controversial and possibly dangerous.

"Is he a big mouth? Yes," the memo said. "Does he say really deplorable things? Yes. Is he a physical threat to anyone? I don't think so."

Records show the FBI continued this kind of questioning throughout its connection to Turner — valuing his ties to right-wing hate groups, but also worrying that his audience might follow up on his violence rhetoric.

In a July 2007 memo, Turner's primary FBI handler, Special Agent Stephen Haug, wrote that Turner "will continue to be admonished in the strongest possible terms and on a periodic basis about his rhetoric and the potential of it inciting acts of violence."

Haug went on to say that Turner would be "instructed to utilize his celebrity status to insure he continues to remind those who follow his rhetoric that such rhetoric is not intended to incite violence."

"In balance," Haug wrote, "this source's value outweighs the discomfort associated with source's rhetoric. Source's unique access provides important intelligence which, if lost, would be irreplaceable."

Turner, meanwhile, often tried to assure the FBI that his shock jock rhetoric was not serious. "The audience loves the rip-roaring radio psycho," he wrote in one e-mail to the FBI. "They literally throw money at it. Just be confident that the personality you hear (or hear about) on radio is not real life. I have zero intention of doing anything stupid."

Nonetheless, Turner's statements were closely watched.

In February 2008, in the midst of the presidential primary season, Turner attracted the attention of federal officials when he turned against then-Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

"I'm starting to come to the realization that it may be up to a sole person, acting alone, to make certain this guy is never allowed to hold the most powerful office in the world," Turner wrote on his Web site. He later removed the statement.

But later that year, court records show that he contacted federal authorities to say that he had heard of a possible assassination plot by white supremacists against the president-elect.

"I didn't like Barack Obama," Turner explained in an interview. "But he won the election."

Seven months after the possible threat to Obama, Turner was in FBI handcuffs — for allegedly threatening the Chicago judges.

"Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges deserve to be killed," Turner wrote on his blog on June 2. "Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty."

Turner also posted photos of the judges, their work phone numbers and office addresses as well as a map of the courthouse that pointed out "anti-truck bomb barriers."

"The word 'deserve' is just an opinion," Turner later told The Record. As for posting the photos of the judges, he added: "I can't tell you to this day how sorry I am."

Even if he wins his federal case, Turner's legal problems will not be over. In June, Connecticut authorities charged Turner with inciting violence against state officials who supported a proposed state law to give Roman Catholic parishioners greater control over church finances.

In each case, Turner contends his words are protected as free speech under the First Amendment. Turner's attorney, Orozco, adds that other federal prosecutors routinely ignored his outlandish statements. "He has made other controversial remarks about judges, none of which have ever been prosecuted," wrote Orozco in a legal brief.

"I never intended for anybody to feel threatened," Turner said.


Longing to be heard


Whatever his intentions, it remains unclear who the real Hal Turner is.

A fraud? A serious threat to homeland security? A white supremacist? A loyal citizen trying to help the FBI? A radio showman trying to build an audience — and income — with shocking statements?

After he was arrested by FBI agents in June, Turner was sent on a journey that took him to jails in Newark, Oklahoma and Chicago — often in solitary confinement. By late September, he was transferred back to New Jersey and sent to the Hudson County Jail in Kearny. In all, he spent 119 days behind bars.

In the interviews at the Hudson County Jail, Turner offered many glimpses of his personality and motivation.

"My country needed me," he said when asked why he accepted the FBI's offer in June 2003 to become an informant. "I'm a loyal, patriotic decent American citizen."

But why did he say — or hint — that some judges and other officials should be killed? Turner blames the FBI, saying that while agents never said he could threaten judges, they coached him on the limits of what he could say. As a result, Turner said he felt he had wide latitude.

"I was given specific instructions," he said. "Here, I am in prison, betrayed."

In one of his more controversial statements, Turner gloated over the murder of the husband and mother of a federal judge in Chicago in 2005. But Turner described his rhetoric as fake, arguing he hoped it "would solidify my anti-government credentials" among ultra-right-wing groups he was spying on.

As for hanging out with neo-Nazis and skinheads, Turner said, "That's not me. It never has been."

Raised in Ridgefield Park, the 47-year-old Turner labored more than a decade in a variety of positions with several moving-van companies. In 1988, while working for a moving company in Atlanta, Turner was arrested on a drug possession charge. In interviews, he said he had a cocaine addiction at the time and checked into a rehab program.

By the early 1990s, Turner moved to North Bergen and worked as a real estate agent. Within a few years, however, he began to dabble in politics, trying to beef up the Republican Party in overwhelmingly Democratic Hudson County. He also was a campaign manager in New Jersey for Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

Politics seemed to offer Turner something he never realized he had — a voice and a need to speak out on hot topics. Now, however, several close associates question whether that voice is authentic or just the work of someone looking for the limelight.

In 1997, when Ramapo College Finance Professor Murray Sabrin ran for governor on a libertarian platform, he hired Turner to manage his campaign. Turner was a frequent caller on WABC's popular talk radio shows with Bob Grant and Sean Hannity — "Hal from North Bergen," as he came to be known.

Turner surely had a conservative flair, especially on such issues as abortion and immigration. But Sabrin noticed a complete shift after Turner started his own talk radio show. In particular, Sabrin, who is Jewish, found some of Turner's remarks to be anti-Semitic.

"People have a public face and a private face," said Sabrin. "Everything that he is doing now is a complete 180-degree shift. It's totally opposite from what I knew. I don't know where this is coming from. I certainly wouldn't have tolerated it."

For several years, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights group, has regularly monitored Turner's radio broadcasts and blog. Indeed, the center was one of the first organizations to raise questions that Turner might be an FBI informant.

Hearing now that Turner admits to being an informant, the center's director of research, Heidi Beirich, was especially critical of the FBI. "We've never seen anything like this with informants. It's essentially idiotic on the part of the FBI. Anybody who spent two seconds looking at Hal Turner's Web site would know he is a wild hare," she said.

Indeed, Turner's own recounting of his life with the FBI does not always mirror what records show he did.

Turner, for example, says the FBI asked him to participate in a mission to plug leaks of information inside the Department of Justice to a variety of groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti Defamation League. Turner also says the FBI asked him to specifically criticize such African-American leaders as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

"I was supposed to be a counterbalance to Sharpton," Turner said.

Officially, the FBI declined comment on those unproven stories by Turner. The documents bear no trace of those operations.


Expedition to Brazil


Unofficially, FBI and other federal officials expressed a mix of dismay and outright anger when told of Turner's claims of being coached to make provocative statements.

"Absurd," said one. Another added: "And pigs will fly beginning with the next full moon. It never happened."

During interviews with The Record, Turner was at times unclear on some details. FBI records indicate, for example, that he did not become an informant until June 2003; Turner originally said he was recruited by federal agents in 2002, but later said he was mistaken.

Along with Haug of the FBI, his other regular contact was Leonard Nerbetski, a New Jersey State Police detective assigned to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Requests to interview Haug and Nerbetski were turned town by the FBI and by the state police.

In an early communication, Turner reported to the FBI about a meeting in Elmwood Park by the National Alliance. A few months after that, FBI records show that Turner was reaching out to several national leaders of the alliance.

FBI memos indicate that the bureau had appropriated as much as $100,000 for Turner's work as an informant.

"It was good money," said Turner, who would not say how much he was ultimately paid by the FBI.

Turner said he was earning about $15,000 a month from his suddenly popular radio show and blog.

As 2004 wore on, Turner found himself reporting to the FBI about a possible theft of evidence in a Bergen County drug case and about an attempt to set up a chapter of the Aryan Nations in northern New Jersey.

A year later, with the FBI paying for his visa and passport renewal, Turner embarked on his most ambitious mission — to confer with a wealthy white supremacist in Brazil who was considering making a $1 million donation to his American counterparts.

While in Brazil, Turner also reported meeting a World War II German Luftwaffe flying ace and linking up with a representative of the Brazilian Arab Society, who discussed a plan to ship $10 million in consumer goods to anti-American Iraqi resistance fighters.

After Turner returned to New Jersey, the records show that the FBI investigated the Arab Society representative and even reached out to U.S. officials in Brazil for help in monitoring his activities. But it's not clear if the $10 million shipment was attempted.

The $1 million donation also never materialized, records show. The Brazilian benefactor backed out of the deal when an American white supremacist did not accompany Turner on the trip.

Records indicate the FBI wanted Turner to return to Brazil to spy on white-supremacist training there. But Turner never went. While in Brazil, Turner said, he carried a gun for protection, which was not authorized by the FBI.

Only a few weeks after returning to the United States from Brazil, Turner again found controversy. In a radio broadcast, he targeted African-Americans.

"A full day of violence against blacks would be a really nice thing," he said.

Turner went on to call for "lynchings, church burnings, drive-by shootings and bombings to put these subhuman animals back in their place," according to a report complied by the Anti-Defamation League.

The episode illustrates the complicated relationship between the FBI and Turner. Despite Turner's racist radio rhetoric, the FBI also valued his undercover work — and was apparently willing to take a risk with him again — and pay him, too.

For example, a July 2005 memo by the FBI said Turner had been paid $10,365 in the previous fiscal year and that he "provided information which continues to be highly accurate and sensitive."

Turner continued to reach out intermittently to the FBI — with tips including a possible KKK murder plot — until June 2, 2009, the day he posted the alleged threats on his blog about the Chicago judges.

In an e-mail that day to the FBI, Turner says he has heard reports that agents had interviewed skinheads and others about him.

"Am I unapproachable?" Turner asked in the e-mail. "Geez, I'd think by now I would have proved myself. It's not like I'm gonna go postal or anything."

Three weeks later, Turner was arrested.

Four months after that, Turner, unshaven and wearing frayed green prison garb and fumbling with a loose tooth, sat in an interview room at the Hudson County Jail and pondered his journey — from shock jock to FBI informant to inmate charged with a serious federal crime.

"I can't believe this is happening to me," he said.


Timeline is also worth including for our purposes here:

Timeline

1992: Serves as the North Jersey coordinator for Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign.

1994: Organizes a rally in Trenton, attended by members of the white supremacist Nationalist Movement, in support of WABC radio host Bob Grant.

1996: On Curtis Sliwa’s radio show, reveals the name of a sex offender who had moved to Englewood, thus violating the confidentiality restrictions of Megan’s Law.

1997: Manages the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign of libertarian Murray Sabrin.

2000: Enters elective politics and comes in last in a three-way primary race for the Republican nomination to challenge U.S. Rep. Bob Menendez.

2002: Begins broadcasting daily radio show; speaks at rally of the Aryan Nations in north-central Pennsylvania.

2003: Recruited by the FBI as confidential informant “Valhalla”; attends National Alliance meeting in Elmwood Park and its leadership conference in West Virginia.

2004: Provides information on the National Alliance, Aryan Nations and Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as on a white supremacist plotting to bribe a judge and steal the evidence in his cocaine trial in Bergen County.

2005: Designated an extra-territorial source by FBI headquarters, travels to São Paulo, Brazil, and meets a noted white supremacist who wanted to donate up to $1 million to the American National Alliance. He also reportedly meets a member of the Brazilian Arab Society who proposes a venture to ship U.S. consumer goods to the Iraqi resistance.

2006: Travels to rallies around the country and warns FBI about pending attacks on two white supremacists suspected of being informers, and a television news reporter.

2007: Citing serious control problems, the FBI’s Detroit office closes Turner as a confidential informant after he refuses to call off a “Rally Against Black Gang Terrorism” he organized in Kalamazoo, Mich. “While source’s closing may negatively impact the timeliness of future receipt of information concerning potential extremists, this information is not so valuable as to outweigh source’s uncooperative and renegade behavior.” It is not the end of his relationship with the FBI.

2008: Hackers break into Turner’s computers and post an exchange of e-mails between him and his FBI handlers. He is warned to close down his show and Web site or other e-mails would be made public.

2009: Turner is arrested in separate cases for allegedly posting threats against Connecticut lawmakers and three federal judges in Chicago.

Sources: Record archives, government documents
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Jul 30, 2013 1:52 am

I don't like to co-enable dead end topics so here is the trade off.
Create another post that looks at the psychological consequences to a species that hires mercenaries to protect them.
Because........................even though you could name all the FBI informants...............
you are incapable of doing anything about it.


In return................
My roomate/s were FBI informants.

We brought Scott Camil to speak at our 3rd Annual Conference Investigating Crimes Committed by FBI agents in the early
1990's at Bates College. We also brought Professor Charles Schultz who wrote a book that included Scott Camil called
IT DID HAPPEN HERE http://books.google.com/books?id=rhiDOr ... re&f=false


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Camil

also see http://www.jou.ufl.edu/pubs/onb/f98/freedom.htm

also see



see http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/ar ... ead/168830





You might want to visit here http://whosarat.websitetoolbox.com/

Now create that post. this just in
http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/07 ... story.html


‘Whitey’ Bulger begins defense by calling FBI agent who wanted to shut him down as FBI informant


Attorneys for James “Whitey” Bulger today called the first witness for the defense — retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick, who tried in the early 1980s to stop his agency from using Bulger as an informant.

Fitzpatrick is the author of the book “Betrayal’’ and worked for the FBI for 21 years, including a period of time as the assistant special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office. Fitzpatrick told jurors that for an FBI agent to get promotions, they would need to develop informants.

“If you don’t have an informant, you have a problem,” said Fitzpatrick, adding that an agent’s supervisors would see it as “a weakness.”

Defense attorneys sought to use Fitzpatrick’s testimony to describe the culture of corruption that permeated the FBI. Fitzpatrick said he once feared that James Greenleaf, a special agent in charge of Boston at the time, was providing leaks to informants, but he was told to “shut up” and not report it. But he did, and said he was retaliated against.

Meanwhile, nothing was done about his complaint. Fitzpatrick also said he had suspicions that the FBI’s relationship with Bulger was not up to the agency’s standards, and he recommended that the agency terminate his status as an informant. Bulger’s relationship with the FBI continued, however.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:37 am

Sounds like a classic RI conversation -- I'm not an activist, so "doing something about it" is not the purpose of my studies. I just want to understand an ecosystem, and I appreciate your contributions towards that, sir. Especially this gem:

Fitzpatrick told jurors that for an FBI agent to get promotions, they would need to develop informants.

“If you don’t have an informant, you have a problem,” said Fitzpatrick, adding that an agent’s supervisors would see it as “a weakness.”


MEANWHILE, IN BOSTONIA...

Via: http://articles.courant.com/2013-07-30/ ... se-witness

BOSTON — Defense witness No. 2 at James "Whitey" Bulger's racketeering trial was on the witness stand for 12 minutes Tuesday as Bulger contended again that he has never been an informant for the FBI.

The witness, retired Boston FBI agent Joseph Kelly, was questioned about the way information provided by informants was filed by the bureau in Boston 30 years ago, a system about which he acknowledged being uncertain.

But his short answers to a brief series of questions were intended by the defense to lend plausibility to a theory that a corrupt agent could have pilfered information from other informants and used it to fill a phony informant file he opened under Bulger's name.

Bulger's prosecutors have ridiculed his denial about being an informant as an attempt by an aging gangster to rehabilitate his reputation. During the six-week prosecution case, they introduced as evidence more than 500 pages of FBI reports that they say prove Bulger and his partner Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi were highly valued, "Top Echelon" FBI informants in the 1970s and '80s.

Fighting the evidence has proven to be an uphill battle for Bulger. Even his first defense witness, retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick, said Bulger was an FBI informant — although not suited to be one.

Fitzpatrick, a former Assistant Special Agent In Charge of Boston, also testified Monday and Tuesday that the bureau had grown concerned in the early 1980s because Bulger's status as an informant had become known among other law enforcement agencies. Normally, informant identities are among the bureau's most closely held secrets, he said.

When an expensive state police investigation of Bulger and Flemmi was compromised in the early 1980s, Fitzpatrick said, the state police assumed it was the result of FBI efforts to protect its informants.


Bulger is being tried for dozens of crimes — 19 murders and weapons offenses that carry the possibility of life sentences, as well as drug, extortion, gambling and money-laundering conspiracies through which he is accused of collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a week.

Given the staggering weight of evidence presented by the government through more than 60 witnesses — three of them former partners of Bulger — analyzing the tenuous strands of the defense has become something of a pastime among lawyers, investigators and dozens of other trial spectators.

Two have emerged.

Boston defense attorney Anthony Cardinale sarcastically called the first — Bulger's insistence that he is not an informant — a "legacy defense."

But Bulger lawyer J.W. Carney Jr. argued in court that the informant question is an important element of the defense. If jurors are persuaded Bulger was not an informant, Carney said, they may question the credibility of the government witnesses who said he was.

The defense called Fitzpatrick to make its second point — that federal law enforcement in general enabled Bulger to commit crimes. Fitzpatrick testified, among others things, that former federal prosecutor Jeremiah O'Sullivan, who has since died, once refused to provide protection to a witness Bulger is accused of killing days later.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly subjected Fitzpatrick to two days of vitriolic cross examination on that claim and others.

"O'Sullivan is dead, isn't he?" Kelly barked. "It's pretty easy to blame a dead guy, isn't it?

"That's an insult," Fitzpatrick fired back. "That's an insult. That's a blatant insult."

Joseph Kelly, the second defense witness, testified that, when he worked in Boston in the 1970s and 80s, John Connolly, the discredited, convicted and incarcerated agent who the government's evidence indicates was Bulger's informant handler, also held the position of FBI informant coordinator.

As coordinator, the retired agent said, Connolly was the only agent among the 240 or so assigned to Boston who had unrestricted access to all information reported by all informants who were registered with the bureau's Boston division.

In their opening statement and in their questions earlier to government witnesses, Bulger's lawyers have suggested that the Bulger informant file contained information not from Bulger, but provided by others.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:38 pm

Via: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/th ... oid=875101

The Last Hours of William O'Neal

He was the informant who gave the FBI the floor plan of Fred Hampton's apartment. Last week he ran onto the Eisenhower Expressway and killed himself.
By Michael Ervin


William O'Neal spent the last few hours of his life with his uncle Ben Heard, a retired truck driver from Maywood. It was Martin Luther King Day.

"We were just sitting around drinking beer," Heard recalls, "talking to some friends of mine. We had company. The company left and that's when he started acting kind of strange."

At 2:30 AM the 40-year-old O'Neal ran out of his uncle's apartment, across the westbound lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway, and was struck by a car and killed. His death was ruled a suicide.

O'Neal achieved lasting infamy in 1973 when his role in the 1969 raid in which Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered was revealed. Though O'Neal was a Panther insider to the point where he was in charge of security for Hampton and possessed keys to Panther headquarters and safe houses, he was at the same time serving as an informant for the FBI. Among the information the teenaged O'Neal fed his FBI contact was the floor plan of Hampton's west-side apartment that was used to plan the fatal raid. After his cover was blown O'Neal entered the federal witness protection program, assumed the alias William Hart, and moved to California. He secretly returned to Chicago in 1984.

So not all who knew O'Neal will mourn. But Heard, who says he knew O'Neal as well as anyone, depicts his nephew as a young man who cooperated with the FBI to reduce his own potential jail time, then got in way over his head and was forever tortured by the guilt.

After their drinking buddies left in the early-morning hours of King Day, Heard became worried when O'Neal kept getting up to go to the bathroom. "He'd stay in there 10 or 15 minutes. The last time he stayed 20 minutes. He came out in a rage and he tried to jump out my living room window [which is on the second floor]. I stopped him. I grabbed him by the ankles. I wrestled with him but he broke free and he ran out the door.

"I just had my house shoes and pants on. I couldn't run after him like that. I couldn't have caught him anyway. There was a woman standing in front of the house and she said, 'Lord, it sounds like somebody got hit on the expressway!'"

Heard ran to the ridge of the grassy slope and looked below to the Eisenhower, where he saw a prone body and a car with a broken windshield parked on the shoulder. The state police were already on the scene. When Heard got a close look at the body with his flashlight, his worst fears were confirmed. "The impact had torn the back of his shirt and pants off. His eyes were open. I took his pulse and it was hardly anything." After O'Neal was taken away Heard sat in the trooper's car and listened to the deeply shaken driver tell how O'Neal had jumped out in front of him waving his arms. He tried to swerve, but it was too late.

Heard had seen O'Neal gripped by this rage once before. It was last September, when O'Neal ran out onto the Eisenhower and was struck but only injured. Heard says, "I ran out on the street but I didn't know which way he went. About 15, 20 minutes later I heard an ambulance and I said, 'I hope it's not Bill.' I called the emergency room and it was."

Heard said O'Neal never wanted to talk about the incident. He never said why he did it or if coming so close to death had taught him anything. "But I never thought he would do it again, since he came so close," Heard says. "I never thought he was suicidal."

Heard learned of O'Neal's secret shortly after Hampton's death. "I thought about some of the things he did and said. I asked him, but he denied it." But later O'Neal told his uncle that he'd been in trouble for everything from car theft and home invasion to kidnapping and torture. "He said they had someone tied up and they were pouring hot water over his head. They were trying to get him to do something." So an FBI agent told O'Neal he would take care of it all in exchange for his infiltrating the Panthers.

"I think he was sorry he did what he did. He thought the FBI was only going to raid the house. But the FBI gave it over to the state's attorney and that was all Hanrahan wanted. They shot Fred Hampton and made sure he was dead."

Heard says he was with his nephew the morning after the ambush when he saw the inside of Hampton's apartment. "There was papers strewn all over the floor, blood all over. There was a trail of blood from where they had dragged Fred's body. Bill just stood there in shock. He never thought it would come to all this."


Via: http://cironline.org/reports/man-who-ar ... -show-3753

Man who armed Black Panthers was FBI informant, records show

The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training – which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s – was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report.

One of the Bay Area’s most prominent radical activists of the era, Richard Masato Aoki was known as a fierce militant who touted his street-fighting abilities. He was a member of several radical groups before joining and arming the Panthers, whose members received international notoriety for brandishing weapons during patrols of the Oakland police and a protest at the state Legislature.

Aoki went on to work for 25 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator at the Peralta Community College District, and after his suicide in 2009, he was revered as a fearless radical.

But unbeknownst to his fellow activists, Aoki had served as an FBI intelligence informant, covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him.

That agent, Burney Threadgill Jr., recalled that he approached Aoki in the late 1950s, about the time Aoki was graduating from Berkeley High School. He asked Aoki if he would join left-wing groups and report to the FBI.

“He was my informant. I developed him,” Threadgill said in an interview. “He was one of the best sources we had.”

The former agent said he asked Aoki how he felt about the Soviet Union, and the young man replied that he had no interest in communism.

“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?’ Very pleasant little guy. He always wore dark glasses,” Threadgill recalled.

Aoki’s work for the FBI, which has never been reported, was uncovered and verified during research for the book, “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.” The book, based on research spanning three decades, will be published tomorrow by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In a tape-recorded interview for the book in 2007, two years before he committed suicide, Aoki was asked if he had been an FBI informant. Aoki’s first response was a long silence. He then replied, “ ‘Oh,’ is all I can say.”

Later during the same interview, Aoki contended the information wasn’t true.

Asked if this reporter was mistaken that Aoki had been an informant, Aoki said, “I think you are,” but added: “People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.”

However, the FBI later released records about Aoki in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. A Nov. 16, 1967, intelligence report on the Black Panthers lists Aoki as an “informant” with the code number “T-2.”

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on Aoki, citing litigation seeking additional records about him under the Freedom of Information Act.

Since his death – Aoki shot himself at his Berkeley home after a long illness – his legend has grown. In a 2009 feature-length documentary film, “Aoki,” and a 2012 biography, “Samurai Among Panthers,” he is portrayed as a militant radical leader. Neither mentions that he had worked with the FBI.

Harvey Dong, who was a fellow activist and close friend, said last week that he had never heard that Aoki was an informant.

“It’s definitely something that is shocking to hear,” said Dong, who was the executor of Aoki’s estate. “I mean, that’s a big surprise to me.”

Dong recalled that Aoki tended to “compartmentalize” the different parts of his life. Before he shot himself, Dong said, Aoki had laid out in his apartment two neatly pressed uniforms: One was the black leather jacket, beret and dark trousers of the Black Panthers. The other was his U.S. Army regimental.

In Berkeley in the late 1960s, Aoki wore slicked-back hair, sported sunglasses even at night and spoke with a ghetto patois. His fierce demeanor intimidated even his fellow radicals, several of them have said.

“He had swagger up to the moon,” former Berkeley activist Victoria Wong recalled at his memorial.

From gangs to the military

Aoki was born in San Leandro in 1938, the first of two sons. He was 4 when his family was interned at Topaz, Utah, with thousands of other Japanese Americans during World War II.

After the war, Aoki grew up in West Oakland, in an area that had been known as Little Yokohama before becoming a low-income black community. He joined a gang and became a tough street fighter who as an adult would boast, “I was the baddest Oriental come out of West Oakland.”

He shoplifted, burgled homes and stole car parts for “the midnight auto supply business,” he told Berkeley’s KPFA radio in a 2006 interview. Oakland police repeatedly arrested him for “mostly petty-type stuff,” he said in the 2007 interview. Still, he graduated from Herbert Hoover Junior High School as co-valedictorian.

But the internment during World War II had shattered his family, Aoki had said. His father became a gangster and abandoned his family, and his mother won custody of her sons and moved them to Berkeley. Aoki did well academically at Berkeley High School and became president of the Stamp and Coin Club. However, he assaulted another student in the hallway and, as he recalled, “beat him half to death.”


Three days after graduating from high school in January 1957, Aoki reported for duty at Fort Ord, near Monterey. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army the prior year, at age 17. He acknowledged in the 2007 interview that he had “cut a deal” in which military authorities arranged for his criminal record to be sealed.

Aoki said he had hoped to become the army’s first Asian American general, but he served only about a year on active duty and seven more in the reserves before being honorably discharged as a sergeant.

Although he saw no combat, he became a firearms expert. “I got to play with all the toys I wanted to play with when I was growing up,” he told KPFA. “Pistols, rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers.”

Being in the reserves left Aoki a lot of free time, and he became deeply involved in left-wing political organizations at the behest of the FBI, retired FBI agent Threadgill said during a series of interviews before his death in 2005.

“The activities that he got involved in was because of us using him as an informant,” he said.

Threadgill recalled that he first approached Aoki after a bureau wiretap on the home phone of Saul and Billie Wachter, local members of the Communist Party, picked up Aoki talking to fellow Berkeley High classmate Doug Wachter.

At first, Aoki gathered information about the Communist Party, Threadgill said. But Aoki soon focused on the Socialist Workers Party and its youth affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance, also targets of an intensive FBI domestic security investigation.

By spring 1962, Aoki had been elected to the Berkeley Young Socialist Alliance’s executive council, FBI records show. That December, he became a member of the Oakland-Berkeley branch of the Socialist Workers Party, where he served as the representative to Bay Area civil rights groups. He also was on the steering committee of the Committee to Uphold the Right to Travel.

In 1965, Aoki joined the Vietnam Day Committee, an influential anti-war group based in Berkeley, and worked on its international committee as liaison to foreign anti-war activists.

All along, Aoki met regularly with his FBI handler. Aoki also filed reports by phone, Threadgill said.

“I’d call him and say, ‘When do you want to get together?’ ” Threadgill recalled. “I’d say, ‘I’ll meet you on the street corner at so-and-so and so on.’ I would park a couple of blocks away and get out and go and sit down and talk to him.”

Arming the Black Panthers

Threadgill worked with Aoki through mid-1965, when he moved to another FBI office and turned Aoki over to a fellow agent. Aoki was well positioned to inform on a wide range of political activists.

Aoki attended Merritt College in Oakland, where he met Huey Newton, a pre-law student, and Bobby Seale, an engineering student, who were in a political group called the Soul Students Advisory Council.

In fall 1966, Aoki transferred to UC Berkeley as a junior in sociology. That October, Seale and Newton took a draft of their 10-point program for what would become the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to Aoki’s Berkeley apartment and discussed it over drinks. The platform called for improved housing, education, full employment, the release of incarcerated black men, a halt to “the robbery by the capitalists of our black community” and an “immediate end to police brutality.”

Soon after, Aoki gave the Panthers some of their first guns. As Seale recalled in his memoir, “Seize the Time:”


“Late in November 1966, we went to a Third World brother we knew, a Japanese radical cat. He had guns … .357 Magnums, 22’s, 9mm’s, what have you. … We told him that if he was a real revolutionary he better go on and give them up to us because we needed them now to begin educating the people to wage a revolutionary struggle. So he gave us an M-1 and a 9mm.”

In early 1967, Aoki joined the Black Panther Party and gave them more guns, Seale wrote. Aoki also gave Panther recruits weapons training, he said in the 2007 interview.

“I had a little collection, and Bobby and Huey knew about it, and so when the party was formed, I decided to turn it over to the group,” Aoki said in the interview. “And so when you see the guys out there marching and everything, I’m somewhat responsible for the military slant to the organization’s public image.”

In early 1967, the Panthers displayed guns during their “community patrols” of Oakland police and also that May 2, when they visited the state Legislature to protest a bill.

Although carrying weapons was legal at the time, there is little doubt their presence contributed to fatal confrontations between the Panthers and the police.

On Oct. 28, 1967, Newton was in a shootout that wounded Oakland Officer Herbert Heanes and killed Officer John Frey. On April 6, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver and five other Panthers were involved in a firefight with Oakland police. Cleaver and two officers were wounded, and Panther Bobby Hutton was killed.

During the period Aoki was arming the Panthers, he also was informing for the FBI. The FBI report that lists him as informant T-2 says that in May 1967, he reported on the Panthers.

None of the released FBI reports mention that Aoki gave guns to the Panthers.


FBI’s reliance on informants

M. Wesley Swearingen, a retired FBI agent who has criticized unlawful bureau surveillance activities under the late Director J. Edgar Hoover, reviewed some of the FBI's records. He concluded in a sworn declaration – filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records on Aoki – that Aoki had been an informant.

Swearingen served in the FBI from 1951 to 1977, and worked on a squad that investigated the Panthers.


“Someone like Aoki is perfect to be in a Black Panther Party, because I understand he is Japanese,” he said. “Hey, nobody is going to guess – he’s in the Black Panther Party; nobody is going to guess that he might be an informant.”

Swearingen also said the FBI certainly must have additional records concerning Aoki, including special informant files.

“Aoki wouldn't even have to be a member of the party. If he just knew Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, if he went out to lunch with them every day, they would have a main file,” he said. “But to say they don’t have a main file is ludicrous.”

In the 1990s, testimony from Swearingen helped to vacate the murder conviction of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther leader in Los Angeles. Evidence showed that the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department had failed to disclose that a key witness against Pratt was a longtime FBI informant named Julius C. Butler. Pratt later won a civil suit for wrongful imprisonment, with the City of Los Angeles paying Pratt $2.75 million and the FBI paying him $1.75 million.

During the late ’60s and early ’70s, the FBI sought to disrupt and “neutralize” the Black Panthers under COINTELPRO, the bureau’s secret counterintelligence program to stifle dissent, according to reports by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

As part of COINTELPRO, the committee found, the FBI used informants to gather intelligence leading to the weapons arrests of Panthers in Chicago, Detroit, San Diego and Washington. By the end of 1969, at least 28 Panthers had been killed in gunfights with police and many more arrested on weapons charges, according to news accounts.

Hoover declared in late 1968 that the Panthers, who by now had chapters across the nation, posed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” He cited their radical philosophy and armed confrontations with police.


Although Aoki later would boast of his role with the Panthers, he was secretive about his relations with them at the time, explaining in the 2007 interview that he feared being expelled from UC Berkeley if his activities were known.

In early 1969, Aoki emerged as a leader of the Third World Liberation Front strike at UC Berkeley, which demanded more ethnic studies courses. He advocated violent tactics, according to interviews with him and Manuel Delgado, another strike leader.

Scores of students and police were injured during the three-month confrontation, which became the campus’s most violent strike to date. Gov. Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency and sent the National Guard to quell the violence.

At a memorial service for Aoki at Wheeler Hall in May 2009, Seale, of the Black Panthers, and other activists hailed Aoki as a “fearless leader and servant of the people.” In a phone conversation last week, Seale expressed surprise at hearing that Aoki was an informant and declined to comment further.

Seth Rosenfeld was an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle and has won the George Polk Award and other journalism honors. He can be reached at seth@sethrosenfeld.com. This story was edited by Robert Salladay and copy edited by Nikki Frick.


Seth's book "Subversives:The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power" is f'ing superb, 10/10.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Aug 02, 2013 1:10 pm

Via: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbirchS.htm

In an exclusive interview granted to Valley Publications, former undercover operative for the FBI, Harry Dean, has stated that the John Birch Society had a heavily armed network of citizen soldiers ready to take to the streets in late 1963 and early 1964, if President Johnson and Chief Justice Warren did not quickly find Lee Harvey Oswald (a supposed communist sympathizer) guilty of the murder of President Kennedy. The threat was delivered to Johnson and Warren, within a few days after the assassination, by intelligence sources and by agents of the power structure that eliminated the President. LBJ had the choice - nation-wide internal strife or knuckling under to the threat and thereby giving this minority force a position of recognition. Johnson opted for the second choice.

Dean, an undercover operative for the FBI from 1960 to 1965, had been assigned by the FBI to infiltrate the Birch Society. In that role, he was active in the Covina, (Calif.) chapter of the JBS from 1962 through 1964. During Dean's tour with the Society he states they planned three major activities against John Kennedy: a planned assassination in Mexico City in 1962 that was called off: the assassination in Dallas; and the threat against a thorough investigation. In each case, according to Harry Dean, Congressman John Rousselot (R-San Marino) was involved in the planning. Rousselot was Western Director of the John Birch Society during the first half of the '60s.

During the years when Harry Dean had been acting as an active member of the Covina Birch Society, the main meeting place for all the anti-Kennedy activities was at a residence on San Pierre Street in El Monte. The Birchers were connected with anti-Castro Cubans, often mentioned as assassination suspects, through the Drive Against Communist Aggression (DACA). The DACA was an anti-Communist organization directed by members of the JBS, which had attracted certain Cubans who were in the Los Angeles area during 1962-63, trying to enlist support for another invasion of Castro controlled Cuba. The DACA operated in Mexico as well as the U.S.. According to Dean, World War II hero Guy (Gabby) Gabaldon was the Mexican Director, while Ray Flieshman of Whittier was the U.S. Director. Another active member of DACA and the Covina JBS, who had a close relationship with Gabaldon, was Dave Robbins, who at the time (1962-63), was a high ranking employee of the Fluor Corporation. (J. Robert Fluor and John Rousselot had been known to be close political allies.) In a number of different circumstances, Dean was able to determine that Gabaldon, Robbins, Flieshman, and Rousselot had been involved in planning the aborted assassination of JFK in Mexico City, June 1962.
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Re: FBI Informants

Postby elfismiles » Sun Aug 04, 2013 9:17 am

Exclusive: FBI allowed informants to commit 5,600 crimes
Brad Heath, USA TODAY 6:05 a.m. EDT August 4, 2013
USA TODAY exclusive: New documents show FBI agents gave their informants permission to break the law thousands of times in 2011.

Image
Accused Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, center, during a pretrial conference in federal court. The Justice Department put limits on crimes by informants after the FBI acknowledged that Bulger had been a source for the agency. before U.S. District Judge Denise Casper, left rear, in a federal courtroom in Boston. Bulger is flanked by his attorneys Henry Brennan, left, and J.W. Carney Jr., standing at right. Carney on Wednesday, June 5, 2013 argued that jurors should be allowed to hear statements that government prosecutors made about a star witness against Bulger, including that he's "a sick individual" and not credible. (AP Photo/Jane Flavell Collins, File) ORG XMIT: NY141(Photo: Jane Flavell Collins AP)

Story Highlights

FBI agents gave confidential informants permission to break the law 5,600 times in 2011
New documents offer the first public view of how often FBI sources are allowed to break the law
Rules were tightened after the FBI said it used accused mobster James "Whitey" Bulger as an informant

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WASHINGTON — The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.

The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.

Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.

"It sounds like a lot, but you have to keep it in context," said Shawn Henry, who supervised criminal investigations for the FBI until he retired last year. "This is not done in a vacuum. It's not done randomly. It's not taken lightly."

USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI's 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau's sources were known to have committed without the government's permission.

Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year. The FBI was responsible for only about 10% of the criminal cases prosecuted in federal court in 2011, and federal prosecutions are, in turn, vastly outnumbered by criminal cases filed by state and local authorities, who often rely on their own networks of sources.

"The million-dollar question is: How much crime is the government tolerating from its informants?" said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles who has studied such issues. "I'm sure that if we really knew that number, we would all be shocked."

A spokeswoman for the FBI, Denise Ballew, declined to answer questions about the report, saying only that the circumstances in which its informants are allowed to break the law are "situational, tightly controlled," and subject to Justice Department policy. The FBI almost always keeps its informants' work secret. The agency said in a 2007 budget request that it has a network of about 15,000 confidential sources.

Justice Department rules put tight limits on when and how those informants can engage in what the agency calls "otherwise illegal activity." Agents are not allowed to authorize violent crimes under any circumstances; the most serious crimes must first be approved by federal prosecutors. Still, the department's Inspector General concluded in 2005 that the FBI routinely failed to follow many of those rules.

The rules require the FBI — but not other law enforcement agencies — to report the total number of crimes authorized by its agents each year. USA TODAY asked the FBI for all of the reports it had prepared since 2006, but FBI officials said they could locate only one, which they released after redacting nearly all of the details.

Other federal law enforcement agencies, including the ATF and the DEA, said last year that they cannot determine how often their informants are allowed to break the law.

"This is all being operated clandestinely. Congress doesn't even have the information," said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., who sponsored a bill that would require federal agencies to notify lawmakers about the most serious crimes their informants commit. "I think there's a problem here, and we should have full disclosure to Congress."

Bulger, long a notorious Mob figure, is facing murder and racketeering charges in federal court in Boston. Prosecutors allege that he used his status as an FBI informant to steer police away from his own crime ring. Bulger has not disputed some of the charges against him, but his lawyers insist that he was not an informant; the former crime boss on Friday called the case "a sham."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... t/2613305/
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