He interviewed Aoki twice in 2007 about those allegations. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Seth Rosenfeld reports that Aoki may have been covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him. He said, “I don’t have any interest in communism.” And 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?” So, one thing led to another, and he became a real good informant. I developed him.”īURNEY THREADGILL JR.: Oh, yeah, he was a character. And he says, “Hey, I know that guy.” And he said, “Aoki was my informant. SETH ROSENFELD: A former FBI agent had heard that I was doing research, and he contacted me. In this video produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting, Rosenfeld explains how he first stumbled across information about Richard Aoki. He eventually compelled the agency to release more than 250,000 pages from their files. Over the last 30 years, Rosenfeld sued the FBI five times to obtain confidential records. The claim that Aoki informed on his colleagues is based on statments made by a former agent of the FBI in a report obtained by investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld, author of the new book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. He was also a member of the Asian American Political Alliance that was involved in the Third World Liberation Front student strike. Richard Aoki was an early member of the Panthers and the only Asian American to have a formal position in the party. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with explosive new allegations that the man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training was an undercover FBI informant in California. We speak to Rosenfeld, an award-winning journalist and author of the article, “Man Who Armed Black Panthers was FBI Informant, Records Show,” published by the Center for Investigative Reporting, and to Diana Fujino, Aoki’s biographer and a professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The claim that Aoki informed on his colleagues is based on statements made by a former bureau agent and an FBI report obtained by investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld, author of the new book, “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.” But Aoki’s friends and colleagues, as well as scholars, have challenged the book’s findings.
Richard Aoki, who died in 2009, was an early member of the Panthers and the only Asian American to have a formal position in the group. Explosive new allegations have emerged that the man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training was an undercover FBI informant in California.
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