Top photo: Ward Churchill testifying in defense of his scholarship in the civil trial of Ward Churchill v. University of Colorado. (image from Wikipedia)
Left photo: Book jacket.
Agents of Repression
The FBI’s Secret Wars Against The Black Panther Party and The American Indian Movement
© Copyright 1988, 1990 – Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall
Chapter 8 - “Informers, Infiltrators, Agents Provocateurs”
A Few Choice Excerpts:
“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers too plainly proves a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”
— Thomas Jefferson — from the intro to Part I, ‘The FBI as Political Police: A Capsule History.’
“The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters…”
— J. Edgar Hoover memo establishing the “black nationalist – hate groups” cointelpro, 1967 — from Chapter 2, ‘The Cointelpro Era.’
“…prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups…prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability…Prevent the rise of a black ‘messiah’ who would unity and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcomb X [sic] might have been such a ‘messiah;’ he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elija Muhammed [sic] all aspire to this position. Elija Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.” [emphasis in original]
— J. Edgar Hoover memo elaborating on his instructions for the “black nationalist – hate groups” cointelpro, early 1968 — from Chapter 2, ‘The Cointelpro Era.’
Some Longer Excerpts:
Chapter 8, “Informers, Infiltrators, Agents Provocateurs” (pp. 223-233):
[NOTE — These are the last several paragraphs of Chapter 8, summing up the coverage of FBI “informers, infiltrators, and agents provocateurs,” of whom Douglass Durham was one of the most damaging and effective. Durham gained Dennis Bank’s friendship and trust, became his personal bodyguard, AIM’s security director, became privy to the innermost workings of the AIM organization, and was designated coordinator of Banks and Russell Means’ defense committee in the “Wounded Knee Leadership Trial.” With access to AIM (American Indian Movement) and WKLDOC (Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee) bank accounts, he is estimated to have stolen as much as $100,000 from these accounts. He is also implicated in turning members against other members through bad-jacketing, spreading of rumors, and, directly or indirectly, in the murder of various AIM activists.]
One Aim member concludes that:
“I can’t think of any one person who did more damage to AIM than Doug Durham. The kind of pressure the feds were putting on the leadership after Wounded Knee was already causing problems. Some people were beginning to unwrap, Russ and Dennis were continuously tied up in trials, so there wasn’t a lot they could do about it. Durham just absolutely destroyed the trust inside the organization when he turned out to be a pig…especially when it turned out that there were others as well. Nobody could be sure how far it went…This wasn’t a joke. The feds were trying to put people in prison on totally bogus charges, remember. And this was for heavy time, like 90 years, or 150 years or more than 200 years in a couple of cases. And people were getting killed right and left. So, nobody could afford to be real trusting, if you catch my drift. They were really trying to do us in…The game had become as serious as it gets. The thing with Harvey Major proved that, and the thing with Anna Mae [Aquash], no doubt. And then there was Skyhorse and Mohawk, and the thing with Jancita Eagle Deer, and it just kept comin’ down. All of that was Doug Durham. And that’s not even to mention all the lies and misrepresentations he put out as an ‘official AIM spokesman,’ or the speeches he made for the Birchers, or that bullshit he said to Congress, which got AIM labeled as a ‘terrorist organization.’”
“You could say that a lot of the spirit went out of the movement around what Durham did. Oh, it wasn’t just him. The FBI was doin’ a lot of other stuff which contributed too. And AIM made its own mistakes. But Dennis [Banks] was never the same after he got taken in. And a whole lot of that early feeling, the openness of AIM disappeared. It got to be small groups who already knew each other real well, who couldn’t give up the resistance, but who were thinking more in terms of survival than anything else. That’s what AIM was by 1975. And that’s what happened at Oglala in the summer of ’75 [see Chapter 9]; some feds finally ran into one of these groups which they’d forced into being, and they finally got back what they’d been puttin’ out. They took it on the chin for what Doug Durham and the whole damned FBI had been doing to people.”
Finally, an elder of the Colorado AIM chapter, Vivian Locust (an Oglala), frames the matter at another, perhaps more important level:
“That Durham, he showed us what we were really dealing with. We was trying to act like human beings, reaching out to other human beings, the way Indians always do. But that Durham, he didn’t act like no human being. And I’m not sure what to say he did act like. No conscience. No guilt. No remorse. No human emotion at all. I’d say he acted like a snake, but that’s not fair to snakes. Snakes aren’t that cold. He was more like some kind of machine, a robot…and then we figured out there was a lot more just like him: that [SA David] Price was one, and that [SA William] Wood was another. And there was that [SA Norman] Zigrossi, and [SAC Joseph] Trimbach, and on and on. None of ’em acted human at all. We Indians don’t have any way to cope with people like this.”