On February 26, 1971, Huey Newton sat in a KGO-TV Channel 7 studio in San Francisco. Eldridge Cleaver was on the phone from Algiers. It was the last time they would speak on television.

The Black Panther Party had 233 active COINTELPRO operations running against it. The FBI had spent nearly a year writing letters. When the broadcast ended, Newton called Cleaver back privately. Cleaver pressed record. Newton expelled him from the party and said he would write the North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Algerians to have him kicked out of the embassy and thrown in jail.

Seven weeks later, two Panthers were dead. Thirty to forty percent of the membership walked out. The party never recovered.

233 Operations

Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland in October 1966. By 1970 it had chapters in more than 35 cities, free breakfast programs in more than 20, and a weekly newspaper distributing 200,000 copies. Samuel Napier ran that distribution out of New York.

The party also had an international section with diplomatic status. Cleaver had been in Algeria since mid-1969, running an embassy the Algerian government recognized. Allies included North Korea, North Vietnam, China, and African liberation movements.

In July 1969, J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers the greatest threat to the internal security of the country. The bureau authorized 233 separate COINTELPRO operations against the party. More than any other domestic target in the program’s history.

The Wedge Program

In March 1970, the FBI began what the Church Committee later called a concerted program to drive a permanent wedge between the followers of Eldridge Cleaver and the supporters of Huey P. Newton. Newton was in prison appealing a manslaughter conviction. Cleaver was in Algiers. The ocean was the operational opening.

The first forged letter went to Cleaver in Algeria. It was written to look like it came from Connie Matthews, a Caribbean-born organizer who ran the party’s Scandinavian solidarity network. She was also Newton’s personal secretary. The letter told Cleaver that party leaders in California were undercutting his influence. Cleaver read it and expelled three international representatives.

The FBI sent a second letter through its Paris legal attache, again in Matthews’s name, this time to chief of staff David Hilliard in Oakland. It said Cleaver had tripped out and was working too hard. The Paris office mailed it when Matthews was in or near Paris, so the postmark would hold up.

George C. Moore, chief of the FBI’s racial intelligence section, documented the approach in a May 14, 1970 memo to William Sullivan, head of domestic intelligence. A September 16, 1970 airtel from Hoover to three field offices authorized outright lies as content. Hoover called it immaterial whether the claims were factual as long as the results could not be traced back to the bureau.

Every Statement a Weapon

When Newton walked out of prison in August 1970, the Philadelphia field office distributed a forged Panther directive questioning his leadership. When Newton welcomed gay and trans people into the revolutionary movement, headquarters mailed forged letters from supposed community members protesting his position. When Cleaver gave asylum to Timothy Leary in Algiers that October, the San Francisco office mailed Newton an anonymous letter accusing Cleaver of playing footsie with Leary. When Cleaver condemned Leary in January 1971, headquarters sent Newton a fake letter from a Berkeley commune attacking Cleaver for abandoning white revolutionaries.

An internal FBI evaluation dated January 28, 1971 credited the counterintelligence program as a direct cause of Newton expelling senior party members. The memo ordered recipients to maintain the present high level of counterintelligence activity. Four days later, on February 2, headquarters ordered 29 field offices to submit two proposals within eight days: disrupt the local chapter, and drive dissension between local chapters and Oakland.

Two forged letters the Church Committee later reproduced in full: one signed over the name of Elbert Big Man Howard, editor of The Black Panther, telling Cleaver that Newton now lied to him from a penthouse called the throne. Newton had moved into a $650-a-month apartment overlooking Lake Merritt after his release. The FBI had already prompted the San Francisco Examiner to run a piece about it. The second letter, forged over Connie Matthews’s signature, told Cleaver headquarters was dreadfully disorganized and the Supreme Commander had to go.

The Broadcast and the Bodies

On February 26, 1971, host Jim Dunbar put Newton in the studio and Cleaver on the phone from Algiers. On air, Cleaver demanded the reinstatement of the New York 21 and the expulsion of David Hilliard. Newton refused to continue on air. He called Cleaver back privately. Cleaver recorded everything.

On March 8, Panther Robert Webb, aligned with Cleaver’s East Coast faction, was shot in the head at 125th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem. On April 17, assailants came for Samuel Napier at the Oakland-aligned Panther chapter in Corona, Queens. They shot him three times in the back, tied him to a bed, gagged him, shot him three more times in the head, and set the building on fire. Four Panthers, including Dhoruba Bin Wahad, eventually pleaded to reduced charges after a hung jury.

Bobby Seale later said 30 to 40 percent of the membership left in the weeks that followed.

The Archive

J. Edgar Hoover died in office on May 2, 1972. He was never charged with anything. In April 1976, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published its final report. Kathleen Cleaver testified on April 8, 1976. The letters, she said, had caused disruption and confusion in the relationship between the Algerian section and Oakland. We did not know who to believe.

The committee documented 233 authorized COINTELPRO operations against the Panthers. It found FBI officials had desired to promote violent confrontations, had condoned tactics calculated to achieve that end, and had taken pride in claiming credit for the bloodshed.

No one was prosecuted. The men who authorized the operation died in office or retired on federal pensions. The forged letters are still in the archive.

Sources: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence final report (April 1976); FBI memos including George C. Moore to William Sullivan (May 14, 1970), Hoover airtel (September 16, 1970), and internal evaluation (January 28, 1971); Kathleen Cleaver testimony (April 8, 1976).