On November 25, 1968, J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to every FBI field office ordering imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the Black Panther Party.

Fifty-three days later, two Panthers were shot dead inside a classroom at UCLA.

The official story calls it a rivalry between two black organizations. The declassified files show the FBI manufactured the rivalry from scratch using forged letters, fabricated cartoons, and an informant who delivered guns and money to the man whose organization pulled the trigger.

Bunchy Carter

Alprentice Bunchy Carter was not a college activist. He was the former leader of the Slauson Renegades, the hardcore inner circle of the second-largest street gang in America. He had done time in Soledad Prison for armed robbery. Inside, he found Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. He met Huey Newton in 1967 and joined the Black Panther Party.

By early 1968, Carter had built the Southern California chapter from nothing. By April, the chapter was gaining between 50 and 100 members a week. Elaine Brown joined. Geronimo Pratt joined. The free breakfast for children program launched in Los Angeles. Carter was converting street power into political power. The FBI’s Los Angeles field office was watching every step.

In September 1968, Hoover designated the Panthers the greatest threat to the internal security of the country. Assistant Director William C. Sullivan oversaw the counterintelligence operations from headquarters. Two months later, the November 25 directive went out. The FBI was not going to arrest Carter. They were going to make another black organization do it for them.

The US Organization

The target was the US Organization, founded by Maulana Karenga, born Ronald McKinley Everett. The man who would later create Kwanzaa. The Panthers were Marxist revolutionaries. US was cultural nationalist. They argued about strategy and ideology. Real tensions existed.

The FBI turned those tensions into a war.

The Los Angeles field office proposed an anonymous letter to the Panthers, written to look like it came from US. The letter claimed the US youth group had learned of a Panther contract to kill Karenga, and that US members had made plans to ambush BPP leaders in retaliation. There was no contract. There was no ambush plan. The FBI invented both and put them in writing.

FBI agents in Los Angeles then produced cartoons designed to humiliate each group, drawn to look as if the other side had made them. The cartoons caricaturing the Panthers were filed in the bureau’s own records on reel 2, frames 1001 to 1007. The ones targeting US were on frames 1047 to 1050. Federal agents manufacturing psychological operations distributed between two black organizations to provoke violence.

Then came a third channel. Louis Tackwood, a former informant for the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section, later testified he personally delivered money, arms, and orders to Karenga. Tackwood said he was to curtail the Panther Party’s growth no matter what it cost. His account was confirmed by a polygraph administered by Chris Gugas, past president of the American Polygraph Association. The FBI wrote the script. The LAPD supplied the weapons. Karenga’s organization carried it out.

Campbell Hall

On January 17, 1969, a Black Student Union meeting was held at Campbell Hall on the UCLA campus to select a director for the new African American Studies Center. Both groups were present. Accounts of what started the confrontation vary. What is not disputed: US member Claude Hubert drew a gun and shot John Huggins in the back. He shot Bunchy Carter in the chest. Both men died on the floor.

Carter was 26. Huggins was 23. Huggins left behind his wife Ericka and a daughter named Mai less than a month old.

The LAPD response tells you everything. Police did not raid the US Organization. They raided the Panthers. 75 Panthers were arrested on charges of conspiring to murder US members. Every charge was dropped. The US Organization was never raided. Claude Hubert fled to Guyana and was never apprehended. George and Larry Stiner were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of second-degree murder. Conspiracy requires premeditation. Second-degree murder excludes it. The verdicts contradict each other.

Grant Nature the Opportunity

Two more Panthers, Sylvester Bell and John Savage, were killed by US members later that year. Four Panthers dead. Zero FBI agents charged.

On May 26, 1970, 16 months after Campbell Hall, the FBI’s Los Angeles field office wrote another memo. This one stated that the US Organization should be discreetly and appropriately advised of the time and locations of BPP activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.

Two Panthers were already dead. Two more would be killed. The FBI put in writing that they wanted to keep engineering confrontations.

On December 8, 1969, four days after Fred Hampton’s assassination in Chicago, LAPD SWAT surrounded the Panther headquarters on Central Avenue in Watts at 3:00 AM. 100 officers, AR-15s, sniper squads on nearby rooftops, and an armored personnel carrier. Geronimo Pratt had fortified the building based on his military training. The Panthers survived. Pratt became the next target. He was framed for the 1968 murder of Caroline Olsen and spent 27 years in prison before the conviction was vacated.

The Ledger

Ron Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa, was convicted in 1971 of felony assault, torture, and false imprisonment of two women in his own group. One was whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton. A hot soldering iron was placed in the other woman’s mouth. A psychiatrist who examined him at sentencing concluded he was paranoid and schizophrenic. He served about four years. He later became chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach. Carter’s own son attended the same university from 1987 to 1992.

The Stiner brothers escaped from San Quentin in 1974 after learning white prison guards had plotted against them. George Stiner fled to Guyana and has never been recaptured. Larry Stiner fled to Suriname, lived through a civil war, and in 1994 surrendered in exchange for political asylum for his six children. He was immediately returned to San Quentin. The State Department reneged on the agreement. His children remained in Suriname for 11 years.

The 1975 Church Committee hearings confirmed the FBI had deliberately manufactured the conflict. The forged letters, the fabricated cartoons, the engineered confrontations were all documented in the bureau’s own files. Richard Held, the FBI agent involved in the Los Angeles operations, was promoted to special agent in charge of the San Francisco office.

Hoover wrote the operating principle in an internal memo. Purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the Black Panther Party, and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge. The truth was irrelevant. The point was disruption.

The actual shooter has never been found. The FBI agent who oversaw the operation was promoted. The man whose organization pulled the trigger chaired an academic department. George Stiner has been a fugitive for over 50 years. Hoover’s November 1968 memo, the one that started it all, sits in the National Archives. Declassified. Available.

Sources: FBI COINTELPRO files including Hoover memo (November 25, 1968), Los Angeles field office memo (May 26, 1970), and internal memo on disruption; Louis Tackwood testimony and polygraph by Chris Gugas; Church Committee hearings (1975).