On March 15, 2009, authorities found Richard Aoki’s body in his Berkeley apartment. He had laid out two pressed uniforms next to him. One was the black leather jacket, beret, and dark trousers of the Black Panther Party. The other was his United States Army regimental. He had shot himself.

The coroner’s office told the public he had died from complications of dialysis. It took nearly a year for the truth about his death. It took three more for the truth about his life.

Richard Aoki gave the Black Panther Party their first guns. .357 Magnum revolvers, .22s, and 9mm pistols. He trained the founders how to shoot. Bobby Seale confirmed it in his 1971 memoir Seize the Time. In 2012, journalist Seth Rosenfeld revealed what none of the Panthers ever knew. The man who armed them had been an FBI informant for 16 years.

Topaz to Fort Ord

Richard Masato Aoki was born in San Leandro, California on November 20, 1938. His parents, Shozo and Toshiko, were Japanese immigrants. When Aoki was four, Executive Order 9066 sent the family to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. 120,000 Japanese Americans were locked behind barbed wire. Aoki later told his biographer Diane Fujino he understood even as a child that the wire was angled inward.

His father became a gangster and abandoned the family. His mother moved the boys to West Oakland, a neighborhood once called Little Yokohama. Aoki joined a gang. He became co-valedictorian of his class. The same year, he beat another student half to death in a hallway.

Three days after graduating Berkeley High in January 1957, Aoki reported for duty at Fort Ord. He had enlisted at 17. Military authorities sealed his juvenile record in exchange for service. He served one year active, seven in the reserves. He became a sergeant. He became proficient with firearms.

SF 2496-R

An Army Statement of Personal History dated March 29, 1957 asked the Cold War standard: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Aoki answered no. On the follow-up about association with Communists, he answered yes. He listed eight names. People he had met in high school. Including a girl he had dated.

That form made its way to the FBI. Retired agent Burney Threadgill Jr. approached Aoki in the late 1950s and asked him to become an informant. Threadgill told Rosenfeld that Aoki had no interest in communism and was not political at all. Threadgill said Aoki became involved in political activities initially at the request of the FBI.

That is not an informant who infiltrated a movement. That is a man the FBI sent into one.

The bureau assigned him the code name Richard Ford and the symbol number SF 2496-R. His informant file was FBI headquarters file 134-HQ-100010. It ran 221 pages. He reported on the Berkeley Young Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Vietnam Day Committee.

Merritt College, 1964

In 1964, Aoki enrolled at Merritt College in Oakland. He met two students who would change history. Huey Newton was studying pre-law. Bobby Seale was studying engineering. The three became close through the Soul Students Advisory Council.

Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. One month earlier, Aoki had transferred to UC Berkeley. He was there from the beginning. Aoki later said he had a little collection, Bobby and Huey knew about it, and when the party formed he decided to turn it over to the group. He provided the weapons and the training.

The Panthers used those guns for armed patrols of Oakland police, operating within a California loophole that allowed public carry. Those patrols made them famous. Those patrols made them the target of J. Edgar Hoover, who declared the party the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.

An FBI intelligence report dated November 16, 1967 listed Aoki as informant T-2. One file entry is blunt: only Richard Masato Aoki, Huey Percy Newton, and Bobby George Seale were fully informed on the organization’s political philosophies. Aoki was listed third in leadership. The highest-ranking non-black member of the party.

The Main File

Retired FBI agent Wesley Swearingen spent 25 years in the bureau. He said the critical question is whether the FBI knew Aoki was arming the Panthers. Swearingen said the answer is almost certainly in Aoki’s main file, which the FBI still has not released. They definitely would have had that information somewhere. Bureau protocols required informants to report significant activities. Handing military-grade weapons to an organization the director had flagged as a national security threat would qualify.

Aoki’s complete main file remains classified. The 221 pages released under court order in September 2012 were heavily redacted. Seth Rosenfeld sued the FBI five times under the Freedom of Information Act over 30 years and compelled the release of more than 250,000 pages. The Aoki revelations came from a single unredacted line in a document where every other informant’s name had been blacked out. For some reason, Aoki’s had not.

When Rosenfeld tracked down Threadgill, the retired agent said, Aoki was my informant. I developed him. Threadgill described how they met. He would call Aoki, park a couple blocks away, walk to a street corner, sit down and talk. In San Francisco, Swearingen noted, a Japanese FBI agent could meet Aoki in public. Nobody would think twice.

In 2007, Rosenfeld got Aoki on tape and asked him directly. Do you know Burney Threadgill? Aoki said, No, I don’t think so. Told Threadgill said he had worked for the FBI, Aoki said, Oh, that’s interesting. Asked if he had worked for the bureau or been paid by them, Aoki said, I would say that’s untrue. He never gave a definitive denial. Two years later, he was dead.

Two Uniforms

Diane Fujino, professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, published Aoki’s biography the same year Rosenfeld’s book came out. She acknowledges the documents exist. She notes the files contain no evidence Aoki directly harmed groups he was in. She notes his activism was real. He co-founded the Asian American Political Alliance in 1968. He was a key leader of the Third World Liberation Front strike at Berkeley that created the first ethnic studies departments. He spent 25 years as a teacher and administrator at Peralta Community College District.

None of that was an act. Aoki wasn’t pretending to be a radical. He was a radical. He was also an FBI source. Both things were true for 16 years.

The FBI recruited Aoki before he was political. The FBI directed him into radical movements. The FBI assigned him a code name, a file number, and a paycheck. Then that man put .357 Magnums into the hands of an organization the FBI director called America’s greatest internal threat. And the bureau used the armed image of that organization as the reason to destroy it.

When Aoki chose to die, he laid both uniforms out side by side, pressed and ready. He did not leave a note. The uniforms were the note.

Sources: Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power; FBI file 134-HQ-100010 (221 pages, released September 2012); FBI intelligence report (November 16, 1967); Bobby Seale, Seize the Time (1971); Diane Fujino, Samurai Among Panthers; Rosenfeld interviews with Burney Threadgill Jr. and Wesley Swearingen.