They Huey P. Newton Reader

es onse 0 the overnment to the Black Panther Part 345
by the OCCIB in 1972 identified among its prime targets the Black
Panther Party.
The creation of a new superagency to direct the counterintelligence
activities against the BPP and other dissident groups was an indication
of how badly the federal government wanted to destroy the Panthers.
The successful extent of coordination between law enforcement agencies
intent on getting the BPP is not yet clear, largely because documents
showing this direction have yet to be discovered. Still, the general method
of operation described by Epstein appears to have been employed against
the Party, at least if one focuses on just three agencies for which some
documented information is available: the FBI, IRS, and CIA.
Within one year of the formation of the Party, the FBI formed a special
counterintelligence program dubbed COINTELPRO. The purpose
of this program was, in the FBI's own words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black
nationalists." A specific purpose of COIN TEL PRO was to prevent the
rise of a '"Messiah," a charismatic Black leader who might "unify and
electrify" Black people. Martin Luther King,]r., was named as a potential
Messiah in the FBI's own secret memorandum establishing COIN­
TELPRO, but after the assassination ofK.ing in 1968, the FBI shifted
its focus to the Party and its leadership, particularly Huey P. Newton.
J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, publicly stated that the
Party constituted "the greatest threat to the internal security of the
country . .. " of any organization. Of the 295 documented actions taken
by COINTELPRO alone to disrupt Black groups, 233-or 79 percent-were
specifically directed toward destruction of the Party. Over
S100 million of taxpayers' money was expended for COINTELPRO;
over $7 million of it allocated for 1976 alone to pay off informants and
provocateurs, twice the amount allocated in the same period by the
FBI to pay organized crime informants.
Indeed, while COINTELPRO ostensibly targeted five domestic
organizations-the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party,
White Hate Groups, Black Nationalist Hate Groups (e.g., the Panthers),
and the New Left-it was Blacks, and the Panthers in particular,
who received the brunt of the damage. As the Senate Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations found,