Driving Wedge Between Newton and Cleaver
In March 1970, the FBI initiated a concerted program to drive a permanent wedge between the followers of Eldridge Cleaver, who was then out of the country, and the supporters of Huey P. Newton, who was then serving a prison sentence in California. An anonymous letter was sent to Cleaver in Algeria stating that BPP leaders in California were seeking to undercut his influence. The Bureau subsequently learned that Cleaver had assumed the letter was from the then Panther representative in Scandinavia, Connie Matthews, and that the letter had led Cleaver to expel three BPP international representatives from the Party. Encouraged by the apparent success of this letter, FBI headquarters instructed its Paris Legal Attache to mail a follow-up letter, again written to appear as if Matthews was the author, to the Black Panther Chief-of-Staff, David Hilliard, in Oakland, California. The letter alleged that Cleaver “has tripped out. Perhaps he has been working too hard,” and suggested that Hilliard “take some immediate action before this becomes more serious.”
Turning White People Against Panthers
The FBI’s program to “neutralize” the Black Panther Party included attempts to deter individuals and groups from supporting the Panthers and, when that could not be accomplished, often extended to covert action targeted against those supporters. The Bureau made a series of progressively more severe efforts to destroy the confidence between the Panthers and one of their major California supporters, Donald Freed, a writer who headed an organization of white BPP sympathizers called “Friends of the Panthers.” In July 1969, the Los Angeles Field Office sent the local BPP office a memorandum bearing Freed’s name and address to “Friends of the Panthers.” Written in a condescending tone and including a list of six precautions whites should keep in mind when dealing with Panthers, the memorandum was calculated to cause a “rift between the Black Panther Party and their assisting organizations.” A few days later, the Bureau had leaflets placed in a park near a BPP-sponsored national conference in Oakland, California, alleging that Freed was a police informant.
