Seth Rosenfeld, author of the newly released book “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power,” spoke at UC Berkeley Wednesday evening to discuss his new book in which he reveals the “secret history” of the FBI’s involvement on the Berkeley campus in the 1960s.
The event was hosted by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism at Sibley Auditorium in the Bechtel Engineering Center on campus. Lowell Bergman, Logan Distinguished Professor in Investigative Reporting at the journalism school, facilitated the conversation with Rosenfeld.
During a question and answer period, several audience members questioned Rosenfeld’s assertion that civil rights activist and Black Panther Party member Richard Aoki was an FBI informant. Since the release of the book, Rosenfeld has received a fair amount of criticism in response to this revelation.
Read the documents obtained by Rosenfeld on Aoki and watch a video produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting about Rosenfeld’s research on the civil rights activist.
The following is an excerpt shown in the video of a 2007 interview in which Rosenfeld asks Aoki if he ever worked for the FBI:
Rosenfeld: Am I wrong?
Aoki: I think you are.
Rosenfeld: Yeah. So, would you say it’s untrue, that you ever worked for the FBI, or got paid by the FBI?
Aoki: I would say it.
Rosenfeld: And, I’m trying to understand the complexities about it, and I, and I think —
Aoki: It is complex.
Rosenfeld: I believe it is, and —
Aoki: Layer upon layer.
Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president. Contact her at [email protected]
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It is VERY important to keep the following in mind:
1. FBI informants usually were required to sign a notarized affidavit stating that they would never reveal their status as an FBI informant without Bureau permission.
When another Bay Area informant (Karl Prussion) revealed his status to a San Francisco Examiner reporter — without Bureau authorization — he was immediately terminated as an informant.]
2. FBI informants were explicitly told that they were not FBI employees (even if they received payments from the FBI).
3. Therefore, it is conceivable that when Aoki was asked by Seth about his relationship with the FBI, his mind may have interpreted those questions in the context of the instructions he got from the FBI (plus his affidavit restrictions) — so Aoki denied that he was an informant and he denied that he ever “worked” for the FBI — since he was not actually an “employee”. This could be why Aoki used phrases such as “it is complex” and “layer upon layer” — because he was trying to evade a direct and honest answer to Seth’s question.