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The Panther/US letters: how the FBI wrote forged death threats between two Black organizations and watched the bodies fall
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the The FBI's War on the Black Panthers hub.
The Panther/US Letters.
How the FBI wrote forged death threats between two Black organizations and watched the bodies fall. Four Panthers died. The Bureau claimed the credit in writing.
The FBI mailed forged letters and cartoons designed to trigger a lethal 'vendetta' between the Black Panthers and Ron Karenga's US Organization — then noted the resulting deaths as validating the program.
The forged-letters record is uncontested. What no memo shows is an order to kill anyone on a specific date — and the deck holds that line.
shot dead by US Organization members in Southern California in the eight months after the UCLA shooting — Carter and Huggins (Jan 17), John Savage (May 23), Sylvester Bell (Aug 15), 1969.
Church Committee, Book III
The principals.
- J. Edgar HooverFBI Director; signed the COINTELPRO directive
- Bunchy Carter & John HugginsLA Black Panther leaders, killed at UCLA Jan 17 1969
- Ron KarengaFounder, US Organization — the FBI's intended instrument
- Claude 'Chuchessa' HubertUS member named by witnesses as the shooter; never tried
- Elaine BrownBPP member; eyewitness who calls it an 'FBI operation'
Hoover's 1967 COINTELPRO directive ordered field offices to 'neutralize' black nationalist organizations; a November 1968 HQ order demanded 'imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.'
The August 25, 1967 directive ('expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize') is reproduced in Church Committee Book III and the FBI's own Vault release. The November 25, 1968 order went to fourteen field offices, including Los Angeles and San Diego. Exact quoted language is on the public record.
Seven weeks before UCLA, the LA FBI office proposed a forged letter aimed to 'result in an US and BPP vendetta.' It is the single most probative pre-incident document.
The November 29, 1968 memo, reproduced in Book III, proposed a forged letter purporting to come from US warning the BPP of an ambush. The stated aim is in the Bureau's own words — premeditated intent to trigger a violent feud between the two organizations.
On January 17, 1969, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins were shot and killed by US members at UCLA following a Black Student Union meeting.
Documented in Church Committee Book III, LAPD records, the criminal conviction of the Stiner brothers as conspirators, and multiple eyewitness accounts including Elaine Brown's. Uncontested.
The Bureau claimed credit in writing: three days after the killings it noted they 'will even further split the factions,' later credited forged cartoons with causing an armed confrontation, and attributed 'a substantial amount of the unrest' to the program.
The January 20, 1969 San Diego SAC memo, the April 1969 report that mailed cartoons caused the Southcrest Park confrontation, and the September 18, 1969 memo crediting the counterintelligence program with the unrest are all reproduced in Book III. These are the Bureau's own boasts.
“It is hoped this counterintelligence measure will result in an 'US' and BPP vendetta.”
The forged letters elevated the atmosphere of hostility that produced the Campbell Hall shooting — and the man witnesses name as the shooter was US member Claude Hubert.
Churchill and Vander Wall (The COINTELPRO Papers) argue the causal link; Book III attributes 'a substantial amount of the unrest' to the program without specifying incidents, and the Nov 29 letter is the strongest single piece. What is missing is a memo instructing a shooting on a date. Separately, grand-jury testimony from nine Panthers identifies Hubert, who fled before arrest and was never tried — strong convergence, but the absence of a conviction keeps it below FACT.
That Ron Karenga was operating as a witting FBI asset.
Elaine Brown has stated it on the record repeatedly and calls the January 17 killings an 'FBI operation.' But no FBI file confirming Karenga as an informant has surfaced through FOIA or Church Committee review; Book III does not name him; Karenga has denied it. Absent primary documentation, this remains an eyewitness allegation, not established fact — even as it is FACT that his organization was targeted for exploitation by the Bureau, witting or not.
What the record proves, and where the popular narrative overreaches.
- The FBI ran a forged-letter/cartoon program to produce a BPP/US 'vendetta.'
- The Bureau claimed credit for the resulting deaths and unrest in its own memos.
- Four Panthers were killed by US members in the eight months after UCLA.
- A direct FBI order to kill Carter and Huggins on Jan 17 — no such memo exists.
- Karenga as a witting informant (SOME_SMOKE); Hubert as the shooter (PROBABLY_TRUE, no conviction).
Why it matters, and where it connects.
This is the FBI's War on the Panthers hub at its most lethal — provocation engineered to turn one Black organization into the weapon against another. The method is the Sowing Division playbook: forge the letter, spread the rumor, let 'nature take her due course.' The same campaign that wrote these letters is the one that ended in Fred Hampton's bed — the hub's next chapter. Held here at exactly the grade the record supports, and no higher.