Othello

For seven years a man called Othello helped the FBI
destroy legitimate political dissent in the United States. 
This is his story, told exclusively to Penthouse. 

ERNEST VOLKMAN / Penthouse 1apr1980

What baseness would you not commit to root out baseness?—Bertolt Brecht

Sometime during the night of March 8, 1971, a leftist group broke into the offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's resident agency in Media, Pa., and stole a file cabinet of documents. These papers, later made public, revealed that the FBI not only had been carrying out an extensive domestic surveillance program on a wide spectrum of political organizations and black groups but also had been running a top-secret plan to disrupt and destroy these groups.

Many of the papers carried a mysterious heading: COINTELPRO, a now familiar acronym that came to represent a series of abuses unparalleled in American history. (COINTELPRO was shorthand for "Counter Intelligence Program.")

Officially, COINTELPRO died shortly after the Media break-in. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, fearful of further revelations, ordered an end to the program, and Hoover's successors confessed that it was all a bad mistake. They promised that it would never occur again (although the proposed new charter for the FBI does not prohibit such operations). In 1974 the Justice Department produced a heavily sanitized report about the FBI disruption program—a program that attorneys general called "abhorrent" and "outrageous." Major congressional hearings held a year later outlined the basic scope of the FBI's domestic program, which began in 1956 as an operation designed to disrupt the Communist party and that wound up being directed against American citizens and organizations whose political opinions, the FBI decided, threatened national security. According to what the public was told, the FBI attacked those organizations, most of them so-called extremist black groups, by a variety of dirty tricks designed to discredit or disrupt them.

The tricks—mailing anonymous letters, planting false rumors, and the like—sounded like something out of a perverse fraternity house. They were pretty bad, to be sure, but the worst that the House Intelligence Committee finally could conclude was that the FBI's attempt to stifle political dissent in the United States resulted in this: "Careers were ruined, friendships were severed, reputations sullied, businesses bankrupted, and, in some cases, lives endangered."

"They didn't know the half of it," the man called "Othello" says. He laughs. "Hell, forget about half; they didn't find out a tenth of what the bureau was doing—and was still doing long after they said they had stopped." Like what?

"Like accessory to murder," he says. "Like arson. Like planting of false evidence. Like supplying weapons and explosives to radical groups. Like violence. Like black-bag jobs [burglaries]. Like frame-ups. Just about anything you can think of and more. And forget what everybody's been told—that the bureau quit messing around with the domestic groups in 1971. I know it continued for years after that, and I think it still continues to this day."

Othello should know. From 1968 to 1975 he was a paid undercover operative for the FBI and committed many of the crimes that the congressional committees and the Justice Department failed to uncover. Othello was the code name given to him by the FBI, which ultimately became so pleased with his performance it gave Othello $2,400 a month in cash payments and expenses, making him one of the bureau's highest-paid (and therefore one of its most valued) operatives.    

[see: The FBI's Covert Action Program To Destroy The Black Panther Party - Report to US Congress 23apr76]

Othello's real name cannot be revealed here. He has been pursued by federal agents and a variety of law-enforcement groups after breaking with the bureau four years ago. Since then he has been on the move, living underground. Over the past several months Penthouse has held a series of long interviews with him at various hideouts throughout the country and has carried out an extensive investigation of his career. Not all of what Othello has told Penthouse can be verified, but what can be verified—through records, some classified FBI documents, and interviews with witnesses—amounts to a horror story that makes even the admitted excesses by the bureau pale by comparison.

Othello is a defector and an important one. He is one of the few FBI operatives (or "dirty tricksters," as they are sometimes known) ever to have come in out of the cold and been willing to admit a series of self-incriminating actions. His position is untenable: on the one hand, he is being hunted by the law for crimes stemming from his FBI undercover work; on the other hand, a number of groups and individuals he betrayed to the FBI would love to get their hands on him. Their anger is understandable: the damage that Othello caused is difficult to calculate, but a rough accounting would include several organizations completely smashed, at least a dozen people imprisoned, several people murdered, and a legacy of bitterness and anger.

Othello himself is a complex man. Now 30 years old, he is quick and intelligent yet curiously unable to come to grips with his recent past. Often, during his extensive debriefing sessions with Penthouse, he became reluctant to admit some of his worst crimes, finding it hard to confess betrayals of people and organizations he had befriended. Those who knew him under various guises cannot pinpoint his character. "He's very hard to figure out," one man whom Othello betrayed said. "To this day, I find it hard to stay mad at him. He's very charming, very bright, really a nice guy. But he's a chameleon: He did whatever the bureau wanted him to do; whatever it took to get what they wanted, he would do. I want to hate him, but I can't, really."

Othello himself says, "I'm not even sure why I did it. The money was one thing; I got to like the money the FBI gave me, got to like the life-style it could give me. After a while I didn't even have feelings about what I was doing. You know, these people I was betraying or the things I was doing just didn't impact on me. I didn't start to think about it until toward the end, and by then it was too late. Maybe I just liked the whole spy game; I don't know."

In the beginning, money was only part of it. After being discharged from the army in 1968, Othello decided to settle in California and began studying television communications at Sacramento State College. At the same time he became vaguely interested in politics (he thought of a television career reporting on black politics) and began visiting several political organizations—many of them black groups—that were flourishing in the political hothouse of the troubled sixties.

"One day," Othello says, "I was walking out to the parking lot, and this man stopped me. He identified himself as a special agent of the FBI and then started asking me about a lot of names he read off to me from a little notebook he had. He asked me about Newark, New Jersey, and I said I'd never been there in my life. You weren't in Newark a week ago?' he asked me. I said I hadn't. Then he pulled out this manila envelope and showed me a picture. Well, it was a picture of me talking to some people in Newark. Then he said to me, 'Mr.

we know you were in military intelligence while you were in the army [that was true], and we'd like you to work for us. We'd make it worth your while.' I told him no; there wasn't enough money to make me a snitch. I knew exactly what he wanted: he wanted me to become a spy, an

informant." But the FBI man—who will be referred to as Control One for purposes of this account—was not about to give up that easily, as Othello discovered only a few days later.

"The mistake I made—the worst in my life—was that I needed an oscilloscope for some work I was doing; so I bought one from a guy I didn't know," Othello recounted. "That was stupid. Then I did a second stupid thing: my Veterans Administration check was late, and I needed cash badly; so I decided to hock the oscilloscope. The place I took it to was no problem: an old guy looked at the serial number and said, 'Oh, a very nice instrument.' I was asking only fifty dollars for it, but the guy offered eighty dollars. Then he said he had to go into the back and get the money. I should have realized at that point that something was wrong, but I just stood there, waiting. He gave me the money. I put it in my pocket and walked out—and was met by three guys, who put guns in my face. At first, I thought it was a robbery. 'Go ahead, take the money,' I said. But it was no robbery: it was the police.

"The next thing I knew, I was under arrest for possession of stolen property, burglary, and an assault charge. It turned out that whoever stole the damn thing had knocked out a security guard to get it. I didn't know what the hell to do. The cops were pushing this thing, even though the description of the guy who was supposed to have done it was not even close to what I looked like. But my defense was weak, since I had made the mistake of buying the instrument from somebody I didn't know and he wasn't about to testify for me. I had a lawyer, and finally in court the whole thing was reduced to a charge of possession of stolen property, and I was given summary probation. I decided to leave Sacramento and go down to Los Angeles Community College, which had a good television program."

Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, Othello again met Control One. As Othello recounts it, Control One said to him, "You need me." Asked why, Control One replied, "To keep you from going to jail for violation of probation." When Othello protested that he had been given a summary probation—requiring that he report his whereabouts every several months—and that he had already reported his move to Los Angeles, Control One said, "No, our records show you have felony probation, which you've now violated. That means you're going to jail for three years, and we'll make sure you go for three years. We better talk."

And so they talked. "He didn't have to tell me what they wanted," Othello says. "He wanted me to spy on the groups I already knew. Also, I knew I was being squeezed. Right after talking with Control One, I called my probation officer and found out that he had suddenly been transferred off my case. The new guy

knew nothing about any summary probation. Something funny was going on—that's for sure—but what could I do? As a matter of fact, I'll tell you something funny: I didn't even tell my lawyer about any of this until just two years ago, in 1977. He didn't say anything for a while, and then he looked at me and said, 'Well, that's okay; I understand how they set you up. It's strange, because they tried to recruit me, too, but I turned them down.' "

Othello, however, felt he could not. "I had a real fear of jail," he says. "I have terrible claustrophobia, and even the thought of jail puts me in a sweat. Maybe they knew that; I don't know. Whatever, I agreed to work for them."

At the start, it was relatively low-level stuff. Given the code name Othello—apparently a wry reference to his general resemblance to the Shakespearean and operatic Moor—he was instructed to spy on a number of groups, including Socialist and leftist organizations, with special emphasis on black groups. To do so, Othello was to pose as an interested but politically immature naïf trying to understand a particular group's program to see whether he wanted to join it.

"Then they started to test me on something a little heavier," Othello says. "They'd tell me to go to some Black Panther office, for example, and steal somebody's phone book. Little stuff like that, just to see if I would follow orders and if I was capable of carrying out such assignments. To start with, they were paying me about fifty dollars a week; later that went to one hundred dollars a week, then to two hundred dollars, and in the later years I was paid six hundred dollars every two weeks, plus a similar amount in expenses. The way it worked was this: your control agent would apply to FBI headquarters for the money you were to be paid. He would get a check; he'd cash that check and give you cash. I had to sign for it, and all expenses they reimbursed me for had to have receipts. They were very strict about money, very careful."

But the bureau was being less careful about the U.S. Constitution. Othello was unaware of it, but right around the time he was recruited to work undercover for the FBI (dragooned is possibly a better word), J. Edgar Hoover had sent a memo to his field offices, ordering the enlistment of agents provocateurs to infiltrate radical groups and encourage them to take radical action—the more radical the better, presumably part of Hoover's attempt to discredit domestic dissidents. In particular, Hoover demanded strong action against various black groups, especially the Black Panthers. With that carte blanche, FBI agents went to work, particularly on the West Coast, where nearly all the major dissident political movements had been born. (The Black Panthers had started in Oakland, Calif., and an alphabet soup of various leftist groups had sprung up in Berkeley, Calif.)

Othello was also unaware of the fact that he was about to play a key role in this underground war, although he had a sense that the FBI's interest in the organizations on which he was supposed to be spying extended beyond simple information gathering. "Right from the word go," he says, "it was made very clear to me that the bureau was prepared to do anything to get the people they really didn't like, the people they felt had to be gotten rid of. Most of the ones they hated were the black extremists; Control One had a real hang-up about blacks. He was a racist sonofabitch, and I had the feeling that things were going to get very nasty."

They did, and even faster than Othello thought. He noticed that an increasing amount of his undercover work was connected with black radicals, primarily the Black Panthers. The Black Panther party, as it was officially known, had been founded in 1966 in Oakland by two junior-college students named Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. The party had a ten-point program, including a free breakfast plan for ghetto children and other similar social services, but public attention focused on the party's violent rhetoric, especially its routine reference to police as "pigs" and its insistence that blacks in American ghettos should be armed for what they were certain was a "revolutionary struggle" with the "white ruling class." The Panther philosophy spread like wildfire in the ghettos, and by 1968 the party had 4,000 members in 38 chapters. Summarily, the Panthers became what Hoover considered a major threat, and in memos to his agents, he ordered an all-out war.

"I was told," says Othello, "that the sky was not the limit with the Panthers—it was the whole goddamn universe. At that time my role was basically infiltration; I would work my way into the Panthers and their various headquarters and later do very detailed layouts of the inside for Control One. These were used in various raids and burglaries on the buildings; the idea was to find guns or drugs so Panthers could be busted on those charges. Then it started to get very heavy. There was another organization on the West Coast at that time, called United Slaves (US), run by a maniac named Ron Karenga. He didn't like the Black Panthers; so the FBI started to foment a war between the two groups so they would kill each other off. The bureau began by sending anonymous letters from somebody or other to both groups; one letter from a Panther would say that so-and-so is a police informant; another, from a US member, would claim the opposite. These two groups didn't like each other, but by the time the bureau got finished with them, they wound up hating each other. For example, the bureau was using informants to pose as Panthers who would beat up US members; I did that once myself. That kind of stuff."

That was only part of it. At the same time, the FBI was trying to cut off the Panthers from their support in the black community. In one revealing episode the FBI managed to obtain a copy of a "Black Panther Coloring Book," an innocuous publication produced by the Panthers for black schoolchildren. In a clever forgery the FBI added to the book pages showing young children with knives attacking policemen; other pages carried such titles as "Off the pig!" The FBI arranged for the distribution of thousands of copies of the coloring book—to the horror of many black leaders, who, assuming that the book was genuine, began to disassociate themselves from the Panthers.

If that is as far as the FBI program went, the Panthers would not have been ultimately wrecked as an organization (the Panthers have virtually ceased to exist). But what happened was that such disruption was not enough; the Panthers continued to flourish. Othello discovered, almost unintentionally, what the next step was.

It came on January 17, 1969. On that day 150 members of the U.C.L.A. Black Students Union met at the university to resolve a festering dispute: US and Black Panther members were squabbling over which group should have major say in selection of the director of the black studies program. The argument was heated, its tension underlined by the presence of five armed "Simbas" (members of the US "elite guard") and two Black Panthers named John Huggins and Alprentice ("Bunchy") Carter, respectively leader of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panthers and the chapter's "defense minister."

"I should have suspected that something bad was going to happen," says Othello. "Control One had a real problem with Carter and Huggins—both were charismatic and strong leaders; Control One made it clear to me that he wanted both of them out of the way. He gave my assignment. I was supposed to go to this meeting at U.C.L.A. and 'just observe' what was going on and report to him about it later. I knew that weeks before three female Black Panthers were beaten up in the U.C.L.A. cafeteria and a US woman was beaten up by the Panthers; both those incidents, I was sure, were bureau jobs.

"Anyway, I went to the meeting, and there was a lot of shouting. After a while I left, because I figured not much seemed to be happening. Just then I heard some shots, and two guys I recognized as George Stiner and his brother, Joseph, both US members, came rushing out right past me. I saw them go into the parking lot and get inside a car driven by none other than Control One himself. Then I heard that Carter and Huggins had been shot to death at the meeting, and my eyes got big. I said, 'Hey, this is not in the game plan.' So I went down to the federal building where the FBI headquarters was and went up to the fourteenth floor. 'There's been a fuckup,' Control One said. I saw the Stiner brothers right there, with Control One, and he didn't look too happy. There was a third guy with Control One, a guy named Claude Hubert. Later I found out that Hubert, according to witnesses at the meeting, did the actual shooting. Three days later the Stiners turned themselves in to the cops. The way I figured it, I had been assigned to watch the meeting and see if the Stiners and Hubert did what they were supposed to do."

Probably, although it remains unclear precisely whether Control One in fact ordered the murders committed or simply ordered the US members—who were obviously in FBI employ at that point—to create more trouble with the Panthers. There is one interesting piece of evidence: three days after the murders, the Stiners surrendered to the police. They were convicted of murder charges during a trial that featured the odd sight of Black Panther witnesses testifying on behalf of the state, and they were sentenced to San Quentin. But only four years later the Stiners were transferred to the minimum-security section (a very rare action for convicted murderers) at San Quentin, from which they escaped, and they have not been seen since. Hubert, who witnesses said did the actual killing of Carter: disappeared right after the shooting and has never been found.

Quickly, Othello found himself, neck-deep in the escalating war against the Panthers. "As I said, there was no limit," he says. "I was constantly being asked to get information on certain members about their sex lives, anything about them that could be used. I was also asked constantly to try and set them up—to plant weapons or drugs in their homes or Panther offices. Plus, there was the fighting between US and the Panthers. Right after the U.C.L.A. shootout, there were bodies turning up all over the place. It was clear to me that the FBI was bound and determined to get rid of the Panthers."

He was right. As FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act years later showed, there were at least 295 FBI operations against black groups up to 1971; of that total, 233 were targeted against the Black Panthers. The Bureau wound up spending an estimated $7,400,000—much of it on operatives like Othello—for informants and undercover men to wreck the organization. That amount is about double what the FBI was spending to obtain information about organized crime.

By the end of 1969, the war against the Panthers was entering its climactic stage, a war that in the end would result in the

deaths of a dozen Panthers and the jailing of nearly 1,000 others. The Stalingrad of that war came on December 8, 1969, when a predawn Los Angeles police raid on party headquarters in that city, the nerve center for the national Panther movement, resulted in a shootout that ended with the arrests of 24 party members. The raid, which also hit Panther apartments and homes, was meticulously planned and executed and aided by detailed diagrams of the complex of offices and the location and habits of each member. That information was provided by the FBI, which in turn got it from Othello.

"At that time." says Othello, "I was somebody named 'Ed Riggs,' a cool dude who had a reputation for helping out the brothers whenever they needed it. Need a weapon? Cool Ed Riggs will get it for you. Need a few bucks? Ed will get it. Of course, I was getting all this stuff from the bureau, but only I knew that—or at least I hoped I was the only one outside the bureau to know. The Panthers, especially, took a dim view of informers and such. But I was considered okay not only by the Panthers but by a lot of other groups. I always seemed to be around, willing to help out anybody who wanted me to. I was posing as a sort of reporter, just a guy sort of hanging around, getting a view of what was happening in the black communities. I never really pushed anybody for information, just acted cool. You know, the first time I gave them [the

FBI] some good information on the Panthers, Control One gave me two hundred dollars. I wouldn't take the money, because I was saying to myself, 'Listen, they squeezed you into this, and if you're ever found out, at least you can say you didn't take any money from the sons of bitches.' Well, that changed; the second time I took the money, and I kept taking it after that. Besides, I didn't have any real feeling about the Panthers or anybody else. I really figured, 'Hey, there must be a good reason why some outfit like the FBI is after these people so bad; they must be some kind of a real threat.' "

Besides, Othello was in the position of a man riding a tiger, fearing ever to dismount. "You know, one time, I was driving in this jeep with a couple of Panthers. The guy driving suddenly said, 'There's an informant in this jeep right now.' I said to myself, 'Oh, shit, they found you out; this is it.' But he turned around to one of the guys sitting in the backseat and said, 'That's the sonofabitch.' We drive up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. He took the guy into the woods, and I heard a couple of shots. Later I saw the guy's body; his whole face was just blown away. Later I told all this to Control One, who looked at me and said, 'That's what happens to informants.' I guessed he was trying to tell me something."

The final spasm of the Black Panthers in December 1969 marked the virtual end of the FBI's anti-Panther campaign. In addition to the Los Angeles raid, similar raids at about the same time took place in other cities, the most notorious occurring in Chicago, where Panther leader Fred Hampton was gunned down by Chicago police in a fusillade of 80 shots that killed another Panther and wounded four others (the Panthers fired only one shot, and that one apparently accidentally). In an operation remarkably similar to the one involving Othello in Los Angeles, the Chicago FBI office used an undercover operative to set up Hampton, including the dispensing of a secobarbital tablet to Hampton just a few hours before the raid.

[See: Attempted Murder Charges Eyed in Panthers Gun Fight - Chicago Tribune 5dec1969]

By the beginning of 1970, Othello's stock was high with the bureau, and he acquired a second agent to deal with, who will be called Control Two in this article. "When you first start working for the bureau undercover," Othello says, "you start off with a grade of zero. In the beginning they give you little jobs to do: get the address of this guy, steal this guy's phone book, find out where so-and-so hangs out. Actually, they already know what they're asking you to do; it's just a test to see if you can do the work without getting caught and if you're capable of following orders. The next step is that they give you bigger and bigger assignments. You're graded on a scale of one to one hundred, and when you reach a score of ninety-five, then you're considered tops, one of the best. I was told I had a ninety-nine rating."

For his next task Othello was told to infiltrate a "prominent community group," meaning one of the several organizations that had sprung up following the ghetto riots in the early 1960s. Armed with federal funds and private contributions, they were bootstrap operations designed to offer new hope and a spirit of community organization to the residents of the urban ghetto.

The target selected for Othello was the Watts Writers Workshop in Los Angeles, one of the most highly publicized and successful of such groups. Initially bank-rolled by a number of prominent Hollywood personalities, including writer Budd Schulberg and actors Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger (Sammy Davis, Jr., contributed a piano), the workshop reached out for ghetto youths who showed promise and then trained them as writers, television technicians, actors, and other craftsmen. Considered a model community-action project, the workshop was run by a prominent television scriptwriter Harry Dolan ("Julia," "The Partridge Family," and other shows), and its location in the black Watts ghetto in Los Angeles made it not only a fulcrum of white liberal guilt about blacks but also a vital cultural center of the black community. Which is where the problem started.

"The FBI had a real thing about organizations like the Watts Writers Workshop," Othello says. "They became convinced that groups like the workshop were actually what they liked to call 'hotbeds of radicalism.' You know, what was really going on in places like that was that kids were being taught how to make bombs and fire weapons and kill police, stuff like that. They just couldn't get it through their heads that it wasn't anything like what they thought, but they were bound and determined that the workshop had to go. So I had a simple job: I was supposed to get inside the place and wreck it. I don't know any other way to describe it; anything I had to do to get the job done, I had to do."

Othello, posing now as a former black student down on his luck, showed up at Dolan's office door one morning, wearing threadbare clothes. Offering to work as a janitor at the workshop without salary in exchange for sleeping quarters, Othello talked Dolan—noted for his reputation as a soft touch—into granting him a job. He set about his work diligently, noting such things as the workshop's $250,000 theater, built with donations from major movie studios and the proceeds of a celebrity pool tournament. Clearly, with its facilities and Hollywood connections, the workshop was big time, and although there was plenty of actor training and instruction for writers, poets, and playwrights, nothing subversive was going on, at least as far as Othello could see.

Not that it mattered. Almost coincidental with Othello's arrival, the workshop began to experience serious trouble: organizational squabbling, anonymous charges of pilfering, strong pressure exerted against contributors, rumors of "radical black training" at its courses, and rumors of trouble between white and black overseers at the center (Schulberg finally quit the workshop after an acrimonious dispute).

Othello had nothing to do with the trouble, although he was perfectly aware of the fact that it had been instigated from the outside. He was working diligently under his cover and within several months had talked Dolan into heading up the workshop's video communications program. For his FBI control, the move was ideal: armed now with the workshop's portable video cameras, Othello could use his workshop job as perfect journalistic cover for infiltrating other groups in which the bureau had strong interest. He became a fixture throughout many West Coast communities, seemingly everywhere, taking his pictures. Almost all those tapes were turned over to the FBI, especially the ones showing interiors of offices. Additionally, Othello talked a number of radical-group leaders into "private interviews," which, he assured them, would be used only for showing at the workshop; these, too, went to the FBI to be included in bulging dossiers. (Often, in such cases, Othello, a trusted figure in the radical community, would entice the interviewee to make blatantly radical statements.)

Othello's cover was so perfect that even a bad mistake would hardly ruffle the surface. "One day," says Dolan's wife, Clara, who administered the workshop, "one of the people who worked there came up to me and said he saw Othello taking papers out of our files. Well, I knew Othello very well; as a matter of fact, Harry was sort of a father to him. So I just couldn't believe it. For one thing, I couldn't understand why anybody would be stealing stuff from our files; there wasn't anything secret about us at all. I dismissed the whole thing."

Other things were dismissed. "Once," says Dolan, '.'we had a big benefit dinner all set up; a great many prominent Hollywood people were to be invited. We made up the invitations and sent them out. Came the night of the dinner, and hardly anybody showed up. We were terribly disappointed, not to mention the money we lost. A few days later the mailman came in and handed me a sack. 'I found this lying in the gutter,' he told me, I looked inside, ,and there were all the invitations. It was then that I remembered that I had given Othello the invitations to mail after he volunteered to take them to the post office. But even then I didn't suspect him; I figured he had somehow fouled up.

"He was always fouling up; we took to calling him 'Baby Huey,' after the cartoon character who was always breaking things. That was Othello—always breaking things; he'd smash expensive equipment by accident, drop things, foul up lights and everything. To tell you the truth, not until long after it was over, did I figure what he did was deliberate."

By "it," Dolan means the final act in the Watts Writers Workshop tragedy. His funding cut off, the contributors no longer contributing, and faced with mounting bills, to save money Dolan put $20,000 of his own money into the project and cut costs, including cancellation of the fire insurance. But early in 1974, a fire swept through the workshop, leveling it to the ground. The Los Angeles Fire Department pronounced the blaze arson.

"It sure was," Othello says, "and I know it was arson because I set the fire myself. What happened was that despite everything the bureau had done to wreck the place, Harry Dolan and his wife somehow kept it going. Both Control One and Control Two were getting frantic. 'Listen,' I told them, 'what's the big deal? It provides good cover for me; so let's keep it going.' But Control Two said, 'No, it's got to be dealt under.' I told him it was about dead anyway, but they insisted. Then I said, 'Look, what else can you do, kill these people?' I saw this light shine in their eyes, and Control One said, 'Normally, you don't have to do that. Let's just get rid of the place.' Then they told me to burn the place down. I was negative. 'No way,' I said. 'Look, maybe some of these other groups go off the deep end, but the workshop isn't like that. Forget it.' I was told to do it—or else. So I did it. I put some gasoline in two Purex cans with

road flares sticking out, and I lit one fire in the front and one in the back—a real professional job, just like the bureau taught me. The place went up like a torch. I called the fire department after I was sure the building would be totaled, and then I called Harry Dolan. After that I was drunk for most of a month."

The workshop incident was the beginning of the end for Othello. Curiously, although upset by the episode, he seemed to have no equivalent qualms about some of the other things he was doing for the bureau at that time. In addition to out-right spying, Othello was ordered to help provide weapons and explosives for several radical groups, most notably the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army, the latter a radical offshoot of the Black Panthers.

"The workshop thing really got to me," Othello says, "and for the first time, really, I started thinking about what I was doing, whether all of it was worth saving my ass from the jail. See, jail was the big thing. Control One and Control Two made it clear that if I didn't play ball, they could slap me in jail anytime they wanted. I suppose they needed me at that point. I was well known throughout the radical community. It was like this: hey, here's Ed Riggs, crazy dude. He'll do anything for you—get you weapons, get you explosives, anything. He never asks questions, just does it for you. A good guy. Some good guy, right? The bureau had some kind of arrangement with BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tax, and Firearms, an agency of the Treasury Department], which gave the bureau some weapons they had confiscated. In turn, the bureau wanted these weapons distributed to various groups, mainly to set them up on weapons charges.

"See, it's not easy to get weapons or explosives, at least not as easy as people think," Othello says. "If you're a radical, you find out that only a few people sell arms and explosives; the stuff is just too easy to trace. The people I was either giving or selling this stuff to didn't ask where I got the stuff; first, you don't ask, and, second, they must have figured this guy can't be an FBI plant if he's getting weapons—that's for sure. So they trusted me, even when I had some close calls. One time I was given some TNT by Control Two. I looked at the stuff, and I saw that it was 'sweating' [beginning to chemically decompose]. 'Fuck it,' Control Two said. 'So what if it blows up in their faces?' Another time I helped the bureau set up the Black Liberation Army to steal weapons out of an army armory in Compton [Calif.]. Only thing was, without telling me, the bureau had removed the firing pins from the weapons, which were M-16 rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers. So there I was, having to explain to the people that this great shipment of weapons I helped get for them somehow was missing firing pins."

Indeed, Othello at this point was a very busy man. In addition to his cover as an itinerant journalist of sorts, he was also posing as a radical who, although not attached to any particular organization, was willing to help all, no questions asked. He was providing weapons, explosives, and fake identifications (provided by the bureau) for those who needed them and keeping tabs on several groups, carrying out black-bag jobs to plant listening devices, and generally keeping his eyes and ears open for any news of interest.

The FBI's appetite seemed not only insatiable but amazingly broad as well. Othello's assignments, for example, included the following activities:

• Wiretapping the office of the lieutenant governor of California. (Othello never found out why.)

• Breaking into the office of Leon Ralph, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, to steal papers and plant a bug.

• Spying on the Reverend Jesse Jackson when Jackson came to the West Coast to set up Operation PUSH, his social-welfare program. Othello was told to find out about Jackson's sexual habits and attempt to plant drugs in his hotel room. (Othello told the FBI that he was unable to do so.)

• Spying on such Hollywood personalities as Sammy Davis, Jr., producer Burt Sugarman, singer Barry White, and others, all of whom were known to have given money to black organizations. Othello provided detailed layouts of their offices, all of which were later burglarized.

• Spying on the annual Image Awards Dinner, sponsored by the NAACP, to obtain information on who was contributing money to the organization. Othello felt that the assignment was stupid, since the NAACP was hardly a radical organization.

And there was still another community organization to be destroyed. The target this time was the Community Freedom School of Los Angeles, a black organization that taught black children "black pride" and the Swahili language. "I was told to destroy the place," Othello says. "They [the FBI] wanted it busted up, and they wanted it busted up fast. I could never figure out why the big panic, but like the Watts Writers Workshop, I think they thought the place was some sort of hot-bed of radicalism. This one turned out to be easier than the Watts Writers Workshop to wreck."

Actually, it took only a few months. First, Othello struck up a close friendship with the director of the school and soon nearly became a fixture around the place, even to the extent of buying an electric coffee maker for the school. Again, Othello used his video cameras, filming a series of "interviews" with the director and other people connected with the school. The next step was for Othello to plant pipe bombs in the school and a few manuals of urban guerrilla warfare in the building's library. Subsequently, the FBI tipped off police that the pipe bombs were in the school; the director was arrested. For good measure, it turned out, Othello had also talked the director into buying some guns under an assumed name; that led to a federal firearms charge. Without leadership the school collapsed.

It was another successful operation, but it was clear that Othello's string was running out. For one thing, even though his cover was good, he had been in too many places too many times; even the dimmest radical could now put two and two together: Othello somehow always seemed to be connected with trouble. Second, he himself had become tired of the whole thing. By early 1975 he had been living a double life for nearly eight years.

"By that time," he says, "I had a wife and a small baby. The bureau had provided me with a house, but I just couldn't see how much longer I could possibly keep this up. I'd look out and see how many lives I'd ruined, how many people I'd betrayed, how many organizations and groups had been destroyed. And, yes, I thought about the people who had been killed. Maybe if I hadn't done anything, they'd have been killed anyway, but the fact was that I did participate in the setups and the frame-ups and the disruptions that finally did kill them."

The money, of course, came in regularly, scrupulously paid on time, all in cash. His relationship with Control One and Control Two, however, was becoming strained, and they detected a growing rebelliousness. Othello talked to them at length, often face to face, other times via written instructions left at dead drops. (He had the foresight to keep some of those written instructions; one in early 1975 warned him not to sever his relationship with the FBI, noting the murder of a Blank Panther in prison.)

Then, too, his credibility in the underground was becoming frayed. The first warning that he was no longer fully trusted came early in 1975, when he tried to arrange the escape from prison of Elmer ("Geronimo") Pratt, a Black Panther jailed at San Quentin on murder charges. The breakout, which was to be arranged by Othello and was to use members of the Black Liberation Army, was the brainstorm of the FBI, which never made clear to Othello why it wanted Pratt out of prison. In any event, BLA members contacted by Othello balked at the idea and made it clear that they wanted nothing further to do with him. Possibly, they were thinking of what happened to George Jackson, the famous "Soledad Brother," who in 1971 was shot to death at San Quentin during an alleged escape attempt. (According to Othello, the escape was in fact an FBI plan; the gun smuggled to Jackson had been seized earlier in a raid on the Black Panthers, and the plastic explosive also smuggled to him was actually window putty.)

On May 20, 1975, Othello called Control Two and told him that he would no longer work as an undercover operative. Control Two asked him to think it over and promised to come and see him in order to help arrange a new job. The next morning there was a police raid on Othello's house, and he found himself under arrest for violation of his probation seven years before. "I saw Control One and Control Two across the street, laughing while this was going on," he says. "Things started happening real fast. First, the cops ransacked my house. I mean, they really tore it apart. Apparently, they were looking for some stuff—mainly papers—the bureau said I had taken from them."

Actually, the FBI was correct: Othello had stolen some papers, among them FBI classified Telex messages, a theft he regarded as providing insurance against such a contingency. Additionally, Control Two had learned that Othello had tape-recorded one of their phone conversations, during which Control Two authorized Othello to steal a tape recording from a radio station in Los Angeles.

Carted off to jail, Othello was shuttled among various jails while a lawyer tried desperately to find him. And he certainly needed a lawyer. In addition to the probation charge, he discovered that he was also being charged with check forgery (it turned out to be $125 in checks he had written under an FBI alias) and, for the clincher, car theft. (Othello beat that one by noting that he did not drive and, further, that he didn't have a driver's license.)

"I was in jail about a week until the lawyer got me out," says Othello. "While I was in, Control One and Control Two came to see me. They said, 'This can stop, Othello.' I said to them, 'You know, I'll be so happy when I see your asses in jail.' Their intimidation didn't work this time; I had just made up my mind that I wasn't going to play snitch anymore. That was it. It was over; I figured if they killed me at that point, at least I'll die like a man instead of some kind of a rat. What finally happened was that I was offered probation on the check charge—which I refused—and the other charges were dropped."

And at that point Othello dropped out of sight, deep into the underground he had learned so well. Since then he emerged into the public limelight only once—a disastrous appearance. In December 1976 he agreed to testify at the trial of an influential California businessman indicted on charges of tax evasion. Othello, who says he wiretapped the businessman for the FBI three years before, was called by the defense to buttress its contention that the federal charges were politically inspired, a defense that ultimately failed. Othello did just that, in the process dropping a bombshell: in court he played the tape recording of his conversation with Control Two to prove that he had been an under-cover operative for the FBI.

An FBI agent called to testify admitted that Othello had been given that code name by the FBI, but he insisted that Othello was a low-level informant who had worked only briefly for the bureau, leaving unexplained why the FBI would bother giving a code name to a low-level informant.

The FBI testimony was of small comfort to Othello, who during a recess in the trial was arrested, this time for illegal wiretapping. In another court the matter of the old probation came up again; a judge ordered Othello to serve two days in jail on the charge, then later face the charge of wiretapping. Othello served the two days, but following that, he disappeared again. He has been on the run ever since.

Why has he decided to tell his story now?

"I'm tired of running," Othello says. "My wife and child for the past four years have been living someplace in the Midwest. I know where they are, and we have a special system of communicating with each other when we have to. The last time I saw my son, he was in diapers; now he's four years old and starting preschool. He still keeps asking for me, and the only thing my wife tells him is that I'm in New York."

Othello's existence is now rather hand-to-mouth. "I have some people I know, some people who help me out. But not much. The longest I can hold a job is three to six months, since I have to work under aliases, and they always catch up to you eventually. Since I've dropped out of sight, my family has been harassed; they've been visited by federal agents, demanding to know where I am. I can't go near friends and relatives for fear I'll get them involved; I know some of them are under surveillance."

And what about the possibility of jail? "I can't think about that," Othello says quietly. "Whatever will happen, will happen. It's got to end, and it's got to end now. I can't hang on any longer, no matter what happens."