Agents, "Do anything that you can, anything that you can think of to destroy the party." So the FBI does things that range from infiltrating the party and having agent provocateurs inside the Panther Party who are provoking violent acts and buying guns and supplying guns to the Panthers, to he has [a] memo that says we have to set spouse against spouse. ...
I think that the Black Panthers and the leadership felt that their phones were tapped and those kind of things, but nobody understood the extent that the FBI was going to destroy the Panthers and other groups. ... The idea of writing letters to people's husbands or wives to tear them apart ... that was one of the tactics that the FBI was using, but just anything that they could possibly do to tear people apart and to create the sense of paranoia because you didn't know what was going on. You didn't know what was true or what was not true; you didn't know who your friends were. All of those things the FBI was using and I don't think anybody really understood the extent and the low level that the FBI would sink to to destroy people it looked at as its enemies. ...
The Panther Party was riddled with informants. They had no background checks that they could do on people, so they had this kind of open-door policy: If you wanted to join the Panthers, they wanted you to be part of it.
The Mediterranean Sea became a dangerous place for merchants as there were no powers to control the activities of pirates who marauded as far north as the English Channel.
