“Pig Nixon,” Sino-American Rapprochement, and a Turn to Africa

In October 1971, six months after their expulsion from the BPP, the members of the international section watched in horror as the secret efforts at Sino-American rapprochement that had begun shortly after Richard Nixon took office exploded into public view. “When the news came that Henry Kissinger was in Peking making arrangements for Richard Nixon to go to China,” Cleaver recalled, “it fell like an atomic bomb in Algeria.”7 China had never figured as prominently in Cleaver’s ad hoc diplomacy as Vietnam and North Korea had. Nevertheless, the revelation that Mao was prepared to negotiate with “Pig Nixon” was a bitterly disillusioning experience. “As long as there was Mao and his Red Book proclaiming war and the people’s struggle,” Cleaver lamented, “there was something to look toward.”

Cleaver, however, would have neither the time nor the space to rebuild as the ideological shock of Nixon’s overture to China signaled a fundamental shift in the Cold War environment in the early 1970s.

Historian Jeremi Suri has argued that U.S., Chinese, and Soviet leaders embraced détente in part out of a shared desire to contain the domestic unrest that roiled the industrialized world in the late 1960s.9 Nixon’s overture to Beijing was obviously motivated by more than a desire to undercut the Black Panthers, but the administration was certainly aware of the BPP and its foreign operations as it undertook preparations for the meeting. Kissinger had been among the recipients of FBI and CIA reports on Cleaver’s operation in Algiers, and the secretary of state invoked Huey Newton by name in an offhand remark about the terms of a proposed Sino-American agreement during his secret negotiations with Zhou Enlai in 1971.10 Whether by design or happenstance, Nixon’s engagement with China, combined with the gradual U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, proved devastating to Cleaver’s operation in exile. The Nixon-Mao summit, he noted bitterly, “started a whole stampede throughout the Third World and Socialist World for establishing a diplomatic relationship with the United States.”11 Most foreign governments, he wrote, “don’t want to fuck with Uncle Sam” to begin with, and in the changing international climate of the early 1970s even those handful of revolutionary nations “who have related to [the Panthers’ struggle] at a stage when it seemed to be something romantic and not involving very much … now are beginning to get up-tight because the pressure is getting stronger and the situation is heating-up.”12

Nixon’s foreign policy initiatives had particularly dramatic effects on smaller nations that had looked to the PRC for inspiration and support, including Cleaver’s two closest Asian allies, North Vietnam and the DPRK. “Various countries, which we thought were our friends and allies to the end,” he lamented, “are now making a separate peace with our sworn enemy, the fascist imperialist U.S. government and ruling class.”13 In the aftermath of the Nixon-Mao meeting, Kim Il-sung began to reposition the DPRK internationally. While still engaged in the Third World, Kim’s government reacted to the changing international environment and its own increasingly strained domestic situation by building economic relationships with avowed capitalist enemies, including Japan and countries in western Europe (most notably France), and opening negotiations with South Korea.14 In a sign of the shifting currents unleashed by Nixon’s diplomacy, when Cleaver warned that Sino-American rapprochement would undercut efforts to internationalize the black freedom struggle, the North Koreans rebuked him, accusing the exiled former Panther of engaging in the cardinal sin of “revisionism.”15 North Vietnam and the PRG continued to court public support from antiwar elements in the United States and elsewhere as leverage for the ongoing peace negotiations in Paris. But as the end of the war loomed, the leadership of a soon-to-be united Vietnam was more interested in rebuilding and dealing with regional rivals than in cultivating an anticolonial coalition that included groups such as the BPP or the international section.16 Cleaver’s canny exploitation of Cold War geopolitics in revolutionary Asia had made possible the founding and continued existence of the international section in Algeria. His inability to control those developments, however, was dramatically demonstrated when, in Cleaver’s words, “Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went to China and stole Mao Tse-Tung away from us.”17 There was no single, dramatic break between Cleaver and his Vietnamese and North Korean patrons. Rather, the combination of his expulsion from the BPP and the larger shifts brought about by détente, Sino-American rapprochement, and the winding down of the Vietnam War led to a gradual disengagement that left the international section to fend for itself in Algeria.

Diplomatically outmaneuvered by “Pig Nixon” and forcibly confronted with the limits of relying on state-level partners in Asia over whom he had little or no leverage, Cleaver and the international section cast about for new alternatives. Shortly after being expelled from the BPP, the exiles received an invitation to attend the International Conference of Solidarity with the People Under Portuguese Domination held in Brazzaville, the capital of the People’s Republic of the Congo. Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, along with former New York Panthers Denise Oliver (who was also a member of the Young Lords) and Michael Tabor, traveled to Brazzaville in April 1971, staying several weeks after the conference to attend May Day celebrations, tour training camps for fighters from the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and meet with Congolese military and civilian leaders, including President Marien Ngouabi.18 Although this trip predated the public revelation of Kissinger’s visit to China, Cleaver was already eager to seek additional allies given his perpetually precarious situation in Algiers. In this context, Ngouabi’s Marxist-Leninist government seemed to offer all of the ideological affinities of states such as China, the DPRK, and North Vietnam while also sharing unique cultural and historical connections to black Americans that these revolutionary Asian states lacked. Upon his return to Algiers, Cleaver proclaimed that the People’s Republic of Congo represented a “synthesis between the cultural aspects of our African connectedness and the revolutionary aspects” and as such was an ideal partner for black Americans looking for allies in their struggle against the U.S. government.19 To promote this notion, Cleaver approved the release of documentary footage of the trip shot by a photographer, William Stevens, who had accompanied the Panther delegation. The Algerian exiles also collaborated with editors at Right On! and Voice of the Lumpen to publish a collection of essays extolling the virtues of the Congolese revolution. Among the messages included was the flattering assertion of First Secretary of the Congolese Workers Party Claude-Ernest Ndalla that “the blows that we strike against American imperialism in the Congo, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, or in Chile, these blows cannot have the same impact that the blows that the Afro-American people can strike against American imperialism on its own soil.”20

As a veteran of the struggles between revolutionary nationalists and cultural nationalists in the United States and head of an anticolonial exile group that depended on increasingly tenuous relationships with nation-state allies in Asia, it is hardly surprising that Cleaver embraced the People’s Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the delegation’s visit in spring 1971. By situating Marxism-Leninism in the context of an indigenous African government, Cleaver suggested such an alliance would “unite the Afro-American liberation struggle stronger that it has even been united before.”21 Specifically, he hailed Ngouabi’s government for making concrete the combination of black nationalism, anticolonialism, and proletarian internationalism that Malcolm X had tentatively begun to explore just before his assassination.22 As an indigenous African example of Marxism-Leninism, Congo could appeal to black Americans’ sense of cultural and racial pride without falling into the trap of narrow ethnic nationalism that might foreclose alliances with revolutionary states and groups outside of Africa. “What the Soviet Union meant to Europe, what China meant to Asia, and what Cuba meant to Latin America,” Cleaver declared, “the Peoples’ [sic] Republic of the Congo means to Africa and to black people everywhere.”23

Unstated but implicit in these paeans to Congo was the hope that the same sense of cultural affinity that attracted black American support would also bind Ngouabi’s government, making it a more reliable partner than allies in Asia, Europe, or elsewhere. This was a need that became ever more pressing in the aftermath of Mao’s betrayal. Amid an increasingly precarious situation in Algiers, Cleaver petitioned the People’s Republic of Congo to host the international section.24 As Malcolm X had discovered, however, even friendly African nations had their own needs of state that often trumped ideological, cultural, or racial affinities with black Americans. Cleaver’s petition to Ngouabi’s government never received a response. This likely stemmed in part from distractions and internal turmoil in Brazzaville and the fact that the needs of a small group of American exiles were simply a low priority for the revolutionary government as it sought to ensure its viability in an increasingly challenging international environment. It certainly did not help that upon hearing of Cleaver’s visit, Newton wrote directly to Ngouabi warning that “the Hidden Traitor Renegade Scab Eldridge Cleaver, who presently occupies the Black Panther Embassy in Algiers, Algeria neither represented the Black Panther Party nor any organized Black movement within the United States.”25 Cleaver continued to seek support on the African continent, but his efforts to arrange an audience with exiled Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah were also frustrated, unsurprisingly given that the former president was closely associated with Stokely Carmichael, with whom Cleaver had frequently and publicly feuded.26

The RCPN and “Voodoo”

As they searched for a new home for the international section, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver also explored ways to continue the revolution without the need for constant state-level support from foreign allies. For all his ideological differences with the leadership of the U.S.-based BPP, the strain of relying on the whims of the Algerian government compounded by Mao’s dramatic reversal eventually led them to embrace elements of Newton’s intercommunalism. Specifically, they began to look beyond alliances rooted in Cold War internationalism to explore transnational strategies for black liberation in the age of neoliberal hegemony. In 1971, the Cleavers established the Revolutionary People’s Communications Network, “an international apparatus for exchange of information among revolutionary peoples and organizations engaged in the international anti-imperialist struggle.”27 Kathleen Cleaver, who played arguably the most important role in building the new organization, declared in an October 1971 press conference that “it’s very relevant that … revolutionary people have access to their own sources of news about revolutionary activities, not only in this country, with each other, but around the world.” This need was particularly pressing given the confusion inspired by the BPP split and the changes in the Cold War environment. It was vital, she declared, “to inform other people of the true strengths and the true weaknesses of the revolutionary movement, so that we may build on the basis of correct information and advance our struggle on the basis of real facts.”28 While building the basis for a transnational revolutionary movement that could survive in the era of détente, the RPCN would also serve the more short-term goal of reconnecting the former-Panther exiles in Algiers with supporters around the world. The transnational solidarity networks that had supported the BPP from 1968 to 1970 had been shaken by the split within the party and the increasingly domestic-focused and reformist drift of the Newton-led Panthers. RCPN publications provided some linkage. The newspaper Babylon featured correspondents in Algiers (the Cleavers and Denise Oliver), New York ( Janet Cyril), Philadelphia (Mumia Abu-Jamal), San Francisco ( J. Frank Lin), and Detroit (Paulette Frye).29 Meanwhile, Kathleen Cleaver, who was not a fugitive and retained her U.S. passport, traveled extensively in an attempt to rebuild connections with groups around the world that had once sympathized with the Panthers.

The RPCN had its strongest support in New York, home to a number of former Panthers who sympathized with Cleaver and the international section, and in West Germany, where students and activists worked with radical American GIs stationed in Germany who considered themselves a “Black Panther Task Squad.”30 Former German SDS leader Karl Dietrich Wolff, who had helped link that group to the BPP starting in 1969, provided the crucial organizational link between German activists, radical GIs, and the Panther exiles in Algiers. Starting in November 1970, Wolff’s small press helped to publish Voice of the Lumpen, a newspaper staffed by dissident black soldiers based in Germany. Heavily influenced by the Black Panther and its anticolonial vernacular and primarily aimed at U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany, it also served as a link to German activists. Working with radical black GIs and supporting the Panthers offered a chance for Germans disillusioned by the crushing of revolutionary forces in Europe in 1968 and the dissolution of SDS to continue the struggle.31 At the same time, the stresses placed on the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany by the war in Vietnam, which lead to a drain on its ranks and thinly stretched resources, and ongoing racial tension as a result of institutionalized white supremacy in both the army and German society, made it fertile recruiting ground for self-identified Black Panthers on U.S. bases in the late 1960s and early 1970s.32 The Cleavers, who already had strong connections to the West German Left, quickly seized on this possibility as they sought to rebuild after the split. The first issue of the RPCN’s Information Bulletin identified prisons and the military as the two best locations for future organizing and recruiting as both offered highly centralized populations of disaffected black Americans. “[A]ll the righteous, the vast majority, the hard core, the cream of the crop,” Eldridge Cleaver declared, are “jacked up, in the prisons and in the pig’s military.”33

An incident in southwestern Germany in late 1970 helped to cement the alliance between elements of the German Left, radical black GIs, and the Cleavers’ operations in exile. On November 19, two discharged black soldiers and contributors to Voice of the Lumpen, William Burrell and Edward Lawrence Jackson, attempted to enter Ramstein Airbase in order to put up posters promoting a planned visit to Germany by Kathleen Cleaver. Upon being denied entry, Burrell and Jackson were involved in a shooting incident that resulted in injuries to one of the base sentries. The two were subsequently arrested by German police and put on trial in a German courtroom.34 Although the split of the BPP several months after the shooting incident discouraged many of the Panther support committees, the trial of the so-called Ramstein 2, which began in Zweibrücken in April 1971, provided renewed opportunities for cooperation. At a time when the U.S.-based BPP was moving away from alliances with radical whites in the United States and Europe to focus on local black activism in Oakland, the international section continued to cultivate ties to both German radicals and disaffected GIs. In July, Kathleen Cleaver spoke at the University of Frankfurt in support of the Ramstein 2 and in the process laid the groundwork for transnational links with German activists to replace those that had been damaged following the split.35 At the conclusion of the trial in August 1971, Burrell was found not guilty and put on a plane to Algeria, where he joined Cleaver and the international section.36 By October 1971, the Voice of the Lumpen had become an official organ of the RCPN, joining Right On! and Babylon as an alternative to the post-split Black Panther newspaper. That same month, Kathleen Cleaver traveled to New York with Elaine Klein and Jessica Scott, who had worked on the Voice of the Lumpen in Germany, to help link the fledgling transnational group to former BPP members and their supporters in the United States.37

An improvisational creation in the aftermath of the BPP split and the dramatic international changes inaugurated by Nixon’s visit to China, the RPCN was an innovative effort at transnational organizing in the era of détente. At a time when both domestic and international trends were turning against the tide of radicalism that had washed over much of the industrialized world in the 1960s, the RPCN sought to develop a support system that would allow activists to continue the fight against the U.S. empire in the challenging circumstances of the 1970s. Whereas Huey Newton’s response to these developments was to emphasize a return to locally focused organizing while deferring a battle against “reactionary Intercommunalism” on the world stage to an unspecified future date, the RPCN was necessarily transnational in orientation from its inception. Among the most innovative tactics employed by the group was the use of emerging technologies to facilitate connections between dispersed and persecuted radicals who were increasingly forced to go underground in the 1970s. Most of the exiles in Algiers were without valid passports and subject to arrest or deportation if they attempted to travel outside of the country. Even Kathleen Cleaver, who retained a passport and was not wanted on any criminal charges, found that diplomatic pressure from the United States often made it difficult to gain entrance visas (as happened at least once in her attempted travel to Germany).38 Printed materials such as Voice of the Lumpen provided one means of connecting activists. Ultimately, however, the logistics and cost of running a large-circulation newspaper with global reach were prohibitive for a small, decentralized group such as the RPCN that lacked the substantial aboveground base enjoyed by the BPP.

The RPCN used what Eldridge Cleaver dubbed “voodoo” to confront the dilemma posed by isolation, limited resources, and ongoing state repression. With portable personal video cameras and players, RCPN activists could quickly produce propaganda films (voodoo) that could be easily transported across borders and shown to audiences large and small. This new video activism freed the RPCN from having to rely on unwieldy print distribution networks or the more centralized and expensive production associated with traditional filmmaking. Cleaver had been experimenting with this “voodoo” at least since March 1971, when he demonstrated it to ambassadors from the PRG and Cambodia along with representatives from the DPRK and North Vietnam, who were apparently impressed.39 The BPP delegation took their portable Sony video camera when they toured the People’s Republic of the Congo. William Stevens subsequently cut the resulting footage into a film with editing assistance (via long-distance telephone) from French director Chris Marker.40 As the Cleavers and their allies in Algeria and elsewhere sought to rebuild radical networks via the RPCN, grassroots video played a crucial role. Donald Cox, one of Cleavers’ most important lieutenants in Algiers, explained,

In an ironic commentary on the unintended effects of technology and globalization, a cartoon in the pages of Babylon depicted RCPN activists using Sony video recorders and televisions to outwit “the pigs” and educate the masses.42

The combination of video voodoo, printed matter, and the travels of Kathleen Cleaver, Denise Oliver, and others provided the sinews connecting the activists associated with the RCPN. Mere communication, however, was not Eldridge Cleaver’s goal. In spite of the immense challenges posed by the party’s split and ensuing disintegration of the black radical movement in the United States, Sino-American rapprochement, and the larger shifts in the Cold War environment in the early 1970s, Cleaver remained as committed as ever to his vision of overthrowing of the U.S. government. “The American Revolution has progressed to the phase of a violent peoples revolution,” he declared, promising that “[w]e are moving now for the seizure of power.”43 The body that would lead this fight in the United States, which he dubbed the “Afro-American People’s Army,” “must come into being through combat, fighting from its inception for its right to be.”44 The ultimate goal of the RPCN was to provide a support and communications network in service of this larger goal. “[T]he Revolutionary Peoples Communications Network,” proclaimed a September 1971 communiqué, “was initiated to provide the above ground information apparatus to the revolutionary forces[,] many of which are underground in Babylon.”45

Free from the moderating hand of Newton, Hilliard, and the Oakland- based BPP, Cleaver could now pursue his goal of initiating guerrilla warfare in Babylon, at least in theory. In practice, he still faced the difficult question of how to recruit, organize, equip, and lead his army to victory against the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. state. The most obvious solution was to turn to disaffected Panthers in the United States who shared Cleaver’s belief in revolutionary violence and were willing to go underground in order to put this tactic into practice. Initially Cleaver planned to employ the Black Liberation Army (BLA) as the military wing of his revolution inside the United States. The BLA (covered in more depth in the next chapter) had grown out of the underground wing of the BPP and attracted a number of more militant former Panthers, particularly on the East Coast, in the aftermath of the party’s split. Following the suspected involvement of BLA members in two attacks on New York City police officers in May 1971, however, the group went deep underground, making communications with Algiers and the RPCN difficult if not impossible. Moreover, BLA members apparently grew wary of accepting advice or taking orders from a man exiled thousands of miles away, a person who had little direct knowledge of conditions they faced on the ground in the United States. Fortuitously, however, the loosening of ties to the BLA was accompanied by the rise of two new groups, both of which had at least indirect ties to Cleaver and his operations in Algiers, that offered new models for conducting guerrilla warfare on the changing global terrain of the early 1970s.

The RAF, Black September, and “Cosmopolitan Guerrillas”

Many involved with the German New Left in the 1960s drifted away in the aftermath of the dissolution of the German SDS and the government’s decision to offer amnesty for activists convicted of minor crimes.46 Some stayed active in the various solidarity committees linked to the BPP, the international section, Angela Davis, and the Ramstein 2. A small number, however, chose to go underground to begin a war against the West German state and U.S. installations there. The Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion), sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after two of its founders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, had its roots in the radical German Left and anarchist movements of the late 1960s, including several individuals involved with the firebombing of Frankfurt department stores in 1968 “in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese.”47 In the aftermath of a May 1970 jailbreak, in which Meinhof and several associates freed Baader from custody (stemming from his conviction in the Frankfurt bombings), the nascent underground cell traveled to Jordan, where they received guerrilla training in PLO camps.48 In June 1970 they announced themselves as the Red Army Faction in the pages of the radical German newspaper Agit 883, declaring that the time had come to “START THE ARMED STRUGGLE.”49 The RAF followed this with a series of bombings and shootings targeting German police, U.S. military facilities, and the right-wing Axel Springer media corporation. Support for these operations, which later expanded to including kidnapping and hijacking, came from aboveground sympathizers as well as from bank robberies aimed at acquiring the funds necessary to arm and equip the group’s guerrilla cells.50

At least one RAF member spent time in Algiers, where she had direct contact with Cleaver and the growing collection of hijackers connected to the former international section, and historian Martin Klimke has suggested that Panther-affiliated GIs in Germany may have been involved in providing weapons for the group.51 More broadly, the BPP in general and Cleaver in particular were influential in shaping the group’s approach to anticolonial violence. From the Panthers, the RAF took the notion that armed struggle in the metropole could play a crucial role in winning a global battle against colonialism and white supremacy. The best way for those in the heart of the capitalist West to support those fighting for their freedom in places such as Vietnam was to strike directly at the U.S. empire and its “lackeys” in West Germany. Invoking the birthplace of the BPP in their declaration of war against the German state, Meinhof asserted that “what is beginning to happen here has been going on for a long time in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Guatemala, in Oakland, and Watts, in Cuba and China, in Angola and in New York.”52 As historians Maria Höhn and Klimke concluded, “In the eyes of the RAF, the Black Panthers became both a role model and a partner in what they conceived as an international revolutionary struggle.”53 In a graphic demonstration of the party’s influence, the RAF’s first communiqué concluded with the injunction “die rotearmee Aufbauen!” (“Build the Red Army!”) superimposed over a drawing of the iconic panther employed by the BPP. The RAF also directly tapped the Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular, including the use of the word “pig” to describe German police.54

As the BPP’s most vocal public advocate of urban guerrilla warfare, Cleaver played a particularly influential role in shaping the way West German guerrillas saw their role in the struggle. Prior to the formation of the RAF, Cleaver had urged European activists to take up the gun, and the group’s April 1971 manifesto “The Urban Guerrilla Concept” directly invoked the BPP’s former minister of information.55 This crucial early document was, according to RAF member Margrit Schiller, deeply informed by discussions among the group’s members about the lessons to be learned from the Panthers.56 Specifically, RAF leaders identified the BPP’s attempt to simultaneously operate aboveground and underground wings as a tactical mistake in light of the repressive powers of the state. Echoing Cleaver’s cry to “intensify the struggle,” the RAF argued that the time had come to embrace “illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention.”57 The RAF failed in its goal of bringing about a revolution in West Germany, and it did not bring down U.S. imperialism. But despite an intense domestic security campaign by the German state that surpassed that mounted against the BPP in the United States, and waves of arrests that several times appeared to have broken the back of the RAF, the group survived and even grew during the 1970s, remaining in operation until its remaining members voluntarily disbanded in 1998.58

In its persistence, the RAF joined the BLA in demonstrating that Cleaver’s notion of an urban guerrilla force operating within the heart of the First World was not as implausible as it may have first appeared. But the group that most directly inspired Cleaver in the early 1970s as he grappled with the changing international landscape was one that had roots closer to his own Algerian headquarters. Black September was a Palestinian guerrilla organization that arose out of divisions within Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Although the circumstances and context differed in many ways, the struggles within Fatah during the late 1960s and early 1970s over the role and scope of anticolonial violence shared similarities to those that split the BPP during the same time period. Fatah was united in its opposition to the Israeli colonization of Palestinian land, and it was committed to engaging in guerrilla operations against the occupying forces. But there were sharp differences within Fatah, and the Palestinian resistance more broadly, over both tactics and targets. Arafat led a faction within Fatah and the larger PLO umbrella organization that sought to balance military operations with a longer term diplomatic strategy aimed at securing international recognition and support for the Palestinian cause. Others within Fatah, however, were more concerned with delivering vengeance not only against Israel, but also against Arab leaders who failed to support their cause. Led by Salah Khalaf, the militant faction within Fatah took its name from events in September 1970, when King Hussein of Jordan ordered a bloody assault on Palestinian refugee and training camps in his country as part of the battle for control of the kingdom between the monarchy and exiled Palestinian fighters. In response, Black September mobilized militants from Fatah and other Palestinian resistance groups to launch a wide-ranging campaign of anticolonial violence.59

The most notable aspect of Black September’s operations, which included assassinations, hijackings, bombings, sabotage, and, most dramatically, the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, was the degree to which they exploited vulnerabilities within an increasingly globalized and interconnected world to operate across borders. While groups such as the RAF, the BLA, and the Weather Underground largely confined their operations to their respective home soils, Black September struck at targets in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe as well as international air travel in a series of dramatic hijackings in the early 1970s.60 The group also explicitly tailored its actions in an attempt to win support from other militants sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Among the demands of the Black September guerrillas who staged the assault at the Munich Olympics was the release of German RAF prisoners. In the aftermath of the raid, which resulted in fourteen deaths when German police attempted to free the hostages by force, the RAF issued a statement praising the Palestinian fighters.61 Although the two groups never formally collaborated, the Munich action raised the specter of what historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dubbed a “global offensive” in which “small states and guerrilla groups sought to exploit a proliferating array of transnational connections … using a revolutionary set of tactics and strategies never before seen in history.”62

Observing the operations of the RAF and Black September from Algiers, Cleaver became enamored with the notion of stateless, transnational anticolonial violence as a new template for resisting the American Empire and its clients at a time when Nixon’s diplomacy was rapidly neutralizing revolutionary anticolonialism in both the socialist bloc and the Third World. Although he had long supported strikes against the American Empire and liberation for Palestine while condemning both Israel and “the dyed-in-the-wool lackey clique of Amman, headed by arch-puppet King Hussein,” the tactics employed by the RAF and Black September appealed to Cleaver as much as their ideology.63 Hailing those he dubbed “Cosmopolitan Guerrillas,” Cleaver observed that “the instantaneity of communication and transportation, along with the elaborate nature of technology, and the world market, the complex interconnected nature of the world economy, has created a unity on the planet for which our narrow nationalist perspectives and analogies do not prepare us to deal with.” While this analysis of the death of the nation-state echoed Newton’s intercommunalism, Cleaver was less interested in transnational community building than he was in exploiting “the landscape of technology, the channels and circuits of our environment,” in order to strike at “all pigs and pig structures” around the world.64 He was particularly impressed with Munich and with Black September’s hijacking operations, which illustrated the vulnerability of advanced Western capitalist states to small groups of dedicated guerrillas operating across national frontiers. Asserting that “[w]e who are waging struggles in the metropolis of the international empire of Babylon, can not retreat into the Sierra Maestra [mountains of Cuba],” Cleaver hailed Black September for turning the technology of globalization against its masters, attacking not just individual targets but also the very notion of borders and frontiers with its shadowy transnational operations in the heart of the industrialized West.65

Given the increasingly tenuous state of his base in Algiers and his difficulties in maintaining connections with potential underground comrades in the BLA, it is hardly surprising that Black September’s model of a loosely organized, transnational anticolonial violence appealed to Cleaver. There were some obvious potential problems, however, as Cleaver contemplated applying this strategy to black liberation in the United States. Most fundamentally, it remained entirely unclear how such a guerrilla force could hope to actually overthrow the U.S. government or affect meaningful change. Although the BLA, the Weather Underground, the RAF, and Black September had shown it was possible for guerrillas to conduct sustained operations, none of these groups had succeeded in their ambitious goals. In fact, Black September, the group that most inspired Cleaver’s plans for an army of “Cosmopolitan Guerrillas,” was effectively brought to heel by Fatah and the PLO by the end of 1973 after it became apparent that its operations were doing more harm than good to the Palestinian cause.66 In the United States and Germany, bombings, sabotage, and the killing of police officers appeared to have accomplished little outside of building public support for increasingly militarized government actions against those labeled as domestic terrorists. As Harold Cruse had warned in the mid-1960s, there was little reason to believe that domestic bombings would be any more effective than wartime strategic bombing in effecting revolutionary change, “for the capitalist owners simply rebuilt their property and proceeded to exploit it as before, under the same system.”67

Cleaver acknowledged that many were skeptical of the prospects for armed rebellion in the United States. In extolling the need for an Afro- American people’s army in the pages of Babylon, he conceded, “There are those, I know, who feel let down at this point, because here I go again talking about guns.”68 For Cleaver, however, the failure of the various 1960s movements to bring about revolution, along with the ascendency of Nixon and the conservative counterreaction, left little choice. Whereas some would-be revolutionaries had embraced the notion of urban insurgency with a sense of optimism in the 1960s, with Robert F. Williams famously proclaiming the prospect of a ninety-day war bringing the government to its knees, Cleaver seems to have clung to it with a sense of desperation in the early 1970s.69 In the wake of détente and the neutralization of the socialist bloc, it was clear, he believed, that “[t]he ruling class of the United States is unfolding a plan to carve up the planet in such a way that when the deal goes down the Afro-American people will find themselves trapped inside and at the mercy of a white racist empire.” Seeing no way to combat these developments at the level of national politics or international diplomacy, the only choice was to “organize ourselves into a powerful, deadly, invincible block inside the United States” and ally with “all the other oppressed people inside Babylon and the world who have not made their separate peace with the enemy and continue to struggle for their human rights.” Making no promises of an easy or inevitable victory, Cleaver insisted only that “[t]here is a world of difference between 30 million unarmed niggers and 30 million niggers armed to the gills.”70

Beyond the question of long-term goals and efficacy, Cleaver’s dream of a Black September-–style guerrilla group operating in and out of the United States faced many practical hurdles. Stripped of support from both the BPP and his Asian allies, on uneasy terms with the Algerian government, and unable to locate a new home for the international section, Cleaver was struggling to keep the RPCN afloat, much less engage in an ambitious campaign of transnational revolutionary violence. Kathleen Cleaver carried the brunt of the burden of raising funds and gaining support to keep the RPCN functioning during her trips to the United States and Europe. She later recalled, however, that “[w]hile attracting considerable interest, the RPCN was never able to provide substantial organizational cohesion to the scattered newspapers, groups, and individuals it sought to link together. Apathy and defeat seemed generalized in the movement in America, and the fear and confusion generated by the split in the Panther Party posed a major obstacle to anything connected with Eldridge Cleaver.”71 Even a light and lean transnational guerrilla group needed some means of supporting itself. It was fitting, then, that the apparent solution to this dilemma arrived literally out of the blue in the summer of 1972.

Hijacking, Natural Gas, and the Dissolution of the International Section

On June 2, 1972, Willie Roger Holder and Catherine Marie Kerkow hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 from Los Angeles. Holder, a troubled Vietnam veteran with a history of petty crimes, had no previous involvement with the Black Panthers or any other activist groups. His somewhat erratic plan involved ransoming the passengers in exchange for the freedom of Angela Davis (then awaiting a verdict in her trial in San Jose, California), $500,000, and transit to North Vietnam for himself and Kerkow. Unable to secure freedom for Davis and informed that the plane lacked the range to reach Hanoi, the hijackers instead took the ransom payment and directed the pilot to land in Algiers, where they planned to seek asylum with Cleaver and his fellow band of exiles. Though Cleaver had no advance knowledge of the hijacking, when news arrived via a call from the Algerian government, he rushed to the airport to greet them and inquire about the ransom.72 Starved for funds to continue the operations of the RCPN, support the exiles nominally under his leadership, and perhaps begin his long-delayed guerrilla warfare campaign, the $500,000 that arrived along with Holder and Kerkow was a tantalizing prize. Having embraced hijacking as one of the tools of the cosmopolitan guerrilla, he and his organization now stood to directly gain from its application. Instead, echoing lessons from his earlier dealing with the governments of Cuba and his Asian allies, Cleaver was forcibly reminded that nation-states retained significant power even in this supposed age of transnational insurgency.

When the hijacked Western Airlines flight touched down in Algiers in June 1972, the government of President Boumédiène was deeply involved in negotiations for the state oil company Sonatrach to export natural gas to a Texas-based U.S. company. This contract, valued at potentially $1.2 billion, would raise badly needed funds for Algeria’s economic development. While still publicly committed to Algeria’s revolutionary heritage and opposed to the U.S. war in Vietnam and support for Israel, Boumédiène was loath to jeopardize the potential windfall from natural gas exports, particularly in service of those who seemed more like bandits than legitimate liberation movements.73 Much to Cleaver’s frustration, the Algerian government returned the $500,000 ransom payment along with the plane rather than turning it over to the hijackers or the international section. Holder and Kerkow were granted asylum and released into Cleaver’s custody, but this too proved a mixed blessing. Hopes of selling the hijackers’ story to the U.S. press in order to raise at least some money failed to materialize and soon they became simply another burden on the already overstretched operations of the international section and RCPN in Algiers.74

Compounding the series of setbacks they had suffered internationally and in dealing with Boumédiène, the tensions of daily life in exile had taken a tremendous toll on the group even prior to the arrival of the hijackers. “Those conditions that stimulated the intense momentum of the Panther movement in the United States,” Kathleen Cleaver later observed, “did not exist, and the cultural isolation of the Panthers attenuated their sense of belonging to a genuine community.” At the time, she privately lamented the “stagnation, chaos, disinterest, disgust, [and] perversity,” that characterized “the life of the marooned exiles in Algiers”:

Timothy Leary, who fled his virtual imprisonment at the hands of Cleaver in early 1971, offered a predictably more colorful assessment, describing life in the international section as “a Graham Greene horror story, complete with exotic North African locale, sexual intrigue, personal disintegration, and a cast of exiles caught in webs of counter-intelligence, revolutionary conspiracy, treachery, bravery, and melodrama.”76

Beset by internal and external turmoil, the final act of the international section came in August 1972 in response to another hijacking drama. The hijackers of Delta Airlines Flight 841 were, in the words of Kathleen Cleaver, “an odd assortment of friends who had shared a house together in Detroit.”77 A group of five adults and two children, the hijackers had been living in a Detroit commune prior to executing their plan to seize a plane, demand a ransom, and fly to Algeria. Although two of the commune’s members, Melvin and Jean McNair, had previously considered joining the Panthers in Detroit, none had any real connections or experience with the BPP or other activist organizations. When the hijackers were eventually questioned in Algiers after being released into the custody of the international section, Kathleen Cleaver found that they had “little political consciousness” but instead “strange spiritist beliefs and vaguely pan-African convictions.”78 What they also had, however, was a $1 million ransom that they received in exchange for freeing the crew and passengers of the plane upon reaching Algeria on August 1, 1972. Mindful of the government’s confiscation of the previous ransom, Cleaver and Sekou Odinga reportedly followed the vehicle transporting the hijackers from the airport and shouted out the window “Don’t give up the bread! Don’t give up the bread!” before being halted at gunpoint by Algerian police. The money, however, was already gone. Once again Boumédiène’s government choose to return both the ransom and the plane in order to avoid further antagonizing the United States and jeopardizing the proposed natural gas deal.79

Tensions between the Panthers and the Algerian government had been mounting well before the hijackings in the summer of 1972. Eldridge Cleaver acknowledged that the exiled Panthers, with their “fast cars, Russian machine guns, and plenty of fresh-air macho,” had tested the patience of their hosts from the very beginning.80 So long as Cleaver and his associates confined their activities to issuing propaganda and engaging in dubious hustling operations in Algiers, they were a nuisance that could be tolerated in the name of revolutionary solidarity. The hijackings, however, escalated matters by thrusting the international section, which was nominally recognized and supported by the Algerian government, into the public spotlight amid a global upswing in air piracy. Before Delta Airlines Flight 841 had even landed in Algiers, the representative of the Algerian Interests Section in Washington, Abdel Kader Bousselham, was summoned to the State Department. There he was warned by the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who said that “he could not over-emphasize the seriousness with which this second incident is viewed at the highest level of the USG [US Government] nor the effect that its outcome will have on the progress of our relations.” U.S. officials explicitly cited statements by the Panthers in Algeria as encouraging the hijackings and warned that this constituted “a direct intervention” into U.S. domestic affairs. Bousselham responded by quickly and emphatically disowning Cleaver and his contingent of exiles:

As had been the case in Cuba, the tensions hijacking exposed in Algeria were symptoms of a larger divergence in aims between Cleaver and his hosts. Changing Cold War dynamics ushered in by détente combined with the weight of U.S. economic power to render the Panthers no longer worth protecting.

Though not privy to the high-level discussions in which the Algerians denounced Eldridge Cleaver to U.S. officials, the Panther exiles were acutely aware of the change brought about by the hijackings. In the aftermath of the second hijacking, Kathleen Cleaver recalled, “The hostility towards the Panthers among Algerians, from the lowest policeman to the highest official, became blatant.”82 Long frustrated by the meager support from the Algerian government, which was unable to cover the day-to-day costs of the growing delegation, much less provide the kind of arms and training that Eldridge Cleaver had long desired, he responded to the increasing pressure with a desperate gamble. On August 2, he released an open letter to Boumédiène to the press in Algiers, which was picked up by Le Monde and other newspapers, asking for the return of the $1 million ransom to which he believed the Panthers were entitled. Warning that “without money to organize and support the struggle, there will be no freedom, and those who deprive us of this are depriving us of our freedom,” he suggested that failure to turn over the money to the Panthers would be tantamount to the “the Algerian government … [fighting] the battles of the American government for the fascist imperialist ruling circles that are oppressing the whole American people.”83

Cleaver’s brazen public bid to pressure Boumédiène into releasing the ransom was the last straw so far as the Algerian government was concerned. It was bad enough that the hijackings were jeopardizing potentially lucrative economic arrangements with the United States. Cleaver’s outburst not only called further attention to this fact but also constituted a public attack on Boumédiène’s government and its revolutionary credibility. In response, the Algerian police raided the international section’s villa on August 10, seized their telephone and telex equipment, and put the entire delegation under house arrest.84 In the aftermath, Cleaver was summoned to the office of Salah Hidjeb (also known as Si Salah), the head of the Algerian Sécurité Militaire. The Algerian official was blunt, according to Cleaver’s account of their meeting, declaring that it was widely believed “that we [the Panther exiles] don’t do anything. We are nothing but Palace Revolutionaries.” The official went on to confront the international section’s remaining members with a laundry list of complaints, ranging from encouraging hijacking to drug offenses, kidnapping, and death threats. Cleaver replied by urging his hosts not give in to American pressure to evict the Panthers in order to facilitate the pending natural gas deal. In a clear demonstration that national self-interest trumped any remaining ideological affinity for the exiled former Panthers, Salah curtly replied, “This is Algeria’s gas, and we can sell it to who[m]ever we like—capitalist, communist, it doesn’t make any difference.”85 Privately, Algerian foreign minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika assured U.S. secretary of state William P. Rogers that his government was “interested in developing its relations with U.S.” and added that the Black Panther exiles “do not make any effective contribution to Algeria from [a] revolutionary, ideological, or moral standpoint.”86

The Legacy of the International Section and the RPCN

In the aftermath of the hijackings, the Algerian government lost all remaining patience for what was left of the international section. A September 5, 1972, intelligence report by the CIA, which continued to keep close tabs on the Panther contingent in Algiers, reported that “[l]ast week, the villa was empty and Cleaver was gone.”87 By the end of 1972, the vast majority of the exiles had fled for other destinations. Pete and Charlotte O’Neal left for Cairo in September 1972 and from there traveled to Tanzania, where they took up farming and eventually engaged in a very different brand of transnational activism, founding the United African American Community Center in the village of Imabaseni and hosting visiting young people from their hometown of Kansas City. Connie and Michael Tabor settled in Zambia, while others, including Sekou Odinga, quietly returned to the United States.88 Cleaver had nominally turned over the international section to Pete O’Neal, who was apparently on better terms with the Algerian government, in January 1972. With O’Neal’s departure, formal control of the organization devolved to hijackers Willie Roger Holder and George Brown, neither of whom had any real connections to the domestic or internationally based black freedom struggle.89 What had once been a thirty-person “embassy of the American revolution,” with connections to liberation movements in Algiers, activists in Europe and the United States, and powerful state-level allies in Asia, was reduced to a skeleton crew consisting of the Cleaver family and a handful of hijackers with no place else to go. In January 1973, Eldridge and Kathleen secretly traveled to France, effectively ending their three-and-half-year effort to institutionalize an international base for the African American freedom struggle.

The rise and fall of the Panthers’ international section highlighted both the perils and opportunities of the evolving Cold War for the black freedom struggle in the 1960s and 1970s. By embracing and exploiting Cold War dynamics in Asia, Cleaver and his fellow exiles were able to build an institutional base that did not depend on the U.S. government for support or legitimacy. Canny triangulation between Algiers, Asian allies, and supporters in Europe and elsewhere helped to keep the international section (and later the RPCN) afloat for almost two years after its members were expelled from the BPP. The fate of the international section in the era of détente, however, drives home the point that during the Cold War there was no such thing as a free lunch. Not only did these alliances leave Cleaver dependent on his new allies and vulnerable to unexpected shifts in the Cold War environment, they also led him to tailor his message to appeal to governments and movements that in most cases had only superficial knowledge of and concern for African Americans living in the United States. As Huey Newton had observed from his jail cell, paeans to the genius of Kim Il-sung might serve Cleaver’s needs in exile, but they did little to endear the party to its core base of supporters in urban black America. Diplomacy almost invariably involves choosing between imperfect options. For all the drawbacks, given the position in which he found himself and the aims he sought to achieve, Cleaver’s alliances with revolutionary Asia were almost certainly the best available option at the time. That the international section was able to operate from 1970 to 1973 in spite of the unrelenting hostility of the U.S. government, concerted FBI and CIA efforts to undermine the Panthers from within, the reluctance of its Algerian hosts, eventual excommunication from the BPP, and the logistical challenges of holding together a fractious group of exiles is a testament to the efficacy of the “Asian strategy.”

Similarly, Cleaver’s embrace of the model provided by Black September in the early 1970s was prescient in identifying the ability of stateless groups to exploit the vulnerabilities that came along with the rise of an increasingly high-tech and interconnected world economy. A larger and harder to resolve question involves the appropriateness of these kind of tactics for the black freedom struggle in the United States. The experiences of the BLA, Weather Underground, and the RAF in Germany validated the notion that urban guerrillas could operate for prolonged periods in the heart of the capitalist West. The results produced by these groups, however, were not encouraging for those who saw revolutionary violence as a tool for social change in the First World. The notion that a black guerrilla army, whether it was supported by Kim Il-sung or by a dispersed transnational network, could seize and hold power in the United States remained as far-fetched in the early 1970s as it been when Robert F. Williams had promised a ninety-day victory in the previous decade. But if the government of the United States was, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” fighting a genocidal war in Southeast Asia, maintaining an empire of military bases around the world, and subjecting people of color inside its borders to institutionalized poverty and police brutality, then anticolonial counter-violence could plausibly be seen as not only a just response but a necessary one.90 Given the foundational role of white supremacy in the United States and a centuries-long history of war and repression against people of color at home and abroad, including under a succession of avowedly liberal presidents, reform from within the system was no more likely to bring justice to people of color than was anticolonial violence. Romanticized and gendered notions of violence as a way to “stand up as black men inside of Babylon” undoubtedly fueled the obsession of Cleaver and others within the movement with taking power by force.91 But this strategy was also rooted in a nuanced understanding of the relationship between white supremacy, capitalism, and the violence that supported them. “[W]hether we like it or not,” Cleaver observed, “the world that we live in is controlled with guns, organized and controlled by those who rule. This is the basic fact that we have to deal with. Those who cannot move beyond that point—I don’t know what to say to them.”92 The international section, the RPCN, and the “Cosmopolitan Guerrillas” ultimately and perhaps predictably failed in their efforts to remake America through revolutionary violence. It does not necessarily follow, however, that their goals and tactics were as irrational as suggested by their detractors.

The failure of the international section and its offshoots had much to do with forces beyond the control of its members, from the corrosive effects of COINTELPRO through the calculations of national interest in Algiers, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Hanoi that ultimately undermined the foundations of its foreign support. Internal flaws and weaknesses also played a role in its dissolution, however. Some of these were likely unavoidable: holding together a diverse community of exiles living far from home under conditions of constant uncertainty, with a number of them likely suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their violent encounters with police and the stresses of Panther life, was a challenging task even under the best of circumstances. “[W]orking on that level was new to most of us,” recalled Charlotte O’Neal decades later, “and I think maybe diplomacy wasn’t uppermost in everybody’s minds.”93 The leadership structure of the international section, however, almost certainly exacerbated both its internal and external problems. Running an ambitious and precarious operation an exile was inevitably a cooperative endeavor, with responsibilities that included everything from child care and cooking to high-level international diplomacy and weapons training. Leadership, however, was centralized in the person of Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver was, by his own admission, unprepared for the responsibility of coordinating daily living for as many as thirty people while also trying to carry out his ambitious plans for revolution in the United States.94 This was further complicated by his tendency to treat the female members of the group dismissively and sometimes violently. Women, including Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Klein, Denise Oliver, Charlotte O’Neal, and Connie Matthews Tabor, played a crucial role in creating and maintaining the international section. Elements of the RPCN also attempted to draw attention to the importance of gender and the precarious situation of black women as victims of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.95 But from his autocratic and patriarchal control over the People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation to his treatment of Kathleen, Eldridge Cleaver appears to have advanced little from his earlier conception of “pussy power” in which women were subservient sex objects rather than full equals in the revolution. While attempting to keep the RCPN above water in late 1971 amid “all the petty ridiculous bullshit,” Kathleen Cleaver privately lamented, “Unfortunately, Eldridge seem to feel there is some sexual problem—I have more or less lost interest in that since I do not understand how fucking will lead to freedom.”96