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LEARNING FROM COINTELPRO’S SURVIVORS: ACCOUNTABILITY AND REPAIR  
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Kazu Haga
August 24, 2026
Convergence
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_ "The goal of COINTELPRO wasn’t simply surveillance. Its goal was
to divide us and make us distrust one another.” The technologies
have changed. But perhaps the underlying energy has not. _

, Featured illustration: Kimmie Dearest

 

"Stiner,” a San Quentin Prison correctional officer yelled.
“You’ve got mail.”

Nearly fifty years after COINTELPRO tore through the Black liberation
movement, Watani Stiner found himself staring at a letter he was
afraid to open.  On the envelope was a name he never expected to see:
Ericka Huggins.

Although Watani had not pulled the trigger that killed Ericka’s
husband, the Black Panther Party leader John Huggins, as well as
another party leader, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, he had known for
decades that there was some accountability for having been part of
something larger that made such violence possible. After attending a
restorative justice workshop inside San Quentin, he found himself
compelled to write to her—not to defend himself or explain away the
past, but simply to share his truth and acknowledge his
responsibility.

Writing that letter, he told me, was one of the hardest things he had
ever done. “I struggled with how to apologize. I didn’t want to
reopen old wounds for her. I didn’t want her to think I was trying
to manipulate her or improve my chances of getting out of prison.”

He wrote maybe nine or ten versions, he estimated, before finally
sending it. Weeks later, Ericka’s response arrived. He couldn’t
bring himself to open it. “I honestly thought it was going to say,
‘You’ve got a lot of nerve writing to me.’” Instead, he found
something entirely unexpected. “It was one of the most beautiful and
heartfelt letters I’ve ever received.”

It is difficult to imagine a more unlikely beginning to a friendship.
It is also difficult to imagine a better place to begin thinking about
what our movements need today. Because as I listened to Watani’s
story, I realized we were talking about much more than history. We
were talking about why movements fracture, why they lose sight and
connection to one another. And what it might take to become whole
again.

Watani Stiner has lived through chapters of American history that most
only know through books. As a young man, he became involved with the
Us Organization, one of the major Black nationalist organizations of
the 1960s. After being wrongfully imprisoned for the deaths of John
Huggins and Bunchy Carter, he escaped from San Quentin and spent six
years in exile in the South American country of Guyana, then another
fourteen years in Suriname, before the political violence there began
to threaten the life of his family. He negotiated a deal with the US
government: he would turn himself in and, in exchange, his family
would receive asylum in the US. The government went back on its word,
and Watani was taken away to serve two more decades in prison, while
his family was forced to stay behind in Suriname.

While incarcerated, he became a writer, mentor, restorative justice
practitioner, and one of the most respected elder voices inside San
Quentin. Since his release, he has moved into the intentional
community of Canticle Farm and has continued to work with young
people, restorative justice practitioners, and movement organizers,
helping new generations wrestle with questions he has spent a lifetime
carrying.

History matters. State repression and the history of apparatuses like
COINTELPRO are important to understand. COINTELPRO, short for Counter
Intelligence Program, was a covert and illegal FBI program that
operated primarily from the 1950s through the early 1970s to surveil,
infiltrate, disrupt, and dismantle movements the government considered
politically threatening. It was especially focused on Black liberation
movements, using informants, disinformation, manufactured conflict,
psychological warfare, and criminal prosecutions to sow distrust,
prevent the emergence of Black leadership, and fracture organizations
from within. 

Yet as movements today wrestle with cancel culture, polarization,
public call-out, shaming, and the seemingly endless ways we turn on
one another, I found myself asking a different question: _What does
someone who survived one of the most coordinated government efforts to
destroy social movements believe we most need to learn?_

Understanding Watani’s story is not only important as a historical
artifact. It also gives us the opportunity to carry forward the
lessons of his struggle, and ensure that the lessons gleaned in the
belly of the beast contribute to more powerful movements today. In
honoring his struggle, we see how history is not frozen in time.

THE WEAKNESSES WERE ALREADY THERE

When people talk about COINTELPRO, we often imagine a government
program that infiltrated and destroyed movements from the outside. And
it was. Watani didn’t deny that: “I consider myself a survivor.”
Prison. Exile. Watching friends die. Watching movements fracture. He
had survived all of it.

But what was most insightful was not how he talked about the state’s
role in destroying movements. It was how quickly he turned our
attention inward: “The weaknesses inside our movement existed before
COINTELPRO. They only exploited those weaknesses.” Watani wasn’t
minimizing the violence of the state; he was complicating the
narrative by acknowledging our own responsibility.

There is plenty of responsibility to go around. COINTELPRO was a
government run, multi-million dollar covert operation whose goals
were, in the FBI’s own language
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to “_expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize
the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and
groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and
supporters._” While the program utilized some of its most vicious
tactics against Black radicals, it also targeted and destroyed
liberation and anti-war movements across the country. They _did_, as a
matter of policy, create movement fractures.

But for Watani, the accountability started with the ways he and his
movement allies contributed to those fractures and gave COINTELPRO
more fertile ground to sow distrust.

This lesson was not so different from what I had learned from so many
other incarcerated people. All of them have, in some ways, survived
forms of oppression and state violence: racism, generational poverty,
segregation, the war on drugs. Their healing relied on locating their
story within those larger social-economic-political contexts, but
_also_ about recognizing their individual responsibility in the harm.
Reclaiming agency in their own story is essential.

As Watani reflected on those years, he didn’t spend our time talking
about informants or surveillance. He talked about relationships: “We
developed ideas like operational unity and unity-in-diversity, but
there was also a tendency toward uniformity. Toward seeing one
organization as more valuable than another.”

He described organizations slowly losing the habit of talking with one
another. Differences that had once been creative became competitive.
Healthy disagreement hardened into suspicion. Charismatic leaders
centralized too much power. Jealousy emerged over who got to be the
“vanguard.” Disagreements were hashed out in public spaces:
“Once communication broke down, and once we began dehumanizing other
organizations or seeing them as less legitimate, the movement became
vulnerable.”

Watani returned again and again to one distinction that feels relevant
today: UNITY IS NOT UNIFORMITY. Looking back on the movements of the
1960s, he reflected on Malcolm X’s enormous influence, and how
different organizations inherited different aspects of his vision.
“The Black Panther Party emphasized community survival and
self-defense. The Us Organization focused on reclaiming our African
history, values, identity, and culture. Other organizations emphasized
self-determination, land, or political education. None of them carried
the whole vision.”

“The mistake,” Watani reflected, “was believing our particular
piece was the whole answer.”

As he spoke, I couldn’t help thinking about our own movements.
Today, we often imagine fragmentation as something created by social
media. Certainly, social media accelerates it. Perhaps the deeper
question isn’t how quickly division spreads, but WHY FRACTURES FIND
FERTILE GROUND IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Watani isn’t asking us to agree with one another. He’s asking
something much more difficult: _Can we remain in relationship with one
another even when we don’t agree?_ Because when we stop seeing one
another as fellow travelers carrying different pieces of a shared
struggle, we become remarkably easy to divide. And history suggests
that someone, or something, is always waiting to take advantage of
that.

Years ago, I remember a conversation I had with Luis Rodriguez,
another movement elder. He told me that yes, infiltration _did_
destroy movements. But he also told me something else that will always
stay with me: _Accusations _of infiltration destroyed as many
movements as actual infiltrators. He told me that the strength of a
movement is in how much we trust each other, and how deep our
relationships are. Once we begin pointing the finger and accusing each
other of being infiltrators, of selling out, of not being radical
enough, then we become our own worst enemy. Then, the state only needs
to step back and watch.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ACCOUNTABILITY

As social movement activists, we often think of accountability as
determining who was right and who was wrong. We debate intent, assign
blame, and ask what consequences are deserved. But as I was listening
to Watani speak of accountability, he was describing something much
deeper. In working on that first letter he wrote to Ericka, he
wasn’t asking himself, _“Am I guilty?”_ He was asking, _“What
is my responsibility?” _There is a profound difference.

When Watani first encountered restorative justice, it wasn’t because
he was searching for it. He laughed as he recalled that he attended
the workshop mostly because it gave him an opportunity to leave his
six-by-nine-foot cell for a few hours. The workshop was led by Fania
Davis, one of the country’s foremost restorative justice
practitioners. By the end of the day, something inside him had
shifted. He approached her with a question. “I told her that I
hadn’t fired the shot, so I didn’t feel responsible in that direct
sense. But I did feel responsible for being part of an atmosphere that
led to the deaths of two human beings.” He asked whether she thought
Ericka Huggins, a friend of Fania, would be willing to receive a
letter from him.

It would have been so easy for him to blame the state and build up
resentment. Not only did Watani not pull the trigger, but now decades
later, we know that the FBI sent forged letters to Black
revolutionaries at the time to inflame tensions between the Panthers
and organizations like the Us Organization. It would have been so easy
for him to say, “It wasn’t me. I was wrongfully imprisoned.”

Yet, Watani wasn’t denying individual responsibility. He was
expanding it. He was asking what it means to participate in cultures,
organizations, and systems that make harm more likely, even if we are
not the person who ultimately causes it. “Throughout my life,
whether in prison, exile, or after my release,” he explained, “I
have tried to distinguish between individual guilt and collective
responsibility. I have never accepted responsibility for crimes I did
not commit, but I have accepted responsibility for helping create a
movement culture in which tragedy became possible. That distinction
lies at the heart of restorative justice.”

I am left with curiosity. How do I contribute to an atmosphere in
which it becomes so easy to see people in our movements as disposable?
How do I co-create a culture where fractures are ripping apart
movements and organizations left and right? What would it look like
instead for me to contribute to a culture of deep belonging?

When Ericka agreed to receive his letter, Watani found himself
confronting a different challenge: How do you apologize for something
that cannot be undone? How do you acknowledge your place in history
without claiming responsibility for what isn’t yours? He described
rewriting the letter again and again: “I wanted the letter to come
completely from my heart.”

There is something beautifully slow about his story. Nothing happened
online. No public statements. No performative declarations. No
audience. No likes. Just a man alone in a prison cell trying to find
truthful words.

When Ericka’s reply arrived, he was terrified to open it. Yet,
instead of condemnation, he found grace. “She didn’t simply offer
forgiveness. She gave me something even greater: the gift of
self-forgiveness.” Their story points us toward a kind of
accountability that isn’t about determining winners and losers. It
is trying to restore humanity and strengthen connection, not fracture
them.

Watani told me that he and Ericka corresponded for nearly three years
before meeting face to face. During that time, they didn’t simply
revisit the past. They talked about their children. Their work. Their
disappointments. Their hopes. It wasn’t a conversation about who was
wrong. It was about getting to know the humans behind the harm. “Our
humanity really began to emerge through those letters,” he said.

I couldn’t help thinking about how different that is from the ways
we often encounter one another today. When so many of our conflicts
happen on social media, we lack the multiple points of connection, of
relationship, to make sense of ourselves and each other. We miss the
wholeness that is essential to accountability, healing, and repair. 

HUMANITY CANNOT BE INFILTRATED

Eventually, with the help of Fania, Watani and Ericka met at San
Quentin. He described walking into the room, embracing her, and
unexpectedly beginning to cry–something he rarely did. They spoke
not only about John’s death, but about the movements that had shaped
both of them. They compared memories, wounds, histories. Now, they
consider each other the deepest of friends.

Listening to Watani recount this story, I was reminded of the
importance of curiosity. The willingness to ask another human being,
“Who are you? What did you experience? What did you see? What
matters to you? How are you hurting? What would bring you healing?”
It is the willingness to stay in relationship long enough for another
person’s humanity to become visible again. “If I had to point to
one experience that transformed my understanding of humanity,”
Watani said, “It would be meeting Ericka.”

LESSONS FOR TODAY

I asked Watani what he would want young organizers to know. His
response? “Dialogue.”

He worried that movements today are losing the ability to remain in
relationship with one another. Technology has transformed how quickly
information (and misinformation) moves. Social media can connect us
across continents, but it can also convince us that we know someone
without ever having sat across from them. “Who benefits from this
conflict?” he asked. “Who benefits from this division? Who
benefits from this distrust?” Those questions feel as urgent today
as they did fifty years ago.

He was careful not to equate social media with COINTELPRO. The
contexts are different. The actors are different. But the underlying
dynamic felt familiar to him. “The goal of COINTELPRO wasn’t
simply surveillance. Its goal was to divide us and make us distrust
one another.” The technologies have changed. But perhaps the
underlying energy has not.

Near the end of our conversation, Watani offered one final reflection.
“If we can hold on to our humanity and recognize the humanity in one
another, it becomes much harder for anyone to divide us.”

I noticed he didn’t say, “if we can all agree with one another,”
or “if we stop making mistakes,” or “if we find the one correct
ideology.” He said, “recognize the humanity in one another.”
Even across harm.

The humanity that emerged through years of letters with Ericka
Huggins. The humanity that allowed accountability to become something
larger than blame. The humanity that movements lost when they stopped
talking to one another. The humanity that no program—not even
COINTELPRO—can destroy unless we first surrender it ourselves.

“The weaknesses in our movement were already there. COINTELPRO only
exploited them.” For me, that sentence is not an indictment, or even
a warning. It’s an invitation. An invitation to ask not only how we
resist the forces that seek to divide us, but how we cultivate the
relationships that make division less possible in the first place.

 

_Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and
restorative justice with over 25 years of experience in social change
work, a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding
core member of the Ahimsa Collective, a YES! Jam facilitator, and
author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm
and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through
Collapse._

 

_Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We work with
organizers and activists on the frontlines of today’s most pressing
struggles to produce articles, videos and podcasts that sharpen our
collective practice by lifting up stories from the grassroots and
making space for reflection and study. Our community of readers,
viewers, and content producers are united in our purpose: winning
multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic economy._

 

* COINTELPRO
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* The Black Panther Party
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* Us Organization
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* restorative justice
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