Roots of the NSA: How the White Panthers Saved the Movement and the FISA Court was Created | Alternet

In early August 1970, two thin white guys with Afros and purple T-shirts that said “White Panther Party” WPP came into the National Lawyers Guild office in Detroit. A few weeks earlier, Lawrence Pun Plamondon, the first white revolutionary in modern times to make the FBI’s Top 10, had been arrested in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for allegedly throwing a beer can out of a van. He was being driven to a hiding place by Jack Forrest and another member of the WPP. They pled guilty to harboring a fugitive.Pun, Jack and John Sinclair at that time doing nine and a half to 10 years in Michigan’s Jackson Penitentiary for two joints had been charged earlier for the 1968 dynamite bombing of the CIA recruitment office in Ann Arbor. Pun, already facing numerous charges around the county, went underground at the news of the indictment and ultimately to Algeria, where Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers BPP was also a fugitive. But there wasn’t any marijuana, alcohol or hippie girls in Algeria, so Pun did not last long. Because the FBI had infiltrated the WPP and their informant was sleeping with Pun’s wife, they were hot on his trail.

via Roots of the NSA: How the White Panthers Saved the Movement and the FISA Court was Created | Alternet.