Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  According to him, he was asked by the leadership to take the group on a super-secret mission to the state of Maine. Their task, Machtinger says, was the kidnapping of a member of the Rockefeller family, said to be at a summer home whose exact location has been lost to time. “I don’t even remember which Rockefeller it was,” he says. “I just remember we went up there, got a hotel, and drove around a lot, not even sure what we were supposed to do. We were there like a week, and eventually, you know, we didn’t have any plan, we just kind of gave up.” What Machtinger does remember, however, is the leadership’s wrath when he returned in defeat to San Francisco. Though he had been one of the group’s eleven founders and had been among those considered the early leadership, he was now abruptly dismissed from Weatherman and exiled to Seattle. “You know, there’s this myth that Bernardine ruled out any violent actions after Mendocino, but it’s just not true,” Machtinger says. “The line is much blurrier than that. The fact is, we were prepared to do a political kidnapping, and in fact we tried to, but we weren’t able to carry it out.”

  The second stage of the war plans involved something almost as dramatic: the bombings of major centers of power on both coasts. The targets were the San Francisco Hall of Justice, the massive concrete monolith that housed the courts and the police department, and the headquarters of the New York Police Department. The San Francisco bomb was placed in a men’s room drain; a warning was phoned in, but the device failed to detonate, presumably because the Bay Area Weathermen had yet to master a working bomb design. Though rumors of the incident floated among FBI agents for years, details were only confirmed in David Gilbert’s 2012 book, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond. Afterward, Gilbert writes, “we had the awkward but necessary responsibility of telling the authorities [by telephone] exactly where the device was hidden so that the bomb squad could find and defuse it, thus giving police forensics an intact example of our circuit and components.”*9 By the June 4 deadline, in fact, neither the San Francisco nor New York actions had taken place. This was a significant setback for the organization; war had been declared, actions had been promised, and nothing had happened. “Raising people’s hopes that high isn’t a good way to build trust in the underground,” griped a letter writer to the Berkeley Tribe.

  Weather’s reputation was salvaged in the near term by its fledgling New York cell, which would come to play an outsized role in future actions. The cell’s importance has never been publicly explored, largely because until now its members have declined to discuss its operations. But it was surprisingly small: Before the Townhouse, Weather could count as many as thirty-five active members in New York; afterward, while outsiders and aboveground supporters drifted in and out, the core of the “new” New York cell was rarely more than six people, including Ron Fliegelman. Its leader was Robbie Roth, the twenty-year-old student who had replaced Mark Rudd as head of Columbia’s SDS chapter. Roth was a popular Weatherman, smart, generous, and easygoing, traits Dohrn and the others recognized. Weather’s post-Mendocino leadership has usually been understood as comprising three people—Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Bill Ayers—but in fact, Roth was named leadership’s fourth member after the Townhouse.

  Months later the New York cell’s third prominent member, Eleanor Stein, would be named the fifth member of Weather’s Central Committee. Stein was a classic “red diaper” baby, intense and committed. That June she, Roth, and Fliegelman were living with several others in an apartment they rented in a house on Amity Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. (“That place took all the romance out of the underground for me,” recalls Stein’s ex-husband, Jonah Raskin, a Weatherman supporter who visited often. “A single apartment, upper floor, remaindered furniture, with a half-dozen people crammed inside.”) Fliegelman had purchased dynamite in Vermont under an assumed name; he kept it in a garage they rented nearby. Forty years later, he shudders at the memory of that first bombing, at NYPD headquarters. “That first one was the scariest,” he recalls. “Going into a public building, there was security, and you had to get past it. We had people who did the casings. We needed people who wouldn’t be noticed, so they went in dressed like lawyers. Still, I was scared. Very scared. We knew if we did this, they would come after us.”

  The “casers” identified a second-floor men’s room as an ideal spot to hide a bomb: It was just 125 feet from Police Commissioner Howard Leary’s office. In the years to come, public bathrooms would become Weatherman’s favorite target. Stall doors allowed a measure of privacy, and many bathrooms could be locked from within. At the Amity Street apartment, Fliegelman built the bomb, a large one, using his new design: about fifteen sticks of dynamite and a Westclox alarm clock purchased at a Radio Shack. The challenge was smuggling it into the building; they couldn’t risk having a backpack or briefcase searched. In the end, Fliegelman says, they hollowed out a thick law book and placed the bomb inside. Exactly who walked it through security and placed it above a ceiling tile in the bathroom has never been disclosed, but by the afternoon of Tuesday, June 9, the bomb was in place. “It wasn’t like they had metal detectors back then,” Fliegelman says. “There was just a guy at a desk, and we walked right past him.”

  At 6:40 p.m. they phoned in the warning. “There is a bomb set to go off at police headquarters,” said the male caller, who hung up without offering details. At that moment about 150 people were in the building. Police operators got this kind of call routinely in 1970; it was ignored. Seventeen minutes later, at 6:57, the bomb exploded, its deep boom ringing through the narrow streets and alleys of Little Italy. The blast demolished two walls of the bathroom and blew a hole in the floor twenty feet wide and forty feet long, destroyed a deputy commissioner’s office on one side, shattered dozens of windows, and catapulted a cloud of soot and smoke into Centre Street; chunks of granite the size of cinder blocks crushed two cars below. Eight people were treated for injuries, none of them serious. Afterward, furious police inspectors stalked the wreckage. “We’ll investigate this until our dying day,” one told the Daily News.

  Forty years later Weatherman bombings can blur together, a string of dates and buildings and communiqués. The NYPD headquarters attack, however, was unique, because it was unprecedented; it left the department and all city government deeply shaken. Commissioner Leary flew back from a conference in West Berlin; as he spoke to reporters at Kennedy airport in New York, headquarters was being evacuated after a copycat bomb threat. Mayor John Lindsay vowed a “relentless” investigation; his residence, Gracie Mansion, was itself evacuated after a bomb threat. “Our problem,” one police commander said, “is not the damage to the building or to our own morale. Our problem is the feeling that if the police cannot protect themselves, how can they protect anyone else?”

  In the days immediately afterward, significant security precautions began appearing for the first time at police headquarters, major government buildings, and New York skyscrapers, a trend that would accelerate during the early 1970s. Civilians entering police facilities were forced to show identification, have their appointments confirmed, and be escorted when in the building. At J.C. Penney headquarters the company installed electronically coded door openers and television cameras. In other buildings the bathrooms began to be locked. The Times, for one, remained skeptical that anything could be done. “Nothing and no one can be made safe from a man determined to explode an infernal machine in a public building,” it editorialized. “When the full implications of that truth sink in . . . New Yorkers are going to realize that they are living with a new urban anxiety.”10

  The NYPD bombing marked an abrupt change, too, in the tone of Weatherman’s message. The communiqué issued afterward was a sharp turn away from the traditional New Left fight-alongside-the-blacks message. In place of the dense Marxist verbiage of the original Weatherman statement was something that sounded as though it were written in Haight-Ashbury rather than in some Ivy League apartment. It was a clear effort, the first of several,
to connect with the burgeoning youth culture that had taken over much of the Movement in the wake of SDS’s immolation:

  The pigs in this country are our enemies. . . . The pigs try to look invulnerable, but we keep finding their weaknesses. Thousands of kids, from Berkeley to the UN Plaza, keep tearing up and ROTC buildings keep coming down. Nixon invades Cambodia and hundreds of schools are shut down by strikes. Every time the pigs think they’ve stopped us, we come back a little stronger and a lot smarter. They guard their buildings and we walk right past their guards. They look for us—we get them first. They built the Bank of America—kids burn it down. They outlaw grass, we build a culture of life and music.

  At their apartment in Cobble Hill, the New York cell and its supporters were jubilant. “That first one, I remember, we had one heck of a celebration afterward,” recalls Ron Fliegelman.

  06

  “RESPONSIBLE TERRORISM”

  Weatherman, June 1970 to October 1970

  On Friday, June 5, 1970, four days before the attack on NYPD headquarters, President Nixon summoned J. Edgar Hoover and CIA director Richard Helms to the Oval Office, along with the chiefs of the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nixon was furious. Everywhere he looked, the antiwar movement seemed to be turning increasingly violent. The deaths at Kent State were still fresh in the air. Weatherman had now declared war; its first attacks were promised any day. This had gone far beyond the Townhouse and random bombings. The president lectured Hoover and the others that “revolutionary terrorism” now represented the single greatest threat against American society. He demanded that the four agencies assemble a concerted, overarching intelligence plan to defeat its spread.

  At the FBI, Hoover’s No. 2 man, Bill Sullivan, already had such a plan well in hand. The following Monday, June 8, he convened the first of five meetings intended to tear down the walls between the FBI, the CIA, and their brethren, lift all restrictions on domestic intelligence gathering, and clear the way for all four agencies to institute every dirty trick in the FBI’s old playbook: illegal break-ins, unilateral wiretapping, the opening of mail, even inserting informants into undergraduate classrooms. They called it the Huston Plan, after Tom Charles Huston, the twenty-nine-year-old Nixon aide who championed it alongside Sullivan. When Huston relayed the plan to Nixon on July 14, the president said he approved. There was just one problem: J. Edgar Hoover was dead set against the Huston Plan.

  The old man had grown exceedingly cautious in his last years, fearful his legacy would be tarnished if the rampant illegalities he had ordered over the years burst into view. He had never liked working with the CIA and had rarely done so; he didn’t want anyone, especially the FBI’s institutional rivals, knowing the Bureau’s secrets. But his main objection was the question of blame if this ever became public. Nixon had given only verbal approval. Hoover, who had no idea that Sullivan had already cleared FBI offices to engage in almost all these illegal tactics, had no doubt he and the FBI would take the fall.

  Hoover had something else to hide: the Bureau’s near-total inability to learn much of anything about Weatherman and other violence-prone radicals. With the loss of Larry Grathwohl, the FBI didn’t have a single informant anywhere near Weatherman—not one. Nor did it any longer have any useful wiretaps. As a result, the Nixon administration was badly misreading Weatherman’s status. No one at the FBI had any idea that the Townhouse had left the group in shambles. In fact, the startling explosion in the heart of New York City left senior officials believing exactly the opposite: that Weatherman constituted as dire a threat to national security as any the United States now faced. In the FBI’s nightmare scenario, Weatherman would lead thousands of long-haired demonstrators into a campaign of sabotage and assassination.

  Without informants, FBI agents across the country had first tried traditional investigative methods, interviewing Weatherman family and friends. This got them nowhere. A few agents were allowed to grow their hair long and linger at demonstrations, but it would take months if not years before they could be expected to infiltrate Weatherman or its allies. The fact was, the FBI had never attempted to root out an underground group like Weatherman. The legality of the tactics under consideration—or already under way—was unclear; no court, for instance, had yet ruled whether wiretaps could be installed without a court order. “Can I put an informant in a college classroom?” William Dyson, the agent put in charge of Weatherman cases, recalls wondering. “Can I penetrate any college organization? What can I do? And nobody had any rules or regulations. There was nothing.”

  Unsure and unconnected, Dyson and his peers had no clear sense of how to safely operate in this strange new world of long hair, drugs, and secrecy. The one thing everyone believed was that Weatherman would never be brought down by traditional methods. That brought extraordinary pressure to bend the rules. “There were certain people in the FBI who made the decision: We’ve got to take a step—anything to get rid of these people,” Dyson recalls. “Anything! Not kill them, per se, but anything went. If we suspect somebody’s involved in this, put a wiretap on them. Put a microphone in. Steal his mail. Do anything!”

  Chief among those “certain people” was Bill Sullivan, who was assuming control over all the FBI’s domestic investigations. A number of offices had already begun illegally opening the mail of Weatherman supporters; New York’s Squad 47 purchased a small machine that steamed open envelopes. “We knew they were doing it,” recalls Elizabeth Fink, who lived with several Weatherman supporters in Brooklyn. “Our mailman told us. They came and took our mail every two weeks. Like clockwork.” Wiretaps were ramped up; the Bureau would eventually record more than thirteen thousand individual conversations. Sullivan had already sent word down the chain of command that “black bag jobs” were to be resumed—without Hoover’s knowledge. These illegal burglaries (typically designed to place listening devices in the homes of Weather sympathizers) would eventually center on known supporters such as Bernardine Dohrn’s sister, Jennifer.

  The most zealous of the FBI’s burglars belonged to Squad 47. All its break-ins fit the same pattern. One of its alumni, Donald Strickland, today an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut, says that when an agent sought approval for a break-in, he wrote a memo to Squad 47’s supervisor, an avuncular Irishman named John Kearney, asking for an “intensive investigation.” Kearney, in turn, would clear the job with a senior administrator at FBI headquarters, often the Bureau’s No. 3 man, Mark Felt, best known to history as the reporter Bob Woodward’s infamous “Deep Throat” source. Once a burglary was approved, up to twenty agents would stake out the site. In New York most of the bag jobs took place in apartment buildings. There was generally no need for an actual break-in; a building superintendent would almost always hand over a key. Half the agents would wait for the target to leave and follow him or her, reporting back to supervisors if the subject was returning; the other agents would then enter the apartment. Once inside, they would silently fan out, guns drawn, to make sure no one was there.

  “We’d give ’em ten to fifteen minutes to get out of the neighborhood, then we’d go,” Strickland recalls. “You never knew who might have stayed inside. It could have been Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn themselves. So that was pretty hairy.”

  Once the coast was clear, each agent had a specific duty. One or two would bag and remove the trash. Others would insert tiny microphones into the overhead lights, taking special care to bug the bedroom—“where we knew all the skullduggery talk took place,” Strickland says. Another agent would be assigned to make copies of any address books and personal correspondence. The squad had a special camera built into a briefcase, and two agents were assigned to photograph the apartment. In most cases the FBI burglars were able to finish their tasks in thirty minutes or less.

  Still, such tactics made many agents uncomfortable, few more so than William Dyson. “We were going to end up with FBI agents arrested,” he remembers thinking at the time. �
�Not because what they did was wrong, but because nobody knew what was right and wrong.”

  J. Edgar Hoover sensed this as well. After Nixon approved the Huston Plan, Hoover demanded an audience with the president. “In view of the crisis of terrorism,” Nixon told him, he found the plan “justified and reasonable.” But Hoover would have none of it. Nixon, fearing a scandal if Hoover resigned in protest, relented. The Huston Plan was dead. But as his own men continued pursuing these tactics behind Hoover’s back, the FBI remained the leading edge of the illegal campaign against antiwar radicals. The Bureau was, in effect, going it alone, and in the end it would pay the price.

  • • •

  By midsummer Ron Fliegelman’s new bomb design had migrated to the Bay Area, allowing Weatherman to finally begin launching actions on both coasts. Cathy Wilkerson acknowledges that she helped build the first two bombs, small ones they decided to detonate at the sprawling Presidio military base, near the tip of the San Francisco peninsula. The twin bombings may have been viewed as experimental, in that there was no communiqué or claim of responsibility released afterward. The first device, described in newspapers the next day as a pipe bomb two inches in diameter, was left in a trash can in a parking garage outside the Armed Service Police Headquarters. The second was placed at the base of a twenty-five-foot outdoor model of a Nike-Ajax missile. The bomb in the trash can was spotted. A police bomb squad was en route, in fact, when it went off just before 1 a.m. on Sunday, July 26, blowing a hole in an adjacent cinder block wall and scattering debris across a military policeman’s desk. The second bomb went off without a hitch, destroying the missile model. No one was hurt.

  A brief communiqué, Weatherman’s third, was issued later that day, but in Detroit, where two days earlier Dohrn, Ayers, and eleven other Weathermen had been indicted for “conspiracy to commit terrorism.” Rich in the groovy jargon the group had begun using in an effort to reach the counterculture, the communiqué was timed to coincide with the eleventh anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. “Today we attack with rocks, riots and bombs the greatest killer pig ever known to man—Amerikan imperialism,” it read. “A year ago people thought it can’t happen here. Look at where we’ve come. . . . [Attorney General John] Mitchell indicts 8 or 10 or 13; thousands of freaks plot to build a new world on the ruins of honk America. And to General Mitchell we say: ‘Don’t look for us, Dog; we’ll find you first.’”