The move into Dohrn’s orbit introduced young Delia to a strange new world of intrigue she found thrilling. “There were secret things, and I kept them secret,” she recalls. “We would go see Bernardine and Billy, and Mom would say, ‘Don’t say anything about this at school, don’t tell your dad, don’t tell your grandparents.’ I knew what was happening, what they were doing, and why. I knew the FBI was all around, and it was dangerous. I never told a soul.”
When Dohrn was visiting from Hermosa Beach, Delia would join her in the Sunset-area apartment. But before long she began accompanying her on outings, first around San Francisco, then to Hermosa Beach and other destinations she can only vaguely remember. In those early months Mona would drop Delia off at Golden Gate Park’s Conservatory of Flowers, a Victorian-era greenhouse, where her mother showed her how to watch for police. Once they were sure they weren’t followed, Mona would leave, and Delia would wander among the greenery until Dohrn or Bill Ayers or Paul Bradley would mysteriously appear to take her away. In Hermosa Beach, Dohrn and Ayers—now “Molly and Mike”—would take her shopping and to the movies. They insisted on calling Delia by her code name, “Sunflower,” which Delia secretly loathed.
“I went to L.A. a bunch of times,” Delia recalls. “I would play while they had meetings. There was a lot of time in cars. Bernardine and Billy always had cool cars, fifties cars. We would go to movies, old films, Chaplin films. Later I started going on trips, into the countryside, to other cities, trips on airplanes, on trains, cross-country, once or twice to upstate New York, where I think we stayed when Jeff Jones moved there. I knew they loved spending time with us, my siblings included, but I also knew we were good cover. The two things went together well. I know Mom was really into that, that we were helping. Did we scout out bombing targets? Yeah, I think so. I never actually saw anything explode, but it was always discussed. ‘We had a great action. We’re going to be discussing an action.’”
In time, Delia came to know almost all the remaining Weathermen, though their ever-changing code names perplexed her. “I totally loved Cathy Wilkerson. Cathy was ‘Susie.’ Paul Bradley introduced me to comic books. He was ‘Jack.’ Robbie Roth was ‘Jimmy.’ Rick Ayers was ‘Skip.’ I didn’t like it when Bernardine changed from ‘Molly’ to ‘Rose’ and Billy went from ‘Mike’ to ‘Joe.’ It was confusing.”
The second Mellis daughter, Miranda, who was three when the family moved to San Francisco, fell into Wilkerson’s orbit. “I was not allowed to go near Delia, because she was Bernardine’s,” Wilkerson recalls. “So Miranda and I, we would hitchhike to Santa Cruz and walk on the beach all day. She remembers none of it. It had nothing to do with actions.” Even the baby, Bernadine—everyone called her by her nickname, “Redbird”—was used. “I used to take the baby, little Bernadine, down to Hermosa Beach and leave her with ‘Big’ Bernardine all the time,” recalls Marvin Doyle. “It was cover, sure, but it was also a respite for Mona.” Paul Bradley recalls a trip in which he was obliged to ferry the baby back north on a commercial flight.
It took time for Dennis Cunningham, who remained in Chicago, to realize what had happened. “[Dohrn] had been interested in me [going underground],” he says, “but they definitely wanted Mona out there, because I think what they wanted most was my kids, to use as ‘beards.’ I know what Mona did. I know how many of these ‘trips’ Delia went on with Bernardine. She and the other kids went on actions. Did it upset me? Well, I was indifferent at first, then a little fearful, sure.”
As the months stretched into years, all four of Mona Mellis’s children grew accustomed to traveling with the Weathermen. Wilkerson drove cross-country with Delia and Miranda at least once. The children were useful ornaments, but other factors were at work. Several of the Weatherwomen were approaching thirty, and a few, like Dohrn and Wilkerson, were struggling with the issue of motherhood. Says Wilkerson of her time with Miranda, “It was all about my biological clock. I had always been a ‘kid person,’ and then I had given up kids for the revolution.” Delia believes she and her siblings served not only as cover but as surrogate children until these women could become mothers themselves. “Bernardine once told me we were the reason she decided to become a mother,” Delia remembers. “Until then, she had been wrapped up in this idea that she couldn’t and still remain a feminist.”
• • •
Dennis Cunningham, it turned out, wasn’t the only person keeping tabs on what Mona Mellis was up to in San Francisco. At least one of his friends was an FBI informer, and it didn’t take long before Mona drew the Bureau’s scrutiny. “We got word that Mona was coming out to do her thing with Bernardine,” a retired Bay Area FBI agent named William Reagan recalls. “She had been on our radar, but it wasn’t till she came out here that things got serious.”
“Willie” Reagan wasn’t just any FBI man: He was one of the first agents in the Bureau’s history to work exclusively undercover. After transferring from Florida, Reagan had been among the first San Francisco agents to begin wearing long hair and hippie attire in 1969; most used this disguise only to infiltrate public meetings and demonstrations. Heavily bearded, a dead ringer for the rock singer David Crosby, Reagan had tracked Weather fugitives in vain since the group’s earliest days, hanging out with Abbie Hoffman and other Yippie leaders in hopes of sniffing them out. He had been one of the “beards” on Market Street the day of the Encirclement.
Reagan thought Mona Mellis was the best lead the FBI had gleaned in eighteen frustrating months hunting the Weather leadership. When she and her children rented the apartment in Haight-Ashbury, Reagan moved into the same building. Riffing on his Florida background, he posed as “Bill Raymond,” a fugitive Gulf Coast gambler now working as an accountant for a group of marijuana farmers. “Mona was sharp,” Reagan recalls. “I remember the first time I met her, walking up the apartment stairs, probably December ’71, she said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m your new neighbor.’ She goes, ‘How did you get this apartment? I’ve had friends who wanted to move into this building, and they couldn’t get in.’ I gave her this long explanation about how I knew some people in the Haight [Haight-Ashbury], and that seemed to satisfy her.”
Both the FBI and the San Francisco police kept Mona’s building under around-the-clock surveillance. They followed most of her visitors, not that it mattered. “We didn’t have anything close to modern surveillance procedures,” Reagan says with a sigh. “Half the time we had no idea who we were following. They were really good at losing our guys.” SFPD detectives, meanwhile, zealously searched the Mellis family’s trash. “Oh, God, worst trash you’ve ever smelled,” recalls one retired detective. “Her kids were vegetarians, and those diapers, oh, Jesus. . . .” As the weeks ticked by, Reagan made a habit of encountering Mona in the hallways. They became friendly. Mona was in the process of coming out as a lesbian, and Reagan began accompanying her to a lesbian bar, Maud’s, where they played pool.
That winter, in fact, Reagan grew close enough to Mona that she asked him to babysit her children—the very same children who were hanging out with the Weather leadership. But neither the children nor Mona ever said a meaningful word about Bernardine Dohrn or the Weather Underground. The FBI didn’t have a clue about Delia’s visits with Dohrn; in fact, Reagan didn’t learn of Dohrn’s relationship with the Mellis children until he was interviewed for this book. At only one point during the six or seven months he lived in their building, he says, did he sense Weather’s presence. It came in the spring of 1972, when he agreed to drive Mona to a music festival in Colorado. At the last moment she canceled, then asked Reagan if he would take one of her girlfriends instead. The trip never happened, but Reagan did catch one tantalizing glimpse of the girlfriend when Mona briefly opened her apartment door. The young woman, whoever she was, was wearing a bright red wig, and for a fleeting moment Reagan thought it was Dohrn. He never met her, or saw her again, and shortly afterward transferred to British Columbia, where he spent the next two
years tracking sightings of Weather fugitives. “I don’t know whether that was Bernardine or not,” he says. “It haunts me to this day.”
North of the city, in Marin County, another FBI agent, Bud Watkins, had his own chances to pursue the Weather leadership. Michael Kennedy’s law partner, Joe Rhine, had a home on a remote hillside near Point Reyes, and one of his neighbors told a story of encountering Rhine with a woman while out walking. The woman repeatedly turned her face away from the neighbor’s gaze, making him suspicious, and during a subsequent visit to the post office the neighbor spied Dohrn’s wanted poster. He was certain the woman he had seen was Dohrn, but the FBI, despite another long surveillance, was never able to confirm it.
Watkins felt he got much closer to capturing Kathy Boudin. The Bureau had flagged her fake driver’s license, and when the license was entered into a state database following a speeding violation in Marin, Watkins and another agent had an all-points bulletin issued on the car. It was found a few days later in San Anselmo, parked near the home of an attorney with well-known radical sympathies. Surveillance on the car, however, indicated that it had been abandoned. Boudin was never found.
• • •
By the beginning of 1972, Weather’s energies were ebbing. They were down to fifteen or so active members, and almost all were questioning their reason for being. “There were long periods when not much got done,” remembers Ron Fliegelman. “We met with people to raise money, we talked about politics. You read, you talked. It was never boring. It was pleasant.”
Weather’s leadership, especially Dohrn, spent much of 1972 traveling the country in an effort to rebuild the political and intellectual alliances it had so cavalierly burned after destroying SDS. “By mid-’71 we realized we had pissed too many people off,” says Marvin Doyle. “It was time to rebuild those bridges, and Bernardine was really good at that. She was completely sincere.”
For most of America, however, Weather simply disappeared. During all of 1972, in fact, it mounted only one action, though its target was significant: the Pentagon. This lone bombing can be understood in the context of input the leadership was receiving from other radical groups, who felt that protest bombings no longer had much purpose. For Weather to give up bombings altogether, however, would be to disavow everything it had achieved to that point. Dohrn and Ayers, at least, agreed on a new tack: fewer bombings, bigger targets.
A description of the Pentagon bombing is included in Bill Ayers’s Fugitive Days, and while he uses pseudonyms, it seems clear that members of the New York cell were responsible. The key participant, “Aaron,” appears to be a thinly disguised Ron Fliegelman. Fliegelman says he does not remember the incident. “Aaron,” Ayers writes, “was the backbone of the group—entirely committed and trustworthy, hardworking and dependable. . . . A guy we all believed could easily survive in the Australian Outback or the Siberian wilderness for weeks with nothing but a pocket knife. . . . The model middle cadre.”
The Pentagon was the second of Weather’s three “dream” targets, the others being the Capitol, bombed a year earlier, and the White House, which they had “cased” by mingling with tours. “Aaron” was one of three Weathermen who studied the Pentagon off and on for months; the others, a woman Ayers calls “Anna” and a man he calls “Zeke,” may well have been Robbie Roth and any one of several female Weathermen. They deposited their dynamite in a rented storage locker and, in keeping with tradition, took a cheap apartment they paid for by the week. “Anna” was their scout, walking into the Pentagon most mornings amid the crowds of incoming office workers. She wore a dark wig and thick glasses, dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase, and covered her fingertips in clear nail polish, the better to obscure any fingerprints she left behind. In the days before the military tightened its security procedures, she was able to prowl the long miles of hallways unchallenged, usually leaving by 11 a.m. Back at the apartment, she drew elaborate maps from memory. Ayers writes:
I can do it, she said finally, pulling out her sketches and maps. Here—she pointed to an isolated hallway in the basement of the Air Force section—I’ve been here four times, never seen another person, and there’s a woman’s room halfway down, right here. She made an X on the map. There’s a drain on the floor, narrow but big enough, I think, she said. One more visit was planned in order to unscrew the cover and take the dimensions of the space.
Anna was in the next day at 9:00 AM, and was in the women’s room and the stall by 9:10 AM. She locked the door, hung up her jacket, and pulled plastic gloves, a screwdriver, and [a] tape measure from her briefcase. The grated cover was gunky but easy to pop off once the screws were out, and there was a comfortable 4-inch diameter that ran down for over a foot. Anna replaced the drain cover, wiped the area down and was back at the apartment by 10:00 AM.
“Aaron” had the bomb ready when she returned, a foot-long packet of dynamite with fishing line and a hook tied to one end so that it could be lowered into the drain; the final decision to move forward was made only after calls with Dohrn and Ayers. Afterward “Aaron” slid the bomb beneath the papers in Anna’s briefcase, and she returned to the Pentagon to place it in the drain. While “Anna and Zeke” left town, “Aaron” spent the rest of the afternoon wiping down the apartment, cleaning the storage locker, and paying their remaining bills. He called in the first warning to the Washington Post, making just one slipup: He said a bomb would detonate on the eighth floor, but the Pentagon has only five. At eleven thirty “Aaron” phoned a second warning to the Pentagon’s emergency line. The bomb went off just before 1 a.m., right on schedule, demolishing the fourth-floor restroom and sending thousands of gallons of water cascading onto a shopping concourse below.
Among the Weathermen, this was a major strategic victory, a strike inside the heart of America’s war machine, by far the most audacious bombing in the group’s short history. However, 1972 was not 1970, and in the ensuing days the tenor of mainstream press coverage was far more scathing than after bombings just two years before. In an especially stinging comment, the New York Times editorialized:
The bomb explosion at the Pentagon represents a return to the mindless display of violence as a means of registering dissent from the violence of war. The ultraradicals who boast of responsibility for this pointless act stand totally discredited by the overwhelming mass of the student generation whom they once hoped to enlist in their anarchist ranks. . . . It is important to recognize the culprits for what they are—not idealistic activists but vandals posing as revolutionaries.
• • •
By 1972 the lassitude that pervaded the Weather Underground had spread to its government pursuers. The roving prosecutor, Guy Goodwin, was still convening grand juries, but not one had led to a significant arrest, much less a conviction. The FBI’s feckless work, meanwhile, reached a turning point that spring. For two solid years agents across the country had engaged in a variety of illegal activities designed to track down Weather’s leadership: illegal wiretapping, mail opening, and dozens of break-ins, much of it targeting the group’s families, friends, and supporters—anyone, in short, who might have the first idea where they were hiding. But by May 1972, when J. Edgar Hoover died at the age of seventy-seven, the Bureau had precisely one arrest to show for the risks it had taken: that of Judy Clark outside a Manhattan theater, a matter of sheer luck. Conventional methods had gotten them nowhere.
Privately many officers in the busiest Weatherman squad, New York’s Squad 47, thought Weather no longer warranted the resources the Bureau was devoting to it; among the nicknames agents pinned on the group was “the terrible toilet bombers.” They even penned a bit of doggerel: “Weatherman, Weatherman, what do you do? Blow up a toilet every year or two.” When the squad’s supervisor, John Kearney, retired that June, his men gathered to present him with a gift. “We haven’t managed to actually capture any of the Weather leadership,” an agent announced, “but we have come awfully close.” And with a flourish, he produced a cl
ear plastic evidence envelope and presented it to Kearney, who grinned when he saw its contents: a pair of Bernardine Dohrn’s sister Jennifer’s panties.
Kearney’s replacement was a veteran agent named Horace Beckwith, who had been working radical cases, including the Sam Melville bombings, since 1966. Beckwith was deeply frustrated by the Bureau’s inability to make arrests. In an attempt to reinvigorate the investigations, senior agents from around the country gathered in Quantico, Virginia, that June. At such gatherings agents typically referred to ongoing practices of questionable legality—the wiretaps, the break-ins—by euphemisms. That day, however, a Detroit agent rose during the afternoon session and exasperatedly blurted out: “We’re doing bag jobs, wires, and [opening] mail. What else can we do?”
The outburst rattled at least one headquarters official, Edward Miller, who headed the internal intelligence division; afterward, he approached a group of senior agents and asked, “Do you think I should be hearing all this?” Indeed, there seemed to be widespread confusion at the top levels of the Bureau as to what methods had been approved and who had approved them. Hoover was dead. His right-hand man, Bill Sullivan, had resigned. No one left in their wake seemed entirely sure what was legal and what wasn’t.
Indeed, the legality of many of the FBI’s tactics was already being debated in two major court cases, both of which climaxed that June. The first occurred in Detroit, where two years earlier most of the Weatherman leadership had been indicted in a federal court. One of their attorneys, a young New York firebrand named Gerald Lefcourt, repeatedly told the presiding judge, Damon J. Keith, that his clients’ families had been the subject of months of illegal burglaries, wiretaps, and “espionage techniques.” The press, for the most part, ignored his claims. But Keith, in a startling decision issued June 5, 1972, ordered the government to disclose whether it had actually used burglaries, sabotage, or electronic surveillance techniques in its investigations. Two weeks later, on June 19, the Supreme Court ruled in an unrelated case that warrantless wiretapping was in fact illegal. That same day the U.S. attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, issued a written directive ordering the FBI to immediately stop any and all wiretaps and burglaries that hadn’t been authorized by a court. Forty years later Don Strickland insists that no such order was relayed to the agents in Squad 47. “Nobody told us about it, I can tell you that—no one,” he says. “We just kept doing what we’d been doing.”
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