Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  And nothing ever did. In the end Squad 47’s downfall was pure happenstance. By 1976 disclosure of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program had prompted the Justice Department to open a number of investigations, including probes into work against Martin Luther King and a host of black-power groups. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had filed suit, charging that they had been subjected to COINTELPRO-like tactics as well. Reviewing those charges fell to Bill Gardner, a lawyer who ran the criminal section of the department’s Civil Rights Division.

  Every few days during the spring of 1976, Gardner walked over from his office in the Todd Building to FBI headquarters, where a pile of the Bureau’s SWP files would be awaiting him in a conference room. He had received a top security clearance in order to perform the review, but the Bureau took no chances: As Gardner sorted through the files, a pleasant FBI agent—Gardner thought of him as his babysitter—always sat in one corner, watching. The Keith decision in June 1972 made any warrantless electronic surveillance or break-ins against domestic organizations strictly illegal; any violations Gardner found that occurred after that date he fully expected to prosecute.

  But a funny thing happened as Gardner was thumbing through the files. There was no indication whatsoever that the FBI had performed illegal surveillance of the SWP. But for some reason, someone had inserted dozens of the Bureau’s Weather Underground files into those he was reviewing. When he glanced at these, Gardner realized in an instant that Squad 47 had been carrying out buggings and break-ins well after June 1972. The files cited dozens of instances, maybe hundreds, all the way into 1975. It was all there in black and white, in the FBI’s own files. There was no way anyone in the Bureau could deny it.

  Gardner, sensing he was onto something big, went straight to Stan Pottinger’s office. Pottinger, a suave government attorney who would go on to a successful career as a novelist, ran the Civil Rights division. Pottinger, in turn, took the matter to the U.S. attorney general, Edward Levi, a former president of the University of Chicago appointed by President Ford. Levi appeared personally offended. The FBI had repeatedly sworn that these kinds of black bag jobs were history. He immediately authorized a task force to investigate Squad 47.

  Gardner led the group of six attorneys. To investigate the men of Squad 47, the FBI lent them a group of agents, whose unpopular assignment soon earned them the nickname “The Dirty Dozen.” A grand jury was impaneled in Washington to hear testimony. Gardner was not expecting serious difficulties. It seemed an open-and-shut case; the only question was whether Squad 47 was a rogue unit or something authorized by top FBI officials. “We had a series of smoking guns right from the start,” Gardner recalls. “There was absolutely no question as to the blatant illegality. The question was how high up the chain it went. We divided into teams. We ran our investigation in a traditional pyramid style: Start with the ground agents, then their supervisors, then see how far up the ladder it goes.”

  One by one the agents of Squad 47 were interviewed. To a man, they hired lawyers and said nothing. Gardner and his team begged and wheedled and negotiated but got nowhere. They called a string of agents before the grand jury, but all took the fifth, including Don Strickland, by then an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut. “I remember Pottinger just begging me in the grand jury, ‘I want you to talk to us,’” recalls Strickland. “And I wouldn’t. No one would.”

  In the meantime, members of the “Dirty Dozen” descended on the FBI’s Sixty-ninth Street offices with search warrants. They gathered documents from desks and safes, including one in SAC Horace Beckwith’s office.* The men of Squad 47 panicked, furiously disposing of thousands of pages of Weather-related internal documents. “Everyone was running scared, guys were just scared to death,” remembers Richard Hahn, then an agent on the FALN case. “Guys were literally burning files, tossing them in bags and taking them home to throw in their fireplaces. I know. I watched ’em do it. Before long you couldn’t find a single folder in the New York office with the name Weather Underground on it.”

  Finally a single agent, identified by retired agents as Michael Kirchenbauer, agreed to tell the truth in return for immunity. Then the dam burst. One by one the men of Squad 47 sat for prosecutors and spoke up. “Some of us felt that what the Bureau did constituted a far greater danger to society than what the Weathermen ever did,” recalls one prosecutor on the case, Stephen Horn. “When you looked the beast in the eye, and we interviewed all of them, you got a sense of how this started out as a somewhat regulated activity that just mushroomed. It was so much easier than regular police work. It was all Squad 47 did, in effect. They were seduced by this, and this just got totally out of control. They were going in everyone’s house, mail openings, you name it. They were literally running amok. And they just didn’t get the illegality of it all. I remember one agent saying to me in an interview, in a defensive tone, ‘You gotta remember we cleared a lot of people by bagging their houses.’”

  The Justice Department, however, had little interest in arresting street agents, who were only following orders. They wanted their superiors. By the first weeks of 1977, Bill Gardner and his team were prepared to do something no prosecutor had ever done: secure a felony indictment against an FBI supervisor. Their target was John Kearney, the avuncular Irishman who had retired as Squad 47’s supervisor five years earlier. Kearney now worked in security for Wells Fargo in Massachusetts, but “flipping him”—that is, forcing his testimony as part of a plea agreement—was their best hope of gathering evidence against those higher in the Bureau, conceivably all the way to the FBI’s No. 2 man in 1972, Mark Felt, who had since retired.

  Negotiations with Kearney’s attorney, Hubert Santos, were going nowhere. Kearney “felt like he was doing the right thing, that they were doing everything the Bureau wanted them to do,” Gardner recalls. “But deep down they knew the Bureau was doing something wrong. I know John Kearney wrestled with that. We were pushing him for a plea to get our investigation going. Hubert kept telling us, ‘John can do a plea for a misdemeanor, he can’t plead to a felony, because he doesn’t feel guilty.’ We needed a felony. Someone had to turn. We had a couple of SACs in our sights, and we needed a plea to go after them.”

  The Squad 47 investigation paused that winter when the new Carter administration entered office. A wizened Atlanta jurist, Griffin Bell, took over as attorney general. Gardner’s team drafted a fat memo on the case for Bell’s review. His reaction was not what they had hoped. While President Ford’s attorney general, Edward Levi, “had been very offended by everything he learned about this, Bell was a completely different guy,” Gardner recalls. “He was far more bothered by how this would disrupt the Bureau. When he was briefed on this, we heard he was quoted as saying, ‘What’s this got to do with civil rights?’” Still, unwilling to quash an investigation his men were excited about pursuing, Bell reluctantly allowed them to move ahead.

  They did. On April 7, 1977—smack in the middle of the FALN grand jury proceedings—another federal grand jury in New York handed up a five-count indictment against Kearney that included two counts of conspiracy, two counts of obstruction of correspondence, and a single count of unlawful wiretapping. The New York Times carried the news on page 1. Morale among the agents plummeted. “It killed us,” remembers Lou Vizi of the FALN squad. “It just killed us.”

  This was more than routine bellyaching. One week later, when Kearney was scheduled to appear in court to make his plea—not guilty—three hundred stone-faced FBI agents gathered on the steps of the federal courthouse in Foley Square in protest. It was an assembly unprecedented in FBI history, not to mention saturated in irony. Here were the men (and precisely two women) of the FBI—the agency that for a decade had been the bane of student protesters, whose undercover agents had secretly circulated through thousands of antiwar rallies, who had bugged and burgled and wiretapped long-haired activists, whose crew cuts and shined shoes marked them as the antithesis of the entire protest generation—turning to
the very tactics they had been trying to stop for years. Attired in dark suits, they stood silent until a car drove up carrying Kearney and his wife. When the couple stepped from the car, the agents broke out into applause. Their spokesman, an agent named Patrick Connor, burst forth in a stout defense of Kearney.

  These agents are here, he announced in what the Times called “a ringing baritone,” “to demonstrate their personal loyalty to you and to give testament to your just and moral leadership over a period of years in the fight against the enemies of our nation, namely anarchy and terrorism.” When the full truth “is before the American people and their voice is heard, your vindication will be assured.”

  In Washington the FBI director, Clarence Kelley, issued a statement decrying the indictment. Behind the scenes he and others strongly protested the move. “Judge Bell was just overwhelmed by the public reaction, he was lobbied heavily by the law enforcement community that this was a horrible, horrible thing to be prosecuting the FBI,” Gardner recalls. “I can’t tell you how many Saturday mornings I had with that guy where he was just wringing his hands. ‘Have you read A Man Called Intrepid?’ he would say. ‘The Bureau’s been doing this stuff since World War Two. This is gonna destroy the Bureau.’ He was deeply troubled. He kept telling us, ‘How am I gonna reform the Bureau with you guys prosecuting them all the time?’”

  Yet Gardner’s team forged ahead. Confident that they could eventually wring a plea agreement from Kearney, they turned to a related case, the proposed indictment of six FBI officials—including Horace Beckwith, Kearney’s successor at Squad 47, and Wallace LaPrade, the official in charge of the New York office—on charges of perjury and conspiracy for lying about Weatherman cases before a grand jury. An assistant attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, approved seeking the indictments. But this time Attorney General Bell put his foot down. “Civiletti came back to us and basically said, ‘He doesn’t want to do this,’” recalls Steve Horn. “‘He wants you to skip all these layers and go straight to the top.’”

  Gardner’s team was crestfallen. This meant rethinking all their work to focus solely on the indictment of the top three FBI officials from 1972, Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, Acting Associate Director Mark Felt, and Assistant Director Ed Miller. Before that could be done, however, Bell ordered Gardner’s men to interview senior White House officials from that era—the Watergate era—to see whether any had sanctioned Squad 47’s activities. To a man, the prosecutors rolled their eyes; this, they were sure, was a wild goose chase. It took months. One of Gardner’s men interviewed the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman in an Arizona prison, where he was serving time on Watergate charges. Another interviewed H. R. Haldeman. Yet another, an attorney named Frank Martin, traveled to California and actually interviewed Richard Nixon himself, at his retirement home in San Clemente.

  No one admitted knowing a thing about Squad 47. Judge Bell was not impressed. When Gardner’s team once again put the matter of broader FBI indictments on his desk, Bell said no. They could indict Gray, Felt, and Miller if they must. But no one else. In December 1977, after weeks of tense discussions among themselves, Gardner and his team did something no one could remember any other Justice Department prosecutors doing in the past century: They resigned.

  Judge Bell carried the day. Four months later, in April 1978, a Washington grand jury handed up indictments against Gray, Felt, and Miller.* Felt, for one, thought the charges were outrageous. Later, after appearing in court, the three defendants were taken to a marshal’s office, where they were photographed and fingerprinted. As Felt held out his fingers, Gray stood beside him, washing his hands in a basin.

  “Pat,” Felt asked, “how many years of service have you given your country?”

  “Twenty-six years,” Gray replied.

  “This is the reward which your country has for you.”

  It was another moment steeped in irony. After the Weather Underground’s seven-year bombing campaign, three senior FBI men were heading toward a criminal trial—and not a single Weatherman.

  17

  “WELCOME TO FEAR CITY”

  The FALN, 1976 to 1978

  By the spring of 1976, as both the Weather Underground and its Squad 47 pursuers began to implode, what appeared to be the most lethal of the remaining underground groups, the FALN, had all but vanished. It hadn’t claimed responsibility for a single action since the ten “anniversary” bombings the previous October. No one had a clue why. Maybe it had run out of dynamite. Maybe its members were in jail on unrelated charges. Maybe, like the NWLF, the FALN had given up.

  The FBI hadn’t. In Chicago agents studied every facet of the unexploded bomb found in a bundle of roses outside Standard Oil the previous October. They had the FBI lab analyze the flowers and the wrapping paper but found nothing of use. The one lead they unearthed involved the dynamite, which the lab discerned had been custom-made for use in building the Heron Dam in New Mexico, completed in 1971. The Albuquerque office interviewed workers at the site and identified a Chicano activist named Pedro Archuleta as the possible thief. Archuleta, however, had vanished. Agents also found that several of the October bombs had been secreted inside a certain brand of leather shaving kit, scraps of which were recovered at the scenes. In New York detectives fanned out across the city and discovered a luggage store in the Bronx whose owner claimed he had sold dozens of the kits to a curly-haired Hispanic man. A police artist drew up a sketch, but no one recognized the face.

  Then suddenly, after eight months of silence, the thunder of FALN bombs once again echoed through the canyons of downtown Chicago. At 10:45 on the night of June 7, 1976, bundles of dynamite exploded simultaneously in a pair of trash cans, one outside the Hancock Building, the second at Bank Leumi, an Israeli bank a block from City Hall, the probable target. No one was hurt. All across downtown police and security guards scrambled to check for more bombs and, to their dismay, found one in a trash can outside police headquarters. The area was cleared of pedestrians just as the bomb exploded at 11:00. But no one found the last device, which detonated outside the First National Bank of Chicago. Damage at all the sites was minimal.

  By the next morning no communiqués had been found, but the FBI lab confirmed that the dynamite was the same as that stolen from the Heron Dam, meaning it was the FALN. Three weeks later they struck again, this time in New York: four small bombs exploding in the dead of night outside two bank branches, the Pan Am Building, and the NYPD’s 40th Precinct house. By this point there was a sense that the FALN attacks were growing almost routine: Four bombs drew all of five paragraphs in the Times.

  The FBI, however, couldn’t be so sanguine. The New York bombs exploded just a week before the largest celebration in postwar history: the Bicentennial, on July 4, 1976. A massive fireworks display was planned above the Statue of Liberty, among many events across the country. It was an ideal time, and an ideal place, for radical groups such as the FALN to strike, as several officials told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that June. The FBI, working closely with the NYPD, organized hundreds of teams to stake out virtually every landmark and skyscraper in New York, hoping they could catch the FALN in the act. But the holiday came and went with no bombings.

  The attacks, in fact, came a week later, but in dismayingly tiny packages. On July 12 ten incendiaries placed inside cigarette packs, identical to those used by MIRA four years earlier, burst into flames at a series of Manhattan department stores, including Gimbel’s, Lord & Taylor, and the flagship Macy’s at Herald Square. All the fires were quickly extinguished. A caller to the New York Post pointed police to an FALN communiqué, which said the action was in protest of the Puerto Rican delegation at the Democratic National Convention that began that week at Madison Square Garden. A month later it happened again, flash fires erupting in the lingerie section at a Korvette’s, in the coat section at Gimbel’s, and in a third-floor dress section at Macy’s. Sprinklers doused confused shoppers, who ran from the b
uilding. All three stores evacuated several floors before returning to normal.

  At that point a new FBI supervisor, Paul Brana, encouraged by the Bicentennial cooperation between the FBI and the NYPD, proposed a second citywide dragnet, this one to coincide with the second anniversary of the FALN’s debut in late October. They called it “Operation Catch a Bomber”; it took months to arrange. As meetings stretched on that September, the FALN struck twice more, in Chicago on September 10 and New York on September 21. The Chicago bombs were left in a restroom at the Lake Shore Drive Holiday Inn and in a government office. Damage was minimal; a communiqué noted that a “free and socialist Puerto Rico, if necessary, will be written in red blood.” The New York bomb was more harrowing, demolishing a twenty-fourth-story stairwell at the New York Hilton, where Puerto Rico’s governor was to be honored at a banquet that night.

  In late October Operation Catch a Bomber went forward, flooding the streets around New York landmarks with hundreds of FBI agents and detectives. It was a complete bust. At the FBI offices on Sixty-ninth Street, Don Wofford and Lou Vizi were at their wits’ end. At one point, in desperation, they brought in a psychic. Nothing worked.

  And then they got lucky.

  • • •

  Deep in the rough Puerto Rican neighborhoods around Chicago’s Humboldt Park, there lived an emaciated young man named Raul Velez. He rented a small flat on the third floor of a run-down building at 2659 West Haddon Avenue, five miles northwest of the skyscrapers downtown, and for the past several days he had been watching his new neighbors, a pair of Hispanic men, as they moved things into an apartment across the hallway. They had just purchased the building, they told him, and would be refurbishing it over the next several weeks. Velez studied them closely as they hauled in a suitcase, a footlocker, a large zippered bag, and several packages that looked like Christmas gifts. The two men stayed inside the apartment during the day and disappeared at night.