Basically, the point I was trying to make is that we didn’t know how to investigate terrorism then. When I say “we,” I mean law enforcement in general, and the FBI specifically. We couldn’t even work together. And that’s a message I try to give to all these people, that this is not an FBI problem. This is not a local police problem, or a county problem, or a state. It’s all of our problems.
When you have a group like the Weather Underground that’s clandestine nationally, and they do a bombing in San Francisco, the person who did the bombing may be from New York. The person who wrote the communiqué may be in Florida. And it’s impossible for the San Francisco Police Department to solve it, because the people who did it may have only just come there, did it and left. They may have nothing to do with San Francisco.
On the other hand, the poor FBI, they’re limited. We only had about eleven thousand agents—a handful considering the population of the United States—so how are you going to solve it? We didn’t know the local areas as well as the police department did.
BILL AYERS
When we went underground, we stopped going to the old neighborhood. We stopped going home. We assumed false identities. In the beginning we were improvising, because we didn’t know how to make false IDs. Sometimes people carried stolen identities. They didn’t think much about it; they found a wallet of somebody five foot ten and said, “What the hell, I could be that guy.”
But soon we began to build up lots of sets of IDs for each one of us. There were a lot of ways to do it, but the way that proved to be the most enduring was to go to a place like South Dakota, find a cemetery, and find the tombstones of kids who were about your age. For example, in my case, somebody who died before the age of ten or so, somebody born between 1942 and 1948. I was born in ’44. If I could find a kid who was born in those years and died five years later, that was a perfect identity for me. Then I’d go to the courthouse and ask for the birth certificate of Anthony Lee, born on such-and-such a date, and I would buy the birth certificate for two dollars from the county courthouse. With that birth certificate I’d get a fishing license and something else, and when I had four or five pieces of ID I might use that ID for a drop box, and get a letter sent to that drop box. Then I have a mailing address. I have a birth certificate. I have a fishing license. I have three or four other little things, maybe a health card. Then I’d go to get a driver’s license and a Social Security card, because there’s never been a Social Security card issued for Anthony Lee, because he died when he was five. I’d get a California driver’s license, or an Illinois driver’s license, and now I have a perfect ID set. So that’s how we did it. Things have definitely changed now, but then it was not so hard.
BILL DYSON
When you did fugitive investigations, there were basic rules. You assumed they had contact with their family; close family, distant family, associates. But the Weather Underground was very different. The family either agreed or didn’t agree with what they were doing. If the family didn’t support them, then you basically abandoned the support. If Mom died, you probably weren’t going to show up to the funeral. But if you were looking for a criminal fugitive—I’ll use the Mafia, for an example—if Mom or Dad died, we’d always cover the funeral, because there was a good chance the guy would come to it. Maybe he couldn’t come to the funeral, maybe he’d stay in the outside, maybe sneak into the funeral home at night. Not with these people. So we had to learn different methods for chasing fugitives.
BILL AYERS
We would all try to build multiple ID sets. It was part of our work all the time, because it wasn’t something you wanted to rest on. Because we were inexperienced, we made a lot of mistakes.
The worst one was “the encirclement,” when somebody had an ID and bought a car, so the car was registered in this name and linked to a house he had rented in the same name. He used this ID to do something else, and then he got a telegram from someplace, using this ID, but the police were watching the telegraph office. And then, the FBI had the house. It turned out, at that house somebody else had bought a car, and gotten a ticket in front of that house. So then that ID was gone. And that ID was tied to another house. And somebody else had done something else in that house. And so it went: We lost everything in the first year, in just a couple of weeks’ span, simply by having one ID blown, and that ID linking to every other ID. That taught us that you couldn’t ever link them. That you had to rent your house—your apartment—in a different name than you bought your car in. You didn’t park in front of your house—you parked two blocks away. We learned a lot. But that’s just spycraft, and there’s not much to it. It changes all the time, and none of what we learned would be relevant to anybody else today.
BILL DYSON
They wouldn’t maintain contact with their family if they didn’t think the family would support them. If the family did support, then they expected the family would practice extreme security, whereas I don’t think the average criminal assumes that. He may maintain contact with his family, and he doesn’t expect the family to maintain extreme security. It’s not just Weathermen; this is generally true with most political extremists: Security is everything. Security, security, security. Good false identification. Not just changing your name, good false identification. And it took a long while for us to learn this. They did false ID very, very well. But once we learned how to do it, we could find them. These people didn’t realize how close we were.
I was the last person to try to interview Bernardine Dohrn before she went underground. She didn’t talk to me, but at least I made an effort. I talked to Bill Ayers’s father very frequently when he was a fugitive, so I got to know his father—not that we were close friends by any means.
BILL AYERS
We started to develop a long list of code words and phrases, and we took a lot from rock and roll. For example, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” “Maggie’s farm” meant the Pentagon. We called ourselves the “eggplant” for a while, because there was a song called “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago.” Another word for the organization was “the joke.” “Does he know the joke?” Weather was “the joke”; our aboveground support group was “the forest.” The FBI were “the shoes,” for gumshoes.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
If you look at the FBI documents from the time, from 1970, once we were underground, you can see that they didn’t understand anything. They had the words all wrong. They were translating our words, but there’s no comprehension behind the words.
BILL AYERS
We had to reorganize, and that was work. We had to find ways to be in touch with the people who weren’t underground, and that was work. But all of it was pretty much accomplished within the first year or two. And then we had a functioning organization that was living underground, that was in several cities, that had good links to the radical movement aboveground, and had good relationships with the most unlikely people. I won’t even tell you who. The odd and interesting thing, and what makes me know that we were a legitimate American phenomenon, is people as diffuse as John Holt, who was a right-wing school reformer and an old friend of mine, supported us. People from the Quaker pacifist community gave us money. People who had no reason to think that the Weather Underground was the right way to go didn’t want to see us arrested. So I was recognized on the street on an average of every month, and no one turned me in, ever. Why would they? What would be the point of turning me in? They weren’t Weather people, but they also weren’t the police. I mean, they didn’t think the police were great.
Credit 21.1
On October 14, 1970, the FBI placed Bernardine Dohrn, age twenty-eight, on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitive list, replacing Angela Davis, who had been captured the day before.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
By late 1970 I took on an outlaw identity. We didn’t plan it, but there is a love of the outlaw in American history. The FBI put us on the Ten Most Wanted list, and then added the students from Brandeis, and then the students from Wisco
nsin, and at Brown, Davis. It meant that eight or nine of the top ten most wanted were all of us. It’s a very funny chapter in American life. Suddenly people had our pictures in their windows with “Welcome here!” signs.
BRIAN FLANAGAN
Most of my underground life was spent in California. A lot of times when I was traveling around California, I’d wind up staying in hippie communes. They didn’t know who we were. One time somebody figured it out. “You’re a Weatherman, aren’t you?” And I said, “Yes, I am.”
I worked for the Berkeley Tribe for a while, and the San Diego Free Press, Great Speckled Bird. The East Village Other was the one in New York, The East Village Other and Rat. Those were fertile breeding grounds for us, for people to swim in, if not to recruit them, but we didn’t recruit a whole lot of people. We did get a good following of people aboveground. So, I don’t know how much organizing we did underground—we took some people like Mary Moylan down that had to go under.*9
BERNARDINE DOHRN
I did a lot of waiting tables, and I also spent a year cleaning women’s houses; the kind of work where you get paid for at the end of the day in cash. We cut grapes. We paid our rent in cash, and we bought our cars with cash. We lived outside that economy. A lot of people were doing that as a choice, and a lot of people were doing it out of desperation.
MARK RUDD
When I was underground, I was nobody. I had no background, I had no employment or educational experience. I was a laborer in a factory. I was hired the same day as a black guy in a factory in Philadelphia. I spoke English, I read and wrote English; these were the privileges that my background gave me. Very quickly I rose in this stupid little laborer’s job I had, and in a matter of a month or two I became the supervisor of the black guy I was hired with. We just looked at each other and said, “Same old shit.” There’s no way to get rid of privilege, no matter how hard you try.
BILL AYERS
We were part of that San Francisco music scene. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were two of the San Francisco groups that we loved. Grace Slick and Paul Kantner wrote a song about Diana [Oughton], and we had some communication with them through an intermediary.
Huntress of the moon and a lady of the Earth
Weather woman Diana
—PAUL KANTNER AND
GRACE SLICK, “DIANA”
BRIAN FLANAGAN
We were playacting hippies because we thought they were the base. There was a stoner part of me, but I was really a commie. The hippies seemed to be a natural group. I mean we were not going to recruit from Mormons, and Opus Dei was not a fertile field for us, either. You’ve got these hippies—and there were various grades of hippies, there were hippies with guns, there were stoners, there were people who went back to the earth, there was a lesbian communist community in New Mexico called Sisters of the Sun. It was every kind of weirdo you could imagine.
BILL AYERS
You could go to any rock concert or any country place and say, “Weather Underground,” and they’d be like, “Hell yeah, brother!” The thing about security when you’re a fugitive is that it’s not so much technical as it is political: If you have the support of the people, you’re okay. If the people are going to rat you out, then you’re in trouble. Many times when we were in trouble, we could just hitchhike and say, “I’m a fugitive; can you help me out?” “Oh yeah, brother; what do you need?” It was very common in that time. If the FBI visited someone, even someone really square, and said, “We’re looking for Bill Ayers,” or “We’re looking for Bernardine Dohrn,” within a day or two we’d hear about it. So information would not flow their way; it would flow our way. And that’s the essence of being in a guerrilla base. So we did see ourselves as fish in the sea. We wouldn’t have that kind of support now. If you ran around and said, “We’re bombers for Earth First,” most people would say, “I don’t know you.” You have to understand the atmosphere at the time.
We changed our appearances a little, but not dramatically. I had very short hair and a mustache, then, I suddenly had long hair and a beard. Was that a big change? Not really. I got a new pair of glasses. We learned through experience that if you did something stupid like put on a red wig, it was garish. It was obvious. Whereas, if you just shifted slightly, some people would recognize you, if they knew you well. But nobody expects to see you there. And it wasn’t like today, where everybody’s image is everywhere.
RICHARD NIXON (RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon)*10
On June 5, 1970, I called a meeting with Hoover, Helms of the CIA, Lieutenant General D. V. Bennett of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, Director of the National Security Agency. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Bob Finch, and Tom Huston were also present. Huston was a young lawyer and a former Defense Intelligence Agency aide whose assignments on the White House staff included the problem of violence from radicals. He was seriously concerned about the inadequacies of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, both in the face of domestic violence and in comparison to the intelligence capabilities of Communist-bloc countries.
I told the group that I wanted to know what the problems were in intelligence-gathering and what had to be done to solve them. I wanted their report submitted to me jointly, and I asked Hoover to act as chairman for this purpose.
The committee formed a study group to evaluate the situation and draw up alternatives. A report was drafted that was approved by the heads of the CIA, DIA, and NSA. Then it went to Hoover, who added as footnotes to the body of the document, his personal objections to several of the sections.
The report was completed on June 25, 1970. It was officially called “Special Report Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc).”
The report opened with a brief analysis of the problems confronting us, ranging from the Black Panthers and the Weathermen to Communist infiltrators. It differentiated radical terrorist groups from those that merely indulged in incendiary rhetoric. It gave a summary of the available intelligence techniques, the current restrictions on them, and the advantages and disadvantages of lifting those restrictions.
There was only one technique which Hoover had no objection to seeing expanded—the National Security Agency’s coverage of overseas telephone and telegraph communications. He had strong objections to the four central possibilities discussed: resumption of covert mail-opening, resumption of black bag jobs, increased electronic surveillance, and an increase in campus—therefore young—informants.*11
CARL BERNSTEIN (Washington Post reporter)
From the first months of the Nixon presidency, they had, from the president down, decided that the antiwar movement must be undermined….So, just like all his other enemies, his [Nixon’s] way of dealing with the antiwar movement was to regard them as subversive, not so much to the country but to his own interests. He didn’t think Hoover would share all the information with him, so he decided he needed his own extralegal force to do black-bag jobs and wiretap people in the antiwar movement, and that became the Huston Plan, based on a report outlining this illegal security operation written by a young White House aide, Tom Charles Huston. The Huston Plan, and its illegal means approved by Nixon, was the first comprehensive plan of illegal actions to deal with those that Nixon thought opposed and constrained him.
BILL DYSON
There were certain people in the FBI who made the decision “we’ve got to do anything to get rid of these people. 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. There were other people who were opposed to it. I can say, in all honesty, that as the national case agent, I never violated the law. I was opposed to doing anything illegal. But I do not criticize those agents who said, “We’ve got to save our country.”
BRIAN FLANAGAN
What happened was that we had an FBI group assigned to us in New York called Squad 47, and they became fond of doing black-bag jobs, which are illegal.*12 We also had a phone
snitch in New York. We knew which phones were tapped. We found out because we had a mole in the phone company. So I knew the phone was tapped. I’m the only one that has proof from the government that my phone was tapped. I also knew from my superintendent that there was mail cover. The super was telling me that things were being intercepted. They read your mail before it comes to you. The super knew it because the FBI kept asking him, “Does he pick up his mail regularly?” And they asked him all these questions, and then told him, Don’t say anything to anybody. It’ll be a federal crime if you talk to them. But the super was a friend of mine, and I don’t think he was a tipster. I was living on Riverside Drive, on the Upper West Side.
I had always assumed if you’re in the Weather Underground, the phone conversations are unbelievable. We had code words for everything. We did pay-phone-to-pay-phone until they started recording pay-phone-to-pay-phone.
BILL DYSON
We were not so much listening in. Not too much wires in those days. Once the SDS national office found out, we didn’t have wires to speak of. First of all, we had to find somebody to put a wiretap on. And you’d have to get it under the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968.*13 You’d have to get probable cause. I mean, it’s not like you get a wiretap just like that. So a lot of it was surveillance, development of informants, interviewing relatives, friends, and so forth. Remember, we’re still learning how to catch these people.
Witness to the Revolution Page 46