Then the family moved to Washington, and her mother insisted that they take an apartment in a predominantly Black neighborhood near Capitol Hill, rather than living in a White suburb. Elsa was one of only four White students at the junior high-school to which they sent her.
Elsa had developed early. Her natural warmth and open, uninhibited nature combined with her outstanding physical charms to produce a girl who had been extraordinarily attractive sexually even at 15. The result was that the Black males, who also continually badgered the one other White girl at the school, gave Elsa no peace. The Black girls, seeing this, hated Elsa with special passion and tormented her in every way they could.
Elsa dared not go into the restroom or even let herself out of the sight of a teacher for a moment while she was at school. She soon found that the teachers offered no real protection, when a Black assistant principal cornered her in his office one day and tried to put his hand inside her dress.
Each day Elsa came home from school in tears and begged her parents to send her to another school. Her mother's response was to scream at her, slap her face, and call her a "racist." If the Black boys were bothering her, it was her fault, not theirs. And she should try harder to make friends with the Black girls.
Nor did her father offer her any comfort, even when she told him about the incident with the assistant principal. The whole issue embarrassed him, and he didn't want to hear about it. His liberalism was more passive than her mother's, but he was usually intimidated by his thoroughly "liberated" wife into going along on any matters that touched on race. Even when three young, Black thugs accosted him on his very doorstep, took his wallet and wristwatch, and then knocked him down and stomped on his eyeglasses, Elsa's mother wouldn't let him call the police and report the robbery. She regarded the very thought of filing a police complaint against Blacks as somewhat "fascist."
Elsa stood it for three months, and then she ran away from home. She was taken in by the little commune she is with now, and, having a basically cheerful disposition, she learned to be tolerably happy in her new situation.
Then, about a month ago, the trouble arose which led to my meeting her. A new girl, Mary Jane, had joined their group, and there was friction between Elsa and Mary Jane. The boy Elsa was sharing her mattress with at the time had apparently known Mary Jane earlier, before either had joined the group, and Mary Jane regarded Elsa as a usurper. Elsa in turn resented Mary Jane's none-too-subtle efforts to entice her boyfriend away. The result was a screaming, clawing, hairpulling fight between the two one day which Mary Jane, being the stronger, had won.
Elsa had wandered the streets for two days-that's when I met her-and then she had returned to the basement commune. Mary Jane, meanwhile, had gotten on the wrong side of another of the girls in the group, and Elsa pressed this advantage by issuing an ultimatum: either Mary Jane must go or she, Elsa, would leave permanently. Mary Jane had responded by threatening Elsa with a knife.
"So, what happened?" I asked.
"We sold her," was Elsa's simple reply.
"You sold her? What do you mean?" I exclaimed.
Elsa explained: "Mary Jane refused to leave after everyone sided with me, so we sold her to Kappy the Kike. He gave us the TV and two hundred dollars for her."
"Kappy the Kike," it turned out, is a Jew named Kaplan who makes his living in the White slave trade. He makes regular trips to Washington from New York for the purpose of buying runaway girls. His usual suppliers are the "wolf packs," from one of which I had rescued Elsa. These predatory groups snatch girls off the street, keep them for a week or so, and then, if their disappearance has caused no comment in the newspapers, sell them to Kaplan.
What happens to the girls after that no one can say with certainty, but it is thought that most are confined in certain exclusive clubs in New York where the wealthy go to satisfy strange and perverted appetites. Some, it is rumored, are eventually sold to a Satanist club and painfully dismembered in gruesome rituals. Anyway, someone in the commune had heard that Kaplan was in town and "buying," so when Mary Jane wouldn't leave they tied her up, located Kaplan, and made the sale.
I had thought I was unshockable, but I was horrified by Elsa's story of Mary Jane's fate. "How," I asked in a tone of outrage, "could you sell a White girl to a Jew?" Elsa was embarrassed by my obvious displeasure. She admitted that it was a terrible thing to have done and that she sometimes feels guilty when she thinks about Mary Jane, but it had seemed like a convenient solution to the commune's problem at the time. She offered the feeble excuse that it happens all the time, that the authorities apparently know all about it and don't interfere, and so it is really more society's fault than anyone's.
I shook my head in disgust, but this turn of our conversation gave me a convenient opening to the topic in which I was mainly interested. "A civilization which tolerates the existence of Kaplan and his filthy business should be burned to the ground," I said. "We should make a bonfire of the whole thing and then start over fresh."
I had unconsciously raised my voice loud enough for my last comment to be heard by everyone in the basement. A shaggy individual got up from his mattress in front of the TV and sauntered over. "What can anyone do?" he asked, not really expecting an answer. "Kappy the Kike's been arrested at least a dozen times, but the cops always turn him loose. He's got political connections. Some of the big Jews in New York are his customers. And I've heard that two or three Congressmen go up there regularly to visit some of the clubs he supplies."
"Then someone should blow up the Congress," I answered.
"I guess that's already been tried," he laughed, apparently referring to the Organization's mortar attack.
"Well, if I had a bomb now I'd try it myself," I said. "Where can I get some dynamite?"
The fellow shrugged his shoulders and wandered back to the TV set. I then tried pumping Elsa for information. Which groups in Georgetown have been doing bombings? How can I get in touch with one of them?
Elsa tried to be helpful, but she just didn't know. It was a subject in which she had no particular interest. Finally, she called out to the man who had strolled over earlier: "Harry, aren't the people over on 29th Street, the ones who call themselves 'Fourth World Liberation Front,' into fighting the pigs?"
Harry was obviously not pleased by her question. He jumped to his feet, glared fiercely at the two of us, and then stomped out of the basement without answering, slamming the door behind him.
One of the women at the laundry sink turned around and reminded Elsa that it was her day to prepare the midday meal and that she hadn't even put the potatoes on the stove to boil yet. I squeezed Elsa's hand, wished her well, and made my exit.
I guess I botched things rather badly. It was incredibly naive of me to imagine that I could just walk into the "dropout" community and be politely directed to someone engaged in violent and illegal activity against the System. Obviously every undercover cop in Washington has been trying the same thing. Now the word must certainly be out everywhere that I'm a cop too. That blows any chance I may have had of making contact with anti-System militants in that particular milieu.
Of course, we could send someone else over to try to find the "Fourth World Liberation Front," whatever the hell it is. But I wonder now whether there's any point in that. My visit with Elsa has pretty well convinced me that, in the people who share her life-style, there's just not much potential for constructive collaboration with the Organization. They lack self-discipline and any real sense of purpose. They've given up. All they really want to do is lie around all day screwing and smoking pot. I almost believe that if the government would double their welfare allowances, even the bomb throwers would lose their militancy
Elsa is basically a good kid, and there must be a number of others whose instincts are mostly all right but who just couldn't cope with this nightmare world and so they dropped out. Although we both reject the world in its present condition and have both dropped out, in a sense, the difference between the people in th
e Organization and Elsa's friends is that we are capable of coping and they aren't. I cannot imagine myself or Henry or Katherine or anyone else in the Organization just sitting around watching TV and letting the world go by when so much needs to be done. It is a difference of human quality.
But there's more than one kind of quality that's important to us. Most Americans are still coping, some barely and some quite successfully. They haven't dropped out, because they lack a certain sensitivity-a sensitivity which I believe we in the Organization share with Elsa and the best of her friends-a sensitivity which allows us to smell the stink of this decaying society and which makes us gag. The copers out there, just like many of the non-copers, either can't smell the stink or it doesn't bother them. The Jews could lead them to any kind of pigsty at all, and as long as there was plenty of swill they would adapt to it. Evolution has made skilled survivors of them, but it has failed them in another respect.
How fragile a thing is man's civilization! How superficial it is to his basic nature! And upon how few of the teeming multitudes to whose lives it gives a pattern does it depend for its sustenance!
Without the presence of perhaps one or two per cent of the most capable individuals-the most aggressive, intelligent, and hardworking of our fellow citizens-I am convinced that neither this civilization nor any civilization could long sustain itself. It would gradually disintegrate, over centuries, perhaps, and the people would not have the will or the energy or the genius to patch up the cracks. Eventually, all would return to their natural, pre-civilized state-a state not too different from that of Georgetown's dropouts.
But even energy and will and genius are not enough, clearly. America still has enough over-achievers to keep the wheels turning. But these over-achievers seem not to have noticed that the machine their exertions keep running long ago ran off the road and is now hurtling headlong into an abyss. They are insensitive to the ugliness and unnaturalness, as well as to the ultimate danger, of the direction they have taken.
It is really only a minority of a minority which led our race out of the jungle and along the first few steps toward true civilization. We owe everything to those few of our ancestors who had both the sensitivity to feel what needed doing and the ability to do it. Without the sensitivity no amount of ability can lead to truly great achievement, and without the ability sensitivity leads only to daydreams and frustration. The Organization has selected from the great mass of humanity those of our present generation who posses this rare combination. Now we must do whatever is necessary to prevail.
Chapter XIII
March 21, 1993. Today a new beginning. Quite a coincidence that it's the first day of spring. For me it is like a return from the dead-470 days of living death. To be back with Katherine, back with my other comrades, able to resume the struggle again after so much wasted time-the thought of these things fills me with an indescribable joy.
So much has happened since my last entry in this diary (how glad I am that Katherine was able to save it for me!) that it's difficult to decide how to condense it all here. Well, first things first.
It was about four o'clock in the morning, pitch dark, a Sunday. We were all sound asleep. The first thing I remember is Katherine shaking me by the shoulder, trying to wake me up. I could hear an insistent buzzing in the background, which, in my sleep-fogged condition, I assumed was our bedroom alarm clock.
"Surely, it's not time to get up yet," I mumbled.
"It's the warning buzzer downstairs," Katherine whispered urgently. "Somebody's outside the building."
That snapped me awake, but before I could even get my feet on the floor, there was a loud crash, as something trailing a stream of sparks came hurtling through the carefully boarded-up bedroom window. Almost immediately the room was filled with a choking cloud of gas, and I was gasping for breath in agony.
The next couple of minutes are a little hazy in my memory. Somehow we all got our gas masks on without turning on any lights. Bill and I raced downstairs, leaving Katherine and Carol to man the upstairs windows. Fortunately, no one had yet tried to enter the building, but as Bill and I reached the bottom of the stairs we could hear someone outside with a bullhorn ordering us to come out with our hands up.
I took a quick look through our peephole. The darkness outside had been turned bright as day by dozens of searchlights, all trained on our building. The glare kept me from seeing much of anything beyond the lights, but it was instantly clear that there were several hundred troops and policemen, with lots of equipment, out there.
It was obviously futile to attempt to shoot our way out, but we laid down a brief barrage anyway-half-a-dozen quick shots each-from the upstairs and downstairs windows, front and back, just to discourage the people outside from attempting to force a quick entry into the building. After that, we all stayed clear of the windows and doors, which were immediately riddled with a withering return fire, and concentrated on getting as much of our essential equipment out through our escape tunnel as we could. The cement-block walls of the garage offered protection from the small-arms fire being sprayed at us from every direction.
Bill, Katherine, and Carol relayed our gear down the long, dark tunnel, while I stayed in the shop and gathered together for them the things I thought we should try to save. In a frantic and exhausting three-quarters of an hour, they assembled a small mountain of armaments and communications equipment in the drainage ditch at the far end of the tunnel.
Although the three of them did most of the carrying, at least they were not in danger of being shot. I had bullets whistling around my ears the whole while, and I was stung at least a dozen times by splinters of concrete chipped from the walls by ricochets. I still don't understand how I avoided being killed. I even managed to fire a few rounds back through the door at our attackers every five minutes or so, just to keep them under cover.
Finally we had gotten out all our small arms and ammunition, about half our bulk explosives and heavier weapons, and all the completed communications units. Bill's tools were saved, because he has the tidy habit of keeping them all together in a tool box, but we abandoned most of my test equipment, because it was scattered all over the shop.
We huddled briefly in the grease pit and decided that Bill and the girls would steal a vehicle and load our things into it while I stayed in the shop and prepared a demolition charge that would cover the entrance of our escape tunnel. I would give them 30 minutes, then I would light the fuse and make my own exit.
Katherine broke away and ran quickly back upstairs, where she grabbed some of our personal items-including my diary- and then I shooed her back into the tunnel with the others for the last time.
The downstairs doors and the boards over the windows were about half shot away by this time, and so much light was coming into the shop from the searchlights that any movement was becoming extremely hazardous. Working with nervous haste, I assembled a 20-pound charge of tritonal in the grease pit, just above the tunnel entrance, and primed it.
Then I crawled along the floor, heading for the wall where approximately another 100 pounds of tritonal was stacked in small containers. I intended to run a length of primacord from that batch to the charge in the grease pit, so that the whole shop would go up in one blast, thoroughly covering everything in rubble. It would take the cops a couple of days to sift through the debris and discover that we had escaped.
But I never made it to the wall. Somehow-I still don't understand exactly what happened-the charge in the grease pit exploded prematurely. Perhaps a ricocheting bullet hit the primer. Or perhaps sparks from one of the tear gas grenades which were still being lobbed into the place ignited the fuse. In any event, the concussion knocked me cold-and very nearly killed me. I regained consciousness on an operating table in a hospital emergency room.
The next few days were extraordinarily painful ones. I wince at the memory. I was taken directly from the emergency room to an interrogation cell in the sub-basement of the FBI building, which was still only partially cleared
of the rubble from our bombing seven weeks earlier.
Although I was still disoriented and in extreme pain from my wounds, I was handled very roughly. My wrists were tightly handcuffed behind me, and I was kicked and punched whenever I stumbled or failed to respond fast enough to an order. Forced to stand in the center of the cell while half-adozen FBI agents shouted questions at me from all sides, I could hardly do more than mumble incoherently, even if I had wanted to cooperate with them.
Even in my agony, however, I felt a surge of elation when I realized from my interrogators' questions that the others must have gotten away safely. Over and over again the men around me screamed out the same questions: "Where are the others? How many were in the building with you? How did they get out?" Apparently, the charge in the grease pit had successfully obliterated the tunnel entrance. The questions were punctuated with repeated slaps and kicks, until I finally sagged to the floor, mercifully unconscious again.
When I came to, I was still lying where I had fallen, on the bare, concrete floor. The light was on, no one else was in the room, and I could hear the chattering of pneumatic hammers and other sounds being made by repairmen working in the corridor beyond my cell door. I ached all over, with the handcuffs causing me particular agony, but my head was nearly clear.
My first thought was one of regret that I no longer had my poison capsule. The secret police, of course, had taken my little necklace away as soon as they had found my unconscious body in the wreckage of the garage. I cursed myself for having failed to take the precaution of carrying the capsule in my mouth before the explosion. Probably it wouldn't have been found there, and I could have bitten it as soon as I woke up in the hospital. In the days to come, this regret was to recur again and again.
My second thought was also one of regret and selfrecrimination. I was tormented by a suspicion so strong that it nearly amounted to certainty that my ill-advised visit to Elsa two days earlier was responsible for my predicament. Evidently, someone from Elsa's group had followed me home and then had informed on me. This suspicion was later confirmed indirectly by my captors.
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