SITUATION REPORT A QUARTERLY PUBLICATION OF THE SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE FUND

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000400420002-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 12, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: March 1, 1979
• Content Type: REPORT

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Situation Report
A Quarterly Publication of the Security and Intelligence Fund
The Carter Administration, out of its
maladroit aptitude for putting last things first, is
about to make its final move against the three
former senior Federal law enforcement officers
whom it marked nearly a year ago as sacrificial
offerings to its liberal-left supporters.
Early this spring, Mr. L. Patrick Gray, briefly
the Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, and two long-standing career
officers, Mr. W. Mark Felt, Acting Associate
Director, and Mr. Edward S. Miller, Assistant
Director, Intelligence Division, are scheduled to
go on trial in the nation's capital under criminal)
indictments instituted against them last April by
their former employer, the Department of
Justice. They are charged with directing an
illegal investigation of a band of American
terrorists who call themselves the Weatherman
Underground Organization (WUO)..
No possible good can come of this trial. It is a
vengeful and destructive action. At best, the
result, in our opinion, could be a woeful
miscarriage of justice - the pillorying of
patriotic civil servants for performing what they
had every reason to believe to be their duty
under usages long sanctioned by the highest
authorities since the presidency of Franklin D.
Roosevelt. At worst, the trial, leading as it must
to further exposure of essential intelligence
sources and methods, is bound to spread
consternation among Americans already
alarmed and confused over the Carter
Administration's apparent inability, or
unwillingness, to defend our nation from its foes
at home and abroad.
In fact, we are driven to say that just about
the last thing the country needs at this hour of
deepening world crisis is another rattling of
supposed skeletons in the FBI's empty closets by
zealous prosecutors who seem obsessed with
the delusion that the intelligence services
entered into a conspiracy to destroy civil
liberties and who themselves are determined on
that account to stage another Roman circus for
television and the press.
The assault on the FBI and the intelligence
community began four years ago under the
Congressional mandate conferred upon the
Church and Pike committees. The assault
succeeded only because President Ford and the
leadership of the intelligence community
crumpled before the unexpected challenge and
surrendered the constitutional sanction and
authority of the Executive in the defense of the
national security. To satisfy the cry for victims
from the American Civil Liberties Union andthe
civil rights libertarians who dominate its
Criminal Division, the Department of justice, in
April 1977, indicted a middle-level FBI
supervisor, John Kearney, of the Bureau's New
York office, where the investigation of the
Weatherman Underground was largely focused.
So intense was the protest from outraged
Americans, that Attorney General, Griffin B.
Bell, admitted, in chagrin, that his mail was
running 300 to one against the action and hewas
"fast losing" even that one.
. A year later, Mr. Bell gingerly withdrew the
Kearney indictment, only to raise the Bureau's
three top officials within his sights. This was
manifestly a face-saving act; and to give it
plausibility he let it be known that 68 other FBI
supervisors and special agents were still under
investigation for alleged illegal wiretaps,
unlawful entry and mail openings. On
December 5,1978, the Director of the FBI,Judge
William H. Webster, in a statement akin to that
of Mr.,Bell's, announced that no disciplinary
action would be taken against the special agents,
but that two of their superiors would be fired,
another demoted, yet another suspended, and
two more censured. In January, in consequence
of the collapse of the evidence, not to mention
the weakness of his case, he rescinded one of
the firings and let the other officer retire.
The same strange air of uncertainty and
hesitation has lately befogged the
Government's approach to the case of the most
senior former FBI officers. First set for January
24, then postponed to March 5, the trial was
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postponed again three days before it was to
begin on the Governments tardy plea that it
needed more time to decide whether classified
intelligence bearing on the Weatherman
connection with hostile foreign groups could be
released to the defense, as the judge in the case
had ordered. That issue goes to the heart of the
case and the government's shilly-shallying is all
the more bewildering in light of judge
Webster's settled opinion that the Weatherman
Underground was and is the "closest thing we
have in the United States to international
terrorism."
A kind of madness, certainly folly, is at work
here. The national intelligence services,
although their jurisdictions differ in law, are all'
of a piece. One must complement the other.
When one fails or falters, the rest are weakened?
The dismal and predictable consequences of
the pointlessly destructive revelations of the
Church and Pike Committees in 1975 are visible
among all too many other situations in the
collapse of American intelligence in Iran and the
growth of the Italian Communist Party. Now, in
the aftermath, the public has awakened, tardily,
to the realization that the danger to our security
lies far less in the likelihood of the intelligence
services willfully preempting our civil rights than
in their incompetence to perform the vital tasks
they must do for us.
Dr. Henry Kissinger, in a recent interview in
The Economist of London, has rightly marked
one of the principal sources of the waverings
and incertitudes that caused the United States,
in the face of the Carter presidency's first
international testing, to behave like the presidency's
helpless giant" which Richard Nixon swore it
never was. The failure in Iran he blames, in large
part, on the "emasculation" of our intelligence
services brought about by the onslaughts of the
two congressional committees in league with a
hostile part of the press that took leave of its
responsibilities along with its senses.
Even Senator Frank Church, the new
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, was moved the other day to say, in a
freshet of crocodile tears, "I wonder if we are
competent to manage an intelligence gathering
program on anything." He ought to know. No
one did more to shatter the structure, the esprit
de corps, and, in consequence, the competence 1 -1
of American intelligence.
A DORMANT LAW
Central to the case against Messrs. Gray, Felt
and Miller is the question of the precise limits of
the constraints which the law places on
counterintelligence operations against
American terrorists. The three men are charged
under a 60-year-old statute, as revised in Section
241 of the Civil Rights Act of 1969, with having
engaged during 1972-3 in a "conspiracy to
violate the civil rights of friends and relatives of
Weatherman fugitives by utilizing techniques of
surreptitious entry." Weatherman was the name
taken by a brutal band of radicals who emerged
in the forefront of the anti-war mobs that broke
American unity while the Vietnam War was still
unfinished and unwon. The name itself came
from a leftist folksong carrying the lines:
"You don't need a weatherman to know the
way the wind is blowing."
At its murderous peak, 1969-72, the
Weatherman band. numbered by the FBI's
count, 1,554 men and women, mostly in their
twenties and thirties. Today the remnants on the
wanted list number no more than eight or nine
hard core individuals, all fugitives, perhaps in
this country, or settled in revolutionary
sanctuaries abroad.
'
. Considering the Weatherman peoples
shocking record of terrorism in support of alien
communist causes, their mysterious travels to
communist centers abroad for training and
indoctrination, the statute which the
Department of justice's clever young lawyers
have dusted off for degrading the law
enforcement officers who struggled to put a
stop to the deadly business is hardly on all fours
with the facts of the case. They have closed their
eyes to the pervasive foreign connections of the
Weatherman terrorist, and dredged up, an old
statute which until the present case was used
almost exclusively in the South for the
prosecution of Ku Klux Klansmen and local
police who beat up or otherwise harassed voters
at the polls - actions having nothing to do with
national security.
in other words, to bring this moss-covered
law to bear, the Department of justice's
prosecutors have staked their case on the
premise that the Weatherman organization was
and remains a genuine homegrown expression
of political dissent. For proceeding on this line,
the prosecution took its cue from the Supreme
Court's ruling in the "White Panther," or Keith,
.decision in 1972, growing out of an incident in
Detroit. Here. the Court . ruled that . the
Presidential authority for warrantless search
under the War Powers Act does not apply where
dissent or civil disobedience is domestic in
character. That decision abruptly changed the
rules under which the FBI and, as the sovereign
authority, the President himself, had until then
operated in confidence; - for . it asserts the
doctrine that under the Fourth Amendment the
Bureau must now have judicial approval before
it can resort to surreptitious entry, or electronic
surveillance, in all national security cases.
But the ruling still left open tHie question of
the Bureau's authority under the Executive
power to conduct such surveillance where the
target is an individual or group having
"significant" associations with a foreign power
- that is, looking to a foreign sourcefor political
direction and control, or money. On this point
the case stands or falls.
The Weatherman organization certainly
introduced something novel and ominous in
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American political action. Its aim, in Judge
Webster's own words, is "to foster a sustained
armed struggle, seeking to create a
revolutionary atmosphere that would lead to
the violent overthrow of the Government." It
rose out of the pandemonium loosed in the
mid-1960's by the protest against the war in
Vietnam. The Weatherman conspiracy called for
sundering American society by armed struggle
and random violence in the cities while
communist comrades abroad decimated our
forces overseas in so-called "wars of national
liberation." Even Judge Webster, in his
December, 1978, statement, conceded that the
Weatherman people themselves acknowledged
"they could never live peacefully within the
existing political system," and they sought
power not through the orderly processes of the
ballot but "from violence and revolution, which
they viewed as inevitable."
That was quite a judgment of the true nature
of the Weatherman terrorists to come from a
former judge on the eve of the trial of one of his
predecessors and the two other senior FBI
officials. It moved a retired FBI officer of high
rank to remark, "Judge Webster's background
permits him to take judicial notice of an old
truism; if it looks like a duck and walks like a
duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck."
The Weatherman annals are brief and
sinister. Our purpose here is to describe their
salient particulars, so that you will have a fair
understanding of the menace which this brutish
lot injected into our lives, and the severe testing
to which the FBI was subjected in defense of the
nation's security. The evidence presented
herewith is drawn from three sources: "The
Weatherman Underground; and Terrorist
Activity Inside the Weatherman Movement," a
report of the International Security
subcommittee of the Senate Committee of the
Judiciary, issued in 1975; a previously Top Secret
but declassified 400-page report by the Chicago
office of the FBI on Weatherman operations and
political goals, prepared in September 1976, and
excised for public. release; and a separate
analysis of the aims and operations of the
Weatherman threat prepared for our Fund by
two former, senior. FBI officers, W. Raymond
Wannall, formerly Assistant Director,
Intelligence Division, and Donald E. Moore,
Inspector, Counterintelligence Branch. Both are
officers of our Fund.
"A GENERATION OF FIREBRANDS"
The Weatherman people have never been in
doubt about what they themselves really are and
where their allegiances lie. In their first
manifesto, issued in the midst of a raucous and
blasphemous convention in Chicago, in June,
1969, they proclaimed that "revolutionaries are
internationalists" and owe their allegiance to
the world communist movement.
V.I. Lenin would have found that profession
of ideology heartwarming. Early in 1975, having
meanwhile adopted the styles and clandestine
guise of full-blown terrorists and subversives
and having changed their name to the
Weatherman Underground Organization, these
people surfaced again briefly to restate what
they stood for. They did so in a broadside called
"Osawatomie" - a name taken from the little
town in Kansas where the abolitionist John
Brown massacred a group of pro-slavery settlers.
They then had this to say for themselves: "The
Weatherman Underground Organization
(WUO) is a revolutionary organization of
communist women and men. . . For five years
the clandestine WUO has been hated and
hunted by the imperialist state." Their followers,
in their secret communes, were assured that the
work of organizing revolution, though pursued
in secret, was continuing apace: "Without the
habit of revolutionary practice among the
people, a generation of firebrands will slowly
cool into positions of comfortable opposition."
By then, the Weatherman people had
acquired a national reputation for violence
impressive enough to invite comparison with
the PLO, the Red Brigade, and the IRA. They had
claimed credit for, or were convincingly
identified with, at least 35 separate bomb plants
and bomb explosions across the nation. Among
the most daring they took credit for were these:
December 6,1969. Several Chicago Police
cars were bombed. Almost five years later the
WUO claimed credit.
February 16,1970. A bomb exploded at the
Golden Gate Park Branch of the San Francisco
Police Department, killing one officer and
injuring a number of other policemen. It was
aWUOjob,
March 6, 1970. Thirty-four sticks of
dynamite were discovered in the 13th Police
District Station House of the Detroit
Michigan Police Department,, killing one
officer and injuring a number of other
policemen. The WUO took no credit for this
failure. Evidence exists, however, that it was
its work.
May 10, 1970. The National Guard
Association building in Washington, D.C.,
was bombed. Four years later the WUO took
credit.
June 9,1970. The headquarters of the New
York City Police Department was bombed
and the WUO issued a communique boasting
of having done it.
October 5, 1970. The police memorial
statue in Haymarket Square in Chicago,
Illinois, was bombed for the second time. The
WUO leadership took , credit with an
insolence that was becoming its trademark.
October 8, 1970. The WUO bombed the
Hall of Justice, Marin County, California, and
admitted it.
October 10, 1970. The WUO bombed the
Long Island City Criminal Court House. In a
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communique it boasted that the job was "part
of an international conspiracy."
October 14, 1970. The Harvard University
Center for International Studies in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was bombed by a
group calling itself the "Proud Eagle Tribe."
The WUO exulted that its "Woman's
Brigade," of which the "tribe" was a unit, had
executed the bombing.
March 1, 1971. The United States Capitol
building in Washington, D.C., was bombed.
The WUO took credit for the crime.
August 28, 1971. The office for California
Prisons at the California state office building
in Sacramento, California, and the
Department of Corrections office in the Ferry
Building in San Francisco were bombed. The
WUO said both pieces of work were its own.
October 15, 1971. The Hermann Building
in the Center for International Affairs at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Cambridge was bombed. A flyer put out by
the WUO claimed that this bombing was
another action carried out by the "Proud
Eagle Tribe."
May 19, 1972. The Pentagon in Arlington,
Virginia, was bombed. The WUO said it had
done the job.
May 18, 1973. The Latin American
headquarters building of the international
Telephone and Telegraph Company in New
York City was bombed. A WUO communique
claimed credit.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
That the Department of justice's zealous
prosecutors should measure the perpetrators of
this string of outrages as nothing worse than
Americans engaged in authentic American
political action raises in our minds some serious
questions about the prevailing perspectives of
the Department of Justice.
The roots of the organization go back to the
founding of the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), a noisesome pioneer gathering of
young radicals who met in convention at Fort
Huron, Michigan, in 1960. They represented a
tight alliance of black activists, white civil
rightists, anti-nuclear pacifists, intellectual
Marxists and one-worlders whose common goal
was to realign the Democratic party along a
"progressive" course. At that time the SDS could
be described as a generally domestic radical
movement. Before the decade was out,
however, the founding movement had come
apart, and the breakaway Weatherman faction
was bent on rallying a following for an assault
aimed at the destruction of American
constitutional society.
Along the way, the SDS leadership changed
course with the shifting winds from Moscow,
Peking, Hanoi and Havana. In the beginning, the
weight of student agitation was thrown behind
the civil rights movements. By the mid-1960's,
however, as American involvement in Vietnam
deepened, the SDS objectives acquired an
international content as well. The
demonstrations which it organized in the streets
and on the university campuses were directed
not just against American intervention in
Vietnam; the intent was to make sure that the
United States forces in the field lost the war.
The Weatherman cadres served their
apprenticeship in the turmoil of rock throwing,
trashing, cop-baiting and street brawling
promoted by the SDS through its inglorious
decade of reign on the campuses. They had a
hand in organizing the first anti-war march on
Washington in 1965; in whipping up anti-draft
demonstrations in the universities; in
blockading factories, laboratories and the
headquarters of the great corporations involved
in supporting the war effort.
Yet, for the firebrands in the SDS national
councils, these were fairly parochial exercises in
contrived disorder. A mixed bag of
undergraduates, dropouts, draft-dodgers,
graduate scholars and unfrocked teachers, they
began to come together in 1968-69 as an
emerging Soviet of nomadic commissars in
search of a swifter, deadlier vehicle for world
revolution than the orthodox Moscow-Leninist
line for overturning advanced industrial
societies offered. By then, the world of Moscow
directed communism had, in addition to
Moscow, three other lively capitals - Prague,
Havana and Hanoi. Travel among them was easy
to arrange. Expenses were looked after.
"Guides" in ideology, and specialists in
subversion and conflict, bomb manufacture and
guerrilla warfare abounded. The Weatherman
people, while casting about for a front to match
their appetites for violence made the round of
communist capitals, usually in delegations.
THE FOUL-WEATHER MEN
Mark Rudinsky, alias Mark Rudd, born in
Irvington, New Jersey, chairman of the SDS
chapter at the University of Columbia in New
York City, found the model which he and others
were seeking when he slipped out of the
country to Cuba in February, 1968, with Mother
SDS activists. A month after his return from
Havana he masterminded the riotous sit-in at
Columbia. His student followers seized the
principal buildings, took the senior Dean
hostage, vandalized classrooms and shut down
this seat of learning for 30 days. Before the siege
was broken, some 700 people were arrested.
Later that same year, another SDS national
officer and declared "revolutionary
communist," Bernadine Rae Ohrnstein, alias
Dohrn, a 1965 graduate of the University of
Chicago and in 1967 of its law school, traveled to
Europe for rendezvous with communist leaders
in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East and West
Germany, Sweden and France.
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Ms. Dohrn was one of Rudd's co-
conspirators in the sacking of Columbia
University, and she, like him, returned from her
travels armed with schemes to fit the SDS into
the world communist revolution of violence.
A year earlier, in November, 1967, Cathlyn
Platt Wilkerson, a 1966 Swarthmore graduate,
and Jeffrey Carl Jones, an occasional student at
Antioch College, both SDS officials, set out for
Hanoi. Because the city was under
bombardment, the venue was changed to
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Here they were
painstakingly drilled by propagandists of both
the Hanoi and the Vietcong on how the SDS
could best cripple the U.S. war effort, which had
moved into high gear. A fellow conspirator,
Naomi Ester Jaffe, had been luckier. Six months
earlier, in May, Ms. Jaffe, a student of the "New
Left" philosopher Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis
University and a 1965 graduate in sociology from
the New School for Social Research in New York
City, was given the red-carpet treatment in
Hanoi with four other SDS activists. They, too,
were indoctrinated in what the international
communist movement required of them. Ms.
Jaffe's fervor was heightened by the experience
(in her own account) of having shot down an
American military plane while attached to a
North Vietnamese antiaircraft battery.
THE CUBAN SOURCES
These were hardly the travels of rising young
American politicians. Nor were they innocent of
foreign taint. In 1967, Hanoi formed a front
called the South Vietnamese Peoples
Committee for Solidarity with the American
People. Its declared aim was to open a channel
to "Progressive groups and individuals in the
U.S...." such as the SDS, and to work with them
to undermine public support in the United
States of the war. As early as September, 1967, a
large delegation of SDS activists met in
Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, with top
propagandists of the Vietcong's National
Liberation Front and Hanoi's senior specialists in
deception and disinformation. Tom Hayden and
Rennie Davis headed the American delegation,
which included a sprinkling of fellow-traveling
clerics. Afterwards, seven in the party went on to
Hanoi with their hosts.
The practiced but shadowed hand of the
KGB, which organizes and manipulates
international fronts for the Soviet Bloc, was
visible in these various collaborations, so crucial
to the survival and eventual success of its Asian
ally. And the KGB's genius for swaying
impressionable American youth came most
effectively into play in its exploitation of the
Cuban connection.
Cuba was handy. It was readily accessible to
American radicals by air from Canada or
Mexico, as well as from the USSR. Here the
agents of the hard-pressed Vietnamese
communists could present their case to
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impressionable American radicals. Cuba had the
further attraction of being itself both a model
and a school for revolution. Castro wasshouting
that it is "the duty of every revolutionary to
make revolution." His principal lieutenant in
tactics and ideology, Che Guevera, who had
been run to the ground and killed in Bolivia in
1967, in a failed uprising, had coined the slogan
"two, three, many Vietnams" for exhausting
American "imperialism."
It was in this brutal admixture of Latin and
Asian experiences in revolution - the drive of
Marxism-Leninism overlaid with Maoism and a
whiff of Latin romanticism - that the
Weatherman idea took root. For the "Action
Faction" in SDS, led in collegial association by
Ms. Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones and William
C. Ayers, a graduate of the University of
Michigan and the son of the then President of
Commonwealth Edison Company-of Chicago,
the logic for action was finally at hand. Armed
struggle had become the essential precondition
for the seizure of state power; the surest path. to
revolution lay through "Peoples" or "National.
Liberation" wars against U.S. "imperialism"
throughout the Third World; and the roleof the
white American radicals in the struggle was to be
internationalized by supplying a combat and
intellectual vanguard for American blacks and
other minorities who constituted Third World
"colonies" inside the heartland of Imperialism.
The "primary enemy," according to a
Weatherman who recanted, was (and probably
still remains) "the Mother Country and their.
total objective is the destruction of the United
States."
What the Weatherman war plan boiled down
to, after the jargon has been peeled away, was a
blind acceptance of Moscow's strategy for wars
of national liberation. It was further influenced
by two other theoreticians of communist
guerrilla warfare. One was the Brazilian Marxist,
Carlos Marighella. In his work, "Mini-Manual of
the Urban Guerrilla," Marighella theorized that
a revolution to be successful had to demonstrate
that a government was incapable of maintaining
stability and order in the society. Once the law
enforcement instrumentalities were shown to
be impotent, a society would collapse, he
argued, and the erosion could be broughtabout
by urban guerrilla warfare.
Marighella's manual had a powerful effect
on the Weatherman tactics. So did another
work, "Revolution in the Revolution?" written
by the French Marxist, Regis Debray. Debray's
book is based on conversations with Fidel Castro
and the example of Che Guevera. While their
model of revolution was rural guerrilla warfare
based on Maoist experience, DeBray shared
Marighella's conviction that armed struggle was
indispensable. The Weatherman plan, as
influenced by these revolutionaries, called for
converting the SDS movement into an urban
guerrilla force and turning the cities of the
United States into battlefields.
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A DECLARATION OF WAR
By mid-1969, the "Action faction" within the
SDS national council, led by Dohrn and Rudd,
Ayers and Jones, was sure enough of its
revolutionary mission and of its support abroad
as well as in the campus chapters to bid for the
leadership of the movement. At the Democratic
Party National Convention in Chicago in June, it
revealed in a 16,000 word broadside the basic
outlines of its war plan. The core of its
proposition was straight from the revolutionary
credo of Vo Nguyen Giap, Hanoi's
Commanding General; the war against
American imperialism in Vietnam was a struggle
for the world; winning there meant winning
everywhere; and war in the streets of the U.S.
would make victory certain in the rice paddies of
Vietnam.
The levees for the urban guerrilla forces
were to come from a reservoir of street fighters
recruited among the "underprivileged' and
"oppressed" youth in the ghettos. They would
become "the true revolutionary vanguard,"
smashing the pillars of law and order in the
American cities exactly as the Maoist Red
Guards of the Cultural Revolution had
convulsed China.
in their thrust for power, the Action Faction
leaders adopted the name Weatherman from
the line in their manifesto that made them
notorious. There was a fight on the convention
floor. The newly formed Weatherman people
broke with the more orthodox revolutionaries
in the movement - those like the members of
the Progressive Labor Party who were
determined to make revolution along the
classical Leninist line of "working class" action.
The breaches in the SDS ranks were never
healed, and the Weatherman people would in
time lose support for their ruthlessness.
Directly after the convention, a Weatherman
delegation numbering 30-odd, headed by Ms.
Dohrn, flew to Havana for urgent discussions
with their now-familiar Cuban and Vietnam
advisors. Another Weatherman, Julie
Nachamin, a 1964 graduate of the University of
Michigan, had preceded them there by several
months on another task: to make arrangements
for receiving the first contingents of the
Venceremos Brigade of American students
traveling to Cuba ostensibly to help cut Fidel
Castro's cane and savor the atmosphere of
ongoing revolution. The Dohrn party had long
discussions with, among others, the senior
Vietcong representative in residence, Huyn Van
Ba. He exhorted them to step up their anti-war
demonstrations to protest the hopelessness of
the U.S. war plan. The man from Hanoi also
offered a piece of practical advice on the
qualities to look for in an American recruit:
"Don't look for the one who says the best thing.
Look for the one who fights."
To appreciate the enormity of the treachery
involved in these transactions, one must go back
a full decade in memory. In Vietnam, the
communist Tet offensive of 1968, far from
producing the American defeat which a rattled
American press had reported it to be, had in fact
been a disastrous failure for Hanoi. The
Vietcong guerrilla forces had been all but
annihilated, and the North Vietnamese main
force divisions in the South were beaten to
exhaustion. In Hanoi and Moscow, the
immediate concern was to keep American
opinion from awakening to the real situation
and calling for the coup de grace. This sordid
service was contributed in no small measure by
Weatherman when, some two months after the
visit to Havana, the group staged its "Days of
Rage" in Chicago. For four days, starting
October 8, 1969, student mobs led by
Weatherman, shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, by
brandishing Vietcong flags, and calling "Bring
the War Home" rampaged through the North
Side, the Gold Coast and the Loop, smashing
store windows, overturning cars, beating up
passersby, and pelting the police and National
Guardsmen with rocks. Before the violence
subsided, 283 demonstrators had been arrested,
including most of the Weatherman leaders.
These "Days of Rage" supplied the wild and
bloody beginnings of the Weatherman
excrescence. By the following June, the group
was ranked in the late J. Edgar Hoover's annual
report on FBI activities with the Black Panthers as
the most dangerous body of militants abroad in
the land. in the same report, covering the Fiscal
Year 1970, Mr. Hoover listed 281 attacks on
ROTC buildings, 38 demonstrations against
Department of Defense research facilities, the
arrest of some 7,200 persons on university
campuses, and 9.5 million dollars worth of
property damaged in the course of the antiwar
tumult. The Weatherman organization was
directly responsible for only a fraction of these
breaches of the peace; but its much publicized
example, where it did not incite such incidents,
undoubtedly stimulated the general onrush of
violence across the land and hastened the
wilting of the nation's will that took the U.S. out
of Vietnam in disgrace, and started our retreat
from the world.
During the winter of 1969-70, only a few
months after it surfaced, Weatherman -went
underground. In accordance with DeBray's
theory that guerrilla war could be most
effectively pressed by small cadres, or "focos"
(from the Spanish word for cores), the veteran
activists split up into collectives, or communes,
each sheltering from 10 to 30 young men and
women. These were scattered mostly in New
York, California, Illinois, Ohio and the State of
Washington. In their hidden communities,
when not on the streets brawling, or picketing
laboratories doing research for the Pentagon, or
sacking ROTC quarters on university grounds,
or manufacturing or planting bombs, they
boned up on Marxism-Leninism, and pondered
the maxims of Chairman Mao, Castro, DeBray
and Marighella.
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 Approved
Larry Grotwohl, in testimony before the Senate
subcomittee on internal Security, on October
18, 1974, said that the WUO leaders were in the
process in early 1970, when he quit them, of
linking up with Third World terrorist
organizations through channels already open.
"The Quebec Liberation Front, the IRA, Al
Fatah, et cetera," Mr. Grotwohl said, "What they
wanted was outside aid."
But to prove that the WUO actually took
direction, even money, form foreign sources is a
difficult, if not impossible, task to lay on the
accused FBI officials at this late hour. For
purposes of cover, the Weatherman people
made a point of insisting that they were self-
supporting. Outwardly, their life styles followed
the spartan standards prescribed in the
Marighella manual. Cadres whose families had
means ripped off their relatives. The rest
resorted to little con games - relief payments,
food stamps and unemployment benefits
obtained by false identification, to supplement
what stolen credit cards failed to provide. But
these enterprises could not have paid for their
continuous travel, their frequent conventions at
home and in distant lands. The Cuban Embassy
to the United Nations off upper Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan was, by many accounts, a generous
paymaster.
We say that the Department of justice is
chasing the wrong people. Instead of
prosecuting the FBI officers, it should be hot on
the trail of the two key Weatherman fugitives,
Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin. In all due
respect we suggest to Attorney General Bell as
the nation's chief law enforcement officer that
his overriding duty to the nation at this point is
to quash the pending trial until this unsavory
pair of women terrorists have been brought to
justice and the traitorous nature of the
Weatherman established. To hasten that
objective, a substantial reward should be
offered by the government for information
leading to their apprehension, or establishing
their whereabouts behind the iron Curtain.
A good deal more than the fate of three men,
serious as that aspect is by itself, hangs on a
sensible and timely resolution of this situation.
President Carter, in his State of the Union
Message of January 23, spoke of building "new
foundations" for, among other things,' our
defense and foreign policies. The intelligence
services, as we remarked earlier, must be
brought together again into a coherent,
interdependent and effective whole. If
President Carter's new substructure is to
tolerate a counterintelligence apparatus
incapable of protecting the nation internally
from subversion, terrorism and espionage and a
foreign intelligence service too weak and
demoralized to be a reliable watchman abroad,
then he is building on sand.
7o JL EN
FUND
SECURITY and INTELLIGENCE
Suite 500
499 South Capitol St., S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20003
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By October, 1970, Bernadine Dohrn and two
other Weatherman maidens were entered on
the FBI's list of "Most Wanted Fugitives" and
Dohrn had actually "declared" war on the
United States.
The bomb manufacturing program suffered
at least one setback. One of the early "factories"
was a fine townhouse in Greenwich Village, on
West 11th Street, owned by Cathy Wilkerson's
well-to-do father, John Platt Wilkerson, an
advertising executive and among other
distinctions president of the Amherst College
Alumni Fund. On March 6, 1970, a tremendous
explosion blew the house apart. Two young
women, one quite nude, were seen streaking
from the debris, to take refuge in a neighbor's
house. One was Cathy Wilkerson. Theother was
the notorious Kathy Boudin, a Bryn Mawr
student who passed her senior year at the
University of Moscow and the daughter of a
tireless defender of the lawless left, the lawyer
Leonard Boudin. Three other Weatherman
cadres died in the blast, two of whom had
traveled to Havana the summer before with
Bernadine Dohrn. Police found 66 sticks of
dynamite, four finished bombs and 100 blastin
caps in the wrecked house. Wilkerson an
Boudin fled to Canada. Their whereabouts are
unknown to this day.
Weatherman people were communists
practicing, not merely preaching, violent
revolution. The language of the founding
Weatherman manifesto in Chicago, could not
have been more forthright:
"The goal is the destruction of U.S.
imperialism and the achievement of a
classless state: world communism.
Winning state power in the U.S. will
occur as a result of the military forces of
the U.S. overextending themselves
around the world and being defeated
piecemeal; the struggle within the U.S.
will be a vital part of this process, but
when the revolution triumphs in the
U.S. it will have been made by the
people of the world ..."
Four years later, in May 1974, the WUO
restated its self-conferred mission in another
broadside called "Prairie Fire" - a term taken
from Chairman Mao's aphorism, "A Single
Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire." The ardor for
armed struggle remained undiminished, and
the paper prescribed the Weatherman "strategy
for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the
United States" - "the enemy of all
humankind:"
Our goal is to attack imperialism's ability
to exploit and wage war against all
oppressed peoples. Our final goal is the
complete destruction of imperialism,
the seizure of the means of production
and the building of socialism.
A year later, however, a new series of
broadsides under the title of "Osowatomie,"
drafted, as were most of the others, by Ms.
Dohrn, were sounding a different bugle call.
The "foco" principle in DeBray's theory of
guerrilla warfare did not fit the circumstances of
American society. in consequence, the
Weatherman revolutionary leadership, Ms.
Dohrn now argued, was thereafter "to
concentrate on organizing the working class to
seize power and establish socialism." In the
changed role, she said, "our goal is revolution,
not armed struggle," and that meant a reversion
to the classical communist role of building a
part organization which would take over the
working classes.
With these utterances, Weatherman as the
fighting vanguard of the American faction of the
world revolution began to leave the stage, not
with a last big bang, but with something of a
whimper.*
But its brief and nasty record of violence has
left its scars on American life. It scared the
country and the government. We seemed to be
sliding into anarchy. President Nixon and his
advisors were baffled and alarmed that so
menacing a band of terrorists could whirl up
unforeseen in the midst of American society.
The FBI was under fierce pressure to assemble
intelligence on the size and scope of the
Weatherman organization, the background of
its principals, and their connections with foreign
powers or international political networks.
Similar pressure was brought to bear on the CIA.
Judge Webster, in his statement of last
December 5th, disclosed that President Nixon
had personally pressed the Bureau to come up
with the answers and to put the Weatherman
organization out of business and that "this
intense interest in catching the Weatherman
fugitives at all costs was conveyed by FBI
headquarters to those in the field responsible
for the effort."
to the test, the Bureau marshalled its then still
impressive resources. The quarry was run down
by the Bureau's resort to the various techniques
of surveillance which had been the authorized
methodology in national security cases
throughout the professional careers of the
officers responsible for the investigation.
Now, by the vagaries of politics, the men who
blunted this naked threat to the nation's law and
order are required to prove that the threat was
real and, additionally, that it had a "significant"
foreign connection. That the Weatherman
leadership considered themselves part of an
international apparatus is plain enough on the
public record. A one-time Weatherman, Mr.
*Actually, there was a last serious try two years later:
an attempt to bomb the Los Angeles office of
California State Senator, John V. Briggs. Two FBI
underground agents who had infiltrated the
Weatherman watched the plot hatch, then pounced
when the infernal machine was assembled. Five
Weatherman were seized with the bomb. Four
pleaded guilty and are now serving sentences. The
fifth is to go on trial in May.
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