a climate of violence: the weather underground & the fbi, 1968-78

1 A CLIMATE OF VIOLENCE

nks

A Climate of Violence

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Weather

Underground, 1968-197811,987 Words Candidate # 44277


Table of Contents

Introduction: Blowing Up Bathrooms …………………………………………….__3

“Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker”: From Columbia to COINTELPRO …...___6

Constructing a Threat: FBI Perceptions of the New Left ……………………...___11

“Two, Three, Many SDSes”: The Birth of Weatherman ……………………….___16

“We Spit on Your Values”: A Clash of Ideologies ………………………………__20

Conclusion: The Aftermath ……………………………………………………….__25

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….._29


Introduction: Blowing Up Bathrooms

Hello. This is Bernadine Dohrn. I’m going to read a declaration of a state of war. This is the first communiqué from the Weatherman Underground… Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice.

- Communiqué #1 from the Weather Underground1

At 1:32am on the 28th February, 1971, a timed explosive blast tore through an unmarked, out-of-the-way washroom in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. Two days later, the Associated Press received a letter from the revolutionary left wing terrorist group “The Weather Underground”, claiming credit for the explosion as a protest against the American invasion of Laos, launched on February 8 th. The “communiqué” identified three reasons for the Capitol bombing: “to express our love and solidarity with the non-white people of the world who always happen to be the victims of 200 years of U.S. technological warfare”; “to freak out the warmongers and remind them they have created guerrillas here”; and “to bring a smile and a wink to the kids and people here who hate this government”.2 The bomb was a small one: 15lbs of dynamite hidden in a briefcase and triggered via a crude stopwatch detonator; besides the bathroom, only the Senate barbershop and three back-corridor offices were damaged.3 Symbolically, however, the bomb powerfully illustrated the ability of the Weather Underground to strike without warning at the very seat of American Government with seeming impunity, and caused a very real panic in Washington, D.C. President Nixon himself denounced the attack on national television as “the most dastardly act in American history”.4

By the beginning of 1971, the terrorist organisation known as Weatherman was seemingly at the height of its powers.5 Although never a large group (around 200 members at most), since its creation in the summer of 1969, it had fermented violent street riots in Chicago and Washington, taken credit for over a dozen bombings of police stations, National Guard outposts, courthouses, military research centres, and prison offices across the country, and aided in LSD guru Timothy Leary’s dramatic escape from a California prison. The Weather Underground, for a time, was Public Enemy No. 1 in America. In February 1970, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover characterised Weatherman as “the most violent, persistent and pernicious of revolutionary groups”, a distinction usually reserved for the Black Panthers.6

However, even before the group finally collapsed in 1977, they had largely faded from the American consciousness. Much of their early limelight was stolen by the

1 Reproduced in H. Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Berkeley, 1970), p. 3002 Weather Underground, “We Bombed the Capitol”, in Liberated Guardian Collective, ed., Outlaws of America: Communiqués from the Weather Underground (New York, 1971), pp. 41-443 Time Magazine, “A Bomb in the Senate”, March 15th, 19714 Quoted in D. Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, 2006), p. 1655 At different times it also referred to itself as, variously, The Weathermen, The Weather Underground, and The Weather People. The name was taken, of course, from Bob Dylan’s lyrics to Subterranean Homesick Blues: “You don’t need a weatherman / to know which way the wind blows”.6 United States Senate, The Weather Underground: Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act (Washington, D.C., 1975), pp. 27-28; 38.


more dramatic violence of other revolutionary groups, such as the Symbionese Liberation Army, who did not hold back from killing civilians and police officers as Weatherman had done. As such, the Weather Underground never inspired much of a distinct historiography. Weatherman remains almost forgotten by the American public, while most histories of the New Left or the counter-culture rebellions of the 1960’s either ignore Weatherman entirely or dismiss the movement in a few paragraphs. The dominant attitude of most scholars towards the group seems to be either apathetic or highly critical.7 Many accounts portray the Weathermen as pathological zealots, caught up in a naive fantasia of revolutionary violence, whose activism had little to do with rational politics. Their ideology is dismissed as nothing more than a twisted system of delusions, fuelled by an irrational hatred for society and monstrous arrogance. Like their German counterparts, the Red Army Faction, the Weathermen are accused of suffering from realitätsverlust, a “loss of reality” that doomed both organisations to destructive illusions.8

However, in the last few years, new material based on the experiences of actual members of Weatherman has appeared that sheds fresh light on the reality of life in a underground terrorist organisation. In 2001, a former leader of Weatherman, Bill Ayers, published Fugitive Days: A Memoir, his account of the organisation he helped found.9 In addition, both Jeremy Varon’s Bringing The War Home (2004) and Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America (2006) explore the rise and fall of Weatherman through exhaustive interviews with both former leaders and rank-and-file members of Weatherman. While undeniably subjective and often self-justificatory, these personal accounts nevertheless contain a wealth of information concerning the ideology and motivations of the Weathermen previously unavailable to historians.

This new scholarship does much to undermine previous portrayals of Weatherman as an essentially nihilistic or pathological movement. In fact, on closer analysis, much of the group’s ideology, for all its admittedly crazed revolutionary rhetoric, is remarkably rational, even moral. The Weathermen were driven by deep-seated political conviction and a genuine commitment to uphold their beliefs through action. Weathermen defined themselves almost exclusively by what they opposed: the Vietnam war, American imperialistic foreign policy, white hegemony and oppression of people of colour, repressive state control of self-expression, the deprivation and injustice of capitalism. They termed this system of repression ‘Pig Amerika’. This essay, however, seeks to examine the conflict between Weatherman and the forces opposed to them: namely, the state police apparatus, embodied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and thereby explore the ways in which these two almost diametrically opposed organisations, one a large and powerful government bureaucracy, the other a tiny and impoverished revolutionary terrorist group, perceived and interacted with each other.

This examination is possible thanks to the release under the Freedom of Information Act of 10,932 pages of internal FBI memos, reports, and intelligence papers documenting its investigation, surveillance, and counter-intelligence activities against

7 See, for example, T. Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987); P. Collier & D. Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (New York, 1989)8 J. Varon, Bringing the War Home: the Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Violence in the 1960’s and 70’s (Los Angeles, 2004), p. 179 B. Ayers, Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Boston, 2001)


the New Left, SDS, and Weatherman between the period 1962 and 1979.10 As a large, highly centralised government bureaucracy, the FBI insists on the accurate reporting and recording of all potentially relevant data in a case. This results in a theoretically coherent and complete record of the Bureau’s investigation of Weatherman. Furthermore, the bulk of the Weatherman files occurred prior to the signing of the Freedom of Information Act in 1974. As such, during the investigation and pursuit of Weatherman there was no reason for Bureau personnel to believe that their reports would ever be released to the public, and so there was no reason for agents to be anything other than entirely candid in their reporting.

There are, however, limitations. For a start, the files released under the Freedom of Information Act do not necessarily represent all the files the FBI has on the subject, as the Act permits the non-disclosure of material that “unauthorized disclosure [of which] could reasonably be expected to cause damage to national security.”11 There is no way of telling how many files have not been released, thus it is impossible to determine if the 10,000 or so pages represent the majority of FBI records or only a fraction of the total population. Furthermore, even those files which have been released frequently have words, sentences or even whole paragraphs blacked out. Normally, this is to protect private information such as the identities of informants, personal telephone numbers, or the true names of undercover agents; however, in numerous instances information has been withheld because it is deemed to present a threat to “national security.” Nevertheless, the FBI documents provide a remarkable window on the interaction between political dissidents and the state during a tumultuous era.

The relationship between the Weather Underground and the FBI is an extremely complicated one, and was played out against a backdrop of a more generalised unrest, both political and cultural, which gripped America in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The FBI’s pursuit of Weatherman suggests that radical movements and state powers do not exist in a vacuum; each is continuously influenced and shaped by the actions and responses of the other. By considering this particular example of the interaction between authority and dissent in isolation, this essay hopes to examine broader themes concerning criminal justice and radical activity during an especially turbulent period of American history. Ultimately, therefore, this essay is concerned with the policing of dissent, the potential for repression of radical political activity within a liberal democracy, and the means by which the state responds when its established institutions are under threat from indigenous dissidents.

10 Request for access to these files was made on 2nd July 2007, and files were released to the Reading Room in FBI HQ, Washington D.C. under FOIPA Request #1098832-000 as of 27th August. After I reviewed the hard copy files in Washington 27 th August – 5th September, I requested a digital copy of some 11,000 pages on CD, which was received on 5th November.11 Executive Order 11562, (37 FR 5209, March 8th, 1972)


“Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker”: From Columbia to COINTELPRO

On April 22nd, 1968, some 1000 students of the University of Columbia stormed five campus buildings, seized Columbia Dean Henry Coleman as a hostage, and barricaded themselves inside.12 The de facto leader of the uprising, Mark Rudd, issued a statement explaining that the students demanded an end to the University’s plans to clear several blocks of African-American housing in order to build a new gym, as well as Columbia’s ongoing affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a military research organisation. Rudd also pointed out various “wrongs” in American society, including American “imperialism” in Vietnam, racial and class segregation, and the meaningless nature of education within conventional universities. The statement concluded with a line of the black nationalist poet LeRoi Jones: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”13

The uprising at Columbia was the end result of the frustration and bitterness that had been slowly mounting within the New Left since 1962. Six years of heartfelt struggle against the Vietnam War, institutional racism and inner-city poverty had produced very little in the way of concrete results. Despite legislative victories, the economic and social conditions of black people had not substantially improved, and despite several huge anti-war protests between 1965 and 1967, the U.S. showed no signs of pulling out of Vietnam.14 Faced with public indifference and a government seemingly resistant to change of any kind, student activists began to question the effectiveness of the reformist, non-violent tactics championed during the movement’s optimistic early days. Future Weatherman Scott Braley remembered the difficulties the New Left faced:

There were very few wins in the sense that you got anything you wanted... we might have fixed some smaller issues, but we didn’t want to fix the smaller issues. We wanted to fix issues that would change the world. It was clear to many people that something much more radical was needed.15

Failure bred frustration, and as the optimism of the early years soured into sullen hostility, student activists began to turn to more militant tactics. In 1967, the New Left’s flagship organisation, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), voted to openly aid draft resisters (in direct violation of Federal law) and went on record in support of the racial uprisings in Cleveland and Detroit.16 As Tom Hayden, founding member of SDS put it, “violence cannot be ignored as an option… we are moving from symbolic civil disobedience to barricaded resistance… towards power – the power to stop the machine if it cannot be made to serve humane ends.”17 As hundreds of thousands died in Vietnam and the inner cities of America tore themselves apart in race riots, the New Left found itself in a state of moral emergency. Convinced that

12 J.L. Avorn, A. Crane, M. Jaffe et al, Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (New York, 1968)13 J.L. Avorn, Up Against the Ivy Wall, pp. 25-2714 J.T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-74 (Oxford, 1996), p. 621-62915 Quoted in Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 2316 K. Sale, SDS (New York, 1973) pp. 317-34417 Quoted in M. Teodori The New Left: A Documentary History (New York, 1969), p. 346


society was flawed and in need of urgent change, increasing numbers of activists abandoned trying to redeem society from within, and began instead to advocate actively fighting the system in order to ‘overcome’ it, to “destroy” the machine and rebuild a better society from the ashes. Columbia was the first manifestation of this new militancy within the New Left.

Inevitably, however, the more direct militancy only invited conflict and condemnation from the establishment. In the early hours of April 30 th, after a week of failed negotiations, Columbia authorities called in the police. Within hours, over one thousand New York City police officers had surrounded the occupied buildings, while SDS members began feverishly constructing a makeshift blockade. Clad in full riot gear, the police easily broke through the barricades and forcibly removed any protester who did not willingly surrender. 711 students were arrested and 148 injured in the ensuing melee.18 The police reported that the injuries were a result of “the fact that force was used to effect the arrests”; the SDS newspaper New Left Notes however claimed that students had been “brutally beaten” with batons and flashlights.19

The Columbia uprising, and the police response, had a profound impact on the course of student radicalism. As the first major example of student activists actively fighting the system, it was quickly seized on as a template for emulation on campuses across America. The May 6th edition of New Left Notes carried the headline “Two, Three, Many Columbias…”, and argued that the point had arrived where “push comes to shove. Power… will remain for us no more than a hypothetical construct as long as our position is: “Please, Sir, can we have some power?”“.20 The TV images of students defying authority and issuing demands at Columbia were broadcast across the nation, convincing many that militant action was the way forward. SDS itself exploded in size following the uprising, expanding from approximately 30,000 members in 250 chapters in August 1967 to around 100,000 in 400 chapters by November 1968.21 Among the thousands of students inspired by the example of Columbia were three future leading members of Weatherman – Bill Ayers, Jim Mellen and Terry Robbins, who co-authored an article in the October 7 th issue of New Left Notes, arguing that

Militant tactics provide activity based on an élan and a community which shows young people that we can make a difference, we can hope to change the system, and also that life within the radical movement can be liberated, fulfilling, and meaningful.22

Arguably, the Columbia uprising was the first example of the kind of militant action that would be taken to its logical extreme in Weatherman, and it is significant to note that several key players in the uprising itself went on to become founder members of Weatherman, including Ted Gold, John Jacobs, and Mark Rudd himself.23

18 J.K. Davis, Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement (Westport, 1997)19 Cited in Avorn, Up Against the Ivy Wall, p. 18120 Cited in D. Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Los Angeles, 2004), p. 4821 Berger, Outlaws, p.5322 Cited in Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew, p. 723 Jacobs, The Way The Wind Blew, p. 5


Furthermore, the police response to the occupation demonstrated graphically to the New Left that the state was ready and willing to meet any militant challenges to the status quo with overwhelming force and violent repression. Evidence of the state’s willingness to employ force against those seeking change would continue to build over the next few years, from the Chicago Democratic Convention later that year to the Kent State slayings in 1970. As David Gilbert, future Weatherman, later recalled,

There became this realization that we weren’t just going to shake up their consciousness and change things, that there was actually a power structure that was determined to keep up the current relationships and was quite willing and capable of using force and violence. I think that realization created a crisis in the movement.24

Columbia is also significant because it provided the impetus for a massive escalation of FBI surveillance and infiltration of the New Left in general, and SDS in particular. Assistant Director William Sullivan later claimed that the FBI “didn’t know the New Left existed” before the uprising, and had to scramble to establish an intelligence operation against the movement.25 This claim is contradicted by the FBI’s own files, which show that the Bureau had been investigating alleged Communist infiltration of the New Left ever since 1962.26 In 1965, Hoover instructed all Field Offices of the Bureau to begin “immediate investigation of all chapters of SDS”, and the Chicago office was soon able to place a high-level informant, David Dumaer, within the SDS national office in Chicago.27 The Bureau was thus in a position to observe and document the New Left’s increasingly militant mood. In 1967 Hoover noted that SDS protests “are carried out under guise of legitimate dissent. Actually, they often clearly call for and encompass violations of local and Federal laws. Frequently, in fact, they border on anarchy and sedition”.28 FBI records clearly demonstrate that the Bureau took the New Left very seriously indeed. Arguing that “the new militant revolutionary wave of subversion whose growth we have witnessed in recent years” presented a “bold and blatant challenge to law and order in our society”, the FBI moved rapidly to develop prosecutable cases.29 In doing so, the Bureau acted entirely of its own accord and received no prior authorisation from its parent organisation, the Department of Justice. Indeed, a remarkably candid 1967 memo from the Head of Internal Security, Charles Brennan, summarising FBI reports on SDS reveals the contempt reserved for the Department:

Perhaps one of these days the authorities will wake up and move. When that time comes, the educators will expel troublemakers, local authorities will make arrests, and even the Department [of Justice] will authorise prosecution. In the meantime, however, we should not sit idly by because others are shirking their responsibilities.30

The militancy of Columbia students and their repeated use of revolutionary rhetoric convinced the FBI, however, that more was needed. On May 9 th 1968, barely a week

24 Cited in Berger, Outlaws, p. 3525 W. Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI (New York, 1979), p. 14726 Memo, Baumgardner to Sullivan, 12th July 196327 Memo, Director to All FO’s, 19th May 1965; FBI Airtel, Chicago to Director, 13th May 196828 Airtel, Director to Albany Office, 5th December 196729 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 6th December 196730 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 6th December 1967


after the uprising, Brennan sent another memo to Assistant Director Sullivan, in which he claimed:

Our Nation is undergoing an era of disruption and violence caused to a large extent by various individuals generally associated with the New Left. Some of these activists urge revolution in America and call for the defeat of the United State in Vietnam. They continually and falsely allege police brutality and do not hesitate to utilize unlawful acts to further their so called causes. The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director of the Bureau [J. Edgar Hoover] in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses.31

The memo officially initiated COINTELPRO-New Left, a programme of formalised, nationwide, covert counterintelligence activity designed to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of [the New Left] and persons connected with it.”32

COINTELPRO-New Left followed on the heels of previous counterintelligence initiatives directed against the Communist Party USA, the Klu Klux Klan, and black nationalist groups such as the Black Panther Party (BPP).33 The FBI’s counterintelligence operations were designed to “cut off target organizations’ access to external resources, while simultaneously reducing their pool of potential recruits and breaking down trust and cohesiveness among existing members” with the ultimate aim of “neutralizing” the organisation concerned.34 Such operations were largely carried out on the sole authority of the FBI, without prior Department of Justice approval, and appear consistent with Brennan’s claim that it was the Bureau’s “responsibility” not to “sit idly by”.

On May 10th, the day after Brennan’s memo, Hoover sent a request to all Field Offices asking for “specific suggestions for counterintelligence action against the New Left”.35 All COINTELPRO operations were to be routed through the Washington Office for the personal approval of Hoover before they could be implemented, and before long a wide range of different suggestions were crossing the Director’s desk, targeting not only SDS but also underground newspapers, radical professors, and antiwar activists.36

Before any further examination of FBI counterintelligence activities against SDS and Weatherman is possible, however, it is important to understand the context in which such operations were carried out and the ways in which the FBI perceived, understood, and interacted with the amorphous entity known as “the New Left”.

31 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 9th May 196832 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 9th May 1968, p. 333 For more on the FBI’s prior COINTELPRO operations, see N. Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom (New York, 1988); Cunningham, There’s Something Happening; and C. Perkus, CoIntelPro (New York, 1976)34 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening, pp. 50-5135 Memo, Director to all FO’s, 10th May 196836 See Memo, Director to SAC New York, 9th September 1968; Memo, Director to all FO’s, 5th July 1968; also W. Churchill & J. Vanderwall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s War Against Dissent (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 187-207


Constructing a Threat: FBI Perceptions of the New Left

The term “New Left” never actually received a formal definition within the FBI. COINTELPRO, according to Brennan, was directed against those “who urge revolution in America and call for the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam” – a remarkably vague target. The New York Field Office in fact commented upon the dynamic, fluid nature of the movement, which made defining the boundaries of the New Left somewhat difficult.37 To warrant counterintelligence operations against it, however, a group first had to be classified as “dissident” or “subversive”. It is thus important to understand what the Bureau meant by the term “subversive”, as well as the process whereby certain groups were deemed worthy of investigation, infiltration and / or counterintelligence, while others were not.

Although the record is censored and incomplete, and thus any conclusions drawn from it should be tentative, the FBI files do seem to suggest that many groups that fell under the FBI’s New Left intelligence programme were not, initially, perceived by the Bureau as violent or criminal. While some New Left targets had engaged in illegal or violent acts, such violence prior to the winter of 1969 was generally low-level and spontaneous, and thus did not justify intensive surveillance or informant infiltration, let alone an aggressive programme of counterintelligence. It is certainly true that the level of such violence increased over the lifetime of the Bureau’s investigation of the New Left, especially following the winter of 1969. However, the FBI first opened files on many New Left groups long before they had exhibited any predilection for violent actions or rhetoric: investigation of SDS started in 1963; and other New Left movements such as the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and the Progressive Labour Party received Bureau attention as early as 1964.38 Although Hoover claimed that such New Left organisations had been able to “paralyze institutions of learning, induction centres, cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials all to the detriment of our society”,39 very few had ever come close to doing so. David Cunningham has made the suggestion that, rather than focusing on illegal or violent behaviour as justification for investigating a New Left group, the FBI’s “primary basis for establishing the ‘subversiveness’ of [a New Left target] was its connection to the Communist Party-USA”.40 New Left groups were seen as a threat to American institutions because they were perceived to be under the influence or control of “Communist agitators”, and thus were targeted for investigation and counterintelligence.

Evidence can be found to support Cunningham’s argument in the FBI’s COINTELPRO files. It would certainly explain why groups such as SDS were closely monitored despite having never broken any Federal laws. For example, the overriding motivation behind the FBI’s early investigation into SDS, beginning in 1963, was to establish the extent of Communist control over the organisation. After three years of investigation, the Bureau had gleaned 3 pieces of evidence of CP-USA influence on SDS:37 Memo, New York to Director, 28th May 196838 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening, p. 9639 Memo, Director to All FO’s, 10th May 196840 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening, p. 95


Gus Hall, General Secretary, Communist Party, USA… described the SDS as a part of the ‘responsible left’ which the Party has ‘going for us’. At the June 1965 SDS National Convention, an anti-Communist proviso was removed from the SDS Constitution. In the Oct 7th, 1966 issue of ‘New Left Notes’…an SDS spokesman stated that ‘there are some Communists in SDS and they are welcome’.41

These three facts, as quoted above, appear over and over in the FBI’s files. They were appended to every Field Office progress report on SDS, quoted in numerous letters from Hoover to the Attorney General and members of the public, and repeatedly included in official and unofficial FBI press releases. The files suggest that the Bureau was at pains to link SDS with Communism whenever the opportunity presented itself. In a 1967 address to the Michigan Regional Conference on Crime Prevention, Hoover described SDS as “a militant group which receives support from the Communist Party and which, in turn, supports Communist objectives.”42 The FBI also leaked information to “sympathetic contacts” in the news media that led to a spate of articles on SDS emphasising “the communist and subversive background of SDS and the danger of the New Left”.43 One such article was the widely syndicated February 1969 report by Robert Allen, based on reports provided by the FBI, which branded SDS as “out-and-out communist agitators”.44 Hoover sent a personal letter to Allen, thanking him for his “perceptive analysis” of SDS’s “insidious philosophies”.45

In making such statements, FBI Headquarters seems to have gone against copious evidence gathered by its own agents, evidence that those in the Directorate were certainly aware of. In July 1963, a report from Internal Security Section Chief F.J. Baumgardner to Assistant Director Sullivan reported that Field Offices “had not developed any information which would indicate that the SDS is the object of Communist infiltration”.46 In December 1964, the New York Office wrote that “it is important to note that there has been no evidence that the CP-USA has been successful in infiltrating the SDS or actually influencing the organization”.47 In 1968, Bureau Supervisor N.P. Callahan stated that “the attitude that most SDS members have towards the Communist Party is one of amusement… not to be taken seriously”.48 Most damningly, a detailed report undertaken by the Chicago Office in early 1969 to determine “alien” influence within SDS concluded that

the CP-USA is regarded as an arm of the Soviet Union and is completely ‘revisionist’ and operates in collusion with U.S. imperialism. Because of the total rejection of CP-USA among the leadership of SDS, it is not believed that they have any appreciable influence at all within SDS.49 [original emphasis]

41 Text is quoted directly and appears countless times in files, eg: Memo, Chicago to Director, 16th November 196742 Quoted in Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 8th June 196743 Memo, Bishop to DeLoach, 19th July 196844 Memo, Bishop to DeLoach, 14th February 196945 Personal letter, Hoover to R. Allen, 14th February 196946 Memo, Baumgardner to Sullivan, 12th July 196347 Airtel, New York to Director, 2nd December 196448 Memo, Callahan to Director, 10th April 196849 Report, Chicago to Director, 9th April 1969, p. 8


Chicago’s findings were later supported by an in-depth Bureau-wide Internal Security report on SDS, which confirmed that “to date the Party has been unsuccessful in capturing any appreciable segment of SDS. The Communist Party has no contact with the national SDS leadership”.50 Even Assistant Director Sullivan, by 1970 the third-ranking official in the FBI after Hoover and Associate Director Clyde Tolson, recognised in his memoirs that the FBI’s characterisation of the New Left was somewhat fallacious:

The connection [between the New Left and Communism] wasn’t real, and the only people who believed it were Gus Hall [General Secretary of CP-USA] and J. Edgar Hoover (I have my doubts about Hall). The New Left never had any important connection with the Communist Party; as a matter of fact the New left looked on Hall and the Communist Party as a joke – hidebound, retrogressive, and outside the mainstream of revolutionary action.51

However, in attempting to understand the FBI’s emphasis on Communism and attitude towards the New Left, the context of developments in social protest and state power of the period, both American and international, should also be considered. It hardly needs reiterating that 1960-70 was a period of great change, but – perhaps even more importantly – perceptions of change were also at a high ebb, amongst both young people and their Establishment elders. Americans witnessed anti-colonial struggles around the world, often successful and often powered by Marxist-Leninist movements advocating armed struggle. The Cuban revolution in 1959 was followed by the victory of Algeria in a bloody guerrilla war for independence from France in 1962, while revolutionary movements emerged in Bolivia, Pakistan and Brazil. Eleven African nations gained independence from colonial powers in 1960 alone.52

Mass protest movements expressed dissent bordering on sedition in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Greece, Japan, Yugoslavia, France, and Mexico. Activists in the United States buttressed their own militancy and commitment through identification with such international movements, and the rhetoric of “solidarity” with Third World liberation movements is ubiquitous within the literature of the New Left. Vietnam, in particular, was an inspiring example, seemingly defying conventional wisdom as to what was possible. To Weatherwoman Naomi Jaffe, Vietnamese resistance to U.S. military strength “was an incredibly ray of hope that lit up brilliantly the sixties and seventies for many of us,” demonstrating that America’s power “wasn’t infinite – that if you organized a strong ‘people’s movement’… then military might wasn’t the last word.”53 To talk of revolution in 1969 was not seen as hyperbolic, as leading radical Panama Alba recalled:

It was a moment here and around the world where you could breathe, taste, smell the revolution. It gave us a false sense that revolution – the conflict between liberation forces and the state and the takeover of state power – was imminent.54

50 Chicago Office, “SDS-IS Report”, 7th May, 1969, p. 8151 Sullivan, The Bureau, p. 14852 Cameroon, Belgian Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, Chad, Ivory Coast, Mali, Gabon, Senegal, Togo and Madagascar. See E. Morgan, The Sixties Experience: Hard Lessons About Modern America (Philadelphia, 1991), p. 29853 Interviewed in Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 29054 Interviewed in Berger, Outlaws, p. 97


As well as emancipating the imagination of young activists, the climate of international militancy also alarmed governments and authorities in America. The rising wave of domestic protest and increasingly vocal criticism of national and foreign policy led to a considerable expansion in state policing of politics. In 1967, the Department of Justice recommended that municipal police forces form political intelligence units to monitor “activists and potential activists”, while in early 1968 the Military Intelligence wing of the U.S. Army greatly expanded its surveillance and record-keeping on civilians. The Los Angeles Police Department’s intelligence division more than doubled in size between 1962 and 1968, while New York’s increased by 50% between 1968 and 1971. The FBI itself expanded rapidly: the Congressionally-approved budget for the Bureau in 1971 was some $334 million, double that of 1967. 55

Furthermore, sociologist Gary Marx has argued that during the Cold War paranoia of the 1950’s and the counterculture backlash of the 1960’s, the line between political protest and actual crime “became blurred in the minds of the public and the police, as black violence and Weatherman activities occurred simultaneously with demonstrations, sit-ins, and other non-violent activities”.56 This is especially significant since the FBI has responsibility for pursuing both political subversives and national criminal investigations. Although Marx’s argument should be applied with caution, the FBI’s own files do seem to support the suggestion that dissident politics had become linked with crime in the minds of some senior FBI officials. Many FBI officials appear to have believed that New Left groups had the potential to turn criminal or violent, based solely upon their connection (however tenuous) with the “deviant politics” of Communism. As such, it would appear that the FBI’s investigations and counterintelligence operations against the New Left were motivated by a perceived ideological threat to American values. A 1976 Senate investigation into the FBI’s COINTELPRO-New Left concluded that

Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.57

Although it is easy to criticize FBI officials for flouting the Constitution of the government they were trying to protect, some authors appear intent on condemning the FBI as paranoid bureaucrats stuck in a Cold War mentality, lashing out against non-violent New Left activists with suspicion and hostility.58 However, in a time of such widespread international militancy and domestic activism, many within the FBI genuinely believed that elements within the New Left presented “a serious danger to

55 G.T. Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant”, American Journal of Sociology 80 (1974), p. 43156 Marx, “Thoughts”, p. 41157 United States Senate, 94th Congress, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, (Washington, 1976) Book III, Part A, p. 258 See especially B. Glick, The War at Home: Covert Action against U.S. Activists (Boston, 1989), and M. Halperin, The Lawless State: Crimes of U.S. Intelligence Agencies (Washington, 1976)


America’s National Security”.59 The Bureau’s files often hint at such urgent anxiety; in a memo to Deputy Director C.D. DeLoach, Sullivan stated,

I cannot help conclude that the… revolution gathering momentum today in our communities has the potential to be far more damaging to the security of this Nation than the Communist Party ever was, even at the height of its strength in the 1930’s.60

It is important to realise that Weatherman was not alone in making the leap from violent rhetoric to actual violence. Between the late sixties and mid-seventies, dozens, perhaps hundreds of different left-wing collectives set fires, laid bombs, stockpiled arms and attacked state property and personnel. A survey by the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division of the U.S. Treasury recorded almost 21,000 “student left-related violent incidents” between January 1969 and April 1970 alone. Of these, some 2800 were bombings – almost 6 a day.61 As Hoover himself put it,

The New Left’s philosophy and way of life is not one of support for America and its traditions… rather it is one of defiance, hostility, and opposition to our free society. Hence to dismiss the New Left, as some do, as a collection of simpletons, eccentrics and jocular fools is to commit a grave mistake.62

59 Chicago Office, “SDS-IS Report”, 5th June 196960 Memo, Sullivan to DeLoach, 8th September 196961 Sale, SDS, p. 63262 Memo, Hoover to Callahan, 9th July 1968


“Two, Three, Many SDSes”: The Birth of Weatherman

By 1969, SDS had swung decisively towards a militant revolutionary position – as Varon notes, by this time it was almost impossible to be part of SDS without claiming to be a committed “revolutionary” – but the leadership of the organisation had descended into ideological squabbling over the correct path to actually bring about the revolution.63 Two factions had emerged: the first, known as Progressive Labour (PL), clung to a traditional Maoist line and insisted that the industrial working class was the only agent of revolutionary change. The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), founded by future Weathermen Bill Ayers, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins, held to a more action-orientated, anarchistic position that supported “oppressed” peoples such as African-Americans, Third World revolutionaries, and working-class youth.64

The Bureau noted the divide as early as October 1968, as shown by a memo from Hoover reminding his agents that

…this split, no matter how superficial at present, can be used to advantage [sic]. In this regard, your informants can be of definite value in creating further irritations by making charges and counter-charges. It may also be possible through anonymous mailings and other actions to create an ideological storm within SDS.65

The note then requested Field Offices to detail counterintelligence proposals “to take full advantage of the dispute in neutralising or destroying SDS as an effective movement.”66

In the run up to the SDS National Convention in June 1969, the Bureau intensified its COINTELPRO efforts to exacerbate the rift. The convention site had to be officially changed twice, after agents in Albuquerque and then Austin “orally furnished” information about SDS’s failure to pay past debts to town and university officials, who promptly withdrew permission for SDS to use their convention facilities.67

Brennan summarised the operation in his report to the Assistant Director: “through the counterintelligence tactics employed by the Albuquerque office, officials at the university of New Mexico refused to allow the NCM to be held on campus”, and later noted with satisfaction that “SDS has been having considerable difficulty in obtaining a site for this convention, and a number of colleges and universities have refused to allow the organisation to use their facilities.”68 The Chicago Field Office then anonymously distributed a letter, purportedly from PL, accusing the RYM faction of deliberately putting off the convention in order to remain in power.69 SDS finally found a convention hall willing to take them, the Chicago Coliseum, but while the

63 Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 3764 The details of the SDS split are long and tortuous, and an analysis of such ideological hair-splitting is beyond the scope of this essay. For details, see Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew, pp. 12-29; Berger, Outlaws, pp. 37-9565 Memo, Director to Chicago, 23rd October 196866 Ibid, p. 267 Airtel, Albuquerque to Director, 2nd April 1969; San Antonio to Director, 17th March 196968 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 25th March 1969; Brennan to Sullivan, 4th June 196969 Memo, Chicago to Director, 6th June 1969


University of New Mexico had originally agreed to host the convention for free, the Coliseum charged some $2000 for the privilege.70

FBI presence at the Convention, which began on June 18th, was high. Kirkpatrick Sale estimates that the total number of undercover FBI and local police “red squad” agents covering the Convention was as high as 500, although the accuracy of this claim is difficult to establish from reference to the FBI’s own records of the conference, which are unusually heavily censored.71 What can be gleaned is that, out of the estimated 2000 attendees, the Chicago Office alone had 25 informants present, while even the Omaha Office (hardly a major centre of student radicalism) had another 14.72 In addition, the Director even hoped to have some high-placed informants elected to the SDS National Council.73 Counterintelligence operations were continued: a fake newspaper article was prepared about a covert “red” faction plotting to seize control of the SDS leadership, which, according to the Chicago SAC, caused “widespread discontent” amongst delegates.74

However, SDS was already set to self-destruct at the Convention, with or without Bureau assistance. The split between PL and RYM was rapidly tearing SDS apart. Meetings frequently descended into shouting matches as the two factions expounded their own brands of repetitive and incomprehensible revolutionary doctrine, and as ideological schism absorbed the energies of the SDS leadership, less and less time was given to recruitment, fund raising or organisation. The FBI noted that “the lack of progress and direction for action at [a 1969 SDS Council Meeting] was in large part a result of the great amount of time taken up by PLP and [RYM] in debating theoretical terms.”75 The rhetoric of both PL and RYM had long since turned away from the optimistic, populist progressivism of the early New Left, and devolved back into tired Old Left dogma that the founders of SDS had explicitly rejected.76 As Brennan put it, “it appears that the so-called New Left is nothing more than a tired body of Old Left sectarians bent on revolution”.77 Most of those travelling to the convention knew that it “would not be just a place to debate policy for the next year; it would be a showdown over the future of SDS”.78

Those delegates entering the ideological chaos of the Convention hall were bombarded by pamphlets and position papers from the usual RYM and PL ideologues. However, on the opening day of the convention, a new treatise appeared: a densely-typed 16,000 word essay, with a title stolen from a Bob Dylan lyric: “You Don’t Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”.79 Authored by a splinter group within RYM (and thus a faction within a faction), including Columbia leaders Mark Rudd and John Jacobs, Ann Arbor radical Bill Ayers, and SDS

70 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening, p. 6371 Sale, SDS, pp. 532-372 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 18th June 1969; Omaha to Chicago, 4th December 196873 Memo, Chicago to Director, 24th May 196974 Memo, Chicago to Director, 18th June 196975 Report, Chicago to Director, 9th April 1969, p. 676 “the Communist movement has failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated aims of leading a worldwide movement for human emancipation” – T. Hayden et al, “The Port Huron Statement”, in A. Bloom & W. Breines, ed., Takin’ It To The Streets: A Sixties Reader (New York, 1995), pp. ???77 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 1st July 196978 Berger, Outlaws, p. 8279 B. Ayers, B. Dohrn, et al, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”, in Jacobs, Weatherman, pp. 33-55


Secretary Bernadine Dohrn, the document was the founding statement of the group which became known as Weatherman. It sought to justify the radical and revolutionary beliefs of those frustrated by the powerlessness of SDS and give hope to those excited by the possibilities of direct, militant action, as well as establish an aggressively anti-PL position.

The article insisted that “the main struggle going in the world today is between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it”, and argued that it was the job of white radicals to give unstinting support to Vietnamese, Cuban, Third World and African American revolutionaries. Indeed, the article went so far as to suggest that black nationalists could bring about a revolution in America on their own, thus placing white revolutionaries in a distinctly subordinate role.80 The manifesto called for the creation of a small, self-reliant and well-disciplined network of revolutionary cells to bring about revolution in America, arguing that large national organisations were too nebulous to bring about real change. Thus, all that had defined SDS – its large student constituency, autonomous chapters, loose national structure, absence of rigid rules, resistance to ideological dogma, and space for multiple viewpoints – was now written off as “counter-revolutionary.” It was obvious that the Weatherman manifesto, written by several SDS leaders, was hardly interested in students, let alone democratic society. Most importantly, however, the document urged budding revolutionaries to escalate their protests into armed struggle – to “bring the war home”.

The convention was a farce, quickly descending into a tirade of fistfights and violent invective.81 Moving quickly, the authors of the Weatherman statement, led by Bernadine Dohrn, took advantage of the chaos to organise an impromptu anti-PL caucus that voted on June 21st to eject all PL supporters from SDS. As an eye-witness FBI informant reported to the Chicago office, Dohrn “attacked PL as having incorrect political beliefs, therefore being counter-revolutionary. [She] accused PL of being reactionary and racist and declared that PL would not be allowed to remain in SDS.”82

It was a bizarre and somewhat improbable move, not least because PL was probably the largest faction at the Conference, but as a terse message to the Director confirmed on the 22nd: “Sources advise split b/t SDS and PL is complete. Dohrn stated as far as she is concerned, PL is no longer in SDS.”83 The Weatherman faction seized control of the SDS National Office in Chicago, including the New Left Notes printing press, and began its self-appointed task of bringing about the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government. Concentrating exclusively on coordinating a network of revolutionary cells and mobilising violent protest, Weatherman allowed the organisational apparatus of SDS to crumble into disrepair, and its dogmatic insistence on revolutionary violence alienated it from all but the most die-hard revolutionaries; as an FBI informant reported, “the Weatherman faction has now become alienated from most individuals who claim membership of SDS.”84 As Brennan noted only six months later, “reliable informants as well as New Left spokesmen have all recently indicated that SDS as an organisation, from most standpoints, is dead.”85

80 B. Ayers, B. Dohrn, et al, “Weatherman”, p. 3781 Sale, SDS, p. 56982 Report, Chicago to Washington, 22nd June 1969, p. 1483 Airtel, Chicago to Director, 22nd June 196984 Airtel, Dir to Albany, 16th January 197085 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 8th December 1969


“We Spit on Your Values”: A Clash of Ideologies

In January 1970, Weatherman closed the SDS National Office, purged itself of those members deemed untrustworthy or insufficiently committed, and went underground. By the end of its consolidation, the newly christened “Weather Underground Organization” (WUO) consisted on barely 100 members, split between autonomous cells in San Francisco, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. A “large-scale, almost random bombing offensive” was planned, and the early months of 1970 were spent in developing forged identities, buying arms, and construction of crude anti-personnel bombs consisting of steel pipes packed with dynamite, ball bearings and roofing nails.86 The FBI was well aware of Weatherman’s plans “to form commando-type units which will engage in acts of terror including bombings, arson, and assassinations,”87 but the move underground caught the Bureau off-guard, prompting a state of near-panic within FBI HQ. Only one undercover operative, Larry Grathwohl, survived the purges, and as a high-level memo candidly admitted in late 1969, the Bureau was “unable to establish the whereabouts of the Weatherman leadership”.88

On March 6th 1970, the leader of the New York cell, 23 year old Terry Robbins, accidentally crossed live wires on a bomb he was constructing in the basement of the cell’s Greenwich Village hideout. The anti-personnel device, intended for an Army dance at Fort Dix, completely destroyed the house, killing three Weathermen: Robbins, Diana Oughton, 28, and Ted Gold, 23. The FBI report into the explosion recorded that found in the wreckage had been “60 sticks of undetonated dynamite, a 37mm artillery shell, a headless female torso consisting of a back, an arm and a leg; and a human hand.”89 The hand was all that remained of Robbins.

For many, the blast was a symbol of the self-destructive violence into which the New Left had apparently descended. The New York Times condemned the Weathermen as “criminals, not idealists”, and intense pressure was applied to the FBI from both President and public to track down and arrest the remaining terrorists.90 Twenty five Weathermen were scheduled for “intensive investigation” under the TOPREV programme, under which Field offices had to submit weekly updates on efforts to locate the missing fugitives.91 Prompted by the discovery of a Weatherman dynamite cache in Chicago in late March, Hoover demanded that “informant coverage must be radically improved”, since “there is every reason to believe that these terroristic activities will accelerate in frequency and violence.”92 Federal indictments were issued against twelve Weatherleaders, raising the number of Weathermen officially designated as fugitives from U.S. law to seventy six,93 and in May, Hoover announced “one of the most intensive manhunts in the FBI’s history” to track down and

86 Varon, Bringing the War Home, pp. 172-17487 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 26th January 197088 Memo, Chicago to Director, 30th October 196989 Report, Brennan to Sullivan, 13th March 197090 Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 17591 Memo, Director to All FO’s, 19th March 197092 Memo, Director to All FO’s, 24th March 197093 U.S. Senate, The Weather Underground, pp. 26-31.


apprehend the WUO.94 Brennan harangued his field agents that “if prosecution is not forthcoming against these terrorists, their activities will continue to accelerate with devastating and tragic consequences to our nation”, while at the same time admitting that “because of their underground status, it has been extremely difficult to locate them”.95

Internal memos reveal the degree of panic within the FBI as agents attempted to stay on top of a threat that had rapidly spun out of their control. Admitting that “the scope of the problem clearly exceeds our existing manpower limitations”, the directorate struggled to keep up with the pace of change:

It has become increasingly clear that we are attempting to cope with a rapidly accelerating large-scale shift to terrorism by New Left extremists. A group [Weatherman] which emerged only as an ideology in June 1969, which we obtained authority to conduct individual investigations on in late November 1969, has erupted into a menace of national proportions in March 1970.96

The FBI’s efforts to apprehend Weatherman fugitives were, however, an embarrassing failure for the Bureau. After the New York explosion, Weatherman shifted its focus from anti-personnel bombings to “symbolic” attacks against government or corporate buildings, conducted after hours when the buildings were unoccupied. Although they had pulled back from the brink of political murder, Weatherman’s “armed propaganda” attacks against high-profile institutions such as the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department Building, and the New York Police Department Headquarters kept them a top priority for the Bureau. And yet only four Weathermen were ever captured involuntarily,97 and the organisation was able to conduct a seemingly unchecked campaign of bombings before the organisation collapsed in 1977. A 1976 internal report into the ongoing WeathFug (Weatherman Fugitives) investigation acknowledged that “investigation of the Weather Underground has been a particularly frustrating experience… although most of the leaders have been federal fugitives for six years, little real progress has been made in locating and apprehending them.”98

In desperation, the Bureau resorted to increasingly unlikely tactics. Aiming to target the WUO’s strident revolutionary feminism, unsuccessful attempts were made to “develop lesbian informants for the purposes of penetrating WUO”99. A Special Target Information Development (SPECTAR) programme was established to allow agents under deep cover, posing as drug dealers or weapons merchants, to infiltrate the Underground;100 however, at least one undercover operative went rogue and refused to turn in fugitives after he apparently began to empathise with their ideology.101 It later emerged that the Bureau had on several occasions broken the law

94 U.S. Senate, The Weather Underground, pp. 38.95 Memo, C.D. Brennan to W.S. Sullivan, 1st April 197096 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 1st April 197097 Dianne Donghi and Linda Evans in April 1970, an unnamed fugitive in December 1970, and

Howard Machtinger in September 1973. Memo, R.L. Shackleford to W.H. Wannal, 6th December 1973

98 Report, “Ongoing WeathFug Investigations”, Chicago Office, 8th June 197699 Memo, Shackleford to Wannall, 15th July 1975100 Memo, Acting Director to All FO’s, 17th August 1972101 C. Payne, Deep Cover: An FBI Agent Infiltrates the Radical Underground (New York, 1979)


in its pursuit of the WUO.102 Several Weatherman hideouts were covertly bugged, and the homes of relatives of Weatherman fugitives were burgled by FBI agents, both without warrants or prior approval from the Justice Department. Such patently illegal operations were euphemistically referred to in FBI files as “sophisticated coverage” or “innovative techniques”, and agents were advised that in conducting such “black bag jobs”, the “most important consideration, of course, is to protect the Bureau from possible embarrassment.”103

The failure of the FBI to destroy the Weather Underground stemmed from a number of interlocking factors. The most obvious obstacle was the nature of the WUO itself, and the type of crimes it committed. The autonomous, tightly-knit infrastructure of the organisation precluded easy informant infiltration, a fact that Weatherwoman Bernadine Dohrn trumpeted:

It is our closeness and the integration of our personal lives with our revolutionary work that will make it hard for pigs to infiltrate our collectives. It’s one thing for a pig to go to a few meetings… it’s much harder for them to live in a family for long without being detected.104

A frustrated Brennan complained that “because of their degenerate living habits, immoral conduct and use of drugs, it has become extremely difficult to obtain informants who fit into this mould and who are willing to live as they do.”105 In addition, the organisation itself took extensive precautions to prevent infiltration. A directorate memo in 1974 summed up the problem:

Perhaps the greatest obstacle we have encountered is the nature of the Weatherman membership. They are intelligent and highly organized. Their extremely sensitive security consciousness has to date virtually precluded the possibility of informant infiltration. [Successful infiltration] requires an informant whose qualifications far exceed those normally required.106

Furthermore, Weatherman bombings tended to leave little for the FBI to work with as the bombs themselves obliterated any potential evidence such as fingerprints or traceable serial numbers that could link known Weathermen to the scene of the crime. After four years of intensive investigations, a review of the cases against leading Weatherman fugitives concluded that “there is practically no physical evidence of prosecutive value in any of these cases… the lack of corroborating evidence raises a question as to the possibility of successful prosecution.”107

Primarily, however, at the heart of the FBI’s failure to apprehend the Weatherman fugitives was the fact that it simply did not understand the people it was pursuing. In part, this was due to the lack of adequate informant coverage as discussed above, but

102 See A. Theoharris, “FBI Surveillance: Past and Present” in Cornell Law Review 69 (1984), pp. 883-894; A. Marro, “FBI Break-In Policy”, in A. Theoharris (ed.), Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 78-128103 Memo, W.M. Felt to Tolson, 2nd September 1970104 Weather Underground, “New Morning, Changing Weather”, 6th December 1970, in B. Ayers, B. Dohrn et all, (ed), Sing A Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground 1970-74 (Oakland, 2006)105 Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 10th March 1970106 Memo, F.S. Putnam to W.R. Wannall, 13th August 1974107 Memo, F.S. Putnam to W.R. Wannall, 13th August 1974


it was also the result of the fundamental ideological divide between the two organisations. FBI agents were overwhelming white, male, and born of traditional, lower-middle or working-class backgrounds; their patriotism and acceptance of the status quo was reflected in their choice of employment in an organisation whose implicit function was the preservation of U.S. political and economic institutions.108

The massive centralisation of power in the position of Director meant that the Bureau was in many ways defined by the hidebound, reactionary Cold War paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover personally forbade women from becoming agents, discouraged the recruitment of African-Americans, and enforced a rigid dress code of cropped hair, wing-tipped shoes, French-cuffed shirts and conservative suits that would have been out of date in the 1930’s.109 It was only after his death that Agents attempting to go undercover in the New Left were officially allowed to grow their hair long and wear “alternative” clothing.110 Even then many senior officials expected undercover operatives to maintain some sense of decency; as one former deep cover agent recalled, “slight sideburns, trimmed moustaches, collar-length hair, new jeans and starched shirts” were deemed an appropriate disguise for infiltrating Weatherman.111

In contrast, Weatherman proclaimed itself to be the antithesis of the status quo that the Bureau sought to uphold. As Weatherman John Jacobs declared, “we are against everything that’s good and decent in Honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy.”112 This ideological distance between the Bureau and the WUO meant that the FBI’s efforts to pursue the organisation were often typified by a kind of bewildered hostility. Assistant Director W. Mark Felt characterised the Weatherman as “violence-orientated white savages at war with the American government and people.”113 Agents made little secret of their disdain for New Left radicals in their reports, describing them as “filthy, bearded, long-haired individuals” with “demented” political goals and “reputations leaving much to be desired.”114 Hoover himself denounced the New Left as “arrogant, demanding legions of irresponsible youths”.115

Such attitudes were far from the dispassionate and nuanced insight required to successfully infiltrate and bring down a dedicated terrorist network.

An interesting parallel can be drawn between the FBI’s prosecution of the Weatherman case and its simultaneous campaign against the Klu Klux Klan. The FBI’s COINTELPRO-White Hate programme, begun in 1964, was designed to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize” the KKK and other racist organisations, and was remarkably successful.116 According to Assistant Director Sullivan’s memoirs, KKK membership declined from a peak of 14,000 in 1964 to barely 4000 in 1971, when COINTELPRO-White Hate was discontinued.117 While the FBI and Weatherman were more or less the ideological antithesis of each other, it has been argued that the Bureau and the Klan shared a significant degree of common ground.118

108 Payne, Deep Cover; M.W. Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Expose (Boston, 1995), pp. 3-11109 Swearingen, Secrets, p. 7110 Sullivan, The Bureau, p. 158111 Payne, Deep Cover, p. 127112 Quoted in Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 160113 Memo, Felt to Tolson, 2nd September 1970114 Memo, Houston to Director, 16th October 1968115 Quoted in Memo, Brennan to Sullivan, 8th June 1967116 Memo, Director to 17 FO’s, 2nd September 1964117 Sullivan, The Bureau, p. 126, 134118 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening, pp. 156-167


Both organisations were patriotic and vehemently anti-communist; furthermore, the Klan advocated a reactionary return to a fading status quo not dissimilar to that valued by many within the FBI. Many Klansmen in fact lauded J. Edgar Hoover for his tough stand against communism, his disdain for Martin Luther King, and his refusal to “lower the Bureau’s standards” by employing African-Americans as agents.119 Such ideological overlap between the two organisations meant that agents more easily understood the motivations, fears and beliefs of Klansmen, and thus were more successful in developing informants within the organisation. By 1966, the Bureau had over 2000 Klan informants on its books, including several senior Klan leaders, and was recruiting at a rate of almost two a day.120

In contrast, the FBI had no such understanding of the motivations of the student radicals who comprised Weatherman. This placed the Bureau at a significant disadvantage; not only was it much harder to successfully develop informants, but the Bureau’s skewed perception of the New Left seriously hampered the effectiveness of many of its counterintelligence programmes. For example, in 1968 the FBI sent a series of “anonymous messages with a mystical connotation” to SDS leaders, hoping to exploit an apparent “yen for magic” amongst SDS leaders to cause “concern and mental anguish”.121 The Bureau apparently genuinely believed that such messages, bearing crude drawings of “mystical” symbols and “sinister” inscriptions such as “Beware the Asiatic Toad!” and “The Siberian Beetle Can Talk”, would cause “suspicion, distrust, and disruption” within the New Left.122 Similarly, a proposal was made by the LA Field Office to send a letter, purportedly from a black power organisation, to the colleagues of a local SDS leader in order to “ridicule and embarrass” the target. The directorate, however, suggested the letter be rewritten for the sake of “authenticity”, and proceeded to offer its own take on black urban patois: “If you don’t know it man, the head whitey of the Communist Party in the U.S. told newsmen in San Francisco that SDS was one of the Party’s soul brothers.”123 Not all FBI operations were as cringe-worthy as these, but the point remains that the cultural divide between the FBI and the radical left seriously hampered the Bureau’s ability to track down and apprehend Weatherman fugitives.

119 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening, p. 158120 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening, p. 161121 Memo, Philadelphia to Director, 21st November 1968122 Memo, Director to Philadelphia, 4th December 1968123 Memo, Director to Los Angeles, 9th August 1968


Conclusion: The Aftermath

On the 3rd of January 1974, the outstanding federal indictments against the Weathermen for weapons possession, bombing plots, conspiracy and rioting were dismissed at the request of the Attorney General. An FBI memo explained that the charges had been dropped because “a recent Supreme Court decision barring electronic surveillance without a court order would have hampered prosecution” of the Weather fugitives.124 The memo referred to the Keith case, a Supreme Court ruling of June 1972 that electronic surveillance (ie: “bugging”) conducted without a warrant was in violation of the Fourth Amendment and thus inadmissible as evidence.125

Although the memo is intentionally vague, it seems that the Justice Department was forced to drop the charges against the Weatherman because the indictments rested on exactly the kind of warrant-less electronic surveillance which the Supreme Court had just condemned. A month earlier, the Department had been forced to dismiss conspiracy and riot charges against fifteen Weathermen because searches had been conducted without proper warrants.126

The lifting of the indictments meant that many Weathermen were no longer sought on any charges whatsoever, and those who only faced minor state charges such as unlawful flight to avoid prosecution or disorderly conduct. Ironically, the fact that many Weathermen were no longer federal fugitives contributed far more towards the ultimate collapse of the group than the FBI ever had. In fact, the FBI’s dogged attempts to pursue and destroy Weatherman may well have helped prolong the existence of the group. Weatherman bombings were sporadic and their propaganda releases infrequent, as in fact most of the time and energy of the collective was taken up with staying one step ahead of “the Feds”. Bill Ayers recounts in his memoirs the painstaking process of creating an elaborate web of aliases, fake identities and untraceable safe houses, the complex security precautions for travelling, buying provisions, and making contact with aboveground allies, and the several near-misses when Bureau agents came close to capturing entire cells.127 In fact, this game of cat and mouse created a strange sense of rivalry between the two organisations; as Ayers puts it, Weatherman actively sought to prove that it was

cleverer, smarter, and cooler [than the FBI] in every way. We wanted to pierce their mythological image as a clean, efficient, well-functioning Swiss watch, to tar them as lazy bureaucrats wallowing ineffectively in their outdated metaphor. We would outsmart them, flip them the bird, and tell them, “Go ahead, you fucking brownshoes, kiss my ass.”128

However, the very fact that Weatherman had to spend so long consciously evading capture created a sense of purpose and mission for the organisation that might very well have been eroded otherwise. The underground nature of Weatherman precluded the kind of public actions that normally sustain social movements, such as marches, open meetings, and recruitment drives. In addition, the group had never been particularly popular even amongst the New Left, and it only received minimal support 124 Memo, Shackleford to Wannall, 4th January 1974125 See United States v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)126 Memo, Shackleford to Wannall, 4th January 1974127 Ayers, Fugitive Days, pp. 219-253128 Ibid., p. 222


from the American public, who remained either apathetic or contemptuous. Given these potentially demoralising factors, the only consistent affirmation that Weatherman’s campaign of armed propaganda was actually having an impact on the wider world was the fact that the state was doing its best to track them down and destroy them. Weathermen saw their fugitive status as a badge of honour, proving that they were on the right track and reaffirming their belief that they did pose a real threat to the stability of American institutions.

The speed with which Weatherman disintegrated once the indictments were lifted seems to confirm this. Some members of the Weather leadership began to consider the possibility of returning aboveground, in order to reconnect with the American left they had forsaken in 1969, and set about building a broad-based radical movement.129

Others, however, felt this was a betrayal of the group’s founding ethos, and by 1976 the WUO had fractured into frenzied ideological backstabbing. Rival factions accused one another of “crimes against national liberation struggles” and “betrayal of the revolution” in language that recalled the hysterical rhetoric of Soviet purges.130 For many of those who had spent six or more years underground, the pace at which Weatherman imploded was tragic. Former member Donna Willmott later recalled, “it dissolved like sand through our fingers”.131

Most of the former members who began to resurface in the late 1970’s and early 80’s received only fines and probation; some, such as Weatherleader Bill Ayers, had all charges against them dropped due to government misconduct.132 Few served prison sentences. Given that the Weatherman creed denounced the American justice system as a brutal agent of fascist repression, many ex-revolutionaries were bewildered at the lenience shown by the courts. It seemed to Willmott as if “the message of the state was that ‘you can always come home again… Look, it wasn’t worth it, come home, there’s a place for you.’”133 A few refused to surrender, and fought on by joining other armed revolutionary movements such as the Black Liberation Army.

In a final, bitter twist, on April 10th 1978, former FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, former Assistant Director Edward Miller, and former Associate Director W. Mark Felt were indicted by federal grand jury for conspiracy to

unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to injure and oppress citizens of the United States who were relatives and acquaintances of the Weatherman fugitives, in the free exercise and enjoyments of certain rights and privileges secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.134

In November 1980, Felt and Miller were found guilty of having authorized FBI agents in the early 1970’s to illegally burgle the homes of relatives and friends of Weathermen, without a search warrant, on nine separate occasions.135

129 Berger, Outlaws, pp. 215-217130 P. Collier & D. Horowitz, Destructive Generation, p. 115131 Interviewed in Berger, Outlaws, p. 232132 Berger, Outlaws, p. 242133 Berger, Outlaws, p. 242134 W. Mark Felt, The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside (New York, 1979), p. 337


The relationship between the FBI and the Weatherman, then, was a confused and contradictory one. The Bureau’s obsession with Communism seriously skewed its perceptions of the origins of Weatherman in the New Left and led it to expend much time and energy in search of connections that simply were not there. Even as late as 1976, the Chicago office devoted several months to the preparation of an exhaustive 500-page study into the “influence, funding, contact, liaison, domination or control of WUO” by foreign Communist powers; the report found nothing of substance.136 As an extremely dedicated, tight-knit and security conscious organisation, the Weather Underground presented a formidable challenge to law enforcement agencies, but the FBI’s attempts to neutralize the terrorist activities of Weatherman were further hindered by the cultural divide between the two organisations. This ideological gulf stemmed from the respective class and educational backgrounds of agents and student radicals, and led agents to demonise those they were investigating, thus precluding the balanced and objective appraisal necessary for a successful criminal investigation.

Many accounts of the Weather Underground either present the group as a gang of crazed bombers in thrall to their own rhetorical excesses,137 or as a romantic band of warrior heroes, striking out from the underground to avenge government injustice and bring hope to the people.138 Such accounts portray the FBI either as noble defenders of American freedoms, or shadowy tools of a repressive state, accordingly. Ultimately, of course, none of these characterisations are true. For the most part, the agents of the FBI set out of combat an organisation that they and many other Americans believed posed a major threat to the fundamental institutions of American society, institutions that they had a responsibility to defend. Although they were guilty of occasionally cutting corners and breaching constitutional principles, they thought they were acting in the best interests of the country. As Associate Director Felt stated before his trial, “to not take action against these people and know of a bombing in advance would simply be to stick your fingers in your ears and protect your eardrums when the explosion went off, and then start the investigation.”139

The Weathermen themselves leave a divided legacy. Their early enthusiasm for politically-motivated mass murder was abhorrent, and it is easy to criticise their naivety, arrogance, and dogmatic inflexibility. However, in choosing to make a principled stand against the evils they saw in society, the Weathermen exhibited idealism, commitment, and immense personal courage. In Jeremy Varon put it, “for all their volatile conceit, they took as the task of their lives nothing less than the complete remaking of their societies along lines both fairer and more just.”140 Even at their zenith, there were no more than 200 Weathermen in a nation of 200 million, and the total damage they caused was probably in the realm of a few hundred thousand dollars in an economy worth several thousand billion.141 Despite this, it is important not to dismiss the Weatherman as some ineffective anomaly, as many historians have 135 Gray successfully argued that he was too highly placed to have had knowledge of the break-ins, and despite serious evidence to the contrary, was never brought to trial. See Theoharris, FBI Surveillance, pp. 885-888. Incidentally, in 2005 Felt admitted on his deathbed that he was the “Deep Throat” behind the Watergate press leaks.136 Report, “Foreign Influence – Weather Underground Organisation”, Chicago Office, 20th August 1976137 R. Moss, Urban Guerrillas (London, 1972)138 Berger, Outlaws, is particularly guilty of such hagiography.139 R. Kessler, The F.B.I.: Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency (New York, 1994), p. 147140 Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 310


done, but to recognise their position at the extreme edge of an extraordinarily wide spectrum of anti-government and counter-cultural feeling of the period. The Weathermen need to be rehabilitated into contemporary discussions of the sixties, as their experience is emblematic of the New Left’s awkward flirtation with violence and the morality of prioritising political objectives over human life.

Ultimately, however, the Weathermen failed to bring down the U.S. Government, failed to gather any appreciable support from the American public and, in the end, fell victim to their own irrelevancy as the radical fervour of the sixties melted away. As former member Larry Weiss later recalled, “I don’t know what it takes to make a revolution. But I know that blowing up bathrooms isn’t it.”142

141 L.D. Johnston and S.H. Williamson, "What Was the U.S. GDP Then? Annual Observations in Table and Graphical Format for years 1790 to 2006”, http:// www.measuringworth.com /datasets/ usgdp/ result.php, 2007.142 Interviewed in Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 295


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