Jeremy Varon (55 page)

likely provided some form of assistance to other armed groups, and certainly described its own bombings as acts of solidarity with the militant struggles of people of color. Finally, the WUO continued to speak in the strident language of the guerrilla, even as it urged moving beyond a guerrilla strategy.
Prairie Fire
declared “revolutionary war” to be the “only path to the final defeat of imperialism.”16 Later, the WUO professed revolutionary “love” of the Symbionese Liberation Army, despite the SLA’s murder of Oakland’s African-American superintendent of schools and other wanton crimes and despite other WUO statements critical of the group.17

As it cast about for a new theory of violence, the WUO itself begged the question of just what purpose its violence served. By 1975, the group had rejected not only the
foco
model of armed struggle but also that of

“war against fascism” and of “retribution.” The group acknowledged that the United States was far from fascist, and that it was utterly naïve to believe that “the revolution is contending for state power now.”18 Regarding “retribution,” the WUO rejected trying to match what it saw as the cruelty of the system with cruelty of its own.19 The WUO was left, then, with only the vague sense that the “revolution will need both open and clandestine movements . . . peaceful and armed struggle,” which were to interact through some unspecified “dialectic.”20 Weatherman Larry Weiss concluded in the early 1970s, “I don’t know what it means to make a revolution. But I know blowing up bathrooms [as in the Pentagon bombing] isn’t it.”21 Nothing in the intervening years made the WUO’s bombings any more “revolutionary.”

The legal situation of the WUO in the mid 1970s added to its political uncertainty. Since the townhouse explosion in 1970, apprehending the Weathermen had been a high priority for the FBI. As of October 1971, eight of the fourteen people on its “Ten Most Wanted” list, among them Dohrn, were “New Left or revolutionary types.” The FBI counted, all told, sixteen Weathermen as highly sought fugitives.22 The Bureau had its near misses, such as in March 1971 when it raided a San Francisco apartment just after the Weathermen, tipped off by helpful neighbors, 296

Conclusion

had vacated it.23 The Weathermen proved extremely elusive. In an internal memo, the FBI explained that they “are intelligent and highly organized. Their extremely sensitive security consciousness has to date virtually precluded the possibility of agent infiltration.”24 The memo also noted that the Weathermen did not seem “susceptible to [a] financial approach”; a $100,000 reward offered in connection to the 1971 Capitol bombing produced nothing.25 The FBI was additionally distressed that two members chose to stay underground even after federal indictments were lifted against them in 1973.26 One Weatherman, Howie Machtinger, was arrested in September 1973 but quickly jumped bail to rejoin the underground, defiantly explaining his decision in a letter to a radical newspaper.27 The FBI took all this as an expression of the WUO’s continuing “dedication to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government”

and “contemptuous assessment of law enforcement.”28

In 1973, conceding its failure, the Bureau established the Special Target Information Development (SPECTAR) program, in which agents went deep under cover in pursuit of Weathermen and other radicals, with no guarantee of protection from local arrests and prosecutions.29 The cover was in fact so deep that some SPECTAR agents seemed to
become
their disguise and even empathize with the objects of their hunt. Cril Payne, posing as a drug dealer, took and sold large amounts of drugs as he toured the semi-secret radical enclaves of the American northwest and western Canada (a haven for draft resisters). In his journeys, he met many people who might have been confused and self-destructive but hardly seemed political threats. Payne virtually abandoned his mission when he found a fugitive couple deep in the Canadian wilderness, living simply, brav-ing nature, and raising their child far from the corruptions of American society. He wondered what possible good could come from their arrest and left the family in peace.30

Legal developments dramatically changed the situation of the Weathermen. In October 1973, government attorneys requested that the federal indictments against the Weathermen for weapons possession and bombing plots, going back to 1970, be lifted. An FBI memo explained that prohibited forms of surveillance by “another government agency”

had been used in preparing the indictments, and that it was therefore “in the best interests of the national security” not to pursue prosecutions.31

It appeared that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the National Security Agency (responsible for the electronic intercept of foreign communications), or both, had conducted illegal investigations. Both agencies, barred from nearly all forms of domestic spying, did not want their Conclusion

297

operations exposed. Two months later, the federal conspiracy and riot charges stemming from the Days of Rage were withdrawn because searches had been conducted without proper warrants.32 The dismissals were a stunning rebuke of the state’s security apparatus, coming at a time when the CIA and FBI were under intense scrutiny for decades of extralegal behavior. Later, federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against top FBI officials for their investigations of the Weathermen, showing that for years the Bureau had conducted surreptitious searches (called “black-bag jobs”) of the homes of relatives and acquaintances of those underground.33

As a consequence of the dismissals, many Weathermen were no longer federal fugitives. Though the majority still faced various state charges, these were relatively minor (such as “unlawful flight from prosecution”

from alleged misdemeanors). Moreover, prosecutors had a strong incentive to be lenient to anyone who surfaced voluntarily, because harsh punishments would deter others from leaving the underground. Some Weathermen, remarkably, were no longer sought
on any charges what-soever.
By August 1974, the FBI counted only twenty-one of an estimated thirty-nine members as fugitives.34

This revised legal situation created new options. Chiefly, the Weathermen could turn themselves in, suffer only minimal repercussions, and continue working as “revolutionaries” above ground. This is just what the group contemplated with its strategy of “inversion,” whose basic idea was to have some members surface and become leaders of a revitalized radical left. Others would remain underground, sustaining clandestine networks and, perhaps, limited forms of armed struggle. In early 1976, the underground Weathermen and the PFOCs organized the “Hard Times” conference in Chicago, which brought together 2,000 or so activists from a variety of groups and causes and sought to develop a common platform and create an umbrella organization for American radicals. Bitter disputes broke out at the conference, however, with the groups of color accusing the white organizers of limiting their roles in essentially racist ways. The PFOCs felt manipulated by the underground members.

And the WUO overall appeared to grossly overestimate its prestige on the left.

Following the disastrous conference, divisions within the WUO deepened. Some members objected to what they saw as the abandonment of the revolution implied by “inversion.” Braley explained: “Even though it was clear that the overall political situation had changed, I had defined my life as doing armed struggle, and even debating that seemed like a 298

Conclusion

betrayal.”35 Over time, an insurgent faction, based largely on the East Coast and favoring a renewed commitment to violence, challenged the WUO’s longtime leaders, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Bill Ayers.

The authorities added to the tension by continuing their harassment of friends and family members, and by aggressively investigating the PFOCs.36

These stresses came to a head in late 1976, when the group collapsed in a torrent of recriminations. The terms of the debate were rigidly ideological, recalling the “mind-clogging rhetoric” amid which Weatherman had been born. The tone was acrimonious, even hysterical. Rival factions accused one another of “crimes against the people,” “betrayal of the revolution,” “white supremacy,” and “male supremacy.”37 The leaders, who had long enjoyed great power, were now savaged by the rank and file; some prominent Weathermen issued severe, self-debasing recantations eerily reminiscent of the language of the purges under Soviet communism. By the time the dust cleared, alliances and friendships had been shattered, a whole subculture was in ruins, and the Weather Underground had fallen into oblivion.

Over the next several years, the great majority of Weathermen turned themselves in, prompting local news stories that read like the final obituaries of a withered radicalism. After negotiating deals with prosecutors (typically probation; some jail time in select cases), they then turned their energy to the difficult task of rebuilding old relationships, a sense of political purpose, and, for some, a basic sense of self. Soon they reintegrated themselves into “normal life,” raising families, developing careers, and sustaining their activist commitments around the issues, such as fighting racism, imperialism, and economic inequality, that had always motivated them. Their professional lives, in all cases I have found, have some broad social value, whether education, various forms of political advocacy, or service to disadvantaged communities.

A few Weathermen, however, remained intent on continuing the armed struggle. Even as the WUO was crumbling, new groups like the “May 19th Communist Organization” were formed to reconsolidate the forces of the far left and reinvigorate the armed struggle. All the while, the United Freedom Front (UFF), a small WUO-like organization based in New England with roots in SDS, bombed state and corporate buildings, robbed banks, and eluded capture. Soon “European American anti-imperialists,”

as many white “revolutionaries” now called themselves, were building new alliances with members of African-American and Puerto Rican armed struggle groups. In addition to the traditional assaults on state Conclusion

299

and corporate property, these new coalitions (under a variety of names) facilitated daring prison escapes (chiefly of FALN and BLA prisoners) and engaged in “revolutionary expropriations”—in plain language, armed robberies of banks—to fund their activities.

One such heist, on October 20, 1981, in Nyack, New York, went terribly wrong, resulting in the shooting death of a Brinks security guard defending an armored truck containing $1.6 million. Two police officers who had stopped a getaway truck containing the money were also shot dead. David Gilbert was driving the truck, and Kathy Boudin was the passenger. The two were immediately arrested. Later that day police captured two others who had fled in a second car: Judy Clark, a former Weatherwoman, and the former Black Panther “Sam Brown.” In the days and months that followed, more participants in the robbery were arrested, among them Kuwasi Balagoon, formerly “Donald Weems,” a major figure in the black armed struggle. Investigators gathered crucial information, such as the location of safe houses and names, about the surviving underground network.

Nearly all the Brinks defendants, whose trials took place in 1983 and 1984, declined to mount conventional defenses and instead used the court proceedings to denounce America for centuries of plunder, exploitation, and violence. Most were given consecutive life sentences for multiple counts of murder.38 Remarkably, some highly sought fugitives, among them former Weathermen and BLA members, continued to commit robberies and bombings. In the mid 1980s, however, a spate of arrests, including members of post-Brinks cells and of the UFF, all but decimated the underground. By 1986, with most suspects captured, the

“armed struggle” movement originating in the 1960s had come to a virtual end.39

Those sustaining armed activities into the 1980s were as convinced as ever of the oppressiveness of the American state and the value of violent resistance. But their politics seemed irreparably out of joint with the times; their actions an afterimage of a radicalism that had lost resonance within the political culture. They now fought to survive prison, to come to terms with their choices, and to sustain meaningful forms of activism. In the face of often fierce resistance from prison administrators, they have worked to improve health care and education in the prisons, to organize peer counseling on issues of HIV/AIDS, and to provide legal assistance to other inmates.40

Their incarceration has given rise to a small, if spirited, movement on behalf of America’s self-described “political prisoners” (or even “pris-300

Conclusion

oners of war”), whether from the Black Power, Puerto Rican independence, anti-imperialist, or Native American movements. Campaigns around individual inmates, some of whose cases go back to the late 1960s, have galvanized public concern around such issues as the death penalty, the activities of the U.S. Navy in Puerto Rico, and the proliferation within the American prison system of special “control units” (also called “super-maximum security” facilities). In such units, which hold thousands of inmates nationwide, conditions that the RAF bitterly described as torture and human rights organizations condemned— chiefly extended periods of total isolation—have become routine, underscoring the powerful differences in the penal philosophies of the two societies and the further degeneration of U.S. prisons into places of great abuse.

Some former Weathermen, motivated by political conviction and personal loyalty, are active in advocacy for the prisoners. Roth explained,

“How can we have a movement that is worth anything if it doesn’t have a component that will work not only to support those in prison but also to free them?”41 For years, efforts to do the latter appeared to go nowhere.

But in 1997, the Los Angeles Black Panther Geronimo Ji Jaga (formerly

“Geronimo” Pratt) was released from prison after twenty-seven years when his murder conviction was overturned. Two years later, and after years of demonstrations and appeals, eleven Puerto Rican prisoners were freed under a grant of conditional clemency by President Bill Clinton.