Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

(Weather Underground member, brother of Bill Ayers)

  We had a nice farmhouse that we’d rented, outside of Seattle, and that was the second safe house we took him to. I never met him. I met his wife, Rosemary. She showed up before him. We all hugged and kissed, “This is great; here’s the house, here’s the dog, here’s where you feed the goat, and, okay, we’re leaving, and Tim will be here in three days.” Melody and I didn’t even stay at the house. We just established the house. So that was our only contribution. Rosemary was lovely, much more SoCal than we were. We were sort of Northwest hippies with homemade vests, and she was more the long scarf.

  Then he flew to France and Algeria. His idea was, “Oh, this is great. Let’s hijack a plane and go to Cuba. Is that what we’re doing?” He was partly nuts, and he was probably too drugged out. We babysat a lot of fugitives who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, because we felt some responsibility. We felt like, “Okay, we’re kind of going to take care of the whole illegal part of the movement.”

  MICHAEL KENNEDY

  (Leary’s lawyer, in a San Francisco press conference, September 17, 1970)

  It’s a merger of dope and dynamite, flower and flames. There is now a merger of Timothy and the Weathermen. This portends more destruction to the American government than anything in history. I wholeheartedly support him….[While he was in jail Leary] began relating to blacks and other prisoners of war. He recognized himself as a political prisoner.

  As it happens in almost every instance, in this case prison took a peace-loving man and in eight months turned him into a roaring revolutionary. Millions of kids look to Timothy for leadership and God knows how many other kids look to the Weathermen for leadership. Now the two are together…this merger portends thousands of prison breaks.*2

  RICK AYERS

  The hippies were very alienated from America. They were going to be the base of the revolution on some level, and this [Leary jailbreak] was a gesture of solidarity with them. So I don’t think it was a bad move. It wasn’t just that we were going to only support more privileged people; it was who we could get. But it was a stance around prisons, and it was a stance around that relationship.*3

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  The Weather Bureau sent Jennifer [Dohrn, Bernardine’s sister] and me to Algeria to welcome Tim Leary. He was going to stay with Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers’ minister of information, who was running the International Section of the Black Panther Party there. At that time, Algeria was one of the main meeting places for all of these national liberation movement exiles. Probably Havana and Algiers were the two main places.

  TIMOTHY LEARY

  (letter to Michael and Eleanora Kennedy, October 10, 1970)

  Beloved Friends,

  How perfect to hear your voice! Your loving vibrations. We love you two! You are such heroes—so wise and strong and effective….The whole thing was miraculous. Really statistically impossible. The escape was incredibly reckless. It was all a dream….It was all automatic and perfect and unbelievably lucky.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  It was the worst mix of people ever. You had Eldridge Cleaver. He was just a total alpha male, armed to the teeth and spoke slowly, with a deep voice, and told you what to do. He had his wife, Kathleen, and his gumada [mistress], this gorgeous secular Arab woman, Malika. They were living in a Black Panther compound in the building that was the former North Korean Embassy.

  Eldridge decided that he was Leary’s boss. And Leary doesn’t really have bosses. He’s an acid head. So the relationship between Eldridge and Leary was doomed. Eldridge decided to bust Leary. He called it a revolutionary detainment, and it was clear that the whole relationship was degenerating and wasn’t going to last because he had this hippie acid head who wasn’t buckling under his authority. Eldridge was the lord of the manor. He was the official ambassador; he had the Vietnamese in the morning, and the North Koreans in the afternoon for tea, and he was living the life of this great Afro-American diplomat. Leary was Leary. Leary was just his own thing.

  MICHAEL RANDALL

  We had to provide some money to make it easy for Timothy to go to Switzerland and get out of Eldridge’s clutches. It was fucked up.

  * * *

  *1 Brotherhood of Eternal Love members Michael Randall and Travis Ashbrook gave the Weather Underground approximately twenty-five thousand dollars to help Leary escape.

  *2 UPI story published in the Desert Sun, September 18, 1970.

  *3 The Leary jailbreak increased the Weather Underground’s notoriety and they followed with a series of synchronized bombings on October 8, 1970: the statue of policemen in Chicago’s Haymarket Square; the Hall of Justice in Marin County, California, where Black Panther Jonathan Jackson and two others had recently been shot; the Criminal Courthouse in Queens; and the Harvard Center for International Affairs.

  CHAPTER 26

  RECKONING

  How is it possible in a democratic society for an official to deceive the American public and many of its officials and to pervert the basic principles of democracy and an open society with such egregious secret policies and actions for nearly a half-century without constraints?

  —BETTY MEDSGER,

  The Burglary: The Discovery of

  J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI

  During most of my tenure as director of the FBI, I have been compelled to devote much of my time attempting to reconstruct and then to explain activities that occurred years ago. Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible. We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated.

  —CLARENCE M. KELLEY, FBI

  DIRECTOR, SPEECH AT WESTMINSTER

  COLLEGE, June 15, 1976

  As the sixties gave way to the seventies, Hanoi and Washington, Haiphong and New York, Bach Mai and Chicago had more in common than meets the eye. The Nixon administration waged an overt bombing campaign on North Vietnam while conducting a covert war of sabotage, surveillance, and dirty tricks on the leadership of the antiwar, black power, and counterculture movements. Nixon instituted new draconian drug laws in 1971 and used them as a political weapon against his domestic foes, while the FBI’s assault on the Black Panthers succeeded in destroying the party from within. Meanwhile, the Weather Underground spent the seventies on the run from the law. The 1970s were littered with a slew of grand juries, indictments, trials, convictions, dismissals, plea bargains, fines, jail terms, and pardons of U.S. citizens opposed to the war and the government officials who tried to stop them. The legal morass was part of the collateral damage of the War at Home.

  Hundreds of thousands of pages of top-secret documents would eventually show that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Nixon administration’s modus operandi was to use covert destabilization and misinformation against any person or group it considered to be in opposition to their goals. In their fearful battle against the movement, Hoover, Nixon, and their henchmen would prove guilty of flouting the very Constitution they were charged to protect and defend. Hoover’s forty-eight-year reign over the FBI took on despotic proportions as no one inside or out of the organization—including the eight presidents he served—had the courage to challenge him.

  The White House and the FBI’s campaign against the Panthers and every faction of the antiwar movement kicked off a chain reaction that severely tarnished the credibility of both offices of the executive branch. FBI wiretaps of NSC official Morton Halperin’s phone and the White House Plumbers’ break-in at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office became foundation stones in the mounting evidence of the Nixon administration’s criminal acts, evidence that animated the Watergate investigation. Instead of serving a long prison sentence for treason, Daniel Ellsberg walked free, while U.S. attorney general John Mitchell and Nixon advisors H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Colson all went to jail.

  The iconic image of Nixon being helicoptered off the White House South Lawn on August 9, 1974, in Army One following his resignation was repeated just five months later as the last m
ilitary helicopter lifted off the roof of the evacuated American Embassy in Saigon. The Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency were forever linked in history for their parallel ignominious endings.

  Proof of deceit and illegal government surveillance and harassment continued to be unearthed even after Nixon’s resignation and the war’s end. In 1976, a cache of top-secret files revealed illegal break-ins by a special FBI squad conducted in 1972 and 1973 against friends and relatives of the Weather Underground. Forty-six FBI agents, including the three highest-ranking officials in the bureau, were indicted in one of the biggest scandals in FBI history. By 1980, the remaining Weather Underground fugitives came out of hiding and resumed normal lives after the government dropped federal charges that years earlier had landed many of them on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Also in 1980, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Mark Felt, a senior FBI agent convicted of green-lighting much of the bureau’s illegal surveillance activity against the movement. No one knew at the time that Mark Felt was Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s infamous source, “Deep Throat.” The plot, laden with irony, thickened and so did the connection between Nixon’s war against the movement and Watergate.

  GERALD LEFCOURT (movement lawyer)

  Here I was, in March of 1971, in the middle of one of the biggest trials that there ever was in this country [the Panther 21], with seventeen months in court—four months in pretrial hearings and a thirteen-month trial. I’m totally focused on these police and FBI Panther infiltrators and here you have the revelation that there was a burglary in the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, which changed the world.

  Without these eight people, who were simple antiwar activists, willing to risk everything, all of us didn’t know what we didn’t know. They released the documents and unearthed COINTELPRO, the actions of the FBI to destroy these movements, and it was like a revelation. We learned that the FBI was out to destroy the Panthers and that out of the 295 operations [between 1968 and 1971] against what they called “black nationalist hate groups,” 233 were done against the Panthers.*1

  MICHAEL KENNEDY (movement lawyer)

  When the group of radicals who called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI’s office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and stole hundreds of secret files, I thought that was a wonderful action. I loved those people for that, and the files that they stole were really the first concrete evidence of COINTELPRO that was made public.

  COINTELPRO wasn’t able to do anything to the Weather Underground because they couldn’t find them. The only ones they could find were a few supporters aboveground. So because they were racists, they concentrated on the Black Panthers. COINTELPRO played devastating work on the Black Panther Party, and actually got them to start hurting one another because the FBI would claim so-and-so was an informant, and if somebody didn’t like them, they’d use that as a basis to kill him. That was the mischief and the nastiness of COINTELPRO.

  NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 9, 1976

  F.B.I. SOUGHT DOOM OF PANTHER PARTY:

  SENATE STUDY SAYS PLOT LED TO INTERNAL SPLITS,

  GANG WARFARE, AND KILLINGS

  By John Kifner

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation carried out a secret, nationwide effort to “destroy” the Black Panthers, including attempts to stir bloody “gang warfare” between the Panthers and other groups and to create factional splits within the party, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

  JEFFREY HENSON SCALES (Black Panther photographer)

  At the time, we on the left really felt that some sort of revolution, some major change was imminent and we were not fully grasping what it meant for the United States government to bear down without mercy on its own citizens, and the insidiousness of the methodologies of undermining the movement. To me, the undermining [by FBI informants] was almost as sad as the killings, but not quite; infiltrating and diminishing things, rotting things out from the inside deliberately.*2

  HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNAL SECURITY, AUGUST 1971

  The Black Panther Party, as a national organization, is near disintegration….The Committee hearings document the steady decline in [party membership] during the last year. Furthermore, the feud between Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton threatens the start of a time of violence and terror within what remains of the Panther Party. Probably only remnants of the party will remain alive here and there to bedevil the police and enchant a few of the young, but its day as a national influence and influence in the black community seems over. It is hard to believe that only a little over a year ago the Panthers…ranked as the most celebrated ghetto militants. They fascinated the left, inflamed the police, terrified much of America, and had an extraordinary effect on the black community….Liberals and idealists who once sympathized with the Panthers have…withdrawn their support.

  STEVE WASSERMAN (student activist)

  I remember when Huey [Newton] was released from prison on August 5, 1970. I had attended a few days of his 1968 trial and was convinced, like so many others, that he was being railroaded. Now, finally, he was being freed and thousands, including myself, had assembled to witness his release on the steps of the Alameda County Court House in Oakland. Few of us could see then what he would become: a sawdust Stalin who, as we would later learn, under the relentless persecution and murderous campaign waged by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and hostage to his own growing cocaine-and-cognac-fueled megalomania, would preside over the ruin of his own beloved party, which, over the next few years, would devolve into little more than a cult and a gang.

  JEFFREY HENSON SCALES

  I moved on in my life and then watched from a little bit afar as Huey got out of jail and things started to digress. There were powerful forces at work when he was out of jail to nudge him along his demonic path. The FBI had placed so many people in key places in the party to influence people to do things that were wrong. That was part of their whole methodology. You could just see that. It was unfortunate.

  I always knew the personality cult that had built around Huey was going to be a problem. There was also the rise of cocaine in the seventies, so there were all those things going on.*3 It was kind of painful to watch because the person I identified most with was Bobby Seale. I remember seeing him move away [from the party]. But they were very violent times and there was violence on all ends and the police were trying to kill the left, literally.

  NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 22, 1980

  LEONARD BERNSTEIN ASSERTS F.B.I.

  USED “DIRTY TRICKS” AGAINST HIM

  “…F.B.I.-inspired harassment ranged from floods of hate letters sent to me over what are now clearly fictitious signatures, thinly-veiled threats couched in anonymous letters to magazines and newspapers,…plus innumerable other dirty tricks….I should be happy to see this whole shameful F.B.I. episode exposed for what it truly was: incitement to violence.”

  PENTAGON PAPERS

  RANDY KEHLER (draft resister)

  Dan Ellsberg came to visit me at La Tuna prison in Texas in 1971. He wanted to know what prison was like. Before he left he said, “By the way, you don’t have a subscription to The New York Times, do you?” I said, “No.” He said, “Want me to send you one?” I said, “Sure, that’d be great, Dan, thanks.” So, in the meantime, this whole thing is about to burst into the press, which he knew, but he couldn’t talk to me about it in the prison yard. So, I’m starting to get the daily New York Times, and soon enough he’s all over the front page.*4 The prison officials went berserk. They said, “That’s that guy who came in here to see Kehler! Who let him in here? How come we didn’t know?” They were just beside themselves. “This traitor to his country was in our prison, we let him in. He saw Kehler, oh my God.” It was all very exciting. They didn’t take any action against me.

  STEVE WASSERMAN

  Two weeks after The New York Times published a selection from the Papers [June 13, 1971] and after The Washington Post, too, began publishing extracts [June 18, 1971], the Nixon Whi
te House created the so-called Plumbers Unit in the basement of the Executive Office Building to plug the suspected leaks. On September 3, 1971, E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and the other bagmen broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding’s, office in Beverly Hills to try to get information to smear him and thus ineluctably launched the country on the slippery slope that would lead to Watergate, the unraveling of the administration, and Nixon’s ignominious resignation on August 9, 1974. The origins of all this can be found in the hinge year of 1970.

  It is instructive to remember the heresy committed by Daniel Ellsberg when he leaked what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. This was an intolerable act for the national security state to permit. It explains why Ellsberg had to be made an example of and it is why our rulers threw the book at him, why he was going to suffer terribly if he’d been convicted on espionage charges, why he faced one hundred and fifteen years in prison, and why Anthony Russo, his co-conspirator, faced thirty-five years.

  While some argue that the Pentagon Papers didn’t have very much effect on the country, I remember it differently. For those of us in the antiwar movement, it emboldened us because the Pentagon Papers suggested that the radical critique of the war was the correct critique, that we’d gotten it right all along, and we now knew this from the government’s own documents.