Back in Cairo, with his devotion to a fundamentalist Islam sharpened by his American experiences, Qutb immersed himself in the Muslim Brotherhood, a militant group often at violent odds with the secular nationalist government of President Gamal Abdul Nasser. Qutb became the Brotherhood’s intellectual voice; his writings spread widely through Islamist circles in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. In 1966, Nasser’s government tried and hanged Qutb for treason. His martyrdom, however, only confirmed Qutb’s status as a thinker who had come to understand the need for an absolutist Islam at war with jahil-iyyah , the “barbarity” of the modern state, and with the “corruption” of Western secularism—a corruption he had experienced at close quarters in New York, Washington, Colorado, and California. Qutb’s writings, and his personal example, would exert a lasting influence on radical fundamentalist groups in the Muslim world, including al Qaeda. On September 11, 2001, ten men influenced by Qutb’s manifestos would fly two jet liners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on the island where their spiritual guide had disembarked almost forty-two years earlier.2
Well before September 11, terrorism had become a threat to New York City, as it had to other cities around the world. Terror has always played a role in war, long before the English coined the term “terrorism” to describe the mass executions carried out by the French revolutionary government. (“Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists . . . are let loose on the people,” Edmund Burke wrote in 1795.) For millennia, generals, admirals, and common soldiers had used pillage, arson, rape, and mass murder against the noncombatant populations so essential to supporting armies in the field. If the September 1776 fire in lower Manhattan was augmented by revolutionary arsonists to deprive the British army and its Tory supporters of their base, as is likely, then it was an act of terrorism.3
Starting in the late nineteenth century, however, terrorism took on recognizably modern forms and aims. Radicals driven by new ideologies—anarchists outraged by the inequities of the existing social order, nationalists seeking independence for their homelands—resorted to assassinations and bombings to advance their causes. Their goals were to maximize their political leverage by sparking widespread fear, to gain optimal publicity in an era when public opinion was shaped by the newspaper and the telegraph (and eventually by radio, newsreels, and television), and sometimes to provoke a government backlash to drive the masses into full-fledged revolution. New York would become only one theater in the shifting international drama of twentieth-century terrorism.
But the link between Qutb’s alienation and September 11 also suggests something about New York’s persistent provocation, its recurring role as a challenge to those bent on violating it. Time and again in New York’s modern history, militants have sought to attack and prevail over the city, leaving behind a litany of obscure dates and tragedies forgotten by all but a few. The history of terrorism in New York has its own trajectory, its own declarations of war, and its own cycles of shock, grief, fear, and forgetting. Only with the mass casualties and destruction of 9/11 has that history regained relevance as prelude and background.
The explosion tore through the red brick façade and scattered debris out onto the tree-lined Greenwich Village street. The shock wave shattered windows up and down the block. As smoke billowed from the wreckage, police officers pulled two dazed and bleeding women out of what had been the building’s first floor. Within minutes, as firefighters arrived, two smaller blasts sent flames rolling up through the four stories of the building as the front wall collapsed into a pile of burning rubble. The actor Dustin Hoffman carried paintings and a Tiffany lampshade out of his damaged house next door before police barred him from reentering. As firefighters’ hoses poured water into the site and police pushed spectators away, the two unidentified women, who had taken shelter in the apartment of a neighbor, fled the scene, disappearing into thin air. It was the afternoon of March 6, 1970, and the townhouse that had stood for 125 years at 18 West Eleventh Street was no more, the evident casualty of a gas main leak and explosion.4
But, as the police soon discovered, the explosion was no ordinary accident. Sifting through the Eleventh Street rubble, investigators found fifty-seven sticks of dynamite and four homemade pipe bombs. Buried under the wreckage were also the remains of one woman and two men—twenty-eight-year-old Diana Oughton, twenty-three-year-old Ted Gold, and another man eventually identified as twenty-one-year-old Terry Robbins. All had been members of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society and of its offshoot, the Weathermen. The two fleeing women, Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, were also identified as members of the Weathermen; the townhouse belonged to Wilkerson’s father, a retired advertising executive who was abroad at the time. The truth was soon clear: the townhouse’s basement had been a clandestine bomb factory. Somehow, something had gone wrong, and a bomb in the making had exploded, rupturing and igniting the building’s gas line and killing Gold, Oughton, and Robbins.5
The townhouse explosion happened at a time of great turbulence in New York and around the country. Rallies against the Vietnam War, campus takeovers, marches by Black Panthers, protests by feminists and gay activists: New York in 1970 was a city at war with itself. Nationally, the 1969–1970 school year witnessed 247 arson cases and nearly 250 bombings on college campuses, most tied to racial or war-related policies. On the Lower East Side, Abbie Hoffman later claimed, “I was approached by several arms dealers during this period with offers of hand weapons, machine guns, plastiques, bazookas, mortars. ‘You name it,’ one dealer said, ‘I can get you a tank, even a jet!’” But for the majority of the city’s blue-collar, middle-class, and affluent white residents, New York was a place of longed-for privacy and security, a domain of apartments and houses where, its denizens hoped, violence would remain a distant reality consigned to news reports from Vietnam, Chicago, Berkeley, or still-segregated Harlem, watched in the safety of the family living room.6
A charred void marks the former location of 18 West Eleventh Street, March 1970. PHOTO BY CO RENTMEESTER / TIME LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES.
Ted Gold, himself the product of a middle-class upbringing on the Upper West Side, saw things differently. He had been a leader of the 1968 student sit-in at Columbia and was a seasoned veteran of militant antiwar activism. “We’ve got to turn New York into Saigon,” he told an old college friend over a drink in the West End Bar on Broadway shortly before his death. The Saigon he envisioned was the Saigon of the Tet offensive, when Vietcong guerillas brought war into the sanctum of that city’s US embassy compound. In 1969, Gold, his Columbia comrade Mark Rudd, and a network of other former SDS members formed the Weathermen (later renamed the Weather Underground) to bring armed revolution to the streets of America.7
The roots of the Weathermen lay deep in the idealism of the student civil rights, antiwar, and community organizing movements. But as the Vietnam War dragged on, as the student left became more defiant, and as the government’s reactive crackdown intensified, a select few young radicals turned, partly in desperation, to destruction as a tool for change. “After a certain amount of frustration you decide that at least you can make yourself into a brick and hurl yourself,” one SDS member commented in 1969.8
“A mass revolutionary movement” was needed, the Weathermen’s founding manifesto declared, something “akin to the Red Guard in China . . . a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.” That manifesto and others amounted to declarations of war against the entire American military-industrial complex. Along with Robbins, Oughton, Wilkerson, Boudin, and John Jacobs, Gold formed a New York collective of the Weathermen dedicated to the idea that only a violent response could end the violence manifested by the United States in Southeast Asia, in the domestic persecution of black activists, and in the malign neglect that left the poor to languish in their poverty. “We were going to bring the war home,” Jacobs later recalled. “‘Turn the imperialists’ war into a civil war,’ in Lenin’s words.
And we were going to kick ass.”9
Behind the elegant nineteenth-century façade on quiet West Eleventh Street, the homegrown militants had found the perfect safe house. Already, in the early morning of February 21, 1970, two weeks before the deadly explosion in Greenwich Village, members of the collective had planted three gasoline bombs in front of the house of Judge John Murtagh in the Inwood section of northern Manhattan. They scrawled “Vietcong Have Won” and “Free the Panther 21” in red letters on the sidewalk but left no mark identifying themselves. Murtagh was presiding over pretrial hearings in the case of twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party arrested for allegedly planning to bomb Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and three other midtown department stores at the height of the Easter 1969 shopping season. Nobody was hurt when the Inwood gas bombs exploded, nor were there injuries when small bombs exploded that same morning in front of the Charles Street police precinct in Greenwich Village and at army and navy recruiting booths on the edge of the Brooklyn College campus.10
By March, the New York collective’s immediate goal was to turn Fort Dix, New Jersey, seventy miles away, into Saigon. There, a dance for noncommissioned army officers and their wives and dates would provide a setting for bringing the horrors of Vietnam home to America. As they planned the bombing, Cathy Wilkerson later claimed, “we still didn’t talk about the physical impact of the actions, either on buildings or people . . . ‘You cannot act with such greed and recklessness without consequences!’ I wanted our message to be, and I wanted to say it as loud as we could.” It was the bomb they planned to plant in the Fort Dix dance hall, a dynamite pipe bomb studded with roofing nails to shred the dancers, that exploded accidentally in the townhouse basement around noon on March 6.11
The Weather Underground was not the only activist group that turned to terrorism to achieve its ends. In March 1970, the same month as the accidental explosion at the group’s safe house, thirteen other bombs exploded in New York City. On March 12, bombs caused damage but no injuries at Mobil Oil’s corporate office on East Forty-Second Street, the IBM Building on Park Avenue, and the General Telephone and Electronics Building on Third Avenue. A letter sent to the offices of United Press International and signed “Revolutionary Force 9” accused the three corporations of profiting from the Vietnam War, “Amerikan imperialism,” and “racist oppression.” On March 22, a lead pipe bomb attached to a clock detonator wounded seventeen people at the Electric Circus discotheque on St. Mark’s Place, and another pipe bomb damaged a stock brokerage on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. The incidents continued a trend. New York bombings between June 1969 and the end of March 1970 cost thousands of dollars in property damage and left forty-three New Yorkers injured and four radicals dead. “To hurt innocent people seems to be the fad these days,” a police deputy inspector commented after the Electric Circus blast.12
A new era in international terrorism had begun in the mid and late 1960s. In Northern Ireland and Israel, guerillas launched surprise attacks that killed civilians. Hijackers commandeered planes (including one from Newark and two from Kennedy Airport) to Castro’s Cuba. In New York and elsewhere, anti-Castro émigrés attacked those who countenanced the Communist government in Havana. Three Cuban émigrés were arrested in December 1964 for firing a bazooka at the United Nations headquarters as Castro’s Minister of Industry, Che Guevara, addressed the General Assembly. (The shell, fired from the Long Island City waterfront, fell short, “sending up a 15-foot geyser of water” in the East River, according to a newspaper report.) In 1968, anti-Castro militants bombed fifteen New York City foreign consulates, tourist bureaus, and bookstores; two of the nine New York men later apprehended for the crimes were veterans of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion force. Black Panthers exchanged gunfire with police in New York and several other cities; incidents accelerated after Chicago police killed Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Moore in December 1969. In 1970–1971, four New York patrolmen would be killed and two injured by black militants. (“The armed goons of this racist government will again meet the guns of oppressed Third World Peoples,” warned a letter sent to the New York Times after one shooting.)13
Yet as New Yorkers pondered their city’s sporadic explosions, and as FBI agents and bomb squads worked overtime to meet the threats, they rarely remembered the city’s long history of radical bomb blasts. In the early twentieth century, New York had experienced its first wave of militant violence, one rooted in the era’s tensions over industry, labor, and class. Firebrands like the German refugee Johann Most had brought the idea of “propaganda by the deed” from Europe, where some of his fellow anarchists, abetted by the increasing availability of concealable handguns and the invention of dynamite in 1866, assassinated monarchs and heads of state. Violence, anarchists argued, was the only fitting response to the daily violence of factory exploitation, strike-busting police, slum housing, and the other outrages of proletarian life. Their perception of New York, the great financial dynamo and hub of immigrant labor, was shared broadly in leftist circles. “If there is one place in America where the workers have reason to revolt against capitalism and this thing called ‘civilization’ and to overthrow it,” Socialist Louis Duchez wrote in 1910, “it is New York City.”14
New York’s first explosion came in March 1908, when a Russian-born anarchist, Selig Silverstein, threw a bomb as police drove Socialist demonstrators from Union Square. The bomb exploded prematurely, mortally wounding Silverstein and injuring several policemen; the dying man proudly proclaimed that “I came to the park to kill the police. . . . I hate them.” A flurry of unsolved explosions followed in 1914 and 1915: bombs went off at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Alphonsus Catholic Church on West Broadway, the Bronx Court House, the Tombs Police Court, and police headquarters on Centre Street. In February 1915, an undercover policeman helped to entrap two Harlem-based Italian-born anarchists, Frank Abarno and Carmine Carbone, in another bomb plot against St. Patrick’s. Their aim, police alleged, was to attack “the ruling classes, law, order, and the churches.” The class war was arriving on the doorsteps of the comfortable denizens of the capitalist metropolis, even if wounds were few and no lives were lost. Mabel Dodge Luhan, the Fifth Avenue socialite and patroness of Greenwich Village radicals, later remembered the era as one in which her anarchist friends frequently “referred to the day when blood would flow in the streets of New York.”15
In 1919—a postwar year of nationwide economic stress, bitter industrial strikes, and the founding of two American Communist parties in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—leftist bombings resumed after a four-year hiatus. In late April, thirty-six packages containing “infernal machines,” some with the false return address of Gimbel’s department store on West Thirty-Third Street, were mailed from New York City to dignitaries and industrialists around the country, including J. P. Morgan Jr., Mayor John Hylan, and Police Commissioner Richard Enright in New York. All but one of the parcel bombs were intercepted and defused; the exception blew the hands off the maid of former Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick in Atlanta. On June 2, a month after this “May Day plot,” dynamite bombs ripped apart a Philadelphia church rectory and the homes of eight officials and manufacturers across the country, including that of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington. The only fatality was a night watchman on the East Sixty-First Street premises of the New York target, Judge Charles Nott, who had sentenced Abarno and Carbone to prison in 1915. The other targets were linked by their public opposition to radicalism or their advocacy of immigration restriction.16
But it was on September 16, 1920, that full-blown terrorism, aimed indiscriminately at the largest possible number of victims, arrived in New York. A bomb on a horse-drawn wagon sitting at the Wall Street curb exploded, killing 38, mostly clerks, messenger boys, stenographers, and drivers in the thick noontime lunch crowd; 143 were seriously wounded. “Free the political prisoner or it will be sure death [for] all of you,” demanded crudely printed flyers, signed “American Anarchist fighters,�
� found in mailboxes nearby. (Five days earlier, on September 11, two Italian immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been indicted for a Massachusetts payroll robbery in which two guards were killed; the flyer probably referred to them.) The site of the blast, next to the US Sub-Treasury, and across the street from the headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Company and the New York Stock Exchange, had profound symbolic value for radicals: no intersection better represented the beating heart of American financial and corporate capitalism. (Fifty years later, a few weeks after the West Eleventh Street bomb blast, the same crossroads would be the site of the hard hat riot against antiwar demonstrators.)17
Yet the September 16 bombing also represented something new: an indiscriminate attack on the mass of random passing pedestrians, an assault aimed at terrorizing the entire population, not just selected officials, businessmen, or landmarks. The wagon, packed with fifty pounds of blasting gelatin and five hundred pounds of iron window sash weights to cause maximum shrapnel damage, was the first major vehicle bomb in modern world history. The death count remains the third worst from a terrorist attack in America, following 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. After tracking and interrogating numerous anarchists, alleged Soviet agents, and cranks, the New York police and federal investigators came up empty, as they also did with the 1919 attacks. To this day, the Wall Street bomber or bombers have never been conclusively identified. (Recent research points to Mario Buda or Boda, an Italian-born anarchist who left for Naples shortly after the event.)18
New York at War Page 37
