Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  The next morning Michael, still dressed as a priest, though now wearing street gloves, went to the Newark Star-Ledger and asked the receptionist to take the box he gave her to the city editor. It contained one undamaged Selective Service file from which the draftee's name had been excised, and a plastic bag full of ashes and a letter describing what they'd done. It ended, "If this was Vietnam instead of New Jersey these would be the remains of people instead of paper," and it was signed, "The Catholic Conspiracy to Save Lives."

  In the next weeks they took advantage of the Christmas and New Year's lull, which slowed the bureaucracies' ability to respond. Michael, Pete Bryant, Joe Reilley and Jerry Dunne repeated the action in Camden, Albany, Wilmington and Harrisburg. In each case they were able to enter the Selective Service office—in Harrisburg it was only a floor above the FBI field office—seize the files and get out. Each morning after, Michael presented the ashes of the burned files to a local newspaper or radio or television station. The Catholic Conspiracy to Save Lives was suddenly notorious. In Portland, Oregon, during the night before Richard Nixon's inauguration, another group unknown to Michael raided the Selective Service office in the same way and signed itself, "The West Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives." By the end of January, draftboards in Joliet, Illinois, and San Diego were similarly hit by other groups.

  In Washington several things happened. The Selective Service received a special appropriation to begin the immediate microfilm duplication of its records. The General Services Administration issued new guidelines for security in federal buildings and created an emergency fund for twenty-four-hour patrols of buildings housing Selective Service offices. J. Edgar Hoover made the arrest of the draftboard conspirators a top priority for the FBI.

  Michael shouldn't have shown himself at the newspapers, perhaps. The FBI had a good description of him and, since his conflict with Spellman and his participation in various demonstrations had been well publicized, he was an obvious suspect. But while his purpose was not to get arrested, neither was it to avoid arrest at all cost or indefinitely. He knew what he was doing. And he knew that if their raids succeeded, the draftboard offices would quickly be made invulnerable anyway to amateurs like him and his friends, both the ones he knew and the ones he didn't.

  The FBI, on the other hand, wanted more than Michael. Hoover wanted everyone. Agents were convinced that Michael Maguire was the leader of at least two dozen raiders, and that he had orchestrated the recent burglaries in the Midwest and on the West Coast too. In fact there had already been that many Catholics arrested and freed on bail, and by the end of 1969 forty or fifty more would be. Most of them were priests and nuns, some like Michael in bad standing and some formally defrocked. They participated in draftboard raids not out of subservience to any leader or as part of a centralized organization, but out of subservience to what they'd have described as a vocation to end the war. They were disparate groups, only in the loosest sense conspirators, but they embraced the word conspiracy nonetheless. Like true Romans, they loved its Latin etymology, for it means "breathe together." Like true Romans, they liked the draftboard raid for its liturgical simplicity and its moral purity. They were destroying paper to save children.

  But governments everywhere fail to understand the spontaneously expressed moral urges of the people. Always governments are fingering agitators and uncovering master plans and tracking down ringleaders. There were a dozen priests like Michael; well known, articulate, charismatic, capable of inspiring boldness in the tame. But the FBI singled him out. Eventually they made him famous. They could simply have arrested him with the evidence they had, and however the trial came out that would almost certainly have ended his aggressive resistance. But, prodded by Hoover and supported fully by the new attorney general, they embarked upon a plan to break the back of what they regarded as the core of the kooky Catholic war resistance.

  She came to his office at NYU in early February. Celia Zack, a startlingly pretty Jewish woman in her late twenties. She had lustrous dark hair and eyes dark enough and deep enough to draw anyone in. But her eyes' constant rapid blinking undercut their effect and belied her intelligence, her nerve, and made her seem slightly vacuous. She blinked like that because of her contact lenses.

  Michael knew her slightly. She was a board member of RESIST, which had its offices in the same building as his. The antiwar crowd had moved into the religious centers of universities as the alienated kids had moved out. RESIST had sponsored the early draftcard burnings and had more recently focused its efforts on helping draft-dodgers get to Canada. Michael had obtained false papers for a dozen or more of his clients from Celia Zack.

  She stood in the doorway of his office.

  "Come in," he said.

  She shook her head. "Let's go for a walk." She turned the fur collar up on her heavy afghan coat.

  When he didn't respond, her eyes went meaningfully to the corners of his ceiling; the room might be bugged.

  Michael nodded and got his coat. On their way out he whispered, "You movement heavies flatter yourselves."

  It was a brittle day, midmorning, and the only people they passed were walking purposefully, tilted into the cold air.

  Celia didn't speak until they'd cut into the park at Washington Square, which was empty even of winos. The fountain in front of the great arch was full of leaves, and on its plaque someone had sprayed, "Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! NLF Is Going To Win!" The trees scratched at the gray sky.

  "I know that you're the mystery priest, Michael," Celia Zack said finally.

  They kept walking. Michael decided to say nothing.

  "Don't you want to know how I know?"

  "What's the mystery priest, Celia?"

  "Skip it, Michael. Come on. You know what I'm talking about. Newark, Albany, Wilmington, Harrisburg. I suspected you right away. When you weren't around the office I figured there'd be a raid within a few days and there always was."

  "Smart. You should be with the FBI."

  "I have a proposal to make."

  Michael said nothing.

  "Well, do you want to hear it or not?"

  "Look, Celia, if you have something to say to me, say it." There was something about this woman Michael didn't like. Was it an assumption of superiority? Secular condescension?

  "Okay. Let me lay it out for you. I have a friend who works as an office manager at the Selective Service Building on Canal Street. That's the central records depot for the local offices all over the city. It's the largest in the country. It's where the One-A forms are transposed onto IBM, the last step before induction notices are sent out. My friend has helped us a few times by lifting files of particular draft-eligibles and destroying them. It's the best way to beat the system. Without duplicates, it takes them a year to track a kid down again, and then the delay gives him the perfect basis for a complaint in court."

  "Why does your friend do that for you?"

  "I've been cultivating him for a couple of years."

  "What's his name?"

  She hesitated, but only for a moment. "Malcolm Dodd. I always thought of him as my trump card, but now he tells me they're going to start microfilming files next week."

  "Good things don't last forever."

  "And then when I put two and two together about you I realized I'd been thinking much too small. Why not take out all the One-A files for the whole city? We could bring the whole system here to a halt. They'd have to start from scratch."

  It was a stunning thought. Michael answered carefully, "How would that work exactly?"

  "My friend hands over plans and keys to the offices, codes for the alarm systems, keys and combinations to the cabinets, and the patrol schedule of the night guards. To do the job right would take a lot of people. There are a lot of files."

  "And that's why you're talking to me? Because I'm the 'mystery priest'?"

  "'The Catholic Conspiracy to Save Lives,' right?"

  "But there are dozens of people in RESIST who'd do it. Why don't you organize them? Imitati
on, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery."

  "I would, but there isn't time. The microfilming will be done in a couple of weeks. An action like this takes discipline obviously, and a group that's been weeded out and tested. A group like yours."

  "What do you mean 'cultivating'?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "You've been 'cultivating' this office manager. How so?"

  She shrugged. "I let him fuck me."

  Michael looked across the park. No birds, no hippies, no derelicts. "So now we fuck him," he said.

  "They probably can't finger him. There are three hundred clerks in that office, and maybe thirty of them could get the keys and plans."

  "Filching a file now and then is small potatoes compared to this. Are you sure he'll do it?"

  "He loves me."

  Michael nodded. "It can make a man pathetic, can't it?"

  She looked up sharply. "Yes." She conveyed for an instant only, but effectively, her hatred. And Michael realized what he didn't like about her. He stifled it and said, "I'll have to talk to my people. We'd move on it this weekend."

  "How many?"

  "Could it handle twenty-five?"

  She smiled. Could it ever.

  Saturday night, Sunday morning. Two o'clock, then three. Canal Street, a canyon of offices and warehouses and loft-factories, was deserted. A careful observer who knew what to look for could see the figures in the shadows. Michael watched the windows of the old stone building from across the street. In cars and vans up the block and down, people sprawled on seats and floors to be invisible. From a casket warehouse behind him people watched. He could feel their eyes.

  He watched. He was waiting for the flashlight beam of the GSA guard to pass by the windows of the stairwell between the third floor and the fourth. It had passed already seven times at intervals of roughly twenty minutes, intervals prescribed in the schedule of rounds he'd memorized. Now when it passed, it was go.

  There it was.

  He turned his jacket collar up against the cold and stepped into the street. Then he was across and at the door. The key worked. Inside he applied another key to a metal panel and opened it. A maze of wires and toggles, it took a moment to make sense of it. He threw the numbered switches in sequence, then closed the panel. The alarm for floors one through five was deactivated.

  Through three sets of locked doors, each key worked. He took the stairs two at a time. On the fifth-floor landing he opened another panel and threw a second set of switches. Now the alarm was off everywhere. He looked at his watch. Four minutes. The guard was in the basement.

  On the seventh floor, he entered the main file room. He waited for a moment to let his eyes adjust to that less severe darkness. He had to work without a flashlight there because of the large uncurtained windows, but they admitted sufficient light from the street. Finally he saw the bank of cabinets that he wanted and approached it. He had the small key ready. It took him a second to find the hole, but then he inserted the key. It made a noise. And then he was ripping sheets of paper furiously. The noise of his destruction resounded through the room.

  "Freeze!" a man cried.

  Lights blinked on.

  In quick succession, two burly men hit him, one with his fist just at the kidneys, and another with a vicious chop between his shoulder and his neck. It dropped Michael to his knees, but immediately he was hauled up. His hands were cuffed behind him. And an agent hooked him under the chin and lifted him with the muzzle of a shotgun.

  "Where the fuck are the others?" the agent demanded.

  Michael said nothing.

  Agents crashed into the room behind them. A dozen others already present were poised with their weapons behind desks and cabinets, ready to shoot. There were shotguns everywhere.

  "Where the fuck are the others?" A note of hysteria in the man's voice surprised Michael. He himself felt remarkably calm. Everything was going as he expected, although the weapons surprised him. The shotguns. Was he Dillinger? Didn't they know they didn't need weapons?

  The agent pressed the gun barrel into Michael's gullet, against his Roman collar. Michael said, "I'm alone."

  The agent eased the pressure with the gun. "What?"

  "I'm alone," Michael repeated.

  A supervisor, one of those who'd been waiting in the casket warehouse, came in. Altogether he had forty-two men in the operation that night, and he didn't like what he saw. He'd pulled people off six squads for this raid, the biggest in New York since the Joe Columbo takedown, and he was going to have to show for it. "Where the fuck are the others?" he bellowed. It was the exact phrase Hoover would use—though without "fuck"—in the morning. "There were going to be twenty-five. Where the fuck are they?" He glared at the agents.

  One said, "He was the only one who came in from the street." Another said, "No one came up the back stairs or the freight elevator. No one came in from the alley." The other agents began to holster their guns and to check their watches.

  "He says he's alone," one offered.

  The supervisor let his eyes fall to the papers that Michael had ripped and strewn. He saw at once that the pages were blank.

  The agents had been cued to wait until the perpetrators had actually destroyed documents before arresting them. The charge would be destruction of government property. But what if the fucker had brought his own paper in? What in hell was going on here? If he hadn't actually destroyed draft files, the charge wouldn't even be B&E since he'd come in with keys. All this trouble for illegal entry? Since the federal government did not own the land on which the building sat, it wouldn't even be crime on a government reservation. It would be a local charge, tried in local courts, a step above trespassing! All this trouble for one fucking son of a bitch? For a month's probation? Heads would roll! His head would roll! If the newspapers got it, he'd be sent to Dubuque.

  The supervisor yelled, "Out! Everyone out! Check the building again! Every corridor, closet and toilet! Find them if they're here! Goddamnit, find them!"

  When the other agents had left, he said to the two who had Michael, "Uncuff him." They did so. "Wait outside." They left too.

  Then Michael was alone with the supervisor in the brightly lit cavernous room. They stared at each other for a long time, then the FBI man bent and picked up one of the torn blank pages. At the top were printed the words "The Catholic Relief Service, 350 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y." The agent smiled. "Very clever, Father."

  "I'm glad you appreciate it."

  "I'm the only one who will." The agent gathered the papers, a third of a ream perhaps, and carefully stuffed them inside his coat. Then he fastidiously pulled on his leather gloves. He opened several file cabinet drawers, then withdrew a file folder from one of them. It was about two inches thick. He offered it to Michael. "I think you'll find this material more interesting, Father."

  Michael did not answer him, nor did he take it.

  The supervisor nodded. "That would have been too easy, wouldn't it? I understand your purposes, Father. Frankly, you're a little naive if you think anyone's going to believe your version of events here. Now I'll have to ask you to understand my purposes."

  Suddenly his right fist shot into Michael's abdomen. Michael doubled over, clutching himself. Before he could stop him, the agent had opened Michael's hands and forced the folder between them. Pages fell to the floor. The FBI man brought both his fists down on Michael's neck. As Michael went down, he kicked him in the groin. Michael fell, hands open, on the scattered Selective Service forms. Fingerprints. Not many, but enough.

  The supervisor picked up a sheaf of papers and carefully ripped them in two. His hands were perfectly steady. No hysteria or threat of it in this man. He dropped the pages, then retrieved another sheaf and ripped those. He let them fall like leaves. He knocked Michael aside, then picked up the pages on which his hands had rested. He ripped those and let them fall. Destruction of government property. Not much, but enough.

  When Michael, gasping and still clutching himself, look
ed up, the FBI man said calmly, "Sorry, Father. It's all in the job."

  The next morning the New York Times had the story on the front page of its late edition. "Priest Arrested by FBI in Draft Office," the headline read. And the subhead: "Priest Charges Entrapment."

  The second paragraph of the story read, "A package delivered to the New York Times early this morning contained a letter describing the one-man draftboard raid and the reasons for it. The letter was signed, 'Father Michael Maguire,' although its source has not been verified. The package also contained a set of wax impressions of keys purported to fit doors and cabinets in the Canal Street Selective Service Building and which the letter claims were supplied to Father Maguire by an FBI agent provocateur. The package also contained a tape recording of a conversation between a woman identified as Celia Zack, an antiwar activist, and a man identified as Father Maguire. In the conversation, which was apparently recorded without the woman's knowledge, she does raise the subject of the raid on the draftboard that took place last night. She can be heard describing keys and building diagrams that she says were supplied by a Selective Service employee named Malcolm Dodd and that were apparently being handed over to Father Maguire. The woman also details the patrol schedule of the building guards. If the tape is authentic and if Miss Zack does in fact work for the FBI as the letter asserts, then there may be some basis for Father Maguire's claim. According to New York Times's legal sources entrapment occurs when a criminal act takes place that could not otherwise have taken place without the material assistance of government agents. New York Times's sources maintain that it is illegal for law enforcement officers to actively further the commission of a crime even for the purpose of gaining evidence against a suspect. The FBI had refused comment on Father Maguire's charges as of this writing, although the New York Times was able to learn that no one named Malcolm Dodd is employed at the Selective Service office on Canal Street. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney denied that Miss Zack works for the government and that there was entrapment in this case. The spokesman said, 'The accused can make his case, whatever it is, to the judge and jury.'"