by Bryce Zabel
Less than two days after the food bank response, a film canister was deposited at the front desk of KMPC, again for disc jockey Morgan. He immediately called the FBI. Soon, the entire world was watching John Lennon read a prepared statement.
[John] “The Weather Underground rejects as insufficient the response made by Apple. We condemn this capitalistic cop-out made to protect their almighty dollars. The people are going to rise up, and this is the beginning. Start the food banks now.”
In the statement, Lennon had used the word “we” when referring to the Weather Underground. It became an immediate guessing game. Had John Lennon joined the group that took him? Or, as the FBI suspected, had he been with them all along? Lennon had white gauze wrapped around the little finger of his left hand. It looked like he had been hurt. Was the Weather Underground using physical force to pressure Lennon into speaking on their behalf?
Richard Starkey called in from Los Angeles with a suggestion. Apple, he thought, should ignore the specifics but donate to an existing food bank, though not at the level that the Weather Underground demanded. Everyone agreed that it would change the course of the conversation, and they made an immediate donation of $250,000 to the Chicago Food Cooperative and stated that they would match the donation when John Lennon was released safely.
Then came a wild card that neither Bernardine Dohrn nor William Ayers had expected. Because their kidnapping of the Beatle had generated such intense public interest, the East Coast chapters of the Weather Underground decided they had to act fast to make it seem to Americans that the end of the old order really was near.
The eastern Weather Underground bombed the U.S. State Department. No one was killed, but two security guards were seriously injured, and a great deal of damage was done, impacting over a dozen offices on three separate floors.
Then, once again, a film of John Lennon surfaced. He read another statement, this time supporting the bombing as a protest against Richard Nixon and the still raging Vietnam War.
[John] “The U.S. State Department has been bombed because the government continues to wage war against Vietnam and Cambodia. The government that divides us against each other through racism also tries to divide us from the people in the world who are liberating themselves. We cannot allow the government to turn to war again, in Indochina or the Mideast, to paper over the crisis of Imperialism…”
Lennon’s statement went on for over ten minutes. It was apparent to anyone who’d listened to his past interviews and news conferences, or had heard him speak at all, that these were not words he’d chosen of his own volition. When the film was studied by the Apple team, the consensus was that the Weather Underground had written the statement and compelled Lennon to read it. It was also duly noted that the little finger on his other hand was now bandaged.
With Richard Nixon on his way to a showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court over the Watergate tapes, the Administration decided to double down on Lennon, hoping that his case would provide distraction to the masses.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation placed John Lennon on its “Ten Most Wanted” list. In the last gasps of the Nixon Administration, the FBI suggested, again, that Lennon was not kidnapped but rather had staged his own disappearance to commit himself to revolution. This, despite all journalistic analysis that Lennon was reading someone else’s words and looked as if he had been compelled to do so by physical torture of some kind.
Nixon himself appeared in the White House Briefing Room to make the case to reporters.
[President Richard Nixon] “Today I have advised FBI Director Kelley to take the possibility of the involvement of John Lennon with the Weather Underground very seriously. Rather than being aggressive in dealing with radicals, America has become increasingly distracted by partisan politics, and this must end. Right-thinking Americans know that it is more necessary to clamp down on domestic terrorism than it is to continue this endless debate about a small-time burglary.”
Trying to use John Lennon as a distraction to his own problems was a daring gambit, fraught with danger, but Nixon, by this time, had very little to lose.
Worse than being targeted by a U.S. president thrashing about in survival mode was the reality that days continued to slip by with no breaks in the case. New strategy or tactics needed to be tried.
While newspapers continued their shrill coverage, Harrison approached Ono and McCartney a second time. Jobs had another idea, he said, a good one, but it could only be implemented if Yoko agreed. It was “a bit sensitive.”
“Steve wants to try something. He wants to call Linda Ronstadt and Elton John. They’re both in the middle of national tours,” George explained. “He wants to ask both of them to give out our number each night at their concerts. They can talk about how important it is to find John and ask the audience to help.”
There it was. Was Yoko willing to reach out to the woman who had, however briefly, been the object of John’s infatuation? To her unending credit, she was.
“They both have different audiences,” she said. “We need to get the word out fast. She can help.”
And that was that. Effective immediately, two major rock acts playing to sold-out crowds were talking about the Lennon kidnapping. Ronstadt, who, like Ono, blamed herself for throwing Lennon out of her life, took a moment in each concert to asked the audience to pray for John’s safety and to call in any information they had to the Apple “Save John” hotline.
The emerging database quickly spread across each and every wall in the suite. A pattern began to appear.
• • •
John Lennon had not had it easy. He refused to read both of the written statements given to him by Dohrn. In each case, a man who referred to himself as “The Hammer” paid him a visit. Lennon had never met this man, and his real identity was never revealed to him. Using a small ballpeen hammer, the man had first broken Lennon’s left little finger, and then his right, with one smartly executed smash to each knuckle.
Lennon continued to be moved among various underground safe houses throughout the West Coast, subjected to classic sleep deprivation and nonstop indoctrination. Both Dohrn and Ayers spent time with him, preaching the ideology of the Weatherman movement. They allowed Lennon to speak after three weeks of silence but only about their revolutionary issues. He acted like a good student.
At one point, he spent two weeks locked in a small toolshed in the Cascades while Dohrn and Ayers were preparing for an East Coast and West Coast summit of the Weather Underground. The man who watched over him never gave his name, either, but did want to know stories about the Beatles. It turned out that he had seen the Beatles in St. Louis when he was just fourteen years old.
Lennon obliged with insider tales. It felt good to talk, to be sure, and there was the sheer relief of being allowed to remember that he had another life waiting for him, if only he could escape to claim it. More than any of that, however, was the fact that he knew in his bones that if he could win the man over, he could escape.
When it was time to move him again, Dohrn and Ayers were practically giddy. They reported the news that Articles of Impeachment had been brought against Richard Nixon by the House Judiciary Committee. The president’s attempt to use the INS to deport Lennon and the FBI to stop the Beatles from playing a protest concert outside the Republican National Convention had actually been incorporated into the case made by the House Judiciary Committee.
To their way of thinking, on the one side, there was Nixon and his corrupt establishment. On the other was Nixon’s victim, John Lennon, a man who was now seen as a committed member of the Weather Underground. In their minds, the revolution was near, and from what they saw each night on TV, this one would indeed be televised.
These powerful news narratives played out in the summer of 1974. Nixon and Lennon had a quantum entanglement with each other, making for some strange bedfellows. Comedian George Carlin tried to dissect the situation in his stand-up act.
[George Carlin] “The people who think
Nixon fucked over all of us think that Lennon is getting fucked, only not by Nixon but by the people who most want to fuck over Nixon. Then the people who think Nixon is getting fucked over by, oh, I don’t know, everybody else, they tend to think that Lennon is one of the guys trying to fuck him over, him being Nixon. But Lennon can’t fuck over the Big Guy in Washington because he’s tied up in some dark closet being fucked over by the guys who have been trying to fuck over Nixon since they were in college. All I know is I’m missing John Lennon way more than I’m going to miss Nixon.”
As far as the strangeness of bedfellows went, there was also a summit meeting between the Weather Underground and the leaders of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA offered to “protect” John Lennon, but Ayers rejected their plan, believing that they simply wanted to take Lennon from them and make him their own hostage. In spring, the SLA had tried to kidnap newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, but their attempt was foiled—after the Lennon kidnapping, her parents posted round-the-clock security guards at her home in Berkeley.
The offer from the SLA, while rejected, addressed an element of true need. The Weather Underground had kept Lennon hidden through extraordinary measures and some luck. The measures could not continue forever, and luck, as it so often happened, could run out at any moment.
In the beginning, the FBI had the edge over the Apple effort. By mid-summer, however, Steve Jobs’s social network program was starting to bear fruit. He attributed this to refining what he called his “search criteria.” Jobs and his team of young acolytes believed that all data was powerful and that seemingly unrelated data could yield relationships and information that would break the case.
“We get lots of very specific leads, but they could be polluted by disinformation from the FBI and fans who want to feel important,” he said. “We’re now assigning values of one to ten for every person who calls, ten being the most reliable. Now we only follow good sources to see where they take us even if they have less specificity than others who are not reliable.”
Leads were coming to the Apple command center at the Plaza Hotel. Good leads. They would be looked over by Jobs and the others, and the most promising ones were passed to the Allen Klein-directed paramilitary unit for investigation and, when the time came, action.
At a small gathering north of San Francisco, in Santa Rosa, Dohrn and Ayers spoke to the loyal few. “If we want to keep him, we have to stop moving him,” Dohrn said. “We need to find the right location, one that can be both hidden and protected, and we need to go there now.”
The right location turned out to be a “safe house” in the Queen Anne district of Seattle, a neighborhood built on the town’s highest hill. The Weathermen referred to the house as “The Castle.” In reality, it was a Victorian home that Weatherman David Bronk had inherited from his parents after they were killed in a 1967 car crash. “We can see in all directions from here,” said Ayers. “If they come at us, they’ll be sorry they did.”
By the time he was moved to Seattle, Lennon had been accepted by his captors, who believed he had been successfully converted to their revolutionary ideology. They couldn’t be blamed for thinking so. Lennon knew that his privileges were tied to his acceptance within the group, and he knew that he could only escape after he had gained that status. He asked questions, talked like a wild revolutionary, and acted like he had learned his lesson. Now, although he was still always under guard, he was allowed to sleep on a couch and take meals with the others.
On a weekly basis, they would write a new diatribe for Lennon to read on camera. With his long hair and beard, the wild rhetoric seemed close to the old days of Bed-Ins and Peace concerts.
[Yoko] “I would come into the office area, late at night, many nights, and watch the films of John. I could tell that he was just acting, saying whatever they want him to say, but still I took comfort to see him. It meant he was alive, and it was just a matter of time until we would find him.”
On August 7, Philippe Petit crossed between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in the most daring act of high-wire walking the world has seen. While Yoko and Paul were as transfixed by the local TV coverage as anyone, Jobs was staring at his boards full of lists and connections. He interrupted them, barely noticing what was on the television.
“He’s in Seattle. Somewhere on a hill.”
Interest in Petit’s crossing was abandoned immediately.
As it turned out, the fourteen-year-old Beatles fan who grew to become a member of the Weather Underground and was put in charge of watching Lennon on a few occasions had a name: Philip Michaels. Michaels simply could not keep the secret about having a personal relationship (although guard to prisoner) with a Beatle. He told a girl he was trying to impress but swore her to secrecy. She told a friend and asked for the same vow. That friend called the Apple hotline.
McNary, the leader of the Core, had his team on a plane to Washington State within two hours. For the next forty-eight hours, the Apple team quietly scouted Seattle, careful not to draw attention to themselves. There was a brief discussion about bringing in the FBI now, given that they had the upper hand. The idea was rejected. If John was going to be rescued, it was going to be by people who wanted him to come home alive.
At the same time, the nation was watching the final collapse of the Nixon Administration. On August 8, Nixon announced he would resign the next day. The media focus proved to be excellent for the Apple effort, diverting everyone’s attention, including the Weathermen who were holding John.
What happened on August 9 was the greatest juxtaposition of news stories in modern history, even eclipsing the 1981 Ronald Reagan inauguration during which the Iranian hostages were released at the exact instant that Reagan took the oath of office.
Similarly, at the same time the Nixon staff packed the president’s bags, a confrontation in Seattle became inevitable. The Core had located the house on the hill and had it in stakeout mode. Somehow, the FBI had gotten wind of the operation. To this day, it is believed that someone in the Apple offices had given them the information, but no one has ever been named. In any case, when federal agents showed up that night, they told McNary and his men to stand down, an order they ignored.
Soon the Seattle Police Department was on the scene. They placed the house under a three-block quarantine. Even as people were being evacuated, it was obvious to law enforcement and civilians alike that immediate action was needed in the house itself. The FBI, the SPD, and the Core sorted out their jurisdiction under extremely heated conditions. It had to go quickly. With three square blocks in lockdown, people would talk, and the people in the zone would see what was happening on the TV news.
As this was going on, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, and Allen Klein were on a plane about to land in Seattle.
In the stress of the moment, the groups struck a highly unusual truce. McNary told the FBI that there was no way he would let them go it alone. The FBI told McNary there was no way they would turn over public safety to a group of vigilantes.
The compromise involved letting the Seattle police enforce the quarantine zone while the FBI maintained tactical control around the house. The FBI and the Core would each send a team of two to the house itself. The Core’s team would use its two members who were retired FBI and thus familiar with strategy and tactics. Each team would need approval from the other.
While the terms were being hashed out, a couple emerged from the home in running gear and began to stretch. As they proceeded to go for a jog, an FBI car cruised behind. The moment the couple rounded the corner, they were confronted by four FBI agents leaping directly from a parked sedan. “We’re the FBI!” shouted one of them.
Without a word, William Ayers raised his hands. Bernardine Dohrn, however, turned and ran, only to be confronted by two FBI agents, one with a shotgun pointed at her chest. “Fucking pigs,” she said as she surrendered.
At this point, a decision was made to move on the house immediately, and the FBI team and the Core team (led
by McNary) assumed their positions. The FBI took the second floor, and the Core took the ground floor.
Using hand signals, McNary and his backup, Alberto Sanchez, entered the house from the back door. In the kitchen, they came face-to-face with the house’s owner, Weatherman David Bronk.
“Freeze!” ordered McNary. Bronk stopped in his tracks and was taken into custody by Sanchez.
McNary looked past Bronk and saw the back of the head of a man who was watching television coverage of Nixon’s final day in office. He remembers the image on the screen being the now-famous one of ex-president Nixon waving from the steps of the Marine One helicopter.
“Freeze or I’ll blow your fucking head off!” screamed McNary at the man on the couch. With his gun drawn, he moved around to confront him. He saw John Lennon, one hand handcuffed to a heavily weighted barbell, looking back at him. McNary, not knowing what shape Lennon was in, did not lower his weapon.
“You’re safe now, John. I’m getting you out of here.”
Lennon pushed up the black plastic-framed glasses they had given him to replace his broken wire-rimmed ones months ago.
“What took you so long?”
• • •
“Where were you on August ninth?” is still a valid question for most Americans who were alive at the time. They remember the smallest details of what they were doing when they heard the news that Richard Nixon was gone and John Lennon had been found.
Lennon was reportedly confused as he was taken from the house by McNary and Sanchez. He was not sure if he was being kidnapped again, given that the two men escorting him out wore no badges. Soon McNary and the FBI were arguing about what to do with him. The FBI was taking him into their custody for questioning, they said, come hell or high water.
Fortunately, the media had arrived by this time as well, along with Paul, Yoko, Klein, and a group of legal talent that would accompany Lennon to the Seattle FBI office.
