The COINTELPRO PapersDuring the 36 months roughly beginning with the end of Wounded Knee and continuing through the first of May 1976, more than sixty AIM members and supporters died violently on or in locations immediately adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation. A minimum of 342 others suffered violent physical assaults. 78 As Roberto Maestas and Bruce Johansen have observed:
Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars
Against Dissent in the United States
by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall
South End Press ISBN 0-89608-359-4Chapter 7
COINTELPRO - American Indian Movement (AIM)
Continued
Of these 60-plus murders occurring in an area in which the FBI held "preeminent jurisdiction," not one was solved by the Bureau. In most instances, no active investigation was ever opened. The same is true for the nearly 350 physical assaults, despite eye-witness identification the killers and assailants who in each instance were known members of the Wilson GOON Squad. When confronted with the magnitude of his office's failure to come to grips with the systematic slaughter which was going on within its area of operations, Rapid City ASAC George O'Clock pleaded 'lack of manpower" as a cause. 80 Yet O'Clock's office, which was customarily staffed with three agents before Wounded Knee, grew by nearly 300% - to eleven agents - during the first six months of 1973. 81 In March of that year, this force was doubled, augmented by a ten-member FBI SWAT unit to the tiny village of Pine Ridge, on the reservation itself. 82 This aggregate force of 21 was maintained for more than two years, until it was tripled during June and July of 1975, affording the Rapid City office with the heaviest sustained concentration of agents to citizens in the history of the Bureau. 83Using only these documented political deaths, the yearly murder rate on Pine Ridge Reservation between March 1, 1973, and Mardi 1, 1976, was 170 per 100,000. By comparison, Detroit, the reputed "murder capital of the United States," had a rate of 20.2 in 1974. The U.S. average was 9.7 per 100,000, with the range for large cities as follows: Detroit, 20.2; Chicago, 15.9; New York City, 163; Washington, D.C, 13.4; Los Angeles, 12.9; Seattle, 5.6; and Boston, 5.6. An estimated 20,000 persons were murdered in the United States in 1974. In a nation of 200 million persons, a murder rate comparable to that of Pine Ridge between 1973 and 1976 would have left 340,000 persons dead for political reasons in one year; 1.32 million in three. A similar rate for a city of 500,000 would have produced 850 political murders in a year, 2,550 in three. For a metropolis of 5 million the figures would have been 8,500 in one year and 25,500 in three ... The political murder rate at Pine Ridge between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was almost equivalent to that in Chile during the three years after the military coup supported by the United States deposed and killed President Salvador Allende ... Based on Chiles population of 10 million, the estimated fifty thousand persons killed in three years of political repression in Chile at the same time (1973/1976) roughly paralleled the murder rate at Pine Ridge. 79While claiming to lack the resources to investigate the literal death squad activity occurring beneath his nose, O'Clock managed to find the wherewithal to compile more than 316,000 separate investigative file classifications on AIM members with regard to the siege of Wounded Knee alone. 84 His agents also found the time and energy to arrest 562 AIM members and supporters for participation in the siege, while another 600 individuals across the nation were charged for supporting the defenders. 85 These 562 arrests resulted in the indictments of 185 persons, many on multiple charges (none involving a capital crime). In the two years of trials which followed, there were a total of fifteen convictions - mostly on minor charges - an extraordinarily low rate for federal prosecutions. 86 As Colonel Volney Warner later put it, "AlM's most militant leaders are under indictment, in jail or warrants are out for their arrest ... the government can win, even if no one goes to jail." 87
1975 expanded version of COINTELPRO specialist Richard G. Held's 1973 field notes taken at Wounded Knee insisting that thenceforth the FBI would assume immediate and absolute control over "paramilitary operations in Indian Country." Note strenuous objection raised concerning official "shoot to wound" orders.
Although the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee (WKLDOC) - a largely non-Indian coalition of attorneys established by National Lawyers Guild activist Ken Tilsen to represent AIM in criminal proceedings undertaken against its members and leadership - formally challenged U.S. jurisdiction over the Pine Ridge Reservation, the government forged ahead with the prosecution of those it considered "key AIM leaders." 88 Indicative of the quality of justice involved in these "Wounded Knee Leadership Trials" was that of Russell Means and Dennis Banks before District Judge Fred Nichol during 1974. Based on an FBI "investigation," the defendants were charged with 13 offenses each, including burglary, arson, possession of illegal weapons, theft, interfering with federal officers and criminal conspiracy; cumulatively, each faced more than 150 years in prison as a result. 89The crux of the case was the "eyewitness" testimony of a young Oglala named Louis Moves Camp-whom Banks had earlier expelled from AIM due to his persistent misconduct - concerning the AIM leaders' actions inside Wounded Knee. The case collapsed when the defense established that Moves Camp was testifying about events allegedly occurring in South Dakota at a time when he had been on the west coast. 90
But that was hardly all that was wrong with the federal case. Moves Camp had been recruited as a witness by David Price and Ronald Williams, two agents recently assigned to the Rapid City FBI office. 91 His participation as a prosecution witness was apparently obtained in exchange for a "deal" concerning charges of robbery, assault with a deadly weapon (two counts) and assault causing bodily harm (two counts) - adding up to a possible 20-year sentence-facing him in South Dakota. 92 He was also paid by the Bureau for his services. 93 Further, while staying at a resort in Wisconsin with SAs Price and Williams, awaiting his turn to testify against Means and Banks, Moves Camp appears to have raped a teenaged girl in nearby River Falls; after meeting for several hours with local police, Agent Price was able to fix this charge as well. 94 Minneapolis SAC Joseph Trimbach refused to allow prosecutor R.D. Hurd to administer a polygraph examination to Moves Camp prior to putting him on the stand; 95 Hurd lied to the court, asserting that the River Falls situation was "only a minor matter," such as "public intoxication." 96 Then it came out that the FBI and prosecution had-despite the filing of proper discovery motions by the defense deliberately suppressed at least 131 pieces of exculpatory evidence which might have served to exonerate the defendants. 97 With this magnitude of government misconduct on the record, Judge Nichol responded by dismissing an charges against Means and Banks. In his decision, the judge observed that it was difficult for him to accept that "the FBI [he had] revered so long, [had] stooped so low," and:
Although it hurts me deeply, I am forced to the conclusion that the prosecution in this trial had something other than attaining justice foremost in its mind ... The fact that the incidents of misconduct formed a pattern throughout the course of the trial leads me to the belief that this case was not prosecuted in good faith or in the spirit of justice. The waters of justice have been polluted, and dismissal I believe, is the appropriate cure for the pollution in this case. 98
The dismissal of charges occurred before it became known that, contrary to Hurd's and Trimbach's sworn testimony, the FBI had infiltrated Banks' and Means' defense team. 99 The operative used for this purpose was Douglass Durham, then AIM's national security director and Dennis Banks' personal bodyguard. In this capacity, Durham attended all the defense team's meetings (enabling him to report their strategy to the FBI, thence to prosecutors), and exerted near-total control over the defendants' office ("Nobody saw Banks or Means without going through me. Period."). 100
[Ed.Note: a common tactic to isolate and control information and funds]
He also maintained free access to defense funds, from which he is suspected of having embezzled more than $100,000 during the course of the trial. 101 Far from the Bureau's having been unaware of the "problem," FBI records reveal that Durham met with his handlers, SAs Ray Williams and Robert Taubert, "regularly" and was given a raise because of the quality of his services during the trial. 102
Such behavior on the part of the prosecution and the FBI might be considered anomalous were it true that Hurd was brought up on ethics charges before the American Bar Association (as Judge Nichol clearly desired), Louis Moves Camp charged with perjury, Trimbach removed from his position as SAC and the involved agents at least reprimanded, and Durham's undercover operation suspended. It was Nichol, however, who was removed from trying any further AIM-related cases. 103 Nothing at all was done to Moves Camp. 104 Far from being disbarred, R.D. Hurd was promoted and received an award for his performance, and was assigned a lead role in seeking convictions against other AIM leaders, such as Stan Holder, Carter Camp and Leonard Crow Dog. 105Trimbach and his agents continued in their positions with no official censure, while spearheading the Bureau's anti-AIM campaign on Pine Ridge. 106 For his part, Douglass Durham remained in his capacity as a provocateur within AIM until the organization itself discovered his true identity. 107 Before this occurred, he played a leading role in the perversion of justice attending the notorious Skyhorse/Mohawk case in southern California. 108 After his exposure, he is thought to have been involved in the violent elimination of at least one of the witnesses to his grossly illegal "investigative techhiques," 109 and - still on the FBI payroll - served as the sole witness before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, "establishing" that AIM was a "violent revolutionary organization." 110
These results are consistent with a Bureau thrust, revealed in the accompanying May 4,1973 teletype from the Los Angeles field office to Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, even before the Wounded Knee siege had ended, in which agents were busily concocting all manner of allegations concerning AIM's acquisition of "automatic weapons, bazookas, rocket launchers, hand grenades, land mines, and mortars" (none of which ever materialized). As the document makes clear, the compilation of such "information" was intended as a means of securing Gray's authorization to undertake to divide AIM from major funders such as Sammy Davis, Jr. It is instructive that in the same document there is an attempt to link AIM directly to the LA chapter of the Black Panther Party, against which similar methods and rationales had long been utilized as part of COINTELPRO-BPP (see Chapter 5). Such techniques couple nicely to the accompanying May 4,1973 Airtel from Gray to his SAC, Albany, which recommends employment of typical counterintelligence measures against AIM and inclusion of AIM leaders in the Bureau's Administrative Index as "Key Extremists."
Far more explicit was a November 26,1973 teletype from SA Richard Wallace Held's counterintelligence group in Los Angeles - which had handled the lethal repression visited upon the LA-BPP - to Gray, suggesting that "Los Angeles and Minneapolis consider possible COINTELPRO measures to further disrupt AIM leadership." 111 This leaves little doubt that counterintelligence specialists such as the younger Held continued to view their job assignments vis 4 vis AIM in precisely the same terms as they had with regard to organizations such as the BPP two years earlier, even if headquarters had in the meantime forbidden use of the customary vernacular. In a superficial exercise in "plausible deniability" the acting director replied in a December 4 teletype:Excerpts from May 1973 teletype itemizing never-substantiated arms acquisitions by AIM and detailing COINTELPRO type operation to deny the organization funding from Sammy Davis, Jr.
What seems to have been at issue was Held's telltale use of terminology rather than the sort of tactics he was recommending. Indeed, as Bureau conduct in its use of Douglass Durham and the nature of its other involvement in the Banks/Means trial readily indicate, there is every indication that the FBI had already adopted the methods Held advocated for use against AIM.Los Angeles suggested that there appears to be a split between Means and Banks based on [deleted's] dismissal from AIM and suggested possible counterintelligence measures be taken to further disrupt AIM leadership ... Your attention is directed to Bureau airtel to All Offices, dated 4/28/71, captioned "Counterintelligence Programs; IS - RM," setting forth that effective immediately all counterintelligence programs operated by the Bureau were being discontinued." 112As was noted above, a far more striking example of this than the utilization of agents provocateurs, disinformation and legal fabrications to neutralize AIM was the Bureau's reliance upon Wilson's GOON Squad to decimate the ranks of organizational members and supporters on Pine Ridge. Deployed in much the same fashion as appears to have been intended for the SAO by Held's LA COINTELPRO Section during 1971 and '72 (see Chapter 6), the GOONs functioned essentially as a reservation death squad. Among their first victims was Pedro Bissonette, the young head of the grassroots OgIala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO), who had emerged as an ION leader at Wounded Knee. In the aftermath of the siege, the FBI had offered Bissonette a "deal" wherein all charges would be dropped against him in exchange for his testifying against the AIM leadership. 113
He refused, and countered that it was his intention to testify instead to the specifics of the graft and corruption permeating the Wilson administration, and the role of the government in perpetuating the situation. Subsequently, he was accosted by a GOON named Cliff Richards in the reservation-adjacent hamlet of White Clay, Nebraska on the afternoon of October 17, 1973. In the ensuing scuffle, Bissonette knocked his attacker to the ground, then got in his car and drove away. 114
Although White Clay is outside BIA police jurisdiction, Pine Ridge police/ GOON head Delmar Eastman immediately mobilized his entire force - assisted by several FBI spotter planes - in a reservation-wide manhunt for the "fugitive." 115 At some point between 9 and 9:50 p.m. the same evening, Bissonette was stopped at a roadblock near Pine Ridge village and shot in the chest by a BIA police officer (and known GOON) named Joe Clifford. In Clifford's official report, he had been forced to shoot the victim, who had resisted arrest, jumping from his car brandishing a weapon. He recorded that he'd used a 12-gauge shotgun and that the shooting occurred at 9:48 p.m. Bissonette was pronounced dead on arrival at the Pine Ridge hospital at 10:10 p.m." 116 No weapon attributable to Pedro Bissonette was ever produced by the police. Several witnesses who drove by the scene, however, later submitted affidavits that a pool of blood indicating that Bissonette had already been shot was evident at shortly after 9 p.m., suggesting that the GOONs had delayed the victim's transport by ambulance to the nearby hospital (and medical attention) for approximately an hour, until he bled to death. 117
May 1973 teletype initiating a nation-wide, "forceful and penetrative interview program," of all individual AIM activists with an eye toward their designation as "Key Extremists." Note similarity to earlier COINTELPRO practice of convincing new left activists there was "an agent behind every mailbox."
Moreover, when WKLDOC attorney Mark Lane viewed the corpse in the hospital morgue at around midnight, he discovered that rather than having suffered a shotgun blast, Bissonette appeared to have been shot seven times with an "approximately .38 calibre handgun" in the chest. The shots, "any one of which might have killed him," were placed in a very tight cluster, Lane insisted, as if they'd been fired at point-blank range." 118 The attorney also recounted that it appeared Bissonette had been beaten prior to being shot. 119 He therefore quickly called Gladys Bissonette*, the dead man's grandmother, and convinced her to demand an independent autopsy be performed. She agreed. Lane then phoned Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Clayton in Rapid City, to notify him of the family's intent to pursue its legal right to commission such an autopsy. Clayton appears to have immediately called Delmar Eastman and instructed him to remove the body from the morgue at 3 a.m. - and have it transported, not only off the reservation, but out of the state, to Scottsbluff, Nebraska. 120 There, W.O. Brown, a government-contracted coroner, dissected the body, turned over whatever slugs he recovered to the FBI and reached a conclusion corroborating Clifford's version of events. There was little left of the corpse for an independent pathologist to examine. 121 Despite the controversy swirling around Bissonette's death, and the existence of witness accounts contradicting the police story, the Bureau pursued no further investigation of the matter. OSCRO collapsed as a viable organization as a direct result of its leader's elimination.
Two years later, with the number of unsolved murders of AIM members and supporters on Pine Ridge having reached epic proportions, 122 and despite Wilson's loss in his third bid for the tribal presidency, the GOONs and their FBI cohorts were still pursuing the same lethal tactics. For instance, in the early evening of January 30, 1976, three cars containing 15 members of the GOON Squad pulled into the tiny hamlet of Wanblee (located in the northeastern sector of the reservation), a strong bastion of anti-Wilsonism. Spotting the car of Byron DeSersa, a young Oglala tribal attorney and AIM supporter who had announced his intention to bring criminal charges against a number of Wilsonites once the regime was disbanded, they gave chase, firing as they went. About four miles out of town, a bullet passed through the driver's-side door of DeSersa's car, catching him in the upper left thigh, nearly amputating his leg. DeSersa pulled over and dragged himself into a ditch, screaming at several friends who had been his passengers to run for their lives. He bled to death alongside the road as the GOONs chased the others through adjoining fields. 123
The GOONs then returned to Wanblee, where they apparently passed a pleasant evening shooting up the homes of those who had opposed Wilson. The following morning, they firebombed several buildings and continued to drive around town taking random potshots. As the Commission on Civil Rights later determined, that afternoon - with the smoke still billowing from the GOONs' incendiary attacks - a pair of FBI agents arrived in Wanblee and were quickly informed by residents as to what had transpired. George Bettelyoun (Oglala), a passenger in DeSersa's car, provided precise identification of the killers, who included Dick Wilson's son Billy and son-in-law, a GOON leader named Chuck Richards. 124 The agents declined to make arrests, stating that they were there in a "purely investigative" capacity. They nonetheless managed to arrest Guy Dull Knife, an elderly Cheyenne who lived in Wanblee; Dull Knife, the agents declared, had disturbed the "peace" by protesting their inaction against the GOONs too loudly. 125 The citizens of Wanblee finally formed a vigilance committee on January 31, giving the marauders until sundown to be gone from their community or suffer the consequences. Delmar Eastman then dispatched a group of BIA police to escort the GOON contingent safely back to Pine Ridge village; again, no arrests were made. The Bureau, as usual, conducted no further investigation into either the DeSersa murder or the firebombings and other aspects of the GOONs' two-day terrorization of the hamlet. 126
Later, while sparring with a congressional committee critical of the Bureau's performance on Pine Ridge during the mid-'70s, FBI Director William Webster was to cast his agents' role there as having been that of "peacekeepers." "Frankly [the Bureau] took ... a little bit of a beating during those days in Wounded Knee period and afterwards," Webster asserted, "[but] our role should be an investigator's role, not a peacekeeper's role." 127 The director's use of the word "peacekeepers" in such a context is illuminating, insofar as this is the standard term in military and police parlance applied to counterinsurgency operatives. 128 The real meaning imbedded in the director's semantics is further revealed in the fact that FBI documents throughout the period in question - such as the accompanying February 6,1976 memorandum from SAC, Portland to Director - openly and consistently refer to dissident Indians as "insurgents." Official protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the FBI not only undertook a full-fledged COINTELPRO against AIM, it escalated its conceptual and tactical approach to include outright counterinsurgency warfare techniques. Only within this framework can the events discussed above be rendered comprehensible.
"RESMURS"By early 1975, it had become clear to the opposition of Pine Ridge that its attempts to achieve resolution of its grievances through due process - whether by impeachment of Dick Wilson, electing another individual into his office, or the filing of formal civil rights complaints - were being systematically aborted by the very government which was supposed to guarantee them. 129 The FBI and BIA police structures were reinforcing rather than interfering with the pervasive GOON violence. Reservation conditions were being officially described by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as a "reign of terror ." 130 The message was unequivocal: the dissidents could either give in and subordinate themselves to Wilson's feudal order, allowing the final erosion of Lakota rights and landbase, or they would have to physically defend themselves and their political activities. Hence Oglala traditionals requested that AIM establish centers for armed self-defense at various points on the reservation.
During the spring of 1975, the Northwest AIM Group - including Leonard Peltier, Frank Black Horse (adopted Oglala), Bob and Jim Robideau (both Anishinabes), and Darelle "Dino" Butler (Tuni) - set up a defensive encampment at the request of elders Harry and Cecilia Jumping Bull. The camp, was situated in a strongly pro-AIM area, on a property known as the Jumping Bull Compound, near the village of OgIala. It was referred to as "Tent City" in FBI communications, and became an immediate preoccupation of the Bureau and its GOON surrogates. 131 As was noted in a June 6,1975 memorandum captioned "Law Enforcement on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation:"
COINTELPRO as counterinsurgency. By 1976 the FBI's misrepresentation of AIM activities was down pat, and its characterization of AIM members as insurgents was standard.
A later memorandum continued, "To successfully overcome automatic or semiautomatic weapons fire from such 'bunkers' it appears as though heavy equipment such as an armored personnel carrier would be required." 133 Whether or not the FBI actually believed this to be true, the fact is that no such bunkers ever existed. The alleged fortifications were later disclosed to have been abandoned root cellars and broken-down corrals. However, by then the Bureau had utilized such flights of fancy (or cynicism) as the rationale by which to justify provocation of a major "incident" and then a massive escalation of force by which it intended to destroy AIM and its Pine Ridge support base once and for all.There are pockets of Indian population which consist almost exclusively of American Indian Movement (AIM) members and their supporters on the Reservation. It is significant that in some of these AIM centers the residents have built bunkers which would literally require military assault forces if it were necessary to overcome resistance emanating from the bunkers. 132
On the afternoon of June 25, 1975, SAs Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, accompanied by BIA police officers (both Oglalas and known GOONs) Robert Ecoffey and Glenn Little Bird, entered the Jumping Bull Compound, ostensibly searching for a 19-year-old Oglala AIM member, Jimmy Eagle, on what they said were charges of "kidnapping, aggravated assault, and aggravated robbery." 134 When they were told Eagle wasn't there and hadn't been seen in weeks, they left, but shortly picked up three Dine (Navajo) teenagers from the AIM camp - Norman Charles, Wilfred 'Wish" Draper and Mike "Baby AIM" Anderson - hitchhiking along Highway 18, which runs between Oglala to Pine Ridge village. Williams and Coler questioned the three, not about Eagle, but about who else was residing in Tent City. The three were then released and returned to camp. 135
Before mid-moming, June 26, local residents knew that something ominous was in the offing. Indians in and around the village of Oglala noted large numbers of paramilitary personnel - GOONs, BIA police, state troopers, U.S. Marshals, and FBI SWAT teams - massing in the area. 136 Around 11:30 a.m. SAs Coler and Williams returned to the Jumping Bull property. They were allegedly sent to serve an arrest warrant on Jimmy Eagle. However, it is clear they'd already ascertained he was not there and, in any event, the warrant for his arrest was not issued till July 7. 137 The agents drove past the buildings of the compound proper and directly toward the AIM camp. They stopped their cars, got out, and began firing their weapons. Members of the camp, believing themselves to be under attack from GOONs, returned fire. 138 This was apparently the cue for the prepositioned reinforcements to arrive; radio transmission logs from SA Williams indicate that he and his partner expected reinforcements to be immediate and massive once the firefight had been initiated.139 Unfortunately for them, three teenagers who had been breakfasting in the compound quickly positioned themselves to cover the route intended by the relief force. 140 Using .22 caliber squirrel rifles, the youngsters shot out the tires of the first two backup cars - driven by SA J. Gary Adams and Fred Two Bulls, a BIA policeman and known GOON. Confronted with these meager potshots, Adams and Two Bulls promptly retreated, abandoning Coler and Williams. 141 Not until 6 p.m., when federal forces had swelled to over 250 men, including a SWAT unit airlifted in from the Bureau's training facility at Quantico, Virginia, and a vigilante force headed by South Dakota Attorney General William Janklow, 142 did the FBI finally mount an assault. 143 By this point, Williams and Coler were long since dead, and the Indians who had been in the AIM camp that morning had - other than a Coeur D'Alene named Joe Stuntz Killsright who had been killed, ostensibly by a long range shot fired by BIA police officer Gerald Hill 144 - made their escape.
Although the deaths of Coler and Williams were probably an unintended consequence, the provocation of the firefight achieved its intended objective: the public justification for a truly massive paramilitary assault on AIM and the Pine Ridge traditionals. As is shown in the accompanying memo from R.E. Gebhardt to J.E. O'Connell, dated June 27,1975, the FBI's top COINTELPRO specialist, Richard G. Held - assigned as the Bureau's Chicago SAC, but already prepositioned in Minneapolis - immediately assumed control over the RESMURS ("Reservation Murders") investigation. Among those accompanying Held to South Dakota was "public information specialist" Tom Coll who immediately undertook a series of sensational press conferences in which he pronounced that the agents had been "lured into an ambush" by AIM and attacked from a "sophisticated bunker complex" where they were wounded and "dragged from their cars" before being "riddled" by "15-20 rounds each" from "automatic weapons." In Coll's accounts, Williams and Coler died while disabled and "begging for their lives." Both agents were "stripped," as part of their "executions," according to Coll. 145 Although literally none of this was true - a matter well known to Bureau investigators at least a day before the first press conference presided over by Tom Coll - such stories produced the lurid headlines necessary to condition public sentiment to accept virtually anything the FBI wished to impose upon AIM. 146 An additional advantage of Coll's media ploy was that it caused a senate select committee planning to investigate those FBI operations already directed against AIM to be indefinitely postponed, "under the circumstances. " 147 It was a week before FBI Director Clarence Kelley quietly "corrected" this welter of disinformation, offered in the finest COINTELPRO style. 148
Another star performer the Chicago SAC brought along was Norman Zigrossi, a young counterintelligence protege whose mission it was to replace ASAC George O'Clock in Rapid City for the duration of the anti-AIM campaign. 149 The elder Held's son, Los Angeles COINTELPRO section head Richard W., was also involved in RESMURS from the outset, as is evidenced in the accompanying June 27,1975 memo from O'Connell to Gebhardt. As is revealed in the accompanying July 26 memo, he had by that date joined his father at Pine Ridge, a locale in which the experience he had acquired while heading the Bureau's counterintelligence campaign against the LA-BPP (see Chapter 5) could be deployed against AIM, and his background overseeing SAO attacks against the left in southern California (see Chapter 6) might be used in connection with the GOONs. Actually, the younger Held probably arrived in South Dakota earlier, as is evidenced by the fact that RESMURS com munications - such as the accompanying June 30, 1975 memo from B.H. Cook to Gebhardt - suddenly adopted the practice of referring to Richard G. Held as "Dick" in order to distinguish him from his namesake.
The sorts of operations this stable of COINTELPRO aces had in mind had become apparent as early as June 27, when a task force of at least 180 SWAT-trained agents, supported by significant numbers of GOONs/BIA police and a scattering of federal marshals, began running military-style sweeps across Pine Ridge. 150 Outfitted in Vietnam-issue jungle fatigues, and equipped with the full panoply of counterinsurgency weaponry - M-16 assault rifles, M-14 sniper rifles, M-79 grenade launchers, plastic explosives, Bell UH-1B "Huey" helicopters, fixed-wing "Bird Dog" spotter planes, jeeps, armored personnel carriers, army-supplied communications gear and tracking dogs - this huge force spent nearly three months breaking into homes and conducting warrantless searches. 151 Their activities included outright air assaults upon the property of AIM member Sylvester "Selo" Black Crow near Wanblee (on July 8), and Crow Dog's Paradise (on September 5 . 152 On July 12, an elderly resident of Oglala, James Brings Yellow, was frightened into a fatal heart attack when a group of agents led by J. Gary Adams suddenly kicked in his door for no apparent reason 153 With that, virtually the entire Oglala community - AIM and non-AIM alike - launched a petition drive demanding the FBI withdraw from Pine Ridge, and even the typically prostrate Sioux tribal councils endorsed the position. 154 The Bureau's July performance on Pine Ridge was such that the chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Arthur J. Flemming, characterized what was happening as "an over-reaction which takes on aspects of a vendetta ... a full scale military type invasion." He went on to say:Memo assigning COINTELPRO specialist Richard G. Held, at the time Chicago SAC, to head up the RESMURS investigation. He had been prepositioned in Minneapolis.
"All in the family." Memo showing participation of COINTELPRO specialist Richard W. Held, son of Richard G. Held, in the RESMURS investigation from its earliest moments.
Memo showing Richard W. Held's presence on Pine Ridge as a supervisor at the peak of the RESMURS-related repression. The younger Held's "caliber in such a capacity was no doubt proven by his earlier leadership of COINTELPRO-BPP in Los Angeles.
[The presence of such a a massive force] has created a deep resentment on the part of many reservation residents who feel that such a procedure would not be tolerated in any non-Indian community in the United States. They point out that little has been done to solve numerous murders on the reservation, but when two white men are killed, "troops" are brought in from all over the country at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. 155
Memo referring to Richard G. Held as "Dick" to distinguish him from his son during their joint participation in RESMURS. Note also the Bureau's belated concern with getting its story straight, "before any statement to the press."
Undeterred, SAC Held not only continued his sweeping operations, by which he sought to finally cow the traditionals, but requested a series of special grand juries be convened in Rapid City. 156 This last was an expedient by which he might exercise broad subpoena powers to compel testimony of Indian against Indian - thus undercutting the cohesion of the Pine Ridge resistance - and/or bring about the indefinite incarceration (for "contempt") of those who were perceived alternatively as "weak links" or as "hard cases" who refused to go on the stand. 157 By mid-July a strategy was emerging to at last divide the local reservation community from "outside agitators" such as the Northwest AIM group. Only in giving up their allies, so the reasoning went, would the Oglalas be able to save their own from what was being inflicted upon them. Cannily, Held seemed to realize that once the AIM/ traditional solidarity which had been so painstakingly solidified over the previous four years was to some extent eroded in this fashion, it would be unlikely that it could ever be completely reconstituted. Hence, although by this point the FBI already had the names of some 20 Oglalas it thought had participated in the firefight which left the agents dead, the RESMURS investigation was geared almost exclusively toward obtaining a basis for prosecuting only non-Oglalas. 158 As is demonstrated in the accompanying July 17,1975 teletype from Held to Director Kelley and "all offices via Washington," a high priority was already being placed on developing "information to lock [Northwest AIM member] Leonard Peltier into this case." The same document, of course, also points out that Held really had no clear idea at all as to "the actual events of the afternoon of June 26,1975." Identification/apprehension of whoever truly shot Coler and Williams was playing a clear second fiddle to satisfaction of the Bureau's political agenda on the reservation.
Correspondingly, on November 25, 1975, federal indictments were returned against four individuals on two counts each of first degree murder and two more of "aiding and abetting" in the murders of SAs Ronald A. Williams and Jack R. Coler. Three of those targeted - Leonard Peltier, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau - were considered by the Bureau to be key leaders of the "outsider" Northwest AIM group. The other, Jimmy Eagle, appears to have been temporarily included merely to justify the presence of the agents on the Jumping Bull property in the first place. Eagle had turned himself in to the U.S. Marshals Service in Rapid City on July 9. 159 Butler was arrested on September 5, during the air assault on Crow Dog's Paradise. 160 For his part, Robideau was arrested near Wichita, Kansas on September 10, when the car he was driving caught fire and exploded on the Kansas Turnpike. 161 Thus, by October 116 - as is shown in the accompanying teletype of the same date - SAC Held considered his plan far enough along that he might return to his post in Chicago (where "urgent matters" attending the Hampton-Clark cover-up claimed his attention) despite the fact that Leonard Peltier was still at large, having in the meantime fled to Canada. 162
Teletype showing the FBI's use of a grand jury to coerce "reluctant witnesses" to "lock Peltier ... into" the RESMURS case.
In actuality Held's departure hardly marked the conclusion of his RESMURS involvement. To the contrary, as is evidenced in the accompanying January 29,1976 memo written by R.J. Gallagher at FBI headquarters, he remained a guiding force at least until Peltier was arrested by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Inspector Edward W.J. Mitchell and a corporal, Dale Parlane, at the camp of traditional Cree leader Robert Smallboy (near Hinton, Alberta) on February 6. 163 Despite the fact that he was already well beyond normal retirement age, and undoubtedly as a result of the quality of the counterintelligence services he had rendered over the years, Held was promoted to serve as FBI associate director on July 20, 1976. 164 In this capacity as the Bureau's second in command, he was able to bring his unique talents to bear on the culmination of the RESMURS operation in particularly effective ways.
Also, Jimmy Eagle Deer's grandmother
Teletype noting the departure of Richard G. Held from the Pine Ridge area. The Chicago SAC returned to his home office where he continued his orchestration of the cover-up masking FBI involvement in the 1969 Hampton-Clark assassinations.
Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 1976
Excerpted from Paul Wolf's Web site Here
