According to the official histories, COINTELPRO existed from late 1956 through mid-1971. During this period, the FBI admits to having engaged in a total of 2,218 separate COINTELPRO actions, many of them coupled directly with other sorts of systematic illegality such as the deployment of warrantless phone taps (a total of 2,305 admitted) and bugs (697 admitted) against domestic political targets, and receipt of correspondence secretly intercepted by the CIA (57,846 separate instances admitted). The chart on the following page illustrates the sweep of such activities during the COINTELPRO era proper.1This however, is dramatically insufficient to afford an accurate impression of the scope, scale and duration of the Bureau's domestic counterinsurgency function. None of the FBI's vast proliferation of politically repressive operations conducted between 1918 and 1956, covered to some extent in the preceding chapters, are included in the figures. Similarly, it will be noted that certain years within the formal COINTELPRO period itself have been left unreported. Further, it should be noted that none of the Bureau's host of counterintelligence operations against the Puerto Rican independentistas during the years supposedly covered were included in the count. The same can be said with regard to COINTELPRO aimed at the Chicano movement from at least as early as 1967. 2
Even in areas, such as its campaign against the Black Panther Party, where the FBI disclosed relatively large segments of its COINTELPRO profile, the record was left far from complete. During the various congressional committee investigations, the Bureau carefully hid the facts of its involvement in the 1969 Hampton-Clark assassinations. 3 Simultaneously, it was covering up its criminal withholding of exculpatory evidence in the murder trial of LA Panther leader Geronimo Pratt. 4 Recently, it has also come to light that the FBI denied information to congress concerning entirely similar withholding of exculpatory evidence in the murder trial of New York Panther leader Richard Dhoruba Moore. 5 How many comparable coverups are at issue with regard to the anti-Panther COINTELPRO alone remains a mystery. Given the Bureau's track record, on this score, however, it is abundantly clear that much of the worst of the FBI's performance against the Panthers remains off record."
Admitted FBI Illegalities During the COINTELPRO Era
Year COINTELPROs Taps Bugs Mail Openings 1956 N/A N/A N/A N/A 1957 35 N/A N/A N/A 1958 51 N/A N/A 666 1959 65 N/A N/A 1964 1960 115 114 74 2342 1961 184 140 85 3520 1962 147 198 100 3017 1963 128 244 83 4167 1964 230 260 106 5396 1965 220 233 67 4503 1966 240 174 10 5984 1967 180 113 0 5863 1968 123 82 9 5322 1969 280 123 14 5384 1970 180 102 19 4975 1971 40 101 16 2701 1972 N/A 108 32 1400 1973 N/A 123 40 642 1974 N/A 190 42 N/A
Then there is the matter of the Bureau's continuation of domestic political counterintelligence operations after 1971 despite well-publicized governmental claims that the program ceased, and the FBI's abandonment of the acronym COINTELPRO itself. One indication of this is revealed in the accompanying chart. During the three years (1972-74) following the point at which COINTELPRO was supposedly terminated, the frequency with which the Bureau engaged in warrantless bugging and wiretapping increased dramatically (bugging from l6 instances in 1971 to 42 in 1974; wiretaps from 101 instances in 1971 to 190 in 1974). The relationship between these ELSUR activities and the fact that the FBI maintained an ongoing involvement in defacto COINTELPRO is brought out clearly in the accompanying July 29,1975 teletype from Director Clarence Kelley to all SACs inquiring as to the proportion of "warrantless electronic surveillance" then being devoted to "counterintelligence purposes" associated with "domestic security investigations."6
The reality of COINTELPRO's continuation was masked not only behind the dropping of the descriptive title, but a retooling of the terminology utilized to define its targets as well. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Bureau typically followed the McCarthyesque practice of defining those subject to "neutralization" as being "subversives." By the second half of the latter decade, however, such vernacular was archaic and discredited. Hence, COINTELPRO specialists shifted to habitual use of the phrase "political extremist" in defining their quarry; the organizations and individuals focused upon during this peak period of COINTELPRO might also be described as "violent" or "violence prone," but they were acknowledged as being politically so nonetheless.
After 1971, with the FBI increasingly exposed before the public as having conducted itself as an outright political police, the Bureau sought to revise its image, ultimately promising never to engage in COINTELPRO-type activities again. In this context, it became urgently necessary - if counterintelligence operations were to continue - for any hint of overt orientation to subjects' politics to be driven from agents' vocabularies, preferably in favor of a term which would "inspire public support and confidence" in the Bureau's covert political mission This pertained as much to internal documents as to public pronouncements, insofar as the possibility of FOIA disclosure of the former was emerging as a significant "menace."
Teletype directly linking warrantless ELSURs with
counterintelligence and domestic security operations, four
years after COINTELPRO had supposedly been terminated.
The Advent of "Terrorism"
This was accomplished in the immediate aftermath of COINTELPRO's alleged demise as is shown in the accompanying April 12, 1972 Airtel from Director L. Patrick Gray to the SAC, Albany. The word selected was "terrorist," applied here to members of the Black Panther Party cum Black Liberation Army who had only months earlier still been designated as "agitators" and "key extremists." 7 Such a word-choice allowed the deployment of a raft of associated terms such as "guerrillas" and - in the case of the American Indian Movement - "insurgents." The public, which experience had shown would balk at the idea of the FBI acting to curtail political diversity as such, could be counted on to rally to the notion that the Bureau was now acting only to protect them against "terror." Thus, the Bureau secured a terminological license by which to pursue precisely the same goals, objectives and tactics attending COINTELPRO, but in an even more vicious, concerted and sophisticated fashion.
The results of such linguistic subterfuge were, as was noted in the introduction to this book, readily evidenced during the 1980s when it was revealed that the FBI had employed the rubric of a "terrorist investigation" to rationalize the undertaking of a multiyear "probe" of the nonviolent CISPES organization - extended to encompass at least 215 other groups, including Clergy and Laity Concerned, the Maryknoll Sisters, Amnesty International, the Chicago Interreligious Task Force, the U.S. Catholic Conference, and the Virginia Education Association - opposed to U.S. policy in Central America."8 Needless to say, the CISPES operation was attended by systematic resort to such time-honored COINTELPRO tactics as the use of infiltrators/provocateurs, 9 disinformation, 10 black bag jobs,11 telephone intercepts,12 conspicuous surveillance (to make targets believe "there's an agent behind every mail box"), 13 and so on.
Early Airtel applying the term terrorist to those previously described
as "activists," "radicals," "agitators" or "political extremists."
The same veneer of "counter-terrorism" has also been applied to operations conducted against the devoutly pacifist Silo Plowshares organization - committed to antinuclearism/anti-militarism - a situation so ludicrous as to provoke COINTELPRO veteran John Ryan to refuse to participate. Ryan, who had two commendations to his credit during a 21-year career, and who was less than two years short of retirement at the time, was fired as a result of his stand. 14
Meanwhile, Plowshares "terrorists" such as Katya Komisaruk Jerry Ebner, Helen Woodson, Lin Romano, Joe Gump, Ann and Jim Albertini, George Ostensen, Richard Miller and Father Carl Kabat were being ushered into long prison sentences for such things as "conspiring" to trespass at U.S. nuclear facilities. 15
Even in instances involving actual armed struggle on the part of liberation movements - leaving aside the probability that earlier applications of COINTELPRO tactics had done much to convince adherents that no other route to effect positive social change lay open to them - the Bureau had been duplicitous in its approach. One need only examine the case of Assata Shakur (s/n: Joanne Chesimard) to get the picture. Publicly and sensationally accused by the FBI of being the .revolutionary mother hen" of a BLA cell conducting a "series of cold-blooded murders of New York City police officers," Shakur was made the subject of a nationwide manhunt in 1972. 16 On May 2, 1973, she, BLA founder Zayd Malik Shakur (her brother-in-law) and Sundiata Acoli (s/n: Clark Squire) were subjected to one of the random harassment stops of blacks on the New Jersey Turnpike for which the Jersey state troopers are so deservedly notorious. Apparently realizing who it was they'd pulled over, the two troopers -Werner Foerster and James Harper - opened fire, wounding Assata Shakur immediately. In the fight which followed, both Zayd Shakur and trooper Foerster were killed, trooper Harper and Sundiata Acoli wounded. Both surviving BLA members were captured. 17
Assata was, however, charged with none of the killings which had ostensibly earned her such celebrated status as a "terrorist." Instead, the government contended she had participated in bank robberies, and the state of New York accused her of involvement in the killing of a heroin dealer in Brooklyn and the failed ambush of two cops in Queens on January 23, 1973. 18 She was acquitted of every single charge in a series of trials lasting into 1977. Meanwhile, she was held without bond, in isolation and in especially miserable local jail facilities. 19 Finally, having exhausted all other possibilities of obtaining a conviction, the authorities took her to trial in New Jersey in the death of trooper Foerster. Despite the fact that Sundiata Acoli had long-since been convicted of having fired the fatal bullets - and medical testimony indicating her wounds had incapacitated her prior to the firefight itself Assata Shakur was convicted of first degree murder by an all-white jury on March 25, 1977. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The travesty imbedded in all this was unmistakable, and Shakur's circumstances remained the topic of much discussion and debate. This became all the more true on the night of November 2, 1979, when a combat unit of the BLA set the prisoner free from the maximum security building of the Clinton Women's Prison in New Jersey. 20 It is instructive that this organization of what the police and the FBI were busily portraying as "mad dog killers" appear to have gone considerably out of their way to insure that no one, including the guards, was hurt during the prison break. For her part, Assata Shakur - now hyped by the Bureau as "the nation's number one terrorist fugitive" despite the state's failure to link her to any concrete ,act of terrorism" 21 - was quietly provided sanctuary in Cuba where she remains today.
Meanwhile, the FBI was utilizing the spectacle of the BLA cases - in combination, it claimed, with threats created by the Puertorriqueno FAIN and two right-wing clandestine groups, the Cuban exile Omega 7 and the "Serbo-Croatian Liberation Front" 22 - as a rationale to establish the sort of instrument of political repression which had been only embryonic during the COINTELPRO era proper. What emerged in 1980 was a formal amalgamation of FBI COINTELPRO specialists and New York City red squad detectives known as the Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF), consolidating the more ad hoc models of such an apparatus which had materialized in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles during the late '60s. 23
In many ways, the JTTF and the way it has been able to project the image of organizations and individuals engaged in armed struggle, has been the defining characteristic of domestic political repression during the 1980s. We will examine three cases which demonstrate this point.
The Revolutionary Armed Task Force
The Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF) evolved from a multi-organizational community service project in the South Bronx known as the Lincoln Detox Center, dedicated to combatting the plague of heroin addiction afflicting black inner cities during the mid-70s Nominally headed by an acupuncturist and RNA member named Mutulu Shakur (s/n: Jeral Wayne Williams), Lincoln Detox proved highly successful in applying the cures to heroin addiction pioneered by Malcolm X during the early '60s. Working from an increasing base of activists and ex-addicts, it pursued the Black Panther Party's agenda of developing programs leading to increased community self-control and self-sufficiency. It was perhaps because of the project's very success that government funding was withdrawn and police used to evict staffers on November 29, 1978. 24
After Lincoln Detox was forcibly returned to the orbit of conventional (and typically unsuccessful) heroin treatment programs, Mutulu Shakur acted to establish a private entity dubbed the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA) to continue the work. The organization established a heroin treatment facility in Harlem. According to the JTTF, a subset of BAAANA was the BLA-led RATF, formed in 1978 to provide a funding base for the heroin clinic by robbing banks and armored trucks. 25 On October 20,1981, the BAAANA/BLA/ RATF ensemble came unwrapped as the result of a failed armored truck robbery in West Nyack, New York, in which two guards were killed and several RATF members captured. 26 Mutulu Shakur and several others escaped, but were forced underground; BAAANA rapidly dissolved thereafter. 27
In the aftermath, the JTTF rapidly captured a number of other RATF members, killing one (Mtyari Sundiata; s/n: Samuel Lee Smith) on October 23. 28 In the trials which followed, the defendants were tried under "RICO" (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; 18 USCS § 1961-1968) charges - anti-racketeering statutes, seldom utilized against organized crime - and sentenced to long stretches in prison. 29 Relatedly, after RATF supporter Susan Rosenberg and an associate, Tim Blunk (a neurology researcher), were captured at a cache of explosives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey on November 29,1984, they received utterly unprecedented 58 year sentences for possession. This is compared to the seven year sentence received by Dennis Malvesi, a right-wing fanatic convicted of actually using explosives to blow up abortion clinics during the early 1980s. 30
Far more instructive with regard to the JTTF's (and, more broadly, the FBI's) handling of the "Brinks Case" than the way in which it dealt with the RATF per se, is the way it utilized the matter as a pretext by which to conduct operations against other elements of the left. For instance, in the wake of the West Nyack incident, U.S. Attorney John S. Martin, Jr. convened (at the request of the Bureau) a federal grand jury in New York, casting an extremely wide net across east coast dissidents in what one attorney described as "not so much an effort to gather evidence in the Brinks case itself, as to compel testimony which provides comprehensive general intelligence on personal and organizational relationships within the left as a whole." 31 Thirteen key activists were jailed for as long as eighteen months because of their "contempt" in refusing to cooperate with this fishing expedition. 32
The New York grand jury gambit proved so successful that by late 1983 the FBI had requested a second be convened in Chicago, ostensibly to explore links discovered between the RATF and Puerto Rican independentista formations such as the FAIN. This led in due course to the imprisonment of five key members of the Movimiento de Liberacion National (MIN) - Ricardo Romero, Maria Cueto, Steven Guerra, Julio Rosado and Andres Rosado - for up to three years for the "criminal contempt" of refusing to cooperate. 33
Yet a third such grand jury was set in place during 1984, this one assigned to probe the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC), an organization said to have "fraternal relations" with the RATF, the FAIN, and other "terrorist" entities. Another six key activists went to jail for refusal to collaborate. 34
Symptomatic of the sort of "hard information" generated by the grand juries and other JTTF investigative activities related to the RATF are the following "proofs" that the May 19th Communist Organization was part of a "terrorist network" (a characterization extended by the Bureau in the New York Post as early as October 1981):
A 1985 Profile in Terrorism lists as a "terrorist incident," the arrest of nine "May 19th Communist Organization members" for trespassing during a sit-in at the ticket office of South African Airways in New York City.
Other May 19th Organization activities posited by the Bureau as "evidence of terrorism" include attending peaceful demonstrations sponsored by CISPES, conducting an educational forum at Boston University, holding a nonviolent public rally in New York, publicly advocating solidarity with the Southwest African Peoples' Organization (SWAPO), and having interorganizational contact with CISPES.
Advocacy of the right of oppressed peoples to engage in armed struggle and specifically endorsement of the escape of Assata Shakur are listed as "terrorist activities" undertaken by the "May 19th Communist Coalition [sic; Organization]."
FBI Director William Webster offered as "links" between the May 19th Communist Organization and the FAIN the fact that May 19th members were known to have attended "rallies and functions" supportive of Puerto Rican independence. Similarly, Webster claimed to have uncovered links between May 19th and the RATF based on the facts that the organization openly engaged in "support of New Afrikan Freedom Fighters" and "one person [Silvia Baraldini] associated with May 19th was arrested in the Nyack incident [emphasis added]. 35
Being thus gratuitously (or maliciously) cast by the FBI as a terrorist group is not a laughing matter as the experience of a black Harlem study group headed by Coltrane Chimarenga (s/n: Randolph Simms) bears out. Infiltrated by a JTTF provocateur named Howard Bonds in 1984, the membership was shortly arrested en masse on criminal conspiracy charges and publicly branded "Son of Brink."36 They were accused of planning at least two bank robberies and to free RATF members Sekou Odinga and Kuwasi Balagoon. Despite the prosecutor's introduction of some 450 pages of affidavits - including lengthy excerpts from wiretap logs - and testimony of Bonds, the jury appears to have ended up believing that most or all of the "conspiracy" was a product of the infiltrator's own actions and/or imagination. They voted for acquittal on all substantive charges, convicting seven of the eight defendants only on charges of possession of restricted weapons and phoney IDs. 37 Afterwards, several jurors publicly commented that the JTTF tactics revealed at trial had constituted a "clear violation of the civil rights and liberties of the accused," and that the conduct of the "counter-terrorists" themselves represented "a far greater threat to freedom" than anything Chimarenga's group might have contemplated. 38
The defendants in the "Son of Brinks" case ultimately went free, even though they had spent nearly a year bound up in legal proceedings - and were thus thoroughly neutralized in terms of their political organizing - in what turned out to be, at best, an utterly frivolous case on the part of the government. Less lucky was Dr. Alan Berkman, a founder of JBAKC whose long history of activism included a stint as a medic at Wounded Knee, several years working at Lincoln Detox, and staunch support of the black liberation and independentista movements. Indicted in 1983 for having rendered medical assistance to Marilyn Buck, an RATF member allegedly wounded in the leg at Nyack, Berkman successfully went underground before being captured in Philadelphia in mid-1985. He was then held without bond for two years, until a 1987 trial which resulted in his conviction as an "accessory" in the Brinks case. He was the first individual since Dr. Mudd, the man accused of rendering medical aid to John Wilkes Booth after the Abraham Lincoln assassination, to be so charged. Berkman was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment for his "involvement in terrorism." 39
Organizations as such also suffered direct physical consequences from the JTTFs RATF-related "investigation." For instance, on January 31, 1983, "the FBI carried out a massive raid on the Madame Binh Graphics Collective in Brooklyn, New York. The May 19th Communist Organization used this studio for its First Amendment protected organizing activities. The warrant to search the graphics studio falsely stated it was the home of Donna Borup [a May 19th activist]. In the course of the search the FBI destroyed printing equipment and seized large quantities of political literature and art work ." 40 No charges were ever brought against Borup, the ostensible focus of the raid, a matter which has prompted many people to conclude her pursuit was merely a pretext by which the Bureau accomplished its real objective of disrupting the Madame Binh Collective's ability to function.
Ironically, many supposedly progressive groups and individuals have joined the chorus supporting the FBI's "campaign against terrorism" on the left, arguing that the "menace" posed by armed struggle somehow "justifies" virtually any politically repressive activity in which the Bureau might care to engage, and that those who engage in or support "terrorism" deserve whatever fate the state wished to accord them, no matter how cruel, unusual or "anomalous." 41 Such victimblaming attitudes are precisely what the FBI requires as a basis for its conduct of the broadest forms of ideological warfare, a matter the CISPES investigation should have proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
To underscore the matter even further, it is only fair to observe that the Bureau has shown no inclination to cast such broad nets over the radical right. This holds true even when the FBI has investigated such unabashed terrorist organizations as the neo-nazi "Bruder Schweigen" - or "Silent Brotherhood," otherwise known as "The Order" - a group which admittedly performed the cold-blooded murder of Alan Berg (a Jewish talk show host in Denver), killed a Missouri state trooper, "executed" a third individual and conducted a series of armored car and bank robberies netting several times the amount attributed to the RATF. 42 The group was also heavily involved in counterfeiting.
The Resistance Conspiracy Case
Stemming to some extent from the FBI's anti-RATF operation, the "Resistance Conspiracy Case" (U.S. v. Whitehorn, et al., CR 88-145-05) concerns seven long-term white activists accused of planning and involvement in the execution of "a terrorist bombing campaign" during the early 80s. Among the more notable actions they are alleged to have carried out were the placing of explosives at the National War College and U.S. Capitol Building in 1983 as protests against the U.S. invasion of Grenada. One of the seven accused, Betty Ann Duke, has evaded capture to date. Five of the six in custody - Marilyn Buck, Susan Rosenberg, Tim Blunk, Linda Evans and Dr. Alan Berkman - are already serving lengthy prison sentences on RATF related matters. 43 The sixth, Laura Whitehorn, has been held in "preventive detention," without bond or trial for more than four years. 44 The defendants face 40 years apiece in prison if convicted.
There are certain glaring defects in the government's approach to the case. All the defendants except Whitehorn have already been convicted of the specific acts they are accused of having conspired to commit. This blatant exercise in double jeopardy has been challenged in a motion to dismiss, addressed recently by a federal court decision that - while the case could go forward - prosecutors would be required to demonstrate additional actions on the part of the defendants in order for the matter to be bound over to a jury. 45 For its part, the Justice Department has expressed strong displeasure at not being allowed to simply try the same case over and over, under a variety of billings, stacking up virtually limitless penalties against those it wishes to persecute.
In some ways even more problematic, FBI and prosecutors have already been caught trying to withhold exculpatory evidence from the defense. Contrary to the seeming federal certainty embodied in the indictment handed down on May 11, 1988 that these particular individuals were guilty as charged, it has become increasingly evident the Bureau really has no idea who was involved in the bombings. For instance,
...in a Washington Post newspaper article run several days after the capitol bombing, the FBI apparently had evidence tending to show similarities between the 8 to 11 bombings in the New York and Washington, D.C. areas and the capitol bombing. On the basis of facts unknown to the defendants, they suspected (1) the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN), (2) the United Freedom Front (UFF), (3) the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), (4) the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), or (5) the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) of the bombing ... Suspicions of involvement in the bombing by groups 1 through 4 were voiced by the FBI Director William H. Webster and Special Agent Theodore M. Gardner to the Washington Post in an article printed November 13, 1983. 46Subsequently, in a Post article run on March 15, 1984, an FBI spokesperson announced that the Armed Resistance Unit (ARU) - the organization to which the six present defendants all belonged - was not involved in the bombings. Further:
While testifying before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism in 1985, Mr. Webster stated that the FBI believed the UFF to have been responsible for the bombing(s). He testified ... categorically that "the progress we have made with the group called the United Freedom Front will reflect itself in diminished activity by the group that claims credit for the Capitol bombing." 47As is pointed out by the defense, "information generated and possessed by the FBI's National Bomb Data Center must have aided the FBI, and others, [in] casting its suspicions over groups and persons other than the Revolutionary Fighting Group (RFG) [ARU], and the Red Guerilla Resistance (RGR)." 48 Susan Rosenberg also points out that she and several other defendants were in prison at the time several of the bombings were carried out. 49Despite bona fide discovery motions, the government has refused to divulge the documents relevant to how it arrived at its various conclusions that entities other than those now accused are responsible for the actions at issue.
As Mary O'Melveny, a defense attorney, put it: "The defendants' direct guilt or innocence ... appears immaterial to the government, which has constructed an indictment to convict the six on charges of aiding and abetting and of 'conspiracy to influence, change and protest practices of the United States ... through the use of violent and illegal means.'" 50 In this instance, "aiding and abetting" can be construed to mean ideological solidarity. "Influence, change and protest" can mean statements of advocacy or support of the bombers. No concrete action, or demonstrable interaction with those engaged in the action, is technically necessary for the defendants to be "guilty." This affords an interesting perspective upon U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens' assertion at the time of the indictment: "Let this be a warning to those who seek to influence the policies of the U.S. through violence and terrorism that we will seek unrelentingly to bring them to justice." 51
The Resistance Conspiracy group is thus to stand as a symbol of the government's ability to define dissidents as terrorists at its own discretion and regardless of the facts. Under such circumstances it follows that dissent per se can be made punishable by long prison terms, a matter which, as O'Melveny puts it, makes a point "which says to people, 'Shut up. And don't even consider stepping out of very narrow bounds of protest! That's what I think this case is all about." 52 Certainly, such an objective is well within the spirit of COINTELPRO, and would represent a major "accomplishment" in terms of political repression, if achieved.
The question nonetheless arises as to why this particular group of people has been selected to serve as the example. On the one hand, an answer of sorts may lie in the fact that they are convenient, already in custody and found guilty of "terrorist involvements." On the other hand, as O'Melveny points out, there is little to be gained by adding 40 years more to the 70 year sentence now carried by Marilyn Buck, the 58 year sentences carried by Susan Rosenberg and Tim Blunk, or the 45 years Linda Evans is now serving. Tactically at least, it would make far more sense for the FBI to try to neutralize a whole new group of activists.
The truth of the matter may well lie in something as simple as pique and vindictiveness on the part of certain Bureau officials. Evans, Buck and Whitehorn are former members of SDS aligned with the Weatherman faction who made the transition to the clandestine Weather Underground Organization in 1970. Berkman also had an affinity to the latter through its above ground support entity, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). Rosenberg and Blunk, who are younger, appear to have more-or-less cut their activist teeth on Weather politics. Collectively, they participated in a process of greatly embarrassing the FBI in its spectacular inability to apprehend WEATHERFUGS (Weatherman Fugitives) throughout the 1970s.
Worse for the Bureau, the very methods employed in trying to break the Weather Underground's political apparatus came back to haunt individual FBI officials in court, perhaps the only time this has ever happened. In 1978, former FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, former acting Associate Director W. Mark Felt, former Assistant Director for the Domestic Intelligence Division Edward S. Miller, and former supervisor of the New York field office's Squad 47 (the COINTELPRO section) John Kearney were indicted for having conspired to "injure and oppress citizens of the United States" in their anti-Weatherman operations. After a lengthy 1980 trial, Felt and Miller were found guilty by a jury, the only FBI personnel ever tried and convicted of COINTELPRO-related offenses. They were freed on appeal bond, but were apparently losing, given Ronald Reagan's April 1981 intervention to pardon them rather than see two such "loyal public servants" go to prison for their misdeeds. 53 Several of the resistance conspiracy defendants were extremely active during the course of the officials' trial, utilizing its precedent value to increase public consciousness concerning the FBI's true nature. Their organizing seems to have been deeply humiliating to FBI officials, especially after their colleagues were convicted.
This humiliation undoubtedly increased dramatically when, shortly after Reagan bestowed his pardons, former WEATHERFUGS Judy Clark and Dana Biberman entered a lawsuit (Clark v. U.S., 78 Civ. 2244 (MEL)) against the FBI, seeking $100 million in damages on behalf of those victimized by the anti-Weatherman operations and injunctive relief to insure the Bureau never utilized such tactics again:
Several of the defendants in [the Resistance Conspiracy] case were active participants in the lawsuit against the FBI. They assisted in legal research, built support for the case, conducted community organizing, received discovery and were, along with the plaintiffs, subject to continuing acts of government harassment. 54There being no presidential remedy available to fix this particular problem, the Bureau was forced to reach "a monetary settlement favorable to the plaintiffs." 55 In the end, then, the Resistance Conspiracy case may have nothing at all to do with bullets and bombs. To the contrary, it seems likely- notwithstanding the undeniable chilling effect it is intended to impart across the entire spectrum of left politics in the U.S. - it is designed to salve the wounded egos of the Bureau's COINTELPRO specialists. It is, as Susan Rosenberg would say, "pay-back time."
The Ohio 7
The cases of the Ohio 7 concern a group of white activists who formed the United Freedom Front (UFF) - otherwise known as the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Brigade (SMJJ) 56 - and are accused of engaging in a series of bombings during the early 1980s. Among the many such actions they are alleged to have undertaken was detonating an explosive charge at a South African Airways office on December 16, 1982, as a protest against ongoing cordial relations between the U.S. government and South Africa's apartheid regime. The same day, they are said to have bombed an office facility of the IBM Corporation because of the computer giant's provision of sophisticated computer systems to the South African military and police. On March 19,1984, according to the state, they bombed a second IBM office complex, this time in commemoration of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in which South African police murdered seventy unarmed black men, women and children. In September of 1984, they are charged with having carried out one of two bombings of offices belonging to the Union Carbide Corporation because of its economic activity in South Africa. 57 As was the case with the bombings attributed to the Resistance Conspiracy defendants, warning phone calls prevented anyone from being killed or injured by those associated with the Ohio 7. [Some Ohio 7 members have been accused of a 1976 courthouse bombing in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in which people were injured. No credible evidence of this has, however, been produced (See Note 72, this chapter).]
The seven - Jaan Laaman, Barbara Curzi-Laaman, Richard Williams, Carol and Tom Manning, Pat Gros Levasseur and Ray Luc Levasseur - were the focus of the most intensive and wide-ranging JTTF campaign to date, at least so far as is known. This assumed the form of BOSLUC (an acronym derived from combining the first three letters of Boston, the city in which the operation was headquartered, and Ray Luc Levasseur's middle name), an effort initiated in 1982 and eventually drawing not only the FBI and New York police establishments, but the BATF and police representation from Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well. 58
BOSLUC initially concentrated its energies in the Boston area, largely due to an incident in 1982 in which black community activist Kazi Toure (s/n: Christopher King) was stopped by state police on Route 95, near Attleboro, Massachusetts. A sharp exchange of gunfire followed, leaving two troopers wounded and Toure in custody, a passenger in the latter's car having escaped. 59 The fugitive was identified as UFF member Jaan Laaman. The Attleboro firefight closely followed a similar event on Route 80 in rural New Jersey when state trooper Philip Lamonaco stopped a car driven by Tom Manning and, apparently recognizing the occupant, opened fire. Lamonaco ended up dead. Police subsequently contended Richard Williams had been with Manning at the time of the shooting. 60
By early 1984, frustrated at coming up dry in Massachusetts, the JTTF expanded the scope of BOSLUC to encompass all of New England in what was dubbed "Western Sweep":
Agents of the task force seized many citizens resembling the Ohio 7 and subjected them to public humiliation and physical abuse prior to any positive identification. A family was surrounded by police after leaving a diner, and the father was beaten and searched in front of his [wife and children] in the parking lot. Another family was pulled over on the highway and forced at gunpoint to lie face-down in the rain on the pavement. Another man's teeth were broken with the barrel of a gun. In Pennsylvania, a paramilitary team landed in a field, surrounded a family in their home and held them hostage for six hours. These people had the simple misfortune [of looking] like members of the Ohio 7. 61No expense was spared, as "surveillance by electronic means, paid informants and photographic methods yielded 500,000 pages of material from investigations of the Ohio 7. In designated areas, numerous pen registers [electronic devices which, when installed on a phone, reveal the number of any phone calling it] were obtained, then hundreds of BOSLUC agents would conduct an intelligence sweep; the idea was that the increased police activity would generate more phone calls [from UFF members] to sympathizers and all [such] calls would be subject to FBI investigation. A casual mention by a distant relative of Tom Manning of the name 'Tommy' in a telephone conversation brought a small army of agents into the bedroom of a stranger in less than an hour." 62
The newly minted agents of Western Sweep went out, knocked on doors, stopped cars, set up roadblocks and saturated the area with wanted posters [including photos of the children of the accused]. They contacted schools, daycare centers and medical facilities with photos and medical and dental records. Many activists were repeatedly interviewed, followed and harassed. The women's community in western Massachusetts was contacted by FBI agents offering assistance after a rash of telephone threats. The FBI assistance turned out to hinge on cooperation with Western Sweep. In the estimation of the government, one out of every three residents of [Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire] was contacted during Western Sweep. 63Ultimately, such heavy-handedness was for naught. BOSLUC was finally able to home in on the first of the SMJJ group through use of a mainframe computer donated by the Grumman Corporation. Utilizing a sophisticated database and name-matching program, agents were able to trace Patricia Gros Levasseur through a series of aliases to a post office box in Columbus, Ohio. 64 They then staked out the postal facility and, when she showed up for her mail on November 3,1984, they followed her home to a house in nearby Deerfield. Ray Luc and Pat Gros Levasseur, along with their three daughters, were captured the following morning. 65 At about the same time, some 75 FBI SWAT-team members, armed with a warrant for Richard Williams and an armored personnel carrier known as "Mother," had surrounded a house at 4248 West 22nd Street in Cleveland; Williams, Jaan and Barbara Curzi-Laaman, and the Laaman's three children were captured. 66 The Mannings initially evaded the roundup, but were eventually traced via the serial numbers on a gun seized in the raid on the Cleveland address and captured, along with their children, on April 24,1985. 67Federal treatment of the children of the captured Ohio 7 members is instructive. Upon the arrest of their parents, the three Levasseur girls were whisked away for a solid five hours of interrogation by the FBI and representatives of the New Jersey State Police. Afterwards, they were turned over to welfare department officials despite the fact that a number of relatives - none accused of any crime, and all gainfully employed - lived in the area and expressed their willingness to take them in. Later, Carmen Levasseur, the eldest daughter at age eight, recounted how, when she expressed that she'd grown hungry during the initial interrogation, an agent had offered her a pizza and $20 to provide incriminating information against her mother and father, as well as the whereabouts of Tom and Carol Manning. 68 The three Laaman children underwent much the same experience. 69 As for the Manning children - Jeremy (aged 11), Tamara (aged five) and Jonathan (aged three) - they were repeatedly interrogated and arbitrarily placed in a foster home despite repeated attempts by Tom Manning's sister Mary, and her husband, Cameron Bishop, to obtain custody. 70 The Mannings were finally compelled to began a hunger strike in prison in order to force authorities to release their children into the custody of Carol's sister. 71
In the series of trials which followed the capture of the Ohio 7, the government relied heavily upon the testimony of an informant named Joseph Aceto (aka: Joseph Balino), a former member of Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), a prisoners-rights organization founded in Portland, Maine during the early 1970s by Tom Manning and Ray Luc Levasseur. 72 Aceto offered considerable "evidence" concerning the original formation of the SMJJ, its evolution into UFF, and supposedly first-hand recollections of the defendants' having described their bombing and bank-robbing exploits to him. Only later did it emerge conclusively that the government's star witness had consistently lied under oath, passing off third-hand gossip and utter fabrications as conversations in which he himself had participated. 73 It also came out that Aceto had been diagnosed as psychotic and administered heavy doses of the tranquilizer Mellaril - to "increase his veracity" - prior to testimony. 74 To top things off, it was revealed that, in exchange for such testimony, the FBI had arranged for him to be released from prison where he was serving a life sentence for a brutal stabbing murder and placed on the federal witness protection program (a package with an $800 per month stipend). 75 All this information had been withheld from the defense - and consequently from the jury - at trial.
As the prosecutorial smoke cleared in 1987, Ray Luc Levasseur had been convicted of six bombing charges and had been sentenced to 45 years imprisonment. Tom Manning had also been convicted of six bombing charges and sentenced to 53 years, as well as murder in the death of New Jersey state trooper Lamonaco (a life sentence to run consecutively to the bombing sentence). Richard Williams had been convicted on six bombing charges and sentenced to 45 years; he was not convicted in the Lamonaco killing, but is to be retried. Jaan Laaman was convicted on six bombing charges and sentenced to 53 years. Carol Manning and Barbara Curzi-Laaman were convicted of lesser accessory charges and sentenced to 15 years apiece. Pat Gros Levasseur was convicted of harboring a fugitive (her husband), and sentenced to five years. 76
Apparently unsatisfied with the virtually permanent incarceration meted out to each of the male "principles" in the Ohio 7 case, hoping to secure heavier sentences against the women, and generally seeking to set a more spectacular "example," the government next resorted to the same double-jeopardy ploy being utilized in the Resistance Conspiracy case. All seven defendants were charged - on the basis of actions for which they had already been convicted - of "seditious conspiracy" and violation of the RICO statute. The holes in the case became almost immediately apparent as charges were dropped against both Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman, in order to "simplify proceedings," according to prosecutors. 77 Next, Barbara CurziLaaman was severed from the trial after the court (finally) ruled that the FBI's 1984 SWAT raid on her home, which resulted in her capture, had been illegal. 78 The government then began offering reduced sentence deals to any defendant who would enter a guilty plea; Carol Manning accepted the offer. 79
In the end, after a trial lasting ten months (February-November 1989), costing more than $10 million, and in which nearly 250 witnesses took the stand, the jury acquitted the three remaining defendants - Ray Luc and Pat Gros Levasseur, and Richard Williams - of both charges on November 27,1989. 80 Pat Gros Levasseur was released from custody on a "time served" basis, while her husband was returned to the federal prison at Marion, Illinois to continue serving his existing sentence. Williams was transferred to the custody of New Jersey authorities, pending a retrial in the death of state trooper Lamonaco.
The Most Imprisoned People on Earth?
The verdicts reached in the final Ohio 7 trial represent something of a victory for political liberty and common sense in the U.S. They demonstrate that a jury of average citizens will, when exposed to a reasonable amount of factual information and given adequate time to think through the issues, reject as implausible government contentions that any small group of radicals - no matter how "secretive and violent" - are capable of seriously plotting to "overthrow the government by force of arms." So much for the notion of seditious conspiracy. Similarly, the verdicts show clearly that, under appropriate conditions, the same jury will conclude that political formations which engage in bank expropriations and similar activities while they may have engaged in criminal behavior under the law - are no more guilty of "racketeering" than were the founding fathers at the Boston Tea Party.
Other recent verdicts also offer glimmers of hope, as when on August 26,1989 a jury acquitted Puertorriqueno independentista leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios of attempted murder of a federal agent and seven other charges stemming from Richard W. Held's island-wide ride in 1985. 81 As was the case in the 1976 Cedar Rapids trial of Bob Robideau. and Dino Butler, the outcome of Ojeda Rios' ordeal proves that an ordinary jury - once again assuming it is presented with a sufficient range of facts - will arrive at the conclusion that armed self-defense is an entirely legitimate response to the sorts of tactics employed by the FBI against political dissidents.
Other examples are more grim. Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt, the New York 3 and many other victims of earlier COINTELPRO operations remain in prison despite overwhelming evidence that they were railroaded into their respective cells. 82 And additional casualties continue to accrue. For instance, there is Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former BPP member in Philadelphia, convicted and sentenced to death on July 3, 1982, ostensibly for having killed a cop, despite eyewitnesses having identified an entirely different individual as the assailant. On March 6,1989, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied Abu-Jamal's last possible appeal prior to the electric chair even while acknowledging that "genuine doubt" exists as to the killer's identity. 83
Indeed, use of the prison system for purposes of political neutralization appears to have become the preferred mode for the FBI and associated police agencies by the end of the 1980s. At present, the U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of having a greater proportion of its population incarcerated than any western industrialized country. Its imprisonment just of its Euroamerican citizens is tied - at 114 per 100,000 - with Austria for first place. Its rate of imprisonment of African-Americans - 713 per 100,000 - is, however much higher: 25 times the Netherlands' 28 per 100,00 rate of incarcerating its citizenry. 84
The proportion of the black population presently imprisoned in the U.S. is almost exactly double that in South Africa. 85 More, both federal and state policy makers have lately made no secret of their intention to double the number of available prison beds during the coming decade, "privatize" an additional large number of penal facilities, and to develop extensive application of .electronic incarceration techniques" which will require the building of no new physical structures. Following these projections, even the most conservative arithmetic makes it plain the U.S. elite is fully prepared to triple or even quadruple the already burgeoning North American prison population. At the point such plans are consummated, the U.S. citizenry will have become - barring unforeseen eventualities elsewhere - the most imprisoned people on the face of the earth. 86
While such a trend represents an exercise in social engineering going well beyond any conceivable definition of "counterintelligence" per se, it obviously affords modern COINTELPRO operatives a perfect cover under which to conduct their business; hence, the increasing emphasis upon criminalizing political dissidents as "terrorists" and "racketeers" throughout the 1980s. Of late, this process of criminalization has been accelerated considerably under the rubric of a national "war on drugs," headed up by such veteran COINTELPRO specialists as Richard W. Held in San Francisco. Little is said about the fact that the "black street gangs" now decried by the FBI as sources of "drugs and violence in our cities" are exactly the same entities secretly supported by the Bureau in its COINTELPROs against such anti-drug political formations as the Black Panther Party twenty years ago. 87 Even less is mentioned of the CIA's role in establishing these gang- based drug distribution mechanisms during the same period (for the dual purposes of narcotizing political unrest at home and generating revenues with which to fund covert "off the shelf" operations abroad). 88 SAC Held has, however, proven quite vocal in extending utterly unsubstantiated assertions that contemporary political organizations such as the Black Guerrilla Family are important components of the drug scene. 89 Meanwhile, the "drug wars" veneer may well already be in use as a screen behind which the selective assassination of key political activists may be carried out. A notable example of this last was the execution-style murder of Panther founder Huey P. Newton in Oakland, on August 22,1989. 90
In some ways more to the point of what is occurring is the nature of the prison facilities the federal system has begun to spawn. Based generally on the "Stammheim Model" perfected by West Germany during the early 1970s, these include the Marion "super-max" prison for men in southern Illinois, and the Marianna prison's high security unit (HSU) for women in northern Florida. 91 The Marianna facility was piloted at the federal women's prison at Lexington, Kentucky during the 1980's. Its purpose was unabashedly political as is demonstrated in the U.S. Bureau of Prison's official criteria for incarceration:
[A] prisoner's past or present affiliation, association or membership in an organization which has been demonstrated as being involved in acts of violence, attempts to disrupt or overthrow the government of the U.S. or whose published ideology include advocating law violations in order to "free" prisoners ... 92Constructed some thirty feet underground in total isolation from the outside world, painted entirely white to induce sensory deprivation, with naked florescent lights burning 24 hours per day and featuring rules severely restricting diet, correspondence, reading material and visits, the HSU was deliberately designed to psychologically debilitate those imprisoned there. This was coupled to a program of intentional degradation in which the incarcerated women were strip searched, often by male guards, and observed by male guards while showering and using the toilets. Perhaps worst of all, the Bureau of Prisons (BoP) refused to set any formal criteria by which the women might work their way back out of the HSU once they were confined there. The objective was to invoke in them a sense of being totally at the mercy of and dependent upon their keepers. 93 In the polite language of the John Howard Association:
Through a year or more of sensory and psychological deprivation, prisoners are stripped of their individual identities in order that compliant behavior patterns can be implanted, a process of mortification and depersonalization. 94The techniques involved have been described by Amnesty International in the accompanying chart. As early as 1962, Dr. Edgar Schein described the methodology at issue rather more straightforwardly in an address to all federal maximum security prison wardens in Washington, D.C.:
In order to produce marked changes in behavior, it is necessary to weaken, undermine, or remove supports for old attitudes. I would like you to think of brainwashing not in terms of... ethics and morals, but in terms of the deliberate changing of human behavior by a group of men who have relatively complete control over the environment in which the captives live... [These changes can be induced by] isolation, sensory deprivation, segregation of leaders, spying, tricking men into signing written statements which are then shown to others, placing individuals whose will power has been severely weakened into a living situation with others more advanced in thought reform, character invalidation, humiliations, sleeplessness, rewarding subservience, and fear [emphasis added]. 95Dr. Richard Kom, in a 1987 report on Lexington commissioned by the ACLU, framed the matter even more clearly. In Kom's estimation, the purpose of an HSU-style facility is to:
... reduce prisoners to a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion. That failing, the next objective is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient, self-directing antagonists. That failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves.96Of the three political women incarcerated in the Lexington HSU - Susan Rosenberg and Silvia Baraldini of the RATF case and independentista Alejandrina Torres all had ceased menstruating, were afflicted with insomnia and suffered chronic hallucinations before the facility was ordered closed in 1988. 97 By then, the HSU had been condemned as a violation of elemental human rights by organizations ranging from Amnesty International to the ACLU.98 The BoP response was that it was "satisfied" with its Lexington experiment, and would replicate the HSU's essential features at its Marianna facility, designed to hold several hundred women rather than a mere handful. 99Marion is even more entrenched. Established in 1963 as a replacement for the infamous Alcatraz super-maximum prison, which had grown cost-prohibitive to maintain, it contains the first (created in 1972) of the federal government's formal Stammheim-style behavior modification "control units." 100 The ideological function intended for control units was made apparent virtually from the outset when independentista Raphael Cancel Miranda was sent there to undergo "thought reform" after having served more than fifteen years in confinement. 101 By 1983, the control unit model was deemed so successful by BoP authorities that the occasion of an "inmate riot" was used as a pretext by which to convert the entire prison into a huge behavior modification center. 102 Since that year, all of Marion has been on "lock down" status, with prisoners confined to their cells, in isolation 23 hours per day, often chained spread-eagled - for "disciplinary reasons" - to their concrete slab "bunks." Strip searches are routine, prisoners are shackled upon leaving their cells for any reason, all contact visits are forbidden and reading material is tightly restricted. As was the case at Lexington, no dear criteria for getting out of Marion have ever been posited by the BoP; the length and extent of prisoners' torment is left entirely to the discretion of prison officials. 103
Also as was the situation in the Lexington HSU, a significant number of those incarcerated at Marion are political prisoners or Prisoners of War. At present, these include independentista Oscar Lopez-Rivera; black liberationists Richard ThompsonEl, and Kojo Bomani Sababu; Virgin Islands Five activist Hanif Shabazz Bey; Euroamerican Prisoners of War Bill Dunne and Ray Luc Levasseur; and Plowshares activist Larry Morlan. Scores of others have spent varying lengths of time there. In another parallel with Lexington, Marion has been repeatedly condemned by a broad range of organizations, including Amnesty International, as systematically violating United Nations proscriptions against torture and other minimum standards required by international law with regard to the maintenance of prison populations. 104 Rather than favorably altering the situation inside Marion, the BoP has indicated that it considers the lockdown permanent, and has begun to clone off comparable environments - such as the N-2 "death unit" at Terre Haute (Indiana) federal prison - in other maximum security facilities for men.
Although U.S. District Judge Barrington Parker ordered the Lexington HSU closed on August 15, 1988 - on the specific basis of its use as a political prison - his decision was overturned by a federal appeals court on September 8, 1989. 105 As Susan Rosenberg has put it: "The appeals court held that the government is free to use the political beliefs and association of prisoners as basis for treating us more harshly and placing us in maximum security conditions. Further, the appeals court ruling means that no court can question or dispute the prison's decision even if those decisions involve the prisoner's politics or political identity ... This legal decision gives official sanction to the BoP to place political prisoners into control units." 106 The rulers of Orwell's totalitarian empires could not have put it better than the judiciary of the United States.
