Days of Rage (26 page)

As luck would have it, they were at that very moment in Washington, D.C. The next day they bombed the U.S. Capitol.

 • • • 

The Capitol bombing on March 1, 1971, was the rare Weatherman action in which all, or almost all, the leadership gathered to take part. Ron Fliegelman believes he built the bomb, though his memory is hazy. Security in the building at the time was all but nonexistent; a visitor’s bags weren’t searched, and there were no metal detectors. According to several sources, Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin simply left the bomb behind a toilet in a first-floor men’s room on the Senate side of the building. According to an account Jeff
Jones gave years later, it failed to explode, forcing a second team of Weathermen to sneak back inside and rearm it. After a warning call, the bomb finally detonated at 1:30 a.m., demolishing the restroom, heavily damaging an adjacent barbershop, and blowing out windows in a Senate dining room down a corridor. Damage was estimated at $300,000. On ABC News, anchorman Howard K. Smith noted that it was the first attack on the Capitol since the British burned it in 1814.

Much like the bombing of New York police headquarters nine months earlier, the Capitol bombing had a lasting and dramatic impact on security measures in Washington. For the first time, Capitol police began inspecting all purses and parcels brought into the building. All employees were issued photo identification cards. Gallery attendants received training in identifying suspicious persons. Seldom-used nooks and corridors were closed off. In the following year, the Capitol police force was increased in size to 1,000 officers from 622. Patronage appointments, until then routine, were stopped. Training was formalized. The department purchased its first bomb-sniffing dogs.

The roving prosecutor, Guy Goodwin, was brought in to lead a grand-jury investigation of the bombing. It turned into a fiasco. In a flurry of headlines, a nineteen-year-old demonstrator named Leslie Bacon was arrested—and later released—while several of her friends, including the Yippie activists Stew Alpert and Judy Gumbo, were subpoenaed to testify. Gumbo appeared with the Weather Underground logo—a neon rainbow—painted on her forehead. Alpert wore a sequined dress with appliqué spelling out
BERNARDINE
. Yet another Yippie, noting that Goodwin was looking for urban guerrillas, showed up in a gorilla suit. In the end no indictments were returned. “We didn’t do it,” Gumbo said when asked about the bombing. “But we dug it.”

 • • • 

Days after the Capitol bombing, Jones and Dohrn returned to San Francisco with no sense that the FBI knew their identities or that agents were searching for Jones’s truck. But as luck would have it, it wasn’t the truck that got them into trouble. It was a single, innocuous money order, for all of $650.

It came from Dohrn’s friend Dennis Cunningham. On the morning of
Thursday, March 4, the Chicago attorney walked into a Western Union office on West North Avenue and slid a wad of cash—$650, as he recalls—to the clerk. He used a fake name, Herman Schaefer, as he had done before, to send a money order to a “Duane Lee Compton” in San Francisco. Afterward he returned to his office, unaware he was being watched by FBI agents. Within minutes word was relayed to the Bureau in San Francisco, where dozens of agents were pursuing Weatherman leads. None had any evidence the money order was connected to the underground, much less knew who Duane Lee Compton was; most agents assumed he must be some aboveground supporter. “We were gonna set up a surveillance,” recalls one agent, Max Noel, now retired. “The theory was, they would send an aboveground person, and we would follow them. This was the only plan. When we questioned this, the fact that there was no secondary plan if a fugitive arrived, the supervisors pooh-poohed the idea and told us not to worry.”

By early afternoon a team of agents was in place at a Western Union office on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. One worked the counter. Another stood ready in a backroom with a camera. Two or three “beards”—long-haired street agents—lingered in the lobby, while two more teams sat in cars outside. For hours they waited. No one appeared. Finally, at seven thirty that evening, a customer asked for the money order from Chicago. He was a young man, tall and blond, with a bushy beard. At first glance, several agents thought it might be Jeff Jones himself. As the man left, two of the beards bumped into him. Afterward both whispered into their radios that it was Jones.

Chaos erupted among the FBI contingent. Jones was a Top Ten fugitive (on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List), and there were strict rules for arresting a Top Ten. “FBI regs say an SAC must be present to arrest a Top Ten,” Max Noel recalls. “If he isn’t, we would have to explain it to headquarters. So it was total turmoil deciding what to do.” As the agents argued, the man who might be Jeff Jones stepped into a waiting Volvo sedan.
*

Behind the wheel the agents could see a young woman. Some thought it was Cathy Wilkerson. It wasn’t. It was Bernardine Dohrn.

 • • • 

As Jones remembered that day years later, he and Dohrn had just finished a meeting in the Tenderloin district and were on their way to meet Bill Ayers for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Stepping into the Western Union office, Jones immediately sensed that something was amiss. Three men were lounging inside, wearing what he sized up as hippie attire straight out of a dinner-theater production of
Hair
. As he took his place in line, his mind raced. Were they FBI? If they knew who he was, he would already be under arrest. If they didn’t and he ran, they would be suspicious.

He waited as the line inched forward. In a back office an FBI agent began snapping photographs. When his turn came, Jones slipped his driver’s license under the glass and received his money. He stepped outside onto the sidewalk, keeping his head. Sliding into the car, he turned to Dohrn. “There were three guys in there, and I didn’t like the looks of them,” he said. She told him a man had just walked by and glanced at their license plate. As they pulled from the curb, Jones stared in the rearview mirror. He saw a black sedan ease from its parking space, take a slow U-turn, and begin to follow them.

“Then the parade began,” Max Noel continues. Neither the pursued nor the pursuers, however, were entirely sure this was real; the agents weren’t certain who they were following, and Jones and Dohrn weren’t certain they were being followed. Unsure, Dohrn drove north from Market, then turned left onto California Street. One FBI car trailed behind, while two others drove parallel streets. The procession continued for several blocks until Dohrn, taking no chances, suddenly took a sharp left turn onto Mason Street. The FBI car behind her, caught unawares, stopped at the light, then radioed to the other two cars to take up the pursuit. In the resulting confusion, neither was able to spot the speeding Volvo. “They lost ’em,” Noel recalls.

It was the first time anyone in the FBI had so much as laid eyes on Weatherman’s leadership in more than a year. “It was shattering,” Noel continues. “So afterward everyone came back to the office. The supervisors said it
couldn’t have possibly been Jeff Jones. Then they developed the film, looked at the photos, [and said,] ‘It sure looks like Jeff Jones.’ We had his prints from Western Union, and finally the fingerprint guy came and ID’d it as Jones. Well, you can imagine the uproar. The concern was how we explain this to headquarters.”

As agents debated what to do, Jones and Dohrn met Bill Ayers and other friends at the restaurant. Safely inside, Jones began to doubt himself. It was not at all clear that they had been pursued. The men at Western Union couldn’t really have been FBI agents, could they? He told himself he was being paranoid. Still, once dinner concluded, Jones suggested to John Willard Davis that they switch cars. Handing him the keys, Jones and Dohrn took Davis’s car home.

“By this time it was evening,” Max Noel continues. “So we start this huge canvass around the 1000 block of California at Mason, where the car was lost. Then one of the agents leaving to go home, driving down Market, he sees the Volvo, parked right outside a laundry. They set up a surveillance on the vehicle.” The stakeout began at eleven. A few minutes after midnight agents saw a young man walk up and unlock the car. It was Davis. Agents leaped from their cars and rushed him, guns drawn. Davis raised his hands and went peacefully. They took him to the Hall of Justice, where, during hours of questioning, he denied knowing anyone named Jeff Jones. The Volvo, he insisted, belonged to his parents, which the FBI confirmed.

“So they had to release him the following morning,” Noel says. “We watched him walk up to a pay phone on Van Ness and start making calls, obviously warning everyone. Everyone in the office was assigned to saturate that neighborhood up on California and Mason. We knocked on every door, but it was fruitless. Nothing ever came of it.”

When Jeff Jones heard what happened, he realized the danger they were in. He had registered a car using the same name he used to pay the electric bill for the Pine Street apartment. It was only a matter of time, he suspected, before the FBI made the connection and raided the apartment. He realized that Weather’s entire Bay Area infrastructure—the fake IDs, their cars, the apartments—was tainted. He telephoned Pine Street and told everyone to leave immediately. They did so, leaving their belongings behind. Years later,
remembering an episode that came to be known in Weather lore as “the Encirclement,” some of those involved would recall running out just as FBI agents stormed the flat.

That wasn’t the way it happened. In fact, despite knocking on every door in the neighborhood, the FBI didn’t find the connection. A week later, however, a Chinese American landlord telephoned the San Francisco office saying a group of young white people had disappeared from an apartment he owned at 1038 Pine Street; when he pushed his way inside, he found what appeared to be bomb-making equipment. Max Noel and three other agents were at the apartment within the hour.

“We found what was essentially their West Coast bomb factory,” Noel recalls. “There were stacks of communist, Cuban and antigovernment literature, Maoist tracts. Disguise kits. And lots of bomb-making equipment, pliers and wires and pipes and tools, one big block of C-4 plastic explosive. We called in the bomb squad.” Agents later identified fingerprints taken from the apartment as those of every significant Weatherman believed to be on the West Coast.

Not that it mattered. They were all gone.

 • • • 

The day after the FBI almost captured Dohrn and Jones, Friday, March 5, 1971, people began gathering in New York for the one-year anniversary of the Townhouse. Down on Eleventh Street the rubble of the Wilkerson residence had been cleared; all that remained was a vacant lot fronted by a high plywood barrier. Someone had painted the words
WEATHERMAN PARK
across the top; beneath it hung a few posters and hastily scrawled slogans:
POWER TO THE UNDERGROUND,
read one.

The next afternoon Abbie Hoffman led a procession up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square. Everyone gathered in front of the townhouse. “Terry, Teddy, and Diana were fighting to make this a free country, which it’s not,” Hoffman told the crowd. “They saw the nature of the beast imperialism and were ready to give their lives to destroy it. They paid the ultimate
sacrifice. They made a mistake. They weren’t careful with explosives. From now on we’ve got to be careful.”

It was the last anyone would hear of the Weather Underground for months. What none of the protesters gathered at “Weatherman Park” that day realized, however, was that an entirely new front of the underground struggle was poised to open, one that was far more desperate, and far more deadly. It happened barely sixty days later, on the far side of
Manhattan.

Part Two

THE BLACK LIBERATION ARMY

08

“AN ARMY OF ANGRY NIGGAS”

The Birth of the Black Liberation Army, Spring 1971

The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities; conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country’s prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement. The Black Liberation Army stands for freedom and justice for all people.

—Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur

MAY 1971 | NEW YORK CITY

Along the Hudson River, high on Manhattan’s left shoulder, Riverside Park was a green finger of calm, an oasis of playgrounds and gardens a world away
from the angry traffic on the parkway over by the river. That warm May evening, the 19th, the park was in bloom, a dazzle of pink and crimson on the Japanese dwarf cherry and crab apple trees.

One man who lived on the park, at 404 Riverside Drive, was Frank Hogan, known as Mr. Integrity, who had been the New York district attorney since taking over from Thomas Dewey all the way back in 1941. The week before, Hogan had wrapped up the longest case in state history, the trial of the Panther 21, and while the proceedings were finally over, policemen still sat outside his building around the clock. Weatherman had firebombed the home of the presiding judge, John Murtagh, the year before. It was May 1971. No one was taking any chances.

At 9 p.m. a green-and-white cruiser relieved the officers. Inside sat a pair of thirty-nine-year-old patrolmen, Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti. Darkness had fallen barely fifteen minutes later when, to their dismay, a dark Maverick suddenly sped past, going the wrong way down 112th Street, a one-way street. Officer Binetti wheeled the squad car into a sharp U-turn and gave chase as the Maverick swerved left onto Riverside Drive.