Outlaws of Amerika:

The Weather Underground

Organization
Contents
Foreword i
By Roy M. Cohn
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . iIi'
The Weather Underground Organization , 1
WUO Origins 1
SDS and Vietnam 3
SDS International Contacts 4
First Terrorism 9
Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army 12
WUO Alliance with Black Revolutionaries , 12
Republic of New Africa .. , . , . , . , , 16
The Underground and Aboveground 19
National Hard Times Conference 22
May 19th Communist Organization 36
Nyack Defense 39
Terrorist Support Activities 39
Terrorist Unity Rally 43
Nyack Update 46
The National Lawyers Guild and the Weather
Underground Organization 51
Origins of the NLG 53
NLG Mission 54
NLG and IADL 54
NLG Organizes Support for Terrorism 56
The NLG and Cuba 58
The NLG and the WUO 58
NLG Control ofWUO 63
NLG and WUOI PFOC Support for the
Symbionese Liberation Army 73
Nyack Case Involvement 73
NLG: Organizational Support for Terrorism 77
1971 NLG Convention 77
Prison Task Force 78
GrandJury Project 81
1977 NLG Convention H4
NLG 1979 Convention 86
NLG 1980 Convention 88
Mterword 91
By Mark Felt
Glossary 93
Foreword
By Roy M. Cohn
During the 1970s, the American internal security and counter-intelligence com-
munity was virtually destroyed through attacks by certain publicity-seeking Sen-
awrs and Congressmen, and a sensation-seeking national media which utilized
selective "leaks" and disclosures in order to present a bizarre, distorted picture of
the purpose and operations of the intelligence, counter-intelligence and internal
security agencies.
Fortunately, and through the efforts of associates of ours and the common-
sense of the voters, some of these legislators have been turned out of office-
notably now ex-Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who was chairman of the Senate
InteJligence Committee. However, important assistance to these witchhunts
against the intelligence agencies was provided by an "anti-intelligence lobby"
headed by the National Lawyer's Guild, a Communist-controlled organization of
revolutionary lawyers; the Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist think-tank that
has been characterized as .. the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which
would be resisted if they ,,:ere to originate openly from the KGB"; the Center
for National Security Studies, a lobbying group set up by IPS and NLG mem-
bers working with the American Civil Libenies Union.
The primary target of this anti-intelligence lobby was the Federal Bureau of
Investigation because it is responsible for federal internal security and counter-
intelligence programs. The main criticism of the FBI, contrary to common
sense, focused on its investigations of two of the most violent revolutionary or-
ganizations in America, the terrorist Weather Underground Organization which
arose from Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panther Party
which gave birth to the terrorist Black Liberation Army.
The FBI was in possession of intelligence information that showed that the
Weather Underground Organization terrorists who murdered a police officer in
San Francisco with one of their bombs and who were responsible for bombings of
the U.S. Capiwl, State Department and government and private buildings in
New York. Boston. Chicago. Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles were in con-
tan with hostile foreign powers including Cuba, North Vietnam, the Soviet Un-
ion. Algeria, Czechoslovakia and the People's Republic of China; and that the
WUO had contacts with foreign terrorist groups ranging from the Palestine Lib-
eration Organization (PLO) and Quebec National Liberation Front (FLQ) to the
Japanese Red Army.
Yet when scapegoats for the campaign against the intelligence agencies were
sought, those selected were the FBI agents responsible for catching terrorists and
their leaders, Mark Felt and William Miller. Felt and Miller were prosecuted py
the Carter Justice Department and his Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti for
violating the civil rights and privacy of members and associates of the terrorist
Weather Underground Organization. Five former Auorneys General of the
United States testified that Felt and Miller had acted perfectly proper within pol-
iey from the President down approving warrantless searches in national security
cases. This policy is supported by the leading United States Court of Appeals
t
decision on the subject, which even allowed into evidence, matter found in such
a warrantless search. Mter a "mock" trial-I know.) I was in the courtroom and
testified-they were convicted in December 1980. Both men were pardoned by
President Reagan in 1981. President Reagan pointed out that Carter had given
amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers, and praised Felt and Miller for their un-
selfish service to our country.
Coinciding with the disclosures of FBI investigations of the terrorist fugitives
of the Weather Underground were guidelines for internal security investigations
issued by Ford Administration Attorney General Edward Levi that effectively
barred the FBI from conducting any internal security investigations.
When the Department of Justice commenced prosecution of the FBI anti-
terrorist officials, members and supporters of the Weather UndergrouDR' filed
civil suits for damages. The leading plaintiff in these suits is Judith Clark, a pub-
lic member of the Weatherman faction, who has been indicted in relation to the
killings of a Brink's guard and two police officers, and the robbery of $1.6 million
in Nyack, New York, and who, it has been reported, has boasted of her ties to
PLO support groups and of her visit with a leader of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) earlier this year.
The Weather Underground's National Lawyers Guild (NLG) attorneys used
the Felt-Miller case as a prior bar against prosecution of terrorist fugitives. As
WUO leaders surfaced one at a time over the past four years, they faced only
minor local charges, most related to 1969 riots in Chicago. Each WUO fugitive
refused to provide any information on the terrorist network and who had har-
bored them. No federal grand juries were impaneled to investigate. Against
the warnings of veteran investigators that an extensive terrorist infrastructure was
in place in the United States with strong ties to Cuba and foreign terrorist organi-
zations, the conventional wisdom said, "it can't happen here. "
But it did happen. Investigations stemming from the Nyack, New York rob-
bery and murders have brought before the public interconnections among the
Weather Underground Organization and its overt political arms and fronts,
and "Third World" terrorist groups including the Puerto Rican FALN, the
Black Liberation Army, the Republic of New Africa, and an in-prison network of
revolutionary convicts associated with the Black Guerrilla Family.
Does the Nyack episode foreshadow a re-emergence of revolutionary terrorism
and sabotage in this country? Only time will tell, but what is clear is that the
anti-intelligence lobby has been far more effective than the officials of the FBI
and state and local police departments prefer to admit.
As the direct result of the anti-intelligence agency campaign, the FBI is unable
to send informants or undercover agents into the overt support groups for terror-
ist organizations from which new terrorists are recruited. The FBI cannot even
collect and study literature produced by terrorist support groups in which they
discuss providing "material aid" for terrorism; and cannot monitor protests by
these groups to look for terrorist fugitives even when they are demonstrating
outside the Justice Department on Inauguration Day. Furthermore, the CIA is
still forbidden to monitor the activities of American supporters of terrorist
groups when they are traveling overseas.
The Attorney General's guidelines need a thorough overhaul so that the FBI
can do the job it is supposed to do-protect life and property. Three people were
killed in New York City near the beginnings of the Weathermen's operation,
II
and much more recently, three men were killed at Nyack because past political
leaders bowed to pressure from the supponers of terrorism. We must not wait
for more deaths to take the necessary corrective action.
The morale and effectiveness of the FBI and the CIA are at stake. If they had
not been crippled by the politicians and organizations referred to here-does
anyone doubt that we would have had advance notice of the seizure of our em-
bassy and the hostages in Iran? We cannot afford more tragedies like this.
Roy Cohn won a stellar place in the anti- Communism pantheon as Assistant U. S. At/orne)' bal/ling
Communist Parly leaders and Soviet espionage agents. He won lasting national recognition as Sen-
atorJoseph McCarthy's aggressive chief counsel on the Senate Government Investigations Subcom-
mittee. He practices law in New York City.
ttl
Introduction
During the nearly 11 years since the leadership of the Weatherman faction of
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) publicly announced their decision to
transform their revolutionary faction into a clandestine terrorist organization on
December 31, 1969, at their "War Council" conference in Flint, Michigan, an
elaborate terrorist infrastructure has been developed, the Weather Underground
Organization (WUO). As documented by declassified FBI files, agents of both
the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Cuba were involved at high levels in
the formation of the WOO. Fugitive WUO leaders were reported sighted in Cuba
and other foreign countries. In a documentary made recently by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, Larry Grathwohl, a former FBI informant in the WUO
who was surfaced in April 1970 in connection with the arrests of Linda Evans and
Diane Donghi, stated that WUO had special code names and if cut off from their
comrades, they called the Cuban embassies in Toronto or Mexico City and iden-
tified themselves by their code name. A Cuban DGI officer would put them in
touch with WUO members they were seeking who also were identified by code
names.
The WUO has built protective concentric structures and organizations of sup-
poners and fronts around its core leadership. These overt WUO arms include the
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), the John Brown Book Club aBBC).
and May 19th Communist Organization (M-19 CO) based in New York City.
In addition the WUO has established liaison and cooperation with at least four
other active terrorist groups-the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Libera-
tion (FALN) and its overt wing, the Movimiento de Liberacion Naciona/ (MLN);
with Chicano revolutionaries associated with the Denver Crusade for Justice. La
Raza Unida Party (LRUP) and terrorist Continental Liberation Army (CLA); the
Black Liberation Army (BLA); and the Republic of New Mrica (RNA).
To provide support to these and other terrorist groups, the WUO's oven arms
have set up a number of fronts. Among them are the New Movement in Solidarity
with Puerto Rican Independence (NMSPRI); the Women's Committee Against
Genocide (WCAG); and theJohn Brown Anti-Klan Committee aBAKC).
The arrests that followed the $1.6 million armed robbery of a Brink's armored
truck in Nyack. New York, with the killing of two Nyack police officers and one
guard and the wounding of others, have brought into sharp focus the interchange-
ability between the WOO's "underground" terrorists and members of its overt
arms. The Nyack incident has also highlighted the WUO's active collaboration
on overt and covert levels with the BLA and RNA.
This report will outline the development of the WUO, its alliances and ac-
tivities during the past decade.
v
The Weather Underground
Organization
WUOOrigins
Both the WUO and BLA evolved as factions supporting immediate recourse to
terrorist urevolutionary armed struggle" within earlier activist groups. The WUO
arose as the street-fighting Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), and the BLA originated as the Eldridge Cleaver faction of the Black
Panther Party (BPP).
Originally a non-violent socialist student organization, SDS' s past can be traced
back to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) founded in 1905 byJack London,
Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow and Walter Lippmann. The ISS changed its
name in 1921 to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID); it established an
auxiliary group, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID).
Under the impetus of the civil rights movement, SLID was reorganized in
1959; its name was changed to SDS. From the stan, SDS/SLID maintained close
relations with the militant civil rights groups. SDS participated in the April 1960
founding conference of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose leader at that time,
James Farmer, had been a SUD national secretary during the 1950s.
Initially SDS enjoyed no noticeable popularity on campus; however, early in
1962 the SDS national executive committee asked Tom Hayden, SDS field organ-
izer and leader of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, to draft a statement
on the relevance of SDS to the new wave of student activism.
"A newleft must start controversy across the land, if
nationalpolicies andnationalapathy are to be reversed. "
Hayden's Uport Huron Statement" called for development of a university-
based Unew left" and said, "A new left must start controversy across the land, if
national policies and national apathy are to be reversed." With some revisions,
it was adopted at the June 1962 national convention which elected Hayden SDS
president; and it paved the way for the subsequent growth in membership and
militancy.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover estimated that at the height of its influence in
1969, SDS had 250 chapters and 40,000 members. It was obvious that SDS was
able to influence many thousands of students and campus drop-outs who never
1
held formal membership, but who panicipated in SDS-initiated demonstra-
tions and campus takeovers. Some of these later joined other revolutionary
groups.
Cooperation between the predominantly white SDS and black militants begun
during the civil rights movement continued. SDS cooperation with the violence-
oriented SNCC was so close that until the end of 1964 SDS described itself as a
"Northern Arm" of SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
(MFDP).
During this period SDS began to move more openly toward a revolutionary
position. The Port Huron statement mandated SDS cooperation with Clsocial-
ists," but SDS was quickly penetrated by Communists and Marxist-Leninists
despite a chaner clause barring them. The penetration of Communists in large
pan derived from SDS' s involvement in the "civil rights" movement in which
Communist Patty, U.S.A. fronts including the Southern Conference Educational
Fund (SCEP) and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) were highly active.
SDS's long cooperation with the "foremost legal bulwark of the Communist
Pany, its front organizations and controlled unions," the National Lawyers Guild,
on which SDS came to depend heavily as its illegal actions, campus sit-ins and
takeovers increased, began about 1964. At that time the NLG formed the Com-
mittee for Legal Assistance in the South (CLAS) and sent revolutionary lawyers,
some of them Communist Partyt USA veterans and others already more enamored
of the new Communist regime in Cuba than of Stalin and Kruschev, to Mississippi
and other areas to work on legal problems faced by various demonstrators.
SDS committed itself to an electoral politics campaign backing the seating of
MFDP delegates to the Democratic National Convention and in Congress. That
effon was coordinated by NLG activists Arthur Kinoy, Benjamin E. Smith,
Morton Stavis and William Kunstler. When it failed, SDS permanently aban-
doned electoral politics; but SDS leaders continued dose cooperation with the
NLG. Bernardine Dohrn, later a top WUO leader, was hired as the NLG's na-
tional student organizer in 1967.
Rising anti-white sentiment among black militants became such an issue early
in 1965 in SNCC and CORE that cooperation among black and white revolution-
aries was disrupted.
SDS began to move openly info aMarxist-Leninist analysis
of IIU. S. imperialism" andclass war.
SDS began to move openly into a Marxist-Leninist analysis of ClU.S. imperial-
ism" and class war. Late in 1964 the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in Berkeley
gained SDS support, and SDS moved into anti-Vietnam, "anti-imperialist"
agitation on the campuses. At the same time SDS was "colonized" by the youth
groups of competing Communist panies including the CPUSA's youth group, the
W.E.B. DuBois Clubs; the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and its youth group,
the May 2nd Movement (M2M) whose leaders went to Cuba in the summer of
2
1963; and Trotskyist Communist groups including the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP) and its Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) , and the Workers World Party
(WWP) and its Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF).
At itsJune 196.5 national convention SDS droppedits con-
stitutionalprovision barring Communists from member-
ship....
At its June 196; national convention SOS dropped its constitutional provision
barring Communists from membership; four months later liO ceased funding
SOS.
As revolutionaries became more influential within SOS the organization
moved into full-scale support for the Cuban regime and of the Vietcong and
North Vietnamese aggression in Indochina.
SDS and Vietnam
SOS supported an anti-Vietnam march in May 1964 called by the May 2 Move-
ment of the Progressive Labor Party and urged SOS members to support it in SOS
publications. Collaboration with the Communists became so common that SOS
issued an invitation for the CPUSA's OuBois Clubs to send observers to the
Oecember 1964 SOS National Council meeting at which SOS officially came out
in opposition to U.S. policies of "containment" of Communism and to U.S.
military action to help an ally against Communist aggression.
The principal guest speaker at the SOS meeting was I.F. Stone, who gave an
account of the "history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia." Stone, the
3
brother-in-law of secret CPUSA member leonard Boudin. the paid agent of the
Cuban government. had previously floated lines during the Korean conflict dis-
missing POW charges of abuse by their Red Chinese and North Korean cap-
tors as "propaganda." and promoting North Korean claims that the United
States was conducting germ warfare.
Following Stone's presentation, SDS leaders maneuvered the National Coun-
cil into calling for an anti-draft march on Washington in which the CPUSA. its
"peace" fronts, the disarmament groups and rival revolutionary parties all joined.
Confrontational policies, oven suppon for the Vietcong terrorists and identifica-
tion with Third World Marxist-leninist revolutionary movements involved in
, 'armed struggle" followed. and the new recruits to SOS came not from the ranks
of intellectual academics, but of malcontents willing to consider violence as a tac-
tic for attaining their goals.
SDS International Contacts
The contacts of 50S with hostile foreign powers and revolutionary terrorist
groups was initiated through the various Marxist-leninist organizations working
with 50S. The Trotskyist SWP and its Young Socialist Alliance had formed the
backbone of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee which was disbanded after one
of its active members, lee Harvey Oswald. a former defector from the U.S. Army
in Japan to the Soviet Union, killed President Kennedy. Members of the Pro-
gressive labor Party and its May 2 Movement traveled to Cuba in 1963 and 1964.
Amongthoseparticipating was a member ofthe Politburo
ofthe Brazilian Communist Party, Carlos Marigheill,
who shortly thereafter became the leading theoretician of
urban te"orism.
Several international c o ~ e r e n c e s were strongly influential in setting 50S's
course toward revolutionary violence. These included the Tricontinental Con-
ference in Havana inJanuary 1966 at which the Organization of Solidarity of the
Peoples of Mrica. Asia and latin America (OSPAAl). a Cuban apparatus for the
expon of revolutionary terrorism and subversion. was established. Among those
participating was a member of the Politburo of the Brazilian Communist Party,
Carlos Marighela, who shonly thereafter became the leading theoretician of ur-
ban terrorism.
The imagination of many 50S activists was captured by Che Guevara's speech
sent to OSPAAl in praise of armed struggle:
"How shining and near could we see the future if two. three, or many Viet-
nams flourished on the face of the earth. with their quota of death and their
great tragedies, their daily heroism. their repeated blows against imperial-
ism.... And if we were all capable of uniting so that our blows would be more
solid and better delivered. so that every kind of aid to peoples engaged in
4
fighting would be still more effective, how great the future would be-and
how near!"
In)uly 1968 SDS sent an observer to the Havana conference of OSPAAL's re-
gional affiliate, the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS). That con-
ference of leaders and potential leaders of Castroite armed movements urged a
unified fight to ovenhrow "Yanqui imperialism" and governments friendly to
the United States.
They readwritings on te"onsm andguerrilla warfare by
Mao, andbegan a close examination ofrevolutionary
"armedstruggle" models...
Similar encouragement was provided to U.S. militants by Vietcong and North
Vietnamese spokesmen whom SDS members met on trips to Cuba and Canada.
SDS leaders who would form the Weatherman faction began supporting studies
of Marxist-Leninist theory. They read writings on terrorism and guerrilla war-
fare by Mao, and began a close examination of revolutionary "armed struggle"
models, using not merely the rural campaigns of the Cuban, Vietnamese and
Red Chinese examples, but also the manual on urban terrorism written by
Carlos Marighela, The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, published in Eng-
lish, Spanish and other languages in OSPAAL's Tn'continental Bulletin, and
the Marighela-inspired Tupamaros terrorists ofUruguay.
In September 1967,41 U.S. activists including IS SDS leaders traveled to Brati-
slava, Czechoslovakia, to meet with Vietcong and North Vietnamese officials
and discuss tactics for ending U.S. support to South Vietnam. Seven continued
on to Hanoi. In November 1967 four SOS members were invited to visit North
Vietnam. The four were Karen)o Koonan, who a year earlier was active in the
CPUSA youth club at UCLA (and now is a leading NLG activist); Jeff Jones;
Cathy Wilkerson and Steve Halliwell. The group stayed for 10 days in Cambodia
where they held "many long conversations with a number of Vietnamese of-
ficials and Cambodians," but were unable to complete their journey to Hanoi
because of U.S. air raids.
During February 1968 Mark Rudd, Karen Ashley and Gerry Long were SOS
members who visited Cuba. In April the Columbia University SOS chapter,
whose members became the core of the WUO terrorist organization, led a violent,
week-long campus takeover resulting in nearly 700 arrests. Contacts between
SOS leaders and foreign Communist officials continued. At the same time infatu-
ation with street fighting resulted in a workshop on sabotage being given at the
SDS national convention inJune 1968.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reponed to the National Commission on the
Causes and Prevention of Crime that the convention participants studied "flush-
ing bombs in toilets to destroy plumbing; using sharp, tripod-shaped metal in-
struments to halt vehicles; firing Molotov cocktails from shotguns; jamming
5
radio equipment; and dropping thermite bombs down manholes to destroy com-
munications systems. ' ,
In August 1968 SDS memhersparticipatedin the riots at
the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which took
place after eight months ofplanning by representatives
ofSDS, the NLG, CPUSA andother revolutionary groups.
In August 1968 SDS members participated in the riots at the Democratic Na-
tional Convention in Chicago which took place after eight months of planning by
representatives ofSDS, the NLG, CPUSA and other revolutionary groups.
Mark Willi4m RII"d
The accelerating trend toward involvement in terrorist violence was evidenced
by a pamphlet entitled simply "Sabotage," circulated at the SDS national coun-
eil in October 1968. The pamphlet was a reproduction of pages from a manual,
150 Questions for a GueTTilla, by Albeno Bayo, a Cuban general who boasted of
being the man who trained Fidel Castro.
Organizing the legaldefense was Bernardine Dohrn of
the National Lawyers Guild.
At this time a line was developed by the SDS national leadership dominated
by the Columbia SDS members that in order to attract new members and broaden
its outreach to "white, working class youth." SDS should emulate street gangs
6
and demonstrate that it was a I 'fighting movement." This " Action Faction"
evolved into the Weathermen.
A month following the arrests of nearly 700 students and others occupying
Columbia University, the Columbia SOS Action Faction led by Mark Rudd
staged yet another building occupation. On the second day police arrested 160
SOS militants. Organizing the legal defense was Bernardine Oohrn of the Na-
tional Lawyers Guild. For many of this group student life and the university had
become irrelevant. "Two, three, many Columbias" became the SDS slogan. The
nucleus of the Weatherman faction took shape-professional revolutionaries. SDS
took the position that their head-on confrontations with university authorities
and police would "expose their repressive nature" and radicalize new recruits.
They considered themselves as taking revolutionary "internationalist" and
"ami-imperialist" positions within a key institution of U.S. society, the uni-
versity, the training ground for the new elite.
In June 1968 Bernardine Dohrn ran for the SDS post of Inter-Organizational
Secretary. Asked to define her politics, she replied, "I consider myself a revolu-
tionary Communist .. , No opposing votes were cast.
The Weatherman faction took its name from the title of a position paper writ-
ten in the spring of 1969, taking a line from a Bob Dylan song, "You don't
need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The position paper
was written for the 'most part by individuals associated with the SDS National
Office in Chicago.' Signed by Karen Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn,
John "J.J." Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen,
Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd and Steve Tappis, the document attempted to analyze
the potential for revolution in the United States. The Weatherman leaders ar-
gued that they should:
'I ... build a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as
fast as they have to and are able to, and still itself keep up with that black
movement enough so that white revolutionaries share the cost and the blacks
don't have to do the whole thing alone. "
HowlITaNorlon MilChlinger
"'..
7
The Weather Underground Organization and its overt arms have never altered
that position; and the involvement of WUO members with the Black Liberation
Army and Republic of New Mrica in the events in Nyack, New York, has demon-
strated that the Weather Underground has indeed been willing to "share the
cost" with black terrorist groups.
Following the dissolution of SDS during sharp faction fighting at itsJune 1969
convention, a large number of Weatherman leaders traveled to Cuba inJuly 1969
to meet with Vietcong and North Vietnamese representatives. On August 29,
1969. the 50S newspaper New Left Notes published an eight-page supplement
containing an article, "Bring the War Home," which stated it reflected "five
weeks in Cuba, two of them meeting and traveling around with the Vietnam-
ese," and an additional week "working, planning and writing on a Cuban ship
as we returned.... " The article reponed that the Vietcong had asked the Weath-
ermen to organize violent protests against U.S. support of South Vietnam. In
the words of the article:
"We understood that the reason the Vietnamese called the meeting was to
get us moving against the war again. The Vietcong were giving us a kick in the
ass.... Kick ass is the main message we hrought hackfrom the meeting....
"At the meeting in Cuba with the PRG [the Vietcong Provisional Revolu-
tionary Government. dissolved in 1975 as soon as the North Vietnamese Army
captured Saigon], Van Ba (head of the PRG delegation) told us: 'When you go
into a city, look for the person who fights hardest against the cops. That's the
one you talk all night with. Don't look for the one who says the best thing.
Look for the one who fights.' "
The Weathermen movedimmediately to carry out the
Vietcong directive for revolutionary violence.
The Weathermen moved immediately to carry out the Vietcong directive for
revolutionary violence. A "national action" was called for October 8-11, 1969,
in Chicago. The riots that developed from these demonstrations became known
as the "Days of Rage. " The Days of Rage riots commenced with the first Weath-
erman bombing [acknowledged a year later in Communique #5 signed by Bern-
ardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones and Bill Ayers]. The bomb destroyed the Haymarket
riot police memorial statue.
It is significant that many of the approximately 250 Weathermen arrested in
the "Days of Rage" riots. riots organized by the WUO leaders at the instigation
of Vietnamese and Cuban Communist officials. remain active with the WUO's
overt support arms such as the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), the
John Brown Book Club aBBC), John Brown Anti-Klan Committee aBAKC)
and May 19th Communist Organization (M-19 CO).
Having failed to spark another Vietnam on the streets of Chicago as a result of
firm action by the Chicago police. the Weathermen called a "War Council" in
Flint, Michigan. December 27-30. 1969. As the revolutionary Liheration News
Service (LNS) reported at that time:
8
"Weatherman sees revolutionary change in America as happening almost
solely, if at all, as a belated reaction to a successful world revolution including
a successful revolt by the black colony inside the U.S. "
During the heated 'psyching" sessions of the War Council, the Weathermen
reveled in concepts of "barbarism" and praised the mutilation and murder of
actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, by the Manson gang. LNS quoted
Bernardine Dohrn as saying:
"We're about being a fighting force alongside the blacks.... We have to get
into armed struggle. ' ,
WHO WI! ARI!
he r
, tho ' ~
plo of tho .,.
& revolutionary p' , ~
Tho prosra of tho Woo '
- US 1IIporlallm out tho
- Peaco. Oppoao 1apcrioUot
- l'ight rocloa. Build an on
Support oolf-clotonlination
- Strugglo OSoil1Ot OOXiOb and tho
- Organize the vorlttna clasa. l'iSht fo Power to tho 1'001'10.
In 0 atnale aentence, tho pr08r4l& _ana thio: Kobilizo tho oxploited and opprea""d peoplo to waso the
class atruaala 4ga1nat US 1J::Iperiol1aa, the c=n cnollJ.
The LNS article continued by commenting:
"Part of armed struggle, as Dohrn and others laid it down, is terrorism.
Political assassination... and literally any kind of violence that is considered
anti-social were put forward as legitimate forms of armed struggle. "
As the Flint War Council closed, some 40 Weatherman leaders facing riot and
other criminal charges disappeared. Many of those who remained in the open
commenced organizing the first Venceremos Brigade to Cuba.
First Terrorism
The Weathermen commenced bombings on October 7, 1969 by targeting the
Haymarket police memorial statue in Chicago the night before the "Days of
9
Rage" riots. Two days after the December 4, 1969 deaths of Chicago BPP
leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark during a police raid, the WUO bombed
police cars in vengeance for the deaths of the BPP leaders, but did not take public
responsibility for years.
The making ofshrapnel-packed, anti-personnel bombs
andpipe bombs commenced.
The WUO's collectives in the San Francisco area, Detroit and New York tar-
geted the police and judicial system. The making of shrapnel-packed, anti-
personnel bombs and pipe bombs commenced. In mid-February Weatherman
collectives and cadres in the San Francisco Bay area, Boston, Seattle, Santa
Barbara and New York took the lead in carrying out riots, arson and bombing
attacks following the contempt of coun convictions of the Chicago Seven.. The
riots marked 'The Day After" (IDA) the convictions.
The WUO's 1974 political statement, Prairie Fire, concluded:
I 'Whatever decisions Black people and other oppressed peoples make in ex
ereising this right to self-determination, white revolutionaries and anti-imper-
ialists have a very clear-cut responsibility to suppon these decisions once they
are arrived at. This does not mean to suppon only those decisions one approves
of,.... Support.. .is a principle and a prerequisite to successful revolutionary
movement in the oppressor nation. "
Black Panther Party and
Black Liberation Army
The BPP was founded in California in 1966 by a small group of black militants
led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Eldridge Cleaver joined a year later. To
avoid a parole revocation hearing slated for November 27, 1968, Cleaver fled to
Cuba where he lived until May 1969. Complaining of Cuban racism, Cleaver
moved to Algeria where he was provided with facilities by the Algerian govern-
ment and functioned as BPP Minister of Informa,tion. Late in 1970 factional
fighting erupted. Newton expelled Cleaver's leading supporters including Elmer
"Geronimo" Pratt, the "Deputy Minister ofDefense" of the Los Angeles BPP.
In February 1971 Newton expelled 11 New York BPP members, most indicted
in 1969 for bombing conspiracy as pan of the Panther 21 and who were about to
go on trial. Several Panther 21 defendants and associates fled to Algeria. Among
them were Richard "Dhoruba" Moore; Michael "Cetewayo" Tabor; Don Cox
and Nathaniel Burns, 35, aka "Sekou Odinga," arrested after a chase and shoot-
out in Queens, New York, on October 23,1981.
As a follow-up to these riots, on February 16, 1970, in San Francisco, an anti-
personnel bomb was planted in a window of the small police station in Golden
10
This phoJograph was tal-en outside the]ustice Depmment during President Reagan's inauguration.
Gate Park. The explosion killed one officer and wounded others. The press re-
ported two suspects were seen running from the scene: a tall long-haired blond
male in his early twenties. and a stocky middle-aged male. This murder remains
unsolved.
According to WUO defectors, among the leading members of the Bay Area
Weatherman collectives at this time were Lincoln Bergman, Arlene Eisen Berg-
man, Clayton van Lydegraf, JeffJones, Julie Nichamin, Karen Latimer and Scott
Braley. Nichamin had returned from Cuba where, in cooperation with Cuban of-
ficials. she took the lead in organizing the first Venceremos Brigade (VB).
Members ofthe VB who askedthe Cubans for training in
"armedstruggle" are known to have receivedtraining in
explosives, the use ofautomatic weapons andother
firearms, andin clandestine organization andcommuni
cations.
Organizing and selection of candidates for the first five VBs to Cuba was un-
der the control of WUO veterans. More recently members of the CPUSA and its
youth group. the Young Workers Liberation League (YWLL) have become the
dominant VB organizers. This change appears to be the result of strong protests
11
by the CPUSA that it should have responsibility for such liaisons. Some 5,000
people are estimated to have traveled to Cuba on VB-related trips. Members of
the VB who asked the Cubans for training in "armed struggle" are known to
have received training in explosives, the use of automatic weapons and other ftre-
arms, and in clandestine organization and communications.
One month after the murder of the police officer in the Park Police station in
San Francisco, a Weatherman bomb factory in New York exploded, taking the
lives of three terrorists who were preparing an anti-personnel bomb-Ted Gold,
Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins. Bernardine Dohrn wrote [Communique No.
7, December 6, 1970], "Diana and Teddyhad... both spent weeks with the Viet-
namese in Cuba.... They fought in the Days ofRage in Chicago. "
Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin fled from the collapsing structure. They
and other WUO fugitives have been reported to have fled the United States, with
the aid of members of the Cuban U.N. Mission, to Czechoslovakia. Other WUO
fugitives were reponed at various times during the next 10 years in Canada and
other countries.
WUO Alliance with
Black Revolutionaries
The WUO's alliance with black revolutionaries dates [0 the late 19605 when
SOS-supponed Black Panther Parry (BPP) leaders and members were arrested or
jailed for various crimes. Partially as the result of the organizing of Bernardine
Dohrn as NLG national student organizer, a considerable number of revolution-
ary law students and lawyers were attracted to the Weatherman faction. Many of
12
these had become involved in defense work for BPP members and leaders in-
cluding the New York Panther 21, the New Haven 12, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey
Newton and GeorgeJackson.
NLG lawyers and law students who played leading roles in defending these
cases have continued to be the first choice of WUO members who have been ar-
rested; in representing activists in the WUO's oven arms and fronts; and have
represented WUO members during negotiations with federal and local prosecu-
tors during the slow careful process of resurfacing WUO fugitives while avoid-
ing in almost all cases jail sentences and appearances before any grand juries that
might have investigated the terrorist infrastructure.
WUO-relatedpublications have consistentlyprovided
support for black revolutionaries in andout ofprison.
WUO-related publications have consistently provided support for black
revolutionaries in and out of prison. Overt members of the WUO have played a
leading role in the revolutionary prison movement. WUO members in the NLG
have provided defenses for prisoners charged with riot offenses from Attica in
1971 to the Pontiac Brothers acquitted earlier this year.
WUO member Russell Neufeld, one of those who had been indicted on bomb
conspiracy charges, in 1974 joined the staff of the NLG's newspaper for prison-
ers, Midnight Special, which got into the jails despite its open advocacy of terror-
ism as 'armed struggle" and its printing of communications from the BLA and
radical prisoners through the NLG's sponsorship. During 1975 and 1976 WUO
memberJudith Clark edited the NLG prison newsletter.
Members ofthe Cleaver BPPgroup were in contact with the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) andmaintained
liaison with the Soviet-controlledAfrican National
Congress (ANC) ...
Members of the Cleaver BPP group were in contact with the Palestine Libera-
tion Organization (PLO) and maintained liaison with the Soviet-controlled Af-
rican National Congress (ANC) through Johnstone Makatini, then ANC's chief
of liaison for arranging terrorist training in Cuba and Algeria and now the prin-
cipal ANC representative to the United Nations.
The New York Post [October 29, 1981] reponed that Burns and other mem-
bers of the BPP Cleaver faction in Algeria had traveled to Angola and received
training from Cubans while fighting with the Marxist-Leninist Popular Move-
ment for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) whose regime is maintained by the
presence of 20,000 Cuban troops plus several thousand Soviet and Warsaw Pact
13
POl/erfrom Na/iolllZl
/tfora/orium AgainJl
Police RepreJJion. which
organizeda march on the
UnitedNa/iom in 1979
to charge the UnitedStatel
with "iolating the human
rightl ofChicanoI Mejicano.
Puerto Rican. Black and
Na/ive AmeriuRpeoplel.
technicians and advisers. Burns reportedly later fought in the ranks of the Angola-
based South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), a terrorist group
trained and backed by the USSR and Cuba.
Burns and Samuel Smith were riding in a car bearing a license plate traced to the
escape of members of the Nyack robbery and murder team. Both were reportedly
wearing bullet-proof vests, but Smith was shot in the head. In Smith's pocket was
a bullet fired from the gun of Nyack Sgt. Edward O'Grady who was killed at a
roadblock.
In January 1971 Cleaver announced his intention to lead an "Afro-American
Liberation Army." He reorganized his U.S. followers into the Revolutionary
People's Communications Network (RPCN) and sent his wife, Kathleen Neal
Cleaver, back to the United States as his proxy organizer. A headquarters was
opened in Brooklyn.
The first" acknowledged act of BLA terrorism was a campaign of anti-police
terror that started on May 19, 1971, the anniversary of the births of Malcolm X
and Ho Chi Minh. Using a machine-gun, BLA members shot and severely wound-
ed two police officers guarding the home of the Manhattan District Attorney who
was prosecuting the Panther 21 case. Two days later New York City police of-
ficers WaverlyJones andJoseph Piagentini were shot to death in an ambush.
Two hours before the murders of officers Jones and Piagentini, a package was
delivered to the New York Times which contained a license plate from the car
14
used in the May 19th attack, a .45 caliber bullet from the machine-gun and a
statement from the BLA which said:
, I All power to the People.
, 'Here are the license plates sort after [sic] by the fascist state pig police.
"We send them in order to exhibit the potential power of oppressed peoples
to acquire revolutionary justice. The armed goons of this racist government
will again meet the guns of oppressed Third World peoples as long as they
occupy our community and murder our brothers and sisters in the name of
American law and order... the domestic armed forces of racism and oppression
will be confronted with the guns of the Black Liberation Army, who will mete
SUPPORTTHE STRUGGLE
FOR BLACK PEOPLE'S HUMAN RIGHTS!
INDEPENDENCE FOR THE NEWAFRIKAN NATION!
15
out in the tradition of Malcolm and all true revolutionaries real justice. We
are revolutionary justice.... ' ,
The next day another BLA statement arrived that took responsibility for the
murders of the two police officers. Latent fingerprints were found inside the
package wrapping. They were identified as those of Richard "Dahruba" Moore,
one of the former Panther 21 defendants who had been acquitted of bombing
conspiracy charges; and of another Black Panther Party activist, Eddie Joseph.
Until the discovery of the fingerprints authorities had thought Moore was still in
Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver.
On June 2, 1971, four men-Moore, Eddie Joseph, Irving "Butch" Mason
(also a BPP'member) and Augustus Qualls-were arrested in the Bronx during
the holdup of an after-hours dub. Among the weapons seized by police was a
.45 caliber submachine-gun which was found to be the same one used in the
May 19 attack. Moore was sentenced to seven years imprisonment after convic-
tion of the bar holdup; and on April 26, 1973, he received a life sentence which
he is now serving for the machine-gun attack.
It is noted that Cleaver faction members on the West Coast for a time used
the name Mro-American Liberation Army (AALA). Many AALA members, in-
cluding Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, were jailed following convictions for crimes
ranging from assault and armed robbery to murder. AALA/BLA members form
the core of the California-based prison gang, the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF).
Republic ofNewMrica
The Republic of New Mrica (RNA) was established in March 1968 in Detroit.
The RNA's founding conference was attended by some 3,000 people who listened
to 200 delegates discuss plans for demanding a separate, independent all-
black country to be carved out of the southern United States with the assistance
of the United Nations.
The organizers of the RNA were two brothers, Milton and Richard Henry. The
fust RNA president was Robert F. Williams, then in self-imposed exile in Cuba,
Tanzania and Peking to avoid prosecution for kidnapping a white couple during
a North Carolina racial disturbance. During Williams' residence in Red China he
produced a pamphlet-sized magazine, The Crusader, that was smuggled into
the United States. In The Crusader Williams issued calls for black Americans to
destroy the major cities through terrorism, violence and sabotage; and to facili-
tate this, Williams provided detailed instructions. Soon after his return to the
United States in December 1969, Williams resigned from the RNA. [North
Carolina eventually was able to extradite Williams; but the death of one of the
kidnapping victims 15 years after the event and the deteriorating health of the
other victim caused North Carolina authorities to eventually drop the charges
against Williams. ]
In 1970 Richard Henry, who prefers to be called Imari Abubakari Obadele,
took control of the RNA. The next year the RNA established its "provisional
capital" on a farm in Hinds County, Mississippi, outside Jackson. During a joint
raid by the Jackson Police Department and FBI on the RNA "Government
Center" in Jackson on August 18, 1 9 7 ~ . , a shootout erupted in which a Jackson
16
police lieutenant was killed and another officer and an FBI agent were wounded.
An anicle by the BLA published in the Fall 1978 issue of Breakthrough, the
political journal of the WUO's Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), en-
titled I 'By Any Means Necessary," stated:
"In August 1971, the BlA opened a country-wide counter-offensive which
began in solidarity with the Republic of New Mrica, whose leadership was at-
tacked and arrested in Hinds County. Mississippi. Days later, in response to the
state's murder of George Jackson, the BLA attempted to fire a 66mm anti-
tank gun at the Mission police station in San Francisco, attacked an SFPD
patrol car, bombed a Bank of America branch, and ambushed the Ingleside
police station in San Francisco, killing one cop and wounding others."
Contacts between the RNA and persons linked to the BLA continued. In
November 1971 Kathleen Cleaver and Afeni Shakur of the BPP 21 participated in
a conference of black militants in Tallahassee, Florida, with RNA vice president
Virginia Collins, aka Dara Abubakari.
NEW AFRIKA
With 11 leaders fighting convictions for murder and other charges stemming
from the 1971 Jackson shootout, the RNA became relatively inactive. In De-
cember 1976, having exhausted his appeals, Richard Henry began serving a 12-
year federal prison sentence. He instructed the ,. officers of the Provisional
Government" of the RNA to demand at the U.N. "freedom for all Prisoners of
War (RNA-lI, the Wilmington Ten, the Black Liberation Army, Black and In-
dian and Pueno Rican and others)."
In the fall of 1977 the "Provisional Government of the Republic of New
Afrika" [sic] received suppon from the WUO/PFOC and from black revolu-
tionary and pro-terrorist groups close to Cuba in holding a demonstration out-
side the U.N. to publicize RNA's demand for "self-determination" and suc-
cession.
WUO publications consistently have supponed jailed RNA activists; and the
Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa has joined in cosponsor-
17
AhmedObgfemi, representative ofthe Republic ofNew Afrika. speaking in San Franci.rco. 1979.
ing demonstrations with the WUO's overt arms and fronts in New York. Among
these was a demonstration on April 22, 1981, at the U.N. in support of the
Soviet-backed terrorist South West Mrica People's Organization (SWAPO),
sponsored by three WUO front groups-the Material Aid Campaign for ZANU
(PF) [Zimbabwe African National Union/Patriotic Front] which also used the
name the "Dollars for Bullets Campaign;" the John Brown AntiK1an Commit-
tee OBAKC); the Moncada Library which is the Brooklyn, New York, offices
used as the headquarters of the WUO-support network; and the Women's
Committee Against Genocide.
Endorsers of that rally included the May 19th Communist Organization (M-19
CO), which is the Communist party founded by the WUO in New York; the
Committee for the Suit Against Government Repression (CSAGR), a group set
up to publicize a lawsuit in which Judy Clark is the leading plaintiff against
the FBI by members and supporters of the WUO and its overt arms; the
Patrice Lumumba Coalition (PLC); Casa El Salvador; the Palestine Solidarity
Committee (PSC), whose leaders, George Cavaletto and Sheila Ryan Cavaletto.
are former Weathermen who continue to work closely with the WUO support
arms in New York; and the American Coordinating Committee for Equality in
Sport and Society (ACCESS), a group backing South African revolutionary
terrorist groups founded by Marxist sports activists who were associated with fugi-
18
tive Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) terrorists William and Emily Harris and
Patricia Hearst.
The Underground and Aboveground
A major difficulty for law enforcement in tracking the WOO group is they have
made mandatory the adoption, particularly by the rank-and-file and potential
new recruits, of the "alternative culture" lifestyle including communal living,
drug abuse and homosexuality. Some exceptions were made to this rule, but
generally these involved some of the NLG members whose skills and legal posi-
tion were needed. Dohrn outlined the rationale:
"Collectives have sprung up from Seattle to Atlanta, Buffalo to Vermont,
and they are units of people who trust each other both to live together and
to organize and fight together. The revolution involves our whole lives; ... It
is our closeness and the integration of our personal lives with our revolutionary
work that will make it hard for undercover pigs to infiltrate our collectives.
It's one thing for pigs to go to a few meetings, even meetings of a secret cell.
It's much harder for them to live in a family for long without being detected."
In an effort to recapture its former position as the vanguard of the U.S. revolu-
tionary left, in May 1974 the WOO came forward with its ISO-page political
statement, Prain"e Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. Signed
by Bernardine Dohrn, Billy Ayers,]eff]ones and "Celia Sojourn" (pseudonym),
the document proclaimed "We are communist women and men, underground
in the United States for more than four years."
The WUO statedit intendedto develop "a clandestine
political organization engagedin everyform ofstruggle,
protectedfrom the eyes and weapons ofthe state... II
The WUO stated it intended to develop "a clandestine political organization
engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and weapons of the
state, a base against repression... from which to attack. "
In Praine Fire the WOO leaders instructed their followers to become active
in support of virtually every revolutionary issue from homosexuality and women's
rights through backing the PlO and Mrican, Puerto Rican, Chicano, American
Indian and black revolutionary and terrorist groups.
The WUO members and supporters formed discussion groups around the
document [more than 35,000 distributed by the Communications Co., Box
40614, Station C, San Francisco. Calif. 94110 in 18 months] in order to carry
out the WUO Central Committee's directive to form an overt WOO arm, the
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC).
PFOC chapters were formed in the Bay Area [P.O. Box 5246, San Francisco,
Calif. 94101], New York [P.O. Box 411, Brooklyn. N.Y. 11217], Boston, Chi-
cago, Seattle. Los Angeles. Texas and other areas. Bombings continued.
19
From the spring of 1975 through July 1976 ehe WUO produced an official
journal, Osawatomie, named for the place in Kansas where abolitionist John
Brown fought pro-slavery settlers. Osawatomie was published by the John Brown
Book Club aBBC), P.O. Box 22383, Seattle, Wash. 98122; and materials by a
WUO women's collective were produced and distributed by Inkworks, 4220 Tele-
graph Avenue, Oakland, Calif. 94609.
WUO members andsupporters hadalready been very
active in supporting the American Indian Movement...
WUO members and supporters had already been very active in supporting the
American Indian Movement (AIM) armed takeover of Wounded Knee, South
Dakota, and in the Native American Solidarity Committee (NASC); and in the
defense committee for Puerto Rican Nationalist Party militant Carlos Feliciano,
indicted on charges of making and planting bombs for the Movimiento de
Independencia Revolucionano en Armas (MIRA) [Armed Revolutionary Inde-
pendence Movement]. It is noted that Feliciano, represented by William Kunst-
ler, eventually pleaded guilty to possession ofexplosives.
Work in the Carlos Feliciano defense brought WUO associates in contact with
Puerto Rican revolutionaries who are believed to have formed the initial core of
the FAI.N; and expanded their support for the causes of the Puerto Rican clarmed
national liberation struggle" to agitation for pardons for the five Nationalist
Party terrorists who attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman in 1950
and who in 1954 in the U.S. Capitol shot several Congressmen. Both attacks had
been carried out in coordination with attempted armed uprisings in Puerto
Rico. WUO veterans were active with the Committee for the Freedom of the Five
Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners (CFFPRNP) which shared an address [Box 164,
162 E. Houston St., New York, N.Y. 10002 (212/677-2553)] with the Friends of
Roberto Santucho, a support group for the Argentinian leader of the terrorist
People's Revolutionary Army (ERP).
Film Moves Ctzmp ofAIM

II
20
CarlOJ Feliciano
The WUO's PFOC remained highly supportive of the BLA. OnJune 12, 1975,
at least 12 WUO and BLA supporters were present in a New York courtroom
when three BLA members were provided with explosives and other escape ma-
terials concealed in legal-sized envelopes. Twelve individuals were subpoenaed
by a grand jury: Naomi Burns, Judy Clark, Ron Hill, Yuri Kochiyama, Bart
Lubow, Ellen Sokolow Molinari, Curtis Mullins, Martha Pitts, NLG attorneys
Martin Stolar and Elliott Wilk, Evelyn Williams and Sundiata Balagoon.
The PFOC's major organizing effort was the National Hard Times Conference
in Chicago, January 30-February 1, 1976, which was attended by nearly 3,000
supporters and sympathizers. PFOC activists taking leading roles included Russ
Neufeld, Shelly Miller, Annie Stein (mother of WOO fugitive Eleanor Stein
Raskin), Jennifer Dohrn, Mike Deutsch (NLG), Nancy Ryan, Sylvia Warren, Jed
Proujanski, Melinda Rorick, Julie Nichamin, Laura Whitehorn, Barry Weinberg,
Susan Waysdorf, Susan Tipograph (NLG), Flint Taylor (NLG), Mara Seigel,
David Saxner, Eve Rosahn, Miles Pustin, Lance Pustin, Sarah Loft, Lisa Lawrence,
Kitty Kirnatsu, Connie Keresey, Sarah Kaplan, Jeff Haas (NLG), Penny Grillos,
Brian Flannigan, Marc Fliegelman, Melody Ermachild, Bob Cantor (NLG),
Nancy Barrett, Alan Berkman, Diane Block and Arlene Eisen Bergman.
Two weeks after the conference concluded, the Information Digest, an authori-
tative newsletter that has long monitored the WUO and its activities, published
an eyewitness account of the Chicago meeting. This account is reprinted here.
21
National Hard Times Conference
(Reprinted from InfomJ(ltion Digest)
A national project of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). the overt
aboveground arm of the terrorist Weather Underground Organization (WOO).
the National Hard Times Conference was held in ChicagoJanuary 30-February 1.
1976. at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. Some 2.500 persons, including
a large number of old Students for a Democratic Society (50S) members and
former members and supporters of the Weatherman SDS faction, jammed the
plenary sessions.
The National Hard Times Conference (NHTC). a long-planned scheme of the
WUO and its PFOC. was designed to build a new and expanded circle of sym-
pathizers around the WUO core. To build this newapparat, the PFOC chose to
call a conference ostensibly to discuss the problems related to the economic re-
cession. The method of consolidating the new nationalapparat will be organizing
mass demonstrations to disrupt the July 4th Bicentennial celebrations in Phila-
delphia.
The call for the mass demonstrations was originally issued by the Cuban-backed
Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). and it has been endorsed by representatives
of a wide variety of groups operating as the July 4 Coalition, P.O. Box 205.
Cooper Station, New York. N.Y. 10003. a coalition formed by the PSP the
weekend before the Hard Times Conference.
The organization Resist, "a call to resist illegitimate authority," 720 Massa-
chusetts Avenue, Rm. 4, Cambridge. Mass., provided some funds for preliminary
conference organizing. However, Representative Larry McDonald (D-Ga.), re-
ported in the Congressional Record (February 11, 1976), that approximately
$3.000 of the $7,000 in actual conference costs at the Circle Campus had been
provided by an organization entitled the American Issues Forum: Chicago (AIF).
The AIF: Chicago was funded in September 1975 by a $350,000 grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent Federal agency.
Rep. McDonald said that his staff had interviewed Rev. Richard Leucke. di-
rector of the AIF: Chicago, who had "confirmed that a substantial sum (to his
recollection, $2,700) had been provided to the Hard Times Conference as the re-
sult of an application by Shelly Miller and Russell Neufeld.... "
The AlP was created to promote public discussions of '" key issues" confronting
America during the Bicentennial period. AIF states that its programs are to be
developed with the full participation of "professional humanists." "Typically,"
states AIF, "these are teachers and scholars... engaged in one of the following
studies: philosophy, history, literature, language, linguistics, jurisprudence, com-
parative religion. ethics, archaeology, theory and criticism of the arts, and con-
ceptual aspects of social science." a list specified in the Congressional legisla-
tion. It is difficult to see how Marxist-Leninist terrorists come under those cate-
gories.
According to the Congressional report. AIF director Leucke stated that the Hard
Times applicants had been vouched for by Eugene Eidenberg, Vice Chancellor
of the University of Illinois Circle Campus. Eidenberg is a member of the AIF
Committee which must approve all grants and also serves as Chairman of the Illi-
nois LEAA Commission which rules on all LEAA grant applications in that state.
The National Hard Times Conference opened on Friday evening. January 30.
22
1976, with a "Peoples Tribunal" to "demonstrate both the distinctive qualities
and the similarities which connect local struggles, and... allow us to pass judg-
ment against U.S. imperialism for its crimes against the people."
The large number of "testifiers" included:
Yvonne Golden-leader of the San Francisco Black Teachers' Caucus, San
Francisco, California. [Hard Times Conference Board]
Rob Brinkman-leader of the recent strike of interns and residents at Cook
County Hospital, Chicago, Illinois.
Mafundi-Atmore-Holman Brothers, Inmates for Action, Birmingham, Ala-
bama.
Kathy Dorsey-former member of national executive board, Coalition of Labor
Union Women (CLUW) and former co-chairwoman of National Minority Com-
mittee of CLUW, Brooklyn, New York.
Pete Kelley-president, Local 160 (UAW); co-chairman, United National
Caucus, Warren, Michigan.
Evalina Antonetty-leader of education and daycare struggles; director of
United Bronx Parents, Bronx, New York [not present].
Penny Grillos-student activist at Brooklyn College, Prairie Fire Organizing
Committee, Brooklyn, New York.
Vu Ngoc Kon-Union of Vietnamese in the U.S.
Ted Dostal-long-time leader of the Steelworkers' Union; fighter for the
rights of the elderly, East Cleveland, Ohio. [A founding member of the Trotskyist
Communist Workers World Party]
Fred Stover-long-time leader of farmers' struggles, U.S. Farmers Association,
Hampton, Iowa.
Tapson Mawari [or Mawere]-representative ofZANU in the U.S.
Evelyn Weiner-leader of unemployment struggles and struggles in the 1930s;
Lower East Side Mobilization for Peace Action, New York, New York.
Rudolfo Lasano-leader of CASA-General Brotherhood of Workers and the
fight for the rights of undocumented workers, Chicago, Illinois. [served as a
judge, instead of a witness]
Pedro Grant-president of the Boiler Makers' Union of Puerto Rico, AFL-CIO;
director of Movimiento Obrero Unido (MOU-trade union federation); member
of the central committee of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, Puerto Rico. [did
not participate in the tribunal, but was present the following day]
Ellen Moves Camp-American Indian Movement.
Doris Lucas-Welfare Mothers for Justice. New York, New York.
Rafaelo Garcia-Chicano industrial striker, Los Angeles, California.
Irrero Guitierriez-CASA, northern California.
The judges or "hearing officers" of the "Peoples' Tribunal" included:
Wilbur Haddock-presiding officer; president, United Black Workers; mem-
ber, Hard Times Conference Board, Newark, NewJersey.
Ella Baker-long-time civil rights activist; founder of SNCC, New York, New
York.
Thelma Hamilton-20-year leader of parents' education struggles, commun-
ity leader, Brownsville, New York.
Bill Kunsder-Iong-time people's lawyer, New York, New York.
Antonio Rodriguez-Secretary-General of CASA, General Brotherhood of
Workers, Los Angeles, California.
23
Olga Sanabria-member of the Pueno Rican Socialist Party, New York, New
York.
Irwin Silber-Executive Editor of the Guardian newspaper, New York, New
York.
Annie Stein-a leader of People Against Racism in Education; member of the
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and member of the Hard Times Conference
Board, New York, New York.
Ronald Starks-Black Panther Party, who replaced BPP "official spokesper-
son" David Graham DuBois, of the Hard Times Conference Board.
Virginia Collins-vice president, Republic of New Africa; member, Hard Times
Conference Board, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Iberia Hampton-mother of dead BPP leader Fred Hampton, Chicago, Illinois.
Yuri Kochiyama-National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners,
New York, New York.
DonJose Major-Pueno Rican Socialist Party.
Queen Mother Audley Moore-Universal Association of Ethiopian Women,
New York, New York.
Roben Mendoza-American Indian Movement, San Francisco, California.
Two luminaries of the left who did not attend the opening Tribunal as sche-
duled were Carlos Feliciano of the Hard Times Conference Board, who in 1973
pled guilty to charges of possession of explosive devices and a pistol and was
sentenced to four years imprisonment, but was released for time served in July
1975; and attorney Anhur Kinoy of the Center for Constitutional Rights. It was
announced that Feliciano had the flu; but Kinoy, founder of the M ~ Pany
Organizing Committee (MPOC) [formerly the National Interim Committee for a
Mass Party of the People (NIC)], and active supporter of the Puerto Rican So-
cialist Party (PSP), was busy preparing Congressional testimony to be delivered on
February 9, 1976, attacking the proposed Compact of Permanent Union be-
tween the U.S. and Pueno Rico.
In summary, the Tribunal was disorganized and ran late, with both "testifiers"
and "hearing officers" placing the blame for the range of society's problems-
bad housing, racism, sexism, unemployment, etc.-on capitalism.
The Saturday session began late to a capacity crowd estimated at over 2,200
persons. NHTC organizers announced that by Friday evening, 1,700 persons had
registered, and this figure was substantially swelled on Saturday. The Illinois
Room at the Circle Campus had aI, 500 seating capacity which was surpassed
before the first speaker began.
To cope with the chaos, marshals wearing yellow armbands ferried people in
and out of the main room to the cafeterias where the proceedings were being
broadcast. Blacks attending the conference were very few, numbering about 100.
Many of those were members of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), brought into
the meeting through Virginia Collins.
However, about a quarter of those present were Spanish-speaking, principally
members of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and CASA. A significant delega-
tion from the American Indian Movement (AIM) was present.
But although the PFOC organizers had taken care to select a Hard Times Con-
ference Board which was drawn in large part from black and Third World organ-
izers of the 'working class" or what passes for such in New Left circles, the over-
24
whelming number of those attending the NHTC meetings were educated whites
in their twenties or early thirties, no longer in school, many of whom were former-
ly active as SDS members.
But where many of the former SDS activists had previously expressed contempt
or indifference toward working class organizing class and radical organizing in
the trade unions, preferring to look to the revolutionary guerrilla movements of
Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria or Cambodia for models, many of them now appeared to
recognize the need for grassroots organizing to prepare for a revolution.
The opening plenary started very late with a keynote speech by PFOC leader
Jennifer Dohrn. Dohrn's speech centered on presenting the Hard Times Bill of
Rights as the "unifying program" containing the "immediate demands for the
working class as a whole to fight the depression." Dohrn hailed the document as
the program to unite the unemployed and all those hit by inflation, cutbacks
in welfare, education, housing and other government social welfare programs.
The plenary sessions were extensively covered by the radical and alternative
media. As many as eight radio stations were present broadcasting parts of the
proceedings live. Representatives of Liberation News Service, the Village Voice
and the Pacifica network were present, as was former indicted Weatherman
Robert "Bo" Burlingham in his present guise of a New Left journalist.
Yvonne Golden of the Hard Times Conference Board served as moderator for
the afternoon session. She introduced Kathy Dorsey, a black activist in the Com-
munications Workers of America and Coalition of Labor Union Women who is
close to the Workers World Party (WWP), which did a large part of the organiz-
ing for the Hard Times Conference. Dorsey mentioned as the sort of action neces-
sary to fight the "hard times," the occupation of New York Mayor Beame's of-
fice during which a hole was kicked in the wall. She warned that violence has al-
ready started and that it is going to continue.
Pedro Grant, a member of the PSP Central Committee and head of the Movi-
miento Obrero Unidos (MOU) [United Workers Movement] spoke about labor
organizing in Puerto Rico. Grant claimed that he now had one-third of the total
union membership in Puerto Rico under his control through the MOV, and said
that if his negotiations with the Center for Labor Action were successful, "nearly
half' of the total union membership would come under Marxist-Leninist leader-
ship. Grant concluded by stating that he had grown up watching movies in which
the' 'sheriff killed the Indian chief. " But now, said Grant, the Indian chief will
kill the sheriff.
More than 22 workshops were held at the National Hard Times Conference.
The workshops were in general overcrowded and reflected the vague politics of
the PFOC organizers, despite the efforts by Workers World cadres to give direc-
tion and impetus. Principal workshops and their leaders, in summary, included:
-Angola-Nick deFreitas, Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF); Fred
Goldstein, WWP; Prexy Nesbitt, Coalition for the Liberation of Angola, Mo-
zambique and Guinea-Bissau; Irving Davis and Mohammad Kenyatta, Black
Economic Development Corp.
The Angola workshop, chaired by deFreitas, a writer for Workers World, pro-
posed a resolution giving "full and unconditional support to the People's Re-
public of Angola, led by the MPLA," which was passed by the NHTC plenary
with two friendly amendments. The amendment by Prexy Nesbitt, who reported-
ly had taught at a FREUMO school based in Tanzania during the guerrilla war
25
against the Portuguese, condemned all recruiting of mercenaries to fight against
MPLA.
The amendment offered by the PSP praised the Cubans for sending troops to
Angola and for having sent assistance to the revolutionary guerrilla movements
in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Said the PSP amendment:
"There has not been any doubt in our minds of the Cuban people's solidar-
ity with the liberation movements throughout this planet. It was shown in Viet-
nam, Cambodia and Laos, it is being shown in Angola, and it will be shown in
Pueno Rico. ' ,
-Anti-Repression-Winslow Peck, Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate;
Mike Deutsch, National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Chicago; Truman Nelson; AI-
benoMares.
-Busing and Anti-Racist Organizing-Nancy Ryan, People Against Racism in
Education (PARE); Jane Katz; Fred Hobby.
Dominated by members of the WWP and YAWF, the workshop proposed
various demonstrations, but the proposal was not passed by the NHTCplenary.
-Chile-Bobbye Ortiz, Monthly Review; Kevin Duncan.
-Cultural Workers-Bev Grant, Cultural Workers Front, N.Y.; Rev. Frederick
Douglas Kirkpatrick; Betty Garcia, PSP; and Bernice Reagon, a former SNCC
activist who had appeared at the October League's rival National Fight Back Con-
ference in Chicago in December 1975.
-Childcare (changed from "daycare" because of objections that some parents
work night shifts)-Sylvia Warren, PFOC; Danny Albert; Louise Sweeney; and
Nick Sanchez, an unsuccessful candidate for District 1 school board in New York
City.
-Education-Annie Stein, People Against Racism in Education (PARE) and
member of National Hard Times Conference Board; Eugene Clancy and Georgina
Hoggard, a former member of the District 1 school board in New York City not
reelected.
The workshop reporter, a black woman who apparently was a sympathizer of
the Republic of New Mrica (RNA), began a denunciation of whites and a ram-
bling demand that whites accept total black leadership. The woman was removed
as reponer and replaced by Georgina Hoggard.
-Housing & Tenants-Arnold. Townsend, WAPAC, San Francisco, a member
of the Hard Times Conference Board, and David Duboff.
-Health Care, Drugs & Anti-Sterilization-Sheila Gruchala; Rob Brinkman,
Cook County Hospital; Vicki Wheeler; Rosa Alvarez.
-Economics, Food & Inflation-Claudette Furlongo, YAWF; and Fred Stover,
an aging Stalinoid whose targets ranged from the various corporations involved
in food production and distribution to Ezra Taft Benson.
-Elderly-Ruth Dear and Ted Dostal, founding members of the WWP, who
denounced "ageism" and "youth worship."
-Indochina-Vu Ngoc Kon, Union of Vietnamese Students, who called for
solidarity actions on April 30th, the date that South Vietnam will be "reunited"
with the North Vietnamese conquerors; Sokhom Hing, Khmer Residents in the
U.S.; Donna Futterman; Antonio Villaro; and Cora Weiss of Women Strike for
26
Peace, Clergy and Laity Concerned and now the Friendshipment program of vol-
untary "reparations" for the Vietnamese Communists.
-Labor-Pete Kelley, UAW Local 160; George Thomas, United Black Workers;
Deb Dunfield, USWA.
-Military & Veterans-Gerry Condon, National Council for Universal and Un-
conditional Amnesty (NCUVA), a deserter from the Green Berets who has re-
fused the Presidential "earned re-entry" clemency to tour the U.S. organizing
for NCUVA; George Simpson.
This workshop, which included five active-duty Gis, proposed organizing
against the possibility of U.S. troops being sent to the Middle East and against
use of National Guard troops as "riot cops" and "strike breakers." Other de-
mands included an end to U.S. support of the anti-MPLA forces in Angola and
for the end to all U.S. military installations in Puerto Rico.
-Native Americans-Ella Moves Camp, AIM; Robert Mendoza; Ann Durham,
Native American Solidarity Committee and PARE, N.Y.; David Tilsen;Jed Prov-
janski and Melinda Rorick, San Francisco.
-Organize the Unorganized & the Unemployed Struggle-Susan Klug and
Tom Gardner, WWP;)oel Myron, Eugene V. Debs Caucus; Leo Fletcher; Eveline
"Evvy" Wiener, an aging Stalinoid from LEMPA, N.Y.; and Juan Irizariy, As-
sociation of Farm Workers (ATA), Connecticut.
-Prisons-Tom Soto, WWP; David Saxner; Brooks Whiting; Akil Mafundi,
Inmates for Action, Birmingham, Alabama; and Willie Tate.
Predictably, the ex-convicts and their Leninist supporters called for total aboli-
tion of the death penalty and expressed their solidarity with other revolution-
aries "victimized by the system," including Lolita Lebron and the Puerto Rican
Nationalist Party terrorists; H. Rap Brown, Martin Sostre andJim Grant.
-Puerto Rico-Jose Lopez, Northeastern University, Boston; Olga Sanabria,
PSP; and)ulie Nichamin, Venceremos Brigade and Puerto Rican Solidarity Com-
mittee (PRSC).
The workshop repeated the PSP's slogan for a "Bicentennial without col-
onies," and stressed that Puerto Rico had entered a classical "pre-revolutionary
stage" and immediate organizing was necessary to take advantage of it.
-Students-Charles Isaacs, Staten Island Community College; Miguel Alvarez.
-Undocumented Workers-Rudolfo Lasano, CASA; Enrique Flores.
Other plenary speakers on Saturday included Wilbur Haddock of the United
Black Workers, Newark, New Jersey, who acted as de facto chairman of the
conference. In a highly charged speech, Haddock claimed that when he fust be-
gan to organize at the Ford Mahwah plant, "Ford, the John Birch Society, the
KKK and the Minutemen" all joined to resist him, to no avail.
Vernon Bellecoun of the American Indian Movement was preceded by a drum
song. Bellecourt stated that AIM is l'the shocktroops of Indian sovereignty."
, 'Indians are the landlords of this country," he continued. "It's the first of the
month, and the rent is due, and it's time to pay."
Bellecourt said of the Bicentennial: "When they light the candles on the 200th
year birthday cake, we will be there to blow them out."
Among the activities also held on Saturday afternoon were video tape produc-
tions and film showings. Featured was the Palestine Liberation Organization film
Revolution Until Victory.
27
Saturday evening was devoted to a "cultural program" for the masses of those
attending, but the Hard Times Conference Board and a few others held a private
meeting to discuss the conference. The Board agreed that the Hard Times Bill of
Rights needed a great deal of work before it could be accepted by the groups at-
tending.
The cultural performers included CASA's Teatro Movimiento Primavera. Los
Angeles; Atis Independan, a Haitian group from New York City; Jeanne Mackey
and Mary Trevor. Washington, D.C.; Betty Garcia, PSP dancer, N.Y.; the George
Jackson Players, Chicago; Guy Carawan, an organizer at the Highlander Center
in Knoxville, Tenn., who performed with the Fiction Brothers Bluegrass Band;
and PFOC's Beverly Grant, who appeared with a band from New York City, the
Human Condition.
The Sunday plenaries were chaotic. Women's and gay caucuses took the floor
to protest lack of consideration for their issues and to propose amendments to
the Hard Times Bill of Rights.
The black caucus, which included many members of the Republic of New M-
rica and cultural nationalists, held the floor for almost an hour, demanding en-
dorsement of "the right of self-determination for Black People" and support of
"the struggle for independence in the Cush District of Mississippi as led by the
Provisional Government of the Republic of New Mrica." The white majority,
still apparently suffering "guilt trips" from their "white skin privilege:' passed
the black caucus resolution without debate.
However. the caucus, with assistance from Joe Carnegie of Fightbaek, refused
to yield the floor and continued its harsh criticisms. At that point the conference
was "saved" by an organized and disciplined effort by the Puerto Rican Socialist
Party and CASA.
Carlos Vasquez of CASA demanded that the problems of "undocumented
workers" (illegal immigrants) be discussed, as well as the problems of the white
workers. PSP Central Committee member Jose LaLuz then called for the con-
ference to immediately consider the "action proposals," in particular the call for
mass demonstrations in Philadelphia onJuly 4.
Shouts of "Unidad!" and "Accion" rose in the room. Jim Houghton intro-
duced Charles Isaacs of New York who introduced the action proposals. On the
previous weekend, the PSP had invited most of the groups present to form the
July 4 Coalition. The coalition is to form regional coalitions to organize toward
the goal of bringing 500,000 militants to Philadelphia for July 4. The coalition
will hold a meeting during February to elect a national board.
A proposal by the Workers World Party for a national demonstration in Wash-
ington, D.C., on April 15 was rejected. However, local actions in solidarity with
International Women's Day, March 8, were approved.
Some sort of solidarity actions, probably local, were approved for April 30 and
May 1. April 30 will be Vietnam "reunification" day and May Day is the tradi-
tional Marxist workers holiday. The NHTC agreed that September II, the anni-
versary of the overthrow of Allende in Chile, and November 1, the anniversary of
the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party uprising in 1950 and the attempted assassina-
tion of President Truman, should also be marked with actions.
The National Hard Times Conference Board became the Hard Times Continu-
ations Committee and will deal with specific organizing around those dates.
Although the coming April 20, 1976, meetings of the National Organization
28
for Women (NOW) were endorsed, the gay liber.ation movement received little
recognition. A move to call for support of the New York Christopher Street
commemoration of the Stonewall riots was denounced as C 'Mafia inspired. "
The Hard Times Conference found unity on a broad range of international
issues, calling for MPLA victory in Angola and applauding the vanguard role of
Cuban troops in the fight there. The conference expressed support of the terrorist
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with the c'struggle of the Portuguese
against fascism/' and with the struggle in the Philippines "against the U.S.-
backed Marcos dictatorship. "
Support was expressed for the Cuban Revolutionary Government and for
reparations to the Vietnamese. The conference also supported the cause of the
Cuban-backed Marxist dictator of Panama, General Omar Torrijos, who is at-
tempting to have the United States turn over control of both the Panama Canal
and the Canal Zone. Members of the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee and
PSP were busy during the conference setting up a new Panamanian Solidarity
Committee which is scheduled to hold a national conference in Washington,
D.C., March 13-14, 1976.
The Workers World Party, which had done a great deal of the preliminary
organizing for the PFOC and the Hard Times Board, appeared satisfied with the
conference outcome. The WWP cadres avoided any direct confrontations or tests
of strength with the PFOC.
The conference had no discussion of attending either the Democratic or Re-
publican national political conventions. However, the Youth International Party
poster calling for disruptions was distributed at the conference.
Despite the general chaos of the conference, the Prairie Fire Organizing Com-
mittee organizers were fully satisfied with the results and feel that the beginnings
of a national organization now exist.
The National Hard Times Conference Board, now the National Hard Times
Continuations Committee, includes:
Helen Ackley, Long Island EqualJustice Association
Evelina Antonetty, United Bronx Parents, N.Y.
Brian Becker, Youth Against War and Fascism, N.Y.
Vernon BeUecourt, American Indian Movement (AIM)
SlimColeman, Intercommunal Survival Committee, Chicago, Ill.
Virginia Collins, Republic of New Africa, New Orleans, La.
Walter Collins, former executive director, SCEF and a founder of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); MPOC
Pam Costain, Twin Cities Women's Union
Jennifer Dohrn, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee
David Graham DuBois, Black Panther Party, Oakland, Calif.; MPOC
Carlos Feliciano
Leo Fletcher, United Community Construction Workers, Boston
Ted Glick, Mass Party Organizing Committee
Yvonne Golden, San Francisco Black Teachers Caucus
Beverly Grant, Cultural Workers Front, N. Y.
Wilbur Haddock, United Black Workers, Newark, N.J.
JimHaughton, Harlem Fightback; MPOC
Frederick Douglass Hobby, Black Workers Coalition, Louisville, Ky.
29
Juan Irizariy, Association de Trabajadores Agricolas, Connecticut
Peter Kelley, President, Local 160, UAW; Co-chairman, United National Caucus
Marian Kramer, Welfare Workers forJustice, N. Y.
Maggie Kuhn, Grey Panthers Network
Joel Myron, Eugene V. Debs Caucus
Rosa Negron-(dropped or resigned before conference)
Florencio Merced-Rosa, Political Commission, Puerto Rican Socialist Party
Eddie Sanchez, political prisoner
Annie Stein, People Against Racism in Education (PARE)
Arnold Townsend, WAPAC, San Francisco
Gene Vanderport, Midwest Federation
Carlos Vasquez, CASA (General Brotherhood ofWorkers)
Preliminary organizing for the National Hard Times Conference was done from
the following regional offices:
-Bay Area Hard Times Committee, clo Yvonne Golden, Opportunity Senior
High, 160S. VanNess, San Francisco, Calif. 94103 [415/626-6207].
-Boston Hard Times Committee, 32 Rutland Avenue, Boston, Mass. [6171
267-6557].
-Buffalo Hard Times Committee, clo Attica Now, 1528 Jefferson, Buffalo,
N.Y. 14208 [716/882-0254].
-Youth Against War and Fascism, 730 Main Street, Buffalo, N.Y. 14202 [716/
855-3055].
-Columbus Hard Times Committee, Box 8324, Columbus, Ohio 4320l.
-Denver Hard Times Committee, clo Stan Woods, [303/388-1996].
-National Hard Times Office, Rm. 1601, 53 West Jackson, Chicago, Ill. 60604
[312/341-0539].
-New Orleans Hard Times Committee, clo Virginia Collins, 9130 Fig Street,
New Orleans, La. 70113.
-New York Hard Times Committee, Rm. 411, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York,
N.Y. 10010 [212/691-9281].
-Newark Hard Times Committee, clo United Black Workers, P.O. Box 1855,
Newark, N.). 0710l.
-Norfolk Prisoners Solidarity Committee, P.O. Box 7032, Norfolk, Va. 23509
[804/627-0870].
-Minneapolis Hard Times Committee, clo Twin Cities Women's Union, 2953
Bloomington Avenue, Minneapolis, Minn. 55407.
-Seattle Hard Times Committee, c/o Women Out Now, P.O. Box 22199,
Seattle, Wash. 98122.
-Washington, D.C., Hard Times Committee, clo YAWP & Insurgent Press,
1071 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. [202/783-7079].
Among the sponsors of the National Hard Times Conference were:
Action for Women in Chile, N.Y.
Alliance for Labor and Community Action, Washington, D.C.
American Indian Movement (AIM)
Associacion de Trabajadores Agricolas (ATA), Conn.
30
Attica Now, Buffalo, N.Y.
Black Panther Party, Oakland, Calif.
Black Panther Party, New York
Black People's Lenin Parry, Stanley Co. Unit, Albermarle, N.C.
Black Workers Coalition, Ky.
Toni Cade Bambara
Bronx Committee of Concerned Neighbors, N. Y.
Brownsville Welfare Workers for Justice, N. Y.
Scott Cade
CASA (General Brotherhood of Workers)
Coalition for Survival, Calif.
Columbia Tenants Union, N.Y.
Come! Unity Press
Communist Labor Party (CLP)
Cultural Workers Front, N.Y.
Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center, N.Y.
The Federation, Chicago, Ill.
Fight Back, N.Y.
Friends ofIndochina, N. Y.
Harlem Consumer Education Council, N.Y.
Intercommunal Survival Center, Chicago, Ill.
Liberation News Service
Lincoln Detox, N.Y.
Long Island EqualJustice Association, N.Y.
Looking Left, Binghamton, N.Y.
Lower East Side Mobilization for Peace Action (LEMPA), N.Y.
Manhattan Valley Spanish Civic Organization, N. Y.
Mass Transit, N.Y.
Migrants in Action, Minneapolis, Minn.
Mass Party Organizing Committee (MPOC) [formerly the National Interim Com-
mittee for a Mass Party of the People], N. Y.
National Prisoners Association, Ga.
Native American Solidarity Committee, N.Y.
New American Movement (NAM)
N. Y. City Star
N.Y. Women's School
North East Prisoners Association, N.H.
Nuclear Objectors for a Pure Environment (NOPE), Montague, Mass.
Oklahoma Prisoners Union
Overtime, Ill.
People Against Racism in Education (PARE), N. Y.
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC)
Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP)
Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee of Brooklyn, N. Y.
Red Balloon, N. Y.
Rising Up Angry, Chicago, Ill.
Roben Williams Defense Committee, N.C.
R. T. (Rough Ji'mes,Journal of Radical Therapy), Mass.
San Francisco Black Teachers Caucus
31
San Quentin Six Defense Committee, Calif.
Sing Out Magazine
Sojourner Truth Organization, Chicago
St. Paul Tenants Union, Minn.
Students, Staff and Teachers Against Cutbacks (STAC), N.Y.
Twin Cities Women's Union, Minn.
United Black Workers, Newark, N.J.
United Community Construction Workers, Boston, Mass.
WAPAC, San Francisco, Calif.
West Bank Tenants Union, Minn.
West Side Harlem Coalition, N.Y.
Witchcraft Rebellion
Workforce, Mo.
Workers and Parents United for Daycare, N.Y.
Workers Unity Organization, Mo.
Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF)
Howard Zinno
New Left commentators on the Hard Times Conference are generally opti-
mistic about the chances for success of this Weather Underground spin-off.
Al McSurely, a former Southern Conference Educational Fund organizer in
Appalachia now with the Washington, D.C. Alliance for Labor and Community
Action (ALCA), commented:
"The same problems we meet in the Alliance's work in the Washington
area ~ e r e spotlighted at the national Hard Times Conference of 2,500 mili
rants: (1) lack of dear political direction, program and strategy; (2) the legacy
and practice of racism, sexism, anti-communism and business unionism with-
in organized labor preventing a deep-rooted alliance between labor and na-
tionally-oppressed minorities.
"What political direction there was at the Conference came from the many
veterans of the Black Liberation Movement, the well-organized Puerto Rican
Socialist Party, CASA (the Mexican workers organization) and the American
Indian Movement (AIM). They were dear and serious about their programs.
Participation by organized labor was limited to many militants from rank-and-
ftle caucuses and the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and a few Local leaders.
"Despite this lack of labor participation, many long-time activists in the
labor and human rights movement felt the solidarity and non-sectarian nature
of the Conference was a beginning step toward some initial unity on a national
level between these different groups. "
Writing for New Times (February 20, 1976), former Weatherman leader Bo
Burlingham noted that double the expected number of activists attended the
Chicago Hard Times meeting, and that similar overflow crowds had attended
the socialist-feminist conference in Yellow Springs, the Institute for Policy
Studies Madison conference of radical elected officials, the December National
Fight Back Conference of the O<;tober League, and the January meeting of the
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in Washington, D.C., Burlingham
noted:
32
"Far from resting in peace, the specter that, haunted America in the late
19605 is rising again, .... New Left historian Kirkpatrick Sale estimates that
there are 2.5 million erstwhile activists who still consider themselves radicals.
though few of them are part of a national organization. Thousands more have
cast in their lot during the past three years. many of them joining community
organizations and labor groups that, while not explicitly 'of the Left,' harken
to the same trumpet as the more orthodox radical formations.
"Until now these local efforts-and hundreds more like them-have lacked
a national focus. The Hard Times Conference sought to remedy the situation.
No one is quite sure whether it succeeded. At its best. the conference provided
a setting for serious organizers to swap networks. But it also attracted a swarm of
sects that buzzed around like flies on a jar of honey....
"It is by no means clear how successful these demonstrations Uuly 4th and
November 1] will be. And if the Hard Times strategy turns out to be a blind
alley, it will not be the first one American leftists have entered. To work for
radical change in the United States is to search for a black cat in a dark room....
Under the circumstances. the wonder is not that the searchers have yet to find
the cat, but rather that so many of them are still looking. ,t
Persons Identified as Attending the National Hard Times Conference
January 30-February 1, 1976
(spelling based on phonetics)
Ellen Afterman, PFOC, Chicago
Danny Albert
Miguel Alvarez
Rosa Alvarez
Roben Appel, PFOC
EllaJ. Baker, MPOC & PRSC
Joe Barnett, PFOC, Calif.
Nancy Barnett (Frappier), Bay Area PFOC
Dick Becker, WWP
Alan Berkman, N. Y. PFOC
*Vernon Bellecoun, AIM
Arlene Eisen Bergman, Bay Area PFOC
Barbara Bishop, San Francisco
Diane Block, sec.-treas., PFOC Bay Area
George Bowers, United Black Workers.
Newark, NJ.
Rob Brinkman, Cook County Hospital
Joel Britton, SWP observer
Robert "Be" Burlingham, Boston
Bob Cantor, NLG, N.Y. PFOC
Guy Carawan, Highlander Center I Knox-
ville, Tenn.
Joe Carnegie, Fightback, N.Y.
Eugene Clancy
Paddy Colligan, WWP
*Virginia Collins, RNA. New Orleans, La.
Gerry Condon, NCUUA
Rick Cornish
*Pam Costain, Twin Cities Women's Union
33
Dennis Cunningham, NLG, Chicago
Jim Dannon, Philadelphia PFOC
Ruth Dear, WWP
Nick DeFreitas, WWP
Mike Deutsch, NLG, Chicago PFOC
Jennifer Dohm, PFOC National Com-
mittee
Kathy Dorsey, CLUW, N. Y.
Ted Dostal, WWP
David Duboff, Center for Defense In-
formation. D.C.
Kevin Duncan
Deb Dunfield, United Steelworkers
Ann Durham, PARE; Native American
Solidarity Committee, N.Y.
Melody Ermachild, PFOC. Calif.
Francis Estrella
Phyllis Fastwolf
Brian Flannigan, PFOC
Marc Fliegelman, Philadelphia PFOC
*Leo Fletcher, Boston
Enrique Flores
Claudette Forlongo, WWP
Donna Futterman. N. Y.
Barb Gagre, N. Y. PFOC
Betty Garcia, PSP
Raphaelo Garcia, Calif.
Tom Gardner, WWP
*Ted Glick, MPOC, N.Y.
*Yvonne Golden, San Francisco Black
Teachers Caucus
Fred Goldstein. WWP
Linda Goodspeed. Philadelphia PFOC
*Beverly Grant. N. Y. PFOC
Pedro Grant, PSP Cenual Committee
Penny Grillos, PFOC, Brooklyn College
Sheila Gruchala
Irrero Guitierriez
Jeff Haas, NLG, Chicago PFOC
*Wilbur Haddock, United Black Workers
Thelma Hamilton, Brownsville, N.Y.
Iberia Hampton
Frederick Douglass Hobby, Black Workers
Coalition. Louisville, Ky.
Georgina Hoggard. N.Y.
SokhomHing. Khmer Residents in U.S.
Sarah Horowitz, Boston PFOC
*James Haughton, Fightback, N. Y.; MPOC
*Juan Irizariy, Assn. Trabajadores Agri-
colas. Conn.
Charles Isaacs, N.Y. PFOC, Staten
Island Community College
Mard Isaacs. N.Y. PFOC
Sarah Kaplan, N. Y. PFOC
Jane Katz
*Pete Kelley. UAWLocal160; United
National Caucus
Mohammad Kenyatta. Black Economic
Development Corp. Philadelphia
Connie Keresey, Vermont PFOC
Kitty Kimatsu. Chicago PFOC
Susan Klug, WWP
Rev. Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick
Yuri Kochiyama, PRSCNational Board
Vu Ngoc Kon. Union ofVietnamese in
the U.S.
WilliamKunstler. N. Y.
Jose LaLuz, PSP Central Committee
Rudolfo lasano. CASA
ilia Lawrence. Chicago PFOC
Jon Lerner, N.Y. PFOC
Rev. Richard Leucke, AIF: Chicago
Margo Levine
Rick Levine. N. Y. C.
Sarah Loft, Boston PFOC
Jose lopez. Northeastern University,
Boston
Doris lucas, Welfare Mothers
Jeanne Mackey, Washington, D.C.
Akil Mafundi, Inmates for Action, Ala.
DonJose Major. PSP
Albeno Mares
34
Tapson Mawere, Zimbabwe Mrican
National Union (ZANU), N.Y.
Al McSurely, Alliance for Labor & Com-
munity Action, D.C.
Roben Mendoza, AIM, San Francisco
Shelly Miller. PFOC
David Moberg, The Reader, Chicago
Queen Mother Audley Moore, N.Y.
Donald Monon. Southern Mrica Com-
mittee
Joel Myron, Eugene V. Debs Caucus
Truman Nelson
Prexy Nesbitt, Chicago
Russell Neufeld, PFOC National Com-
mittee
Julie Nichamin, PRSC national staff
Nancy Nichols. N. Y.
Betty Olbelcson, Minn. Welfare Recipi-
ents Alliance
Roger Olson, PFOC
Bobbye Oniz, Monthly Review
Charles Ostrofsky, SWP
Belinda Palm
Winslow Peck, Fifth Estate, Wash., D.C.
Ken Peterson. WWP
Jed Provjanski, N.Y.
lance Pustin, Philadelphia PFOC
Miles Pustin, Vermont PFOC
Bernice Reagon, singer
Antonio Rodriguez, sec.-general, CASA
Melinda Rorick, Bay Area PFOC
Sharon Rose, Middle East Research &
Information Project, Alliance for labor
& Community Action, W.D.C.
Eve Rosen, N.Y. PFOC
Susan Rosenthal, PFOC
Lisa Roth, N.Y. PFOC
Marge Russell, Boston PFOC
Nancy Ryan, PARE; NY PFOC
Olga Sanabria, PSP, N.Y.
Nick Sanchez, N.Y.
Jeff Sarokov, PFOC
David Saxner, Chicago PFOC
Mara Seigel, Chicago PFOC
Gloria Shepherd. Bay Area, Calif.
Irwin Silber, Guardian
George Simpson
Tom Smucker, Village Voice
Tom SOto, WWP
Ronald Starks, Black Panther Party
*Annie Stein, PARE; PFOC; PRSC, N.Y.
Mike Sturdevent
Louise Sweeney
Willie Tate
George Flint Taylor
David Tilsen
Susan Tipograph, N.Y. PFOC
*Arnold Townsend, WAPAC, San Fran-
cisco
Peggy Two Deer, Chicago
Alfredo del Valle, PSP U.S. Zone Com-
mittee
Clayton Van Lydegraf, Bay Area PFOC
Carlos Vasquez, CASA
Antonio Vellaro
Sylvia Warren, N.Y. PFOC
Susan Waysdorf, N.Y. PFOC
Barry Weinberg, PFOC, Calif.
Cora Weiss, Friendshipment and Women
Strike for Peace
Kathy Welsh, PFOC, Calif.
Tim Whally, PFOC
Vicki Wheeler, PRSC national staff
laura Whitehorn, Boston PFOC
Brooks Whiting
Evelyn "Evvy" Wiener, LEMPA
Hal Womack
Margaret Wright, People's Party Presi-
dential candidate
indicates members of the NationaJ Hard Times Conference Board.
End of reprint from Information Digest
Factions developed quickly within the WUO and PFOC over the WUO Cen-
tral Committee's failure to use the Hard Times Conference to launch a new Com-
munist party, and their agreement to the strategy for surfacing, called "in-
version. to An open split took place early in 1977. An article by Peter Biskind in
David Dellinger's now defunct magazine Seven Days [February 28, 1977] noted
that the production of the Emile deAntonio film Underground, interviewing
WUO leaders, was part of a strategy for surfacing fugitives. In discussing the split
in the WUO between the California-based Revolutionary Committee led by Clay-
ton van Lydegraf and Dohrn, and the Central Committee led by Bill Ayers and
JeffJones, Biskind wrote:
"A year and a half ago, there was a meeting of about a dozen left lawyers
to discuss legal strategy for the surfacing.... The meeting of the lawyers was
convened by Leonard BoudiIJ., father of underground member Kathy Boudin.
According to some of those present, the plan for 'inversion' came from the
lawyers themselves, not from the Central Committee."
Judith Emil, BuseD
35
Leonard Boudin has been paid by the Castro regime to represent its interests
in the United States for 20 years. A memorandum based on classified FBI files
entered into the coun record by the defense in the December 1980 trial of former
FBI officials Mark Felt and William Miller identified Boudin as a former CPUSA
member.
The WUO/PFOC Revolutionary Committee, which carried out at least one
bombing, was dealt a crippling blow when five members of its Los Angeles group
were arrested on November 19, 1977, in Houston and Los Angeles for conspiracy
to bomb the office of a California state senator as the stan of a campaign of
assassinations of public officials. Those charged and later convicted of lesser of-
fenses were Judith Bissell, Leslie Mullin, Thomas Justesen, Mark Perry and Clay-
ton van Lydegraf. All are now free on parole.
May 19th Communist Organization
The WUO reorganized in 1978. The New York PFOC chapter was trans-
formed into the WUO's embryonic Communist pany and was renamed the May
19th Communist Organization (M-19 CO), to commemorate the birthdays ofHo
Chi Minh and Malcolm X. [M-19 CO uses as its mailing address Box 613, Van
Brunt Station, Brooklyn, N. Y. 11215.]
... "toprotJiJe materialaidandpoliticalsolidarity" to the
Third Worldrevolutionary ten-orists and 'beprepared
tofight alongside. "
The M-19 CO Principles o/Unity clearly align the white revolutionaries with the
Black Liberation Army and the Republic of New Mrica's "fight to free the land"
in defining the role of white revolutionaries as "to provide material aid and
political solidarity" to the Third World revolutionary terrorists and "be pre-
pared to fight alongside. t,
In the case of the terrorist forces in Rhodesia led by Marxist-Leninist Robert
Mugabe, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) that formed with
Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe Mrican People's Union (ZAPU) the so-called Patriot-
ic Front, WUO/M-19 CO promptly set up a suppon front, the "Dollars for
Bullets Campaign" now known as the Material Aid Campaign for ZANU (PF).
Now that Mugabe's ZANU is in power, this front is concentrating on suppon for
the South West Mrica People's Organization (SWAPO), based in Angola and
trained by Soviet, Cuban and East German instructors.
The M-19 CO program of action was defined in its founding statement as in
solidarity with the worldwide black liberation struggle, material aid for Zimbab-
we, exposure and attack on government intelligence programs, to fight for the
freedom of Poeno Rican revolutionaries and terrorists, to organize among prison-
ers, and "to concretely contribute to freeing Afrikan (sic) prisoners of war." It is
36
C:RONIMO PR"''tT
/
BLACK PRISONERS OF WAR IN AMERICA
clear that this last point could include aiding and abetting jailbreaks and es-
capes, and is panicularly significant in light of the fact that members of the
WUO who are lawyers have access to jailed terrorists and have been implicated
in several escapes.
M-19 CO's list of "paws" consists mainly ofRNA and BLA terrorists.
37
Active front organizations include the New Movement in Solidarity with Pueno
Rican Independence and Socialism (NMISPRIS) with chapters in New York [2121
962-8681]; Chicago [Box 295, 2520 N. Lincoln]; San Francisco [1005 Market,
#207, San Francisco. Calif. 94103 (415/285-9473)] Oudith Mirkinson); and Los
Angeles (Howie Emmer). Related groups include the Committee Against Re-
pression, Denver [303/629-6460]; and Committee Against Repression, Oakland
[415/636-1831].
In the San Francisco Bay area, the WOO-related prison movement news-
paper is Arm the Spinl, [P.O. Box 5548. Berkeley, Calif. 94705]. The John
Brown Anti-Klan Committee operates from Box 406. Peter Stuyvesant Station.
38
New York, N.Y. 10009; and P.O. Box 1604,' Washington, D.C. 20013 [2021
543-3960].
Related groups backing prison inmates include the Pontiac Brothers Suppon
Coalition, c/o Alliance to End Repression, Room 1000, 407 S. Dearborn Street,
Chicago, Ill. 60605; and the Committee to Free the Pontiac Brothers, 220 9th
Street, #443, San Francisco, Calif. 94103, and at 6253 Hollywood Blvd., Suite
116, Los Angeles, Calif. 90028.
The New York Material Aid Campaign for ZAPU (PF) lists its contact num-
bers as 212/732-1884 and 212/868-3330 and an address of P.O. Box 1276, New
York, N.Y. 10009. The phone is answered by the law offices of Sharon Flood
and Susan Tipograph, a member of PFOC/M-19 CO who represented convicted
FAiN bomber William Morales, who esCaped with the aid of a pair of bolt
cutters shortly after Tipograph paid a visit. Tipograph also represents Judy
Clark, the M-19 CO leader arrested in Nyack and charged in connection with
the robbery and murders there; RNA leader Cynthia Boston also known as
FuJani Sunni-AJi, now in jail for grand jury contempt; and five members of
the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee charged with assault from a melee at
Kennedy International Airpon against the South Mrican Springbok rugby team.
In addition to the M-19 CO, the PFOC continues to operate, publishing its
journal through the John Brown Book Club/PFOC, P.O. Box 14422, San Fran-
cisco, Calif. 94114. Other current PFOC addresses are P.O. Box 60542, Los
Angeles, Calif. 90060; and Box 253,2520 N. Lincoln, Chicago, Ill. 60614.
Nyack Defense
The WUO's oven supporters appear somewhat disconcerted by the nature of
the charges stemming from the Nyack murder investigations. Nevertheless,
under the sponsorship of the Material Aid Campaign for ZAPU (PF) and the
RNA, a memorial attended by some 40 M-19 CO members was held on October
29, 1981, in Brooklyn for Sam Smith, aka Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, as a "New
Mrikan Freedom Fighter killed in action. ' ,
For the most part the effort has been to try to mask the nature of the crimes,
which may include other murders and armed robberies totaling S4 million in the
last two years, as examples of "repression" and "brutality."
Terrorist Support Activities
In the aftermath of the arrests on October 20, 1981, of three leaders of the
Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and one of its overt arms, the
May 19th Communist Organization (M-19 CO), in Nyack, New York, following
the armed robbery of $1.6 million from a Brink's armored truck and the killings
of a guard and two police officers, the members and supporters of the WUO net-
works have intensified efforts to strengthen "unity' I among Puerto Rican, Chi-
cano, black and white revolutionary groups involved in "armed national libera-
tion struggle. ' ,
A rally of "unity against repression" in New York has served to highlight ties
39
between the WUO/M-19 CO; the Republic of New Africa (RNA); and the
MOllimiento de Liberacion Nacional (MLN), the overt political arm of the terror-
ist FuefZl1S Armada.r de Liberacion Nacional (FALN) [Armed Forces of National
Liberation].
M-19 CO activities prior to the unity rally have included providing a counroom
presence at hearings involving the "Springbok 5,' I and those arrested in Nyack
and subsequently in connection with that case; a memorial service in suppon of
a Nyack terrorist killed in a Brooklyn gun battle with police; and support for
Puerto Rican revolutionaries subpoenaed by a Brooklyn federal grand jury in-
vestigating the FALN and the escape of convicted FALN bomber William Mor-
ales.
On October 26, under the banner of one of the many New York area WUOI
M-19 CO front organizations, the Material Aid Campaign for ZANU (PF) [Zim-
babwe Mrican National UnionI Patriotic Front], P.O. Box 1276, Stuyvesant Sta-
tion, New York, N.Y. 10009 [2121732-1884], WUO/M-19 members rallied at
Queens Supreme Court to protest high bail set for the Springbok 5-Eve Rosahn,
Timothy Blunk, Donna Borup, Mary Patton and Margaret "Margo" Pelletier-
arrested during a September 26, 1981 melee at Kennedy Airport.
I 'The]FKdemonstration was acriticalstep in galvanizing
a movement ofwhitepeople committedto a militant
fight against the worldwide system ofwhite supremacy. "
A statement released to the press on Material Aid Campaign letterhead said,
"The ]FK demonstration was a critical step in galvanizing a movement of white
people committed to a militant fight against the worldwide system of white su-
premacy." Eve Rosahn was indicted on October 29, 1981, on three counts of aid-
ing and.abetting murder and one count of aiding and abetting armed robbery.
TimOlhJ B l l l n ~
40
A press conference was called on November 2, ~ 9 8 1 , "Black Liberation Day,"
by the RNA to deny involvement with terrorism. Participants included Nation-
al Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBl) director Victor Goode; attorney C.
Vernon Mason; Sylvia Baraldini, M-19 CO representative; and Chokwe lu-
mumba, a Detroit lawyer who is the RNA vice president and "acting president"
who has been barred from representing in New York Cynthia Boston, aka Fulani
Sunni-Ali; Nathaniel Burns. aka Sekou Oclinga; and Samuel Brown because of
his leadership post in the revolutionary separatist RNA organization.
Lumumba released a statement on the letterhead of the RNA publication The
New Afn"kan [P.O. Box 1184, Manhattanville Station, Harlem. N.Y. 10027]
entitled "Position Paper of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New
Afrika on the Arrest of People's Center Council Chairperson Fulani Sunni-Ali. I'
The RNA statement denied that Smith was active with the RNA at the time of
his death, but defended him as "dedicated to the liberation of the New M-
rikan Nation to the end." While also denying links between the Black Libera-
tion Army (BLA) and RNA, the RNA admitted:
" ...some New Afrikans (Black people in america) have exercised their
human right to form a Black Liberation Army to actively and offensively com-
bat the killer cops and the u.s. militaryI economic establishment which wages
and sponsors a genocidal war against our people....
"We fully recognize and support the B.L.A. 's right to exist and combat
genocide and fight for the independence of our people. "
"... armedstruggle" is "an intemationally accepted
andapprovedmethodofliberation struggle... "
The RNA statement said that terrorist 'armed struggle" is "an internationally
accepted and approved method of liberation struggle. It is the way Mrikans free
themselves from racist colonial masters and white settlers." The investigations
and prosecutions stemming from the Nyack robbery and murder case were dis-
missed as an "attempt to discredit and disrupt the Provisional Government and
the Black Liberation Movement. "
Baraldini's statement on behalf of M-19 CO also claimed that the Nyack ar-
rests and investigations are an effort by the government to engage in "acts of
terrorism against the Black liberation struggle, its supponers, and the Black
community in general." Nevertheless, M-19 CO indicated its assumption that
the Nyack defendants had engaged in terrorism (which the terrorists call' 'ar.tned
struggle") in cal1jng Samuel Brown. Judith Clark. Kathy Boudin and David Gil-
bert "captured combatants. "
The M-19 CO statement read by Baraldini confirmed that "Since 1978,
Judy Clark has been a member and public spokesperson for the May 19th Com-
munist Organization;' r and alleged that the arrest of Eve Rosahn resulted from
her membership in the Committee for the Suit Against Government Misconduct
(CSAGM), a WUO/M-19 CO front established to publicize a lawsuit by WUO
41
u.s. NAVY OUT OF VIEQUES!
U.S. OUTOF PUERTO RICO!
",
,
j."
> .

I' .
a .
.t ,C
).-",,;
I

PROTECT AND DEFENDTHE
ARMED CLANDESTINE MOVEMENTl
members and supporters against the FBI. The statement provided a summary of
M-19 CO ideology and activities:
"May 19th Communist Organization.. .is named after the birthday of Ho
Chi Minh and Malcolm X, two great revolutionary leaders of the world-wide
struggle against u.s. imperialism. May 19th Communist Organization is com-
mitted to the struggle to defeat u.s. imperialism and to uphold the right of
self-determination for all oppressed nations. In panicular, we support the right
of the Black nation to land and independence, the struggle for independence
and socialism in Puerto Rico, the liberation of ChicanoI Mexicano people and
42
sovereignty for Native American nations.... We fully support the right of op-
pressed nations to wage armed struggle. ' ,
The Washington, D.C., chapter of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee,
P.O. Box 1604, Washington, D.C. 20013 [202/543-3960], sponsored a forum at
American University on November 10, 1981. The featured speaker was Nana
Seshibe of the Pan-Mricanist Congress (PAC) of South Mrica. The purpose of
the forum was to support PAC, the South West Mrica People's Organization
(SWAPO), the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) of South Africa and the
Springbok 5 defendants. The JBAKC charged the Springbok 5 were arrested be-
cause "the indendence of Zimbabwe along with the resolute advance of the
struggles in Puerto Rico, Palestine and the Black Nation in the US are defeating
US-led imperialism, and the US is desperately lashing out. "
On November 12 the Material Aid Campaign released a statement at Queens
Courthouse attacking the Springbok 5 prosecutor and the judge for demanding
that the sources of contributions to the Springbok 5 Bail Fund be disclosed be-
fore the $30,000 cash bond would be accepted. Calling the Nyack armed rob-
beryand murders "attempted expropriation," it asserted, "The DA's affirma-
tion opposing any bail for Eve, based only on lies about Weatherman terrorism,
continues 15 years of counterinsurgency against this activist and this movement. "
Terrorist Unity Rally
A rally entitled "A Program of Unity against Repression: A Call to Resist,"
was held on the afternoon of November 15, 1981, at Public School 41, 11th
Street at 6th Avenue, half a block from the site of the March 1970 townhouse
explosion which killed three WUO bomb-makers.
The sponsoring organizations were:
-May 19th Communist Organization, P.O. Box 3111, Cadman Plaza, Brook-
lyn, N.Y. 11202.
-New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence and Socialism
(NMSPRIS), P.O. Box 2512, Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202.
-Moncada Library, 434 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 1121;.
-Women's Committee Against Genocide (WCAG), clo Moncada Library,
434 ;th Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 1121;.
-John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC), P.O. Box 406, Stuyvesant Sta-
tion, New York, N.Y. 10009.
-Committee for the Suit Against Government Misconduct (CSAGM), P.O.
Box 2;4, Stuyvesant Station, New York, N.Y. 10009.
-Provisional Government of the Republic of New Mrika (RNA), P.O. Box
1184, Manhattanville Station, New York, N.Y. 10027.
-Movimiento de Libertldon Nadona/ (MLN) of New York City.
-National Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Prisoners of War, Box 70, 115
Essex Street, New York. N.Y. 10002.
Endorsers were listed as including the Anti-Springbok ; Defense Committee;
Comite Chi/eno Anti-Fascista [Chilean Anti-Fascist Committee]; Committee to
43
Honor New Mrikan Freedom Fighters; the Congolese National Liberation Front
(FINC); John Brown Anti-Klan Committees. W. Mass.; and the MOllimiento
Popular Domincano [Dominican Popular Movement].
While members of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) at-
tempted to sell literature on the sidewalk, a goon squad of M-19 CO male and
female cadre with Nancy Nichols. one ofJudy Clark's roommates. taking a lead-
ership role. provided security outside the school. thoroughly searched every per-
son entering, and prowled the aisles of the auditorium glaring at the audience,
apparently looking for those who did not express the required attention, respect
and adulation for the speakers.
Some 275 white and Hispanic supponers of the WUO and FALN and a small
44
number of blacks braved cold, rain and a fingering by the M-19 CO goons to
hear blind guitarist Marta Rodriguez sing lyrics such as "Was It a Surprise"
r'My people were killed in a church/in the prison by policellf we stand side
by side/they'll be surprised.") and the stridently didactice "What to Do when
Questioned by the Police about Our Friends" (' 'The terrorist imperialist Gov-
ernment of the United States has no right to impose its rule on Puerto Rico.")
She also sang Spanish lyrics about the FALN.
The most popular performer was singer and RNA leader Fulani Sunni-Ali
[Cynthia Boston), released as a suspect in the Nyack robbery and murders al-
though she offered no alibi for several days until defense lawyers William Kunst-
ler, Susan Tipograph and Sharon Flood provided documentation accepted by
the court as showing that she and her van had been in New Orleans shortly af-
ter the Nyack incident.
Boston remarked that WilliamJohnson, her "common-law husband" who is a
fugitive wanted in connection with the Nyack case, was being sought for "some
kind of mix-up with Brinks." In addition to singing "Something in My Blood,"
she chanted the RNA slogan, "Give up the land" to an enthusiastic audience.
The speech by Jose Lopez, national coordinator of the MLN, was a call in sup-
port of terrorism. After a paranoic attack on urban renewal programs as a govern-
ment "conspiracy" to force minority groups out of inner c ~ t y ghettos into suburbs
"where they can be controlled, exploited and manipulated," he urged all
minority groups to form "clandestine movements" and establish a "national
alliance of all oppressed minorities. " Internationally, he linked the MLN to total
support of " revolutionary Turkey, EI Salvador and Palestine." For ideological
support of terrorism, Lopez cited writings by Argentinian terrorist Mario Ro-
beno Santucho, founder of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP).
[During the trial this year of FALN leader Oscar Lopez Rivera, Alfredo "Fred-
dy" Mendez, a convicted FALN member, testified that the MLN is "the above-
ground FAiN," and said that Jose Lopez, Oscar's brother, recruited him into
the FALN/MLNorganization.]
Lopez stressed that unity of the struggles of Pueno Rican, black and Chicano
revolutionary groups was essential because 'This struggle will become a people's
war .... Armed struggle and mobility of people is the only way to free the masses."
Ahmed Obafemi, RNA East Coast Regional Vice President, emphasized soli-
darity between the RNA I 'free the land" struggle and sovereignty demanded by
American Indian militants, stating:
"We recognize our solidarity, bond and blood ties with the Red Nation .
We must support the Red population in their struggle to get back their land .
V.S. imperialism must die."
Proclaiming support for "New Afrikan socialism in the U.S.," Obafemi re-
ferred to the United States as "the real terrorist, similarly [sic] the State of Israel
that stole the homeland of the Palestinian people. ' ,
Mter staring, "We support, applaud all clandestine forces that work for all....
Hurray for what happened at Nyack; ...sorry it failed;" Obafemi was given a
standing ovation.
Ricardo Romero, head of the MLN's Chicano/Mexicano Commission, ex-
45
plained that the MLN was, like the RNA, trying to regain lost national terri-
tory-California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and other lands "wrongfully ap-
propriated by the United States from Mexico." 'We understand the Palestinian's
struggle for their homeland, for the Irish people's struggle for their homeland,"
he said.
Romero's impassioned presentation included an involved version of the
history ofU.S.-Mexican relations. He said:
"We don't recognize the border. Our country was taken from us by the U.S.
and the only way we can reclaim it is to wage war against the U.S. But we must
be willing to go to jail, to die, for the Republic of New Mrika, for the Palestini-
an right to their homeland. You have to recognize the enemy and the enemy is
the U.S. We must topple that government. You must put theory into prac-
tice, be internationally minded."
Juan Antonio Corretjer, head of the Liga Socia/ista Puertoriquena (LSP)
[Puerto Rican Socialist league], a veteran of the Nationalist Party's armed up-
risings of the 1930s and one of the most vehement supporters of terrorism, re-
ceived a polite audience response, doubtless because he spoke only in Spanish and
without notes. A few points made by the Puerto Rican revolutionary "elder
statesman" were translated, such as his endorsements of the BlA, RNA, FALN
and terrorist groups in Puerto Rico whom he termed "the army organization in
Puerto Rico. ,. Corretjer boasted:
"The forces of repression do not understand the true nature of socialism-
killing the enemy. The struggle is to break the imperialist state.
Federico Cintron Fiallo of the United Committee Against Repression in Puerto
Rico and former secretary of the United Workers Movement (MOU), was slated
to speak, but did not appear.
M-19 CO representative Sylvia Baraldini closed the rally with expressions of
M-19 CO's "full support of the socialist Puerto Rican and Mexicano expression of
solidarity against U.S. imperialism and its grand jury attack." Baraldini praised
a list of 'freedom fighters" who included convicted terrorist bomb-maker Wil-
liam Morales, John Brown, Ho Chi Minh and Nyack defendant Sam Brown.
Mter a long vitriolic denunciation ofgrand jury investigations, Baraldini said:
"Only through people's wars will oppressed peoples win freedom. Ho Chi
Minh was a terrorist!. .. We can overturn the system that oppresses us alL...
We are a white revolutionary organization.... We must fight to build a social-
ist society. ' ,
Nyack Update
From actions taken to date, the defense strategies of the Weather Underground
Organization (WUO), Black Liberation Army (BLA) and Republic of New Africa
46
(RNA) regarding investigations into the October 20 armored car robbery and
triple murder in Nyack, New York, can be summarized as " cut the losses and pro-
tect the infrastructure. ' ,
Among the many indicators of this was the distribution of a purported Black
Liberation Army "communique" grandiosely entitled "On the Strategic Alliance
of the Armed Military Forces of the Revolutionary Nationalist and Anti-Im-
perialist Movement" by the National Committee to Defend New Mrikan Free-
dom Fighters (NCDNAFF) which operates from the same post office box address
and phone number used by the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Re-
public of New Africa and its publication, The New Afrikan.
This' 'BLA communique" opened with the following statement assuming the
guilt of the four defendants arrested in Nyack:
"On October 20th, 1981, under the leadership of the Black Liberation
Army, Black Freedom fighters and North American Anti-Imperialists, all mem-
bers of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, attempted an act of expropria-
tion of$1. 6 million from an armored Brinks truck. ' ,
After writing off the four individuals arrested immediately after the robbery
and killings [Samuel Brown, Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert and Judy Clark], the
statement asserted that none of the suspects arrested later and charged [Eve
Rosahn; Cynthia Boston, aka Fulani Sunni-Ali; or Nathaniel Bums, aka Sekou
Odinga] were involved.
"... the comrades who are injailare not criminals. They
are Prisoners of War, andthey are HEROES... struggling
against RACISM, FASCISMANDIMPERIALISM, "...
The purponed BLA statement made the customary claim that "the comrades
who are in jail are not criminals. They are Prisoners of War, and they are HEROES
...struggling against RACISM, FASCISM AND IMPERIALISM," and calls on
"the Black community to...stop robbing each other and to go to the fascist multi-
national corporations where the risk is the same and the act more political. ' ,
Indicative of the alienated and paranoid mental processes of terrorist and pro-
terrorist groups was the bizarre assemblage of "facts" used to justify terrorist
"armed struggle" by the blacks and whites of the Revolutionary Armed Task
Force. They included:
"-The killing of Black men in Buffalo.
"-The collaboration of the Ku Klux Klan and the Federal Bureau of Investi-
gation in Nonh Carolina, and the subsequent disclosure of Bill Wilkinson as
an FBI informant.
"-Founeen unsolved murders of Blackwomen in Boston.
"-The on-going murders of children in Georgia.
, '-The shooting offour Black women in Alabama.
, '-The stabbing deaths of Black men in New York City.
47
I' eThe use of KKK, Police and the United States Army as mercenaries in the
Dominica invasion.
I' eThe KKK use of the Department of Parks for its reenactment of para-
military training... a clear indication of government suppon for right wing fas-
cist military training.
'leThe government assassination of Black activist Yulanda Ward in Wash-
ington, D.C.
I' eThe consistent use of mercenary forces in putting down the Miami Re-
bellion. "
Terrorists do not let facts confuse them and so omitted to mention that a sus-
pect found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial was apprehended for the
New York City and Buffalo murders; that a Black man was arrested in relation
to the Atlanta murders; that "mercenary forces" did not put down the riots in
Miami's Liberty City district; andso forth.
Law enforcement officials revealed in November 1981 that among the docu-
ments seized in the East Orange, NewJersey apartment rented by fugitive Marilyn
Buck were photographs that members of the terrorist gang had taken of one an-
other-often while holding weapons. On November 21, Betty Jean Abramson,
28, a fugitive wanted on murder charges, was arrested at a Manhattan mail drop
office where she had arranged to pick up a birth cenificate mailed from Nonh
Carolina for Sharon L. Jarrell, an infant who died at birth.
Abramson was held on $500,000 bail set by a federal magistrate.
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kenneth Walton told the press that Abram-
son's picture had been found in the East Orange, NewJersey apartment rented
by BLA fugitive Marilyn Buck, and that a radio transmitter found in a Bronx
apartment used as a "safe house" by the Nyack terrorists had been traced to the
Wells Spring Communion, a commune in Humboldt County, California, where
Abramson had lived. Abramson had been a fugitive since June 1980, when she
and another fugitive, Wendy Sue Heaton, were charged with murdering Rosane
Gouston, a commune member who was shot in the head as she collected her be-
longings to leave.
Humboldt County law enforcement officials said that the Wells Spring com-
mune had ties to the terrorist Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and its succes-
sor, the New World Liberation Front (NWLF), as well as to the followers of
Charles Manson and to a revolutionary group based in the San Francisco Bay area
called the Tribal Thumb. The commune's farm near Eureka was believed to be a
terrorist training camp. One of its founders, Earl Satcher, an ex-convict and
former Black Panther Party activist, was killed in a 1977 shootout at the group's
headquarters on Folsom Street in San Francisco.
It is noted that after the June 2, 1980 shooting, the headquarters of the Wells
Spring Communion in San Francisco were raided, and several members of the
commune were arrested after a sawed-off shotgun and M-16 ammunition were
discovered. One of these was Marie 1. Ferreboeuf, listed on the deed to the Eur-
eka farm, whose husband, Artie Baker, was charged with killing a U.S. Customs
agent on the Canadian border in 1979. He reponedly led a jail break in Seattle
some months later.
RNA leader Cynthia Priscilla Boston (Fulani Sunni-AJi) was released from jail
on November 5, 1981, after her lawyers offered evidence that she had been in
New Orleans shonly after the Nyack crime. She was immediately served with a
48
federal grand jury subpoena which ordered her to provide hair and handwriting
samples and to answer questions. On November 30 and again on December 7,
she refused to cooperate although offered immunity. FederalJudge Lee Gagliardi
found her in contempt and ordered her jailed. The maximum sentence could be
18 months-the life of the grand jury. Her cause has been supponed by a variety
of revolutionary groups including the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) , the U.S.
section of the Brussels-based Trotskyist Communist Founh International; the
"Gang-of-Four" -supponing Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP); the
Guardian; Workers World Pany (WWP) and others.
Also refusing to cooperate with the grand jury investigation was Yaasmyn
Fula, also jailed for contempt.
On November 4. 1981. WUO fugitive leader Jeff Jones pleaded guilty in
Superior Coun inJersey City, NewJersey, to reduced charges of manufacturing a
bomb. In a plea bargaining arrangement, charges against Eleanor Stein Raskin-
with whom he had been living and by whom he has a 4-year-old son-were
dropped in exchange for his guilty plea. The charges stemmed from the finding
of explosives, detonators and timing devices in a Hoboken apartment Jones and
Raskin had occupied.
At sentencing on December 16. Jones' attorney. Monon Stavis of the NlG
and Center for Constitutional Rights, toldJudge Geoffrey Gaulkin thatJones and
Raskin had married. Jones later explained they had wed in anticipation of his be-
ing sentenced to prison. Instead. the judge sentencedJones merely to 18 months
probation, a $3.000 fine and six months "community service" working at a day
care center operated by the Montefiore Community Center in the Bronx. and on
weekends in the emergency room of Noah Central Bronx Hospital. Also as part
of his legal arrangements, during the first week of January 1982 Jones pleaded
guilty in Chicago to having struck a police officer and an assistant corporation
counsel in Chicago during the 1969 'Days of Rage" riots. He was sentenced to a
year's probation.
Jeffrey CllrljoNu
49
In a separate development. New York state judge Harold Rothwax a year
earlier had sentenced WUO fugitive Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson. 36. to a "zero- to
3-year" prison term after she surrendered on March 8. 1980, and pleaded guilty
to a felony. possession of explosives. in connection with the March 6, 1970, town-
house explosion in which three WUO terrorists died and from which she and
Kathy Boudin escaped.
An appeals court had criticized as an lIerror" the common practice of sen-
tences starting with II zero" years. The maximum sentence could have been 7
years imprisonment; but the judge resentenced her to 5 years probation over
strong objections from the prosecutor and state correctional officials.
The judge said he gave Wilkerson the minimum sentence because IIshe said
she felt she had a moral duty to prevent the government from doing an immoral
action" and that "she acted out of hopelessness and frustration." He had post-
poned the start of her jail term until January 1981 to give the terrorist veteran
sufficient time to make arrangements for the care of her 4-year-old daughter.
Eve Rosahn was released on $2.500 cash bail on December 31, 1981. Rosahn
said she had been served with a grand jury subpoena ordering her to provide
evidence including hair and handwriting ~ a m p l e s . but was refusing because they
would be used for a "frame-up."
Rosahn said she gave her "full suppon, full respect" to the other Nyack de-
fendants and called them II combatants" captured in warfare against the United
States.
Rosahn was scheduled to face additional grand jury hearings inJanuary.
OnJanuary 7t 1982. suspected BLA member Anthony Nicholas LaBorde. 32, a
suspect wanted in connection with the Nyack case. was arrested in Philadelphia
and extradited to New York. LaBorde was armed with a 9mm pistol with a 20-
round clip. had 104 rounds with him and a bulletproof vest. LaBorde andJames
D. York had been indicted in absentia for the murder of New York City police
officerJohn Scarangella. who died two weeks after being shot in the head on April
16, 1981 by two men in Queens during a routine traffic stop. Officer Richard
Rainey was shot 14 times by 9mm automatic pistol bullets, but survived.
York was captured on August 17. 1981. in Sumter, South Carolina. LaBorde is
also a suspect in the 1979 escape of BLA leader Joanne Chesimard. From 1974
until October 1980, LaBorde worked for the New York Housing Coun. Until the
April 1981 shootings. he was employed as a counselor by the Bronx Legal Services.
Represented by lawyers Katherine Stone and Martin Garbus. Kathy Boudin and
Judith Clark won a decision onJanuary 7. 1982 by federal judge Kenneth Duffy
when he ordered officials of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan,
where they had been held. to grant full contact visits and end their segregation
from the general prisoner population. Hours before the decision. Boudin and
Clark were transferred to special facilities in an all-male prison at Woodbourne.
100 miles north of New York City.
OnJanuary 15. Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribitz announced
that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of a ninth suspect. Donald Weems,
alias Kwesi Balagoon. Weems has been a fugitive since his 1978 escape from the
state prison at Rahway, NewJersey.
50
The National Lawyers Guild
and the Weather Underground
(Extension ofRemarks in the U.S. House ofRepresentatives
by Rep. Larry McDonald of Georgia, December 7, 1981)
The murders of two police officers and a security guard during the $1.6 million
armed robbery of a Brink's armored truck in Nyack, New York, has served to
bring to public attention the existence of an elaborate terrorist underground in
the United States.
...the role ofrevolutionary lawyersfrom the National
Lawyers Guildwho, in close association with Cuba and
other Soviet satellites, playakey role inproviding
logisticalandpropaganda support to terrorists and
revolutionaries.
But the Nyack tragedy also has served to highlight the role of revolutionary
lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild who, in close association with Cuba
and other Soviet satellites, playa key role in providing logistical and propa-
ganda support to terrorists and revolutionaries. This support is not limited to
mere legal representation, but includes hiding and supporting terrorist fugitives.
The SUpPO]t provided by NLG activists, according to declassified FBI documents,
has included direct participation in terrorist acts including jailbreaks and smug-
gling weapons for jailbreak attempts.
These same NLG activists, many with very close ties to Cuba and involved
with terrorist support work, have played leading roles in the attacks on our fed-
eral, state and local intelligence, counter-intelligence and law enforcement
agencies over the past decade. Both as an organization, individually and through
related groups dominated by NLG activists including the National Emergency
Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC), the Center for National Security Studies
(CNSS), projects of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and private in-
vestigative firms, the NLG has used the Privacy and Freedom of Information
acts and lawsuits to gain law enforcement intelligence files for their terrorist
clients. For example, at the time of her escape from a NewJersey prison, Black
Liberation Army leader Joanne D. Chesimard, alias Assata Shakur, had some
1,500 pages of FBI files on the Black Liberation Army in her cell.
Some NLG members have been identified as members of the Marxist-Leninist
terrorist Weather Underground Organization (WOO). These and other NLG
members, for example New York NLG activist Michael Krinsky, Washington,
51
D.C., NLG leader. William Schaap, and Los Angeles NLG activist Karen )0
Koonan maintain intimate liaison with officials of the Cuban government and
its espionage service, the Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI).
Other NLG members have been identified as maintaining contact with repre-
sentatives of the Soviet Union including KGB officers, while still others have links
to the governments and intelligence services of other Communist regimes such as
the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Vietnam and Angola.
Still other NLG activists are involved with foreign terrorist groups, particularly
the Palestine Liberation Organization (Denoit NLG leader Abdeen ]abara), Iran-
ian terrorist groups (Nancy Hormachea and Alan Womack of Houston; Leonard
Weinglass and Dick Eiden of Los Angeles), and with the West German terrorist
network (Bill Schaap, Ellen Ray. William Kunstler. Stew Albert. Margaret Rat-
ner and others).
Among the revolutionary, violence-oriented and terrorist U.S. groups suppon-
ed by the NLG have been the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Black Panther
Party (BPP), American Indian Movement (AIM), Puerto Rican Socialist Party
52
(PSP), George Jackson Brigade (GJB), Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) ,
Weather Underground Organization (WUO), and the Armed Forces of National
Liberation (FAlN).
In its international work, both organizationally and as the main U.S. affiliate of
the Soviet-controlled International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL),
the NLG has supported the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the West
German Red Army Fraction/June 2nd Movement, the Irish Republican Army
(IRA), Organization of People's Fedayee Guerrillas (OIPFG) and Organization of
Mujahedin of the People of Iran (OMPI), Mrican National Congress (ANC) of
South Mrica, the New People's Army of the Philippines, the Sandinista Na-
tional Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua and similar Castroite and pro-Soviet
terrorist forces in EI Salvador and Guatemala.
The NLG's official organizational suppon to international terrorist groups will
be discussed in a separate report. Today we will examine examples of the National
Lawyers Guild's involvement with the terrorist Weather Underground'Organiza-
tion (WUO), an involvement which from public evidence, may extend to con-
trol of some aspects ofWUO policy.
The extra-legalsupportprovidedby members ofthe
National Lawyers Guild rangesfrom servingas
communications links toprovision ofstill-classifiedor
restrictedlawenforcement intelligencefiles... to aiding
terrorist groups in the analysis ofintelligence documents.
The extra-legal support provided by members of the National Lawyers Guild to
terrorists ranges from serving as communications links between underground
fugitives, to provision of still-classified or restricted law enforcement intelligence
files concerning ongoing investigations to members of the very terrorist group
under investigation, to aiding terrorist groups in the analysis of intelligence docu-
ments to discover the identities of sources and active participation in jailbreak
attempts.
In order to put these activities into the correct context, it will be necessary to
briefly review the origins and development of the National Lawyers Guild.
Origins of the NLG
The National Lawyers Guild was formed in 1936 with the assistance of the Inter-
national Labor Defense (ILD) , the U.S. section of the International Class War
Prisoner's Aid Society, which was an agency of the Comimern. Known in English
as the International Red Aid, sections of this Comintern organization were set up
in various countries in order to "render material and moral aid to the imprisoned
victims of capitalism." The ILD was formed in 1925, and before it was dissolved
by Stalin during World War II as a gesture to the USSR's capitalist allies, the lID
helped to form both the National Lawyers Guild and the International Juridicial
Association.
53
NLGMission
Currently claiming a membership of 6,000 lawyers, law students, legal work-
ers and prison inmate "jailhouse lawyers," the NLG's purpose, to manipulate
the law and legal system in order to bring about revolutionary change, was ex-
pressed in a Program Committee policy statement at the 1971 Denver conven-
tion. It said. "The NLG's struggle to defeat the ruling class in t h i ~ country and to
defeat its hold on large parts of the world" is "not a struggle separate" from the
full range of revolutionary and left issues in the U.S. The statement said, "The
plogram committee recognizes that fundamental social change means not only
change of an economic system and the transfer of political power, but also the
revolutionizing and liberating of relationships between people. "
More imponant. the 1971 program statement. which has never been repudi-
ated, set fonh the NLG's role as providing leadership to the U.S. revolutionary
movement, not merely to serve as a source of legal representation for radical cli-
ents. In the NLG's own words:
"There is no disagreement among us that we are a body of radicals and
revolutionaries. We are not simply servants of the movement. We are radicals
and revolutionaries who now propose to carry the struggle for social change
into our lives and our profession. "
NLG leadership is especially visible when examining its actions as the key
group supponing and in some cases controlling the actions of terrorist groups in
America.
NLGandIADL
The NlG remains the principal U.S. affiliate of the Soviet-controlled Interna-
tional Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). The IADL is the successor to
the Comintern's agency for providing legal aid and propaganda suppon to Com-
munists facing legal action, the International Class War Prisoner's Aid Society or
International Red Aid. Prior to its dissolution, the American section of the In-
ternational Red Aid, the International Labor Defense (lID), helped set up the
National Lawyers Guild.
Formed in 1946, the IADL was characterized by the House Committee on Un-
American Activities as an "international Communist front for attorneys" con-
trolled by the Communist Pany of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The NLG partici-
pated in the IADL's founding conference and has increased its IADLactivities.
Like other international Soviet-controlled fronts, the IADL and its Western
Hemisphere regional affiliate, the American Association ofJurists (AAJ), provide
logistical suppon to Soviet- and Cuban-backed terrorist groups.
In a CIA repon. "Soviet Propaganda Operations," prepared at the request of
the House Intelligence Committee and published by that committee in 1978,
the IADL was characterized as "one of the most useful Communist from organi-
zations at the service of the Soviet Communist Pany." The repon noted that at
its 1975 conference in Algiers, "the real and ideological interests of the IADL
54
PARA PUERTO RICV
AN Of WlTQ U INHfENPEtKE OF PUERTO RKO WA$
HElP IN ItAVAt4A, Hoh\ Smn\BER 5-i. THE ISSUEP em, SIC,NEO H J1
NATIONS, W"ICR IN PMJ: mE DEFHT OF (OLott,,,,USN\ IN MCO THE
TOTAL ltJERMION OF fHE fllERTO PEom Will &E l EVENf THAf
'Hilt MAKE POSSI6lE THE PISMANTUMC, Of ONE GF
h\GST tAIl! TAU WILL BE A
VAlIUSlE TO THE OF
pn([.
liRERTAO PAU lOS PRISIONEROS NACtONAlISTAS
were covered by the agenda... which considered law to be a function in the
struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and apartheid.
Under the banner of anti-imperialism, the IADL's thrust ... was to do battle with
the large international companies as a way to gain adherents and backing in the
developing world. ' ,
55
NLG Organizes IADL & AA]
Support for Terrorism
For some 20 years, the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, U.S.A., Cuba and
U.S. Castroite revolutionaries have supported terrorism and violence as a tactic in
the campaign to force the United States to abandon the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico, the keystone to U.S. southern defense. During the 1970s, the so-called
I'independence" campaign escalated, accompanied by the formation of terrorist
groups including the Armed Commandos of Liberation (CAL), the Armed Revo-
lutionary Independence Movement (MIRA), the Armed Forces of National Lib-
eration (FALN) and several groups that have worked in cooperation with the
FALN but are based in Pueno Rico. the Machete-Wielders or Boricua Popular
Army (EPB), Armed Forces of Popular Resistance (FARP) and Organization of
Volunteers for the Puerto Rican Revolution (OVRP).
In 1973 FBI Director Clarence Kelley reportedthat 13'
Puerto Rican revolutionaries hadalready receivedtraining
inCuoa.
In 1973 FBI Director Clarence Kelley reponed that 135 Puerto Rican revolu-
tionaries had already received uaining in Cuba.
An example of NLG work in coordinating suppon from the international
Soviet-controlled fronts for the Puerto Rican revolutionaries and terrorists. was
provided in an account of the AAJ convention in Havana by NLG vice president
John Quigley in GuildNoles, December 1977, Vol. VI, No.6, p. 5:
"Self-determination for Puerto Rico and an end to U.S. conuol of the Pan-
ama Canal were featured topics at the Conference of the American Associa-
tion of Jurists (AAJ), held in Havana, Cuba. October 24-29. The National
Lawyers Guild was represented at the conference, pursuant to an August de-
cision of the NLG National Executive Committee to join the Association.
liThe AAJ, founded in 1975 at an inter-American lawyers' meeting in
Panama, is committed to Ithe complete economic independence and sover-
eignty of the State over its wealth and natural resources.' as well as to 'action
against imperialism. fascism, colonialism, and against racial discrimination,
and discrimination against women, aborigines. and other national minorities. '
"The Havana Conference, attended by over 100 Western Hemisphere
lawyers, was devoted to the reading of papers in working commissions, leading
to adoption of resolution [sic] at plenary sessions. Guild representatives Michael
Withey and John Quigley each presented a paper. Withey on Puerto Rico's
right to offshore oil. and Quigley on rights to ocean-bed minerals. "
Quigley named the other U.S. participants in the AA)'s Havana conference
as including Jim Larson, also an NLG representative, who in 1974 was among
56
those responsible for selecting a San Francisco Bay area NLG member for a three-
week NLG delegation to Cuba. Others participating included Ann Fagan Ginger,
whose Communist Party, U.S.A. affiliation was revealed in documents published
by the Church Committee; Ned SmokIer; Louis Katz; Ernest Goodman of De-
troit, an NLG veteran taking leadership roles in CPUSA fronts and causes for
more than 35 years and who helped set up the NLG's Southeast Asia Military
Law Project which attempted to undermine discipline of the U.S. Armed Forces
in Japan and the Philippines; another NLG "Old Left' I veteran, Allan Brotsky;
former one-term U.S. Congressman Charles Porter of Oregon, an officer of one
of the CPUSA's most active fronts targeted against the U.S. counter-intelligence
and internal security agencies, the National Committee Against Repressive legis-
lation (NCARL); and Joseph P. "J.P." Morray, who spent the period October
1960 toJuly 1962 in Cuba. According to Morray, he spent that time working un-
der the Castro regime as a visiting professor of political science at the University
of Havana and gathering material for a book in praise of the establishment of
Communism (The SecondRevolution in Cuba).
The NLG representatives in Havana ratified the AA)'s "Declaration of Ha-
vana" which set forth what NLG vice president Quigley termed "a resolution on
the duties of anti-imperialist lawyers in the Americas." The AAJ declaration as-
serted:
"We declare that we cannot ignore our duty which commits us to militant
action side by side with our people in support of the legal formulations that
wilJ materialize their legitimate aspirations; that we cannot resign ourselves to
being mere legal scholars nor simple spectators in the face of the rise of the
peoples' struggle against the powers of oppression. I'
The revolutionary lawyers group went on to give its full support to revolution-
ary terrorist "national liberation" movements-including those in Puerto Rico
and on the U.S. mainland, stating:
" ...we propose to call upon all the States to give moral, material and all
other forms of assistance to the movements for national liberation... ; [and]
the condemnation of the use of mercenaries to inhibit armed struggle for na-
tionalliberation. "
Stating its main purpose was not courtroom and related legal work, but "to
mobilize public opinion,' I the AAJ put its full support behind the Castroite and
pro-Moscow revolutionary parties seeking control of Puerto Rico, asserted that the
United States had made Puerto Rico "a military base of aggression against the
peoples of America," and condemned prosecution of Puerto Rican terrorists as a
"repressive policy against the Puerto Rican national liberation movement. I'
Cuban control of the IADL's Western Hemisphere regional affiliate was made
clear by the fact that the AAJ decided to move its headquarters to Havana from
Panama, and from the elections of Fernando Alvaraz Tabio, a justice of the Cuban
Supreme Court, as AAJ president; former Havana resident J.P. Morray of Cor-
valis, Oregon, as vice president; and Miguel Duque de Estrada, President of the
National Union ofJurists of Cuba, as secretary-general.
The NLG members during the Havana meetings reorganized the U.S. AAJ
57
branch. As NlG vice president Quigley reported, a U.S. executive board was es-
tablished composed of CPUSA veteran Ann Fagan Ginger, president; J.P.
Morray ex officio as vice president; and representing at-large members Ernest
Goodman and Michael Krinsky, of Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard, Cuba's
paid agents.
A second example of support from the Soviet-controHed international lawyers
fronts for U.S. terrorists is the resolution of the IADL backing the claims to
prisoner of war status by 11 members of the Puerto Rican FALN who were con-
victed in 1980 of murder, armed robbery and attempting to overthrow the gov-
ernment of the United States through force and violence. They are serving
prison terms of from 55 to 90 years (and life in the case of Marie Torres, con-
victed of murder in New York).
The 35-member U.S. delegation to the IADL's 11th Congress, held in Valetta,
Malta, November 13-17, 1980, included NlG President Mary Alice Theiler and
NlG past president (1970-71) Doris Brin Walker, an identified Communist
Party activist and IADL vice president. Among those reading papers to the IADL
commissions was Michael E. Deutsch, a leading activist in the NlG's Chicago
chapter who is a member of the Weather Underground Organization's Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). Deutsch and Peter J. Schmiedel, his law
panner in the People's Law Office, served as "legal advisers" to the 10 FALN
terrorists tried and convicted in Chicago in 1980.
New York City NlG members Susan Bitensky and Vickie Erenstein, members
of the NlG delegation to the IADL. reponed (Guild Notes, January-February
1981, Vol. X, No. I), "The General Assembly of the Eleventh Congress of-
ficiaHy went on record to express solidarity with various peoples' struggles... and
voiced its support for the people of Puerto Rico in their struggle for self-deter-
mination and independence." Specifically, the IADL supported the terrorists'
claims for POW status under new U.N. additions to the Geneva protocols which
provide for POWstatus to members of' 'national liberation movements."
The NLGand Cuba
The intimate collaboration between the National Lawyers Guild and Cuba
which has been increasing during the past decade is reflected not only in the
NLG's work in support of U.S. and foreign terrorist organizations. but also in
the NLG's leadership role in attacking the U.S. intelligence agencies.
For example, Cuba's premier NLG agents, Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard.
have served for decades as the counsel to a major CPUSA political and legal
action front. the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC),
which raises money for key litigation and distributes propaganda.
Both Victor Rabinowitz and Leonard Boudin have been identified as mem-
bers of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Rabinowitz was identified in Senate testi-
mony in the early 1960s; but Boudin's CPUSA affiliation remained a secret un-
til December 1980. when it was revealed in a defense memorandum based on
declassified summaries of secret FBI files on the Weather Underground's con-
tacts with agents of hostile foreign powers.
NECLC's primary target has been the U.S. Armed Forces and the American in-
telligence. internal security and law enforcement agencies. NECLC has raised
58
funds for major legal actions against the FBI, CIA and local law enforcement
agencies, a primary purpose of which has been to obtain intelligence files using
the Freedom of Information Act and the discovery process in litigation.
The major purpose of lawsuits conducted by the NLG lawyers and funded in
part by the NECLC including suits by the Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist
think-tank with documented ties to hostile foreign intelligence agencies; by the
Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist Communist revolutionary group active in the
support of terrorism; and by the NLG itself is clearly to obtain intelligence files,
determine the sources of intelligence information, and undertake Udamage
control" measures.
The NLGhas been intimately involvedwith Philip Agee's
efforts to disclose the identities ofCIA officers
operating under diplomatic cover inforeign countries.
The NLG has been intimately involved with Philip Agee's efforts to disclose
the identities of CIA officers operating under diplomatic cover in foreign coun-
tries. The CIA charged that Agee's Counter-Spy magazine was responsible for
the murder of the CIA's Athens station chief Richard Welch in December 1975.
In addition to naming alleged CIA agents and setting them up as potential tar-
gets for assassination, Counter-Spy and its spin-off, the Covert Action Informa-
tion Bulletin, have attacked alleged police and FBI informants and private in-
dividuals who oppose Soviet and Cuban expansionism.
The NECLC's Washington office for many years was the law offices of the late
NLG veterans Joseph Forer and David Rein, who also served as the local office of
Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard. It is noted that Forer was co-counsel for the
Communist Party with John J. Abt, a founding NLG activist who also serves on
the CPUSA Political Committee and once headed a Soviet spy ring in Washing-
ton. David Rein also was an identified CPUSA member, as was his wife, Selma,
who while not a lawyer was highly active as an unofficial organizer for the NLG's
Washington, D.C. chapter. Forer and his junior partner, Alan Dranitzke, worked
with Philip Agee's Counter-Spy magazine, with Dranitzke serving as Counter-
Spy's official counsel.
NLG attorney William Schaap and "legal worker" Ellen Ray were co-founders
with Philip Agee of Counter-Spy's successor, the Covert Action InfoNnation Bul-
letin at a 1978 Communist youth festival in Havana. In the late 1960s Schaap
worked with NLG and NECLC anti-military projects in New York. Schaap was
one of several NLG activists associated with the most militant segments of Stu-
dents for a Democratic Society (SDS), including some who became members of
the terrorist WUQ. who helped plan, eight months in advance, riots in Chicago
at the Democratic National Convention.
Working as a member of a law firm headed by two NLG and CPUSA activists,
David andJonathan Lubell, Schaap earned a reputation as a friend and adviser of
the SDS leadership, particularly of Mark Rudd. The firm became a cemer for sup-
port activity for the New York Black Panther 21, charged with bombing con-
59
spiracy, and for the SDS Weathermen. Between 1970 and the fall of 1972.
Schaap represented witnesses subpoenaed before grand juries investigating the
WUO bombing of the U.S. Capitol, unsuccessfully defended WUO-affiliated
radicals convicted of bank bombing conspiracy, and participating in planning
meetings-for riots at the 1972 Republican National Convention.
After Schaap and Ray returned from the NLG's Southeast Military Law Office
project in Okinawa they became active with the Center for Constitutional Rights
(CCR). a tax-exempt litigation group of NLG lawyers and legal workers taking
leadership roles in supporting U.S. and foreign terrorists. NLG members as-
sociated with the CCR. including Schaap, William Kunstler and Peter Weiss,
and members of the Weather Underground Organization's overt support arms.
have held meetings in the United States with associates and members of the
West German terrorist groups, including a lawyer charged and convicted in West
Germany for running a communications network between jailed terrorist leaders
and their comrades at large. After moving to Washington, Schaap and Ray be-
came active in the Washington, D.C., NLG chapter with Schaap serving as
president in 1980/81.
One of the Germans, Kurt Groenewold, attended the NLG national convention
in San Francisco in 1979; another, Petra Rogge, traveled to the United States in
1978 to help coordinate the defense of terrorist fugitive Kristina Berster, who
illegally entered the United States from Canada after spending nine months in a
terrorist training camp in South Yemen (Aden). Berster's defense committee
was controlled by WUO members and supporters, including members of WUO
collectives in Vermont.
It is noted in passing that CIA defector Philip Agee. known to have made re-
peated trips to Havana and Moscow while preparing his anti-CIA "exposes,"
and who was deported from England because of his continued meetings with
Cuban intelligence officials, lives in a house in Hamburg, West Germany,
owned by Groenewold.
NLGandthe
Weather Underground
The NLG's ties to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) date to
the early 1960s, when Students for a Democratic Society militants began working
with NLG lawyers also active with the NECLC and CCR. As SDS demonstra-
tions increased in militancy and violence. legal defense work by the NLG and its
Mass Defense Office became invaluable to the SDS organizers. NLG national
organizers Ken Cloke and Bernardine Dohrn participated in planning sessions,
along with NLG staffers such as Dana Biberman, now a leading WUO member,
and Alicia Kaplow. Dohrn, herself a law school graduate. and Cloke recruited
radicalized law students, many of them former SDS members, into the NLG.
And a number of these NLG law students, including Eleanor Stein Raskin,
joined the terrorist underground as fugitives.
When those Weathermen who faced criminal charges disappeared in the early
spring of 1970, NLG lawyers played key roles in maintaining communications
among the terrorists. Let us consider some specific examples.
60
On February 16, 1970, WUO terrorists planted a bomb at a small police sta-
tion in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The bomb killed one police officer
and wounded others. The press reponed two suspects were seen running from the
scene: a tall, long-haired blond male in his early twenties, and a stocky middle-
aged male. The murder remains unsolved.
According to a defector from the Weather Underground then living in the
WUO's Bay Area collectives, only two Weathermen then active in the area at
that time fit the description. Among the leaders of the Weathermen then present
in the San Francisco Bay area were Lincoln Bergman; Arlene Eisen Bergman, who
is still active with the WUO's Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC) and
John Brown Book Club aBBC); Julie Nichamin, who while visiting Havana early
in 1969 became the initial organizer of the Venceremos Brigades; Karen Latimer
and Scott Braley, both former leaders of the Michigan State University SDS; Jeff
Jones and Clayton van Lydegraf.
Clayton van Lydegraf, now 66 years old, was a leader of the Communist
Party's illegal underground apparatus in the Pacific Northwest during the early
1950s. When subpoenaed by a Congressional committee, he took the Fifth
Amendment rather than deny he had ever served in the Philippines with the
Communist Huk terrorists and whether he had boasted that he had strangled
anyone while serving with the Huks. In the 1960s van Lydegraf attached him-
self to the most extreme SDS militants as an adviser.
Starting in 1974 van Lydegraf served as a highly visible leader of the PFOC,
organized the publication of WUO documents like Prai,ie Fire and Osawatomie,
and was reportedly named by Timothy Leary after his return to the United
States in 1974 as the individual who transported him to Seattle after his jail-
break to meet with Bernardine Dohrn and others. According to veteran investi-
gative reponer Ed Montgomery (San Francisco Examiner, August 8, 1974),
leary "identified a San Francisco attorney, active in the National Lawyers Guild,
as the man who, in league with members of the Weatherman organization, en-
gineered his escape from San Luis Obispo Prison the night of Sept. 12, 1970."
The Information Digest, an authoritative newsletter on U.S. political and social
movements, edited and published by John Rees, who has been publishing the
best non-governmental information on terrorist and violence-oriented groups in
the United States since 1968, reported that sources within the NLG viewed the
Montgomery article as referring to San Francisco NlG attorney Michael Kennedy
and Clayton van Lydegraf.
Van Lydegraf became the leader of the WUO's Revolutionary Committee
which opposed the NLG-proposed "inversion" plan of surfacing fugitives. He
was arrested in November 1977 on charges of conspiring with four other WOO
fugitives to assassinate a California state senator. Convicted, but awarded mini-
mal sentences by a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge, van lydegraf and his
co-defendants are all now free on parole or probation.
The NLGlawyer also providedsome ofthe Weathermen
with money andaccommodations.
The San Francisco Weathermen scattered after the February 1970 murder of
61
OSAWATOMIE
WINTER 1975-76 NO.4 IIOC
WEATHER UNDERGROUND ORGANIZATION
the San Francisco police officer; but they kept in touch via another NLG at-
torney. WUO fugitives and others not sought for known criminal actions shut-
tled between Weatherman collectives in Oregon, Washington and California.
The NLG lawyer provided them with lists of public telephone booths in the
San Francisco area, and day of the week and time they were to call if they needed
to make contact with other fugitives. The NLG lawyer also provided some of the
Weathermen with money and accommodations.
The murder of the police officer remains unsolved and unprosecuted. There-
62
fore it would be inappropriate for this Congressman to name the NLG lawyer
involved, or to speculate as to the WUO members involved in the bombing. How-
ever, the lawyer was also active with the NLG's Prison Law Association which car-
ried out litigation for prisoners and also worked to organize prisoners into a
revolutionary vanguard movement. The SDS Weathermen had an identical, in-
terrelated program stemming from their work on defense committees for Black
Panther Party members in Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and other cities.
NLGControl of
Weather Underground
-Steven Bingham, was indicted with six San Quentin prison inmates by the
State of California which charged that on August 21, 1971, Bingham furnished
a 9mm automatic pistol and clips containing ammunition to George Jackson, a
prison leader of the Black Panther Party and supporter of the Eldridge Cleaver
faction's terrorist Black Liberation Army (BLA). In the jailbreak attempt that
followed, Jackson shot a guard to death; two other guards and two inmates sus-
pected of being informants were murdered by jackson's accomplices. Jackson
was shot to death by guards during his escape attempt. Steve Bingham remains
a fugitive from justice.
A declassified FBI repon prepared by the FBI's Chicago Field Office, "Foreign
Influence-Weather Underground Organization," dated August 20, 1976, docu-
mented that a number of NLG members, including legal workers (movement
organizers) active in pro-terrorist defense committees, had been involved in con-
cealing and aiding terrorist WUO fugitives, and 'functioned so closely with the
WUO that they themselves may be considered as 'underground' functionaries
from time to time. ' ,
There is ample evidence that the NLG continues to exert
influence andcontrol over the Weather Underground
Organization andthe WUO's overt branches.
There is ample evidence that the NLG continues to exert influence and control
over the Weather Underground Organization and the WUO's oven branches.
Among the most prominent NLG members so involved is Leonard Boudin.
-Leonard Boudin, a paid agent of the Castro government since 1960, and his
partner, Victor Rabinowitz, have been identified as members of the Communist
party, U.S.A. Rabinowitz was identified in Senate testimony in the early 1960s;
but Boudin's CPUSA affiliation remained a secret until December 1980, when it
was revealed in a defense memorandum based on classified FBI files concerning
the Weather Underground's contacts with agents of hostile foreign powers.
63
In addition to working for the Cuban government, Leonard Boudin is the
father of Weather Underground Organization (WUO) leader Kathy Boudin.
Staning in the early 1960s, Kathy Boudin attended receptions and functions
with her parents at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. In
1965 she studied for a year in the Soviet Union, was paid 75 rubles a month by
the Soviet government and, according to h ~ r resume, taught school on a Soviet
collective farm, a privilege rarely given one who is not a Soviet citizen. Boudin's
stay in the Soviet Union was not pan of any student exchange program. During
this period it has been reponed that the CIA intercepted correspondence be-
tween Boudin and her father in which he made arrangements for her to partici-
pate in one of the Communist World Youth Festivals.
Following the March 1970 explosion of a New York townhouse which killed
three Weathermen who were constructing an anti-personnel bomb, Kathy
Boudin disappeared. It has been reponed that she and Cathy Platt Wilkerson
were provided with false identification documents by the Cuban U.N. Mission
with which they fled the United States for Czechoslovakia.
Kathie Boudin
The declassified FBI report on foreign contacts of the Weather Underground
Organization produced by the FBI's Chicago Field Office reported that "On
February 10, 1976, a source in a position to possess such information advised
that Leonard Boudin... had indicated to a friend that Kathie [sic] was presently
in Cuba."
In 1975, following distribution of filmed interviews with Kathy Boudin and
four other fugitive WUO terrorists by Emile de Antonio, Leonard Boudin repre-
sented de Antonio and his associates in their successful fight to quash subpoenas
from a federal grand jury investigating WUO terrorism.
An anicle by Peter Biskind in David Dellinger's now defunct magazine Seven
Days (February 28, 1977) noted that the production of the Emile de Antonio
film, Underground interviewing WUO leaders Kathy Boudin, Bernardine
Dohrn, Jeff Jones, Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson was part of a strategy for
surfacing the fugitives.
In discussing the split in the WUO between the California-based Revolu-
64
tionary Committee led by Clayton van Lydegraf and Bernardine Dohrn, and
the Central Committee led by Bill Ayers and]eff]ones, Biskind wrote:
"A year and a half ago, [mid-1975] there was a meeting of about a dozen
left lawyers to discuss legal strategy for the surfacing.... The meeting of the
lawyers was convened by Leonard Boudin, father of underground member
Kathy Boudin. According to some of those present, the plan for 'inversion'
came from the lawyers themselves, not from the Central Committee. "
In other words, Leonard Boudin and the other NLG lawyers who are well
known as members and intimate associates of the NLG were able to set policy
and strategy for the terrorist organization. Even more significant is the fact that
the NlG lawyers, many of whom have appeared in court representing "sur-
faced" WUO fugitives, had the power to enforce a policy dearly highly unpopu-
lar with the terrorist organization.
-Dana H. Biberman, born February 24, 1951, is a veteran of the Columbia
University SDS chapter. Biberman's sister, Nancy, was also a veteran of the
Columbia University SDS. In 1968 Dana Biberman joined the NLG national of-
fice staff where she remained for some four years, organizing mass defense of
demonstrators and support work for the Panther 21 and doing NlG organiza-
tional work.
During 1974 and 1975 she played an active role in the formation of the WUO's
overt arm, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). The FBI report
states that in March 1975 Biberman traveled to Cuba as a member of the Ven-
ceremos Brigade (VB) 8th contingent. Internal PFOC documents circulated in
1976, summing up the group's accomplishments during the previous year,
noted that two PFOC members had been sent to Cuba with the Venceremos
Brigade.
Biberman has been an active member of the New York PFOC chapter, and
its successor, the May 19th Communist Organization. The May 19th Communist
Organization (M-19 CO) can be characterized as the Weather Underground Or-
ganizations own incipient Communist party. With]udith Clark and Eve Rosahn,
Biberman was a member of the Committee for the Suit Against Government
Misconduct, a PFOC-controlled group set up to publicize a damage suit by 10
WUO associates against the United States, FBI and present and former govern-
ment officials.
A week after the October 20, 1981, robbery of $1.6 million from a Brink's
armored truck in Nyack, New York, the killing of two police officers and a guard,
and the arrests after a chase ofWUO leaders Kathy Boudin,]udy Clark and David
Gilbert; Black Liberation Army (BLA) activist Samuel Brown; and a day later in
Brooklyn a shootout in which Republic of New Africa (RNA) member Sam
Smith (alias Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata) was killed and Nathaniel Burns (alias
Sekou Odinga) was captured, Biberman's roommate, Eve Rosahn, was arrested
and charged with having rented, using false identification papers, the van used
by the Nyack terrorist team formed by members of the Weather Underground
Organization (WUO) , the Black liberation Army (BlA) and Republic of New
Mrica (RNA).
-Kenneth Cloke, born May 18, 1941, was an active member of SOS in the
mid-1960s. According to the FBI report, "Cloke has directly been involved with
65
the WUO since its submergence into the underground." It is noted that the
section of the FBI repon on Cloke's WUO activities notes that Cloke had been
seen in contact with Bernardine Dohrn in the summer of 1971, when WUO
fugitives were living in an apartment in Venice, California. The repon also con-
tains two pages of additional material on Cloke's work with the WUO which has
been deleted as too secret to be released.
In 1967, while CPUSA veteran Victor Rabinowitz served as the NLG national
president, Ken Cloke was hired as NLG national executive secretary at the same
time Bernardine Dohrn was hired as national student organizer. According to
a pamphlet entitled " A Historical Sketch of the National Lawyers Guild in
American Politics, 1936-1968," by Doron Weinberg and Many Fassler, dis-
tributed at the NLG's 33rd convention in 1973, Cloke and Dohrn "began the
conversion of the Guild to a I political association of the bar' with the projection
of a more activist, movement-oriented image."
A staff study on the National Lawyers Guild published by the House Com-
mittee on Internal Security in its hearing, "Revolutionary Activities Directed
toward the Administration of Penal or Correctional Systems," Pan 3, provided
a chronicle of Cloke's extensive Communist ties. In 1962 he was a member of
the National Advisory Board of the U.S. Festival Committee, and was a member
of the U.S. delegation to the 8th World Youth Festival in Helsinki, Finland.
The World Youth Festivals are joint operations of the two major international
Soviet-controlled youth and student fronts, the Budapest-based World Federa-
tion of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the Prague-based International Union of
Students (IUS). Selection of the U. S. delegation is in the hands of the CPUSA.
Also in 1967 Cloke joined the National Council of the NECLC, controlled by
veteran CPUSA activists and lawyers including Victor Rabinowitz and Leonard
Boudin. Cloke, and many other NLG activists with ties to the Weather Under-
ground Organization, Black Liberation Army and Cuba, remain on the NECLC
Executive Committee and National Council.
-Dennis D. Cunningham, an NLG activist who has held office not only in
the Chicago chapter, but has been a regional vice president, has been active with
the Chicago chapter of the WUO's Prairie Fire Organizing Committee since
early 1975. He panicipated in the PFOC-initiated National Hard Times
Conference in Chicago inJanuary 1976 during which plans were made for demon-
strations to protest the Bicentennial celebrations in Philadelphia.
Senate and FBI documents note that Cunningham's estranged wife, Mona
Helen Mellis Cunningham, is a WUO "functionary" and deletes for security
reasons the details of her WUO involvements and foreign travel. Cunningham's
brother, Roben Maris Cunningham, III, is named in a Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee report, "The Weather Underground," published in 1975, as a
WUOmember.
Cunningham is a member of the People's Law Office, a Chicago group ofNLG
lawyers and legal workers, most of whom are members of the Weather Under-
ground's PFOC, or WUO/PFOC fronts such as the New Movement in Solidarity
with Puerto Rican Independence (NMSPRI), through which the WUO pro-
vides support to its terrorist comrades in the FALN and the FALN's oven politi-
cal arm, the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional (MLN).
Among the past and current members of the People's Law Office are at-
torneys Michael E. Deutsch, an active PFOC member; G. Flint Taylor and
66
Jonathan C. Moore, lawyers for violence-oriented radical plaintiffs suing the
Chicago Police Department for having monitored their activities; Jeffrey H.
Haas, also an active PFOC member; and legal workers Counney Esposito, in-
dicted as a co-conspirator by a Chicago grand jury in October 1969 following
the Days of Rage" riots; and Mara Siegel.
-Michael E. Deutsch, born May 9, 1945, is an active member of the Chicago
PFOC chapter. The FBI's report on Weather Underground foreign contacts
noted that NLG activists Dennis Cunningham and Jeff Haas hosted at least four
meetings in their apartments to organize logistical suppon to WUO fugitives
during the periodJanuary 7-10, 1971.
The FBI's material on Deutsch's foreign activities is deleted on national se-
curity grounds. Deutsch traveled to Cuba as part of the first official NLG delega-
tion in the summer of 1972. According to GuildNotes (Vol. I, No.3, September-
October 1972), the NLG delegation also included Karen Jo Koonan of Los An-
geles, closely associated with the WUO leadership; and Margaret Burnham, the
step-daughter of the late CPUSA Political Committee member Hyman Lumer.
Currently a Municipal coun judge in Boston, Burnham is also an official of the
National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), a CPUSA
from directed at the prisoner-organizing and civil rights movements.
Also in the NLG delegation was Bobby Nelson of Austin, Texas; Dan Pachoda,
a New York NLG member active with the Black Panther 21 bomb conspiracy de-
fense; Martin Stolar, a New York NLG member who has represented a number of
WOO and BPP-related activists, including Rita Jensen, Kathy Boudin's long-
time roommate; and Michael Deutsch.
According to the FBI repon, Deutsch "has represented such apprehended or
surrendered WUO members as William Willet, Leonard Handlesman and
Daniel Howard Cohen. "
He also was able to quash the subpoenas on the
grounds that attorney-clientprivilegeprotected
himfrom questions about ajailbreak by his client.
-Michael Withey, a Seattle NLG activist, represented captured members of
the terrorist George Jackson Brigade (GJB) which undenook a career of revolu-
tionary bank robberies. In 1975, following a jailbreak, Withey was subpoenaed.
He also was able to quash the subpoenas on the grounds that attorney-client
privilege protected him from questions about a jailbreak by his client. Withey
became an NLG "hero," and was moved out of Seattle to work for the NLG's
Puerto Rico Legal Project, a suppon operation for Castroite revolutionary groups
and terrorists.
-Jeffrey H. Haas, born September 18, 1942, has served as an NLG regional
vice president and is highly active in the NLG Chicago chapter. The FBI re-
ports that "during the period of January 7-10, 1971, at least four meetings
were held at the residences of Dennis Cunningham and Jeff Haas for the pur-
pose of discussing what help could be given to the WUO." Additional FBI
67
material on his WUO activities and his foreign travel and contacts is deleted for
national security reasons.
-Michael J. Kennedy, born March 23, 1937, is stated by the FBI repon to
have "directly assisted the WUO." Kennedy's wife, Eleanore, is stated to have
"assisted Bernardine Dohrn, who is a fugitive." The Kennedy's additional
WUO activities and their foreign travel and contacts have been deleted from the
FBlrepon.
On August 18, 1974, San Francisco Examiner reponer Ed Montgomery wrote
that Timothy Leary had told federal authorities that his escape from San Luis
Obispo Prison was engineered by an NLG San Francisco lawyer in conjunction
with the WUO. As already noted, the Information Digest of August 23, 1974,
reponed that NLG sources were attacking Montgomery's repon as aimed at
Michael Kennedy and Clayton van Lydegraf.
-Karen Jo Koonan, of Los Angeles, an active NLG member, in 1966 was an
active member of the CPUSA's youth club at the University of California at Los
Angeles (UCLA). She was one of four Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
members invited to visit North Vietnam in November 1967. Koonan and her
companions, Steve Halliwell, and future WUO leaders Jeff Jones and Cathy
Wilkerson, stayed for 10 days in Cambodia where, according to the SOS publi-
cation New Left Notes, they held "many long conversations with a number of
Vietnamese officials and Cambodians." but were unable to complete their
journey to Hanoi because of U.S. air raids.
More recently Cuban intelligence officials visiting Los Angeles illegally have
been observed with Koonan and other NLG leaders.
-Bemardine Dohrn was hired by the NLG as National Student Organizer in
1967. While still an NLG representative she traveled to Budapest, Hungary in
September 1968 to meet with representatives of North Vietnam and the Vietcong
terrorists. In July 1969 Oohrn and other SOS Weatherman leaders traveled to
Cuba for more meetings with the Vietnamese Communists. New Left Notes
(August 29, 1969) provided an eight-page special supplement describing what
took place and stating that the Vietcong wanted the Weathermen to organize
violent protests against U.S. support of South Vietnam.
Bemardine Rae Dohm
68
-Gustin Reichbach, active in the New York NlG chapter while a student
NLG member at Columbia University, co-authored "The Bust Book," a pam-
phlet sponsored by SDS and, initially, by the NLG, on demonstration tactics.
His collaborators in "The Bust Book" were Kathy Boudin; Columbia Law School
student Eleanor Stein Raskin, who after 11 years as a WUO fugitive, was ar-
rested with JeffJones in October 1981 in New York City after police found evi-
dence as to their hiding place in Kathy Boudin's apartment while investigating
a robbery and murder in Nyack, New York; and Brian Glick, a leader of the PFOC
San Francisco chapter.
On May 12, 1975, explosives, knives andlock picks
were discoveredin legal envelopes in thepossession of
BLA te"orists Herman Bell, Albert Washington and
Anthony Bottom.... Accordingto the New York
Times, the three hadbeen in contact "with no one
except their lawyers andcourt andco"ection officials. "
-Martin Stolar, a leading New York NLG activist, has represented many Black
liberation Army and WUO defendants. On May 12, 1975, explosives, knives
and lock picks were discovered in legal envelopes in the possession of BlA terror-
ists Herman Bell, Albert Washington and Anthony Bottom. The three were
being sentenced for the ambush murders of New York City police officers Waverly
Jones andJoseph Piagentini in May 1971.
According to the New York Times, the three had been in contact ' 'with no
one except their lawyers and court and correction officials." The supporters of
the BLA and their lawyers present in the courtroom were subpoenaed by a grand
jury. They included Judith Clark, Bart lubow, another NlG "legal worker,"
and NLG lawyers Elliott Wilk and Martin Stolar. The subpoenas were dropped
on grounds of attorney-client privilege. This was the fourth escape attempt by
the three BLA terrorists.
-Jonathan C. Moore, of the People's Law Office, an active NLG member,
represents activists suing the Chicago Police Department. In February 1979 a fed-
eral judge ordered current intelligence files turned over to Moore, with the pro-
viso they not be copied.
However, copies of the Chicago Police Intelligence Unit's case files on the
FALN terrorists were found in an FALN hideout in Milwaukee in April 1980.
When the story broke in the Chicago newspapers in August 1980, Moore was
attending the NLG convention in Boston where his People' s Law Office and
comrades Dennis Cunningham and Mara Siegel with Puerto Rican Nationalist
Party terrorist Oscar Collazo, who had been part of the group that attempted to
kill members of Congress in 1954, gave an NLG convention workshop entitled
"Freedom Fighters and the Armed Clandestine Movement for the Independence
of PuertoRico. '
The police intelligence documents found in the FAlN's Milwaukee hideout
included a detailed listing of potential FALN targets in the Chicago area which
69
were being given special police protection and a listing of dates and anniversaries
most likely to be commemorated by the FALN with acts of terrorism. Also
among the police intelligence files which had found their way from Moore's
custody in the People's Law Office to the fugitive terrorists were profiles of
known FALN support groups and of known FALN fugitives William Morales and
Oscar Lopez-Rivera, naming known associates. No wonder law enforcement had
little success in apprehending the FAIN terrorists.
In 1977the NLGsent Garbus to South Africa to
"observe" the trial ofBreyton Breytenbach, II white
South African who confessedto beinga member oflind
on a missionfor ate"orist support network operated
from France.
-Martin Garbus, co-counsel for WUO leaders Kathy Boudin and David Gil-
bert, charged with the October 20, 1981 robbery of $1.6 million from a Brink's
armored truck and three murders. In 1977 the NLG sent Garbus to South Mrica
to "observe" the trial of Breyton Breytenbach, a white South Mrican who
confessed to being a member of and on a mission for a terrorist support net-
work operated from France by the late Henri Curiel. A founder of the Egyptian
Communist Party in the 1940s, and a first cousin of George Blake, one of the
KGB's top spies in the British intelligence service who successfully escaped
from an English prison in 1964, Curiel's network, Solie/ante, was financed
through a Soviet-controlled Paris bank used to launder funds for the "Euro-
Communist" parties, Communist-supported causes and, through Curiel, terrorist
groups. British and French publications citing French intelligence sources re-
ported Curiel was believed to be I I in constant contact with the KGB. ' ,
-William Kunstler is co-counsel for Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert with
NLG activist Martin Garbus. Kunstler told Moneysworth magazine in Septem-
ber 1975:
"The thing 1'm most interested in is keeping people on the street who will
forever alter the character of this society: the revolutionaries. Whether it's the
American Indian Movement, or the Black Liberation Army, or H. Rap Brown-
a person or an organization-I'm really interested only in spending my talents
and any assets I have to keep the revolutionaries functioning. ' ,
On July 5, 1975, The Nation published an article by Kunstler seeking to
develop U.S. support for leaders of the West German terrorist Red Army Frac-
tion (Baader-Meinhof gang) on trial in Stuttgart for six bombings which killed
four U.S. soldiers, the killing of a police officer during a bank robbery, theft,
burglary and possession of explosives. Kunsder argued that "repression of the
pariahs of the movement almost inevitably leads to the repression of all. ' ,
Kunsder's close associate is NLG attorney Margaret Ratner who is also on the
70
staff of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a tax-exempt litigation
group formed by leading NLG members. In 1975 the CCR attempted to send
an NLG team to aid the defense of leaders of the terrorist Red Army Fraction
(Baader-Meinhof gang) on trial in West Germany. The team included Peter
Weiss, president of the board of the internationally active pro-terrorist think-
tank, the Institute for Policy Studies; former Attorney General Ramsey Clark,
now active in the IADL; William Schaap and Marge Ratner. [In 1977, an NLG
"observer" team of Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray attended terrorist trials in West
Germany.]
During 1977 and 1978 Ratner served on the staff of the Grand jury Project, a
pro-terrorist effon co-sponsored by the NLG and supporters of the Weather
Underground Organization. From 1979 to present Ratner has been a member of
the Grand jury Project board of directors. Her clients have included West Ger-
man terrorist Kristina Berster, caught illegally entering the United States after
undergoing a nine-month terrorist training course in Aden; and Dy1cia Pagan
and Susan Tipograph, the common-law wife and lawyer respectively of con-
victed FALN bomber William Morales, who were subpoenaed after his escape.
Working with Kunstler and Ratner have been Stewan Albert and judy Clavir.
Albert, born December 4, 1939, and his wife, Canadian-born judith Clavir, also
known as judith Hemblen and judy Gumbo, are characterized in the FBI repon
on WUO foreign contacts as "WUO members who failed to submerge into the
'underground' in early 1970 [and] WUO support persons who have functioned
so closely with the WUO that they themselves may be considered as 'under-
ground' functionaries. ,.
A staff study, "Terrorism." published by the House Committee on Internal
Security in 1974, reponed that Albert and Clavir were leaders of the coalition
of Weathermen and alternative culture street-fighting militants known in the
early 1970s as "Weatheryip." The study provided the following information on
Albert and Clavir:
"Stewart E. Albert has been associated with militant demonstrations since
1966 when he was arrested with Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free
Speech Movement, jerry Rubin and others on the University of California at
Berkeley campus, convicted of creating a public nuisance. and sentenced to 60
days in jaiL.. In 1968, Alben was one of the organizers of the demonstra-
tions during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. [Living the
Revolution: The Yippies in Chicago, by David Lewis Stein, The BobbsMerrill
Co., Inc., Indianapolis and New York. 1969, pp. 11 and 12.] A former staff
member of the National Mobilization Committee. Alben was an unindicted
co-conspirator in the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial.... In HCUA hearings in 1968,
Albert was described as 'one of the most active, if not the most vicious, of
the rock throwers.' ["Subversive Involvement in Disruption of 1968 Demo-
cratic Party National ConventionI Part I, " p. 2403.]
I' Canadian journalist David Lewis Stein, who lived with the YIP leaders
during the planning of the 1968 Chicago demonstrations, characterized Al-
ben as a 'Berkeley radical, acid head, Marxist-Leninist and impressive street
fighter.' ...
, 'Albert has had a long and close relationship with Eldridge Cleaver. In his
introduction to Jerry Rubin's book Do It!. Cleaver writes that this association
71
dates back to December 1966, before Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party, a
time when 'the black movement and the white movement were not speaking to
each other.' In his introduction, Cleaver noted that at the time he was writing
the introduction, Alben and 'his rib Uudy] Gumbo' were guests in Cleaver's
Algiers apartment.... Albert was a founder of the International Liberation
School which taught courses in I armed self-defense,' first aid for riot injuries
and other skills....
"In the YIP newsletter Dope Sheet in October 1970, Albert wrote of his
meeting with Timothy Leary in Algiers whose jailbreak had been engineered
by Bernardine Dobrn and other members of the Weather Underground. Al-
ben reponed he had gone to Algiers 'to get political advice from Eldridge
Cleaver' and meet with Leary in the Black Panther Party's International Section
headquarters. The same issue of Dope Sheet contained Weatherman com-
muniques and a letter from Timothy Leary.
"Albert's own views of revolution were expressed in statements he wrote
with Eldridge Cleaver and Jerry Rubin. 'We will not dissent from the Ameri-
kan government. We will overthrow it.' [Do It!, p. 198.] And in a series of
suggestions for actions on Election Day, 1968, which Albert wrote with Jerry
Rubin, 'Force the National Guard to protect every polling place in the coun-
try. Join the rifle club of your choice.... Release a Black Panther in the Justice
Department... .' [Do It!, p. 199.]
"In May 1971, Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo (Clavir) held a press confer-
ence on the Capitol steps to announce they were suspects in the Weatherman
bombing and denounce government 'harassment.' ... That month the two re-
ceived subpoenas to appear before a New York City grand jury in connection
with a Manhattan bank bombing plot involving the 'Crazies.' "
The FBI's report notes that while in Algiers, Albert met with WUO leader
Brian Flanagan, a thug celebrated among the Weatherman for having broken
the back and paralyzed Chicago District Attorney Richard Elrod during the
October 1969 "Days ofRage" Weatherman riots.
The contact between NLGactivists and West German
te"omts has continued.
The FBI report also revealed that on May 1, 1974, Albert and Gumbo were
seen with Clayton van Lydegraf near their home in Kingston, New York. It also
notes that on September 9, 1975 Stew Albert, Judy Hemblen, and NLG legal
worker Ellen Ray were observed in New York City accompanied by West German
revolutionary lawyer Kurt Groenewold. Groenewold was convicted of running an
illegal communications network for the Baader-Meinhof leaders. The contact
between NLG activists and West German terrorists has continued.
In March 1980 Stew Albert and NLG activist Melinda Rorick, a WUO/PFOC
member who had been a member of the Mayday Collective that helped organize
riots to "shut down the government" in 1971, were interviewed on Pacifica
72
radio station KPFK in Berkeley, California. The two described their new enter-
prise, an NLG-related private investigating firm with which Eldridge Cleaver's
former NLG lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, andJudy Clavir also were associated.
Alben and Rorick boasted that their "movement" private investigating firm,
called "ACE Investigators," could trace II suspicious" individuals, that it pos-
sessed surveillance equipment, and that the fmn was being used to obtain FBI
files by making multiple requests under the Freedom of Information Act be-
cause information in the documents usually was deleted differently for each re-
quest. They explained this meant that sometimes sources were left in, or could be
determined by collating the various documents.
NLGand WUO/PFOC
Support Rally for Symbionese
Liberation Army
Organizational suppon by the NLG for revolutionary terrorists was demon-
strated on September 27, 1975, by the NLG's co-sponsorship of a rally called by
the PFOC in suppon of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), following the
arrests of William and Emily Harris, Patricia Hearst and Wendy Yoshimura.
Nyack Case Involvements
It must be stressed that former WUO members have emphasized that there is
no operational distinction between the underground WUO and its oven arms,
between the WUO fugitive core and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee,
May 19th Communist Organization, John Brown Book Club, New Movement
in Solidarity with Pueno Rican Independence, Material Aid Committee for
ZAPU/PF and other WUO/PFOC fronts.
They stated that aboveground (PFOC) members could panicipate in an act of
terrorist "armed struggle" by locating targets, carrying out "intelligence-gather-
ing," providing logistical suppon or by actually being pan of the group that car-
ries out the attack.
On October 20, as Brink's guards were opening their truck after making a cash
pick-up at a bank at a shopping mall in Nyack, New York, gunmen burst out
of a van parked nearby and began fuing shotguns and automatic pistols. One
guard was killed instantly; the others were wounded. Canvas sacks containing
$1.6 million were stolen. The hit team abandoned the van on another parking
lot and split up into three escape vehicles. A yellow car chased by Nyack police
went out of control and crashed. Police arrested Judith A. Clark, a leader of the
WUO's PFOC and its New York affiliate, the May 19th Communist Organiza-
tion; WUO fugitive David Gilben; and BLA associate Samuel Brown.
A rental truck was stopped by a police roadblock. Gunmen, later identified as
members of the Black Liberation Army and Republic of New Africa, burst out of
the rear of the truck and shot two Nyack police officers to death. The gunmen
73
commandeered private vehicles at gunpoint and escaped. Kathy Boudin, who
had been riding in the cab of the truck, was arrested.
Furthermore, it demonstratedthat the members ofthe
overt WUOgroups can also be WUOfugitives usingfalse
identification.
The Nyack Brink's robbery demonstrated the accuracy of the information pro-
vided by former WUO members regarding the participation of overt WUO sup-
porters in terrorism. Furthermore, it demonstrated that the members of the overt
WUO groups can also be WUO fugitives using false identification. For example,
WUO fugitive Kathy Boudin was reponedly active in the May 19th Commun-
ist Organization and its various fronts under the alias Lynn Adams.
eJudith A. Clark, with Dana Biberman, Eve Rosahn and others, is a plaintiff in
a lawsuit against the United States, FBI and present and former officials claiming
damages for surveillance. The total flexibility between the WUO "underground"
and its oven arms is demonstrated by Clark's record. Clark was an original mem-
ber of the WUO who had gone underground in December 1969. A year later
she was arrested in New York; convicted of "felonious mob action," she was
sentenced to 180 days plus three years probation. As soon as she was released on
probation, Clark resumed her WUO/PFOC leadership role.
In May 1975 Clark was among the group ofNLG lawyers, legal workers and sup-
porters subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating how weapons and explosives
concealed in legal-sized manila envelopes got into the possession of three con-
victed BLA terrorists who were in coun for sentencing after they were convicted of
the May 1971 ambush murders of New York City police officers Waverly Jones
andJoseph Piagentini.
Clark was aparalegalemployedas an editor ofthe National
Lawyers Guild'sprison newsletter, the Midnight Special.
In testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1976, citing
internal PFOC documents, William Kintner noted Clark was a paralegal em-
ployed as an editor of the National Lawyers Guild's prison newsletter. the Mid-
night Special.
Only weeks before her arrest in Nyack, Judy Clark was in a Chicago federal
counroom while PFOC members and others from the Alliance to End Repression,
which is sueing the Chicago police department, demanded that the coun perma-
nently bar the police from monitoring any of their" non-criminal" activities.
74
Earlier in 1981 Judy Clark traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, where she visited with
Bassam Sharaf, a top leader of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (pFLP).
'Susan Victoria Tipograph is the NLG attorney representing Eve Rosahn, a
PFOC/May 19th Communist Organization activist arrested and charged with hav-
ing rented with false identification papers the van used by the Nyack terrorists.
Tipograph also represented Republic of New Afrika (RNA) leader Cynthia Boston
(alias Sister Fulani Sunni-Ali), who had been sought in relation to the Nyack
crimes.
Tipograph is the lawyer for the Committee for the Suit Against Government
Misconduct. which is a PFOC/M-19 CO front generating anti-FBI and anti-police
publicity through a suit for damages by ten WUO associates who include Judy
Clark and Dana Biberman. Rosahn, Biberman's roommate, has been active in
the Committee.
In September 1981 Tipograph, assisted by other NLG lawyers including Liz
Fink of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Grand Jury Project, represented
Eve R()SMn and five other PFOC/M-19 CO activists charged with assault in a
violefit demonstration at Kennedy International Airport. The WUO supporters,
delhonstrating under the name of yet another of their fronts, the John Brown
Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC), fought police and airport personnel during what
they mistakenly thought was the departure of a South African rugby team, the
Springboks. In the melee, a police officer was blinded by chemical MACE and a
guard received a severe gash in the leg from a broken bottle.
Tipograph was the lawyerfor convictedFAINbomb-maker
William Morales.
Tipograph was the lawyer for convicted FALN bomb-maker William Morales.
In May 1979 Tipograph visited her client in the Bellevue Hospital prison ward
where Morales was completing rehabilitative surgery for wounds suffered when
his bomb exploded prematurely in August 1978. After her visit Morales obtained
a bolt cutter, cut through a window grillwork, dropped to the ground and es-
caped.
Tipograph was subpoenaed -by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of
New York that was investigating the escape. Represented by Margaret Ratner,
Tipograph was able to quash her subpoena on the grounds it would violate
attorneyclient privilege. However, recently a grand jury has reopened its investi-
gation of Morales' escape.
On January 20, 1981, Susan Tipograph, Judy Clark, and Eve Rosahn marched
in a demonstration called by the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee outside the
U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., protesting the inauguration
of President Reagan. Photographs taken of that event show that also present was
a person identified subsequently by police officers as Marilyn Jean Buck, a mem-
ber of the Black Liberation Army sought in connection with the Nyack killings
who had escaped from the federal women's prison at Alderson, West Virginia,
75
This ph%gTllph. /wn au/side theJus/ice Depmmen/ dunng Presiden/ Rellgan 's inauguration, shows Nt111cy
Nichols. ManlJnJelln BucRandJudy CIarR participllhng.
in 1977. Buck, 34, was sentenced to a to-year prison term in 1973 for illegally
supplying weapons to the BLA, and is suspected of having been the driver of the
vehicle used in the jailbreak ofJoanne Chesimard.
These examples demonstrate conclusively that individual and leading mem-
bers of the National Lawyers Guild are deeply involved with the terrorist Weather
Underground Organization and its oven arms, and that this suppon is not lim-
ited to the proper legal function of representation, but involves criminal and un-
ethical actions.
The second pan of my discussion will show that these individual actions re-
flect the will and intention of the National Lawyers Guild as an organizational
entity; and I will demonstrate this from NLG documents, publications, and from
NLG national convention resolutions and activities.
76
Organizational Support
For Terrorism
(Extension of Remarks in the U.S. House ofRepresentatives
by Rep. Larry McDonald, December 9, 1981)
I have been discussing aspects of the suppon given to terrorist groups by the
National Lawyers Guild. an organization of revolutionary lawyers. law students
and revolutionary activists founded as a Communist Pany front and still oper-
ating under the control of a coalition of members. veterans and supponers of the
Communist Pany. U.S.A. and younger Castroites.
I have pointed out some instances. taken from among scores of potential ex-
amples. of the involvements of members of the NLG in terrorist groups and in
illegal activities in support of terrorism.
Today I would like to examine some of the suppon that the NLG provides as
an organization through its resolutions passed at its national conventions and
through projects the NlG has officially sponsored.
In cooperation with activists from the Weather Underground Organization
(WUO) and other revolutionary Marxist-Leninist groups. the NlG has been in-
volved in radicalizing prison inmates and organizing them to form terrorist shock
troops since the late 1960s. This activity is an outgrowth ofNLG and Students for
a Democratic Society collaboration in defense committees for members of the
Black Panther Party (BPP).
1971 NLG Convention
In 1973 a staff study by the House Committee on Internal Security reponed
on the NLG's 1971 national convention in Boulder, Colorado. and its attitude
toward the prison organizing movement:
"The NlG took a particular interest in prison work subsequent to the 1971
convention noting that it was critical to suppon prisoner militancy as law-
yers have relatively free access to jails and penitentiaries. There was a differ-
ence of opinion in the NlG, however, as to whether their prison work should
be merely supportive or given top priority. At the Guild's National Executive
Board meeting in February 1972. one faction took the position that the pris-
oner is the lrevolutionary vanguard' who will llead us in the streets: The
currently prevailing view in the NlG was expressed in a 1973 resolution citing
prisons as an exaggerated reflection of the I capitalist' system so that any prison-
related work by the NLG would be making a contribution to the revolutionary
movement in general. ' ,
77
Prison Task Force
In July 1975 Guild Notes, the NLG' s official publication, published ma-
terials by the NLG Prison Task Force that advocated revolutionary armed strug-
gle-terrorism-in the prisons, and detailed how, by using the NLG' s logo,
publications supporting terrorism were carried into the prisons.
Some NLG members thought that the publication the Midnight Special, a
newsletter for prisoners initiated by the NLG's New York City chapter in 1971
and the PrisonJustice Committee, at the time of a takeover and riot by militant
inmates in the New York City prisons, had become so inflammatory as to be
an embarrassment and liability to the National Lawyers Guild. The Prison Jus-
tice Committee was a suppon group for radicalized, violence-oriented prisoners
formed by revolutionaries who supponed the Weather Underground and the
Cleaver faction of the Black Panther Patty which formed the Black Liberation
Army (BLA).
The Midnight Special served as an inter-prison communications service by
publishing messages from militant inmates and providing inflammatory accounts
of prison strikes and disturbances. To "legitimize" the use of the NLG logo to
get the publication into prisons past censors, the newsletter occasionally sprinkled
some legal notes for jailhouse lawyers on its pages.
With a circulation of4, JOO, the impact ofthe Midnight
Special onprison discipline was considerable.
With a circulation of 4,500 the impact of the Midnight Special on prison
discipline was considerable. Some of the NLG members were upset by the open
advocacy of terrorism in a publication organizationally sponsored by the National
Lawyers Guild. These NLG members never objected to the NLG's secret suppon
of terrorism and non-public activities to encourage prisoners to violence, but the
highly inflammatory rhetoric of the Midnight Special posed a potential em-
barrassment to their influence among liberals.
The NLG's San Francisco Bay Area Prison Task Force. which included a num-
ber of Weather Underground and Black Panther supponers, defended the Mid-
night Special in a position paper that commenced by quoting George Jackson.
liThe ultimate expression of law is not order-it is prison. II Jackson, a Black
Panther Patty Leader, was killed during an August 1971 jailbreak attempt at San
Quentin. NLG attorney Steve Bingham, a member of the Prison Law Associa-
tion and the NLG's San Francisco Bay area chapter, was indicted on charges of
smuggling the pistol used by Jackson and his co-conspirators to kill three guards
and two prisoners. He remains a fugitive.
The NLG prison group provided the following analysis defending the role of
the Midnight Special:
The analysis presented here finds its basis in the view that the fundamental
struggle in the world today is against American imperialism. We understand
78
imperialism as a two-headed system with one aim-the subjugation and control
of the majority of the people of the world for the benefit of a few.
Prisons are the ultimate weapon of domestic social control. and the place
where imperialism most clearly reveals itself as a unified world-wide system of
oppression....
Because many prisoners are people who have resisted subjugation, they are
potentially a strong revolutionary force....They know that they will only re-
gain their freedom and their dignity in a different changed society, and they
have very little left to lose in this one.
The MS is a major tool in the fight against the isolation which is the basic
destructive tool of the prison system.... Only lawyers and legal workers have
relatively free access to prisoners....
Those who feel that the Guild should sever ties with the MS argue that it is
essentially a political organ and that it expresses a particular political line, i.e.,
armed struggle. which has no place within a broad-based legal organization
like the Guild. In the context of prisons, however. the dichotomy between
legal questions and political questions loses much of its meaning....
A strictly legalistic prison project divorced from the politics and daily lives
of prisoners would be useless. The MS is the only existing extensive com-
munication link between prisoners and with the outside; it has historical ties
with the Guild. depends on the Guild logo for access to prisons and provides
a basis for Guild members to do prison work.
Like other Guild publications, the MS actively solicits material from mem-
bers of the Guild....The Special's greatest value. both to the Guild and to
prisoners, lies in the fact that it is a paper which prisoners write and through
which they can communicate and develop their own politics. The significance
of the Special is greatly enhanced because under the Guild logo it gets inside
prisons where all other political papers are banned.
Because the MS is a voice of the prison movement. it carried anicles and
poems that speak in the voices of prisoners. Some of these voices express the
politics of armed struggle.... Many prisoners. continually subject to armed
aggression by the state. believe that change can only be brought about through
warfare and that conditions demand that the struggle be armed....
Members of the Guild who insist that the politics of armed struggle have
no place in a Guild publication ignore this organization's history and self-
definition. The Guild is not merely a legal organization-it is not the ACLU
or the ABA; we hold ourselves out as a progressive legal group. Funher. this
view ignores the reality that armed struggle has existed in the past, continues
in the present and will increase in the future. Many people within the Guild
consider the strategy of armed struggle to be an integral pan of any revolu-
tionary struggle. The Guild itself has not only defended but actively sup-
poned the armed actions at Attica and Wounded Knee and has in some sense
joined these struggles. Preventing people from having a forum to discuss and
develop these politics will cripple people's ability to distinguish adventurist
actions from a valid revolutionary strategy of armed struggle.
It should be pointed out that the Guild calls itself a broad-based political
organization. which means that it does not put fonh only one line or censor
differing views. The Guild must make room for those who believe in revolu-
tion and armed struggle....
79
The fact that armed struggle politics are discussed in a paper bearing the
Guild logo may in the future bring some pressure from the government on the
Guild as an organization....The Guild has come under attack from the gov-
ernment before as a result of taking principled political stands and should ex-
pect such attacks again and be prepared to resist them aggressively....
At a meeting of the NLG National Executive Board (NEB) in Columbus,
Ohio, August 15-18, 1975, there was lengthy discussion of the prison terrorism
issue. The NLG's decision-making body, the NEB, passed the resolution of the
Prison Task Force and made the Midnight Special, lea publication of the Na-
tional Prison Task Force of the Guild," which should be printed in the name of
theNLG.
The NLG's decision-making body also agreed not to impose any censorship on
the contents of the publication.
The resolution said:
"Since prisoners are the political base of the Midnight Special, it must have
editorial integrity. The Prison Task Force rejects the notion of complete editor-
ial control of the Midnight Special by the NEB. "
It is notedthat those working on this NLGprison newsletter
were members ofthe te"orist Weather Underground Organ-
ization (WUO).
It is noted that those working on this NLG prison newsletter were members of
the terrorist Weather Underground Organization (WUO). The editor of the
Midnight Special was Russell Neufeld, who had been arrested in Vermont in
February 1970 for illegally buying a carbine while under indictment in Cook
County, Illinois, for assault, mob action and aiding and abetting the escape of a
prisoner during the Weatherman "Days of Rage" riots in October 1969. On
June 1, 1970, Neufeld and eight other WUO members pled guilty to charges of
battery and mob action and were placed on 2 to 5 years probation. A federal
grand jury in Detroit indicted Neufeld and 12 other WUO leaders on bomb con-
spiracy charges on]uly 23, 1970.
Neufeld went to work in the NLG's New York City offices. At the same time
he was an active and leading member of the WUO's oven arm, the Prairie Fire
Organizing Committee (PFOC), serving as a member of the PFOC National
Committee. This Congressman made internal PFOC documents available to his
colleagues in the Congressional Record (October 1, 1976) regarding factional dis-
putes which included a statement by Neufeld.
Neufeld not only worked on the Midnight Special, he also wrote for the NLG's
official national publication, Guild Notes, contributing ankles on the status of
federal cases against the fugitive WUO leaders (November 1973). Neufeld pro-
vided an interview to the National Observer Oanuary 5, 1974) in which he
said, '"l suppon what the Weather Underground has done-the bombings."
80
In testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1976,
William Kintner stated that another individual editing the NLG's Midnight
Specifll prison newsletter was Judith Clark. Clark, who had gone underground
with the WUO leadership Flint, Michigan "War Council" in December 1969,
was arrested a year later in New York. In March 1971 Clark pleaded guilty to
charges of "felonious mob action" and was sentenced to 180 days plus 3 years
probation. Judy Clark was among the group of NLG lawyers, legal workers and
supponers subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating how weapons and explo-
sives got into possession of three Black Liberation Army (BLA) terrorists-Her-
man Bell, Anthony Bottom and Alben Washington-who were in coun for sen-
tencing after conviction of the ambush murders of New York City police officers
Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini in May 1971. The New York Times re-
poned that the three BLA murderers had been in contact "with no one except
their lawyers and coun and correction officials." Those subpoenaed were Naomi
Bums, Judy Clark, Ron Hill, Yuri Kochiyama, Ban Lubow (a "legal worker"
who had been associated with the NLG South East Asia Military Law Project in
the Philippines in 1972), Ellen Sokolow Molinari, Cunis Mullins, Martha Pitts,
NLG lawyer Manin Stolar, Sundiata Balagoon, Evelyn Williams and NLG law-
yer Elliot Wilk, a Legal Services lawyer formerly involved in the defense of Attica
prison riot defendants.
The effons of the so-called "prison movement" in organizing prisoners as the
vanguard for revolutionary terrorism was in pan successful. A number of U.S.
terrorist organizations including the Black Liberation Army (BLA), Venceremos
Organization (VO), Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and George Jackson
Brigade (GJB) were formed by ex-convicts and escaped prisoners in association
with radical activists.
The GrandJury Project
The Grand Jury Project was initiated by the New York Women's Union, a
group of militant feminists associated with the WUO, in February 1975, follow-
ing the issuance of subpoenas by federal grand juries investigating the 'under-
ground" which harbored revolutionary terrorist fugitives Kathy Power and Susan
Saxe, wanted for the murder of a Boston police officer during a bank robbery;
and the murders of four people by the Pueno Rican terrorist FALN in the Jan-
uary 1975 bombing of the Fraunces Tavern.
The Grand Jury Project organization included several women lawyers active in
the NLG as well as movement activists-' 'legal workers." The purpose of the
Grand Jury Project has been, and clearly remains, to coordinate policies of total
non-cooperation with any grand jury investigating revolutionary terrorist activ-
ities, and provide encouragement to those subpoenaed once they are jailed for
contempt of the grand jury.
The GrandJury Project has been officilJlly cosponsoredby
the National Lawyers Guildsince 1976.
81
The GrandJury Project has been officially cosponsored by the National Lawyers
Guild since 1976. In 1976 staff members included Ellen Grosse, Judy Peluso and
Terri Turgeon, activists subpoenaed in connection with the hatboring of Susan
Saxe and Kathy Powers; Janet Gallagher, Judy Greenspan, Julie Schwartzbetg
and NlG lawyers Carlin Meyer and Rhonda Copelon. In December 1976 Phila-
delphia NLG lawyer Linda Backiel, who with NlG Philadelphia member Holly
Maguigan had defended Jay Weiner and Philip Shinnick, both "Spons for the
People" activists who preferred to spend eight months in prison for grand jury
contempt rather than answer questions about the harboring of fugitive Sym-
bionese Liberation Army terrorists Bill and Emily Harris and Patty Hearst.
In the spring of 1977 the Project joined the Campaign to Stop Government
Spying (CSGS), which was organized by Morton Halperin, director of the Center
for National Security Studies (CNSS), to coordinate grassroots lobbying effons
against police intelligence units, and Congressional lobbying to abolish FBI in-
ternal security investigations and to abolish the CIA.
This NLG-sponsored project has published in its newsletter, Quash, a num-
ber of anicles by convicted bank robber and terrorist Susan Saxe. The Grand
Jury Project takes the position that the police, FBI and legal system exist only as
instruments of repression. An open letter from Grusse and Turgeon after they
left the project staff in 1977 demanded the movement denounce and expose rad-
icals who criticized their position of total non-cooperation with the legal system
as "informants" and demanded "that all political communities be warned of
their existence... and the threat they pose to our movement." The' 'open letter"
made clear that if there was any' 'threat, II it was posed by the NLG's Grand Jury
Project activists.
The Grand Jury Project has worked intimately with the NLG/WUO lawyers
of Chicago's People's Law Office in distributing support for members of the Na-
tional Liberation Movement (MLN). which has been described in testimony by a
convicted FALN terrorist as the FALN's political arm. At the NLG's 1977 National
Convention in Chicago, the GJP sponsored a workshop on grand jury resistance
tactics moderated by staff lawyer Linda Backiel and with panelists including Holly
Maguigan and Mara Siegel of the People's Law Office and Chicago PFOC. The
GrandJury Project and People's Law Office cosponsored a resolution passed unan-
imously by the NLG plenary calling for the immediate release of all jailed for
contempt of grand juries investigating the FALN.
The Grand Jury Project revealed additional ties to the Weather Underground
Organization and related terrorist groups with its publication of materials by the
jailed president of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), Richard Henry who used
the name Imari Abubakari Obadele I, an organization strongly supported by the
WUO's PFOC and its New York spinoffs, the May 19th Communist Organiza-
tion (M-19 CO) and the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee OBAKC). Along
with messages from a WUO support group for the FALN, the New York Com-
mittee Against Grand Jury Repression of Box 268, 161 E. Houston Street, New
York, New York 10012 (signed by "chairperson" Peggy Powell), Quash printed
a guest column by Vicki Gabriner, a WUO member arrested during the 1969
"Days of Rage" riots, convicted of passport fraud (overturned on appeal in 1978),
member of the Venceremos Brigade's second contingent and a leader of the Bos-
ton PFOC chapter. The GJP described Gabriner as "a lesbian-feminist who is
appealing federal felony convictions arising from her anti-Vietnam War activ-
82
hies with Weatherman-50S in 1969-70." (Qu(JSh, November-December 1977).
The Grand Jury Project staff and associates participate in the NLG national
conventions and in the interim meetings of the NLG's National Executive Board
(NEB) and continue to receive NLG cosponsorship, with funding channeled
through the San Francisco-based Capp Street Foundation set up by the NLG to
fund its projects.
The content of the Project's publication, Quash, concentrates on coverage of
grand juries investigating terrorist crimes, and on publicizing "resistance" ac-
tivities. One example was the publication of an account of an October 1977
kangaroo court against the FBI which featured as its moderator Ahmed Obafemi
of the violence-oriented Republic of New Africa (RNA), which wants to form an
all-black separate country with United Nations sanction from the five Deep South
states of the United States; Terri Turgeon; Vincent Alba, New York Committee
to Free the Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners; jimmy Durham of the violence-
prone American Indian Movement (AIM); and Afeni Shakur, a former N.Y.
Panther 21 defendant, whose comrades, joanne D. Chesimard (Assata Shakur),
Clark Squires (Sundiata Scali), and james Costan (Zayd Malik Shakur) were in-
volved in a shootout with New jersey state troopers on May 2, 1973. Castan,
former Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party in New York and
brother of one of the Panther 21, was killed as was one trooper. Squires and Ches-
imard were captured, convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life im-
prisonment. Chesimard escaped in 1978.
But according to the Quash report, Chesimard and Squires were "activists...
imprisoned as a result of COINTELPRO activity aimed at the black move-
ment."
A year later Quash published a call for assistance by the National Task Force
for COINTELPRO Litigation and Research, P.O. Box 65, Bronx, New York
10473, of which Meni Shakur is a leader, asking for "intelligence materials,
documents" and other materials to aid them in uncovering II domestic war crimes
... particularly against REVOLUTIONARY BLACK NATIONAUSTS" which are
listed as including the BPP and RNA.
On the same page, the NLG's Grand jury Project newsletter reprinted a leaf-
let announcing the filing of a lawsuit against the U.S. government, the FBI and
present and former officials by judy Clark, Dana Bieberman and others asso-
ciated with the Weather Underground for $100 million in damages. The leaflet,
from the Committee for the Suit against Government Misconduct, Box 254, Peter
Stuyvesant Station, New York, N.Y. 10009, stated:
IIWe, the plaintiffs, were pan of the anti-war, student and new left move-
ments.... Within the broader mass movements, we struggled to build anti-
imperialist consciousness and practice. We fought to draw the connections
between the Vietnamese liberation struggle and the movements of Black and
other Third World people in this country. After the high tide of mass activ-
ity was over, we continued to do political work in support of political pris-
oners, in the movement of solidarity with Puerto Rican independence, in the
anti-imperialist women's movement; in community struggles for health care,
day care and tenant rights.
" ... nationalliberation movements engaged in heightened levels of struggle,
exemplified by the American Indian Movement's reclaiming of Wounded
83
Knee, the emergence of the F.A.L.N. (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Na-
donal) as an armed, clandestine wing of the Pueno Rican independence move-
ment inside the u.s. and the panicular heightening of resistence and armed
self-defense by Black people as represented by the Black Liberation Army. ' ,
The newsletter noted that checks for contributions to the lawsuit "should be
made payable to Susan Tipograph, Esq." Tipograph is not only a member of
the NLG, but is also prominent in the WUO's PFOC/May 19th Communist
Organization. Following her visit to convicted FALN bomber William Morales,
he obtained a bolt cutter, cut through a window grillwork of the prison ward of
Bellevue Hospital, dropped to the ground and escaped. Tipograph and Morales'
common-law wife, Dylda Pagan, were subpoenaed by a grand jury; but they
were dropped. Pagan was convicted with nine FALN co-defendants in Chicago
in 1980 of robbery and attempting to ovenhrow the government by force and
violence. Tipograph presently represents Judy Clark and RNA member Cynthia
Boston.
In 1979 the Board of Directors of the Grand Jury Project included Manin
Stolar, currently representing Kathy Boudin's roommate; Jay Weiner, who went
to prison rather than answer questions from a federal grand jury in Pennsyl-
vania about Symbionese Liberation Army fugitives Bill and Emily Harris and
Patricia Hearst; NLG member Kristen Booth Glen, who represented Susan Saxe;
several NLG lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights including Mani
Copleman, Jose "Abi" Lugo, and Doris Petersen; and Saxe grand jury resister
Jill Raymond.
Among the Project's services are printing of instructions in Spanish and English
on how to resist FBI and grand jury investigations.
1977 NLGNational Convention
Pro-terrorist activities remained pan of the official NLG program at the 1977
national convention in Seattle, attended by some 500 NLG delegates and 200 ob-
servers and activists. Events during the convention were reponed in detail by the
Information Digest (September 2, 1977), an authoritative newsletter published
byJohn Rees that reports on u.S. political and social movements, including ter-
rorist organizations and their support infrastructures. In past, the anicle stated:
The Seattle convention was the fust to be addressed by representatives of the
Cuban Government and of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO). The Cuban delegation included Dr. Enrique Marimon Roca, a Cuban
Supreme Coun Justice; and two functionaries of the Federation of Cuban
Women, Ana Maria Navarro Arrue and Maria Yolanda.
Hassan Rahman, a PLO representative at the UN, praised the NLG for its
support of c'nationalliberation movements and just causes around the world. ,t
Said the PLO spokesman, I 'Our struggle is not for the liberation of the Pale-
stinian people alone, but for the Jewish people as well from Zionism." NLG
Detroit activist Abdeen Jabara's suit against the U.S. for having been over-
heard on a number of national security wiretaps was a subject of conversation
at the NLG meeting.
84
The Information Digest report continued with a report on the NLG workshops
in support of such Soviet-controlled terrorist groups as the African National
Congress (ANC) of South Africa and South West Africa People's Organization
(SWAPO):
The highly popular international workshop included discussion ofthe NLG's
support for the Havana and Moscow supported Puerto Rican independence
movement led by the Castroite Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP); increasing
support for such Mrican terrorist movements as the South West Africa Peo-
ple's Organization (SWAPO) and the South Mrican Communist Party-con-
trolled African National Congress (ANC). Examples ofNLG "solidarity work"
for the Soviet-backed southern Mrican revolutionaries included sponsorship
of a speaking tour last winter by a leading white member of ANC in exile,
Albie Sachs; supporting a 1976 treaty signed by some 30 countries which classi-
fies apartheid as a" crime against humanity" and specifies, said members of the
NLG's International Committee, that any individual in any country who has
committed an act of racial discrimination is subject to prosecution in any coun-
try who has signed the treaty.
Another solidarity action by NLG internationalists was a visit to South Mrica
by Marty Garbus of the New York chapter to observe the trial of a man accused
of being an organizer for an underground white revolutionary apparatus called
Okhela ["spark" in Zulu]; and of a dozen men accused of membership in
the South African Communist Party, the ANC and in their jointly controlled
terrorist cadre, Spear of the Nation. Garbus observed the trials ostensibly as a
representative of the International League for Human Rights.
The white South African revolutionary was Breyton Breytenbach, who en-
tered using a false passport and was arrested. Breytenbach confessed he had been
recruited into a network variously called Solidan'te and Aid and Friendship"
that not only engaged in agitational activities in support of revolutionary terror-
ists throughout Western Europe and the Middle East, but also in utilizing ama-
teur revolutionaries to provide safe houses, funds, false papers and courier
services for a wide range of Soviet and Cuban supported revolutionary terrorist
movements. The network, run by Henri Curiel, an Egyptian Communist resi-
dent in France who was identified as in close contact with the Soviet KGB, has
been described as hovering 'on the blurred dividing line between left-wing pol-
itics, support for the Thirq World, and espionage and terrorism."
The Information Digest report on the NLG's 1977 convention noted the fol-
lowing involvement of staff of the NLG Puerto Rico Project and International
Committee with terrorism:
During the convention, reports were presented on various continuing NLG
projects such as the Puerto Rico Project in San Juan whose staff includes Mike
Withey, formerly of the Seattle NLG chapter who ran into grand jury subpoe-
nas early in 1976 during an investigation of the terrorist, prison movement-re-
lated GeorgeJackson Brigade and the escape from custody of one of the terror-
ists who had been captured after a bank robbery and shootout; the GrandJury
Project; the Immigration Project; the Legal Services Task Force on the work of
85
NLG members employed by this federally-funded program; the Housing Task
Force; the National Office and the International Committee.
International Committee repons included information from the 1977 NLG
delegation to Cuba whose members included NLG president Bill Goodman;
Paul Harris, San Francisco; Susan Gzech, Ann Arbor; and Franklin Siegel of
the National Office; on the 1977 NLG observer team at the trial of leaders of
the Baader-Meinhof gang (Red Army Fraction) in West Germany [a 1975
effon to send a Center for Constitutional Rights team of Peter Weiss, Ramsey
Clark, William Schapp and Marge Ratner was rejected by the West German
authorities] with the NLG's 1977 team being Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray; Many
Garbus' trip to South Africa; and the 1977 NLG delegation to the Middle East
in support of the PLO which was led byJohn Quigley.
NLG 1979 Convention
The National Lawyers Guild involvement with support for terrorism and revo-
lutionary violence continued during its national convention in San Francisco in
February 1979. The following account is taken from the Information Digest (May
4, 1979):
Reprinted from the Information Digest.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a coalition of Old Left Communist Party,
U.S.A. (CPUSA) members and supporters, Castroites, Maoists and other New
Left activists, held its 37th national convention in San Francisco, February 15-19.
1979.
The NLG convention reaffmned the NLG's commitment to continue serving as
the key U.S. support group for foreign and domestic Marxist-Leninist, revolu-
tionary and terrorist movements. During the plenaries, caucuses. workshops,
task force and committee meetings, support was expressed-and in some cases
practical measures planned-to aid revolutionaries and terrorists from the Middle
East, Iran, West Germany, Nicaragua and other countries as well as such violence-
oriented U.S. groups as the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Black Panther
Party (BPP), Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), FuerzaI Armadas de Liberacion
Naciona/ ( F ~ ) , United League of North Mississippi and the Weather Under-
ground Organization (WUO).
NLG involvement with the WUO and its oven arm, the Prairie Fire Organ-
izing Committee (PFOC) [plus its New York City splinter faction with which it
has become reconciled, the May 19 Communist Organization (M-19CO)], was
evident in a "champagne reception" held to generate support for the PFOC's ef-
fons to build a fnational support coalition for the terrorist FALN and related
Chicano "armed struggle" groups.
The reception was to honor Steven Guerra of the Movimiento de Liberacion
Nacional (MLN) and former coordinator of the National Committee against
Grand Jury Abuse; and Myrna Salgado, National Committee to Free Puerto
Rican Prisoners of War. Sponsors of the 2/16/79 event were Chicago People's
Law Office and PFOC activists Dennis Cunningham and Mike Deutsch; Mara
Siegel; and the Centro Legal de la Raza, Oakland. The affair took place at the law
86
office of Stuart Hanlon at 294 Page Street. San Francisco. to which all NLG con-
vention goers were invited.
Persons were present from the PFOC and the John Brown Book Club which
distributes the PFOC's theoretical journal, Breakthrough; the October 30th Com-
mittee in Solidarity with Pueno Rico which operates from 1005 Market Street.
#207, San Francisco. CA [415/285-9473]; the Committee in Solidarity with
Pueno Rican Independence (CISPRI), P.O. Box 343, Brooklyn. NY 11217
[212/499- 2767]; and a Chicago coalition of the NCFPRPOW, PFOC, and a
small, extremist Trotskyist splinter group headed by Noel Ignatin, the Sojourner
Truth Organization (STO). This coalition, tentatively termed the Interim Com-
mittee in Solidarity with the Pueno Rican Revolutionary Independence Struggle.
was centered in the Westtown Community Law Office, 2403 W. Nonh Avenue.
Chicago. IL60622 [312/278-6706].
Literature was available in suppon of FALN member William Morales. ar-
rested after the premature detonation of a bomb in his apanment in New York
last year. by the MLN andJuan Antonio Corretjer's Pueno Rican Socialist League
[Liga SocialiIta Puertomquena (LSP)]. PFOC members present criticized the five
members of the WUO's Revolutionary Committee (WUO-RC)-Clayton van
Lydegraf, Judy Bissell. Leslie Mullin. Marc Perry and Michael Justesen-ar-
rested and charged in Los Angelesf with planning to bomb the office of a Cali-
fornia state senator. Panicularly harsh in criticizing Van Lydegraf. long a leader of
the PFOC and WUO, PFOC members from the Bay Area and Chicago said he
was no longer involved with the organization and that they were supponing his
defense only because it was a means for gaining discovery against FBI counter-
intelligence programs.
The reception's principal purpose was to urge NLG activists to become in-
volved in organizing a national movement to "suppon the armed clandestine
independence movement" by pressing for the release of Morales; two Pueno
Ricans who panicipated in the armed takeover of the Chilean consulate in San
Juan, PR, onJuly 3. 1978, Nydia Ester Cuevas and Pablo Marcano Garcia; and of
course the four remaining Nationalist Pany terrorists serving sentences for the
attempted assassination of President Truman and shooting Congressmen in the
1950s.
Resolutions.
Among the resolutions passed at the NLG national convention and National
Executive Committee (NEC) meeting on 2/19/79 of the national officers. reg-
ional vice-presidents (RVPs) , the representative of the National Finance Com-
mittee (NFC) and the full-time members of the NLG National Office (NO) staff
included:
eExpansion of the Police Crimes Task Force to the National Committee on
Government Repression and Police Crimes. Defining "police crimes" as "sur-
veillance, infiltration. disruption and harassment of political groups," the com-
mittee will set up a brief bank and clearinghouse within the NLG for use against
federal and local intelligence agencies including the Law Enforcement Intelli-
gence Unit (LEIU); and will coordinate NLG work with the Center for National
Security Studies (CNSS), Campaign for Political Rights [formerly the Campaign
to Stop Government Spying]. the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
Program on Government Surveillance and Political Rights [co-chaired by the
87
NLG's Margaret Van Houten, a veteran of Counter-Spy], and the American
Civil Libenies Union (ACIU).
-A resolution in suppon of Iranian revolutionaries calling for NLG suppon of
Iranian militants faced with deponation and the sending of "a message of sol-
idarity to the Iranian people by way of Radio Iran." The "whereases" gave a
clear indication of the NLG's continuing suppon for revolutionary armed struggle
and loathing of the U.S. government, stating in part:
"Whereas the heroic struggles of the Iranian people have succeeded in crush-
ing the Shah's U.S.-backed regime; Whereas a large segment of the Iranian
people have taken up arms to defend the achievements of their revolution;
Whereas the revolution in Iran today is a major defeat for U.S. imperialist
policy throughout the world.... "
NLG 1980 Convention
Active in suppon of revolutionary and radical groups and causes since its forma-
tion in 1937, the National lawyers Guild (NLG) held its 38th national convention
at Boston University, August 6-11, 1980. This year's convention theme was
"The Struggle Against Racism," and the proceedings attracted some 725 NLG
members and supponers.
Formed with the assistance of the Comintern and operating under the unques-
tioned conrrol of the Communist Party. U.S.A. (CPUSA) for its first three
decades, the NLG is controlled by a core of veteran members and supponers of
the Moscow-line CPUSA fully backed by generally younger NlG members who
look to Havana or Hanoi for their political direction. Additionally, various Trot-
skyist, Maoist and Newleft panies have members within the NLG.
The Boston convention was relatively low-key after previous heated debates
over the National lawyers Guild's suppon for the Palestine liberation Organ-
ization (PIO) and the effons of the NIG's Maoist minority in running alterna-
tive candidates for national office and in raising the position in international issues
of the People's Republic of China.
It was noted that the present NLG activists, generally in their late twenties and
thirties, appear frozen in the rhetoric, dress and lifestyle of a decade ago. Work-
shops and seminars were replete with references to "fascist police," , 'racist
pigs," "imperialism" and "militarism." Jeans, boots and slogan T-shirts were
the standard dress. with one enterprising capitalist having sold scores of one T-
shin reading' 'Guild by Association-The National lawyers Guild. "
Friday, August 9 Events.
Activities opened with a breakfast meeting by NLG lawyers involved in "Liti_
gation Against Cuban Terrorism," by which they meant against anti-Castro
Cuban exiles. The meeting was principally of lawyers active in the International
Committee and the Cuba Subcommittee.
For the rank-and-file NLG activist, the morning was devoted to interminable
debates over proposed reworkings of parts of the NLG constitution and by the
opening plenary. Following discussions of the constitutional revisions and other
minimally interesting items, the candidates for national office were presented
and answered general questions about what they had to offer, political direction,
views on the world situation, and so fonh.
88
Mternoon workshops included:
Freedom Fighters and the Armed Clandestine Movement for the Inde-
pendence ofPuerto Rico-featured Pueno Rican Nationalist Pany terrorist Oscar
Collazo and members of the People's Law Office in Chicago who act as the law-
yers for the 11 arrested members of the. terrorist Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion
Naciona/(FALN).
With NLG members Dennis Cunningham and Mara Siegel leading. the history
of armed struggle by Pueno Rican revolutionaries through the emergence in
November 1974 of the FALN and the development last year of "coordinated
actions by several armed groups" was outlined.
A draft resolution in suppon of the jailed FALN terrorists termed "Pueno
Rican Prisoners of War Held in U. S. Prisons," was submitted signed by Michael
Deutsch. Dennis Cunningham, Mara Siegel. Ed Voci, Brian Glick "and others:'
In revised and abbreviated form, the resolution received additional signatures
from Kingsley Clarke and Jose Antonio Lugo of the Center for Constitutional
Rights (CCR) and was accepted by the NLG. The resolution stated that since the
U.N. Special Committee on Decolonization, the U.N. General Assembly and the
Conference of Non-Aligned Nations "and all progressived people around the
world" have recognized Pueno Rico as "an oppressed. colonized nation en-
titled to self-determination and independence. It and that "under principles of
international law. persons captured while struggling against colonial oppression
are entitled to treatment as Prisoners of War and release from detention or im-
prisonment, " a status claimed by the FALN. the NLG will demand that the
U.S. Government release the FALN terrorists, send letters to various U.N. agen-
cies and officials supporting the FALN claims to POW status. and campaign for
the release of Haydee Torres from isolation at Alderson federal prison in West
Virginia.
It is noted that while the NLG Boston convention was in progress, the Chicago
Sun-Times [8/10/80] revealed that among the documents captured by police and
FBI agents in an April 8, 1980, raid on an FALN "safehouse" in Milwaukee were
the Chicago Police Depanment intelligence files on the FALN.
The documents included a detailed listing of potential FALN targets in the
Chicago area. a compilation of dates and anniversaries most likely to be commem-
orated by the FALN terrorists with bombings. and files on FALN suppon groups
and on known FALN members such as Oscar Lopez Rivera and William Morales.
In January 1979, Federal District Judge Alfred Kirkland, now retired. signed
an order giving lawyers for plaintiffs in the various suits alleging invasion of pri-
vacy brought by the Alliance to End Repression (AER), American Civil Libenies
Union (ACLU) , Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and
other groups access to the current Chicago intelligence files. On 2/1/79, the
documents found in the FALN hideout were brought to the law offices ofJon-
athan C. Moore, 343 S. Dearborn, Suite 1607. Chicago, IL 60604. where they
were to be inspected. but not copied.
Panners in the firm include Michael Deutsch, Jeffrey Haas, Dennis Cunning-
ham and Peter J. Schmiedel. When reponers tried to call Moore, Schmiedel said
he was in Boston at the National Lawyers Guild convention. Schmiedel also
confirmed that he and Deutsch visited the FALN prisoners held in Cook County
Jail and had provided them with "guidelines for legal procedure" to use in act-
89
ing as their own lawyers. Deutsch also filed a petition with the United Nations
seeking to have the FALN prisoners declared POWs.
It will be recalled that several members of the People's Law Office active in the
NLG figure prominently in the declassified FBI repon on the foreign contacts
of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and that Cunningham,
Deutsch and Haas were formerly active with the WUO's oven arm, the Prairie
Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC).
In its "international work," the NLG reconfirmed its suppon to revolutionary
terrorist organizations. An "observer" representing the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (pFLP) was present distributing PFLP literature and en-
couraging NLG activists to take out subscriptions to its journal. The PFLP activity
took place in association with distribution of literature from the Association of
Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), co-founded by Detroit NLG ac-
tivist AbdeenJabara, a leader of the International Committee's Mideast Subcom-
mittee.
90
Mterword
By W. Mark Felt
During my 32 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I was closely in-
volved in the direction and decision-making of FBI investigation of the Weather
Underground Organization. This was both from criminal and counter-intelligence
standpoints. Fuzzy-thinking liberals still refer to the WUO as a group of I 'polit-
ical activists," but members themselves are avowed Communists and openly de-
clare that they would overthrow our government by force and violence. They
boasted of the many bombings for which they were responsible, including those
of the U.S. Capitol Building, the Pentagon and the State Depanment. They
have been less vocal about the murders resulting from some of the bombings.
The WUO are terrorists of the very worst sort and can be compared to the Red
Brigade, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the AI Fatah. The WUO is a part of In-
ternational Terrorism threatening all non-Communist societies.
Recent events at Nyack. New York. only confirm the obvious and what we see
there is but the tip of the iceberg. A leading news publication stated "FBI
probers believe that a well-organized network of as many as 50 New Left terror-
ists was involved in the October 20 armored car robbery in Nyack. New York. I.
This book, Outlaws 0/ Amen'ka: The Weather Underground, offers an over-
view of this revolutionary group and its supporters, and the facts developed,
chapter by chapter, completely destroy the myth that the Weather Underground
is merely a group of' 'young activists seeking progressive social change."
I strongly commend this study to both my former colleagues in the law enforce-
ment community and particularly to all citizens.
As Associate Director 0/ the FBI. Mark Felt was a leader in the Bureau's efforts to apprehend the
/ugiti,te terrorists o/the Weather Underground Organization dunOng the early 1970s.
91
Glossary
American Indian Movement (AIM)-
a violence-oriented separatist or-
ganization founded and led by sev-
eral radicalized American Indian ex-
convicts. The prime demand of the
AIM' is total and complete sover-
eignty for all Indian reservations
and a return to Indian control of all
their former lands.
A number of AIM radicals utilize
clearly Marxist-Leninist analysis in
their contacts not only with U.S.
revolutionary groups, but also when
dealing with U.N. representatives of
foreign governments through
AIM's subsidiary, the International
Indian Treaty Council (IITC), which
has offices near the United Nations
in New York and which serves as a
sort of "state department" for the
AIM.
Following the AIM's armed take-
over of Wounded Knee, the Weather
Underground and the National
lawyers Guild formed the backbone
of defense organizing, with the
WUO/PFOC, committed to sup-
porting "armed struggle" by "op-
pressed nations," controlling the
Native American Solidarity Com-
mittee (NASC).
Black Liberation Army (BLA)-In
January 1971, Eldridge Cleaver an-
nounced his intention to lead an
"Afro-American Liberation Army."
Cleaver supporters in the Black
Panther Party in California led by
Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt used the
AALA name Initially while East
Coast Cleaver supporters pre-
ferred the name Black Liberation
Army (BLA). The BLA is an out-
growth of the BPP propaganda line
In which acts of criminal violence
are whitewashed as "armed strug-
gle" against "repression," and
which claims that "racism" is the
fundamental base of U.S. society
and that this legitimizes the over-
throw of the government by force
and violence.
93
The first acknowledged act of
BLA terrorism was a campaign of
armed attacks on police that com-
menced on May 19, 1971, the an-
niversary of the births of Malcolm X
and Ho Chi Minh. BLA members
have supported themselves through
armed robbery of businesses, bars
and banks.
Many original BLA members have
been killed in gun battles with po-
lice; and many others are in prison.
However, the BLA cadre have been
able to maintain the structure of
their organization and a communi-
cations network throughout the fed-
eral and state prison systems. In
the California prison system, the
BLA exists as a prison gang, the
Black Guerrilla Family (BGF).
The Weather Underground Or-
ganization has consistently pro-
vided "unconditional support" to
the BLA and ranks BLA leader Jo-
anne D. Chesimard (alias Assata
Shakur), the convicted killer of a
New Jersey state trooper who es-
caped from prison in 1979, as a
heroine and exemplar of revolution-
ary "armed struggle."
Black Panther Party (BPP)-A
revolutionary movement founded in
California in 1966 by a small group
of black militants which quickly
attracted a national following of
revolutionary intellectuals and radi-
calized ex-convicts. The BPP quick-
ly earned a record for violence in
shootouts with police in California,
Illinois, New York and other cities,
in killings of suspected police in-
formants within the group, and for
criminal activities ranging from
armed robbery to extortion and as-
sault.
The faction of the BPP led from
exile in Algeria by Eldridge Cleaver
became the nucleus of the terrorist
Black Liberation Army (BlA).
John Brown Anti-Klan Committee
(JBAKC)-a front controlled by
the Weather Underground Organi-
zation active in New York, Wash-
ington, D.C., Boston and other cities.
The JBAKC group sponsored with
other WUO fronts a demonstration
outside the Justice Department on
Inauguration Day, 1981, In which
the participants included federal
fugitive Marilyn Buck, wanted in re-
lation to the murders of two police
officers and a guard in Nyack, N.Y.
Also participating In the demon-
stration were Eve Rosahn, Judy
Clark and lawyers from the PFOC's
Chicago chapter.
John Brown Book Club (JBBC)-A
front organization set up by the
WUO to distribute Its manifesto,
Prairie Fire, and other WUO publi-
cations in support of terrorist
"armed struggle."
May 19th Communist Organiza-
tion (M-19 CO)-the Weather Un-
derground's embryonic Communist
party formed In 1978 by the New
York chapter of the Prairie Fire Or-
ganizing Committee.
Despite the periodic internecine
factional warfare that has disrupt-
ed the Weather Underground Or-
ganization from time to time, the
group has preserved its organiza-
tional integrity. This is demonstrat-
ed by the fact that in a January 20,
1981 national demonstration at the
inauguration of President Reagan,
the New York, Chicago and other
WUO groups all participated un-
der the names of the PFOC and a
host of other fronts including the
Women's Committee Against Geno-
cide, John Brown Anti-Klan Com-
mittee, Material Aid Campaign for
ZANU (PF), Committee for the Suit
Against Government Repression
and New Movement in Solidarity
with Puerto Rican Independence.
M-19 CO states Its purpose is uta
provide material aid and political
solidarity" to Third World revolu-
tionary terrorists. The WUO/M-19
CO defines Puerto Ricans, blacks,
94
American Indians and Mexican-
Americans as uoppressed na
tions" and states, "We fully sup-
port the right of oppressed nations
to wage armed struggle."
National Lawyers Guild (NLG)-an
organization of lawyers, law stu-
dents and leftist organizers formed
in 1936 with the aid of the Comin-
tern. The NLG remains the princi-
pal legal bulwark of the Commun-
ist Party, U.S.A., its fronts and con-
trolled unions. While there are
small numbers of Maoists, Trotsky-
ites and Independent uNew Left-
Ists" In the NLG, control over Its In-
ternational positions and real do.
mestlc positions lies with support-
ers of the Soviet and Cuban re-
gimes.
In 1971 a statement of the NLG
National Convention Program Com-
mittee defined the NLG's role as
providing leadership to the U.S.
revolutionary movement, not merely
to provide legal representation. Said
the statement, uWe are a body of
radicals and revolutionaries. We
are not simply servants of the move-
ment. We are radicals and revolu-
tionaries who now propose to carry
the struggle for social change into
our lives and our professions:'
A substantial number of the
NLG's leading Castrolte activists
have been Identified In FBI docu-
ments as members of the terrorist
Weather Underground Organization
NVUO) and have been active In the
WUO's overt support arms, the
Prairie Fire Organizing Commit-
tee (PFOC) and the WUO's New
York faction, the May 19th Com-
munist Organization. This Is dis-
cussed in detail in the text of this
book.
New York City Star-a radical news-
paper published in New York City
during 1975-76 by Individuals close-
ly linked to the WUO/PFOC.
Partido Socialists Puertorrlqueno
(PSP) [Puerto Rican Socialist Party]
-The largest of the revolutionary
Communist groups in Puerto Rico
which has half its estimated 6,000
members on the U.S. mainland.
With intimate ties to the Cuban
Communist regime, the PSP has
been identified as the umbrella
group under which the FALN and
other Puerto Rican terrorist organi-
zations operate.
Founded in 1959 as the Movimi-
ento Pro Independencia (MPI) by at
torney Juan Mari Bras, who remains
the PSP general secretary, the
Marxist-Leninist PSP consistently
has supported acts of terrorism and
sabotage.
The PSP has been highly active
on the U.S. mainland in coalitions
with other revolutionary groups,
playing an active role in the WUO/
PFOG-initiated National Hard Times
Conference held in Chicago in Jan-
uary 1976. The PSP was the key or-
ganizer of demonstrations by the
July 4 Coalition, which was formed
as an off-shoot of the National
Hard Times Conference coalition,
in Philadelphia in 1976 against the
Bicentennial celebrations. In 1980
the PSP joined with the successor
to the July 4 Coalitipn, the Coali-
tion for a People's Alternative, to
hold demonstrations and other
protests against the Democratic
Party National Convention.
PSP functionaries took the lead
in organizing the Puerto Rico Soli-
darity Committee (PRSC) in which
WUO/PFOC members took major
roles and have been active in U.S.
support activities for other Soviet
and Cuban-supported terrorist or-
ganizations including those in Nic-
aragua, EI Salvador, southern Af-
rica and the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
People Against Racism in Educa-
tion (PARE)-an organization active
in New York led by the late Annie
Stein, a former Communist Party,
U.S.A. (CPUSA) militant who left
to become a leader of the WUO's
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.
Others reportedly involved in PARE
activities include two New York City
95
high school teachers, Jonah Raskin
and Robert Reilly, both former SDS
activists. Robert Reilly's brother,
Richard, was a leading participant
in the WUO's January 20, 1981 In-
auguration Day demonstration
outside the Justice Department and
was present during the John Brown
Anti-Klan Committee demonstra-
tion against the Springbok rugby
team in September 1981.
Annie Stein's daughter, Eleanor
Stein Raskin, was formerly mar-
ried to Jonah Raskin. She was a
leading WUO fugitive and was ar-
rested in Bronx, New York, with
Jeff Jones a few days after the
October 20 murders in Nyack af-
ter their telephone number was
found among the effects in Kathy
Boudin's apartment.
Before her death from cancer in
1981, Annie Stein was also active in
the Council for Interracial Books
for Children and under the guise of
fighting attempts by racial extrem-
ists to propagandize among school
children, helped prepare "anti-
Klan" materials depicting U.S. soc-
iety as innately and hopelessly rac-
ist. These materials were commis-
sioned by the National Educational
Association and have been na-
tionally distributed for classroom
use by members of the NEA union.
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee
(PFOC)-the overt arm of the ter-
rorist Weather Underground Organ-
ization (WUO) formed to organize
layers of support for the fugitive
terrorist leadership.
The PFOC in turn has established
a number of secondary fronts for
the WUO which include the John
Brown Anti-Klan Committee and
New Movement in Solidarity with
Puerto Rican Independence, as
well as the May 19th Communist
Organization, the WUO's embryonic
Communist party.
Puerto Rican Solidarity Commit-
tee (PRSC)-a New York-based
"organization in support of the na-
tional liberation struggle in Puerto
Rico" founded In 1975 by the
Puerto Rican Socialist Party
(PSP) activists associated with
Communist Party, U.S.A. (CPUSA)
fronts such as the National Lawyers
Guild (NLG) and National Alliance
Against Racist and Political Re-
pression (NAARPR), and associates
of the terrorist Weather Under-
ground Organization (WUO) and Its
overt arm, the Prairie Fire Organ-
izing Committee (PFOC), the PRSC
has been active In the World Peace
Council's anti-Puerto Rico cam-
paigns, backing resistance to grand
juries investigating terrorist at-
tacks, and In Cuban-backed man-
euvers at the U.N. Special Com-
mittee on Decolonlzation.
Among the WUO/PFOC activists
who have played leadership roles
in the PRSC have been Annie Stein
and Julie Nlchamin, best known as
the initial organizer from Havana
of the Venceremos Brigade.
Republic of New Africa (RNA)-
The RNA (which often spells "Af-
rica" with a "k") is an all-black sep-
aratist organization established In
1968 in Detroit. Early In Its career,
the RNA established a record for
armed violence.
The RNA and the BLA have had
contacts since the early 1970s. In
August 1971, In solidarity with RNA
members involved in a Jackson,
Mississippi shootout in which a
pollee officer was killed and two
other law enforcement officers
wounded, and in revenge for the
death of BPP leader George Jack-
son In a San Quentin jailbreak at-
tempt, the BLA boasted It "at-
tempted to fire a 66mm anti-tank
gun at the Mission pollee station In
San Francisco, attacked an SFPD
patrol car, bombed a Bank of
America branch, and ambushed the
Ingleside pollee station in San Fran-
cisco, killing one cop and wound-
ing others."
The RNA goal is to establish an
all-black state carved out of the
southern United States. RNA de-
mands that the United Nations as-
96
sist this secession and segrega-
tion process have received support
from Cuba and Soviet surrogates.
Like the Black liberation Army,
the RNA has recruited among
prisoners.
RNA contacts with the Weather
Underground/Prairie Fire Organiz-
Ing Committee were made both
through WUO involvement In the
revolutionary prison organizing
movement of the early 1970s and
directly through RNA leaders. RNA
vice president Virginia Collins, also
known as Dara Abubakarl, was a
member of the board of the WUO/
PFOC-organlzed National Hard
Times Conference held In Chicago
In January 1976. At the demand of
the RNA-dominated black caucus,
the conference passed a resolution
specifically supporting "the strug-
gle for independence In the Cush
District of Mississippi as led by
the Provisional Revolutionary Gov-
ernment of the Republic of New
Africa."
Workers World Party (WWP)-a
nationally active 'Marxist-Leninist
organization with a long record for
street violence In demonstrations
and confrontations with pollee. The
WWP originated as an ultra-mili-
tant spin-off from the Trotskyist
Communist Socialist Workers
Party (SWP) following the Castro
takeover in Cuba. However, the
WWP now minimizes its Trotsky-
ist origins and has become, for all
in,tents and purposes, a hard-line
"Stalinist" organization which looks
to Cuba, North Korea and Ethiopia
for its models.
The WWP supports terrorism,
terming it "armed self-defense."
The WWP has worked parallel to
the Weather Underground Organi-
zation since 1969, backing radical-
ized prison Inmates and prison riots,
blacks and American Indians
charged with attacking or murdering
police officers, and supporting a
full range of Soviet-supported Third
World revolutionary terrorist move-
ments and regimes from North
Korea, Vietnam and Cuba through
Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Grenada
to the Sandinista National Libera-
tion Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua.
During anti-Vietnam street
demonstrations in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, members of the
WWP and its youth arm, Youth
Against War and Fascism (YAWF),
97
fought police in street battles
alongside the Weathermen. This
is not the result of mutual politi-
cal cooperation, but rather the in-
tense competition between the
WUO and WWP for the allegiance
of radical minority groups-
blacks, American Indians, Puerto
Ricans and Mexican-Americans.
On December 24, 1981, Kenneth P. Walton, FBI Special Agent
in charge of the Anti-Terrorist Task Force formed by the Bureau with
the New York City Police Department to investigate the Nyack bank
robbery told the press: ": .. there could have been as many as 25 to
50 people (involved in the robbery). We have not identified all the
participants... A two-month investigation has uncovered an ex-
tensive structure of safe houses, mail drops, weapons caches, false
identification documents and radio equipment. Half of the FBI's
capacity for analyzing finger prints has been diverted to this in-
vestigation.' ,
On December 29, 1981, Judge William H. Webster told a press
conference: "The Weather Underground Organization is not a
viable organization. There is no evidence that such an organization
is functioning. ' ,
98