We need to be able to respond to the offensives of Third World struggles by an offensive of our own. The rules of attack, like all rules of war, need to be learned, and the armed clandestine is the best place to learn them.
—UNDATED MAY 19TH PAPER, “SOME STRATEGIC PREMISES AND POLITICAL CHANGES”
May 19th members figured that their first attack should be relatively low key, something local, in or around the city—a sharpener, a practice run to get their operational skills into shape. No casualties, just a big bang. Post-attack, they’d use a ferocious-sounding nom de guerre to scare the fascists and imperialists.
Up front in the New York City telephone directory, there were blue pages listing federal, state, and local government offices. The FBI’s New York Field Office was in a forty-one-story, slablike building downtown at 26 Federal Plaza.
By that time, FBI offices in places such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York were locked down tight. Laura, Susan, Linda, Marilyn, and their friends knew this; they’d tangled with the FBI in the past, when they’d been involved in SDS, Weather Underground, and the BLA. During the Bureau’s frantic but ultimately unsuccessful coast-to-coast hunt for Weather fugitives during the 1970s, left-wing agitators of all kinds had been hauled in for questioning.
One particular incident in 1971 had pushed the FBI toward increasing security: on a night in March, antiwar activists crowbarred their way into a tiny, two-man satellite office in Media, Pennsylvania. The burglars had successfully counted on the fact that the office would be empty because it was the night of the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier “Fight of the Century,” and most Americans would be at home, glued to their TV sets or radios.
The thieves made off with reams of Bureau files that documented the FBI’s decades of snooping and disinformation directed against the New Left, black radicals, communists, and the Ku Klux Klan, known collectively as COINTELPRO, the Bureau abbreviation for Counterintelligence Program. COINTELPRO was all about penetration and disruption—just like operations against adversary intelligence services. The Media activists shared their COINTELPRO gleanings with reporters.
It was preinternet WikiLeaks. A wave of public protest followed, with most of the abuse falling on the head of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s aging and increasingly legacy-conscious director. Hoping to tighten things up, Hoover shuttered many of the Bureau’s small “resident agencies”—but not all of them.
The New York phone book listed another FBI office, tucked away in a federal building at 45 Bay Street in the St. George section of Staten Island. An added bonus: it also housed navy and air force recruiting stations.
May 19th did a little reconnaissance. They strolled right in; the place was a real sleepy hollow. The FBI office was on the second floor. They noted the women’s bathroom conveniently located just across the hall. The setting seemed ideal for their plans.
On January 28, 1983, a woman and a man walked into the building at 45 Bay Street. Witnesses later told the FBI that she was about thirty-five, roughly five feet, five inches tall, with a medium complexion. He was described as a white male, twenty-five years old, five feet, nine inches tall, with dirty blond hair, a mustache, and a slim build.
The bomb they’d built was a little bulky, but it didn’t seem to draw any attention. The woman found a hiding spot in the upstairs bathroom, and then the pair slipped out of the building.
At 10:30 that night, the thing went off: a huge blast, followed by burst pipes and cascading water. At 9:10 the next morning, the news desk at United Press International received a call. It was a taped message: “We bombed the F.B.I. office on Staten Island. They are the political police. They are responsible for attacks in the United States and around the world. Death to traitors. Free political prisoners. We are the Revolutionary Fighting Group.”1
Everything went exactly according to plan. May 19th started mapping out fresh attacks. It considered a new theater of operations—maybe somewhere closer to the heart of the “Amerikkkan” state.
• • •
Part of the fallout from the Brinks job was that every public May 19th meeting, rally, and gathering seemed to draw law enforcement scrutiny. Men in windbreakers and bucket hats standing around outside, trying to look inconspicuous. Strange hissing noises and clicking sounds came through on the telephone. Lots of wrong numbers—it seemed as though somebody wanted to find out whether they were at home.
It was obvious that the cops had Madame Binh under surveillance. Suspicions were confirmed on January 3, 1983, when cops hit the studio on Taaffe Place in Brooklyn and said they were looking for Donna Borup, who’d been on the run ever since she’d jumped bail after the JFK fracas. The FBI men tossed the place and hauled off loads of leftist literature and artwork but found no traces of their peripatetic target.2
Madame Binh looked for a new home, someplace less well known to the authorities. The women found one across the Hudson River at 665 Newark Street in Jersey City. A woman Judy Clark had lived with on West 98th Street in Manhattan ran the collective’s day-to-day operations. They continued to crank out agitprop artwork supporting their favorite causes, including Puerto Rican revolution.
It didn’t take much time for the Bureau to discover Madame Binh’s new home, and before long, heavy law-enforcement surveillance was under way. Revolving teams of agents with mustaches, sideburns, and tight trousers clocked their comings and goings. Black wall–tired surveillance sedans abounded. And there was nighttime rummaging in the garbage cans outside, either the cops or the FBI or both, doing what they called “trash runs.”
Government probes weren’t confined to the New York area: May 19th members in Chicago reported that cops were snapping photos at demonstrations, showing up at public meetings, and writing down license plate numbers—just as the Bureau and the Chicago police force’s antiradical Red Squad had done in the 1960s and early ’70s.
May 19th concluded that if they were going to survive and continue the armed struggle, there was only one way forward. They’d have to go on a wartime footing: disappear from sight, pick new identities, cut off contact with friends, family, loved ones, and political comrades. It would be like living the life of a fugitive.
But although Marilyn, Susan, and Alan were on the wanted list, they certainly didn’t see themselves as criminals. Ordinary crooks were in the underworld. Marilyn, Susan, and Alan were in the underground. Linda, Betty Ann, and Tim now had no choice but to join them.
Writing in 1943, two former members of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany described the power of the all-seeing “scientific surveillance of a modern police state.” You couldn’t hide from it, they said, but you could deceive it. And the best way to do that was to live as ordinary a life as possible. “The more you resemble a normal everyday citizen in every respect,” they wrote, “the less apt you are to be suspected. And as long as you do not arouse suspicion and scrupulously observe a long series of rules of caution, you may be able to carry on underground work for years on end. Once you are suspected, even catacombs will not help.”3
There was more: “Maintain in all circumstances the appearance that you are the same as other people, that you have an ordinary job,” the former resistance members advised. This turned out to be excellent advice.
May 19th hid in plain sight, attired in pants suits, dad jeans, flannel shirts, momma skirts over aqua-colored panties, purple scarves, corduroy jackets. They held down ordinary jobs, working as printers, technicians, and office clerks4—work that was mainstream and anonymous and not particularly well paid, but enough to scratch out a living. Typically the gigs had well-defined, regular hours, which made it easier to allocate time for the armed struggle.
Grinding it out underground was a major challenge. The subterranean diet was pretty terrible. Ex-Weatherwoman Cathy Wilkerson described her intake during the 1970s: “oatmeal, candy, doughnuts, coffee, the occasional egg or grilled cheese sandwich, and red wine and bourbon,” as well as endless cigarettes.5
The most important requirement of underground life was security; without it, an operative would end up dead or in jail. When asked about her subterranean years, Marilyn kept her mouth shut, telling one interviewer only, “It is hard to say very much without getting specific, and that I can not do. I suspect that is something the state repressive apparatus would read with great interest.”6
But good security was cumbersome and laborious, and it came at a cost. The underground lifestyle was anything but glamorous. Everything one took for granted aboveground needed to be acquired with risky, painstaking effort.7
There were disguises: Mrs. Doubtfire–style glasses, wigs, dye jobs. Sometimes Susan dressed like an old woman. “We laughed when the first time we dyed our hair it turned orange, a long-honored tradition of underground participants around the world,” she said. “The color was called ‘underground orange’ because it would take several attempts to get the color right.”8
The May 19th cells built a complex security infrastructure: multiple information relay points, false identification, code names, and frequent relocation. “In clandestine work,” noted the anonymous author of one internal May 19th paper, “sloppiness, laziness, and inattention to detail are all forms of opportunism and are dangerous.” At all times, the author insisted, “science and seriousness must be applied to developing correct methodology.”9
They typed out handbooks—meticulous, exhaustive, even obsessive, just like everything else May 19th did. Intellectuals hunched over typewriters, writing and rewriting, peer reviewing, critiquing. Members relied on a document called “Rules of Security and Operations” for in-depth advice, guidance, and regulations for preventing the “fatal blows” that had doomed other, unspecified “revolutionary organizations of the continent.”10 It was essential to “protect the Organization, its combatants, its secrets, documents, arms, and other instruments of work.” May 19th’s ability to carry out operations hinged on the group’s ability to safeguard itself. Without such measures, its members would end up like those of the BLA or the FALN—dead or behind bars.
A central tenet: secrecy. No blabbing to outsiders, of course. It was essential to “maintain the most rigorous silence.” Everything was on a compartmentalized, need-to-know basis. No mingling with outsiders.11 Another principle was being punctual—and never missing a meeting, as they were hard enough to arrange. But don’t show up early. And if somebody fails to appear within ten minutes of the scheduled time, call off the meeting. Always think about a line of retreat ahead of time. And if the cops show up, you might have to undertake “armed maneuvers” in order to get out of there.
Always assume the authorities are listening. If you need to talk inside, crank up the radio. The phones are probably tapped, so try to use a pay phone. May 19th had inventories of public phone numbers and locations all over town. There was a cluster of fifteen on the East Side alone. Each phone was assigned a name, such as “Agnes’s” (87th Street and Second Avenue, southeast corner, 534-9574), “Bernie’s” (79th and Second, southeast corner, 744-9824), “Carol’s” (74th and Second, southeast corner, 650-1302), “Doug’s” (70th and Second, southwest corner, 650-1289), and so on.
If Marilyn wanted to talk to Judy securely, they might make arrangements for “Agnes” to call “Carol” at a certain time and date. If they didn’t connect, the protocol was that they were to try again an hour later, this time using the next name on the list. Marilyn would move on to “Bernie’s” at 79th and 2nd, and Judy would go to “Doug’s.” The system was clunky and time-consuming, but it reduced the chance of government eavesdropping. It was like “Moscow Rules,” novelist John le Carré’s fictional tradecraft for spies: Never forget you’re operating in hostile territory.
Everybody had aliases and noms de guerre, memorable but not too distinctive: “Bess J. Lunderman,” “Loretta Polo” (Betty Ann); “Barbara Grodin,” “Susan Knoll” (Susan); “Milagros Matese” (Laura); “Louise Harmon,” “Eve Mancusco,” “Dee” (Marilyn); “Alex” (Judy); “Christine Porter,” “Louise Robinett,” “Katherine Orloff” (Linda); “Leonard Cohen,” “William Lunderman,” “Kenneth Abrams” (Alan); and “William Bassler,” “William J. Hammond” (Tim).12
It was good OPSEC to rotate aliases from time to time. But it took discipline and practice to remember to use the right name.
May 19th needed identification documents, the most essential tools for surviving in the underground. Library cards were a start, but much more important were Social Security cards, “anchor documents” that they could use as the foundation for a phony persona. With a Social Security card, you could get credit cards and a driver’s license, rent an apartment, even land a passport.
How to get one? There was the “dead baby” method. Record keeping was less digitized and much more lax back in the early 1980s—Social Security cards weren’t issued at birth the way they are today. You’d look at old obituaries or gravestones and find somebody who was born around the time you were but had died young, before he or she applied for a Social Security card. Then you’d get a copy of the birth certificate—a public record. With the right gear and skills, you could even make your own.
Or you could skip the whole process and print some phony Social Security cards. You’d have to make up the numbers, of course, but unless a suspicious clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles or some other place where you were applying for something went through the arduous process of verifying them, you were free and clear.
Life underground was draining, and moreover, it was tedious—being constantly on guard, doing countersurveillance, being underemployed in a crappy job. An Italian terrorist, “Giorgio,” spoke of the grinding boredom of his subterranean existence: “I imagine that few wars or guerrilla campaigns or armed uprisings, call it what you like, have required the level of drudge work, routine, or rat race that is so much a part of ours.”13
Built in 1799, the Washington Navy Yard, in DC’s gritty southeast quadrant, is one of the country’s oldest military installations. During its heyday, personnel at the site built naval guns, repaired ships, did scientific research, and even made the massive gears for the Panama Canal. Some of the original laborers there were enslaved Africans.
In the decades after the Second World War, the yard evolved into a largely administrative center, including back-office activities such as the Naval Command Systems Support Activity. In the early 1980s, computers with any real power were massive contraptions, and the navy had Regional Data Automation Centers in nine places around the country to do data processing.
The one at the Navy Yard was in Building 196, a hulking, four-story factory-like brick structure.14 Hundreds of people, both civilian and military, worked inside.15 Just as at Fort McNair and the FBI office on Staten Island, security at the Navy Yard was light: gates and guards and fences, but at most nothing more than an ID check. It wasn’t hard to wander in and out—not like the Pentagon, where you needed a badge or a visitor’s pass.
May 19th thought the center did computing for the Naval War College up in Newport, Rhode Island. Newport was where the navy ran big war games, simulating massive battles, and practicing to sacrifice the lives of millions on behalf of the ruling class. May 19th believed they could do some significant sabotage against the imperialist enterprise with an attack on the Navy Yard.
May 19th rigged up a device: a DuPont electric blasting cap, a couple of nine-volt batteries, two pocket watches to serve as timers, pin socket connecters, blue, orange, and red wires linking the parts, and the key ingredient, dynamite, wrapped in black plastic tape.
The bomb had what the U.S. military called a “dual firing circuit,” that is, “two independent firing systems, both electric or both non-electric, so that the firing of either system will detonate all charges.”16 In other words, there was less chance of its being a dud. On August 17, May 19th members carried it into the Navy Yard in a blue duffel bag and placed it beside the air-conditioning unit next to Building 196.
A Navy duty officer got a call at 11:56 p.m. A tape recording of a middle-aged man’s voice came over the line: “Clear out, there’s a bomb inside the computer center.” At 12:04 a.m., there was a loud blast. The explosion rocked the building and created a huge mess.17 A worker was knocked out of his chair, but nobody was killed or wounded.18
At 12:15 a.m., reporters at the Washington Post and United Press International received phone calls: another prerecorded message, the voice of a middle-aged man announcing that there’d been an attack. Later, there was a communiqué: “BUILD A REVOLUTIONARY RESISTANCE MOVEMENT! FIGHT U.S. IMPERIALISM!”19
Keeping on the move is good security hygiene, and May 19th decided to relocate. It took time, money, and effort, but its members knew they’d be safer if they didn’t linger in a place for more than a few months. There were hazards, entanglements, and potential pitfalls everywhere: nosy neighbors, suspicious bodega clerks, eager-beaver citizens, busybodies who might do a friendly drop-in and see, hear, or smell something suspicious, and call the cops.
They clustered in Connecticut. Most went to New Haven. It certainly wasn’t as interesting as the Upper West Side or Morningside Heights, but for May 19th, it had considerable appeal. The city had a pretty transient population, so nobody was going to pay any particular attention to new arrivals. Rents were relatively low. The scruffy environs of Yale University seemed just about right—they could easily pass as grad students, as postcollegiate bohemians, as harmless off-campus kooks. New Haven was a small city but just big enough to hide in.
Marilyn, Susan, and Tim moved into the Cambridge Apartments, unit 57 at 66 Norton Street, in September 1983. Linda signed the lease, using the name “Katherine Orloff.”20 The rent was $430 a month. Linda kept her distance, no doubt for security reasons; four adults shacking up in one apartment might have attracted unwanted attention, even in New Haven. She was six miles up the road in Hamden, renting a weathered clapboard bungalow at 135 Cherry Ann Street under the name “Christine Porter.”21 Using yet another alias, “Christine Johnson,” she got a job at Printing Plus in North Haven and started bringing in a little income for cash-strapped May 19th. Alan was farther from the scene, lodging in a place twenty miles down the Connecticut Turnpike, somewhere in Bridgeport.
There were a lot of potential military targets for May 19th to consider. Defense plants were scattered around the state: General Dynamics built submarines in Groton, and Sikorsky Aircraft made attack helicopters in Stratford. May 19th carried out thorough surveillance and reconnaissance, and the group’s files bulged with photos, drawings, and trade journal articles.
• • •
Alan wasn’t too happy underground. He felt cut off—his comrades weren’t too far away, but living alone in Bridgeport, a disintegrating, postindustrial urban void, didn’t enhance his morale. He missed his wife, Barbara. It was too dangerous for him to travel all the way to Chicago again, but she managed to get back east from time to time, sometimes bringing young Sarah. The family reunions required code phrases, calls to pay phones, and meticulous planning. They were surely emotionally gratifying, but they were also resource draining and a threat to the security of the whole group.
Paranoia started to creep in. As Susan pointed out, altering one’s hair color could be tricky. Alan botched his hair-dying job, rendering his black hair a lurid shade of orange, which didn’t help his emotional state. “I looked like a clown,” he said.22 Out at the movies one night, he was convinced that people were staring at him. They probably were.
Alan wasn’t the only May 19th member under psychological stress. Susan recalled the loneliness and anxiety she felt as a denizen of the subterranean world: “It was hard to let down the wall we had constructed between our past and present lives.” Although she was a hardened revolutionary, she missed her parents.
Marilyn, too, felt the absence of the family members she hadn’t spoken to in years. “It is difficult and personally heart-wrenching to be separated from one’s family, friends and one’s political cohorts,” she said.23 She wanted to have kids, but that was tough on the run.24 She ended up forgoing children to devote herself to the armed struggle.
Being underground can mess with your mind and screw you up emotionally. Humans are of course social animals, and it goes against our nature to cut ourselves off from others. One ex-member of the Red Brigades described it this way:
When you remove yourself from society, even from the most ordinary things, ordinary ways of relaxing, you no longer share even the most basic emotions. You become abstracted, removed. In the long run you actually begin to feel different. Why? Because you are different. You become closed off, become sad, because a whole area of life is missing, because you are aware that life is more than politics and political work.25
But ultimately, despite the dangers, physical and mental, some May 19th members relished the subterranean life. They had the cause, the comradeship, and the ingrained habits of conspiracy. Susan confessed that her secret existence jacked her up and gave her “a feeling of power.”26 “I loved being underground,” she said.27
There was certainly a strange glamour associated with their high-risk enterprise: the guns, the bombs, the atmosphere of secrecy, and of course the excitement when one of their creations detonated according to plan. They were the rightful heirs to the BLA and the fearsome FALN. They radiated North American anti-imperialist danger, and they were proud of their revolutionary aura.
They’d done some very solid military actions, and they’d kept their cool before, during, and after the attacks. They had the psychological disposition that one Italian terrorist said was essential to success: “Tense but not nervous, calm but not relaxed, decisive but not foolhardy, careful but not fearful.”28
• • •
May 19th hoped to expand and bring in more members. In addition to being morale boosting, it would help with their growing plans.
They considered a new process to “develop aboveground members,” who would go on to form their own secret cells. These formations would “engage in limited military work (fire bombs, stin[k] bombs, rock throwing, tire slashing, et cetera).”29 It would be a sort of farm-team system for May 19th: see who was promising, who was a high performer, pluck out the most talented and committed, and bring them into the secret group.
It sounded plausible, but then they considered some practical matters. The aboveground pool of potential recruits was shrinking. It had never been all that big to begin with—a couple of hundred people at most, if you included May 19th’s largest affiliated group, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. People were tired of all the hassle from the cops, tired of the endless meetings, pointless demonstrations, and the ideological fanaticism. In The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984), the eponymous heroine of the novel described the arduous and exhausting life of women who were part of a tiny extremist political sect not unlike May 19th:
when most of us started readjusting our lives to match a different reality, going back to school, raising families, these women kept at it. They kept at the tiny demonstrations, the long boring leaflets, educational after educational. They were afraid to go on with their lives.30
Considering how far they’d gone underground, meeting anybody outside their little formation—cadres, spouses, kids—was dangerous. Getting new people in would require the outlay of a lot of time and resources—resources that might be better spent carrying out armed actions.
They ultimately decided to shelve the expansion idea. May 19th’s violent inner circle—Marilyn, Susan, Linda, Laura, Betty Ann, Alan, and Tim—would continue on as the foot soldiers.
The members of May 19th had gained some real bomb-building skills by this time. They even codified their best practices in a typewritten manual, “Sessions of Training, Building of Timing Circuits, Session on Explosives, Final Assembly, Packaging.”31 The goal: to “perfect our weapon for its primary purpose of carrying out guerrilla attack against the enemy” while ensuring “maximum safety, maximum simplicity, maximum security.” They wanted everybody in the group to learn how to build a device and maintain the raw materials: “This is not the province of an explosives expert.”
May 19th needed plenty of room for its matériel. Susan rented a self-storage space in New Jersey, a quiet place to keep the dynamite and the blasting agent off-site. It was also her responsibility to rotate the sticks every thirty days so there wouldn’t be a dangerous buildup of nitroglycerin.
They planned to put their bomb-making skills to use at a choice target three hundred miles away.