November 7, 1983: “Tonight we bombed the U.S. Capitol”
Two of the May 19th women arrived in DC on the night of November 6, 1983. They drove an Oldsmobile with Connecticut tags. It was Marilyn’s car, registered under her “Louise Harmon” alias. For added security, they switched out the original plates.
Using the name “Ana Stackliff,” one of the women registered at the Master Hosts Inn at 1917 Bladensburg Road, in the northeast section of the city. It wasn’t too far from their target, the gleaming, slave-built domed structure that dominates the DC skyline.
At 10:48 p.m. on the seventh, a call came in to the Capitol switchboard. “Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you one time,” a male caller told the operator. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.” Then he hung up.1
At 10:58, a blast went off on the second floor of the structure’s north wing. The explosive load blew doors off their hinges, shattered chandeliers, ripped into a stately portrait of Daniel Webster, and sent a shower of pulverized glass, brick, and plaster into the Republican cloakroom.2 Security guards gagged on the dust and smoke. The shock wave from the bomb was reported to have sounded like a sonic boom. A jogger outside on the Capitol grounds heard the blast: “It was loud enough to make my ears hurt,” she said. “It kept echoing and echoing—boom, boom.”3
The blast left a fifteen-foot-wide crater in a wall. It also shredded a portrait of John C. Calhoun, the nineteenth-century senator from South Carolina, former U.S. vice president, Yale man, and political theorist. The South’s most articulate defender of states rights and slavery, Calhoun has been called “the Marx of the master class.”4 Wiping out his filthy image was an unintended but welcome consequence of the operation for the group.
National Public Radio received a message from the Armed Resistance Unit: “Tonight we bombed the U.S. Capitol.”5
The message continued with denunciations of U.S. imperialism and aggression against the people of Grenada, El Salvador, Lebanon, and Nicaragua.
The communiqué also included a new message. The bombers made it clear that they had contemplated lethal action: “We purposely aimed our attack at the institutions of imperialist rule rather than at individual members of the ruling class and government. We did not choose to kill any of them this time. But their lives are not sacred and their hands are stained with the blood of millions.”6
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Nobody was killed or wounded in the attack, but that did little to soothe frazzled congressional nerves. There was a million dollars’ worth of damage, according to one estimate.
Senator Denton denounced the bombing as “an attack that strikes at the heart of our constitutional democracy.” He pointed fingers at the news media, which he said had failed to heed the alarms sounded by his Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism. “It takes incidents such as the attack on our Marines in Lebanon or a bomb going off in the Capitol to obtain the attention that could have and should have been accorded to the problem earlier,” he said.7
Senate minority leader Robert Byrd—an ex-Klansman, legendary bloviator, and incorrigible pork-barrel spender—said he had had a premonition. “I told my staff yesterday something like this was going to happen,” the West Virginia Democrat said to reporters. “I was sort of anticipating something, especially in light of other occurrences that have taken place around the world recently.”8
The FBI announced that an investigation had begun. It brought in the DC cops and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Dozens of people answered questions about what they had witnessed in or around the Capitol building, and one person said he had seen a “Middle Eastern–type male” lurking around the Senate Reception Room.9 Somebody else mentioned the “strange” behavior of a stocky Hispanic male with a “hooked nose.”10 Another person said he’d seen a mustachioed man in a navy blue windbreaker and old sneakers—an “Iranian-Turkish type,” the guy called him.11
A Capitol employee remembered a white male who had checked a Puma sports bag around 11:00 a.m. on the day of the bombing. “The bag seemed rather heavy for the type of bag it was,” the employee said.12 A security guard reported that he’d seen a jittery white guy up on the second floor sometime between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m. He said the guy had had some kind of sports bag with him, and he saw him again, right around 7:00 p.m. That time he didn’t have a bag.
It was the third “ARU” DC attack that year. With public opposition to the Reagan administration’s wars in Central America running high, some in Congress and law enforcement speculated that a leading antiwar group, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, or CISPES, might be involved with the bombings. One senior Bureau man suggested that CISPES “action cells” were involved.13
For May 19th, it was good news that the dogs were on the wrong trail. Obviously, the FBI hadn’t figured out yet who was behind the nonexistent Armed Resistance Unit or that the same people had been responsible for the Staten Island attack.
May 19th felt that its security systems were solid. Yes, there was surveillance, but not enough to keep its members from carrying out military operations. Silvia had been lifted, but there hadn’t been any other recent arrests. And May 19th was almost certain that it wasn’t facing every underground movement’s most lethal adversary: the informer, the enemy within. They’d all known and trusted one another for years. Plus there were the communal living, the marathon criticism/self-criticism sessions, the lack of privacy—the cops would never be able to get anyone on the inside.
Still, there was no time for complacency. It was time to examine the past, consider the present, and plan for the future. New targets were everywhere.
Laura kept a small spiral-bound notebook. The margins of the gridded paper were dotted with doodles: a cat, a flower, the space shuttle. In her notes, she provided an assessment: they would have to step up the pace of their operations, hit harder—the enemy needed more frequent reminders of “what the wrath of the people will do,” she wrote.14
So far, May 19th’s targets had been limited to institutions of U.S. global domination—the FBI, the navy, Congress. Now, its members decided, it was time to broaden the list and pay attention to the United States’ international co-conspirators. They also felt it was time to retire the ARU name. As they had learned with their constantly changing code names, a new nom de guerre for the group would help keep their enemies guessing and fearful that other formations had joined the armed struggle against imperialism.
Israel, according to May 19th, was a fascist “white settler” entity, a racist ethnostate that was relentless in its persecution of the Palestinians, and a U.S. client to boot. May 19th insisted on inserting quotation marks around the country’s name to signify its questionable legitimacy, and it always used a lowercase “z” when writing about Zionism. In an undated typewritten paper, May 19th declared that “ ‘Israel’ and South Africa are major sub-imperialist [sic] powers that attempt to economically, politically, and militarily dominate entire regions while colonizing the Palestinian and Azanian [South African] people.”15
They had notes on possible targets in New York, including the government-owned Israel Aircraft Industries, or IAI, which had an office at 50 West 23rd Street. The women learned that IAI made airborne radar, electronic warfare systems, and the Gabriel sea-launched missile for the Israel Defense Forces, as well as the export market, and they discovered that IAI had supplied the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Guatemala and upgraded South African military aircraft.
The women clocked the comings and goings at the West 23rd Street building. There wasn’t much security to speak of; the building was a “soft” target. Laura kept track in her notebook. Collectively, they decided to officially retire the Armed Resistance Unit moniker. From then on, they called themselves the Red Guerrilla Resistance, or RGR.I The women put their graphics skills to use and came up with a striking new logo: a red star emblazoned with a silhouette of a female fighter toting an AK-47 assault rifle—the weapon of choice for revolutionary insurrectionists the world over.
On April 5, 1984, they put the IED fashioned from a pocket watch, a Radio Shack 9-volt battery, a Hercules Millidet blasting cap, 23-gauge wires, and of course dynamite, the sticks wrapped tightly with black plastic tape into a cardboard box, and hid it in a third-floor stairwell in the IAI building. At 1:40 a.m., a security guard answered the phone. A prerecorded male voice said a bomb would go off soon. Then the United Press International news desk received a call and heard a recording. It was a man’s voice: a bomb was about to detonate, and Red Guerrilla Resistance was responsible.
At 1:45, there was an explosion in the stairwell of the AIA offices. Walls cracked, plaster and debris rained down. Nothing terribly dramatic, but they had made a point. A subsequent communiqué laid out May 19th’s grievances. They blasted right-wing figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist founder of the Moral Majority. Ed Koch also got a drubbing. They said the mayor’s “virulent hatred of Palestinian and Arab people was matched only by his racism toward Black and Latin people.”16
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A large-scale U.S. military exercise, Ocean Venture 84, was scheduled to kick off on April 20, 1984, and it would include an aircraft carrier, other surface ships, an amphibious assault unit, and paratroopers. Ocean Venture 84, according to the New York Times, “was intended to be a form of psychological warfare intended, as one official put it, to intimidate the Salvadoran guerrillas and their Nicaraguan backers.”17
May 19th considered Ocean Venture 84 a rehearsal for a full-on U.S. invasion of Central America. First Grenada, now Nicaragua and El Salvador. It was naked aggression, and it was not going to go unanswered.
The Officers Club at the Washington Navy Yard was a venerable spot more than a century old. It was another soft target picked by May 19th for its lax security and obvious connection to the war machine.
In the early morning of April 20, the news desk at United Press International received another call with a prerecorded message: a man with a raspy voice. The person who picked up the phone reported the message as being about a “guerrilla resistance” that had “bombed at 2 a.m. the officer’s club at the Washington Naval [sic] Yard . . . in protest of current war games” and the “ ‘imperial war’ against the people of Central America and the Caribbean.”18 The club was closed at the time, and no one was hurt, but the building “was torn up pretty good,” according to a navy spokesman.19
The newly minted Red Guerrilla Resistance issued a communiqué about why they had planted the bomb at the officers’ club. “Genocide is a ladder to success for these men,” said RGR. It couldn’t be business as usual for those killers. Members of the military should start worrying about their own safety. “We need to rob them of the security of a home base and make them know that they are the enemy wherever they go,” according to the communiqué. “Their officers’ club is gone—let them hide in their homes.”20
April 20, 1984: “Their officers’ club is gone—let them hide in their homes.”
The Bureau by this point had been able to piece together that the Revolutionary Fighting Group, the Armed Resistance Unit, and Red Guerrilla Resistance were all related. A close analysis of the communiqués revealed common turns of phrase, themes, and messages. And there was something important in the physical evidence: after each attack, agents had combed the bomb sites and gathered up bits and pieces of what had turned out to be fragments of explosive devices. According to one special agent, “Every bomb-maker has a unique signature because they make them in certain fashions.”21 The DC and New York bombs used similar timing devices, detonating cord, wires, and batteries.
The FBI concluded that a single group was responsible but still didn’t have enough clues to identify its members.
I. European terrorist groups during the 1970s and 1980s also adopted militarized names, the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades being among the most notorious. In Italy, scores of other violent formations operated during the blood-drenched anni di piombo (“years of lead”), including Nuclei Comunisti Combattenti (Nuclei of Combatant Communists); Nuclei Territoriali Antimperialisti (Anti-imperialist Territorial Nuclei); and Squadre Armate per la Lotta di Liberazione Comunista (Armed Squads for the Communist Liberation Struggle). Neofascist terrorist groups took similarly ferocious names. Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) was responsible for the worst terrorist attack in postwar Italy, the August 2, 1980, bombing of Bologna’s central railway station, which killed eighty-five people and wounded two hundred more.