For decades, media elites and academics alike have accepted the accounts that veterans of the anti-Vietnam War movement gave of themselves, particularly when those vets occupied academic berths.
If the anti-war movement were a movie, recently retired University of Illinois professor Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn of Northwestern, would arguably be the leading actors. The statements they gave to the press when they came out of hiding have largely served as their narrative in media and educational settings ever since.
“In 1970, I went underground to fight against the Vietnam war, the full-scale police attacks on the Black liberation movement, and the system that created these things,” Ayers told the press in 1980.
“Over ten years ago, I along with many others went underground to oppose U. S. intervention in Vietnam; to try to support the Black movement for liberation and human rights; and to oppose the system built on slavery, genocide and colonialism,” his wife, Dohrn, said that same day.
Ayers and Dohrn emerged the previous year—1979—when the U. S. Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter elected not to pursue their prosecution due to the convictions of two FBI agents who wire-tapped them for doing so illegally. Nonetheless, apart from the wiretaps, evidence existed tying at least one of the Ayers’s to lethal bombings committed by the Weather Underground movement they helped to found.
Retired FBI agent Max Noel, who investigated the Weather Underground, noted in an interview with America’s Survival president Cliff Kincaid that anti-war literature was the one form of reading material missing from the Underground’s West Coast “bomb factory.” Kincaid also serves as editor of The AIM report, published by Accuracy in Academia’s big sister group, Accuracy in Media.
“This is the first time you will see what he [Noel] and other FBI agents found inside a Weather Underground bomb factory on Pine Street in San Francisco that included the footprints of Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd,” former FBI agent Larry Grathwohl said in a America’s Survival conference at the National Press Club on October 21, 2010. “Remember that Ayers had claimed that he and his associates never killed anyone and never intended to.”
“One of the devices found in the Pine Street location was a voice-activated detonator, meaning that it was intended to be set off when someone said something. You have to be pretty close to that activator to set it off.” Moreover, the FBI raid unearthed more than footprints.
“Not only were fingerprints from many of the top leaders of the Weathermen found at the Pine Street location, but there were tools, watches, wiring, C-4 explosive, and pipes of different lengths with end caps to create pipe bombs,” Gratwohl stated at the National Press Club last week. “The Weathermen used latex gloves to make their bombs.”
“This fact is established by the bomb residue found on the gloves.” It would also explain why fingerprints were rarely if ever found in the wreckage of Weather Underground bombings.
While with the FBI, Gratwohl infiltrated the Weather Underground as an undercover agent. Rudd currently teaches math at Central New Mexico Community College.
It should be noted that Rudd’s ratemyprofessors.com ratings indicate that he uses his classroom time exclusively for the teaching of mathematics. Extracurricularly, he is more expansive about his youthful revolutionary activities, as he was in a lecture at the FBI academy that was held during the administration of George W. Bush.
Ayers, despite his retiring status, wastes no opportunity to continue his revolution, even/especially in a series of education textbooks which he edited for the Teacher’s College at Columbia University.
As for Dohrn, veteran government investigator Herb Romerstein offers an interesting insight. Romerstein’s decades of government service culminated with a stint as an expert on Soviet forgeries at the U. S. Information Agency in the 1980s.
“A group of the Weathermen went down to Cuba in the so-called Venceremos Brigade, and some of them received training in terrorist activities,” Romerstein has stated. “One of their instructors was named Julian Torres-Rizo.”
“Rizo was an officer of the Cuban DGI, the intelligence service. He was assigned to work with the young Americans who were coming down ostensibly to cut sugar cane.”
“They were really coming down for training. And we have one of Rizo’s speeches in which he says, ‘You come from a society that must be destroyed. It’s your job to destroy your society.’”
“Well, Bernardine Dohrn and her cronies published Rizo’s speech and I have the copy that they published so we know what he did and what they said. And Rizo later became the Cuban Ambassador to Grenada at the time of Maurice Bishop and he was still the Cuban Ambassador when Bishop was murdered by his own comrades.” Rizo “finally had to leave and go back to Cuba where he became a member of the central committee of the Cuban Communist Party,” Romerstein recounted.
While at the USIA, Romerstein was instrumental in getting the U. S. government to publish The Grenada Papers, a compilation of documents left by the government of Bishop, that nation’s last Marxist president, when U. S. marines invaded the island to rescue American medical students there.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
