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The Weather Underground were the most active and successful militant left-wing group in US history. As part of their anti-Vietnam war operations they bombed the Pentagon, the State Department, corporate headquarters and other high-profile targets. In this episode I examine whether they were a lethal terrorist organisation, or a non-lethal militant anti-war gang. I look at their relationship with the FBI and the cinema of the Weather Underground, including how the FBI rewrote Robert Redford’s movie The Company You Keep. Audio Player 00:00 00:00 Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume. Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed Transcript For those of you who don’t know much about the Weathermen, they were an offshoot of the SDS – the Students for a Democratic Society, a radical leftist movement mostly based on college campuses. As the SDS started to fracture towards the end of the 60s, the Weather Underground emerged as the group advocating direct action, even violence, as a means of getting the job done. Up until then SDS had mostly focused on sit-ins, mass protests and other non-violent demonstrations. For a brief history of the Weathermen we can turn to a lecture by Arthur Eckstein – a hippy history professor – at the Wilson Center in 2013. Who were the Weather Underground? Eckstein’s lecture goes on to present two competing narratives about the Weather Underground. Narrative A is the one presented by Bill Ayers and other members of the Weather leadership, the Weather Bureau. It says that the townhouse explosion was the result of unauthorised crazies taking matters into their own hands. It presents the Weathermen as a horizontal structure with no central leadership and hence no responsibility for what one collective might do. Narrative B is supported by other former members of the organisation, along with FBI files that were recently declassified. It says that the Fort Dix bombing plot was going to coincide with a similar bombing in Detroit – a coordinated attack, requiring some kind of central command or liaison between the two collectives. The Detroit bombing never happened because an FBI informant – Larry Grathwohl the only informant the FBI ever had within the Weathermen – told them where the dynamite was. Eckstein makes a compelling case for the second narrative, that the Weather Underground was, at least at the end of 1969 and the beginning of 1970, a paramilitary terrorist organisation with national reach. Following the failure of the dual bombings plot and the tragedy at the townhouse, the Weathermen scattered and went underground, assuming fake identities. They did this expertly, indicative of a centralised command structure. For example, Al Qaeda did not manage to do this after 9/11. The problem is that most of the tension between these two narratives is based on recollections decades later, in interviews and memoirs. I am certainly no expert in the evidence but I had noticed how most coverage of the Weathermen points to the fact that they phoned in warnings and did their best not to kill anyone in their bombing campaign. This is certainly true for the post-townhouse period, when they bombed the ladies bathroom at the Pentagon, bombed the Capitol and so on. They managed not to kill anyone. Indeed, another act of violence would signal the end of the organisation. Three former members of the group joined the May 19 Communist Organization, and in October 1981 they helped the Black Liberation Army rob a Brinks truck carrying $1.6 million. Three people were killed, and all three former Weathermen were found guilty. Though the Weather Underground was already falling apart and fading, this is regarded by some as the moment it all came to an end. This raises some important questions about guerilla violence and political warfare. For example, US military manuals on guerilla and terrorist gangs says that successful operations provide a psychological boost to the gang members, making them believe their cause is going to succeed. I think this is broadly true. When it came to the Weathermen the failure of the dual bombings plot and the loss of life at the townhouse led to a shift in strategy. Indeed, the fact that such a shift was possible shows how the leadership were in control, largely confirming one ex-member’s account that all operations had to go up the chain of command for approval. Likewise, the non-lethal bombing campaign was extremely successful, and this period in the early 70s was the Weather Underground at its peak. Indeed, despite being the target of COINTELPRO, the FBI basically didn’t have the informants on the ground to be able to do much about this. So they turned to black bag operations, illegal wiretaps, warrantless searches and so on. In April 1971 the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI – another radical left group – broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of Bureau documents. This included a large amount of information on the FBI’s CO...

ClandesTime 150 – The Weather Underground | Spy Culture