On the night of Feb. 16, 1970, Brian McDonnell was sorting through
bulletins on the Teletype machine at Park
Police Station in the Upper Haight neighborhood of San Francisco. The
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Brian McDonnell was killed by shrapnel in the 1970 bombing of Park
Police Station --- Jacob Poehls
San Francisco Police Department |
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respected 44-year-old sergeant was checking results from the recent
union elections, in which he was running for station representative. Steady
rain fell outside. At 10:45 p.m., a bomb planted on the ledge outside a
nearby window went off.
McDonnell took the brunt of the blast to his body and face. The bomb
was packed with inch-long industrial fence staples, which severed his jugular
vein and lodged in his brain. He would die two days later without regaining
consciousness.
Investigators would later surmise that the explosion had been intended
for 11 p.m., when roughly two dozen officers would be coming on or going
off duty. As it was, many were still changing in the second-floor locker
room. Rushing downstairs, they found Officer Frank Rath, who had been in
the office with McDonnell, stumbling dazedly around the room with his gun
drawn. Blood and staples covered the floor.
“I was a Vietnam veteran. I’d been in a war,” recalled retired police
sergeant James Pera, then a 24-year-old patrol officer and one of the first
on the scene. “But I never expected this to happen in my hometown, in a
police station. It was something we never expected to see in our own country.”
Awash in revolutionary and antiwar fervor, the Vietnam era was a
dangerous time for cops.
Information in the long-running investigation into the Park Station
bombing has been closely held by law-enforcement officials. Yet rumors
have circulated for the past four decades that the Weather
Underground, a militant leftist group, was involved in the attack.
National interest in the Weather Underground was revived during last
year’s presidential campaign, when Republicans and conservative bloggers
tried to smear Barack Obama for his ties to the group’s former leaders,
Bill
Ayers and Bernardine
Dohrn. A married couple now comfortably ensconced in the ranks of Chicago’s
liberal intelligentsia, Ayers and Dohrn were early political patrons of
Obama’s, hosting a campaign event for the future president in 1995 when
he ran for the Illinois state Senate.
Ayers and Dohrn assert today that the group deliberately avoided
killing people in a campaign of “symbolic” bombings of empty government
buildings. They and other former Weathermen have dismissed as right-wing
conspiracy theories any suggestion that their organization was responsible
for the Park Station bombing.
Now, speaking publicly for the first time about the investigation,
former FBI agents have told Village Voice Media the basis for their belief
that the Weather Underground
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Former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn is suspected
by investigators of organizing the deadly attack on Park Police Station
---Photos courtesy Max Noel |
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was behind McDonnell’s murder. The agents have revealed that two
credible eyewitnesses—both former left-wing radicals tied to the Weathermen—gave
detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s alleging that Dohrn and
Howard
Machtinger, whom investigators believed to be one of the group’s principal
bomb technicians, were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack.
Both witnesses claimed to have participated in meetings at which the bombing
was planned, and one confessed to having cased the police station for the
Weathermen.
Working from these statements, authorities have quietly devoted far
more attention to the Weather Underground in recent years than was previously
known. Dohrn, Machtinger and Ayers were all targets of a secret, federal,
grand-jury investigation in 2003 into McDonnell’s killing, according to
San Francisco criminal-defense lawyer Stuart
Hanlon, who has become familiar with the Park Station case while defending
a client charged in another 1970s police murder. While indictments against
the three were never issued, Hanlon said, “it was clear they were the targets.
They weren’t called—other people were called about them.”
The case against the Weathermen is far from complete. Some investigators
say they are troubled by the impunity with which Ayers and Dohrn have peddled
a version of the past wiped clean of bloodshed. “I don’t think they should
be besmirched. I just think the truth should come out,” said retired FBI
Special Agent Willie Reagan, who investigated the Weathermen in the
1970s and served on a task force that in 1999 reopened the investigation
into McDonnell’s murder. “There’s so much there. If you’ve ever been in
a courtroom, you know defense attorneys can create doubt about anything.
But common sense tells you something. Who else could it be?”
Reagan, 68, now lives north of San Francisco and has little in common
with the partisan hacks who tried to make hay from Ayers’ militant past
during the 2008 election season. In his career, Reagan would deploy his
talents for disguise and detection to help bring down extremist groups
of all political stripes.
In the 1970s, Reagan grew out his hair and mastered the counterculture
shibboleths of the New Left. His work as an undercover agent—or “beard,”
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Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers pictured in a law-enforcement
identification kit from the 1970s
---Photos courtesy Max Noel |
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as they were known at the FBI—helped disrupt a 1977 plot by the Weathermen
to bomb the office of John V. Briggs, a conservative California state senator.
Years later, Reagan grew a beard again—this time for a stint with the Freemen,
a group of armed right-wing radicals who sequestered themselves on a Montana
compound at the height of the militia movement in the 1990s. In between,
he infiltrated drug organizations and the mob.
“I worked the right wing as hard as I worked these nuts,” he said
of the Weathermen. “But the press kisses their asses, and a lot of the
information isn’t out there.”
In 2000, the gruff Reagan was recruited out of retirement to join
the Phoenix Task Force, a team of local and federal law-enforcement officials
investigating unsolved cop killings from the 1970s, including the long-dormant
Park Station case. Among his duties was sifting through the FBI’s voluminous
paperwork on the Weather Underground.
He soon came across a set of decades-old FD-302 forms, used by bureau
agents then, as now, to summarize interviews performed in the course of
investigations. The FBI’s first recorded statements on the Park Station
bombing plot came from interviews over two days in June 1972 with a man
who once had been a writer for the Berkeley
Tribe, an underground newspaper. While Reagan would not disclose
the man’s name, law-enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation
said he is Matthew
Landy Steen, who has used the alias William
Hellis Coquillette.
Steen told agents he had attended a Bay Area meeting in January 1970
at which half a dozen Weather Underground activists discussed their plans
to plant a bomb at Park Police Station. Among those Steen placed at the
meeting were Dohrn and Machtinger.
Also in the case file were multiple forms from interviews with a
former Weather Underground member named Karen
Latimer. In the mid-1970s, Latimer came forward to say that she had
attended a separate planning session for the Park Station attack with Dohrn
and Machtinger in the winter of 1970. At these meetings, Reagan said, Dohrn
“seemed to be more or less the ringleader,” while “Machtinger gave instructions
on how to build the bomb, and they discussed the placing of the bomb at
Park Station.”
Reagan said the witnesses’ descriptions of the meetings were consistent
with each other and strikingly similar to other Weather Underground planning
sessions he had attended while undercover. The idea, he said, was to implicate
all members in a criminal conspiracy, reducing the chance that anyone would
turn to the police. “To them, building a bomb is an act of cohesion,” Reagan
said. “It’s almost like the mob when they ask someone to kill somebody
or hack a guy’s arm off. They trust you more when they’re dirty with you.”
San Francisco Police Inspector Joe Engler, the lead detective on
the Phoenix Task Force, declined to comment on evidence or potential witnesses
in the Park Station case, citing the ongoing investigation into the bombing.
He referred a request for the forms on Latimer and Steen to federal authorities.
At press time, the United States attorney’s office for the Northern District
of California said a Freedom of Information Act request from Village
Voice Media for the documents was being reviewed by the U.S. Department
of Justice in Washington, D.C.
For decades, the only known indications of the Weather Underground’s
involvement in the bombing of Park Station had been tenuous hearsay from
Larry
Grathwohl, a U.S. Army veteran who was hired by the FBI to infiltrate
the group in 1969. In sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary
Committee in 1974 and in a 1976 memoir, Bringing
Down America: An FBI Informer With the Weathermen, Grathwohl asserted
that he had heard from Ayers during a meeting of a Weather Underground
cell in Buffalo, New York, that Dohrn “had to plan, develop and carry out
the bombing of the police station in San Francisco.” But former Weathermen
have long dismissed his story as a fabrication. During a book tour of the
Bay Area in January, Ayers told the San Francisco Chronicle that
Grathwohl was “a paid dishonest person.”
Reviewing the bureau’s files in 2000, however, it was plain to Reagan
that the case against the Weathermen went well beyond a solitary piece
of after-the-fact hearsay relayed by an FBI mole. When he read Steen’s
and Latimer’s statements, he had one thought: Why didn’t they prosecute?
It turns out law-enforcement officials had come much closer to pouncing
on the Weather Underground than Reagan realized. According to another investigator
familiar with the case, prosecutors came within a hair’s breadth of filing
charges against the group in the 1970s based on Latimer’s testimony.
An articulate young woman with short, dark hair who had joined the
Weathermen after getting involved with the antiwar movement at Michigan
State University, Latimer wore a tan pantsuit on the day she met with San
Francisco detectives in a Financial District hotel room. According to the
investigator, she had come forward to betray her former comrades in the
revolution in order to have a federal hold on her passport lifted so she
could travel abroad; she was delivered to the SFPD by FBI agents. She was
willing to testify in court if granted personal immunity from prosecution.
Listening to Latimer calmly narrate the planning of the Park Station
attack, the local detectives knew they finally had a break. They believed
she could make their whole case. Latimer claimed to have personally cased
the station and could describe the package that held the explosive device
before it went off. “It was just too detailed,” the investigator said.
“It was A to Z without leaving out L and M. I was convinced.”
The day after interviewing Latimer, the investigator said, the detectives
hastily convened a conference with San Francisco District Attorney John
Jay Ferdon and a federal prosecutor. At that meeting, the police officers
and federal prosecutor argued for granting Latimer immunity and proceeding
to file charges. (It is unclear which Weather Underground members would
have been named as defendants, or whether the DA and U.S. attorney were
aware of Steen’s earlier statement to police.)
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Ferdon opposed this plan, arguing that Latimer’s sudden appearance
could be a ploy. Once she was granted immunity, he feared, she would simply
change her story and confess to planning and executing the bombing alone,
clearing herself and her former comrades of criminal liability. He won
the argument, and local detectives renewed their efforts to find more evidence
or informants to support a prosecution.
Caution in filing charges based solely on Latimer’s statements may
have been warranted for other reasons. Testimony from criminally implicated
informants is notoriously problematic for prosecutors, who must explain
to a jury why their witnesses aren’t merely lying to avoid more severe
punishment. Hence the need, in an ideal world, for more extensive corroboration
of what happened the night of the bombing, such as physical evidence—in
the form of fingerprints or ballistics—to back up Steen’s and Latimer’s
stories.
Such evidence has never been uncovered in the McDonnell murder case.
After the launch of the Phoenix Task Force, a forensics expert at the California
Department of Justice was able to develop a latent fingerprint on a fragment
of the Park Station bomb using new scientific techniques, according to
an affidavit filed by Engler in another of the task force’s cold cases.
But the print was still too undefined to be used for identification.
The FBI’s witness statements are also less comprehensive than investigators
would like. For instance, neither Steen nor Latimer said they had been
present for the construction of the bomb (though Reagan said at least one
of them reported seeing such bombmaking materials as detonator cord at
the planning session), and neither had seen who placed the device on the
station’s window ledge.
And then there is the most vexing obstacle to a successful prosecution
of the Weathermen based on former collaborators’ confessions: the inconvenient
fact that an entirely different set of militant activists has also claimed
credit for the bombing.
On Aug. 28, 1971, Anthony Bottom and Albert Washington, cadres of
the violent Black Panthers splinter group known as the Black
Liberation Army (BLA), pulled up in a car alongside the patrol cruiser
of San Francisco Police Sergeant George Kowalski at an intersection in
the Mission District and leveled a submachine gun at him. The BLA was suspected
or convicted of multiple attacks on police officers in the 1970s, including
the 1971 shotgun killing of Sergeant John Young at San Francisco’s Ingleside
Police Station. On this occasion, however, they were unsuccessful. The
gun, loaded with the wrong type of ammunition, jammed. Bottom and Washington
were arrested and charged with attempted murder.
Over the next month, Bottom, while in police custody, made an extraordinary
series of statements, according to investigators familiar with his case.
Among other confessions, he reportedly told SFPD homicide inspectors Frank
McCoy and Eddy Erdelatz that he had personally planted the bomb that killed
McDonnell and that he had helped plan the Ingleside attack, which took
place while he was in jail.
When he made his far-ranging confession, Bottom was already destined
for prison. A revolver found with him at the time of his arrest had been
traced to New York City Police Officer Waverly
Jones, who was gunned down with his partner, Joseph
Piagentini, by BLA members in a Manhattan housing project that May.
Today, Bottom is serving a life sentence at Auburn Correctional Facility
in upstate New York for his conviction in their murders.
A number of law-enforcement officials with knowledge of the Park
Station case view a BLA link to the bombing with skepticism. Bottom, in
particular, was famous among detectives of the era for his big mouth. “He
was just a guy who liked to hear himself talk,” one investigator said.
“We could not corroborate independently what he told us about Park.”
Another former investigator connected to the case is more blunt: Bottom,
he said, “would confess to the Quake of ’89.”
Mark Goldrosen, a San Francisco attorney who represented Bottom when
he was charged with seven other defendants in 2007 for the 1971 attack
on Ingleside Station, concurs with investigators’ dismissive takes
on his client’s statements about the Park bombing. “If he had admitted
it, and if it was considered credible,” he said, “this would have been
prosecuted a long time ago.”
Another former BLA member, Ruben Scott, also told police in the 1970s
that the organization was involved in the Park Station killing, according
to law-enforcement sources. Scott reportedly said that he was not personally
present the night of the bombing.
The BLA connection to Park Station may be a red herring—or it could
mean that McDonnell’s murder was simply the result of two militant groups
working in tandem. A prime tenet of the Weathermen’s through-the-looking-glass
revolutionary doctrine was that it was their duty to shed “white-skin privilege”
and put themselves at the service of black radicals, and there are indications
that the affinity between the BLA and Weathermen was particularly strong.
For example, the BLA collaborated with former Weather Underground members
Kathy
Boudin and David
Gilbert in a 1981 armed robbery in Nanuet, New York, that ended with
the deaths of two police officers and a Brink’s armored-truck guard. And
Ayers and Dohrn named their son, Zayd Dohrn, after BLA member Zayd
Shakur, who died in a shootout with New Jersey state troopers in 1973.
From today’s vantage point, the spectacle of so many revolutionary
groups competing to blow up or shoot sworn peace officers might seem strange.
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Noel inspects Weather Underground members' belongings during a 1971
apartment search ---Courtesy Max Noel |
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But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, America’s major cities were in
something close to a guerrilla war. In 1972 alone, the FBI attributed 1,500
bombings within the United States to “civil unrest” from domestic radical
groups. Max
Noel, a retired FBI agent who investigated the Weathermen in the 1970s
while based at the bureau’s San Francisco field office, said police officers
routinely searched their patrol cars for bombs before starting their engines.
In this environment, many law-enforcement officials resorted, with
unfortunate results, to dubious practices of their own. The most notorious
example of police overreach from the era was the FBI’s
COINTELPRO, an elaborate program of domestic espionage that targeted
peaceful civil-rights groups alongside the Black Panthers and the Weathermen.
Senate hearings on the program in the late 1970s concluded with a formal
denunciation of such FBI tactics as wiretapping and illegal property searches.
The rise and fall of the Weather Underground is one of the more outlandish
chapters in the phantasmagoria of Vietnam-era radicalism. Formed in 1969
as a militant faction of the mass antiwar movement Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS), what was then commonly called the Weathermen—named
after the Bob Dylan lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way
the wind blows”—proclaimed a desire to foment what they saw as an imminent,
global, communist revolution within the U.S. Their motto: “Bring the war
home.” (After the winter of 1970, the Weathermen became the Weather Underground,
a nod to the group’s fugitive status and disdain for sexist pronouns.)
In December 1969, the group convened a “war council” in Flint, Michigan,
announcing its plans to attack institutions of the U.S. government and
oppose “everything that’s good and decent in honky America,” according
to an account of the meeting by former Weatherman Mark
Rudd in his memoir, Underground.
Presiding over the meeting was Dohrn, the mercurial beauty whom FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover once called “the most dangerous woman in America.”
The University of Chicago-educated Dohrn was a diva of the radical left,
known for her shrill revolutionary creed. “We’re about being crazy motherfuckers,”
she announced at the war council.
This darker phase of the Weathermen lasted through March 6, 1970,
when three members of the group were killed in an accidental explosion
while building a bomb at a Greenwich Village townhouse. That bomb, members
of the group would later reveal, was intended to cause a massacre at an
Army dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Following the townhouse explosion, the Weather leadership convened
a summit at a beach house on California’s fog-hung Mendocino coast. At
that conference, they decided to alter their bombing campaign, targeting
only empty government facilities, according to Rudd’s memoir. Now in hiding
or “underground” because of riot and conspiracy charges, the Weathermen
went on to claim responsibility for setting small bombs at the Pentagon,
the U.S. Capitol and the State Department, none of which resulted in the
loss of human life.
The attack on Park Station falls within the narrow period between
December 1969 and March 1970 when the Weather Underground was still loudly
devoted to killing people. “During that 10 weeks, they were intending,
by their own statements—many statements—to commit acts of violence against
persons,” said Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University journalism professor
and former SDS president who has written extensively on the history of
the 1960s. Gitlin admitted that he had no direct knowledge of the Weathermen’s
actions during the time in question, but said the bombing would have fit
their m.o.
Resurfacing at the end of the decade, many of the Weathermen saw
charges against them dropped or resolved with meager penalties because
of the questionable FBI tactics used against them. Some went on to
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Ayers and e Dohrn, photographed in 2001, are now professors in Chicago
---Todd Buchanan |
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rehabilitate themselves through careers in academia. Dohrn is now a
professor at Northwestern University Law School, and Ayers is an education
professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Machtinger became a
teacher in North Carolina. No former member or associate of the Weather
Underground has ever publicly acknowledged a role in the Park Station bombing.
Dohrn, Machtinger and Ayers did not respond to repeated requests
for comment for this story. Brian
Flanagan, a New York City resident and former Weather Underground member
who has condemned the group’s tactics as misguided, denied that any Weathermen
had carried out the bombing. “There’s nothing that I have for you on Park
Station, except that it was not the Weather,” he said. “I’m absolutely
positive.” He declined to say whether he was in San Francisco when the
attack took place.
Rudd, who once held a leadership position in the group, said he didn’t
think the Weathermen had a hand in the murder of McDonnell, but he acknowledged
that he could not be sure, since he was not based in California at the
time of the bombing. “It’s my impression that Weather Underground was not
involved in that at all,” he said in a telephone interview from New Mexico,
where he now lives. “I was on the East Coast at the time, but I was still
high enough in the organization. I never heard anything about it. Not only
that, I was in a position to know.” He added, “Of course, that’s not any
kind of exculpatory evidence.”
Unlike the bloodless bombings the Weathermen carried out in the mid-1970s,
murder and related conspiracy charges carry no statute of limitations.
If prosecutors opted to file charges in the Park Station bombing, Dohrn,
Machtinger and any others implicated in the attack could be hauled into
court.
Meanwhile, veteran investigators still fume over the ease with which
Ayers and Dohrn have assumed the mantle of middle-class respectability.
When people talk to Noel about the Weather Underground’s avowed intent
to not harm people, he likes to tell the story of a 1971 search of one
of the group’s principal “safe houses,” an apartment on Pine Street in
San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood. Inside, FBI agents and SFPD inspectors
discovered C-4 explosives, voice-activated bomb switches and concealable
shivs made from sharpened knitting needles epoxied into the caps of ballpoint
pens.
“This whole image that these were nice-type people is what makes
me upset,” Noel said. “They were thugs and they were criminals trying to
overthrow the U.S. government.”
During the 2008 election season, Noel even made a brief televised
appearance with Greta Van Susteren on FOX News to counter the arguments
of Weather Underground apologists
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Retired FBI special agent Max Noel was angered by arguments defending
the Weather Underground during the 2008 election |
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who were saying the group had been essentially nonviolent.
Noel, Reagan and other law-enforcement officials interviewed for
this story hold out hope that the Park Station case will one day bring
a reckoning for the Weathermen. But the specter of the Vietnam era’s radical
legacy should be summoned with care, as another prominent cold case from
the same period illustrates.
In 2007, the California attorney general’s office filed charges against
eight alleged former BLA radicals—Bottom among them—for the 1971 attack
on Ingleside Police Station and the murder of Sergeant Young. The Phoenix
Task Force was also responsible for building that case.
After lengthy litigation and an outcry from liberal activists over
the belated prosecution, charges against five of the defendants were dropped.
An additional two, including Bottom, pleaded guilty to lesser charges and
received probation—hardly a meaningful punishment for someone serving a
life sentence. Charges against the eighth defendant have yet to be resolved,
but by most accounts, the case has been a huge disappointment for cold-case
investigators and a humiliation for the attorney general’s office.
According to Hanlon, who represented one of the Ingleside defendants,
the documentation he’s seen on Park Station doesn’t bode for better results.
“I’ve looked at probably 90 percent of the evidence,” he said, explaining
that much of it was available to Ingleside defense attorneys because of
the BLA’s possible connection to the bombing. “They have no case, and that’s
why they have no prosecution. They have enough snitches. They just don’t
have any evidence.”
Investigators privately acknowledge that as time passes, a conviction
seems more improbable. A 2002 SFPD bulletin seeking Steen as a witness
in a criminal-conspiracy investigation states that he was “transient,”
last encountered by police during a 2000 arrest for squatting in Golden
Gate Park; it is unclear whether he would still be a competent witness.
Steen could not be reached by Village Voice Media for comment.
Latimer, who would likely have been a star witness for the prosecution,
died several years ago, according to Reagan. During his brief return to
the Park Station case in 2000, Reagan said, he re-established contact with
Latimer, whom he had known during his years as an undercover agent in the
1970s. Speaking to her again after the intervening decades, he found her
deeply frustrated that her decision to cooperate with law enforcement so
many years ago had been of little consequence. “She was looking for a form
of justice, and she was totally disappointed that there wasn’t enough to
prosecute,” he said. “To her, it was a reality. She was there, and she
heard them talking about doing this.”
At a preliminary hearing earlier this year in the failed Ingleside
murder case, Dohrn, in a gesture of solidarity, traveled to San Francisco
from Chicago to stand with the defendants’ supporters in the courtroom.
Engler was also present.
According to law-enforcement sources, Engler introduced himself to
Dohrn as a San Francisco homicide detective and said he would like to speak
with her after the hearing. She greeted him politely but was noncommittal,
and she left without giving him a chance to interview her.
It had been 39 years since Park Station was bombed. Police were still
looking for a break. And once again, Dohrn had disappeared. |