Weather Underground Terrorist Group History

Weather Underground Terrorist Group

History of the group or groups derived from, including chronology of current series of events. The Weather Underground Terrorist Group, known colloquially as the "Weathermen" and later "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), was a domestic American radical left anti-Vietnam War group that protested against U.S. policies by bombing the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and a string of other government buildings (The Weather Underground Movement 1). The group initially emerged from the campus-based anti-war and anti-racism ("civil rights") movements during U.S. military action in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam, which continued despite the significance of an increasing global desire to stop the war. In the U.S., that desire was particularly evident upon the outcome of the 1968 U.S. presidential election. With militancy gradually supplanting nonviolence as the dominant form of anti-war action, Weatherman had concluded that university campus-based demonstrations needed to be supplemented with more dramatic and violent statements with potential to interfere with the U.S. war-making and internal security apparatuses. The Weathermen thought that guerrilla actions of this type would help to jump-start the revolution. Originally, WUO was part of the "Revolutionary Youth Movement" (RYM), within the "Students for a Democratic Society" (SDS). With their splits - first from the RYM's Maoist faction, and then from SDS itself - the Weathermen distinguished themselves from other self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary groups by claiming that there was no time to build a vanguard party and that revolutionary war against the United States and the system of capitalism should begin immediately. To that end, they carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots (Weatherman Organization 1).

After the 1969 split, Weatherman's adherents explicitly claimed themselves the real leaders of SDS. Thereafter, any leaflet, label, or logo bearing the name "Students for a Democratic Society" or "SDS" was in fact the views and politics of Weatherman, and not of SDS as a whole, since the latter had collapsed. Since the Weathermen contained the vast majority of the former SDS National Committee, including Bernadine Dohrn, the organization, while small, was able to easily comandeer the name of SDS, as well as all its membership lists. For a brief time contact with regional SDS cadre was maintained from the National Office, but with Weatherman in charge the contact didn't last long, and local chapters soon disbanded. It appears also that the 'Weatherman' moniker used by the group may have been meant as a rebuke against the Progressive Labor Party, whose Worker Student Alliance SDS faction had succeeded in recruiting many SDSers to its ranks, and had allegedly co-opted the 1969 convention. The name "Weather Underground" - originally called "The Weathermen," is taken from a line in a Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which featured the lyrics "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The WUO was a small, violent off shoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), created in the turbulent '60s to promote social change. When the SDS collapsed in 1969, the Weather Underground stepped forward, inspired by communist ideologies and embracing violence and crime as a way to protest the Vietnam War, racism, and other left-wing aims. "Our intention is to disrupt the empire...to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks," claimed the group's 1974 manifesto, Prairie Fire. By the next year, the group had claimed credit for 25 bombings and would be involved in many more over the next several years (A Byte out of History: 1975 Terrorism Flashback State Department Bombing 1). Splintering from the activists group "Students for a Democratic Society "(SDS) the WUO became much more radical than the SDS. Feeling that peaceful anti-Vietnam War protests provided no measurable result for their goals the turning point for the group -- according to testimony of former members -- was the murder of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a December 1969 Chicago police raid (The Weather Underground Movement 1). "There's something about a good bomb" said Bill Ayers, former Weather Underground Leader in his memoir "Fugitive Days" (for quotation see: Terrorist Motivations and Behaviors, p. 14.)

The FBI doggedly pursued these terrorists as their attacks mounted. Many members were soon identified, but their small numbers and guerilla tactics helped them hide under assumed identities. In 1978, however, the Bureau arrested five members who were plotting to bomb a politician's office. More were arrested when an accident destroyed the group's bomb factory in Hoboken, New Jersey. Others were identified after two policemen and a Brinks' driver were murdered in a botched armored car robbery in Nanuet, New York. Key to disrupting the group for good was the newly created FBI-New York City Police Anti-Terrorist Task Force. It brought together the strengths of both organizations and focused them on these domestic terrorists. The task force and others like it paved the way for today's Joint Terrorism Task Forces -- created by the FBI in each of its field offices to fuse federal, state, and local law enforcement and intelligence resources to combat today's terrorist threats.

By the mid-'80s, the Weather Underground was essentially history. Still, several of these fugitives were able to successfully hide themselves for decades, emerging only in recent years to answer for their crimes. (A Byte out of History 1).

The following is a list of Weather Underground activities from 1969 to 1972 (see "The Weather Underground Movement" 2-3): Days of Rage October 8-11, 1969: Marked the split and more volatile stance of the now self labeled Weatherman from the SDS. Advertised as the groups disdain for American involvement in the Vietnam War in the title "Bring the War Home" slogan. The group of a few hundred blew up a statue in Chicago built to commemorate fallen policemen. The statue was rebuilt and blew up again by the Weathermen in October of 1970. The event was marked with violence between the Weathermen and police resulting in 6 members being shot and 68 arrested. February 1970: The Weathermen bombed the home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh. The Judge was targeted for his presiding over a trial against members of the Black Panther Party. The Weathermen used three gas filled bombs to attack the home. No one was injured. March 1970: Following Bernardine Dohrn's public announcement on behalf of the organization' "declaration of war" a bomb accidentally detonated killing three Weathermen in the basement of a Manhattan townhouse, the group suddenly became the target of an FBI manhunt, and members were forced to go into hiding. The bomb had been intended to be set off at a dance at a local Army base that surely would have resulted in casualties of enlisted service personnel and their dates. The Weatherman sporadically conducted attacks in empty office buildings after providing threats to insure that no one would be harmed in their bomb statements. June 9, 1970: As a response to the killing of an escaped convict by the police the Weathermen bombed a New York City Police Station. It was after this event that the FBI placed the organization on the ten most wanted list before year end. September 1970: The Weathermen received $20,000 from "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love" to break Timothy Leary out of Prison and to transport him and his wife to Algeria. Later when Leary, an LSD and Drug advocate was captured he offered information on the Weathermen to lessen his sentence. May 1972: The Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women's bathroom in the Air Force wing of The Pentagon. The damage caused flooding that devastated classified information on computer tapes but no one was injured. The day marked the anniversary of the birthday of Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh that was the president of Vietnam until his death in 1969. Late 1970s: The Weatherman group further split into two factions: the "May 19 Coalition" and the "Prairie Fire Collective." The Prairie Fire Collective was led by Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers. After the FBI reduced charges the Dohrn and Ayer's group began coming out of hiding to face minimal charges against them.

Intentions: What are the goals of the group? Tactical, and if applicable strategic?

The WUO wanted America out of Vietnam (The Weather Underground Movement 1). The Weathermen were outspoken advocates of the critical concepts that later came to be known a "white privilege" and "identity politics" (Weatherman Organization 1).

Do they intend to overthrow and/or replace the current government or are they just gathering arms/money for the next attack? In the mayhem years of the WUO, starting in October 1969, nearly 300 members of the organization engaged in vandalism, arson, and vicious attacks against police and civilians alike. Their immediate objective was to spread their anti-war, anti-American message. Their long-term goal, however, was to cause the collapse of the United States and to create, in its stead, a new communist society over which they themselves would rule. With regard to those Americans who might refuse to embrace capitalism, Bill Ayers (leader of the Weather Underground) and his comrades -- including Bernardine Dohrn, and numerous others -- proposed that such resisters should be sent to reeducation camps and killed. The terrorists estimated that it would be necessary to eliminate some 25 million people in this fashion, so as to advance the revolution (Bill Ayers: 1, 2). Although always numerically tiny, the cadre's members were charismatic, provocative, articulate, and intelligent. They commanded news media attention (at the expense of other leftist groups) with their brash rhetoric, violent actions, and, in the eyes of many, romantic allure.

At whom and/or does the group direct its attacks? Is this static or progressive?

In October 1969, we witness WUO's early experimentation with using force to make itself heard. The first attempt is to be seen in the "Days of Rage," an anarchic march of destruction through Chicago, with windows smashed and cars destroyed, which culminated in a brawl with the local police. This was far removed from SDS's peaceful protests but as the WUO leadership soon realized, indiscriminate violence of this type only served to isolate the group, by scaring away the very people whom the organization, through its acts, sought to mobilize. At worst, its intended audience flocked to traditional authorities instead, looking to the security forces for protection against this new threat. This led to a strategic shift in the use of force, which was henceforth calibrated to gain maximum attention without alienating. From around 1970 onward, what the Weather Underground did was to use carefully targeted attacks to broadcast its discontent with specific government policies. In other words, the group moved toward a radical form of 'signal politics': following the killing of George Jackson by prison guards, the Weather Underground bombed the Department of Corrections in San Francisco and the Office of California Prisons in Sacramento; following the Kent State shootings, WUO hit the National Guard Association building in Washington DC; to protest against the U.S. bombing of Laos, WUO bombed the U.S. Capitol building; and in response to a raid over Hanoi, WUO attacked the Pentagon (see Ucko, D. 1,2). The WUO used violence against buildings rather than people, to symbolize their discontent with specific policies and actions, but without killing those held responsible. It was 'propaganda of the deed', but without the bloodshed. Accordingly, none of WUO's attacks resulted in casualties. (see Ucko 2, reporting that the one exception has not been definitively linked to the group).

Membership: Who makes the administrative, active and support elements of the group? From what segment of the population (students, peasants, refugees, political, economic, etc.). Do they derive backing and sympathy? If the group is currently inactive, where are they? In jail, dead, out of the movement? WUO derived backing and sympathy mainly from the world of academia. Many of the Weathermen were college students, who often resorted to violent tactics in the 1960s in an effort to promote the "New Left" and extraction of troops from Vietnam (FBI -- 1975 State Department Bombing 1). After the group began dissolving in 1977, many members moved on to other armed revolutionary groups and were subsequently arrested and held for long periods. By the mid-'80s, the Weather Underground was essentially history. Still, several of these fugitives were able to successfully hide themselves for decades, emerging only in recent years to answer for their crimes. (A Byte out of History 1). Very few WUO members served prison sentences for their time in the Weather Underground; the evidence gathered against them by the FBI's COINTELPRO program was deemed illegally obtained and inadmissible in court (Weatherman Organization 1).