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- <text id=93HT0377>
- <link 93XP0224>
- <link 93XP0223>
- <title>
- 1970s: Terrorists And Cults
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- Terrorists and Cults
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> [Disaffected and dissident groups in the U.S. had learned from
- the civil rights movement how to organize and how to exploit the
- media to gain exposure and redress of their grievances or even
- to bring about changes in the law and society. But in the 1970s
- those groups tended to fracture into splinters of the radical
- right, left and even religious persuasions. Some were utopian
- and pacific, but others were subversive and revolutionary,
- embracing violence, often random and directed at innocent
- bystanders, to call attention to their causes.]
- </p>
- <p>(March 23, 1970)
- </p>
- <p> Only nine months ago, the National Commission on the Causes
- and Prevention of Violence was able to report that the U.S. "has
- experienced almost none of the chronic revolutionary conspiracy
- and terrorism that plagues dozens of other nations." For many
- decades, the specter of the political bomber has been as alien
- and anachronistic as the caricature of the bearded anarchist
- heaving a bomb the size and shape of a bowling ball. Last week
- that specter took on ominous substance as the nation was shaken
- by a series of bombings that highlighted a fearsome new brand
- of terrorism.
- </p>
- <p> Taking their cue from right-wing racists who used to keep
- blacks down with TNT, whites and blacks of the lunatic left have
- begun using explosives to produce sound effects and shock waves
- in their campaign to unnerve a society that they regard as
- corrupt and doomed. Schools, department stores, office buildings,
- police stations, military facilities, private homes--all have
- become targets. So far, miraculously, fatalities have been
- relatively few. One small slip, however--or one bloodthirsty
- bomber--could run up a death toll that could easily rival a
- week's total in Vietnam. If the bomb threat continues, that is
- almost certain to occur.
- </p>
- <p> How slight is the margin of error has been demonstrated by the
- most recent bomb episode. Two weeks ago, three explosions
- destroyed an elegant town house (owned by Businessman James
- Platt Wilkerson) on Greenwich Village's West 11th Street.
- Wilkerson's daughter Cathlyn, 25, and an unidentified young
- woman emerged dazed and trembling from the crumbling, burning
- ruins. The pair disappeared before police came.
- </p>
- <p> In the ruins, police found 60 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting
- caps and four dynamite-packed pipes wrapped with heavy nails
- that could act as flesh-shredding shrapnel. They also found the
- body of Theodore Gold, 23, and the unidentified remains of two
- other persons. A credit card belonging to Kathy Boudin, 26, who
- may have been the person with Cathlyn, also turned up in the
- debris. Gold and the girls were all members of the violent
- Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. Police
- speculated that, while Wilkerson and his wife were vacationing
- in the Caribbean, the amateurs had turned the basement into a
- bomb factory.
- </p>
- <p> As demolition experts continued to probe the 11th Street
- wreckage for more explosives--and perhaps more bodies--bombs
- exploded at the Manhattan headquarters of Mobil Oil, IBM and
- General Telephone and Electronics. An organization that styled
- itself "Revolutionary Force 9" claimed responsibility. No one
- was hurt in the early-morning blasts, which were strikingly
- similar to three blasts in several New York office buildings
- last Nov. 11, but during the following two days news of the
- explosions triggered an outbreak of more than 600 phony bomb
- scares in a jittery New York. Three Molotov cocktails exploded
- in a Manhattan high school. There were scattered bomb threats
- elsewhere in the country, even at the Justice Department in
- Washington. One of them obliged Secretary of State William
- Rogers to leave his office.
- </p>
- <p> Young people have plenty of examples of glamorous, if not
- always successful revolutionaries: the Stern Gang, the Irish
- Republican Army, Algeria's National Liberation Front, Che
- Guevara. Cops in San Francisco and New York City both say that
- the movie The Battle of Algiers has influenced much of the
- bombing surge. It centers on the moral dilemma of killing
- innocent people in the cause of revolution.
- </p>
- <p> In the name of their own vision of utopia, the bombers
- blithely risk the lives of the people to whom, they say, they
- would give power. There is no doubt that determined terrorists
- can blow up property, people and a community's equilibrium. But
- in a nation where the overwhelming majority favor either the
- status quo or orderly reform in the liberal tradition, mindless
- acts of violence by a self-appointed revolutionary elite only
- harden resistance to legitimate, necessary change.
- </p>
- <p> [One such underground group leaped into the headlines and onto
- TV news shows in 1974 by means of violence against an innocent:
- Patricia Hearst, an heiress of the publishing fiefdom, whose
- kidnaping, later exploits as an ostensible terrorist, and long
- sojourn in the radical underground fascinated Americans for the
- best part of two years.]
- </p>
- <p>(February 18, 1974)
- </p>
- <p> Three months ago, not even police undercover agents in San
- Francisco had heard of a terrorist outfit called the Symbionese
- Liberation Army. Now, the bizarrely named group has burst into
- prominence across the U.S. by convincingly claiming
- responsibility for two spectacular crimes in the Bay Area.
- </p>
- <p> The first was the November murder of Marcus Foster, the black
- superintendent of Oakland's public schools. After Foster was
- gunned down in a darkened parking lot, the S.L.A. issued
- "Communique No. 1," taking credit for the gangland-style
- execution.
- </p>
- <p> Last week the S.L.A. sent out another communique boasting of
- a second major crime and backed up its claim with a persuasive
- piece of evidence. Enclosed in an S.L.A. message mailed to a
- Berkeley radio station was a Mobil Oil Co. credit card issued
- to Randolph A. Hearst, 58, chairman of the board of Hearst Corp.
- and the youngest son of Founder William Randolph Hearst. Sixty
- hours earlier Hearst's daughter Patricia, 19, a sophomore at the
- University of California at Berkeley, had been dragged screaming
- from her off-campus apartment and driven off by kidnapers.
- </p>
- <p>(April 15, 1974)
- </p>
- <p> The Polaroid color photograph might have been the cover of a
- paperback thriller--or a recruiting poster for the
- revolutionary left. But the comely, wholesome-looking girl
- holding a submachine gun was Patricia Hearst, and an accompanying
- tape recording of her voice carried a bizarre message: Patty, 20,
- had decided to forsake her millionaire parents and join the
- fanatics who kidnaped her two months ago.
- </p>
- <p> "I have been given the choice of being released in a safe
- area, or joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army
- and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed
- people," Patty announced. "I have chosen to stay and fight."
- </p>
- <p> Patty's statement came just when the bewildering series of
- events surrounding her abduction in Berkeley, Calif., seemed to
- be moving toward a happy conclusion. At the direction of the
- S.L.A., the Hearst family and the Hearst Foundation (which
- supports medical charities) had given $2 million worth of food
- to the needy in the San Francisco Bay area. Though Patty insisted
- on the tape that she had not been "brainwashed, drugged,
- tortured, hypnotized or in any way confused," her stunned
- parents refused to believe that she had not been coerced into
- siding with the S.L.A.
- </p>
- <p>(April 29, 1974)
- </p>
- <p> The robbers--a black man and four white women--strode
- swiftly into the Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco's Sunset
- district, pulling out semi-automatic carbines from under their
- long black coats.
- </p>
- <p> That surreal scene, captured on film by the bank's automatic
- cameras, was the Symbionese Liberation Army's way of
- introducing Patricia Campbell Hearst, 20, to the world in their
- role for her as an armed terrorist. To investigators, the
- robbery had all the earmarks of a macabre publicity stunt,
- staged principally to demonstrate that the S.L.A. has tightened
- its grip on the millionaire's daughter. Said one federal law
- enforcement official: "The S.L.A. feeds on publicity, and its
- appetite is enormous."
- </p>
- <p>(May 27, 1974)
- </p>
- <p> Like some macabre fulfillment of McLuhanism, the bloodiest and
- most suspenseful act in the tragedy of Patricia Campbell Hearst
- became a public event. Millions of Americans watched last week
- as television carried live the shootout in a Los Angeles
- residential neighborhood between lawmen and members of the
- Symbionese Liberation Army. The TV images seemed plucked from
- old Vietnam film clips; street fighting in Danang perhaps, the
- helicopters wheeling overhead, the hissing tear-gas canisters,
- finally the flames of the enemy's hideout leaping into the
- suddenly hushed twilight. But the reality was that Patty Hearst
- might well be in the flames, and the most stricken of all the
- electronic witnesses was the Hearst family, watching 350 miles
- away in a suburb of San Francisco.
- </p>
- <p> So charred were the five bodies brought out of the ruins of
- the house that it was almost a full day before the family's
- agony was, in a measure, eased. Patty Hearst was not among them.
- </p>
- <p>(September 29, 1975)
- </p>
- <p> The evidence was fragmentary and scattered and painfully hard
- to gather, but slowly it accumulated--a red Volkswagon camper,
- a fingerprint discovered at a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, a post
- office box in San Francisco. Suddenly last week the bits fitted
- into a pattern. When they did, an FBI agent and a policeman
- climbed stealthily up the back stairs to the top-floor apartment
- of the modest house on the edge of San Francisco. They knocked,
- and the door swung open. Standing in the room was the thin, pale
- young woman. "Don't shoot," said Patty Hearst. "I'll go with
- you."
- </p>
- <p> That quiet drama ended a 19 1/2-month chase--one of the
- longest and most intensive in U.S. history--and climaxed a
- bizarre odyssey that had a special and disturbing fascination for
- Americans. They had been appalled by the violence of the whole
- affair. With some apprehension, parents debated just why Patty,
- the heiress to a celebrated fortune, had become a self-proclaimed
- revolutionary.
- </p>
- <p> Captured along with Patty was her close companion, Wendy
- Yoshimura, 32. An hour earlier, outside an old white two-story
- house three miles away, the FBI had arrested two of Patty's
- other friends: robust William Harris, 30, and his wan and tired
- wife, Emily, 28. All four were comrades-in-arms in the explosive
- and tiny cult of revolutionaries who grandiosely called
- themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. With the arrests,
- said the FBI, the S.L.A. had ceased to exist.
- </p>
- <p> [Religious cults were a deeply controversial phenomenon of the
- 1970s. Their secretive, tightly run, all-embracing societies and
- their charismatic leaders attracted disaffected young people
- seeking a less materialistic way of life, turning them against
- their families, friends and former pursuits and, many believe,
- "brainwashing" them. The terrible power of such leaders and
- groups was demonstrated in 1979 by the tragedy of Jonestown, an
- American religious colony hewn out of the jungles of Guyana, a
- country on the north coast of South America. There death became
- the ultimate publicity stunt of its crazed and mysterious
- leader, the Rev. Jim Jones.]
- </p>
- <p>(December 4, 1978)
- </p>
- <p> "The large central building was ringed by bright colors. It
- looked like a parking lot filled with cars. When the plane dipped
- lower, the cars turned out to be bodies--hundreds of bodies--wearing red dresses, blue T-shirts, green blouses, pink slacks,
- children's polka-dotted jumpers. Couples with their arms around
- each other, children holding parents. Nothing moved. Washing hung
- on the clotheslines. The fields were freshly plowed. Banana trees
- and grape vines were flourishing. But nothing moved."
- </p>
- <p> So reported TIME Correspondent Donald Neff, one of the first
- newsmen to fly in last week to the hitherto obscure hamlet of
- Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana, on the northern coast of
- South America. The scene below him was one of almost unimaginable
- carnage. In an appalling demonstration of the way in which a
- charismatic leader can bend the minds of his followers with a
- devilish blend of professed altruism and psychological tyranny,
- some 900 members of the California-based Peoples Temple died in
- a self-imposed ritual of mass suicide and murder.
- </p>
- <p> Not since hundreds of Japanese civilians leaped to their
- deaths off the cliffs of Saipan as American forces approached
- the Pacific island in World War II had there been a comparable
- act of collective self-destruction. The followers of the Rev.
- Jim Jones, 47, a once respected Indiana-born humanitarian who
- degenerated into egomania and paranoia, had first ambushed a
- party of visiting Americans, killing California Congressman Leo
- Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector from their heavily
- guarded colony at Jonestown. Then, exhorted by their leader,
- intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and
- painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a
- concoction of potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the
- tongues of babies. The adults and older children picked up paper
- cups and sipped the same deadly poison sweetened by purple
- Kool-Aid.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-