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<text>
<title>
(1970s) Terrorists And Cults
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights
</history>
<link 00189><link 00198><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>