Well, we soon figured out that yes, even paranoids have real enemies and yes, there were spies everywhere.  The Washington D.C. area was especially fertile ground for infiltrating radical groups. Besides the state, county and local cops, every major government intelligence agency was there along with the US military. Not to mention whatever undercover agents and informants various foreign powers may have had running around.

It was the old Mad Magazine Spy vrs. Spy vrs Spy come to life in living color....Agent 99 on speed....Inspector Closeau cloned and programmed....

Some of these infiltrators got people killed, badly hurt or sent away to prison for a long time. That was not funny. Still there are times when you have to laugh just to keep from cryin’.

The first police spy I got to know was Jeff. Jeff joined the UM Students for a Democratic Society around 1968. He claimed to have been a captain in the US Army and to have commanded a tank in Viet Nam. That alone should have made us cautious. Dissent in the US military was growing at the time, but most of the radicals coming out of the military were enlisted personnel or draftees, not officers.

Jeff was a smart guy with an offbeat sense of humor. He liked outrageous posters and made sure that SDS was well supplied with them. He attended meetings regularly and took on a leadership role in the organization. Whatever his other personal shortcomings may have been, Jeff had personal courage. He went to Cuba on one of the early SDS trips. If the Cuban government had any inkling that he was a spy, he would have done some long hard time in a Cuban prison. Instead he returned from Cuba with even more radical credibility.

I liked Jeff and considered him a friend. Then came the phone call. It was some time in 1969. An SDS member named Sue received a call from Jeff’s wife. She was leaving him and she had something she had to tell us. Jeff was a spy. When people tried to contact Jeff, he made it clear that he had a gun and would not hesitate to use it. He then disappeared. My guess is that he was working for military intelligence, but who knows?

Sometimes cops had enough sense to turn down "undercover" assignments. In one case, the state cop relative of a UM campus worker was asked to go "undercover" to spy on student activists. The campus worker was not only an AFSCME 1072 activist, but also was a former SDS member. The state cop relative wisely declined the offer, knowing that his "cover" would be non-existent under the circumstances.

Then there was “Irish”. I have forgotten the name he went by, but that was his nickname. For the purposes of this article, I’ll call him Bill. He infiltrated the Irish solidarity movement. In the wake of the 1960’s Irish Civil Rights Movement and the rebirth of radical Irish republican nationalism, solidarity groups sprang up around the USA, a long tradition in this country.

The largest of these groups was the Irish Northern Aid Committee, closely allied with the Provisional IRA. Another was the much smaller North American Irish Republican Clubs which drew its members from leftwing Irish immigrants and Irish seasonal workers as well as people who had come out of the student New Left.  They were closely allied with the Official IRA.

The Provisional IRA, or the “Provos” as they were called, espoused a more traditional nationalism although they were nominally socialist. The Official IRA aka “ the Stickies”, was an openly Marxist group who believed in non-sectarian class struggle against imperialism.

There was a small Irish Republican Club associated with the University of Maryland led by a UM chemistry professor. We sold pamphlets, organized demonstrations and sponsored talks when people associated with the Official IRA were touring the USA.

Bill started coming to our meetings.  He had no discernible leftwing politics. This was not unusual. Irish-Americans who did not have leftwing backgrounds were often drawn to Irish solidarity because of the brutality of the British occupation. Still he seemed especially uptight.

One night he seemed especially serious and conspiratorial. He informed us that he had some “machinery” in the trunk of his car that we might want to look at. “Machinery” of course meant guns. We politely declined the invitation. Gunrunning is an arcane art best left to those with a talent and inclination for it. We were not opposed to the Official IRA obtaining weapons to defend themselves, but they had their own sources and certainly didn’t need us.

Later Bill drew me aside and told me that he was a civilian advisor to the Montgomery County Md police, and that if I ever wanted to talk to him I just needed to call a command center in Rockville and ask for “Irish”.

Bill cut off his relationship to us and switched over to Irish Northern Aid. Relations between Irish Northern Aid and the Irish Republican Clubs were tense, echoing the political disputes in Ireland, but we relayed our suspicions about Bill to the local Northern Aid people.

Around this time, Northern Aid was hit by the arrest of 5 people on gun-running charges. In addition, we found out that the CIA had a program of offering “advisors” to police departments in the metro DC area. There were dark rumors coming out of Ireland that the CIA was in contact with the Provos because they thought the Official IRA would set up a kind of “Celtic Cuba” if they came to power.

Then there was the strange matter of the Irish National Caucus. The Caucus was Irish Northern Aid’s “respectable” face. It was led by Father Sean McManus, a charismatic and persuasive priest who had lured one of the Irish Republican Clubs’ prominent members over to the side of Northern Aid and the Provos. The Caucus had good relations with a number of people on Capitol Hill and included a couple of White House staff people in the Ford Administration. American Republicans and Irish Republicans? Whew!

The last time I saw Bill he was marching with Irish Northern Aid in a parade. He tried to pretend he didn’t know me. I never did figure out exactly who Bill was working for, but the murky nature of the whole thing didn’t help my paranoia much.

While Bill was uptight and distant, Dee was more like Jeff, personable and friendly. At times, overly-friendly, but we’ll get to that later. Dee came into our lives through the women’s liberation movement. She had infiltrated the Furies, a local DC group with a militant newspaper that combined lesbian separatism with working class politics. Rita Mae Brown, now a prominent writer, was its most well known member.

A couple of the women at the Piney Branch Commune hung around with the Furies and one night in 1972 they brought back a visitor whom they introduced as Dee. Dee knew how to crack a smile and a joke and joined in the general conversation. For some reason we started talking about the Weather Underground which had turned to bombing corporate and government offices.

I mentioned that I had been friends with Cathy Wilkerson before she had taken the Weather plunge. When I knew Cathy in SDS, she had come across as a level-headed organizer with her eyes firmly fixed on the long term. Her sudden entrance to the surreal world of the Weather Underground was a mystery to me. Dee chimed in that she had known Cathy also. A lively exchange about the Weather Underground ensued. I had zero contact with any Weatherpeople at that time, but had known several SDS people who later joined the Weather Underground.

Soon Dee was a regular visitor to both the Lincoln Ave and Piney Branch communes. She began working with the Spark newspaper. The Spark Collective were hardly pacifists, but Dee often seemed a bit over the top when discussing political violence. She was careless about pot. Pot use was pretty common among our friends and associates, but we did ask people to be discreet.  Dee was also aggressively sexual to both women and men. Still, loose talk about political violence, pot indiscretion, and sexual adventurism were not automatic grounds for suspicion.

It wasn’t until after Miami that we began to seriously question where Dee’s true allegiances lay. The Republicans had originally intended to base their 1972 convention in San Diego, but the specter of thousands of radical Californians descending on their coronation of Richard Nixon unnerved them. They decided to switch to the presumably more politically friendly Miami, Florida— more exactly, Miami Beach.

We made plans to go to protest the Convention. Soon we were calling around to arrange transportation for people. We decided we needed a name so we called ourselves the Route One Brigade and created a banner with that name along with the other flags and banners we sewed.

Shortly before we were going to leave, 8 members of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War were indicted for supposedly plotting violence at the Convention. One of them, the late John Kniffin, was a frequent overnight visitor at our Lincoln Ave Commune. He was sometimes accompanied by another one of the defendants, Scott Camil. All were eventually acquitted in a trial marked by serious prosecutorial misconduct.

Clearly the Nixon administration hoped these arrests would deter people from going to Miami.They didn’t deter us. Eight of us crowded into in Jim’s blue Clubwagon van. One of the passengers was Dee. After a long tedious drive through the American Southland we arrived in Miami Beach. More people joined us there via other transport modes.

The local Miami anti-war movement had arranged for protesters to stay in a city park so we set up camp in a corner near the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War and the Gay Liberation Front.

There were about 30-40 of us from the Md-DC area who eventually camped together under the banner of the Route One Brigade. We presented the GLF with a gay liberation flag we had brought with us and they invited us to march through Miami Beach with them that night. We had a couple of Viet Nam veterans in our contingent and they went over to introduce us to the VVAW.

The first few days of the protests were pretty peaceful except when a group of Nazis infiltrated the camp and were forcibly escorted out by VVAW members and some of the local Miami Beach Jewish population. Nazi leader Matt Kohl was badly beaten in the process.

Dee kept up a steady stream of suggestions about attacking cops, banks and police stations but no one took her seriously.

But when Jane Fonda spoke at a rally in front of the complex where the was Republican Convention was being held, all hell broke loose. Bored by the speeches, a group of protesters taunted cops who were around the corner. The cops charged after them, collided with the the mass of the crowd and a major riot was underway. A busload full of GOP delegates was nearly overturned, other delegates were unable to get through the riot and a pall of tear gas hanging over the scene penetrated the Republican Convention itself. Local Miami Beach residents came out of their homes to provide aid to the protesters as the battles raged on through the night accompanied by beatings and mass arrests.

The next day it was clear that the police were not going to allow any kind of mass rallies or marches outside of the park. People decided to break up into small groups and try to get to the Republican Convention site through alleyways and back streets. The Route One Brigade broke up into several groups. I was with the group that included Dee. Equipped with flags and banners we moved toward the convention center as inconspicuously as possible.

We got about half-way there when Dee offered to scout ahead for cops. We huddled in an alley waiting for her return. Several minutes later a bunch of cops appeared and began threatening us with arrest and bodily harm. They seized our flags and NLF headbands. One of the cops threw an NLF headband on the ground and stomped on it. Another kept saying over and over again, “Give ‘em some teargas. That’s what they want. That’s what they came for.” We were told in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of Miami Beach and not to come back.

Then the cops left without arresting us. We managed to make our way to the convention center and join the disorganized protests that were already underway. It was a repetition of the night before, but even more violent and anarchic. We were eventually driven back to the park where cop cars would circle around tossing teargas bombs inside while demonstrators hurled rocks back at them. In the end there were multiple injuries and over a thousand arrests.

If you have seen the movie “Born on the 4th of July”, you’ve seen Oliver Stone’s imaginative re-creation of those days in Miami Beach.

By that time some people in our group were having serious misgivings about Dee. They suspected that her offer to “scout ahead” was just a cover for her to tip off the cops who had taken our flags and banners.

The next day we packed up and left. On the way across the bridge into Miami City, we had a blowout. We got the van to a gas station which unfortunately was run by a rightwing Cuban exile. We watched him “fix” it and tried to keep up a friendly conversation. Soon after we drove off the van began to swerve out of control. An inspection of the wheel showed that the garage guy had deliberately put the lug-nuts on so they would come off. The SOB had tried to kill us.

We got the van into the predominantly Black Overton section of Miami and told some local people who we were and what had just happened. This time we got the help we needed and 24 hours later, we were back in DC.

Suspicion about Dee mounted when she was caught trying to sell pot in a way that would have incriminated several innocent people. Accompanied by a friend of ours named Joe, who was smitten with her despite our suspicions, she decided to go to Columbus, Ohio.  We subsequently found out that she lured some Columbus people into a pot bust including poor naive Joe.

We never found out exactly who Dee was working for, but  sources in Chicago later informed us that she was a well known  police informant there with close ties to Mayor Daley's infamous "Red Squad".

There was at least one more police spy among the ranks of the Route One Brigade in Miami. We read in the underground press that an undercover cop who was known by the nickname “Crazy Annie”, had camped out with us during that week.

Crazy Annie was wasn’t as crazy as her nickname though. According to the story she had refused to leave the park on the last night of the protests because she was afraid of being brutalized by the rampaging cops outside.

Government attempts to infiltrate and spread havoc among activist groups during the 1960’s and 1970’s certainly took their toll. Groups like the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement were heavily damaged by such efforts— often with  deadly results. Time and energy was expended on defense campaigns against government frame-ups. Honest disagreements within organizations exploded into claims and counter-claims about who might be a police spy.

I hope someday that an enterprising sociologist will interview some former police spies and give us some insight into their psychology and their motivations. It would make morbid, but interesting reading.