I spent my last summer in the United States running - sometimes literally - from the FBI. After carefully considering the risk that the two federal inmates that threatened to bury my 18-year old bones in the hills of West Virginia might really be capable of carrying out their threat, and considering a story that preceded my arrival at the short-lived experimental federal penitentiary Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, to the effect that an inmate had been killed a few months earlier in the "psychotic cottage" during a "pool party" (more terminology in "Stir lingo"), I elected not to return to prison from an unescorted furlough to my home in D.C., even though parole was a few months off.
Sunny days
The summer of 1970 on the east coast of the United States was paranoid and sunny. Maybe it really was that sunny, but even more so, juxtaposed to the waves of government poisonthink, not unlike terror alerts in our time, hammered, radiated, transmitted deep into the minds of all of us by the architects of the Amerikan war-machine. Not only those of us forced by gender and age to strike one deal or another with conscription (go to Vietnam and kill or die, or pay a price, if you have the money, and get a deferment, or go to jail for 5 years, which for many meant forfeiting all civil rights for the rest of your life, or leave the country, possibly forever), but all of us in the United States in those years found ourselves sinking or swimming in an ocean of hardly believable history. Lying, power-junkie, criminal war-makers were calling nearly all the shots: bleeding the poor of our own country, dealing low cards to blacks, chicanos, Native Americans, poor whites - they forced any man they could get their hooks into to kill or be killed in Vietnam, but now that more and more tax-payers and voters were saying no, the power-junkies were starting to keep a few back, so as to kill the rest of us off here in the States. Cointelpro's tentacles were supposedly growing among us all, and want it or not, our 18, 19, 20 year old lives were on the line, they had declared war on us, we were forced to dance to their tune, move against them, or do a vanishing act.
Escape velocity
A furlough from federal prison took most of a year to "earn" (read about Skinnerism and Timothy Leary's Interpersonal Behavior Circle Personal Inventory in "Stir lingo") - my first one was intended to prepare for the practical details of a parole. This meant a new place to live - since they wouldn't let me live at St. Francis House, home as it was to public acts of non-violent civil disobedience such as ours and that of the DC 9, who helped us learn how Dow Chemical's napalm was not only burning children in Vietnam, but also helping United Fruit keep its advantaged position in Guatemala. It also meant school - I'd started studying at university while in prison. And it meant a job - I'd already had a few, and this was a time when jobs were easy to find, money easy to make. I even managed to find time to visit my local draft board in Washington, D.C. - I had no choice - where I finally did register.
They knew I was coming! Incredible - I walked into this place where I'd never been, in downtown Washington, not far from 16th and S where I lived, nearly a year after having poured out paint and blood on 1-A files at the draft board in Silver Spring, and they're like "Hello Mr. Bransome". Vaguely I recall some silly joke about me "not pulling that stunt again"... I was issued a draft card which must have sported the regalia "4-F", issued as far as I knew to all commy pinko terrorist fags, as I had recently come to be, approximately, known.
A day before the furlough was to end, I went to see my mother where she still lived in Kensington, Maryland. I laid the cards out for her, and she agreed that the death threat looked like a serious matter, and we both imagined the difficulties it would entail for me to successfully alert authorities to the threat, eliminate the risk and above all not get killed. She gave me some money, and said she would support me whatever I did - which was a sea change from a few months before the action in 1969, when she adamantly declared "My country right or wrong!" She could hardly be blamed: two older brothers in the armed forces, both pilots and war heroes.
The Fugitive
I spent several months "underground" on the east coast of the United States, mostly in or around Boston and New York City. But what was this "underground": was there really some vast dark subterranean network of interconnecting tunnels? I of course had no experience of anything quite as exotic, though in high school history class we had all learned about "the underground railroad" for the northward transport of black people escaping slavery, and while at Newport Junior High I did some research and produced a report (unfortunately lost) about the underground adventures of one of my mother's brothers, Charles Voigt, U.S. Navy pilot shot down over Normandy on D-Day, and his incredible escape, despite serious shrapnel wounds, with the help of the local French Resistance, the Maquis. At the time, in the middle 60's, I actually managed to find someone in France directly involved in Uncle Chuck's rescue and return to England. It's a pretty good bet that some of the adventure element in his experience, together with the bravery of the people who helped him while "underground", was turning the screws on my future already in junior high.
I moved effortlessly into a new phase as The Fugitive. My own "one-armed man", that famous one behind the deed, a famously tricky, now dead, fellow, named Richard Nixon, was still busy directing a blanket of terror onto the heads and lives of villagers and lawful enemy combatants throughout Southeast Asia.
While with regard to our demonstration at the draft board, I never saw myself as innocent, although defacing papers with blood and paint is undeniably less destructive than any single act of war, and while part of the civil disobedience equation is that unfortunate human state called imprisonment, to perform a relatively peaceful act of civil disobedience, even with minor property destruction (the FBI claimed the damage to be worth 12,000 1969 dollars, while the local board staunchly claimed our act gummed up the works a mere few hours) should not necessarily entail risking let alone losing one's life.
Because those two inmates at KYC that morning, in late March or early April of 1970, appeared to mean business when they described my execution at their hands, the civil disobedience equation I learned at Newport Junior High in Kensington (Thoreau, Gandhi, King) was breaking down, and my path was being skewed by unseen forces: I wasn't the one that put those inmates where they were at KYC the day they accosted me.
Fugitive: for how long?! You don't ask that when you believe you are running for your life: you just run, and you keep on running until you no longer need to. Fugitive how far?! Canada? Would they turn me over to the US? Sweden? (I saw Siberia in my mind's eye...) I was definitely in way over my head, and it made sense to listen to people older and more experienced: I was still 18, back when that meant young, inexperienced etc.
All aboard
I consulted some forbidden contacts among my mostly Catholic friends in Washington, D.C. and from there I was transported, a city at a time, by men and women often wearing religious garb, to New York City. My arrival there entailed a happy jolt: I was taken to Jesuit Missions, which in Manhattan at the time was a large apartment high above upper Broadway, not far from Riverside, where the door was opened by a dark-haired guy with a priest's collar, and a face I somehow knew. He introduced himself as Ned Murphy, and he somehow knew me too, and we spent a while trying to figure out why.
Loch Raven School For Boys
In 1966, I was 15 years old, and was made an offer I couldn't refuse: several months, courtesy of the Maryland State Youth Corrections Authority, in Loch Raven School for Boys, a euphemism for the Maryland state youth prison in Loch Raven, Maryland. I spent about six months there, due to my proclivity, demonstrated a handful of times during childhood, to leave my family home in the example of characters made famous by the inimitable Samuel Clemens, to strike out on my own adventure in the world: I was an "incorrigible runaway". Tom and Huck and Mark Twain's riveting world took me for a ride more than once.
During six brutal months at Loch Raven (see "Rats in a maze and other sorrows"), I helped plan three and took part in two mass-breakouts. After each of these, I was put in solitary confinement, the second time for about a week. During that week of no cigarettes, nearly no food or drink, I was visited regularly by a young seminarian from Woodstock College, a Jesuit seminary in rural Maryland. This was Father Ned Murphy, dear friend and as it turned out in the summer of 1970 in Manhattan - co-conspirator.
Map to the Underground
From soon after I got to New York, my whereabouts, movements, means and frequency of communication and many other details conformed strictly to the advice of a man named Eqbal Ahmed, who I met a couple times, and knew before this only as a veteran of the Algerian war of independence from France. Like many in my generation, I had read my Franz Fanon, had been entranced and enraged by the 60's film The Battle of Algiers. The film shows the French using torture and other terror methods to win the Battle of Algiers against an urban guerrilla network, yet soon after this losing the war to the entire Algerian people.
Interestingly, I just read that the film was shown more recently at of all places the Pentagon - a few months after the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 - to a vastly different audience, for reasons very different from the reasons we had for watching in the 60's. Eq as we called him had also helped coordinate Dan Berrigan's activities underground that summer of 1970 - arguably far more difficult, since the FBI by the time of his arrest was said to have 200 agents on Dan's case. Dan was said to have ignored a single rule - "avoid islands" - only much later did it come out that he was actually turned in by an informer.
Eq was accused a year later, together with Dan's brother Phil and others ("The Harrisburg Seven"), of conspiring to dynamite (!) a secret network of tunnels under Washington, D.C., to attack even more draft boards (and violently this time), and ultimately to kidnap not-yet Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger, then widely hated aide to Tricky Dick, the scourge of SE Asia. All the main charges against the "Harrisburg Seven", having probably issued from the booze-addled sicko brain of the arch-imbecile Hoover himself, were of course finally dropped, though Phil, a Catholic priest, and Liz McAllister, a Catholic nun, were found guilty (having, unknown by most of us, already exchanged one set of vows for another) of smuggling letters in and out of federal prison.
While I found myself in the summer of 1970, excluding the odd evening in a "priest-hole, in unexpectedly comfortable surroundings most of the time "underground", even considering the air of paranoia that infused much of where I was and with whom, it was a pretty scary way to spend a summer vacation. Crucial to my sense of balance, periods of a couple weeks each were spent in glorious countryside in Maine, Massachusetts and upstate New York, paddling canoes, fishing, picking berries, reading stories to children, playing guitar. Arguably not your typical underground experience.
Retreats: the Catholic Resistance
During that summer I also took part in retreats - gatherings of peace-makers, mostly Catholic priests and nuns, for the express purpose of planning further "actions" against the war machine, acts of civil disobedience often directed at offices of the Selective Service System, but also at some of the more obviously guilty corporate partners to America's war of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.
Civil disobedience, by which is meant voluntary, purposeful, open, non-violent non-compliance with the law, for stated political or spiritual reasons, traditionally entailed remaining after one's illegal act, accepting apprehension by the authorities, arrest, imprisonment and the rest, to demonstrate and continue demonstrating the political or spiritual wrongness of the law one has broken, and that one is paying for having broken. Our examples were righteous and somehow close at hand: Martin Luther King, who electrified us with the power (and the price) of straight-backed non-violent determination to follow the truth wherever it leads, whatever the cost, and Gandhi, whose movement of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience brought a poor country to its feet and an empire to its knees.
The Selective Service System
The Selective Service System was by modern standards a primitive organization, designed as World War II came to a close. According to the Selective Service Act, a man was required to register for the draft between his 18th birthday and 5 weekdays later. That was the sole legal requirement. This resulted in the creation of a physical "draft file" for each registrant, who was issued a "draft card", to be carried at all times, a primitive mind-implant ("Your body is ours, when we say the word...") to be stored in his wallet with his money and other valuables. The draft file was stored in a filing cabinet in a local draft board. Each state had a number of local boards, full of filing cabinets and little else, and for each registrant, a pair of simple 3x5-cards were made, one of which was kept by the local board, while its copy was sent to the state's central draft board where it was stored for statistical purposes and as backup.
This was essentially the whole system: everything was done by hand, and as far as was known at the time, and events seem to have borne this out, there were no other backups kept of the original registrations. Thus we discovered that the act of destroying a draft file and its 3x5 cards locally and in the central state board effectively erased a potential draftee from the system, which according to the law had no legal way in which to recover the lost registrations, except perhaps to publicly implore "lost" registrants to re-register - I don't know if that ever took place.
Stand-by or hit-and-run
There was a new item on the agenda at the retreats in the summer of 1970, and it cut to the core of the civil disobedience ethos that was one strand in the skein of connections between us all. This was a discussion of the relative merits of "stand-by" and "hit-and-run" actions. The main issue was to do with the open face of the one as opposed to the hidden, according to some even diabolical, face of the other. An act of non-violent civil disobedience had always meant visible persons, acting visibly: here is my face, this is my name, I am a person who takes responsibility, I am ready to stand up and say I did this, and I am ready to pay, this is my reason. A hit-and-run action by its very nature could easily be misrepresented as terrorism - shameless acts of faceless criminals moving darkly in the night.
But civil disobedience, we were discovering, was fraught with problems: one was that those of us willing to put our lives on the line were not in endless supply, and prison time meant - prison time. During the Vietnam war era, there were only about 2-300 of us "crazy" enough to do what we did - deface or destroy draft files or other files, for instance those at Dow Chemical (napalm), General Electric (B-52 bomber technology), Dupont (phosphorus bombs), and then face the music, and if we all ended up in jail, who would carry out the next actions?
What's important is the price
Refusing induction, like refusing illegal orders, is the bare-bones archetype of civil disobedience, straightforward more or less one-on-one acts for which many tens of thousands of young heroes had the right stuff, even in the face of draconian punishment. For soldiers openly refusing illegal orders, at the worst, even surviving (say in the sticky Mekong heat) might be a gamble, while for refusing induction, the going price was 5 years of your young life in federal prison, being stripped of many of your civil rights, such as the right to vote - people I tell this in Europe say I'm making it up. Each option was more than enough to make you think twice about putting your money where your mouth is.
Consensus
The retreats came to a consensus regarding actions against draft boards, since it was the boards and their files we were concentrating on, essential as they were to the waging of the illegal war. The hit-and-run model, if meticulously planned, in particular respecting the need for failsafe precautions so that no one could ever get physically hurt, offered two positive qualities. First was the fact that all essential documents could be efficiently and utterly deleted, and second was the fact that participants could be more efficiently recycled. To "take out" a draft board in the dead of night - given the level of technology at the time - turned out to be a piece of cake (notwithstanding the off chance of an action being derailed by an informer, which also happened), and it also turned out for a while to be nearly as easy to "take out" not only a draft board, or two, but 5, or 10, or 45 boards (the record), in fact all the boards in an entire state, including the central state board with its crucial copies of the 3x5's.
We had discovered empirically that the "stand-by-action" model had no hope of literally erasing the identities of all the potential draftees - it was simply a high-profile way to make our protest heard. This was simple mechanics, or chemistry, and try as we might - and we did experiment: acid baths, bleach, napalm, shredding - there was just no way to completely destroy all that information in the short time it ordinarily took for the FBI to show up at a "stand-by" action. So the hit-and-run model turned out to be a hot topic.
The topic was even hotter since a couple of hit-and-run actions turned out to be very successful: "The Beaver 55", who apparently took out most of the Selective Service System in the state of Indiana, and an action in New York City, which apparently took out most of the Black and Puerto Rican draft registrants in Brownsville, Queens and other parts of New York City.
Every destroyed draft file, provided its centrally stored backup had been destroyed, meant that one more living soul was erased from the system, thus relieved of the opportunity to choose between killing, prison, or exile. These acts were making the illegal war that Nixon, Kissinger and the rest of their bandit pack had tricked the country into waging in Vietnam literally harder to wage, and this fact could simply not be ignored by the civil disobedience purists among us.
A further hot topic regarded the less appetizing end of the civil disobedience equation: prison itself. The Catonsville 9 were to have begun their sentences in federal prison on April 9, 1970, but as I learned during the first day of my furlough, several of them never showed up. And during that summer, Dan's very visible sojourn underground (showing up at mass in well-known churches, for instance) was inspiring an entire country and obviously infuriating the powers that be. The reasoning behind not showing up was not in the purist civil disobedience vein, and that reasoning was: if it was right to try to stop their illegal war then it was equally right to not support their immoral imprisonment of us.
Meeting with Dan in Boston
During the second week of August in 1970, after some very hairy close calls in Boston and New York, I was starting to freak out a bit, and finally got a chance to sit down for an evening with Dan Berrigan, just outside of Boston. Dan was staying with a famous writer, and we got to talk for a few hours. We touched on many subjects: one was that while Dan had much to offer what then was a mass popular movement (with a couple hundred FBI agents hunting for him, Dan could show up in a church in Philadelphia and give a sermon during Sunday High Mass, then slip away), I had little of practical value to offer - I was a fugitive and not a lot more.
Another subject was my abiding feeling that I was not cut out for keeping my eye on my back, learning three escape routes from every building, memorizing addresses and telephone numbers, having no contact with my own family, and the rest. The final straw was the discovery that together with a part Cherokee lady from Kentucky, I was in the process of becoming a parent! Dan's take was that our take was probably right, and we might consider alternatives to my being underground, for instance applying for asylum somewhere, or perhaps emigrating to Canada.
Best laid plansThe first plan was to go west young man, then head north via California and possibly to Vancouver, but events in Cleveland nearly overtook me. Much later I learned that Angela Davis had connections in Cleveland, and she was being hotly pursued by the FBI in Cleveland the very day I got there. It also turned out there were only two "movement" houses in Cleveland: one was the Black Panther headquarters, and the other was the house where Ned and I managed to visit at on our way west.
Shortly after arriving it was noticed that a number of unmarked black Ford sedans with a couple suited gentlemen in each was slowly patrolling the street we were on. I was shepherded into a "priest hole" in the cellar, and spent about 8 hours there. The all-clear was sounded after dark, and I crawled across the lawn and into the back seat of a vehicle which took me to another Ohio city - maybe it was Cincinnati, or Toledo. Close call.
Call of the collar
I spent the next day dying my hair and eyebrows, trying out priest's garb, and trying out my new identity: Jesuit seminarian, student at Fordham University: Richard Lee Murphy, from the Bronx. We caught a plane to Detroit and from there flew onward to Toronto - I last stood on American soil on Wednesday the 12th of August, 1970, and what a long strange trip it's been...
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
