Chapter 1

Riots & Rockets—Army Days (1968-1971)

After Army Intelligence School training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, I was assigned to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. Its headquarters occupied office space above stores in a Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia, strip mall.

My Counterintelligence Analysis Division work in the 902nd was at first in converted warehouse space nearby in Bailey’s Crossroads. Later I had office spaces in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Pentagon, the newly built duplex war room called the Army Operations Center, and the Hoffman Building in Alexandria, Virginia. For several weeks in 1969, I also attended a CIA school in a building in Arlington, Virginia, then known as The Blue U.

My living arrangements were first in an Annandale, Virginia, apartment with two 902nd roommates, and then on my own in a Capitol Hill apartment in the District of Columbia. Throughout, I was technically assigned to Fort Meyer, just to the north of the Pentagon.

Family in the Military

My enlisting in the Army during the Vietnam War years was in part influenced by my knowledge of other family members who had served in the military.

Both sides of my family had members in the military. My mother’s grandfather, Richard Lawrence Gwinn, Sr., lived in Covington, Georgia, and served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Among my mother’s family memorabilia was a picture of him decked out in his uniformed regalia.

In my immediate family, my father, William John Bowe, Sr., enlisted as a part-time soldier in the Illinois National Guard shortly after graduating from Loyola University law school in Chicago in 1915. He trained at Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois, before the U.S. entered World War I. In time he became a supply sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps. When President Woodrow Wilson called the National Guard into federal service to fight in World War I, a massive influx of draftees came into Camp Grant for training. The camp exploded in size, and in short order my father went to France with the other doughboys. Not long after his arrival in France, while trying to board a moving troop train, he slipped, and his left foot was run over by the train. The good news was that he never made it to the front, but the bad news was that he did make it to French hospitals in Blois and Orleans. The amputation of part of his foot required a long convalescence, and the war was over before he could get home.

The summer of 1967, right after my law school graduation, the young French hospital nurse who had cared for my father in Orleans came to Chicago for a visit. She missed seeing her former patient, as my father had died in 1965. Nonetheless, my mother, my brother, Richard Bowe, and I had a pleasant moment as Mme. Marie Loisley reminisced about that time in the Great War.

As a young child in the 1940s, I, of course, noticed his stump and the fact he was missing his toes on one foot. When I got older, I asked him about it. He answered in a matter-of-fact way and showed me the lead insert he wore in one of his high-topped laced shoes and explained its purpose. He also let me play with his cane without complaint.

In the early 1950s, as my father entered his sixties, his cane had fallen into disuse and largely remained in an umbrella stand inside the front hall closet. Perhaps it was because he was no longer out and about as much. But later in the 1950s, as I was going through high school, it certainly reflected the inexorable progress of his Alzheimer’s disease and its accompanying dementia.

When World War II came along, my Uncle John Dominic Casey, recently married to my mother’s sister Martha Gwinn Casey, also served in the Army. As a child I remember visiting my Uncle John when he was recuperating from a broken leg at a military hospital in Chicago at 51st Street and the lake. After the war, the building served as the 5th Army’s Headquarters before the command was moved in 1963 to Fort Sheridan just north of the city.

In the mid-1950s, my older brother, Dick, was in the Army’s Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) in high school and, like his father before him, later enlisted in the Illinois National Guard.

While my father had caught World War I, Dick was luckier. He was too late for the Korean War and too early for the Vietnam War. Between Dick and my father, it appeared to me that wars of one sort or another tended to engage American men each generation.

However, as I turned 18 and headed off to college in 1960, I thought it unlikely that I would have to follow in either Dick or my father’s military footsteps.

The Vietnam War Heats Up

As I started college in the fall of 1960, I just wasn’t prescient enough to see that, like my father and brother, I also would indeed enter the military. While the Vietnam War ended with a bang with the fall of Saigon in April 1975, it had started with a whimper in spring of 1961, just as I was finishing my freshman year at Yale. That was when President John Kennedy ordered 400 Green Beret Army soldiers to South Vietnam as “advisers.”

Then, in August 1964, after my Yale graduation, but before I started law school at the University of Chicago, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This came in the wake of an apparent attack on the USS Maddox off Vietnam. It authorized the president to “take all necessary measures, including the use of armed force” against any aggressor in the Vietnam conflict. Shortly thereafter, in February 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, and the U.S. was in the war big time. I was just halfway through my first year of law school.

After World War II, the draft structure to meet the country’s military needs had been left in place. Thus, it was ready to be employed in my era when volunteers no longer met the needs of the services. Indeed, the draft was increasingly relied upon as the U.S. deepened its involvement in Vietnam. But during the Vietnam War years between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted only 2.2 million men from a large pool of 27 million. With less than 10 percent of those eligible for the draft being called up, and the lottery mechanism to choose them not put in place until 1969, the question of who got drafted was left up to local draft boards and their use of an elaborate system of draft deferment categories.

Being in graduate school at the time automatically removed the risk I would be taken into the military involuntarily prior to my graduation. After graduation, I’d be single and only 25. Unless I married and had children before I reached the safe harbor of 26, there was a real possibility that I could be drafted.

What to do? I had no desire to marry at that time, and a similar desire not to be killed in Vietnam War. This wasn’t an entirely irrational fear, as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., lists more than 58,300 names of those killed or missing in action. Though my personal odds of being cut down might have been small, the threat did loom large in my thinking. The off chance of catching an errant bullet in an inhospitable place far from home was simply not on my young man’s to-do list.

The Decision to Enlist

While I had no desire to be drafted, I was not adverse to military service. Both my father and brother had entered the military as volunteers. They both seemed proud to have stepped up in the service of their country. I also thought if I weren’t killed, I might enjoy the military or at least gain valuable experience of some sort. Having watched my Uncle Augustine Bowe enter public life as a judge late in life and seem to enjoy it, I also thought Army service such as my father’s or Dick’s couldn’t hurt if I later wanted to pursue that path in some fashion. In my third year of law school, I had unsuccessfully applied for a direct commission as an Army officer. While these half-in, half-out alternatives were not remotely appealing choices for me, as I waited for that process to run its course, the Army Reserve and National Guard openings for enlisted men grew far and few between.

With the draft and these military service options off the table for one reason or another, I graduated from law school in June 1967 at the age of 25 and started working at a downtown Chicago law firm. Among other clients, the firm represented Northwestern Railway and various gas and electric utilities. The mid-sized Ross, Hardies, O’Keefe, Babcock, McDugald & Parsons had its offices in a National Register of Historic Places classic. The building was architect Daniel Burnham’s 21-story, 1911 Beaux-Arts building at 122 South Michigan Avenue, just across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago.

During law school, I had bypassed living in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago to help my mother care for my father in his declining health. He had died halfway through my time in law school, so after graduation I left my widowed mother and moved into the Hyde Park apartment of my college and law school friend Bob Nichols. I traveled to my new lawyering job on the Illinois Central commuter train from the 56th Street Station in Hyde Park to the Van Buren Street Station by the Loop. That left me a short walk to the Ross, Hardies office.

The main military option that still seemed open to me, in this period, other than the draft, was to enlist in the military in a way that might improve my odds of living long enough to get discharged. If I didn’t enlist in the military in the ensuing year, and got drafted as a result, it would most likely mean service in the Army’s infantry, and I’d be out of the military in only two years. A big negative of the draft was that I’d be out even earlier if I were killed in Vietnam.

Of course, why didn’t I think of it sooner?! Forget joining the military the way my father and Dick did. Instead of the Army or National Guard, join the Navy or Air Force. Or better yet, join the Army, Navy, or Air Force as a lawyer. I was pretty sure those folks weren’t getting killed much in Vietnam. With a law degree and admission to the Illinois bar in hand, I could enter the Judge Advocate General branches as an officer and gain directly pertinent experience for my chosen profession.

The unappealing part of this choice for me was the time commitment. With demand high to stay out of the infantry, these slots typically required a minimum four-year commitment. The other problem I had with being a military lawyer was the great danger I saw of being bored.

The possibility of being assigned to spend several years of my life defending or prosecuting AWOLs, handling damage claims brought about by tanks taking too wide a turn, or otherwise spending my time on mind-numbing tasks, was completely abhorrent to me. My solution to this quandary, six weeks before I turned 26, was to enlist for three years in the Army Intelligence Branch on May 13, 1968.

Like all recruits, I was going off to Basic Training that day. Seriously hung over from a farewell party thrown by friends the night before, I was dropped off that morning at 6 a.m. at a large yellow brick building west of Chicago’s Loop. Later converted into a headquarters for Tyson’s Chicken, this was the same building where I had recently had the physical exam that found me qualified to enter the Army. That was literally my first exposure to Army life. I was required to strip off my clothes and walk naked single file with dozens of other men along a painted line that wove up, down and around two floors. Sprinkled along the painted line were way stations for you to pause at for various intrusive inspections of your body. To this day, I remember the impolite request barked at the most humiliating stop, “BEND OVER AND SPREAD ‘EM.” This experience gave me a better understanding of how those Tyson chickens must feel as they head down their own conveyer line of peril.

Bused to O’Hare International Airport, we were flown to St. Louis, and then bused from there to Fort Leonard Wood in central Missouri. I, and the other recruits I had been batched with, got off the buses and were ushered into a large room where we were seated in pews.

We were told that if any of us had any guns, knives, brass knuckles, or other weapons on our person, we were to take them out and leave them on our seats. Left unspoken was the, “Or else!” part.  To this day I remember the continuous clanking of metal hitting wood that seemed to go on and on. I had no idea that some of the folks I was travelling with were well armed long before they were even issued a uniform.

The eight-week training regimen had the usual components: calisthenics, learning how to march, marching, the rifle range, the grenade range, and the low crawl under chicken wire with machine gun fire above.

In a large gymnasium filled with sand pits we were given pugil sticks for mano a mano battles. I think this was to teach us that as soldiers we needed to be a little more aggressive in our approach to life.

Large signs with slogans adorned the gym’s walls. One read, “Wars were never won with conscience or compassion.” I recall thinking at the time that while that may be true, it was also true that a little more conscience or compassion might help stop wars from starting in the first place.

Approaching the end of Basic Training we were sent out into the field for a week’s long bivouac exercise.

In a final reminder that Army life was going to be different than civilian life, my training company of 120 men were marching for what seemed like forever down a gravel road surrounded by pine trees on both sides.

These woods were most unusual in that nature hadn’t made this forest. The forest was a man-made, manufactured forest. All the trees were the same 20 feet in height, and all had been planted and cultivated in perfectly lined up rows.

As we marched along the road in single file (so as not to be bunched up and more vulnerable as a group to sniper fire), I noticed two signs, one above the other, on one of the trees. The top sign read, “Hunting Area 7.”

The sign beneath it read, “No Hunting.” It was at this point that it really sunk in that my life the next three years was going to be very, very different.

Fort Holabird and Intelligence Training

One of the first things I noticed once I had stepped out of civilian life was that I had stepped into a world of acronyms I never knew existed.

After two months of Basic Combat Training (BCT) at Fort Leonard Wood, I was assigned to Fort Holabird in my mother’s hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. There I did my Advanced Individual Training (AIT) at the United States Army Intelligence School (USAINTS). At Fort Holabird, I would complete a 16-week course in my Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) and become an Army Counterintelligence Agent (97 Bravo).

At Fort Holabird, I was taught the general difference between what an intelligence agent did and what a counterintelligence agent did. I learned the job of an intelligence agent is to find out an enemy’s secrets, often through espionage. The job can also include disrupting an enemy through sabotage or psychological warfare. The job of a counterintelligence agent is to prevent an enemy from finding out your secrets, and to secure critical assets from attack or degradation. It’s a spy, counterspy, sabotage, counter-sabotage kind of thing.

All of us at the Intelligence School knew that wherever the Army might have troops stationed around the world, the bulk of our graduating class of 97 Bravos would be headed to Vietnam, Germany, or South Korea. Most others would likely be assigned to one of the U.S. Army areas in what the Army called CONUS (Continental United States). Being assigned to duty in the U.S. usually meant spending most of your Army days doing what all counterintelligence agents coming out of USAINTS were trained to do. That meant conducting background investigations of Army personnel being considered for a security clearance. Since I had been investigated this way for my enlistment into the Intelligence Branch, if I ended up assigned to do this kind of work, I feared I would have a safe, but terribly boring, circular trip in the Army.

Towards the end of my time at Intelligence School, a major assigned to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence at the Pentagon addressed our class. His job was to describe the organization of the Army’s Intelligence Branch worldwide and the nature of available counterintelligence assignments.

When the major wound up his tour d’horizon of the Intelligence Branch realm, he closed by saying that if anyone needed to know anything further, he’d be happy to talk to him after he returned to his Pentagon office. I’m sure he thought nobody would ever actually pick up the telephone and try to take him up on his offer. However, I was so unnerved by the prospect of terminal boredom for the better part of the next three years that several days later, I called his office from a Fort Holabird pay phone. The phone was answered by a sergeant in the major’s office. I explained that I was a student soon to graduate from the Intelligence School and that I was taking up the major’s offer to personally discuss my assignment options. I was no doubt the first student that ever tried to take the major up on his offer, because the sergeant was clearly taken aback. However, he couldn’t very well tell me the major had made a mistake and now couldn’t be bothered seeing me.

The upshot was that when I hung up the phone, I thought that I had secured an appointment with the major in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence the next week. I also thought it was going to be easy getting there, as the major’s Pentagon office was relatively convenient and only an hour down the turnpike from Baltimore. However, I still needed permission from my Fort Holabird superiors to absent myself from class and leave the fort. Up the chain of command I went with my request for a temporary leave. It turned out to be one hurdle after another. There were probably four or more levels that had to clear this, and it went all the way up to the fort commander himself.

It was a struggle at each level. Normally, they all would have instinctively squashed my request just because it was unusual, and hence out of bounds. Didn’t I know there was a war on? However, every approval step ultimately caved in. I had been careful to note the Pentagon major’s promise in my request for a temporary leave of absence, so, like the sergeant, they all grudgingly acceded to the request rather than buck their own higher-ups.

Needless to say, with my fate in the immediate years ahead completely up in the air, I allowed plenty of time to drive my second-hand 1964 Volkswagen Bug down the Baltimore-Washington turnpike to the Pentagon. The last thing I wanted to do was be late for my appointment. Unfortunately, I hadn’t given thought to how and where I might park when I got there. There is no street parking at the Pentagon, which is encircled by intersecting and confusing freeways. To accommodate members of the 26,000 Pentagon workforce that drive their cars to work, the building is surrounded by massive parking lots on several of its five sides. As I quickly discovered, almost all of this parking was clearly marked as reserved for those with parking permits, and it took a long time for me to finally find that there were only two or so aisles reserved for visitors. To make things worse, there was a long queue of cars in line waiting for the occasional space there to open up. With the clock ticking and eating away at my time cushion, I got in line and began to inch forward.

It seemed like forever, but I finally got to the head of the line of cars waiting their turn to pull into the visitors’ aisle. As another car finally left, and I began turning into the aisle to park in its space, a car driving by in the opposite direction on the lot’s perimeter rudely swung in front of me and attempted to jump the line. As I rolled down my window to yell at the offender, I recognized the driver. It was my good friend from graduate school days at the University of Chicago, Jan Grayson.

My anger quickly dissipated as we both pondered the oddness of our meeting. He told me he was in the Army Reserves in a biological warfare unit that had a meeting at the Pentagon. Under the circumstances, I decided to forgive him when I understood he knew even less than I did about the parking challenges at the Pentagon. I took him at his word when he promised to never cut me off in the visitors’ parking lot again. Further proof of my charitable nature came when I asked him years later to be my son Pat’s godfather.

When I finally got inside the Pentagon for my meeting, the sergeant said something had come up, and the major was tied up. He told me he would be meeting with me in his stead. My argument to the sergeant was simple. I told him I was older than almost all of the Intelligence School trainees and had college, law school, and a year of private law practice under my belt. I said it might benefit both me and the Army if there was an assignment for me that could make use of this specialized training. He pulled my class roster tacked to a bulletin board behind him and found my name on the list. Then he gave me the bad news.

He said all the assignments were pretty much computer-driven, and there was really no way my ultimate assignment could be predicted at that point. He politely thanked me for driving down to chat and told me to drive safely on my return to Fort Holabird.

While I was disappointed that I had been left still swimming in a sea of uncertainty, I did have the satisfaction of having at least taken a shot at influencing the nature of my next two and a half years in the Army.

Assignment to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group

Before long, assignment day arrived. Next to my name on the class roster was “902nd MI Group.” All I could find out about the 902nd was that it was an organization attached to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the Army and was located at Bailey’s Crossroads in Virginia, just west of the Pentagon.

I found out it was also a stabilized tour. I then knew I would be working in the Washington, D.C., area until I left the Army and that I would wear civilian clothes to work each day. Being in mufti instead of a uniform was an unexpected perk.

Not long before graduation at USAINTS, I drove down to Bailey’s Crossroads to where I was told the 902nd offices were. All I could find there was a small L-shaped suburban strip mall at a crossroads. I was certain I’d been given bum instructions either accidentally or on purpose as a ruse.

After graduation, I got a better address for the 902nd Headquarters where I was to report. Strangely, it was the same L-shaped strip mall I’d been directed to earlier.

This time I noticed there was a second story to the building on the mall’s west side with unusual antennas on the roof.

I also noticed that there was one nondescript entrance on the lower level with a glass door, but no store behind it. Instead, there was a narrow staircase leading up to who knows what on the odd second story. I passed multiple surveillance cameras as I climbed the stairs.

At the top, I found a Mr. Parkinson. He was a Department of the Army civilian, and the administrative chief of the office. I was welcomed and told I would be technically attached to nearby Fort Meyer, assigned to the Counterintelligence Analysis Division of the 902nd, have an office elsewhere, and could rent an apartment with two other 902nd enlisted men anywhere we chose within commuting distance.

This was my introduction to the world of Army spooks.

CIAD in the CD of OACSI at DA in DC

In November 1968, the Counterintelligence Analysis Detachment (CIAD) of the Counterintelligence Division (CD) of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (OACSI) of the Department of the Army (DA) in the District of Columbia (DC) was located in an obscure warehouse building off the beaten path of Bailey’s Crossroads. The adjacent space was taken up by a Northern Virginia Community College automotive repair training workshop. A traditional mission of the 902nd MI Group, of which CIAD was a part, was maintaining security at the Pentagon. This had taken on greater importance following the October 21, 1967, antiwar march on the Pentagon. The march of 20,000 to 35,000 demonstrators had followed the 100,000 strong rally on the Mall by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. This large demonstration against the Vietnam War was immediately chronicled when Harper’s Magazine published Norman Mailer’s 25,000-word article, “The Steps of the Pentagon,” in March 1968. This piece later appeared as the epilogue to Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning antiwar book of New Journalism, The Armies of the Night.

Apart from physical security issues, since the Pentagon was the center of the nation’s military establishment, the building always housed a motherload of military secrets the Soviet Union and other bad actors of the day were always targeting. As a result, part of the 902nd was colloquially referred to as “the night crawlers.”

This group was largely made up of enlisted men who spent their nights patrolling the Pentagon corridors and offices looking for security violations such as filing cabinets left unlocked. This was the kind of boring drudgery I mostly escaped at CIAD. However, I did get assigned once to one of these night crawler details. As soon as the day workers at the Pentagon departed, I began the rounds of a section of deserted offices looking for filing cabinets left unlocked and collecting the large striped paper trash bags filled with all the classified documents people had thrown out during the day. That was the night I learned the way to the Pentagon’s municipal-grade furnace for daily classified document disposal.

The Counterintelligence Analysis Detachment, as the name suggests, didn’t directly run any spies. It was instead in the business of digesting the production of pertinent intelligence gathered primarily by other Army and service intelligence units, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among others. The goal was to sift through this production and cull out what pertained directly to performing the Army’s designated counterintelligence missions.

A number of CIAD analysts were assigned to read and evaluate counterintelligence reports from Vietnam. During my time there, a young analyst with this job had the time to put two and two together in a way that wasn’t possible for his time-pressed counterparts in Saigon. Though the details of his breakthrough were as usual kept under “need to know” wraps, the CIAD chief organized a small party to celebrate and honor my colleague. Thanks to his careful analysis of the counterintelligence traffic crossing his desk, he had pretty much single-handedly caused a North Vietnamese spy ring in Saigon to be rolled up.

When I began my day-to-day work at the Pentagon, my lowly rank as an enlisted man was disguised by my civilian dress. The point of this was to let me freely interact with the many uniformed senior officers I was working with by eliminating rank from the interaction. Being in my mid-20s at this point, these soldiers were not only all senior to me in age. As I also quickly learned, their Pentagon slots were frequently either pre-retirement, capstone assignments at the end of 20 years of service or waystations to major command responsibilities elsewhere in the Army’s global footprint.

A further element that distinguished these senior officers from me was the fact that many had just rotated into the Pentagon from wartime combat assignments in Vietnam or other Cold War hotspots. At one time or another, many of these men had come from leadership roles that had directly exposed them to the random death and destruction inherent in wartime combat, the very combat that I had intentionally tried to steer my military career away from.

One of these men that I became particularly close to was a Lieutenant Colonel his late 40s at the end his Army career.  He had grown up in a working-class Boston family, and his Boston accent had not diminished during his nearly two decades in service.  I was aware he had recently returned from leading combat troops in Vietnam.  Being curious, when I had an opportune moment with him one day, I asked him what struck him most about his own particular wartime service. While he had at least one Vietnam tour of duty behind him, and maybe two, he spoke to me of only a single incident.

He said at one point he was in command of soldiers looking for members of another unit that had recently gone missing after a battle. He described how they made their way through thick vegetation until they came to a clearing with a devastating scene. “There they were — the men we were looking for.  They couldn’t be rescued at that point, because they were all dead. As we got closer to their corpses, I could figure out what happened. They had been captured by the Viet Cong but hadn’t been kept long as prisoners. They’d been lined up and shot with a bullet to the back of their heads.”

“What did you do?” I asked. “Obviously, I directed my guys to begin to gather the remains, so we could bring them all back.” As he went on, he spoke more slowly and began to weep, “My guys were mostly just kids 18 or 19, and here they were looking at this absolutely horrific scene. But they knew they had a job to do, and they went about that job methodically, like adults, but stone-faced. I was so proud of them. And they were only 18 and 19-year-old kids doing this kind of thing!” When he stopped talking, he was crying. Thinking about him reminds me that it isn’t only the dead who pay a price in wartime. Those that may be ineligible for a Purple Heart can bear a painful psychic scar.  Often, one that can last a lifetime.

Some parts of the 902nd’s duties, like Pentagon security, never changed much. But race riots, which had racked the country in 1919 and 1943, were recently back on the Army’s agenda. In the summer of 1967, right before the march on the Pentagon, the Regular Army had been called into Detroit by the Michigan Governor and the President to help quell its violence.

After the Detroit riot and the march on the Pentagon, the recent takeaway for the Army was that it needed to be much better prepared for a continuing period of civil and racial unrest.

The Vance Report

Following the Detroit riot, former Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance (then serving as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Concerning the Detroit Riots) prepared a study to reassess the Army’s preparedness for this new role.

The Vance Report had concluded that the use of the Army to help control antiwar demonstrations and racial disturbances wasn’t an isolated, one-off mission, and the requirement wasn’t going away any time soon.

An abstract of the Report’s lessons learned reads:

Based on the experiences in Detroit, where rioting and lawlessness were intense, it appears that rumors are rampant and tend to grow as exhaustion sets in at the time of rioting. Thus, authoritative sources of information must be identified quickly and maintained. Regular formal contact with the press should be augmented by frequent background briefings for community leaders. To be able to make sound decisions, particularly in the initial phases of riots, a method of identifying the volume of riot-connected activity, the trends in such activity, the critical areas, and the deviations from normal patterns must be established. Because the Detroit disorders developed a typical pattern (violence rising then falling off), it is important to assemble and analyze data with respect to activity patterns. Fatigue factors need more analysis, and the qualifications and performance of all Army and Air National Guard should be reviewed to ensure that officers are qualified (National Guard troops in Detroit were below par in appearance, behavior, and discipline, at least initially). The guard should recruit more blacks (most of the Detroit rioters were black), and cooperation among the military, the police, and firefighting personnel needs to be enhanced. Instructions regarding rules of engagement and degree of force during civil disturbances require clarification and change to provide more latitude and flexibility. Illumination must be provided for all areas in which rioting is occurring, and the use of tear gas should be considered. Coordination at the Federal level to handle riots is emphasized. Appendixes include a chronology of major riots, memos, a Detroit police incident summary, police maps of Detroit, and related material.

Secretary Vance’s report came out in early 1968, just before race riots had exploded in Black neighborhoods of 130 cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4. Many states called up their National Guard troops to join police in bringing the rioting and looting under control. Simultaneously Regular Army troops had to be flown or trucked into Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago from various Army bases. In all cases, they had to back up overwhelmed police and National Guard security forces. In the middle of the Vietnam War, this was not a mission for which the Army was either structured or prepared for. Two months later, the sense of mayhem in the country increased further when Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

I was familiar with this new problem for the Army, since right before I enlisted, I had watched Chicago’s west side erupt in flames from my Loop office window, and later directly witnessed some of the rioting firsthand with my brother, Dick, who worked for the City’s Human Relations Commission. I also monitored bail and other court proceedings involving rioters at the Criminal Courts building at 26th Street and California Avenue.

In this period, Regular Army troops were bivouacked near the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago’s Jackson Park. The next month I was in the Army, and six months after that, I was again engaged with civil disturbances.

During the summer of 1968, Chicago remained in turmoil. Though Regular Army troops had left and returned to their barracks, violent anti-war demonstrations continued to wreak havoc on the city. Rampaging groups of demonstrators before the Democratic National Convention that August brought out the Chicago police in full force as well as the Illinois National Guard.

My brother Dick remained in the middle of this activity. His Report to the Director of the Chicago Human Relations Commission provided a detailed account of the anti-war demonstrations and violence he witnessed between August 24 and 28, 1968. The Report gives a street-level view of the disturbances in both Lincoln and Grant Parks. The final confrontation between the demonstrators and police and National Guard in front of the Hilton Hotel took place during the Democratic Convention’s proceedings and provided a violent backdrop to its nomination of Hubert Humphrey to run against President Richard Nixon that fall.

In 1964, there had been race-related riots in Harlem and Philadelphia. In 1965, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles had seen a major race-related riot. Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco saw riots the next year. Then in 1967’s “Long Hot Summer,” a total of 163 cities were enflamed, including Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, New York, and Portland. Following Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, President Johnson dispatched Regular Army troops to Baltimore, Washington, and Chicago to supplement overwhelmed police and National Guard.

In the aftermath of these troop deployments, President Johnson created the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

With the nationally televised violence directly in the political realm later that year at the Democratic Convention, the Commission had delegated to Daniel Walker, later Illinois governor, the job of undertaking a study of the violence surrounding the Convention.

The Walker Report was formally titled Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago During the Week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968.

It found there had been a “police riot” in addition to violence on the part of more than 10,000 anti-war demonstrators.

In The Walker Report, you will find a picture taken by a Time Magazine photographer of my brother, Dick, about to remove a burning trash basket blocking traffic in the middle of La Salle Drive at the south end of Lincoln Park.

If not for Dick’s ever-present pipe sticking out of his mouth, I might not have recognized him or taken him to be one of the demonstrators, rather than an observer from Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations.

Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations

One of Vance’s recommendations after Regular Army troops had been sent to quell the extreme violence in Detroit in 1967 was to create a joint service command unit to oversee the mission of controlling civil disturbances when the Army was called to deploy troops by a Governor and the President. Thus, was born the Department of Defense’s Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations. DCDPO had an Army Lieutenant General in command, with an Air Force Major General as his Deputy.

Immediately prior to my arriving at CIAD, the then-classified Department of the Army Civil Disturbance Plan (Code Name: Garden Plot) was published on September 10, 1968. In a strange coincidence that arose later, Garden Plot’s author and the first head of DCDPO I worked for was Gen. George R. Mather. After my brother Dick’s divorce, Mather’s son later became my niece and nephew’s stepfather. The good General went on to retire from the Army at the same time I did. However, while I left as a Sergeant, he wrapped up his distinguished Army career with four stars after leaving DCDPO to serve as head of the Army’s Southern Command.

When I began my work at CIAD in November 1968, I was given the task of reviewing domestic intelligence relating to the likelihood of DCDPO being asked to again deploy troops to American cities. With this background in mind, I was assigned to provide intelligence needed by DCDPO for both planning and operational purposes. My reading diet for this task included classified government documents which were primarily and voluminously produced by the FBI, and to a lesser extent the Army. I found open-source, non-classified material was usually of more utility than the classified sources in making judgements about whether and when Regular Army troops needed to be alerted for possible deployment.

By the mid-1970s I was back in civilian life, and the country had become considerably calmer. I imagine DCDPO withered away with the changing times, and a half-century would have to pass before the country again saw the widespread civil unrest of the early 2020s.

Bernardine Dohrn and the Rise of the SDS Revolutionaries

In summer 1968, I had been going through the Army’s Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, and that fall I had been getting my arms around providing intelligence assessments to the Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations on the likelihood of Regular Army deployments to assist in controlling racial unrest. In this short period of time, another major factor began to enter into my professional purview besides the continuing deterioration of race relations in the country. This new factor had a lot to do with what one of my University of Chicago Law School classmates had been up to in her year since graduation.

Bernardine Dohrn had earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and had been one of the small number of women who entered the University’s law school with me in fall 1964. Our law school class had 150 incoming students. While most of the first-year students wore trousers, Bernardine stood out with both her miniskirts and her politics.

The summer after our second year in law school, my brother Dick was working for the City’s Commission on Human Relations. A large rent strike with racial overtones was underway at the former Marshall Field apartment complex in the city’s Old Town neighborhood. I was interested in landlord/tenant law reform at the time, so I took my brother up on his invitation to join him in looking at what was going on. At the site, I found my classmate Bernardine by the picket line. While I was there out of a largely academic interest, Bernardine explained she was there to directly assist the cause of the rent strikers and show her solidarity with the tenants.

The only other law school contact with Bernardine I recall was when I pulled a group of classmates together to help prepare a traditional third-year spring skit. The goal of the exercise was always to relieve some of the tensions of upcoming final exams by poking fun at student obsessions of the day and making sport of notable faculty. I’m not sure why Bernardine turned up, because she found absolutely no humor in any of the subjects put on the table for discussion and took no further part in the effort. While I was in no position to conclude from this that Bernardine was humorless, looking back on much of the language Bernardine later came to use, it occurred to me that it might be difficult to find anything to laugh about if you’re a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary committed to using violence to overthrow the U.S. Government because it’s a racist, imperialist, capitalist, misogynist, and xenophobic regime with its white supremacist jackboot on the oppressed necks of the under trodden.

Following graduation from law school in 1967, Bernardine took a job organizing law students for the left-wing National Lawyers Guild and became active in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In June 1968, just as I entered Intelligence School, she became the Inter-organizational Secretary of SDS, and just three months later, SDS played a role in the violence that broke out in Chicago during September’s Democratic National Convention. The ensuing battles of anti-war demonstrators with police and National Guard in the Convention’s run-up drew a worldwide television audience.

In December 1968, Bernardine helped lead a celebration in New York City of The Guardian newspaper’s 20th anniversary. The Guardian had a Maoist bent and was then a prominent weekly organ of the New Left. Her co-host at the gathering was Herbert Marcuse, a leading academic philosopher of revolutionary upheaval then teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In her remarks, Bernardine denominated Marcuse as “the ideological leader of the New Left.” Marcuse in his own remarks went on to envision the New Left’s coming “political guerrilla force.”

In this increasingly roiled political atmosphere, large scale anti-war demonstrations and anti-government violence in the form of bombings and arson events began to loom large as I prepared my estimates on the likelihood of the President having to deploy Regular Army troops in a civil disturbance control mission. Indeed, in one 18-month period in 1971-72 alone, over 2,500 domestic bombings were cataloged. This new development of broad-scale political unrest joined the extant racial violence as possible contributors that might call for Regular Army troops to supplement police and National Guard forces in a domestic peacekeeping role.

In June 1969, Bernardine Dohrn led a split in the SDS at its national convention in Chicago and, in an accompanying manifesto, Bernardine and her Third World Marxists group in SDS advocated street fighting as a method for weakening U.S. imperialism. The Third World Marxists presented a position paper titled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. The position paper title was taken from a song by Bob Dylan and argued that Black liberation was central to the movement’s anti-imperialist struggle. It explained the need for a white revolutionary movement to support liberation movements internationally. The manifesto became the founding statement of the SDS Weatherman faction. The Weather Underground, as the hard-core group soon called itself, quickly became responsible for what it called the Days of Rage violence in Chicago in October 1969. The premise for this mayhem was the commencement of a criminal trial of the Chicago Seven, leaders of the Chicago Convention violence the prior year. Not long after this, the Weather Underground followed with bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in New York City that killed three Weather Underground members. Along the way, Bernardine was quoted as announcing, “I consider myself a revolutionary communist.”

With these events unfolding, Bernardine appeared as a principal signatory of the Weather Underground’s “Declaration of a State of War” in 1970. This document formally declared “war” on the U.S. Government. Having confirmed the group’s dedication to revolutionary violence, Bernardine went on to record the declaration and send a transcript of it to The New York Times. In my role providing intelligence support to DCDPO, among other open and classified materials, I read a steady flow of Federal Bureau of Investigation reports on internal security matters. For decades the FBI had focused its counterespionage and countersubversion resources on the Communist Party of the United States.

By the late 1960s, however, CPUSA, as the acronym had it, had faded in the priority list of targets. It had been displaced in importance by what was termed by the FBI as the New Left. So it was that a little over a year following my law school graduation, fat FBI dossiers on my classmate Bernardine Dohrn and her later husband, Bill Ayers, landed on my desk in the new Army Operations Center. These reports on Dohrn and Ayres were typical background compilations. As the pair’s bent towards violence increased, so did the FBI’s surveillance activities. In a major embarrassment for the FBI, the government’s misconduct and overreaching in this regard resulted in them escaping punishment for the serious criminal charges they faced.

The Army Operations Center (AOC)

The 1967 emergency deployment to Detroit had caught the Army by surprise, and Secretary Vance had also recommended that a new war room in the Pentagon be built to coordinate up to 25 simultaneous deployments of Regular Army troops to American cities. And so was built the new Army Operations Center (AOC).

I remember being on duty in the new AOC in January 1969 when President Richard Nixon was being sworn in. With the country on edge in the aftermath of the riotous Democratic Party convention in Chicago the preceding fall, the seat of the federal government was a constant target for antiwar demonstrators, and the frequency and size of their gatherings in Washington were increasing. The AOC was in a subbasement Pentagon space. Built as a duplex war room with ancillary offices, its entrance was guarded day and night and restricted to those with proper security clearances. On one side of the two-story war room atrium was a glassed-in command balcony where civilian and military decision makers sat. From this perch they could look down upon the military worker bees at their desks on the floor below, or they could look straight across the atrium at the wall opposite.

This wall was filled with several large projection screens showing maps and troop positions. Other screens could display any live television coverage of ongoing demonstrations.

In standard military fashion, operational briefings in the AOC began with a uniformed Air Force officer giving the weather report. Addressed always as Mr. Bowe, with no indication of rank, I would follow in civilian dress with the intelligence report. As you might expect, the most useful intelligence had to do with the expected size and likely activity of demonstrators. For this purpose, widely available, non-classified newspapers and other common publications were a primary source I used to build my estimates.

The Air Force weather officer and I would precede the operations portion of an AOC briefing. All speakers would deliver their remarks from glass briefing booths on either end of the upper level of the AOC. The briefers were visible to the adjacent command balcony, and, because the pulpit-like booths jutted out a bit over the lower level, briefers were also visible to the joint service officers coordinating information on the lower level. The only thing I had seen like this was the isolation booth Charles Van Doren was in when he answered questions on the rigged Twenty-One television quiz show in the late 1950s, and the bulletproof glass cage where Nazi Adolf Eichmann stood when he was on trial for war crimes in Israel in 1961. While the AOC was a state-of-the-art war room for 1968, later decades made it in retrospect look like a modest starter home compared with the McMansion war rooms that became all the rage.

I always thought Van Doren and I did better than Eichmann after we left our respective glass booths. Eichmann, of course, got the noose, but both Van Doren and I later in life worked on a Greek-language publishing project that Van Doren had initiated at Encyclopaedia Britannica. This was shortly before he retired and I arrived. Years later, when Van Doren came to Chicago in 2001 for his mentor Mortimer Adler’s funeral, I mentioned to him that I had inherited this last project of his.

The AOC could be a strange place at times. In December 1968, I saw accused mass murderer Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley, Jr. in the AOC. I had my desk at the time in the AOC, and one day after lunch, as I came in past the security desk at the entrance and entered the complex, I happened to glance to my left into the anteroom. There, looking very much alone, sitting by himself at a small table, was Calley. I recognized him immediately. His time in Vietnam had landed him on the cover of both Time and Newsweek that week. With the tragic My Lai Massacre all over the press, he had been sequestered for interrogation by the Army in the safest out-of-the-way spot it could find for him, the AOC.

Sometime in 1969, before I got my office in the AOC, CIAD had moved from our windowless quarters next to the Northern Virginia Community College’s automobile shop to more upscale quarters in the Hoffman Building office complex in Alexandria, Virginia. This building had plenty of light, was near the beltway, and was close to the Wilson Bridge over the Potomac. While I had a desk there for the duration, I was spending most of my time in either the AOC or another Pentagon office.

Another space at the Pentagon that I rotated through daily was entered through a nondescript door on a busy corridor on one of the Pentagon’s outer rings. I was moving up in the world. Having started with an interview in OACSI’s lowly assignment office, I had moved up to a first-class basement duplex with the AOC. Now I had been promoted part of the day to an above-ground cubby hole in one of the prestigious outer rings.

In this easily overlooked spot in a highly trafficked hall, one indistinctive door led to a small reception area. I regularly had on a neck chain my Army dog tags, my Pentagon ID, my Hoffman Building ID, my AOC ID, and an ID for this area. Behind the door’s guard was an inner sanctum of windowless offices. This space was where highly compartmentalized, secret intelligence information collected by various foreign and domestic intelligence agencies could be viewed. It was interesting stuff to plough through daily, but rarely bore directly on my main job of preparing and delivering written and oral briefings on the likelihood of demonstrations or civil disturbances.

The Blue U and CIA Training

In June 1969, just as I turned 27, I was selected to join a dozen other Army counterintelligence agents at a special school conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Training. The focus of the two-week course was a survey of worldwide communist party doctrine and organization. Being designed for counterintelligence agents, the survey explored both open and underground tactics used to expand communist power and influence. I had been a political science major in college, concentrating on international relations in the 20th century, so some of the curriculum was more entry level than not from my point of view. The most interesting of the topics covered for me was the examination of Soviet and Chinese intelligence agency organizations and tactics.

As was true for the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System Security Group I later joined, this activity took place in an Arlington, Virginia, office building. Now long gone, the building then was known colloquially as The Blue U for its unusual color and shape. I found that my first day of school at The Blue U was a lot like my first day trying to find the 902nd MI Group headquarters. I had general directions to get there, but no idea of what I’d find when I actually set foot in the place. The CIA training activity was under what was called “light cover” inside the Blue U.  It seemed from the lobby directory that the building housed a variety of routine, non-intelligence Defense Department activities. There were Army and other service functions listed in the lobby directory, but nowhere did I see the CIA school listed. That’s because it was operating under an innocuous and forgettable pseudonym like “Joint Military Planning Office.” I got in the elevator with a handful of others dressed in both uniforms and civilian clothes and pushed the button for my floor. At each floor the elevator stopped, and people got off as normal. However, when we got to my floor, those left on the elevator with me immediately pulled out previously hidden identification cards. The result was that when the elevator door opened on the top floor, and an armed guard immediately confronted us, everyone else already had an ID out. They were the regulars, and I was obviously the newbie.

The office had lots of closed doors on both sides of narrow corridors. None of the doors had names or any indication of what functions lay within, so it was more than a little spooky.

It turns out another member of my extended family also spent time in The Blue U. Years later, I was visiting my cousin John Bowe and his wife, Kathie, at their summer home in Cape Porpoise, Maine. Kathie Bowe’s brother Allan joined us for dinner one evening, and before long we found out we had both done time at The Blue U. While I was a student employed by the Army, he had been a teacher there employed by you know who.

The Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System

Though large antiwar demonstrations and racial disturbances were a common part of the American scene when I was in the Army between 1968 and 1971, they weren’t demanding all my time by any means.

One project that I devoted a lot of time to in 1969 was a counterintelligence study related to the Army’s Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) System under development. I was appointed to a working group in downtown Arlington, Virginia, tasked with understanding the counterintelligence issues associated with the Army’s new Safeguard ABM system. Safeguard was a successor to earlier Nike missile systems.

Nike had been designed to intercept Soviet nuclear bombers. Safeguard was to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

My contribution to the group’s work was to make a detailed analysis of the possible espionage and sabotage threats to the Safeguard system’s functionality.

Huntsville, Alabama, and the Army Missile Command

As I thought about what it would take to do the counterintelligence study correctly, it quickly became apparent that I needed to get out of the Pentagon and talk firsthand to the people who were or would be designing, building, testing, and operating the Army’s new high-tech weapons system then under development.

This meant I had to travel first to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, at the time the headquarters of the Army Missile Command.  Next, I needed to go to the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) in Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The NORAD part of the trip was key for me to understand how the system was designed to operate in wartime conditions. Finally, I needed to travel to Kwajalein Atoll.

What was then known as the western terminus of the U.S. Pacific Missile Test Range is today called The Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site. In 1969, the Safeguard ABM system’s radars and Sprint and Spartan missiles were being tested there.

As expected, I learned a great deal at my first stop at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain

My following visit to Cheyenne Mountain and NORAD’s Headquarters wasn’t just interesting and useful. It turned out to be absolutely fascinating as well. NORAD was a joint U.S.-Canadian command that had begun in the 1950s with its backbone being the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line of radars across the Canadian tundra. By 1969, when I received my NORAD Mission Briefing, it was already tracking space junk, and reorienting its mission from defending against the earlier era’s nuclear-armed Soviet bombers to defending against Soviet nuclear-tipped ICBMs. Today, NORAD describes its missions this way:

Aerospace warning, aerospace control and maritime warning for North America. Aerospace warning includes the detection, validation, and warning of attack against North America whether by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles, through mutual support arrangements with other commands.

You entered the NORAD complex by being driven deep into a tunnel under all-granite Cheyenne Mountain, just outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Getting out of the vehicle, you had to pass through two enormous blast doors. They were designed to keep those inside the doors safe from the radiation and blast effects brought about by nuclear warheads hitting the mountain. Through the blast doors, a short tunnel took you into an enormous cave-like chamber. In it were multi-story prefabricated offices rising to the cave ceiling many stories above. These office structures sat on large I-beams on the cave floor. All the communication, water, and power utilities fed into the office structures through giant spring connections on the I-beams. The whole design was to permit the structures to ride out a nuclear attack on the mountain complex without its functionality being knocked out.

In James Bond parlance, this was to make sure that, in the event of a nuclear attack on NORAD’s mountain headquarters, those working within would be stirred, but not shaken. My early education here regarding space-related defenses was a preview of what we would all come to see in later years. Today, space is doctrinally and organizationally recognized as its own theater of war. But official recognition of this evolution didn’t occur until recently, a full 50 years after my visit to Cheyenne Mountain. It was only in 2019 that the President and Congress shifted the mission of ballistic missile and satellite defense to our newly created U.S. Space Force.

Johnston Atoll and the Origins of Space Warfare

I knew Kwajalein was going to be a very different place, but I didn’t understand that getting there would turn out to be a surprise, too.

Northwest Airlines, with its distinctive fleet of red-tailed passenger jets, had a contract with the government to fly military personnel and civilian contractors with security clearances from Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii, west to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. I knew how long the non-stop flight to Kwajalein was going to take, so I was surprised when we suddenly began descending well short of our destination. There was no engine malfunction, so why land in the middle of the Pacific if you didn’t have to? I had no desire to emulate Amelia Earhart, so I was increasingly nervous about what might be an unexpected descent into oblivion.

My anxiety was quickly relieved when the pilot came on the squawk box to say we should buckle up for landing to refuel at Johnston Atoll. The runway at Johnston seemed only about as long as the atoll itself, leaving no room for error on the pilot’s part. I stared out the airplane window in awe as we decelerated, finally rolled to a stop, and then taxied back to the other end of the runway to deplane.

Though my visit was short, Johnston Atoll ended up being one of the strangest places I have ever been to in my life.   It’s a small, isolated, and currently uninhabited atoll in the vastness of the south-central Pacific, and it lacks natural access to any fresh water. Despite these impediments to human habitation, I later learned that Johnston Atoll had a long, if fitful, history of human habitation before my arrival in late August 1969.  Indeed, there was a period when over 1,000 personnel, some accompanied by their families, lived on Johnston Atoll. These folks were working on extremely dangerous military projects in the highest level of secrecy.

Johnston’s history started late. In 1796, the Boston-based brig “Sally” first discovered the atoll when it ran aground there while transiting the Pacific. The British ship HMS Cornwallis bumped into Johnston a few years later in 1807. Its Captain, one Charles Johnston, quickly and immodestly named the atoll after himself. Commercial development of the Atoll’s substantial guano deposits began after the U.S. Congress authorized this business in the mid-19th century. In the 20^th Century, when the guano enterprise was long gone, the U.S ships Tanager and Whippoorwill did scientific surveys in the 1920s.

During World War II, Johnston served as a Navy and Army Air Force refueling depot. Then, during the Cold War, military requirements changed. This led to substantial dredging of the Atoll’s coral reef and shallows and the incremental expansion of the tiny Atoll’s land.

Beginning in the late 1950s, U.S. defense planners began to become worried that the Soviets might soon be able to launch satellites into orbit with nuclear bombs aboard that could be launched at will on ICBM installations in the US or, God forbid, on U.S. cities. This worry raised the concomitant question as to whether such orbiting satellites could be destroyed by detonating a nuclear warhead in their vicinity. To test this theory, in 1958 the first of a series of lower altitude nuclear tests began at Johnston Atoll.  The purpose of the Project Fishbowl test in 1962 was to find out what happens when you detonate a nuclear weapon in the upper atmosphere.

In the anti-satellite tests at Johnston, modified Thor missiles with nuclear warheads atop were launched to see whether X-rays generated by detonation of their warheads would actually be capable of destroying hostile Soviet satellites. In one early test failure, a Thor missile blew up on its launch pad and spewed plutonium over the Atoll. This resulted in a complicated and lengthy cleanup effort.

However, these early test failures were nothing compared with the spectacular 1962 nuclear explosion that was set off in the upper atmosphere 248 miles above Johnston.  The first thing this early morning nuclear blast produced was a startling artificial sunrise, an Aurora Borealis that lasted for minutes and could be seen all the way from New Zealand to Hawaii.  Of more consequence, no one had foreseen the startling and damaging effects of the electromagnetic pulse generated by the explosion of a nuclear device on the edge of space. On the benign side was the EMP effect that resulted in the inadvertent opening of automatic garage doors in faraway Honolulu. However, a more serious consequence of EMP effects was that the test showed a single detonation above some countries could knock out their entire electrical grid.

Also not foreseen was the negative impact of this detonation on the Van Allen Belt that protects the earth from solar storms, and the damage that could be caused to useful low orbit earth satellites. Among these victims, Telstar, mankind’s first telecommunications satellite, was rendered dysfunctional by the blast. The next year following this unintended result, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by President John F. Kennedy. It forbids nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space.

I had never heard of Johnston Atoll and knew none of this history while en route to Kwajalein Atoll in 1969.

As a result, as we were landing at Johnston, my jaw dropped as I noticed that on either side of the runway were rows of large Quonset-like sheds. They seemed to be connected by train tracks and outside one of the sheds was a large horizontal missile being worked on by two uniformed men.

I was befuddled.  What was I looking at here in the middle of nowhere? There seemed to be no rational explanation for what I saw.  None of my many classified briefings on our missile and anti-missile developments up to that point had even hinted at the existence of such an unusual installation. It was not until many years later that the history of this secret installation was declassified, and I learned that these all these sheds contained Thor missiles that were part of Project 437, a functional and operating anti-satellite weapon system authorized by President Johnson and fully capable of destroying Soviet satellites that might be carrying nuclear bombs. Oddly, almost at the same time as I landed at Johnston, the Air Force made the decision to shut down its anti-satellite installation.

From a counterintelligence planning standpoint, with defense troops far away in Honolulu, there had always been some concern about Johnston’s vulnerability to attack from a submarine or a commando assault in a run up to a real-world nuclear exchange.  However, Johnston’s anti-satellite mission turned out to be more a victim of technological obsolescence and the increased budget constraints brought about by the still growing Vietnam War expenditures.

After we deplaned to refuel at Johnston, we had been ushered past a no-nonsense MP with his weapon drawn into a small, single-story, air-conditioned space. As we sat on plain benches waiting for the refueling to finish, it was hard not to notice the storage cubby holes on each wall and the multiple black hoses hanging down from the odd piping strung from the ceiling. Nothing was said by anyone about all this and in short order we reboarded our airplane and proceeded to Kwajalein uneventfully.

As was true with my delayed knowledge of the Thor anti-satellite weapons system, it was years later that I learned that Johnston Atoll’s unique position in the Pacific Ocean made it a useful place for CIA SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft to refuel on their missions over Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Blackbirds could travel over 2,000 miles per hour and held an altitude record for flying over 85,000 feet. Their high-altitude flights required early versions of the space suits and helmets the astronauts later wore. Hence, the cubby hole storage cabinets. The ceiling pipes and related hoses were also a necessity in the Johnston ready room. They were there to feed the SR-71 pilots’ oxygen in the acclimating runup to their departure.

In the most recent chapter in Johnston Atoll’s history, in the 1990s Johnston was again reengaged to deal with a major national security threat. Vast stocks of aging chemical weapons secreted around the world were beginning to leak and were in danger of becoming unstable enough to explode. Johnston’s new mission became the destruction of the deadliest non-nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. It took over a decade, but an enormous furnace was built on Johnston that safely incinerated these stocks before they created an unintended disaster. At the peak of this effort, over 1,200 military and contractor personnel lived and worked on Johnston.  Then, when the toxic stores were gone, all the housing and all of the other infrastructure on Johnston Atoll was destroyed and its runway shut down. Johnston wasn’t just decommissioned in 2004, it’s fair to say it was “terminated with extreme prejudice.”

So today, Johnston Atoll has reverted to its long uninhabited state and has little wildlife other than the fish that inhabit its coral reef. Knowing something today of Johnston’s history, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the fish glowed in the dark.

As our Red Tail jet took off from Johnston for Kwajalein, the then unanswered mysteries of Johnston Atoll went with me. I had a heightened curiosity as to what I’d find at my next stop. Kwajalein was an even bigger and more important outpost for the cutting-edge military technology being built at the time for the developing war theater of space.

Kwajalein Atoll—The Ronald Reagan Missile Test Site

Kwajalein Atoll was then the western terminus of the Pacific Missile Test Range. Then and now, Kwajalein functions as a critical facility that tests the accuracy of U.S. ICBM missiles and their Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) nuclear warheads. For more than half a century it has also been testing the efficacy of anti-ballistic missile missiles designed to track, intercept, and vaporize hostile, incoming ICBM nuclear warheads. That so-called exercise of “hitting a bullet with a bullet” was hard to do more than a half-century ago, and it hasn’t gotten any easier since with the recent Chinese and Russian development of hypersonic missiles.

Our plane landed on Kwajalein Island, the largest and southernmost island in the Kwajalein Atoll. Kwajalein is due north of New Zealand in the south Pacific and due east of the southern part of the Philippines. In short, like Johnston Atoll, it’s in the middle of nowhere. The Atoll is made up of about 100 islands in a coral chain 50 miles in length, stretching from Kwajalein Island in the south to Roi-Namur Island in the north. Kwajalein Island is only three quarters of a mile wide and three and a half miles long. The whole of the Atoll’s coral land is only 5.6 miles square. The Atoll is about 80 miles wide, which makes it one of the largest lagoons in the world.

The people I most needed to talk to on Kwajalein were the senior Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and Raytheon engineers most familiar with the Safeguard missile development (both the short-range Sprint Missile and the exo-atmospheric Spartan Missile). I also needed to learn more about the functioning of the Phased Array Radar (PAR) central to Safeguard’s ability to track and intercept incoming warheads before vaporizing them with X-rays from a nuclear detonation.

My interviews on Kwajalein Island and Roi-Namur were delayed due to my being bumped by a Congressional staff visit that happened to conflict with mine. Recent glitches in the Safeguard testing had apparently triggered a closer Congressional look at the state of the program and its related budgeting problems.

To have something to do in the meantime, my Army host, who also served as the base recreation officer, took me out to golf. What a course! It lay on either side of Kwajalein Island’s single runway. The narrow greensward where you could play was studded with radars used in the Island’s missile testing work. The so-called fairways had a picket fence on their ocean side that served as a no-go reminder. Should your golf ball go over the fence and plop down in front of one of the munitions storage bunkers there, you might have to kiss it goodbye. However, by the fences were long poles with a circular ring on the end. If it reached your mis-hit ball, you could retrieve it. If the pole couldn’t reach your ball, you were SOL.

There was not the same problem at Kwajalein’s golf driving range. There was no way you could lose your golf ball there. That’s because the range had repurposed an enormous and abandoned circular radar structure. The radar’s construction had created a giant circular steel mesh so tall, and with such a large diameter, that no matter how hard you might hit a golf ball from the radar’s perimeter, you couldn’t knock it out of the enclosed space. This was no doubt the most expensive golf driving range ever built by mankind.

On one of our golf outings by the runway our play was interrupted by loud klaxon horns atop the many radars on the greensward. “What the hell is that?” I asked. My minder said that it was a warning that powerful, potentially harmful radar waves would soon be sweeping our fairway or perhaps there was a danger of debris from an incoming or outgoing test missile, and we needed to immediately take shelter. Believe me, he didn’t have to tell me twice!

One evening after dinner I strolled down to the small harbor at nightfall. It was quiet and peaceful looking out at the lagoon.  Soon I noticed another man out for an evening stroll. We struck up a conversation and I asked him what he did on Kwajalein.  He said he was just visiting from California and that he was looking forward to the incoming ICBM later that evening. That was news to me, so I asked him how he knew about that.  He said that he was the person who had programed the instrument package that replaced the ICBM’s warhead for the test. He said this was his first opportunity to see the fireworks above Johnston as the incoming missile and his package headed through the atmosphere to preprogrammed coordinates in the lagoon. I quickly decided I too would stay up late for the fireworks. Sadly, when I woke up the next morning, I had to kick myself for sleeping through the night and missing the big show.

One of the issues that surfaced in my later counterintelligence report had to do with a Soviet spy ship, disguised as a fishing trawler. It permanently lingered just outside the Atoll in international waters.  There, it constantly monitored the telecommunications of all the personnel on Kwajalein, as well as the telemetry of every rocket test. Besides the communication security protocols in place to minimize the value of the trawler’s signals intercepts, another very important procedure related to the spy ship had been put in place.  When an incoming instrument package had separated from its ICBM and fell into Kwajalein’s lagoon, at least three splash detection radars at different points on the Atoll would triangulate the precise location of the splash. This permitted an assessment of whether the accuracy of the missile launch was sufficient to destroy a hardened Soviet ICBM silo in the U.S.S.R. In a further security step, swimmers would immediately dive into the lagoon at the impact point and recover the instrument package and its data. This was a protocol to ensure no divers from the Soviet intelligence ship would ever beat them to the punch.

When the Congressional folks who had delayed my work hit the road, I caught the first available twin-engine commuter flight up to nearby Meck Island on the Atoll. Here was Safeguard’s recently constructed Phased Array Radar that I needed to understand better. The large radar had a fixed and circular slanted face that permitted it to scan incoming missiles launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Air Force crews, plucked at random from Montana or other ICBM installations, would be trucked with their Minuteman missiles to Vandenberg. At Vandenberg, their launch proficiency would be tested, and the missiles were regularly topped off with instrument packages instead of warheads before being launched at a predetermined point in Kwajalein’s lagoon.

As the Meck Island manager took me into the outsized computer room that formed the base of the large radar, he smiled, and, in a voice like that of a proud father talking about a child bringing home a good report card, he said that there was more computing power in that room than existed on the entire planet in 1955. As I digested the meaning of that, the thought occurred to me that he might in fact be telling me the truth.

From Meck, I flew up to Roi-Namur Island on the north end of the atoll. There were different radars and instrumentation issues I needed to learn about at that location as well. With my fieldwork complete, I was ready to go home to Washington, D.C., and write my report. I quickly caught the last commuter flight of the day at Roi-Namur and flew the 50 miles south back to my Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ) accommodations on Kwajalein Island. Without delay, I was on the next red-tail Northwest jet that came through Kwajalein to shortly begin a week’s leave from the Army in Honolulu visiting a college classmate and his family.

Upon my return to the Pentagon, I spent several weeks doing further research. Then I turned for several more weeks to writing up my report on the Safeguard System’s espionage and sabotage vulnerabilities and the steps necessary to further harden the System’s operational weaknesses. In late fall 1969, I completed my assignment by providing briefings on my report to the Safeguard Security Working Group, other senior Army officers, and various civilian technical and scientific advisers.

My effort must have met with approval as the Commanding Officer of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group awarded me at year-end a Certificate of Achievement for “exemplary duty” for this work. To me, that meant that the report had probably been more useful than anyone had imagined it would be when I was first assigned the task.

Kent State University and the Aftermath

My single worst intelligence assessment was in underestimating the future extensive campus demonstrations against the war that came in the wake of the events that unfolded in May 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio. The violence attendant to the Democratic National Convention in September 1968 had not gone down well with many people, and the Democratic candidate Sen. Hubert Humphrey had been defeated by Richard Nixon in the November election. During 1969, Nixon gradually came to conclude that the best strategy to end the War would be “Vietnamization.” By this he meant the phased withdrawal of American troops concomitant with the strengthening of the South Vietnamese Army. Nixon announced this plan to the American people in a nationally televised speech in November 1969. Opposition to the war had continued to grow throughout 1969, with bigger and more widespread antiwar demonstrations taking place across the country.

On April 20, 1970, Nixon announced that 115,500 American troops had left Vietnam and another 150,000 would depart by the end of 1971. To many it looked as if his Vietnamization strategy might be working. However, just 10 days later, on April 30, 1970, he announced that U.S. and South Vietnamese troops had entered Cambodia to attack the safe haven there that had been a refuge for North Vietnamese forces.

Many colleges and universities across the country were convulsed and promptly gave witness to both peaceful and violent demonstrations protesting the Cambodian expansion of the war. One such school was Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, some 30 miles southeast of Cleveland, with a campus of 20,000 students. On the day after Nixon’s announcement of the Cambodian bombing, Friday, May 1, violence in the streets of downtown Kent resulted in the Governor calling up the National Guard for duty. The next night, Saturday, May 2, protesters set the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) building on fire. Elements of the Ohio National Guard arrived using tear gas and bayonets to clear the area.

The next day, Sunday, May 3, 1970, there were 1,200 Guardsmen on the Kent Campus to confront the student demonstrators. In the ensuing standoff, some of the Guardsmen fired their M-1 rifles into the crowd. When the shooting stopped, there were four dead students and nine wounded.

My job every Monday at the time was to drive to the Pentagon in the early morning hours before dawn and read the FBI teletype and Army spot reports that had come in over the weekend. My focus was on incidents of violence that might engage, or had engaged, National Guard forces. This level of violence would always be a prerequisite of any later call for Regular Army troops. When I had gone through the traffic and made my assessment, my job was to go up from the basement location of the AOC to the Office of the Under Secretary of the Army and brief his military aide on what if anything was going on.

The Under Secretary was the civilian point person managing the Army’s civil disturbance mission, and he and his office wanted to keep close tabs on anything that might evolve into a crisis engaging Army troops.

In 1969, David McGiffert had served as Under Secretary and had learned enough to conclude that the Army had drifted into collecting some information domestically through its U.S. counterintelligence units it shouldn’t be collecting. He had further concluded that it could embarrass the Army if it continued unchecked. Though he was clearly on record in this regard, civilian leadership in the Nixon administration and the Department of Justice did not concur. As a result, various local Army counterintelligence units continued to funnel reports of demonstrations being planned or occurring that were not strictly necessary to carrying out the Regular Army’s limited civil disturbance mission. I had been correct in the technical assessment that I gave the Under Secretary’s aide that the Kent State student deaths and the other mayhem over the weekend would not lead to any engagement of the Regular Army. That was a no-brainer.

But I was about as wrong as you could get in my collateral observation that the outbursts would have a short life and that the campuses would settle down in the ensuing week.

The next week instead saw demonstrations of more than 150,000 in San Francisco and 100,000 in Washington, D.C. And on different colleges and universities, National Guards were deployed in 16 states on 21 campuses, 30 ROTC buildings were bombed or burned, and there were reportedly more than a million students participating in strikes on at least 883 campuses.

Yale, The Black Panthers, and the Army

Also in May 1970, at the same time as Kent State was becoming a symbol of the country’s extreme division over the Vietnam War, a different kind of seminal event of both racial and student unrest was about to unfold in New Haven, Connecticut, at my alma mater, Yale University.

A strange and rare mix of factors did put Regular Army soldiers on the move there. Just a year earlier, on May 22, 1969, the body of a member of the New Haven chapter of the radical Black Panther Party was discovered in woods outside New Haven. Before being shot to death in the woods, he had first been tortured at the Party’s New Haven headquarters. He was suspected of being a police informant. Several members of the local Black Panthers chapter had since confessed to the crime. At least one person implicated Bobby Seale, the National Chairman of the Black Panthers, in the crime. Seale was a founder of the original Black Panther chapter in Oakland, California, and had visited the New Haven chapter at the time when the victim was being held. Seale was scheduled to go on trial for murder the next year in May 1970.

Coincident with the Kent State May Day protests in 1970, a National May Day rally was held on the New Haven Green to protest both the expansion of the war into Cambodia and to support the Panthers charged in the local murder trial.

Activists of all denominations turned up together with Yale students at the rally. Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, was quoted as calling the upcoming trial “Panther repression,” and said, “All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers, and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these acts.” Kingman Brewster, Yale’s President, said he was, “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” He went on to say, “in large measure, the atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against the Panthers in many parts of the country.”

In the aftermath of the Kent State event and the consequent student strikes at colleges and universities across the country, I had followed the New Haven events closely. Beyond a casual interest in my old school of course, my job was to provide intelligence support to DCDPO by periodically assessing the likelihood of riots getting out of hand. That meant I was also watching the New Haven situation unfold from a purely professional perspective.

There had been a growing tendency in the charged atmosphere of the 1960s to think that antiwar student protests and demonstrations were somehow akin to the racial disturbances in cities that had required intervention by the Regular Army associated with the First and Second World Wars and now the Vietnam War. However, from a military planning standpoint, the thought that New Haven in the current context needed the Regular Army forces seemed to me completely unnecessary. Nonetheless, Connecticut’s Governor and President Richard Nixon arrived at a different conclusion.

Through memory’s haze, I seem to recall a newspaper story that John Dean, then a Department of Justice functionary under Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, had met Connecticut’s Governor in Hartford, and that the Governor promptly thereafter issued a statement that the situation in New Haven was beyond the State’s ability to control. The Governor’s declaration legally permitted Nixon to commit federal troops if he chose to.

The situation in New Haven was coming to a head, and I soon found myself accompanying DCDPO’s Deputy Director, an Air Force Major General, up to the offices of the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, General Bruce Palmer. Palmer was taking the meeting in the absence of then-Chief of Staff Gen. William Westmoreland. Palmer had commanded the Army troops President Lyndon Johnson had sent to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic not too long before.

He began to size up the matter with a few incisive questions, and once he had a detailed grasp of the tactical situation, he asked me what my opinion was. Did I think regular Army troops would be required? I told him that I was familiar with the New Haven community, having graduated from college there only a few years before, and said I didn’t think there was a military requirement for deploying Regular Army troops then.

General Palmer scratched his head and said he didn’t think it made much sense to send troops either. At this point my Air Force friend coughed and interrupted. He informed General Palmer, and me, that it was a passed point. Following presidential orders, the first airstream of airborne troops had just departed from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, headed north.

As it turned out, there was no cataclysm in New Haven at the commencement of the murder trial and questions about whether Bobby Seale could get a fair trial went away when he was acquitted. My recollection is that the Connecticut National Guard provided sufficient backup to the New Haven police.

The Regular Army troops got no closer to New Haven than Hartford and Rhode Island, where they bivouacked for a short period before being flown home.

During the New Haven affair, I provided my usual round of briefings to civilian and military managers at the Pentagon. I was supported as always by the graphics department at OACSI. The illustration I remember best was a map of New Haven, no doubt dug out of the DCDPO files.

It was centered on George and Harry’s restaurant, across from my old room at Silliman College. Superimposed on this choice piece of real estate was a freehand black and white drawing of a long-haired, screaming student wearing a toga. The out-of-control youth seemed to be holding a scrolled diploma overhead in a clenched fist, looking much like a banana republic revolutionary holding a rifle.

In the years since, I often thought about the toga-clad students who came after me at Yale. Who would have guessed their style of dress and extracurricular interests would have been so different from mine only a few years before?

When I got out of class, I typically put on jeans, walked across the street, and grabbed a beer at George and Harry’s. When they got out of class, at least in the Army artist’s mind, the animals put on dresses, stormed into the street, and hoisted high school diplomas over their heads pretending they were AK-47 Kalashnikovs.

The Secretary of the Army’s Special Task Force

In January 1970, Christopher Pyle, a former captain in Army intelligence, wrote an article in the Washington Monthly magazine criticizing the Army for going beyond proper bounds in collecting information on civilians.

Pyle’s article prompted inquiries to Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor from various members of Congress, including Sen. Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights.

The responsibility fell to the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Gen. Joseph McChristian, to gather the necessary information internally for the Secretary to respond to the detailed questions being raised. McChristian in turn asked the head of his OACSI’s Directorate of Counterintelligence, Col. John Downie, to take on the task. Since CIAD was under the head of the Directorate of Counterintelligence, I had recently begun to work more closely with Downie than I had up to that point. I had come to like and respect him enormously and thought him a strong and principled leader.

Five years later, following his retirement, Downie was interviewed about this period at his home in Easton, Pennsylvania, by Loch K. Johnson. At the time Johnson was a Congressional investigator for the U.S. Senate Committee popularly known as the Church Committee, named such after its chairman, Sen. Frank Church of Idaho.

Johnson was looking into the origins of the so-called Huston Plan to ramp up domestic intelligence operations by the FBI and the military. It had been approved for implementation by President Nixon and then immediately curtailed by the Nixon White House.

In Johnson’s later 1989 book, America’s Secret Power, The CIA in a Democratic Society, Johnson explains that the Huston Plan was a crash effort to analyze how to expand domestic surveillance of internal intelligence targets quickly and substantially, particularly student radicals and their foreign connections.

Johnson writes that Col. Downie represented the Army at critical meetings in June 1970 to review the Plan. The group met at CIA headquarters and was attended by FBI, DOJ, NSA, and other representatives of the pertinent civilian and military agencies who were tasked to respond to the White House directive.

While Johnson says that there was some enthusiasm for expanded efforts by representatives of the CIA, NSA, and most of the FBI representatives, he quotes Col. Downie as making clear that the Army wanted “to keep the hell out” of any such effort.

Contemporaneously with this, Col. Downie had tasked me to review the Army’s legal authorities for domestic engagement. I had reviewed with him the particulars of the Posse Comitatus Act, originally passed in 1878. This one-sentence law today reads:

Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

Since its passage, the law and its offspring have been bulwarks against permitting the military to meddle in what are essentially civilian law enforcement matters.

When Col. Downie had asked me to undertake this research, he had made no specific mention per se that the Huston Plan was afoot. However, it was clear something big was up and being treated as an emergency. I also was aware Col. Downie indeed had firm ideas on keeping the Army out of this kind of engagement. Furthermore, with the Army at the time facing Senate hearings on allegations of the military surveillance of civilians, the last thing it needed was a thoughtless push to apply its resources into what was by tradition and law a purely civilian responsibility.

With the first round of military surveillance hearings in the offing in early 1971, my immediate work area of the AOC was rearranged. My desk was in the same place, but it had turned 90 degrees. This struck me as a symbolic reflection of the Army’s own change of course in the intelligence gathering at this time. I was also given an elaborate new title that I didn’t know I had at the time: Staff Researcher and Allegations Analyst, Allegations Branch, Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and Department of the Army Special Task Force.

What Under Secretary of the Army McGiffert had tried and failed to do in 1969, now got done. Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor told Gen. Westmoreland on March 6, 1970, to make sure no computerized data banks on civilians should be instituted anywhere in the Army without the approval of both the Secretary of the Army and the Chief of Staff. The new Under Secretary of the Army, Thaddeus R. Beal, wrote Sen. Ervin on March 20 that the spot reports on violence created by the Army would be kept for only 60 days. Later directives flatly banned the use of computers to store proscribed information on civilians.

Pyle wrote a second article with additional allegations in a July 1970 Washington Monthly article on military surveillance, and I went back to work with my fact gathering. Then at the end of the 1970s, a whole new batch of allegations of Army spying on civilians appeared and received wide media attention. John M. O’Brien, a former Staff Sergeant with the Military Intelligence Group in Chicago, told Sen. Ervin that prominent elected federal and state officials had been spied on by the Army, including Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, Rep. Abner Mikva, and former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner.

In the wake of all these allegations, the first Senate hearings on military surveillance took place on March 2, 1971. Fred Buzhardt, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, must have thought the hearings went well for the Army, as he sent a letter to the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Westmoreland, complimenting him on the materials used to prepare for the hearings.

Westmoreland in turn complimented Gen. Joseph McChristian, his Chief of Staff for Intelligence. McChristian, who had also been Westmoreland’s intelligence chief when Westmoreland was commander of the forces in Vietnam earlier, in turn thanked the head of his Counterintelligence Division, Col. Downie. And Col. Downie kept the ball rolling by sending me an attaboy to round things out.

It meant something to me at the time, because I had come to know Col. Downie well in my time at the Pentagon, and I admired him as a decent, straightforward officer who had devoted his life in the honorable service of his country. When I first began working with Col. Downie at the Pentagon, I had been introduced to the heart and institutional memory of the Counterintelligence Division of OACSI. I don’t remember her last name, but Millie had served as the CD’s indispensable secretary for several decades. When I learned about her tenure, I asked her if she’d ever run across a now-retired counterintelligence officer in Chicago that was a family friend, Col. Minor K. Wilson.

Did she know him! She nearly fell off her chair that I knew him too. When she was a young secretary new in the Directorate, Col. Wilson was ending his Army career in the same job Col. Downie now held. Small world indeed, as after my father’s death in 1965, Col. Wilson, a friend of my father’s brother Augustine Bowe, sat at my father’s desk for a time at the family law firm, Bowe & Bowe, at 7 South Dearborn Street in Chicago. Soon joining my uncle as a judge, Wilson gave up my father’s chair for a new seat on the bench.

Getting Short—The 1971 Stop the Government Protests

My three-year enlistment was coming up in the spring of 1971, with my last day of active duty being May 12. In Army parlance, I was “getting short.”

Given the times in Washington, I was also going out with a bang, not a whimper. The violent Weather Underground faction of the radical Students for a Democratic Society was being publicly led at the time by my former University of Chicago Law School classmate, Bernardine Dohrn. This SDS faction took credit for setting off a bomb in the early morning hours of March 1 underneath the U.S. Senate Chamber of the Capitol Building. The bombing had been preceded by an anonymous telephone call to the Capitol’s telephone operator saying, “Evacuate the building immediately. This is in retaliation for the Laos decision.” The next month thousands of Vietnam Veterans Against the War poured into the city to throw their medals away on the Capitol steps. John Kerry, later the Democratic nominee for President in 2004, spoke on their behalf in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 24, 1971. Said Kerry, “The country doesn’t know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.”

The Washington Post reported that more than 175,000 protesters were outside the Capitol that day. Several thousand of the veterans stayed and camped out in tents on the Mall in a modern-day reminder of the Bonus Army’s camp on Anacostia Flats during the Depression.

Militant groups had long been planning to make this May Day crowd large enough to fundamentally disrupt the normal functioning of the government. The organizing slogan was, “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” The goal of the May Day protests was to shut down the beltway around the capital with abandoned vehicles and keep commuting government workers out of the District. There were also 21 prime intersections within the District selected as high-value targets for traffic blockages. Detailed plans to barricade normal access to government buildings had also been made and widely circulated. The District of Columbia Mayor and police were not amused and revoked previously issued permits.

Thousands of protesters began arriving in the District in late April, and more than 45,000 began to set up camp in West Potomac Park, not far from the Mall. As with the veterans camped out earlier, bonfires lit the night there, with marijuana, acid, and other drugs helping set the mood.

The demonstrations began on May 1 and continued daily thereafter. In due course, thousands of protesters finally took to the streets the morning of Monday, May 3, with the intent to shut down the government as best they could. As The New York Times reported on May 4:

The protesters … did succeed in disrupting the city’s normal functioning by impeding traffic and harassing government employees on their way to work, using as weapons trash, tree limbs, stones, bottles, bricks, lumber, nails, tires, rubbish bins and parked cars. … At the height of the disturbances, tear gas fumes filled the air over some of the city’s most famous monuments, streets, and grassy flowered parks. Garbage cans, trash, abandoned automobiles and other obstacles littered some chief arteries.

During all this mayhem I was putting in long hours in the AOC. When I wasn’t in the glass briefing booth, I was assessing the very public tactics demonstration organizers were widely disseminating in their pamphlets and publications. I was particularly focused on trying to get a handle on the number of protesters arriving in Washington. The numbers in my estimates kept going up and up. The count of buses making their way into the District on Interstate 95 was of a magnitude no one had ever seen before.

The surreal moment for me in the AOC came when watching the local television coverage on the AOC’s screens. At one point, on the Ellipse by the Washington Monument, several helicopters landed, and a small number of troops disembarked.

There seemed to be nothing for them to do there, as their commanding officers eventually figured out. To me and everyone else, helicopters disgorging troops had been a constant staple of the evening news in the preceding years. But all those scenes had taken place in Vietnam, not the nation’s capital. To see the same thing underway with the Washington Monument as the backdrop was not only bizarre, but also seemed to be militarily unnecessary. When the boots got on the ground this time, and there was nothing there for them to do, they were marched off in good order and last seen headed up Constitution Avenue towards the Capitol. They may have ended up in the courtyard of the Department of Justice, where other troops were held out of sight, but in reserve.

The whole spectacle made me think of Walt Kelly’s popular comic strip of the day, when he famously had his swamp character Pogo say, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Originally intended as a comment on environmental consciousness-raising after the first Earth Day rallies the year before, it seemed equally to fit the conflicts in America a year later. When the day ended, 12,000 federal troops had been stationed in the Pentagon’s internal courtyard and other strategic points in the District. These were all locations from which they could be easily deployed to hot spots if needed. The front lines had been manned not by the Regular Army or Marines, but by 5,100 District police and 1,500 National Guardsmen. The New York Times had estimated the crowd of protesters arrested as between 12,000 and 15,000 people. About 7,000 of them were arrested May 3, and another 5,000 or so in the immediate days before and after.

When May 3, 1971, finally ended for me, and I headed home to my apartment in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, I left the AOC and climbed the stairs to the ground level. To get to my parked car on the other side of the Pentagon, I took my usual short cut through the building’s inner courtyard. As I walked across the large yard, I saw for the first time that Army troops were also being held here in reserve.

By the time I got to the other side of the courtyard, I noticed I had a few tears in my eyes. I thought that was odd. Although I was tired, I was not at all emotionally upset. I thought no more about it until the next day. That’s when I learned that one of the troops in the Pentagon courtyard had set off a tear gas cannister by accident. I had just caught a whiff of the gas at the tail end of its presence in the courtyard. Again, Pogo’s words came to mind.

I got a pleasant surprise when I left the Army in May 1971. I was awarded the Presidential Meritorious Service Medal for “highly valuable contributions to counterintelligence studies and briefings in connection with a wide variety of threats to the security of the United States Army.”

Veterans who served in the military during the Vietnam War years were often subject to disrespect when they returned to civilian life. I don’t recall ever catching any of this guff, but I know many others did.

1974 Congressional Hearings on Military Surveillance

After I left the Army, Sen. Sam Ervin continued to work on making sure the military stayed out of the business of collecting intelligence on civilians. I had kept up with these developments and was opinionated about the legislation Ervin had introduced to deal with the subject. Chicago Sun-Times reporter Roger Simon interviewed me in 1973 in an article on the subject. By the time new hearings on military surveillance of civilians by Ervin’s Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights got under way in March 1974, Col. Downie had retired near State College, Pennsylvania.

Christopher Pyle, the author of the Washington Monthly articles, was working as a consultant for Ervin’s Committee. Having earlier met me, he contacted me to see what I thought about Col. Downie testifying.

Downie had spent his entire professional career in counterintelligence, and I knew he and I saw eye to eye on its proper role in regard to its rare civil disturbance mission. As it happened, he was interested in sharing his perspective, so I drove from Chicago to his home in Pennsylvania, picked him up, and then drove down with him to Washington for the hearings.

We both had our say on Ervin’s proposed legislation, with Col. Downie bringing to bear his wealth of practical experience. I had more lawyerly suggestions for amending Ervin’s bill to try to correct some problems I foresaw if it became law. Sen. Ervin was having none of my advice on how to rewrite his bill and made sure that he created a record in the hearings that dealt with my points in the event a court ever had to interpret the statute. During the course of Sen. Ervin’s work on the military surveillance hearings, I had the chance to privately chat informally with him in his Senate office.

At the time, I don’t think I’d ever been so struck by a person. I came away feeling I had not only met a friendly, serious, and fair-minded man of purpose, but one with an outsized intellect and an even greater quotient of common sense.

Later in 1974, the Senate Watergate hearings Ervin had chaired the year before finally bore fruit. While Sen. Ervin’s proposed bill regulating surveillance by the military never became law, his adroit conduct of the Watergate hearings ultimately gave him and the country a great victory. Fatally damaged by facts revealed in the Watergate hearings, and facing imminent impeachment and conviction by the Congress, Richard Nixon resigned as President on August 9, 1974.

Also in 1974, Lawrence Baskir, who served as Chief Counsel and Staff Director for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, published an article in the Indiana Law Journal detailing the way in which the Senate hearings on military surveillance had unfolded.

This comprehensive account of the hearings provides a sophisticated look at the work in the Senate. It also provides another reason beyond his performance in the Watergate affair to admire the decency, legislative skills, and political acumen of Sen. Sam Ervin.

Bernardine Dohrn Revisited

The Weather Underground Days of Rage battles with police in Chicago in October 1969 had produced a count of three shot and more than three hundred demonstrators arrested. Ready to plan next steps, Bernardine helped organize a “war council” for the group in Flint, Michigan, at the end of the year. Not surprisingly at this point, the FBI had been able to infiltrate a confidential informant into the proceedings. In remarks attributed to her, Bernardine is said to have made passing reference to the recent Los Angeles murders of movie director Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and four others by cult followers of Charles Manson: “Dig it! First, they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

In a further sign of how far out revolutionary fantasies were becoming, the FBI informant reported on conversations on the need down the road to establish post-revolution reeducation centers in the Southwest when the time came to turn recalcitrant capitalists into right-thinking supporters of the new order.

About the same time the Flint war council was going on, I had the duty as agent for my law school class to solicit my classmate Bernardine for an alumni contribution. Under the circumstances of the day, I’m sure you can appreciate why I thought this was likely a bridge too far. Nonetheless, I dutifully wrote to her at her last known address and made the only argument I thought might elicit a contribution. I told her any amount she could afford would go to buy out the teaching contract of a widely unpopular law professor. My ploy failed when my letter was returned as undeliverable.

I was not the only one trying to get in touch with Bernardine at the time. On March 17, 1970, a federal arrest warrant was issued charging her with interstate flight to avoid prosecution for mob action, riot, and conspiracy. Though FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover put her on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list, Bernardine was nowhere to be found. She had gone to ground.

Though Bernardine was on the lam and out of sight, she made sure the Weather Underground was not completely out of mind. In 1974, she, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones published 40,000 copies of their manifesto, Prairie Fire, so called from Mao Zedong’s revolutionary slogan, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” Distribution was made through college bookstores, left-wing organizations, and similar outlets likely to reach their most sympathetic audience. Prairie Fire laid out the then-radical idea that the underlying principles of the American Revolution were capitalism, racism, sexism, imperialism, and colonialism. It also explained that white supremacy was being perpetuated “by the schools, the unemployment cycle, the drug trade, immigration laws, birth control, the army, the prisons,” and “white-skin privilege.”

With the bombing of government targets a then-failed strategy for the revolution, the new strategy laid out in Prairie Fire was to focus on America’s educational system. The manifesto called on radical teachers to coalesce as an “anti-racist white movement” within the educational system to radicalize other teachers and bring about a completely new educational environment for the students in their charge.

In his book America’s Cultural Revolution, conservative author Christopher Rufo observed that though the Prairie Fire tract didn’t revive the fading New Left in the 1970s:

Over time it would become the entire vocabulary of American intellectual life: “institutionalized racism,” “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “male supremacy,” “institutional sexism,” “cultural identity,” “anti-racism,” “anti-sexist men,” “monopoly capitalism,” “corporate greed,” “neocolonialism,” “Black liberation.”

The next year Bernardine surfaced again, this time as the author of a Weather Underground magazine article “Our Class Struggle.” It was said to be based on a recent speech given to Weather Underground cadres. While some precincts of the New Left had tended by this time to play down some of the traditional communist party rhetoric as beginning to sound out of step and old fashioned, this article was certainly a reversion to the older Marxist-Leninist argot:

We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism. … We must further the study of Marxism-Leninism within the WUO [Weather Underground Organization]. The struggle for Marxism-Leninism is the most significant development in our recent history. … We discovered thru our own experiences what revolutionaries all over the world have found—that Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, our guide to the struggle …

By 1980, Bernardine and her Weather Underground cohort Bill Ayers were raising children and were tired of the underground life. They surrendered. Bernardine pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of aggravated battery and jumping bail but served no time for these offenses. Bill Ayers faced more serious charges, but they were dismissed on grounds of government misconduct.

The later career trajectories of Dohrn and Ayers put truth to the observation made by Paul Buhle, a scholar from the left. In his book Marxism in the United States: “To the question: ‘Where did all the sixties radicals go?,’ the most accurate answer would be: neither to religious cults nor yuppiedom, but to the classroom.”

True to this form, though never admitted to practice law in any state, Bernardine went on to teach in the clinical practice of Northwestern University Law School in Chicago. Bill Ayers went on to teach in the education department of the University of Illinois Chicago. They receded from the public eye for years but roared back into the headlines in 2008 when Barack Obama ran for president, and it was revealed that one of his early backers was Ayers.

Both were retired teachers in spring 2022 when Bernardine unexpectedly turned up with Ayers at the 55th reunion of our University of Chicago Law School’s Class of 1967.

As the frequent emcee of these gatherings over the decades, it fell to me to introduce Bernardine as the main speaker. Bernardine talked about her career at Northwestern law school and then took questions from her classmates.

Still present in the answers to her classmates’ questions was the woman who saw white supremacy and racism as primary causes of her world’s ills.

However, for those classmates paying close attention, there was something new to be heard: hints of misgivings. In a late in life stab at self-abasement, Bernardine even allowed as how perhaps she might have done some things that weren’t “perfect.”

Arrogance and white supremacy?

“I’m saying we were part of the problem. I was, I think, by that arrogance, and by that sense that we could will our way into a changed society. But I also think that the depth and virulence of white supremacy is very much here right, right at our hands.”

Consequences and self-righteousness?

“I was so certain about some things that I forgot to stop and look at what the consequences were of what we were doing. I think we pulled back from the brink. We, you know, that part of the movement. But I think that the cost of self-righteousness is certainly high.”

Risky business and not exactly sorry?

“You know, I made the decision that waking up the American people about particularly the war in Vietnam … But I felt that the other piece about white supremacy wasn’t getting the same amount of attention. … So, we felt that that it was essential to kind of hurl ourselves into solidarity. I’m trying to think of the language that we used and what I felt at the time. And in a way, I’m not exactly sorry for that. I think that we were lucky. We tried to be very careful. We didn’t kill anyone, but what we did was dangerous. I don’t know what other word to use for it. We worked very hard to make it about property damage, and kind of a scream and wake-up to what was happening, but not to hurt anyone. And you know, I realized as an old lady how risky that was. And I don’t claim that it was even the perfect thing to do, just saying what we thought we were doing.”

It has been 60 years since Bernardine Dohrn and I entered the University of Chicago Law school in 1964. Most law school students by the time they graduate understand that one role of lawyers in society is to serve as conflict resolution professionals helping to work through human disagreements peacefully within a system of laws. In an unusual way after law school, Bernardine took the opposite path and became a prominent instigator of broadly based social violence aimed at destroying our democracy and replacing it with an authoritarian Marxist state.

In her answers to the questions of her reunion classmates, she couldn’t seem to bring herself even to clearly acknowledge that the bombing of Congress, and police stations was wrong. Bernardine explains in justification of her actions, that you had to understand there was a war going on she didn’t agree with, and “white supremacy” was afoot. The most she can say as to the error of her ways is that she doesn’t claim that what she did was “even the perfect thing.” She also goes so far as to say she participated in “risky business,” but “I’m not exactly sorry for that,” and  “we didn’t kill anyone.”

In her middle and later years, Bernardine worked in a more productive way by engaging with young people involved in the criminal justice system. Fair enough, but for me it didn’t reset the scales in my opinion of her earlier political radicalism. I believe her life of violence in the 1960s and ‘70s badly damaged the country at the time, and that some of the scars of her excesses are present with us still.

Lunch with Gen. William Westmoreland

In June 1968, while I was in basic training, Gen. William Westmoreland had been kicked upstairs by President Johnson. He was promoted out of his job as commander of our troops in Vietnam and into the job of heading up the Army as its Chief of Staff. I was once in a meeting with him and others at the Pentagon when it was thought a question might be asked about the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System.

I was off the hook and the only topic I remember being discussed that day was the M16 rifle. At Fort Leonard Wood, I had been trained to use the M14, though the more modern M16 had been in use in Vietnam for some years by that time. All I remember of the discussion between Westmoreland and the others present was what an advance it was to put a handle on the M16 to make it easier to carry than the M14. This topic of the day may have related to the official designation in 1969 of the M16A to replace the M14 as the U.S. military’s standard service rifle.

It wasn’t until both Westmoreland and I had retired from the Army that I ran across him again. In 1985, I was General Counsel of United Press International. UPI had just moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C. from Nashville, but I was commuting frequently from our home in Nashville to the nation’s capital. This commute was the product of UPI filing for bankruptcy in the District’s Prettyman federal courthouse. On one of my trips to Washington for UPI, I arranged to have lunch at the Hilton downtown with a newspaper reporter friend from Chicago, Eleanor Randolph. She had left the Chicago Tribune and was then working for the Washington Post. We had started our lunch in the Hilton’s dining room when I noticed Gen. Westmoreland come into the room by himself. He was waiting to be seated by the maître d’. Eleanor immediately said she was going to ask him to join us.

I thought that more than a little presumptuous on her part, but as she got up to retrieve him, she mentioned that she knew him because she had covered his recently concluded libel trial against CBS in New York.

In 1982, CBS had run a documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception. Westmoreland had sued CBS for $120 million for libeling him. His claim was that CBS had falsely said that he had misrepresented to his superiors intelligence estimates of enemy strength for political reasons. Like many others, I had been following the trial and was aware that the lawsuit had just been settled. Gen. Westmoreland had decided abruptly to end the case after 18 weeks, immediately before it was to go to the jury. I was also aware of the fact one of the key witnesses against him had been his former intelligence chief in Vietnam, Gen. Joseph A. McChristian. This was the same Joseph McChristian whom I worked under when he served as Westmoreland’s intelligence chief at the Pentagon. They may have worked closely together for years, but I’m sure there was no lost love between them as a result of McChristian’s damaging trial testimony.

All and all, it was certainly the most interesting lunch conversation I had in all my time at UPI. We discussed current events, the trial, and Army matters. It appeared to me that Westmoreland must have thought he had gotten fair treatment from the stories Eleanor had filed from New York for the Washington Post. From their engagement, an onlooker might even have thought they were real friends, instead of former business acquaintances who were friendly, but still somewhat wary of one other.

As for me, I didn’t miss the opportunity to mention to Westmoreland that I had worked under McChristian. Given the obvious touchiness of the subject, however, I saw no reason to probe into the details of their relationship over the years, as much as it would have interested me to hear his answers. Westmoreland died 20 years after that lunch, in 2005, and Eleanor moved on from the Washington Post to The New York Times, serving for a time on its Editorial Board.