TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/70s/70cults

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Terrorists and Cults

  [Disaffected and dissident groups in the U.S. had learned from the
civil rights movement how to organize and how to exploit the media to
gain exposure and redress of their grievances or even to bring about
changes in the law and society. But in the 1970s those groups tended
to fracture into splinters of the radical right, left and even
religious persuasions. Some were utopian and pacific, but others were
subversive and revolutionary, embracing violence, often random and
directed at innocent bystanders, to call attention to their causes.]


                                                     (March 23, 1970)

Only nine months ago, the National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence was able to report that the U.S. "has
experienced almost none of the chronic revolutionary conspiracy and
terrorism that plagues dozens of other nations." For many decades, the
specter of the political bomber has been as alien and anachronistic as
the caricature of the bearded anarchist heaving a bomb the size and
shape of a bowling ball. Last week that specter took on ominous
substance as the nation was shaken by a series of bombings that
highlighted a fearsome new brand of terrorism.

  Taking their cue from right-wing racists who used to keep blacks
down with TNT, whites and blacks of the lunatic left have begun using
explosives to produce sound effects and shock waves in their campaign
to unnerve a society that they regard as corrupt and doomed. Schools,
department stores, office buildings, police stations, military
facilities, private homes--all have become targets. So far,
miraculously, fatalities have been relatively few. One small slip,
however--or one bloodthirsty bomber--could run up a death toll that
could easily rival a week's total in Viet Nam. If the bomb threat
continues, that is almost certain to occur.

  How slight is the margin of error has been demonstrated by the most
recent bomb episode. Two weeks ago, three explosions destroyed an
elegant town house (owned by Businessman James Platt Wilkerson) on
Greenwich Village's West 11th Street. Wilkerson's daughter Cathlyn,
25, and an unidentified young woman emerged dazed and trembling from
the crumbling, burning ruins. The pair disappeared before police came.

  In the ruins, police found 60 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting caps
and four dynamite-packed pipes wrapped with heavy nails that could act
as flesh-shredding shrapnel. They also found the body of Theodore
Gold, 23, and the unidentified remains of two other persons. A credit
card belonging to Kathy Boudin, 26, who may have been the person with
Cathlyn, also turned up in the debris. Gold and the girls were all
members of the violent Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic
Society. Police speculated that, while Wilkerson and his wife were
vacationing in the Caribbean, the amateurs had turned the basement
into a bomb factory.

  As demolition experts continued to probe the 11th Street wreckage
for more explosives--and perhaps more bodies--bombs exploded at the
Manhattan headquarters of Mobil Oil, IBM and General Telephone and
Electronics. An organization that styled itself "Revolutionary Force
9" claimed responsibility. No one was hurt in the early-morning
blasts, which were strikingly similar to three blasts in several New
York office buildings last Nov. 11, but during the following two days
news of the explosions triggered an outbreak of more than 600 phony
bomb scares in a jittery New York. Three Molotov cocktails exploded in
a Manhattan high school. There were scattered bomb threats elsewhere
in the country, even at the Justice Department in Washington. One of
them obliged Secretary of State William Rogers to leave his office.

  Young people have plenty of examples of glamorous, if not always
successful revolutionaries: the Stern Gang, the Irish Republican Army,
Algeria's National Liberation Front, Che Guevara. Cops in San
Francisco and New York City both say that the movie The Battle of
Algiers has influenced much of the bombing surge. It centers on the
moral dilemma of killing innocent people in the cause of revolution.

  In the name of their own vision of utopia, the bombers blithely
risk the lives of the people to whom, they say, they would give power.
There is no doubt that determined terrorists can blow up property,
people and a community's equilibrium. But in a nation where the
overwhelming majority favor either the status quo or orderly reform in
the liberal tradition, mindless acts of violence by a self-appointed
revolutionary elite only harden resistance to legitimate, necessary
change.


  [One such underground group leaped into the headlines and onto TV
news shows in 1974 by means of violence against an innocent: Patricia
Hearst, an heiress of the publishing fiefdom, whose kidnaping, later
exploits as an ostensible terrorist, and long sojourn in the radical
underground fascinated Americans for the best part of two years.]

                                                  (February 18, 1974)

  Three months ago, not even police undercover agents in San
Francisco had heard of a terrorist outfit called the Symbionese
Liberation Army. Now, the bizarrely named group has burst into
prominence across the U.S. by convincingly claiming responsibility for
two spectacular crimes in the Bay Area.

  The first was the November murder of Marcus Foster, the black
superintendent of Oakland's public schools. After Foster was gunned
down in a darkened parking lot, the S.L.A. issued "Communique No. 1,"
taking credit for the gangland-style execution.

  Last week the S.L.A. sent out another communique boasting of a
second major crime and backed up its claim with a persuasive piece of
evidence. Enclosed in an S.L.A. message mailed to a Berkeley radio
station was a Mobil Oil Co. credit card issued to Randolph A. Hearst,
58, chairman of the board of Hearst Corp. and the youngest son of
Founder William Randolph Hearst. Sixty hours earlier Hearst's daughter
Patricia, 19, a sophomore at the University of California at Berkeley,
had been dragged screaming from her off-campus apartment and driven
off by kidnapers.


                                                     (April 15, 1974)

  The Polaroid color photograph might have been the cover of a
paperback thriller--or a recruiting poster for the revolutionary left.
But the comely, wholesome-looking girl holding a submachine gun was
Patricia Hearst, and an accompanying tape recording of her voice
carried a bizarre message: Patty, 20, had decided to forsake her
millionaire parents and join the fanatics who kidnaped her two months
ago.

  "I have been given the choice of being released in a safe area, or
joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for
my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people," Patty announced.
"I have chosen to stay and fight."

  Patty's statement came just when the bewildering series of events
surrounding her abduction in Berkeley, Calif., seemed to be moving
toward a happy conclusion. At the direction of the S.L.A., the Hearst
family and the Hearst Foundation (which supports medical charities)
had given $2 million worth of food to the needy in the San Francisco
Bay area. Though Patty insisted on the tape that she had not been
"brainwashed, drugged, tortured, hypnotized or in any way confused,"
her stunned parents refused to believe that she had not been coerced
into siding with the S.L.A.


                                                     (April 29, 1974)

  The robbers--a black man and four white women--strode swiftly into
the Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco's Sunset district, pulling
out semi-automatic carbines from under their long black coats.

  That surreal scene, captured on film by the bank's automatic
cameras, was the Symbionese Liberation Army's way of introducing
Patricia Campbell Hearst, 20, to the world in their role for her as an
armed terrorist. To investigators, the robbery had all the earmarks of
a macabre publicity stunt, staged principally to demonstrate that the
S.L.A. has tightened its grip on the millionaire's daughter. Said one
federal law enforcement official: "The S.L.A. feeds on publicity, and
its appetite is enormous."


                                                       (May 27, 1974)

  Like some macabre fulfillment of McLuhanism, the bloodiest and most
suspenseful act in the tragedy of Patricia Campbell Hearst became a
public event. Millions of Americans watched last week as television
carried live the shootout in a Los Angeles residential neighborhood
between lawmen and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The TV
images seemed plucked from old Viet Nam film clips; street fighting in
Danang perhaps, the helicopters wheeling overhead, the hissing
tear-gas canisters, finally the flames of the enemy's hideout leaping
into the suddenly hushed twilight. But the reality was that Patty
Hearst might well be in the flames, and the most stricken of all the
electronic witnesses was the Hearst family, watching 350 miles away in
a suburb of San Francisco.

  So charred were the five bodies brought out of the ruins of the
house that it was almost a full day before the family's agony was, in
a measure, eased. Patty Hearst was not among them.


                                                 (September 29, 1975)

  The evidence was fragmentary and scattered and painfully hard to
gather, but slowly it accumulated-a red Volkswagon camper, a
fingerprint discovered at a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, a post office
box in San Francisco. Suddenly last week the bits fitted into a
pattern. When they did, an FBI agent and a policeman climbed
stealthily up the back stairs to the top-floor apartment of the modest
house on the edge of San Francisco. They knocked, and the door swung
open. Standing in the room was the thin, pale young woman. "Don't
shoot," said Patty Hearst. "I'll go with you."

  That quiet drama ended a 19 1/2-month chase-one of the longest and
most intensive in U.S. history-and climaxed a bizarre odyssey that had
a special and disturbing fascination for Americans. They had been
appalled by the violence of the whole affair. With some apprehension,
parents debated just why Patty, the heiress to a celebrated fortune,
had become a self-proclaimed revolutionary.

  Captured along with Patty was her close companion, Wendy Yoshimura,
32. An hour earlier, outside an old white two-story house three miles
away, the FBI had arrested two of Patty's other friends: robust
William Harris, 30, and his wan and tired wife, Emily, 28. All four
were comrades-in-arms in the explosive and tiny cult of
revolutionaries who grandiosely called themselves the Symbionese
Liberation Army. With the arrests, said the FBI, the S.L.A. had ceased
to exist.


  [Religious cults were a deeply controversial phenomenon of the 1970s.
Their secretive, tightly run, all-embracing societies and their
charismatic leaders attracted disaffected young people seeking a less
materialistic way of life, turning them against their families, friends
and former pursuits and, many believe, "brainwashing" them. The
terrible power of such leaders and groups was demonstrated in 1979 by
the tragedy of Jonestown, an American religious colony hewn out of the
jungles of Guyana, a country on the north coast of South America.
There death became the ultimate publicity stunt of its crazed and
mysterious leader, the Rev. Jim Jones.]

                                                   (December 4, 1978)

  "The large central building was ringed by bright colors. It looked
like a parking lot filled with cars. When the plane dipped lower, the
cars turned out to be bodies-hundreds of bodies-wearing red dresses,
blue T-shirts, green blouses, pink slacks, children's polka-dotted
jumpers. Couples with their arms around each other, children holding
parents. Nothing moved. Washing hung on the clotheslines. The fields
were freshly plowed. Banana trees and grape vines were flourishing.
But nothing moved."

  So reported TIME Correspondent Donald Neff, one of the first
newsmen to fly in last week to the hitherto obscure hamlet of
Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana, on the northern coast of South
America. The scene below him was one of almost unimaginable carnage.
In an appalling demonstration of the way in which a charismatic leader
can bend the minds of his followers with a devilish blend of professed
altruism and psychological tyranny, some 900 members of the
California-based Peoples Temple died in a self-imposed ritual of mass
suicide and murder.

  Not since hundreds of Japanese civilians leaped to their deaths off
the cliffs of Saipan as American forces approached the Pacific island
in World War II had there been a comparable act of collective
self-destruction. The followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, a once
respected Indiana-born humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and
paranoia, had first ambushed a party of visiting Americans, killing
California Congressman Leo Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector
from their heavily guarded colony at Jonestown. Then, exhorted by
their leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives
and painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a
concoction of potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the
tongues of babies. The adults and older children picked up paper cups
and sipped the same deadly poison sweetened by purple Kool-Aid.