Frank J. Rafalko - MH/CHAOS: The CIAs Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers

MH/CHAOS: The CIAs Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "MH/CHAOS: The CIAs Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...108

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

One of my close friends, knowing of my involvement in CIAs counterintelligence (CI) staff s Special Operations Group (SOG) that had responsibility for the MHCHAOS program (Comment: common usage by the CIA rendered the name of this operation as MHCHAOS), urged me to write this book. He said it was important because I was there and could provide a different perspective from historians writing on the same subject from the outside looking in. It would also serve as a counterpoint to the congressional committees and the Rockefeller Commission, which launched investigations into our activities. I had always been concerned that not one of these investigations gave the American people the entire story.

As a history major at Mount St. Marys College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, I never contemplated a career in intelligence, although my roommate during junior and senior year, Dennis Votral, talked about being a spy. I dont think he ever applied, but he went to work for Potomac Edison in their human resources department.

Prior to my service in SOG I had been exposed to radical America. Little did I know at the time that I would be heavily involved in a program to collect information on American leftists and black militants that had and/or maintained contact with foreign revolutionaries, intelligence services, and terrorist organizations.

My first encounter with anti-war resistance was when my college classmate Robert Bob Osborne and I traveled to Washington, D.C., to do some barhopping. We ended up at a crowded and boisterous bar on 14th Street. We were drinking beers when a young man in his mid-twenties approached our table. He asked if he could buy us a roundnow what college student in his right mind refuses a free drink? He got the beers and sat at our table chatting for over thirty minutes. He did the talking, all of it forgettable. Obviously we were not the best company because he suddenly left us and the bar.

No sooner did he leave than another older man approached us. This fellow, while trying to be somewhat friendly, was all business. He identified himself as Army intelligence and wanted to know what our former companion talked about. He was particularly interested in any discussion of resistance to the military draft. Bob and I collectively told him to buzz off.

For Bob, it was an act of defiance since he was very liberal in his outlook. He was an American but lived in Brussels and was somewhat European in his manners, speech, and non-conventional mindset. I had no interest at the time in the war or antiwar movement. I am convinced that our beer-buying buddy was trying to lose his Army intelligence surveillant by transferring the focus to us.

My second encounter was in the fall of 1965 when I was attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. The most electrifying activity on campus was opposition to the Vietnam War by radical new left and young Communist Party activists. Each day at noon, members of these groups would take to the microphone on the steps of Sproul Hall to denounce the war, the president, and the U.S. military. Sproul Hall was opposite the King Student Union, which housed the Golden Bear Restaurant area, and many students sat along the retaining walls or at the outside tables, eating their lunch and watching the comic-tragic opera taking place on the steps.

The speakers appeared to be the same day in and day out because they listed themselves as members of the various radical groups and spoke under the banner of these groups as a way to bypass the universitys rule that did not allow any organization to dominate the noon rallies. Students were also given permission to set up tables near Sather Gate. I remember walking along the row of card tables with signs like: Bay Area Anti-War Coalition, Young Socialist Alliance, Marxist-Leninist Group, and other radical, left-wing groups, ad nauseam.

My next encounter was on a Friday, 16 October 1965 to be exact. I was sitting in the living room of the house where I was living when another graduate student, Niles Walton, came in and asked if I wanted to take a ride to see the confrontation between the antiwar protestors and the Oakland police. The antiVietnam War groups had organized the International Days of Protest, which included a half-day teach-in on the campus and a march from the university down Telegraph Avenue to the Oakland Army Terminal, which was the major port for supplies going to American troops in Vietnam. The protestors goal was to block the road leading into the terminal.

We hopped on Niles motorcycle and reached the dividing line between Berkeley and Oakland before the protestors. Needless to say, other people had the same idea and all of us were occupying the intersection. On the Oakland side stood the riot police decked out in riot gear with their body shields and batons ready to do battle. The city of Oakland had denied the marchers request for a parade permit, and it was incredibly obvious that the police were prepared to enforce the law and crack some heads.

They didnt get the chance. As the front echelon of the estimated ten thousand protestors arrived, they soon discovered that spectators were standing between them and the police. There was no way the protestors could get near the police line without causing mass confusion and a disruption in the march. Each marcher had to face the prospect of nudging his or her way through the mass of humanity, and in so doing becoming a protest march of one versus thousands. Seeing the situation, the protest leaders held a quick get-together to decide their next step.

Any thought of trying to march through the crowd to confront the police was quickly ruled out, because the police would make quick work of any protestors reaching them in small contingents. I dont think the leaders wanted to be the first victims of falling police batons. The leaders discussed making a detour to the next block to skirt the police and the spectators, but the thought of moving that large a crowd in an orderly manner was inconceivable. In the end, sanity prevailed and the protest leaders called the march off and rescheduled it for the next day at noon.

High noon on Saturday arrived, but fewer than one hundred protestors showed up. It was homecoming day for the university football team, and many of the students who were willing to take an evening stroll to the Oakland Army Terminal the night before abandoned the idea in favor of going to the game. The Oakland police had no trouble blocking the marchers, and the march itself became a small footnote in the antiwar movement.

The antiwar movement made the times exciting at Berkeley. One of my friends, Willard Burke Murray, lived in an apartment several blocks away, which he shared with a student involved in the antiwar movement. One day he dropped by for a visit to say he had to leave his apartment because he couldnt stand listening any further to his roommate and his friends discuss an upcoming confrontation with the police. Burke said they had several boxes containing gas masks, which they were going to distribute before battling with the police. I remember Burke calling them nut cases.

The final incident occurred in the spring of 1966 when my wife and I moved to an apartment in Berkeley. One night I awoke because of a loud noise, which rattled the windows. California is noted for earthquakes and I had experienced a few. I thought perhaps another minor quake had struck somewhere. The next day I discovered that a bomb had exploded prematurely in an apartment around the corner from us. The radicals making the bomb were killed. It was never discovered what or who was the intended target.

Next page

1234567...108

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «MH/CHAOS: The CIAs Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers»

Look at similar books to MH/CHAOS: The CIAs Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Nan Levinson

War is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built

Paul Lauter

Our Sixties: An Activists History

Caitriona Beaumont

Housewives and citizens: Domesticity and the women’s movement in England, 1928–64 (Gender in History)

Daniel Levitas

The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right

David L. Parsons

Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era

E.R. Bills

The San Marcos 10: An Antiwar Protest in Texas

Julie Phillips

The Writers Group Handbook: Getting the Best for and from Your Writing Group

Potash

Drugs as Weapons Against Us: the CIAs Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Leftists

Walzer

A Foreign Policy for the Left

Israel

Kill for peace: American artists against the Vietnam War

Rickey Vincent

Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music

Michael Walzer

A Foreign Policy for the Left

Discussion, reviews of the book MH/CHAOS: The CIAs Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.