Infiltrating the Underground

After years of burrowing, FBI moles get their radicals

Ralph and Dick knew their stuff. Avid readers of Marx and Mao, Lenin and Trotsky, they impressed Clayton Van Lydegraf with their grasp of revolutionary ideology. Lydegraf, 62, a Communist Party member since the 1930s, had founded the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in San Francisco. Its aim: to serve as a recruiter and support organization for the Weather Underground, the supersecret group that was formed from,the most extreme elements of the '60s antiwar movement and is bent on fomenting violent revolution in the U.S. Though the Weather Underground is estimated to have only a few dozen hard-core members, it is widely believed to have been behind the bombings of the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and the Gulf Oil headquarters in Pittsburgh in 1974, among other criminal acts.

Dick joined the radicals in 1970; three years later Ralph went underground too. Last April, Van Lydegraf asked his two faithful followers if they wanted to work with the clandestine Revolutionary Committee, a Los Angeles-based feminist faction of the Weather Underground that was looking for new members, especially people who knew about firearms. Ralph's purported experience in the military and Dick's in armed crime made them perfect candidates.

The Revolutionary Committee had a problem: the two men were the first FBI agents ever to penetrate the dark and harsh world of the Weather Underground. Ralph, actually Agent Richard J. Gianotti, and Dick, Agent William D. Reagan, lost their cover in November when federal judges needed their testimony to issue warrants for the arrest of Van Lydegraf and four Weather people, the biggest roundup of the group ever made. The Government contends that the five aimed to bomb the office of California State Senator John V. Briggs, a conservative Republican who hopes to run for Governor on a strong stand against homosexual rights.

Besides Van Lydegraf, the arrested radicals were:

Judith ("Josie") Bissell, 33, whose husband Silas is a descendant of the carpet-cleaner family. She graduated with a degree in fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and was arrested with Silas in 1970 on charges of planting a Molotov cocktail at the University of Washington Air Force ROTC building. Silas' whereabouts are still unknown.

Leslie Ann ("Esther") Mullin, 33, daughter of a retired Air Force colonel. She was a Peace Corps member in Africa after attending the University of Washington, where she was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society.

Michael Justesen, 27, also in S.D.S. at the University of Washington. He was arrested on charges of conspiring to destroy government property during a Seattle demonstration in 1970 but had skipped before the trial.

Marc Perry, 29, formerly a top prelaw student at the University of Washington. He was arrested for aggravated assault at a Weatherman rally in Chicago in 1969 and has been on the lam ever since.

Reagan and Gianotti met with the group a couple of times a week at local restaurants for discussions of how the works of Communist thinkers could be applied to their own goals. Often the group would take 50 pages of Mao's On Protracted War and explicate it line by line.

The two "moles" (spy jargon for longtime double agents) quickly learned that Josie Bissell and Esther Mullin had other prophets, among them Kate Millett and Betty Friedan. Indeed, the Revolutionary Committee had formed as a separate faction because Bissell and Mullin found too much "male supremacy" in the Weather Underground. The women refused any special treatment from the men and forbade them to use such words as bitchy, ballsy or aggressive when talking about women. They also never wore dresses or makeup, except as disguises, condemning them as symbols of male exploitation that were also out of keeping with Mao's dictum of depersonalization. The four lived in the Echo Park-Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, a pleasant older part of the city. Bissell and Perry shared an apartment, while Justesen and Mullin lived together in a small, old house nearby.

The women claimed to have been involved in many bombings and said they knew how to build explosive devices but needed help on firearms. Within two weeks of meeting the agents, they asked for weapons training and were taken by Ralph to the Mojave Desert, near Barstow, Calif. They used various rifles and handguns in target practice, but never became good shots. Ralph made sure their lessons were models of misdirection.

The revolutionaries held regular jobs. Josie Bissell was a nurse's aide, while Michael Justesen worked as a pressman at a lithography firm. To avoid detection, the group scheduled all meetings with Ralph and Dick by calling them at predesignated phone booths. The radicals never went to any political demonstrations for fear of being spotted by lawmen. When driving in cars, they always monitored police radios. The fugitives among them went out only at night. None had any contact with their families. All had aliases and would change them as often as once a week, but they never used counterfeit forms of identification. Instead, they got genuine driver's licenses and other documents from sympathizers within governmental agencies.

The undercover men also had let their hair and beards grow long and scraggly. They dressed shabbily and took on menial jobs-yard work, house painting, truck loading-that did not demand Social Security cards, driver's licenses or other forms of identification that could have been traced by the militants' friends.

While Reagan and Gianotti were moles, they were debriefed once a week by another agent dressed in street people's sloppy garb and then would dictate a long report to an FBI stenographer. After the arrests were made, they at first wanted to keep their cover, but now, after a month of enjoying the real world again, they are happy to be in from the cold.

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