 So good afternoon and welcome to New America. Thank you all for coming to our session, which is tonight we bomb the U.S. Capitol, the explosive story of M-19, America's first female terrorist group. My name is Melissa Sallick-Furk. I'm a senior policy analyst with New America's International Security Program. For those of you new to New America, we are a think and action tank, a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum. The International Security Program aims to provide evidence-based analysis of some of the toughest security challenges facing American policy makers and the public. From homegrown American terrorism to the United States drone wars abroad and the proliferation of drones around the world to the profound changes in warfare brought by new technology and societal changes. I'd like to introduce you to our two panelists this afternoon, Dr. William Rosenau and Peter Bergen. William Rosenau is author of Tonight We Bomb the U.S. Capitol, the explosive story of M-19, America's first female terrorist group, fellow with New America's International Security Program and a senior research scientist at CNA who has worked with Rand Corporation as a counterterrorism advisor at the State Department and as a staffer on the U.S. Senate Terrorism Subcommittee. He has also worked as an analyst at the National Security Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Peter Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, vice president for global studies and fellows at New America, CNN national security analyst and professor of practice at Arizona State University where he co-directs the Center on the Future of War. He is the chairman of the board of the Global Soft Foundation and is also on the board of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for Americans who are being held hostage and for journalists in conflict zones. This afternoon we'll get a comprehensive overview of how the leftist M-19 made its mark in U.S. history by waging war against its perceptions of American imperialism, its plan of approach with its attacks and insights into the group and we'll save the last 30 minutes or so for audience questions. And please also remember to join the conversation online using hashtag M-19 story and following at New America ISP. Thank you. So with that said, let's jump right in. And Bill, in your book introduction, you write, quote, M-19 was unique unlike any other American terrorist group before or since. M-19 was created and led by women. Women picked the targets, women did the planning and women made and planted the bombs. They'd created a new sisterhood of the bomb and gun and to outsiders these people must have seen like ideological robots programmed for permanent rebellion. M-19 certainly didn't see itself that way. So to open from your perspective, how did M-19 see itself and what inspired your research and book? Well, first of all, thank you very much, Melissa. Forgive my cold here. It's great to be here. They saw their mission as really a continuation of a anti-imperialist struggle that had been going on since the 1960s. Many of them had come out of the weather underground. And we can talk a little bit more about that later. That was important. But first and foremost, they saw themselves as fighting on behalf of other, of third world liberation forces. And their job, as they saw it, was to operate within the belly of the beast, the term they used to describe the United States. And to support through violence primarily, mostly symbolic attacks, groups in Central America fighting the United States, supporting Middle Eastern groups, opposing the invasion of Grenada. So they really saw themselves as the support structure, the violent support structure for these global movements around the globe. But they also saw the United States as having its own colonies, its own internal colonies, Indian reservations, what we used to call ghettos, and also, very importantly, Puerto Rico. So Puerto Rican liberation, despite the fact that, of course, 99% of the people in Puerto Rico then is now, don't really wanna be part of the United States, or don't wanna be independent, they were the real, the FALN, no question, they were an insurgency, a terrorist group, very capable, quite lethal. And they saw, the May 19th women definitely saw them as allies and did whatever they could to assist them, including helping their chief bomb maker escape from prison, and maybe we can talk about the Willie Morales escape later on. And what inspired the research, what drew you to them? I guess what inspired me was, well, when I was at RAND, working as a terrorism researcher, I came across references to this group, but they were always sort of very fleeting, and oh yeah, there was this basically little group of crazies and they had been members of the weather underground, and it was mostly women and blah, blah, blah, then it would sort of trail off, which was really a puzzle to me. Now, it may have been a reflection of the time, so not much had been written between 1985 when the group essentially disappeared, although I will add that two of its most important members are still at large, so please check your FBI website. There's a couple of wanted posters that spell out the terms of the rewards, but I think they were just seen as, oh, just the sort of epiphenomenon, they were just the tail end of something they weren't important, but then starting to delve in a little more deeply, I thought, well, it was founded and created by women. That in and of itself is interesting and unique. It's not to say that women haven't been involved in terrorism before. I mean, the Red Army faction, Palestinian groups, all had women in important positions, but this was one that a group is actually founded by women, and actually, as you said in your introduction, and actually led by women, so I found that gap really puzzling, so I started following, and it really began with the Freedom of Information Act, and the FBI and other government agencies sometimes get a bad rap for their non-responsiveness to FOIA requests, and that's often justified, but for some reason, I lucked out and I got in good with the FOIA officer at the FBI, and she guided me along the way and said, well, you might wanna request this and don't worry about that, and these are the type groups of files, and so I got, I don't know, how many thousands of pages of FBI, mostly formally secret case files, so the real, with a lot of redactions, of course, and names of people, but I could figure out who a lot of those people were, but incredible details, not just about the FBI's methods, but also about the group, its dynamics, its MO, its use of explosives, all this, I mean, I couldn't have done the book without it, so that was a big, when I started to get that stuff in, I knew where I was on to something. And so you mentioned Weather Underground, you mentioned all these pages that you found through these FOIA requests, through some of that research, did you find that there were any common threads with the members, or Weather Underground's one piece of it, but also anything, like personal things that happened in their lives, or how they came together? Yeah, I mean, we were talking about this backstage a little while ago. It's, they really were a group of friends, or a group of guys, as more Sagemen term them, I mean, they all knew each other, back from other students who were democratic society, or from the Weather Underground itself. They had cross paths many times before. There was one guy who was named Tim Blunk, who was kind of recruited from the outside, but he was well known to Susan Rosenberg, who's a prominent figure in my book, from something called the John Brown Anti-Clan Committee, which, as the name suggested, Anti-Clan Group, an early version of Antifa, by the way, they would confront clansmen, you know, sometimes violently in an attempt to shut them down. But there was a chapter in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Susan Rosenberg happened to be living, and she met through the group, this guy, Tim Blunk, so a very small network, but people who had been through a lot together, going back to the, you know, really the civil rights movement in the 1960s. So they certainly had that in common. In terms of their personalities, this is always, you know, this is an endlessly discussed subject in the field, if we can call it that, of terrorism studies. It's like, is there a terrorist personality? Well, I think there's a consensus now, there's no such thing as a terrorist personality. There weren't any obvious defects in their upbringing, or anything that would suggest they might embark on a career in violent extremism. I mean, one of the characters, Marilyn Buck, her father, she was from Austin, Texas. Her father was an Episcopal priest. He was a civil rights activist, got his church taken away. He was a veterinarian turned Episcopal priest, and then he had to go back to veterinary work after he got kicked out of the church, weighed 350 pounds, not that that means anything, but and more sandals. In Austin, Texas, in the early 1960s, that he cut quite a figure. Susan Rosenberg, you know, lived on the Upper West Side. Prosperous parents, went to private school, went to Barnard, all of these people had, they had loving families. All the evidence suggests completely normal upbringing. So there's really no, there's nothing to suggest in their personalities, right? Or even in their life stories, because they shared life stories with lots of other people who were active in the civil rights movement, or even the weather underground who decided not to continue the armed struggle. That's definitely helpful. I think another thing I wanna pull out from your book that helps to really kind of paint a picture of what their mission was, was this idea of creating utopia. And something you write is their vision of what this heaven on earth would look like was hazy, but one thing was certain, creating it would require nothing less than violent revolution. And I thought that that was really a point to highlight, just because it meant they had to do something that required violence to get to where they wanted. So they didn't start with bombs and guns though, so I'm curious from what you've researched, what was the impetus to turn to violence and then what you refer to as their eventual moral disengagement? Yeah, if I could just talk about the utopianism first, and this is something that they, May 19th shares, I think, with every terrorist group. I mean, certainly the jihadist groups like Cendero, Limonoso, and Peru, I could go on and on. Or even the provisional IRA in its day. We're working toward this utopia, we're working for these golden end times. But what those actually look like? I mean, for example, with the Islamic State, what would the running of the state be like? What would the day-to-day reality of that be like? Well, the Islamic State didn't spend a lot of time sitting around talking about that. I mean, they did some of those things in very unfortunate ways, but it's always what J. Boyer Bell, the late terrorism researcher, much neglected, but a brilliant pioneer in this field. It's about the dream. It's about the eternal dream. It's about struggling for the dream. It's not even reaching the goal, which probably isn't gonna happen in their lifetimes when they know that. But that process of struggle, of armed struggle, is the real motivator. That's what gets them going. That's a value in and of itself. And also, I think, for these women and many other terrorists, they're saying to the world, yes, there is resistance. They are symbols of resistance. They are resisting actively the American or Zionist or whatever Leviathan. And that has intrinsic value. And that's why, and I talk about in the book, they feel as though they have to maintain this violent presence. Because if you're not bombing or shooting, you're not doing anything. You're sitting around yacking. So to be viable, you have to keep acting. And the second part of your question, I'm sorry. So what was the impetus to turn to violence? Yeah, I think it was, well, I think just, and Peter, correct me if I'm wrong. I think just about every terrorist group views itself as being on the defensive. They see themselves not as victims, but as people who are under assault by the state, by the forces of heresy, apostasy, communism, capitalism, whatever. And these are also, so violence is necessary, not just to advance the cause, but to defend the people. Right? That that's the only currency that the state understands is violence. And you saw this definitely in the weather underground, the precursor of this group, where they just said, look, this is the height of the anti-war movement. We've done everything. We've protested peacefully. We've had civil disobedience. We've burned our draft cards and Kent State goes on. The expansion of the war into Cambodia goes on. We've done everything. The only thing we have left is violence. That makes sense. I think also kind of talking further about that, I'm curious from both of your perspectives how influential you think the 1970s terrorism tactics globally were in pushing M19's mission forward or helping them to decide how they wanted to take their approach once they formed. I think there was, they certainly took inspiration from other terrorist groups, contemporaneous terrorist groups, particularly the Europeans, but also the Palestinians who had enormous prestige in the world of violent extremism and not even extremism. I mean, they were seeing, I mean, Palestinians, Bruce Hoffman makes the argument, basically invented modern terrorism, the idea of conducting terrorist operations outside your traditional theater of operations. They had enormous prestige. And also, at the same time, you had these other European contemporaneous groups. So you had the Red Army faction. You had Axion Direct. You had the Red Brigades. And these are literally operating at the same time as the Weather Underground and later May 19th. So literally, and similarly small, I mean, I think the RAF in the 80s maybe had two dozen members at the most. And so that, there was a, people call it the generation of 68, but this kind of went on beyond 1968 into the 1980s. And it's interesting, one of the FBI files, they talk about apparent visits to the United States by members of the RAF to meet the May 19th women. And the RAF being very rigorous, Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, although their ideology gets incredibly obscure, if not impenetrable. They came over and had these sections, apparently with some May 19th members. And the Germans came away very unimpressed with the command of the sacred texts that the women had. They didn't think they were sufficiently rigorous. And I'm not drawing any national stereotypes, but the Germans a certain way of doing things. And yeah, so they were underwhelmed, but the women certainly held the RAF in a high regard. Why did this all burn out? Why did May 19th burn out? And why did, I mean, this whole generation that you mentioned, the Red Army faction, bottom mine half, Brigadier Rossi, I mean, it all kind of flamed out roughly at the same time or not? Roughly the same time. I think, I mean, they were at their, sort of the Europeans were probably at their height in the 70s. But, you know, different factors in different countries. I mean, you had the repentance laws in past, in Italy that basically made it much easier for people to exit the red brigades. You had, the Germans had developed very effective counterterrorism forces, very what we would, I don't know what we call them, but sort of, what's that maximum security prison? Supermax. They had developed supermax prisons, very harsh regimes. They really worked hard to bring down the RAF and were effective. And I think also with these groups, they became, and this is true of May 19th, they became totally estranged from even what was left of the extreme left. I mean, the RAF was hated by the far left in Germany. They were seen as absolute freaks. And similarly, and it's funny you read these letters, the May 19th people are complaining about the fact that their supposed comrades in other movements aren't paying them any attention. Now this is into the second Reagan administration and there are probably other things to worry about. Than the fate of the May 19th people. But so it was, you know, it was lack of, I would say lack of a political base which had hitherto existed. And that started, that really started to dry up. Well in the United States once the Vietnam War was over in 1975, that any kind of a mass base that a terrorist group could draw on essentially disappeared. And I think it also ties in, Mary Patton who was one of the former M19 member had said that May 19th was always, quote, on the margins of the margins, on the periphery of the periphery. Does that kind of speak to that point you made about not having a base or not being able or feeling disconnected I guess from other groups? Yeah, and that's a wonderful book. She's an artist. She teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago. And a wonderful book called Revolution is eternal dream, which I recommend. And she was part of something, she was part of a May 19th front group called the Madame Bin Graphic Collective. And Madame Bin I think was the North Vietnamese deputy foreign minister. So it was sort of an homage to her. And they did absolutely stunning agit prop. Their posters are, whether you agree with their politics or not, are really stunning. Yes, they were, she's amongst all the members and she was not part of the, I wanna be clear, so she was not part of the inner core. She was not involved in the violence. I mean, I think few if any of the people in the May 19th front groups knew that there was this underground apparatus. But yeah, I mean, she paints a portrait of people who were kind of like those Lyndon LaRouche kids we used to see, not so much anymore. I mean, just hectoring and strident and just rigid beyond belief. The kind of people we might wanna cross the street to avoid, these were, and you see pictures of them and don't wanna draw conclusions from a bunch of undercover police surveillance photos, but they looked a lot of the members, slightly unhinged. I mean, there was a level of real, I'd have to call it fanaticism that I think you know, sent off this bad vibe, even among people who might sort of agree with them politically. When you look at people who join Jihadi terrorist groups or any other terrorist group, I mean, a lot of this, I wrote, I was sort of struck by Larry Wright's and Alex Gibney's film about Scientology. And I wrote Larry a note saying, you know, basically it seems that the process of joining the terrorist group, but one, particularly one that you've outlined is a little bit like joining a cult in the sense that you begin to associate only with people in the group. You often marry people in the group or have relationships with people inside the group. There's this kind of in-group love and our group hate and it's sort of self-reinforcing and you withdraw from society. And you only associate with people who share precisely your views. And I think that's, when we're looking at Jihadi's terrorists and the work that we do, that that's a pretty accurate kind of account of how they become the people they are, right? And that is, I think, also true of, let's say, joining a cult like Scientology. Is that kind of what you saw when you were reporting the book? Absolutely. And I would add to that the fact that all, shares this with the cult, all information coming in is filtered by the group. You don't have any independent access to information. Maybe you do nowadays, maybe you can sneak off to look on the internet, but you believe what the group is telling you and that, from the terrorist perspective, that's, you can say, well, it builds this cohesion and discipline, but on the other hand, it can lead you to terrible mistakes because, and you read these internal communications in May 19th and they clearly have absolutely no idea of what's really going on in the United States or what their prospects are or what the forces arrayed against them are. I mean, when you do that, you lose the ability to make sound judgments and also the, and I think it's also true with Scientology and the Larry Wright book, which I quote, you know, talking about the prison of belief, I think he's absolutely spot on with that. You're in a, you're in a hot house environment, right? You're with these people, 24 seven, May 19th, they're living in these collectives, they're living in these safe houses, they have day jobs so they're, and then they're doing their terrorist activities so they're basically, everyone's always exhausted. The food, there's no, forget sex, people are too tired for sex, the food's shitty and your ability to make judgments under those conditions is, I think, extremely limited and you can tend to make mistakes and certainly May 19th made some critical mistakes in terms of trade craft. But they were quite collaborative. So they worked with the BLA, they worked with FALN and there are some things we were talking about a moment ago which you also referenced in the book about these different prison breakouts. Can you talk to us a little bit about that kind of collaborative spirit instead of working so much in silos in some of those instances and maybe give us one of those stories that you share in the book? Sure, yeah, so veterans of the Black Liberation Army, a much forgotten, yet another forgotten terrorist group, American terrorist group, they were responsible for, they were an offshoot of the Black Panther Party, the Eldridge-Cleber action for those who are interested and they basically went around robbing banks and assassinating policemen and they killed at least 15. So you can imagine if that happened nowadays, assassinating cops like sitting in their police cars in Lower Manhattan. So you had some of those veterans who included Joanne Chesemard, another character in the book, Matul Shakur, various other people and then you had the FALN which is the Puerto Rican National Liberation Organization that the, I would say it's fair to describe M19 as kind of being in all of them. They were also involved in lethal bombings. There was a famous attack in Wall Street in 1975 at Francis Tavern and have you ever been down to Francis Tavern, killed four people, wounded 60. So the bomb maker in chief, and this is to get to the story of the breakout which I, again, I found kind of mind-blowing and almost unbelievable but as I said in the beginning of the book, this is as true as I can make it. So using the best available evidence. So this character, Willie Morales, who the police had long suspected as being the bomb maker in chief responsible for Francis Tavern but they were never really able to pin anything on him. He was a, he is a very ruthless, very capable terrorist. He's quite impressive by anti-dimension. So it's 1970, I wanna say 1979. He's in his bomb factory in Elmhurst, Queens working on one of his, doing what he loves most which is of course making bombs. And unfortunately it, something goes wrong and it goes off and I believe it was a pipe bomb. It goes off, it blows off half his face and nine of his fingers. Some, obviously the police come and what they discover, there's sort of a blood trail and then they look at the stove and on the knob for the gas, there was blood. And so it turns out that he used his own, he used his mouth because he didn't have the digits to turn on the gas to fill the apartment or the bomb factory with gas in the hopes that some cop would let a cigarette and the whole thing would go up. So that's, I'd say a fairly hardcore committed member of the armed struggle. And so he, he's in the federal line to lock up in Manhattan, blah, blah, blah. They decided to transfer him to Bellevue Hospital where he's awaiting a new pair of hands. Now why couldn't they have reattached his fingers? Well the FBI decided, his fingers were evidence. So they kept his fingers and so he's sitting around for months on end in Bellevue and the FBI doesn't really like this so much because this prison hospital is not all that secure. Guards do a lot of sleeping on the job and stuff. But thanks to, well M19 and some members of the FALN and XBLA people, there may be 18 people involved in this operation. We're gonna spring Willie Morales. So how does this happen? Well his lawyer, and there's very good evidence that this absolutely happened. She smuggled in bolt cutters under her skirt, turned them over to Willie. He, Willie managed to improvise a rope out of ace bandages. Okay, it's pretty impressive. You don't have any fingers. Pretty amazing. And he manages, he somehow uses his stumps with bolt cutters to clip the wire, fairly thin wire on the windows. And he's four stories up and he manages to lower himself down a couple of stories and then as they do, ace bandages break and he plummets and but his fall is broken by an air conditioner sticking out. He's pretty banged up. The women spirit him away. It's just an unbelievable jailbreak, pretty spectacular. He winds up in Mexico, which kind of, I mean getting to Mexico with half your face blown off and some stumps, right? You don't just walk through the border. So he's there for a bunch of years and the FBI tips off the federales. They think he's in Mexico and there's a shootout, whatever. Long story short, he goes to prison. The Mexicans decide to release him after six or seven years in prison. We want him back, but our relations with Mexico as now, sometimes a little rocky. So the Mexicans said, well, now we're not gonna send him but we'll send him to Cuba. So there he is to this day. He's in Cuba and there's a nice reward for his capture. But we haven't heard much of him in recent years but he seems to have a decent life down there. As a guest of, I guess it's not the Castro government anymore, but. But you read that part of the book and your jaw just drops and you're thinking, how is this happening? And I think that one of the pieces that really stuck out to me the most was his fingers were evidence and they wouldn't attach them and they could have attached them. Right. It's incredible that he was able to manage doing all the things after that. Absolutely. I mean, sheer, I mean, physical strength, but sheer will. I mean, that's sort of Navy seal-like in a way. I mean, not to make any, I'm not making any in videos comparisons, but one of the themes of your book and also books like Brian Barrow's book is I think the extent to which the 1970s was really that kind of golden age of terrorism, which I think for a lot of Americans don't. I mean, you mentioned the Puerto Rican nationalists. I think they've released 85 bombs during, I mean, it was a very violent group of people. Of course, by the underground, you mentioned the Black Liberation Army, hijackings were a pretty common phenomenon in the 70s. So kind of compare and contrast where we are today. I mean, obviously we have this huge apparatus today that didn't exist then that's devoted to counter-terrorism, but why was there a huge efflorescence of violence? Why was the state kind of seemingly somewhat not incapable but not really able to manage it that well? Yeah, that's a good question. I think part of it was there was no real theory of terrorism, there was no theory of counter-terrorism, there was no strategy, there was some movement in the Nixon and Ford administrations to set up various inter-agency bodies, but it was all quite, I guess probably the biggest difference was the FBI tended to view all of these things kind of in isolation and viewed them like, okay, a bombing was here and we're gonna investigate it. We're not gonna go and infiltrate the group we think is responsible, we're just gonna investigate the crimes after the fact. So you didn't have that sort of proactive policing. And in places like New York, the FBI and the NYPD, which apparently, I guess they work together well nowadays, but back in the day, they certainly hated each other's guts and literally a bomb would go off and some FBI dudes would be rushing toward it, the scene, and then some NYPD guys, and literally they would get into brawls because, oh no, I want the case, I want the case. So it was very, I would say the difference, yeah, very ad hoc, very decentralized, the bureau back in the day, and it's still true now. There's something like, I don't know, 52 field offices, but certainly under Hoover and his successors, very independent, they're an independent fiefdoms. And particularly the big ones, like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, they didn't really answer the headquarters, they didn't have any real analytical capability. Very good forensics, and the forensics are one of the reasons that the May 19th came, was brought down. But I would say those are some of the big factors. And I think a lack of terrorism understanding or theory and then the counter-terrorism theory, that aside, even looking at women in terrorism at that time was something kind of confusing to people studying it, and now we have Alcanza Brigade of ISIS, or you have the Chechen Black Widows, you have different groups now where we can look at suicide bombings, et cetera, to better understand women in terrorism and give them kind of more authority in it. So something you had mentioned was the issues and anxieties that researchers and journalists had at that time, looking at women as perpetrators. Can you talk more about that? And then Peter also, can you weigh in on how things have changed over time? Sure, I mean, terrorism researchers and politicians at the time, so we're talking about the 1970s, they just could not get their mind around the fact that women would engage in this kind of behavior, that it was all quite gendered and rooted in this notion that how could givers of life, mothers givers of life, participate in lethal violence, what, how could this happen? I think I used the word erotomania in, there's all this, if you really want to, I mean, no one in his right mind would do this, would go back and read some of the early literature on terrorism is just some extremely fanciful, I mean, laughable notions. But yeah, this one guy, some psychologist setting terrorism suspected that women who were involved in terror were suffering from erotomania, which I had to look up, an excessive interest in sex. I mean, and then there was also speculation, mostly, well, the British tabloids were all over this because an RAF member had been apprehended in Britain, and it turns out that she was a lesbian. And so the Daily Express and News of the World were basically going mental over this. So there's some, that women involved in this have to be, I guess, the prevailing notion that they have to be perverted in some fundamental way. Yeah, I mean, I, I mean, it's interesting with the jihadi terrorist groups, of course, by definition, they're very misogynist, but that they would, I mean, if you look at the waves of jihadi terrorist groups in the 70s and 80s and 90s, I mean, there were no women involved at all. Or even, it's only with ISIS that you get really kind of substantial numbers of women joining the terrorist group. And for some of them, you know, there was a very interesting article in Prospect in the British magazine about why, why second generation British Pakistanis were joining terrorist groups. And this one, it seemed, it had a theory of the case that I thought was quite interesting. A lot of them come from Kashmir, and a lot of them were gonna have arranged marriages. And so as a way of getting out of arranged marriages, both male and female would kind of join, become, would sort of become more religious and sort of, this was a path out of kind of the arranged marriage in their future. So in a kind of strange way, it was a form of, and this is only true for a particular strand of people who joined terrorist groups. But I thought that was kind of an interesting observation that it was a way of getting out of a potentially an arranged marriage, was become more religious. And then some people would, of course, potentially turn to violence. But yeah, I mean, ISIS, certainly, I mean, we have a lot of cases, Azadeh Mavani, who was a fellow here, was written an entire book about the women who joined ISIS and why they did that. But I think they, you know, they believed in this utopian, I mean, I think for us, we absorb a lot of the, it's a violent group, I think for them. I mean, I looked at this group of teenagers from Chicago who joined, tried to join ISIS and they were 17, 16 and 15, a mix of boys and girls. And for them, it was the utopian message which you mentioned earlier, Bill. And in fact, all revolutionary ideologies have the same essentially message, right? Which is, there is a utopia, history has a direction. It is going towards this utopia. There are certain people who are in the way. These pesky people, whether they're the Kulaks for the Stalinists or the Jews for the Nazis or Pikki or, you know, it's legitimate to eliminate them because don't they get it? You know, I mean, they're standing in the way of utopia here on Earth. And that is surely kind of the underlying, I mean, I think that's, I'm just sort of reprising what you said about how these people tend to see the world, right? Absolutely, and along with that is the belief that history is flowing in this direction and we can speed up history. We can accelerate it. I mean, we will get there eventually, but through violent means, we can make it happen sooner rather than later. And do you think kind of future casting but also looking backwards, that they've provided a roadmap on how to create a female terrorist group? What do's and don'ts? Good question. Perspective, female terrorists might wanna pick up a copy of the book and use it as a, not as a primer, no, that would be wrong. That'd be very wrong, but it's interesting. There have been some women, female violent extremists like Joanne Chesemore, also known as Asada Shakur, who was Chupak Shakur's aunt, kind of interesting. Another weird... I don't know why I was thinking that. And she was definitely part of the BLA, the New York City prosecutor at the time in a rather patronizing way, referred to her as the mother hen of the BLA. And she was involved in a number of murders. She got a life sentence for shooting at the Jersey State Trooper with his own handgun at Point Blank Range in 1973. The women of May 19th also helped to spring her. And she also remains in Cuba. And apparently she, both she and Morales and something like 50 American fugitives who live in Cuba. Obama brought this up with Raul Castro when he was there in 2014, was it 2016? You can't remember. And she's completely out of sight. But I bring her up because she's been valorized by some, I think, essentially naive people. There was an incident at the White House. Obama had a poetry slam and invited Common who rapped a song that was dedicated to Asada Shakur. Again, I don't think, I'm sure Common doesn't believe in cop killing and violent revolution or anything like that, but it's just, she's become a little bit of an iconic figure. And if you just Google Asada Shakur or as the FBI, they call her by her birth name, Joanne Tezmar. But the women of May 19th, they've never got that kind of attention. I mean, I don't know, not to be immodest, but maybe with my book they will. Now, one member, Judy Clark, who is on the, there she is in this corner, upper right hand corner, a very important character. And I'll mention just parenthetically. So her parents were both members of the Communist Party in the 40s and the 1950s and they were both high level functionaries. Dad comes home one day and announces to the family, pack up, we're going to Moscow, 1953. So he becomes the daily worker, correspondent in Moscow. And he comes, the parents and the children come back, the parents, they've seen the hideous, yellow-eyed, pockmarked face of Stalinism up close. And they come back and they're totally disillusioned. They drift out of the party. He became an editor, but he remained a Democrat. He became a Democratic Socialist. He was very involved with Descent Magazine. And he, but Judy, she kind of kept the faith. She was very bitter towards her parents because she really loved the warm embrace of the party. I mean, the party had this whole social structure to build cohesion, so they had summer camps. They went to the summer camp where, you know, Pete Seger would come by and have a hootenanny and she loved the party's warm embrace and she thought that her parents had really betrayed not just the cause, but this warm environment. I'd bring her up because she actually got out of prison this year. She was the last member to be in prison. She had served 37 years. Did she talk to you? No, but we wrote back and forth. Yeah. She was, and she was very nice, but she said, I'm up for parole in New York State, not to be too technical about this, she was serving three consecutive life sentences for secondary murder and basically there was no chance that she could get out. Andrew Cuomo kind of bizarrely commuted her sentence, which made her eligible for parole and so the first time she was up, we started writing and she said, look, you know, I'd like to talk to you, but you know, I'm up for parole or just, you know. Did any of the women talk to you? No. I mean, we had this, David and I had this experience when we were doing, we were writing this book, United States of Jihad, which is we, you know, we, David found everybody who got out, who was a jihadi terrorist. And yeah, they just, for obvious reasons, they didn't want to talk about it. I mean, either, because they wanted to disappear, right? I mean, they don't want to draw any attention to themselves. Absolutely. And I'm sure, Peter, you used some of your old reporters' tricks, like, it's your chance to tell your side of the story. No, we didn't even get to that. I mean, it was very hard to, these people were very, they wanted to disappear. Yeah. You know, for instance, the Lackawanna group, many of them are now out because we think about the Lackawanna case. It was shortly after 9-11. Most of them got 20-year sentences with good behavior you're out after, you know, 17 years, or so you didn't, no one spoke to you directly. No, and I tried for basically a year and a half, you know, directly and indirectly to reach them. I had all their addresses, I basically got, I got nowhere. And it's hard to say, yes, in theory, it would have maybe made a better book if I had interviewed them, but having read interviews, they have given interviews before, and those are always, they were always just sympathetic academics and, you know, other activists. And I had the feeling they were gonna just, it would be like interviewing some active jihadist who's gonna give you a string of basically propaganda. I mean, they were always on message. So I'm not sure what, you know, I suppose if I were a better writer, I could have drawn from, you know, my interactions with them and, you know, noticed ticks or, you know, the fact that, you know, she's lighting a cigarette or whatever, but so it was, that was unfortunate, but I think they would have just given me the same line. They've never, like many terrorists, and those of you who've read terrorist memoirs know this, actually with the exception of Menachem Begin's book on revolts, which is maybe the greatest memoir of its kind, very little in terms of operational detail. Susan Rosenberg, another member of the group, she wrote her memoirs, it's called American Radical. And about 90% or more is about her time in prison and afterwards, all the good stuff. It's in about 10 pages at the beginning and even that's a little bit sketchy, so the things I'd wanna know are not so much like, well, what made you, why didn't you join May 19th? Well, you know, I'm a North American anti-imperialist. I don't know what they're gonna say, but what I'd really wanna know was, what was it like to live in New Haven, Connecticut on, you know, in a crappy apartment with a dead-end job at a printing press? You know, what was that like? What did you eat? What kind of food did you have? What kind of clothes did you wear? How did you see your name? All this kind of, all that stuff, I don't think I could have got from them. And a lot of times with these autobiographies, I think to your point, either they're gonna tell you the exact message points they're supposed to say or they're gonna say, oh no, if they've had like a life sentence or they've served jail time, they want to look like I've reformed. So you don't always know if you're gonna get the full story anyway, so you know, I see your point about would things have changed, but maybe not? Maybe not. I will say probably my best interviews were with retired FBI special agents. Really phenomenal. I mean, any terrorism researchers out there, if you can get in, it's an amazing brotherhood and sisterhood, and if they like you, as I discovered, and also with some NYPD detectives who investigated them, and I'm not sure it's true now, but back in the day when you left the bureau or the NYPD, you got to bring your files with you. And one guy I won't mention, his name I won't mention, he had this, you know, those old card catalog drawers, those of you who are old enough to remember, long wooden thing. He had about six of those filled with mug shots. And so some of the photos in the book are the mug shots that he, I'm sure they're copies somewhere, but. Should we open up to questions if there are any questions? Just wait for the mic, please, and then if you could introduce yourself and your affiliation and ask your question. Thank you. Hi, I'm Rebecca Checkington, I'm assistant director of the Women in Foreign Policy Program over at Council on Foreign Relations. I've done some work with a colleague at GW on how the criminal justice system treats women who are arrested on terrorism charges. And our data only goes back about 10 years, but we found that there's a real discrepancy in sentencing and arrests in the way that these women are described by defense attorneys, similarly to what you talked about, this very gendered lens in the press. Did you find anything like that in the way they were treated by either the FBI or when they eventually went to trial? What were the sort of gendered overtones in their interactions with the criminal justice system? Yeah, one stands out, I'm not sure how much of it is gender, but one of the women who was tangentially involved with May 19th, who had been in the Weather Underground in Kathy Boudin, whose husband, David Gilbert, they were doing some logistics for the Brinksheist. And interestingly, they had a son and when they went away to prison, his son was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, big people in the Weather Underground and he was recently elected, Chesa Boudin was recently elected district attorney of San Francisco. So there you go, I don't know whether that means anything, but so Kathy Boudin, her father was a very important civil rights lawyer named Leonard Boudin and who, among other things, represented the Castro government in the United States but a real civil liberties kind of guy. He handled her defense and she basically was highly cooperative. She didn't really put up much resistance. Other members of the group or people associated with the group really, like this is illegitimate, they'd stand up in court, they'd try to leave, they're getting shackled, this and that. So Kathy Boudin actually got pardoned, she got a lesser sentence, she got pardoned by Bill Clinton, interestingly, but her husband, David Gilbert, who never, he was super militant during the trial, very uncooperative and so basically they threw the book at him. And that's a lot of people point to this, it's like kind of if you continue to resist the system even during the trial, the consequences can be negative. So I don't think she was let off because she was a woman or excessively punished because she was a woman, but it's one of the weird things about the system that the courts take great umbrage with people who don't seem to respect those courts. And I'm sure that happens today. Thank you. That's another question? Thank you, John Goodman. I was just gonna ask you if you had talked to Kathy Boudin or other women in other comparable groups and were they happy to talk to you unlike the May 19th people? Equally unhappy to talk with me. And it was getting to the point where I was thinking, maybe I have all their addresses, maybe I just show up, just show up at the doorstep and see what happens, but that, in retrospect, I probably should have tried harder people who were in the outer fringes. I tried somewhat, but I have to admit it just got really dispiriting when letters don't get answered emails, don't get answered phone calls, don't get returned, so I kind of ran out of steam. But if I had, I think it would have added something if I could, well, and I should say I also tried to interview people who were in the above ground parts of May 19th, including a computer scientist at Union College who like four or five years ago she had a, she was working at the National Science Foundation and she got her security clearance revoked because she had not listed her membership in May 19th which was considered, those of you who filled out security clearance forms. They had never been a member of a group that advocates for the United States and so she said no and so she lost her clearance and lost her job and I reached out to her and it was kind of sad she just said I'm just not up to talking about it which I, as you said, I mean she just wants to disappear and go back to some kind of normalcy and I'm wondering with the jihadists that you, what do you think about this? Is there also an element of shame perhaps that people who, I think it's just no upside, I mean they're just doing a kind of rational, there might be, there could be but I think in the case of the people that David was finding and that I communicated with they just didn't want to talk and the lawyers were also saying, like don't talk. You know, there's like what can you really gain? You've served your time. Right. I think that was the attitude. You might implicate yourself in some other crime or is that also? Well I think, broadly speaking I just want to return to a normal life. Do you have any other final audience questions? If not, we can presumably you will sign books, absolutely. Yes, I have one last question though just about your process to close out. Do you have any unanswered questions after your research? Yeah, I mean I have a couple and I'm not sure, I guess I try to answer them in the book and that is, there's something unknowable about these people. I mean, the last two to be captured were captured in 1985. So they were, this is into the second Reagan administration. They were captured outside a Friendly's restaurant near Doylestown, Pennsylvania, that matters. The man who was with them was wearing a red wig. They both had purses with nine millimeter pistols with chambered rounds and they didn't put up a fight. But I guess my unanswered question is how far could they have gone in terms of violence because toward the end, and I think this is true of other terrorist groups, when they're really in terminal decline or the net seems to be tightening that risk-taking and violence can actually increase. They can be much more dangerous toward the end and they had a sense that the end was coming because all their other comrades were locked up. But in the weapons storage lockers they had, stuff that was uncovered was absolutely amazing. Hundreds of pounds of TNT, debt cord, automatic weapons, pistols. They love the nine millimeter high power. It was their kind of favorite arm. Thousands of blank social security and driver's licenses because they were experts at printing and you look at this, I mean we're talking about grenades and you know, saw it off shot. I mean just unbelievable you think, well what is this for? So how far were they really willing if they hadn't been captured? And they certainly talked about this in their internal communications that the time was right for assassinations of they talk about Henry Kissinger, they talk about prosecutors, they talk about judges, cops. And I guess that's my unanswered question and it's effectively unanswerable. How far were they willing to go from essentially symbolic bombing to actual killing? Maybe one of them will choose to reach out to you after they know you have the integrity of the entire research process intact. We'll have coffee. We'll meet for coffee. Well thank you again everyone, thank you for joining us and again books are available for purchase outside. Thank you. It's great. Thank you.