 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm Davis Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. It's a pleasure to have you with us whether you're here in the theater or joining us on Facebook or YouTube. And a special welcome to our C-SPAN viewers. Before we hear from William Rosano about his book, Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up next week here in the McGowan Theater. On Tuesday, January 21st, at noon, Julie Disjardins will be here to talk about her new book, American Queenmaker, How Missy Maloney Brought Women into Politics. Marie Maddingly Maloney lived in an America where women could not vote, but as a journalist and magazine editor, she recognized the power that women held as family decision makers and created the idea of the female demographic. And on Thursday, January 23rd, at noon, Kathy Pice will be here to discuss her book, Information Hunters, When Librarian Soldiers and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe. Her work reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and post-war reconstruction. To keep informed about these events throughout the year, check our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table, outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports our education and outreach activities. You can check out their website, archivesfoundation.org, to learn more about the Foundation. Often we assume that historians' new work will send us back to times far in the past beyond anyone's natural memory. Today, however, William Rosenau brings us to a startling story that happened within our lifetime. His new book, Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, introduces us to homegrown terrorist organization called M19, the only American terrorist group organized and led by women. Their operations, which culminated in a shocking bombing of the Capitol in November 1983, are documented in many sources, including those in the custody of the National Archives. In a recent interview, William recalled spending days going through boxes of federal court records, which have everything from transcripts to affidavits, from FBI agents to grand jury testimony, to evidence picked up at various crime scene. Those trial records, he remarked, were absolutely invaluable to really getting inside this group. And now, let us hear from the author himself about this little-known domestic terrorist group and their campaign of violence. William Rosenau is a senior policy historian at CNA's Center for Strategic Studies, is an expert on United States and international military advisory roles and missions, international police training, terrorist innovation and political warfare. His articles appear regularly in the media and his books include Acknowledging Limits, Police Advisors Encounter Insurgency in Afghanistan and International Security Assistance to South Vietnam, Insurgency Subversion and Public Order. Before joining CNA, he was a political scientist at Rand Corporation, a senior policy advisor in the Office of the Coordinator of Counterterrorism at the Department of State, an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University. At Harvard, he was a teaching fellow in the Department of History and a research coordinator for the National Security Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Please welcome William Rosenau. Well, thank you very much for that kind introduction and thank you all for coming out today. I want to start off by giving a shout out to the National Archives and Record Administration. As the archivist of the United States pointed out, the court records among other things that I had access to, thanks to the professional men and women of the National Archives branches in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, I was able to delve deeply into this group. One of the fascinating things that I uncovered, many fascinating things, just how important these court records are, these federal court records are for the understanding of terrorism and political violence in those cases where it wound up with prosecutions. And I've never gotten a solid answer to this, but terrorism researchers have tended to ignore these court records. They go far beyond transcripts. And even, I suppose, one of the most valuable things were the items entered into as evidence. So internal documents from the group, diagrams, bomb-making plans, just incredible stuff. And so again, it's a tremendous honor to be here today at the National Archives. And again, I salute the men and women who are the professional backbone of this organization, absolutely invaluable to me and to many other historians. So my guess is that most of you haven't had a chance to read my book yet, having just come out last week. So if you'll indulge me, I'd just like to read a few brief passages from the introduction to kind of set the stage and to hopefully prompt your questions and comments during the second half of today's program. So in 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that it was morning in America. He declared that the American dream wasn't over, far from it. But to achieve that dream, the United States needed to lower taxes, shrink the size of government, and flex its military muscles abroad. Some called the program the Reagan Revolution. Meanwhile, a tiny band of American-born, well-educated extremists were working for a very different kind of revolution. They'd spent their entire adult lives embroiled in political struggles, protesting against the Vietnam War, fighting for Black, Puerto Rican, and Native American liberation, and opposing what they called U.S. imperialism, that is U.S. military aggression, political domination, and economic exploitation. Many of them had been close to or involved in the violent far left scene during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were part of the so-called generation of 1968, a worldwide cohort that embraced drugs, sex, rock music, and revolutionary politics with equal enthusiasm. The journalist Jeffrey Tubin writes, and I quote, in the 1970s, a militant revolutionary ethos took hold in a substantial part of the American counterculture. To a degree that is almost unimaginable today, the bomb became a common mode of American political expression, close quotes. And perhaps the most notorious group operating on the far left fringes of the American political landscape was the Weather Underground, which was responsible for dozens of bombings of government buildings and other targets during the 1970s. By the late 1970s, weather was defunct. The leadership exhausted from nearly a decade on the run, surface from the underground, and those wanted on criminal charges surrendered to the authorities. I'll just add parenthetically, so I was at Columbia as an undergraduate in the late 1970s. I know I'm dating myself, but at the time, these weather people who were living, many of whom had been living on the Upper West Side, started to surface, and it was a huge news story. And so it got me kind of fascinated to think, oh, well, was I standing online with them at a chock full of nuts, was I passing them in the street, were they just hiding in plain sight, and I think they probably were, but that helped spark my interest in terrorism and political violence. Many other Vietnam-era radicals also called it quits, and returned to graduate school, started careers, and re-entered ordinary American life. But pockets of militancy remained. In certain parts of New York, the Bay Area of California, in Chicago, in Austin, Texas, and elsewhere, of revolutionary sensibility still smoldered and sparked as one militant recalled. The weather underground was gone, but these militants and a few others decided to continue the struggle and to do so by any means necessary. As another veteran radical recalled, and I quote, we lived in a country that loved violence. We had to meet it on its own terms, close quits. In 1978, militants created a new organization to wage a war against imperialism, racism, and fascism. They called their new revolutionary formation the May 19th Communist Organization, a name derived from the birthday shared by two of their ideological heroes, Malcolm X and Ho Chi Nen. May 19th was unique. Unlike any other American terrorist group before or since, May 19th was created and led by women, many of whom were self-described lesbians. I'll talk about that later on. Women picked the targets. Women did the planning, and women made and planted the bombs. They created a new sisterhood of the bomb in the gun. They were intellectuals, but also warriors, with the purported science of Marxism and Leninism serving as their infallible guide. As Marxist-Leninists, they believed women and men could bend the arc of history and usher in a new world free of injustice and oppression. Their vision of what this heaven on earth would look like was a little bit hazy, but one thing was certain. Creating it would require nothing less than violent revolution. This vagueness about ultimate objectives is typical among terrorists. As Georgetown University's Bruce Hoffman argues, and I quote, groups as varied as Al Qaeda and the Red Army faction live in the future they are chasing after, but they have only a very vague conception of what exactly that future might entail, close quotes. May 19th had much in common with other ideological extremists in American history. The author Katie Martin in her book True Believer, Stalin's Last American Spy, she concludes that the Soviet agent Noel Field, and I quote, his commitment and his submission to his cause were as total and ultimately as destructive as those of today's ISIS recruits, close quote. Ideologies, whether communist, fascist, nationalist, white supremacist, jihadist, can offer the promise of what Martin calls, quote, a final correction of all personal, social, and political injustices, close quotes. For the captured minds of May 19th, their variant of Marxism-Leninism was a pathway to total liberation. In 1979, just after the founding of May 19th, the great punk new wave group Talking Heads released a song called Life During War Time, some of you may call it one of their bigger hits. Reportedly inspired by accounts of terrorist groups such as the Red Army faction and the Symbionnes Liberation Army, David Byrne's song is a driving, hallucinatory first-person chronicle of a hunted, unnamed figure moving through an unspecified underground realm. And if you'll indulge me, I'm just going to read some of the lyrics. Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons, packed up and ready to go. Heard of some gravesites out by the highway, a place that nobody knows. The sound of gunfire off in the distance, I'm getting used to it now. Lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto, I've lived all over this town. This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around, no time for dancing or lovey-dovey. I ain't got time for that now. May 19th lived the band's lyrics and in real time. So what brought me to this story in the first place? And I think there are three or maybe four reasons. The first is the sheer audacity of their actions. The sort of, I don't want to say nihilist qualities, but the extremely violent in some cases and somewhat bizarre activities of the group. So what about this? During the period from 1979 to 1981, May 19th was very involved with other radicals, most notably veterans of the Black Liberation Army and the AFALN, the Puerto Rican Separatist Group. And May 19th women participated in armored car robberies and bank robberies that netted about a million dollars, which is about three million dollars in today's dollars. So some real money. May 19th was part of one of the most infamous armed robberies in American history. I don't think I'm overstating that. The notorious October 20th 1981 Brinks robbery in upstate New York and Rockland County that left two police officers dead and one Brinks guard was killed as well. And in one of those just sort of bizarre terms of fate, the wounded Brinks guard, who was shot with an M16, his arm was nearly severed by the round, wound up continuing to work for Brinks. And in almost 20 years and one month later, he was in Lower Manhattan supervising the delivery or the collection of some 9 million dollars in currency from Wells Fargo. And he was in the basement of one of the Twin Towers. And police ordered him out. He called his dispatcher and said, I'm told to get out. And that's the last that anyone ever heard of him. So not perhaps meaningful in any great sense, but an interesting or sad irony of history. So and what else? Well, May 19 was involved in two of the biggest prison breakouts, most significant politically oriented prison breakouts of the 20th century. So their first was in 1979, a man named Willie Morales, who was an FALN bomb maker, had been working in his workshop, his bomb-making workshop in Elmhurst, Queens, when doing what he loved most, which is making bombs. And he was apparently making a pipe bomb. It went off in his face. It blew off half his face and nine of his fingers. Somebody called the police, of course. And the police got there and they discovered something that I don't know what to call it, other than a case of extreme revolutionary dedication or fanaticism. They found blood on one of the knobs on the gas stove. And the police concluded that he had dragged himself after being wounded to the stove and turned on the gas with his mouth, hoping to fill the apartment and then have some cop light a cigarette and set the place off. So he was extremely formidable and committed militant or terrorist. The FBI said, rather than allowing his digits to be sewn back on because they were able to find most of them, they kept them as evidence. And so he managed to, he wound up in the prison hospital at Bellevue in New York waiting for a pair of artificial hands. And he just got tired of waiting. So a plot was hatched involving his lawyer, some members of the Black Liberation Army and FALN and some of the May 19 women, about 18 people involved, total to Springham. So this man, Willie Morales, was able to, he got some bolt cutters that were smuggled in by his lawyer under her skirt. He was able to somehow use his stumps to snip the screen, the fairly light screen that was covering the window in his prison ward room. And he was able to lower himself out the building several stories with an improvised rope made out of ace bandages. This, unfortunately for him, well, unfortunately, unfortunately, the ace bandages broke. He fell about a story, hit an air conditioner, and bounced off, landed on the ground, got scooped up. Somehow he made his way to Mexico with the help of May 19th and the others, which is kind of remarkable. I mean, he was horribly disfigured. Made his way to Mexico. Things were good for a few years. The FBI tipped off the Mexican authorities about him at one point. And there was a shootout. Morales went to prison for six years. He got sprung. We wanted to have him extradited back to the United States. We had a difficult relationship with Mexico at the time. And they said no. And he was allowed to go to Cuba, where he lives to this day as a guest of the Cuban government and has been granted political asylum. So the second big prison break that they were involved in involved a woman named Joanne Chesemard, who's better known as Asada Shakur. Chesemard was a member of the Black Liberation Army a long-forgotten terrorist group worthy of its own book made up of a faction of the Black Panther Party. And they robbed banks and assassinated policemen. And they assassinated about 15 policemen in San Francisco and mostly in New York in their early 1970s. And in a rather patronizing description of Chesemard, a US attorney or local prosecutor. I can't remember who described her as the BLA's mother hen. She was involved in a shootout on the Jersey Turnpike in 1973. She or her cohorts shot a state trooper with his own revolver, who was point-like range. She was convicted in 1973. By 1979, there was a plan to break her out. So again, the May 19th women who did a lot of the logistics, renting of safe houses, procuring weapons, getting fake IDs, many of them were actually expert printers. And basically smuggled a gun into this prison a more innocent time when apparently there were no metal detectors. Chesemard and a guy named Matulu Shakur basically took some guards' hostages. The May 19th, there's a car switch. May 19th women spirited Asada Shakur out. She wound up in a safe house in Pittsburgh. Then they got her to the Bahamas. And in 1984, she wound up in Cuba. Again, being granted political asylum by the then Castro regime. She's still wanted by the FBI, as is Morales. And there's a $2 million reward on her head from the federal government and various New Jersey authorities. So that was sort of one piece of May 19th. The second piece of their campaign really began in 1983. We heard from the archivist, of course, and the title of my book suggests what happened in November 7th, even in November 7, 1983, when they bombed the US Capitol outside of the Majority Leaders Office. They also bombed an FBI field office in New York. They bombed the Navy Yard twice. Other targets, the Israeli Aircraft Industry Association in New York, the South African Consulate in New York, and the Petrolman's Benevolent Association in New York. And all of this was to protest things as varied as the US invasion of Grenada, apartheid in South Africa, the occupation of the West Bank in Gaza, and the US backing for the Contras, and the regime in El Salvador. So that was the first thing that drew me to this group was the sort of range of violent and sometimes bizarre and certainly audacious terrorist activities. And the second thing that drew me were the personal stories of the participants, of the women themselves. And to some degree, men. There were a couple of men in the inner circle. And I'm just going to mention three of them that I found that were particularly compelling. Marilyn Buck, she was the daughter of a veterinarian turned Episcopal priest in Austin, Texas, where she was brought up, went to St. Stephen's, a private Episcopal school, and then was admitted to Brown but decided to go to Berkeley. And then came back to the University of Texas, wound up circuitous route back on the West Coast. She became what was described as the only white member of the Black Liberation Army. And she was an armorer, a quarter master, buying guns. She was a nice white Episcopal gal from Texas, less likely to raise suspicions than the militants of the BLA. So she was able to buy weapons in multiple states. She got picked up in 1973 for buying 1,000 rounds of ammunition using a fake ID, which is the federal offense. She gets sent to a women's federal prison in West Virginia. And again, this was perhaps simpler and more innocent time. Federal prisoners at that time were allowed furloughs. So she got a furlough. Two serving ten-year sentence, got a furlough to visit her parents who had moved to Galveston, came back. And then in 1977, got a second furlough to visit her lawyer in New York, the same lawyer who smuggled in the bolt cutters to help Willie Morales escape. So she gets her furlough, six-day furlough, never comes back. She was not captured until 1985. So if my math is right, eight years on the run. A second person, Susan Rosenberg, daughter of a kindly New York dentist, a graduate of a private school in New York. She attended Barnard. A fascinating character in her own right. She's got some memoirs, came out a few years ago, like many terrorist, memoirs of former terrorists, pretty light on the operational details, the things that we terrorism researchers tend to be interested in. Interestingly, she was pardoned in 2001 on the same day, last day of the President Clinton's administration, the same day that he pardoned the notorious fugitive financier, Mark Rich. She got a pardon. And do in part, one of her staunchest advocates was someone who's been in the news many, many times, Alan Dershowitz, but also of none other than Jerry Nadler. Again, one of those just strange coincidences. I'm not sure it means much of anything, but fascinating to go through these documents and see letters written on her behalf to the White House Council from people like Ellie Vizel and so on. The third person who really piqued my interest was, and perhaps the most fascinating of all, at least for me, was Judy Clark. And Judy Clark was a classic red diaper baby. Her parents were high-level functionaries in the Communist Party of the United States. She grew up in the warm embrace of the party, which had tons of social activities, summer camp. She would go to these Hootenannies out in the Lakeside Hootenannies in Connecticut. She loved the party. Amazingly, she spent the first few years of her life in Moscow, where her father was employed as the Daily Worker correspondent, Daily Worker being the Communist Party's Daily newspaper. The parents came back from Moscow having looked into the yellow-eyed, pockmarked face of Stalinism and decided that they were done with the party. Judy kept the faith, and Judy was extremely bitter toward her parents for having left the party. Her father, who remained a man on the left, a Democratic Socialist, he was very involved in Descent Magazine. And when Judy was kicked out of the University of Chicago for rioting in 1968 or 1969, rioting and occupying an administration building, he was able to persuade the great literary critic Irving Howe to intervene with the great novelist Saul Bello, who was a major presence at the University of Chicago, and get Bello to try to intervene with Edward Levy, the president of the University of Chicago and future attorney general. And so Bello talks to Levy and says, can't you rescind this? Can't you let her come back? And Levy says, no, she's a bad one. So she spent 35 years, more than 35 years, in prison in connection with the Brinks robbery. She was sentenced to three consecutive 25-year-to-life sentences for second-degree murder, basically not eligible for parole. That was until 2016 when the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, spent an hour with her and decided to commute her sentence, which meant she became eligible for parole. And the first time she was up, she didn't get it. She got sprung in April of this year. So after 37 years, Judy is a free woman. So just to wrap things up here, I want to talk about the third thing that attracted me to this story. Many other things, the fact that not the sexuality of the women involved, but the fact that they saw as one member of the group, Laura Whitehorn, said, my lesbianism may be a better anti-imperialist. She had recognized at an early age that she had a different sexual orientation and this created within her a feeling of kinship with other minorities and persecuted groups. But I think the most important reason, ultimately, was a desire to kind of excavate our own history, to recover our own past. And what do I mean by this? Well, sort of 9-11 aside, Americans have been quick to forget or never remember, in fact. The violent political extremism that's been part of the past 400 years of the American experience. For example, how many of us give any thought to the terrorist attack on the Alfred Piedmura federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995? How often is that commemorated? This bombing, those of you will recall, by a pair of white supremacists killed 168 people, including children and wounded 680 more. Fortunately, a younger generation of American historians are helping us to understand how terrorism and political violence has profoundly shaped our past and our present. And I'll mention two of these authors, who I think have done really outstanding work. The first is Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale, who did a magnificent book 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago, called The Day Wall Street Exploded, A Story of America and Its First Age of Terror, about the September 1920 attack on the Morgan Bank building in Lower Manhattan. And the second scholar I mentioned in her book, I think, is absolutely critical to understanding what's going on on the white supremacist front in the United States. That's Kathleen Bellew. She's a historian at the University of Chicago. And she's the author of Bring the War Home, The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America. So I think historians have come around. There's been lots of great work. I'm not putting my modest tale in the realms occupied by Kathleen and Beverly. But for those of you who decide to read it, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed writing it. It was a labor of love. And I think with that, I'll bring my formal remarks to a close and open up the floor for questions and comments. Yes, sir. Thank you for the talk. Just a couple of things that maybe you could elaborate. I'm sure it's in the book. As far as patterns, you talked about the Oklahoma bombing. This obviously was prior to that or around different circumstances. What's unique, obviously, is that you're talking majority-wise women and why specifically something related to a sexual orientation. But if someone was to say, hey, I'm recruiting in Berkeley, is there psychological things that were looked at at these characters? Were there psychiatric issues? Were there abusive issues? Was there anything that comes out? Is there a kingpin, like a Manson character, that basically is going around specifically looking for? Here's my newspaper. I'm looking for lesbians that are angry and want to get back if there's something like that that you can describe. Sure. I think with May 19, the important thing to recognize, and this is a terrorism scholar named Mark Sageman, who talked about many Jihadist terrorists being a group of guys, a group of friends. And that was a pretty important insight. And it's certainly true with May 19. These were people who had known each other for 10, 15 years. These were not. There was nobody who was brought into the inner circle, anyway. I should mention that May 19 also had front groups. There were several hundred people involved in things like the John Brown Anti-Clan Committee, which was kind of an early version of Antifa. They had other front groups that were involved in fundraising for African independence movements and so on. But basically, people in the core all knew each other. They were one of the guys in the group. I haven't mentioned any of the guys, but the important guy was a medical doctor named Ellen Berkman, who had been involved in the weather underground. He knew Judy Clark and Laura Whitehorn from back in SDS days. Everybody knew everybody else. So that was really the extent that it was recruiting going on. It was amongst people who were known and trusted with ties of affection or kinship. That answers your question. So I must have been out of touch. Did the bomb go off in the US capital? Where was it? It went off on the second floor. It went off about 11.30 at night. The Senate was not in session, but it could have been. Interestingly, so it created about $1 million worth of damage. It blew massive, huge crater in the wall. It also, and again, this is one of those interesting ironies, or maybe interesting only to historians, but it managed to shred the portrait of John C. Calhoun, the notorious theoretician of slavery and the Confederacy, who the great historian Richard Hofstadter referred to as the Karl Marx of the master class. So as an added dividend from this bombing, the group was able to unintentionally shred this portrait of an arch white supremacist. This college at Yale was renamed a couple of years ago. So yes, it definitely went off. And it was a sophisticated device. It was powerful. At first, well, they issued a communique using the name the armed resistance unit. And they used, and they always had a communique after one of their actions. And they used a variety of different names, so red guerrilla resistance, armed revolutionary unit. And that was for two reasons. I think it was to try to throw off the authorities to make them think there were multiple groups. But it was also to sort of, as a piece of the adjunct prop, as a way to sort of suggest that there's a bigger movement out there to the general public. And it was only through the meticulous work of the FBI lab down in Quantico that they were able to figure out that they picked up the scraps from all of these bombs and then eventually figured out there was a signature. I had to learn more than I ever want to know about explosives in writing this book. But bomb makers have signatures. And they figured out, the FBI was able to figure out that basically one person had made all of these multiple bombs. So that was a key break in the case. But it certainly went off. Thanks. Bill? Yes? So I'm curious in your interviews with the surviving members of May 19th, how open were they with you about their motives and operations? And if they weren't, why you think they were withholding information? And then are the surviving members, are you aware? Are they still in touch with each other? Are they still share same sympathies, or are they not? After trying for roughly a year and a half to reach the surviving members and also people who were in above ground front groups, I was ultimately unsuccessful. I did have some correspondence with Judy Clark. But as she was up for parole, she said, I really can't say anything up for parole, which I understand. I tried the old reporter's trick of, this is a chance for you to tell your side of the story and to get your message out and to court it for posterity, et cetera, et cetera. That went nowhere. The only other response I got was from the second male. It was Tim Blanc, who was part of the Inner Circle. And he sent me this email. It said, dear Dr. Rose now, having read your biography, what in the world makes you think I'd ever speak with you? Sincerely, Timothy Blanc. Good on him. He's absolutely, I admire that. I don't think they would have had much to share with me. And I think that's for a variety of reasons. I think they have given interviews, but always to very sympathetic academics and journalists and fellow activists. So I'm pretty convinced that they saw me Rand, CNA, Defense Department, State Department, saw me as one of the bad guys. I tried to be fair in this book. I worked really, really hard. I don't have sympathy for May 19th, but I guess I have empathy. That's the right term. I tried hard to be fair and balanced and to weigh the evidence and to test different hypotheses. So I think I was fair. What would have happened? And I was giving a talk up in New York last week. And it was a sort of Davos style thing. And my interlocutor was Professor John Jay. He asked me a great question. He said, well, if you could sit down with him and have a drink, what do you think you'd talk about? Which was a good question. And I think if they had agreed to talk to me, I have the suspicion it would be a lot of the same stuff. The same kind of political discourse. I'm very familiar with that. All of the imprisoned women did lots of writing. They were poets, they were artists. But they wrote political tracks, gave interviews. I didn't really have any expectation that they would reveal anything of real value. I mean, I suppose if I were a professional writer of nonfiction, I might be able to create the scene where we're in the cafe and somebody's smoking a cigarette and something breaks out in a sweat or whatever and have those kinds of nice details. But ultimately, in terms of interviews, my most valuable source, and again, it's one-sided, but were these FBI special agents who had worked these cases? And yes, they had very strong opinions. But as they discovered, probably not it's true nowadays. It's all digital. But when FBI special agents or NYPD detectives who I also interviewed would leave their jobs and retire and these guys were long retired, they would bring stuff with them. So they had photographs of the bomb sites. They had just incredible stuff to share with me. So that was also extremely valuable. But a long-winded way of saying, yeah, I didn't talk to them. I think for the second part of your question, I think they are in touch with each other because some of the people I used, or some of the people who served as sort of not proxies, but entrees to the group, some of those people kind of suggested that the surviving members had sort of discussed this and they had absolutely no interest in participating. Is there another question? Well, let me, since I have a few moments, let me ask a question of myself. And this was something that someone asked me during another talk. And the question was, what was the one question that you were unable to answer during the writing of this book, which I thought is a great one of an interview or ever interviewing a writer. And one of the questions was, how far were they willing to go ultimately in their use of violence? Now, they didn't, during the Brinks robbery, they didn't pull triggers, but they were getaway car drivers and deeply involved as participants in that deadly failed bank robbery. And in their communique, after the capital bombing, on November 7th, 1983, they said explicitly, well, tonight we chose not to kill any senators. We decided to attack an institution of imperialism, but I'm paraphrasing here, don't think that you're safe. They ultimately didn't go on to conduct lethal bombings, but my question to myself was, how far, though, could they have gone farther? And you start looking into their reading, being intellectuals, of course, they're constantly writing tracks and screeds, which is probably pretty bad terrorist tradecraft. But they put a lot down on paper, like 20-page single-spaced documents, which made for difficult reading, sometimes. But toward the end, I came across a couple of documents where they talked about how the time was right for selective assassination of prosecutors, of policemen, of politicians, of Henry Kissinger. And you can say, well, these people are all in this hot-house environment churning out these papers and the FBI's website. They were wearing disguises. They had non-millimeter pistols, fully loaded, chambered around, and they had storehouses that were uncovered during after the arrest. And there were storage lockers and things like that. So what did they have in these lockers? Well, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of TNT, which was in pretty bad shape. I've learned more about Hercules, Unigel, Tamptite, than I really ever expected. But nitroglycerin was weeping out, making it extremely dangerous. But thousands of rounds of ammunition, detonation cord, blasting caps, and dozens of small arms, fully automatic UZIs, lots of non-millimeter pistols, as I said, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and thousands of blank social security cards, driver's licenses, DEA cards, FBI cards. And so you have to ask. It's like, well, why do they have all this stuff? This isn't just a couple of sticks of dynamite and some debt cord. These were major arsenals, to the point where the dynamite that was found in Doylestown, not in Doylestown, but in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia, the bomb squad, the Philadelphia bomb squad, came in to move it. And they started to load all this stuff up into one truck when one of the bomb technicians said, you might not want to do that. Because if this thing goes off, it could drop a bridge, going across the Franklin Bridge. But I was left with a question, ultimately, of how far would they have gone? I mean, they only stopped when they were caught. Nobody gave up. Nobody affected. Nobody surrendered. Everybody was always well-armed. I don't know. I don't think that question could be answered except by the participants, and they're not talking. I think we have another question here. Yes, sir. Thank you. Did you find any links or similarities to European terrorist groups that pretty much operated during the same time? You mentioned the Red Army Faction before, or the rep regates in Italy, for an example. Absolutely. You're spot on with that. They were almost exact contemporaries with the Red Army Faction. And certainly with the reburgates and Axion Direct. And one of the fascinating little sort of excursions I took, and I wasn't able to develop it as much as I would have liked, is apparently members of the RAF, the Red Army Faction, actually visited the United States and met members of May 19th. And they had a couple of sessions together. This is according to FBI documents. I have no independent verification. But a couple of different documents talk about this. And it's interestingly, the Red Army Faction, which definitely was more lethal, certainly in the 1980s. But also a tiny band of people who were alienated from even the extreme left of German politics. I mean, people in the far left didn't want to have anything to do with these crazies. And it was the same deal with May 19th. May 19th, and their internal documents are kind of bitching and moaning periodically about how the left-wing groups aren't supporting them and aren't getting behind them and what about our prisoners. So the thing I found sort of amusing is that the Red Army Faction people came over and they apparently had a couple of sessions. And the RAF came away very unimpressed with May 19th's command of Marxism-Leninism, that their understanding of the theory and practice was certainly subpar by the high standards that the RAF sent. So I think unless there are other questions, maybe we'll bring this to a close. I want to thank you all again for coming out. I want to thank the National Archives and the Archivist for this great opportunity and this great privilege of speaking to you about my book. I'm going to be signing copies outside, afterwards upstairs, one floor. And I hope you find it good reading. So thank you very much. Thank you.