NOW THE URBAN GUERRILLAS HAVE A REAL PROBLEM THEY'RE TRYING TO MAKE IT IN THE MAGAZINE BUSINESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000300230020-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 29, 2004
• Sequence Number: 20
• Publication Date: November 1, 1976
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Release 2005/01/11: CIA-RDP88-01314Rqff ~30p2 ~ t e
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They're Trying To Make It'
In The Magazine Business
Most-wanted fugitives publish on the lam.
BY GABRIELLE SCHANG & RON ROSENBAUM
The people who bombed the Capitol are now in the maga-
zine business. You could call them the most sought-after peo-
ple in the media-three of them spent three years on the
F.B.I.'s Ten Most Wanted list. The editors are members of the
Weather Underground Organization. They call their publish-
ing venture the-Red -Dragon Print Collective and they call
their magazine,Dsawatonrie.* ;The F.B.I. calls them interstate
fugitives from justice`armed and believed to be dangerous.
Somewhere in the United States-according to their own
account-the Weather fugitives gather together over a clan-
destine printing press to produce bi-monthly issues of the
magazine, collating the pages as they come off the press with
gloved hands to avoid leaving fingerprints.
Should Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Jeff Jones and the
other Weather fugitives who write and edit Osawatomie be
captured in the middle of a press run, they would collectively
face years behind bars for acts of violence committed before
they went underground. If convicted for the 25 bombings
they've claimed credit for since then, each of them would
probably face life. This sort of thing can add a certain urgency
to meeting deadlines.
The magazine project is a recent development in the seven-
year history of the Weather Underground Organization
(WUO), although it is their second publishing venture (the
first, a book of theory and history called,Prair?ie Fire,; also clan-
destinely printed, appeared in mid-1974) --In--the pages of
Osawatonrie, between the lines, in hints and asides, sometimes
directly, it is possible to get a shadowy glimpse of an identity
crisis in the lives of the Weather fugitives, many of whom
were considered the best and the brightest leaders of Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960's. Consider the
following juxtaposition.
On June 6, 1975, a nightwatchman in the Banco de Ponce
in midtown Manhattan received a phone call from a woman
who told him to evacuate the building immediately. A power-
ful explosion tore open the front of the bank building. In a
communique found in a nearby phone booth, the WUO
claimed credit for. the bombing, in support of striking cement
workers in Puerto Rico.
A few days later, it woman walked into the Eighth Street
Garielle Rosenbaumc is x egg{ei~6 r qf? 01~E~a ~~ /1 o>
Bookstore in lower Manhattan, carrying two heavy shopping
bags that she checked behind the sales counter. She browsed a
bit, then walked out, leaving her shopping bags behind. Ten
minutes later the cashier received a call. "Look in the shop-
ping bags," said the woman caller. "You'll find your copies of
the new Osawatomie." A clerk at Cody's bookstore in
Berkeley received a phone message instructing him to "look
in the bushes across the street where we've dropped your new
copies of Osawatomie." At Modern Times bookstore in San
Francisco, personnel arriving early to unlock the doors dis-
covered neatly-piled stacks of the magazine leaning against
the storefront. About the same time, hundreds of individuals
and bookstores received plain manila envelopes with a rub-
ber-stamped fake return address, containing one or more of
the latest issue.
In the 15 months since the Ponce bank bombing, there has
been only one further bombing: the Salt Lake City headquar-
ters of Kennecott Copper was hit on the September 1975 an-
niversary of Allende's downfall in Chile.But in that same 15
months there have been eight further deliveries of
Osa watonrie.
The shift from dynamite to printer's ink has not
diminished the attention the Weather people have been get-
ting from the F.B.I. The Bureau has dismantled, it claims, the
now notorious "WeathFug" Squads. These were the special
government strike forces in large cities whose furious and
futile cross-country pursuit of the Weather fugitives from
1970 to 1974 involved multiple illegal break-ins, warrantless
searches, bugs and burglaries. Recent revelations of
WeathFug excesses have led to criminal investigations of at
least 75 agents. and many of the F.B.i.'s top leadership from
that period, including the former number-two man in the
.Bureau, Mark Felt. It was, then, particularly ironic for Felt to
hold up an issue of Osawatomie on "Face the Nation," be-
cause in using it to justify WeathFug illegalities, Felt gave the
Weather Underground the kind of network TV exposure they
couldn't get with just another bombing.
Despite such setbacks for the Bureau,the hunt goes on.You
can follow it from the F.B.I.'s point of view in the pages of the
Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner where re-
'The name Osawatomieis derived from the 1856 Battle of 0sawatornie.Kansas,
~gJ_fus~~ottkgpl~L,gvfRUas,clefeateA a superior force of