National Lawyers Guild & its Terrorist Network

In 1973 FBI Director Clarence Kelley reported that 135 Puerto Rican revolutionaries had already received training in Cuba.

An example of NLG work in coordinating support from the international Soviet-controlled fronts for the Puerto Rican revolutionaries and terrorists,was provided in an account of the American Association of Jurists (AAJ), the Western Hemisphere regional affiliate of the Soviet-controlled International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), in Havana by NLG vice president John Quigley in Guild Notes, December 1977, Vol. VI, No. 6, p. 5:

“Self-determination for Puerto Rico and an end to U.S. control of the Panama Canal were featured topics at the Conference of the American Association ofJurists (AAJ), held in Havana, Cuba, October 24-29. The National Lawyers Guild was represented at the conference, pursuant to an August decision ofthe NLG National Executive Committee to join the Association.

“The AAJ, founded in 1975 at an inter-American lawyers meeting in Panama,is committed to ‘the complete economic independence and sovereignty of the State over its wealth and natural resources,’ as well as to ‘action against imperialism, fascism, colonialism, and against racial discrimination, and discrimination against women, aborigines, and other national minorities.’

“The Havana Conference, attended by over 100 Western Hemisphere lawyers, was devoted to the reading of papers in working commissions,leading to adoption of resolution [sic] at plenary sessions. Guild representatives Michael Withey and John Quigley each presented a paper.Withey on Puerto Rico’s right to offshore oil, and Quigley on rights to ocean-bed minerals.”

The NLG representatives in Havana ratified the AAJ’s “Declaration ofHavana” which set forth what NLG vice president Quigley termed “aresolution on the duties of anti-imperialist lawyers in the Americas.” The AAJ declaration asserted:

“......we cannot resign ourselves to being mere legal scholars nor simple spectators in the face of the rise of the peoples’ struggle against the powers of oppression.”

The revolutionary lawyers group went on to give its full support to revolutionary terrorist “national liberation” movements - including those in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland, stating:

“...we propose to call upon all the states to give moral, material and all other forms of assistance to the movements for national liberation...; [and] the condemnation of the use of mercenaries to inhibit armed struggle for national liberation.”

The intimate collaboration between the National Lawyers Guild and Cuba which has been increasing during the past two decades is reflected not only in the NLG’s work in support of U.S. and foreign terrorist organizations, but also in the NLG’s leadership role in attacking the U.S. intelligence agencies.In this regard, the NLG has been enormously successful, with nearly all of the U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies of the U.S. having been disbanded, eliminated, or diluted to the extent that they are for the most part, shells of their former selves lacking any investigative authority. This decimation of our intelligence agencies resulted from the placement of NLG members within the highest levels of the Carter Administration, Edward Levi, and notably, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, himself an NLG member. The Reagan Administration, although a lot of fanfare and bluster to the contrary, did nothing for the restoration of these vital investigative and citizen-protecting agencies.

For example, Cuba’s premier NLG agents had been, Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard, serving for decades as the counsel to a major CPUSA political and legal action front, the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee(NECLC), which raises money for key litigation and distributes propaganda.

Both Victor Rabinowitz and Leonard Boudin were identified as members of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Rabinowitz was identified in Senate testimony in the early 1960s; but Boudin’s CPUSA affiliation remained a secret until December 1980, when it was revealed in a defense memorandum based on declassified summaries of secret FBI files on the Weather Underground’s contacts with agents of hostile foreign powers.

NECLC’s primary target was the U.S. Armed Forces and the American intelligence, internal security and law enforcement agencies. NECLC has raised funds for major legal actions against the FBI, CIA and local law enforcement agencies, a primary purpose of which has been to obtain intelligence files using the Freedom of Information Act and the discovery process in litigation.

The major purpose of lawsuits conducted by the NLG lawyers and funded inpart by the NECLC including suits by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Marxist think-tank with documented ties to hostile foreign intelligence agencies; by the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist Communist revolutionary group active in the support of terrorism; and by the NLG itself is clearly to obtain intelligence files, determine the sources of intelligence information, and undertake “damage control” measures.

The NECLC’s Washington office for many years was the law offices of the late NLG veterans Joseph Forer and David Rein, who also served as the local office of Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard. It is noted that Forer wasco-counsel for the Communist Party with John Abt, a founding NLG activist who also serves on the CPUSA Political Committee and once headed a Soviet spy ring in Washington. David Rein also was an identified CPUSA member,as was his wife, Selma, who while not a lawyer was highly active as an unofficial organizer for the NLG’s Washington, D.C. chapter. Forer and his junior partner, Alan Dranitzke, worked with Philip Agee’s Counter-Spy magazine, with Dranitzke serving as Counter-Spy’s official counsel.

NLG attorney William Schaap and “legal worker” Ellen Ray were co-founders with Philip Agee of Counter-Spy’s successor, the Covert Action Information Bulletin at a 1978 Communist youth festival in Havana. Schaap was one of several NLG activists associated with the most militant segments of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), including some who became members of the terrorist Weather Underground (WUO), who helped plan,eight months in advance, riots in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.

Working as a member of a law firm headed by two NLG and CPUSA activists, David and Jonathan Lubell, Schaap earned a reputation as a friend and adviser of the SDS leadership, particularly of Mark Rudd. The firm became a center for support activity for the New York Black Panther 21,charged with bombing conspiracy, and for the SDS Weathermen. Between1970 and the fall of 1972, Schaap represented witnesses subpoenaed before grand juries investigating the WUO bombing of the U.S. Capitol,unsuccessfully defended WUO-affiliated radicals convicted of bank bombing conspiracy, and participating in planning meetings for riots at the 1972 Republican National Convention.

NLG and the Weather Underground

The NLG’s ties to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) date back to the early 1960s, when Students for a Democratic Society militants began working with NLG lawyers also active with the NECLC and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). As SDS demonstrations increased in militancy and violence, legal defense work by the NLG and its Mass Defense Office became invaluable to the SDS organizers. NLG national organizers Ken Cloke and Bernardine Dohrn participated in planning sessions, along with NLG staffers such as Dana Biberman, herself becoming a leading WUO member, and Alicia Kaplow. Dohrn, herself a law school graduate, and Cloke recruited radicalized law students, many of them former SDS members, into the NLG. And a number of these NLG law students, including Eleanor Stein Raskin, joined the terrorist underground as fugitives.

When those Weathermen who faced criminal charges disappeared in the early spring of 1970, NLG lawyers played key roles in maintaining communications among the terrorists.

On February 16, 1970, WUO terrorists planted a bomb at a small police station in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The bomb killed one police officer and wounded others. The press reported two suspects were seen running from the scene: a tall, long-haired blond male in his early twenties,and a stocky middle-aged male. The murder remains unsolved.

According to a defector from the Weather Underground then living in the WUO’s Bay Area collectives, only two Weathermen then active in the area at that time fit the description. Among the leaders of the Weathermen then present in the San Francisco Bay area were Lincoln Bergman; Arlene Eisen Bergman, who was also active with the WUO’s Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC); Julie Nichamin, who while visiting Havana early in 1969 became the initial organizer of the Venceremos Brigades; Karen Latimer and Scott Braley, both former leaders of the Michigan State University SDS; Jeff Jones and Clayton van Lydegraf.

NLG Control of Weather Underground

Leonard Boudin, a paid agent of the Castro government since 1960, and his partner Victor Rabinowitz, were identified as members of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

In addition to working for the Cuban government, Leonard Boudin is the father of Weather Underground Organization (WUO) leader Kathy Boudin. Starting in the early 1960s, Kathy Boudin attended receptions and functions with her parents at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. In 1965 she studied for a year in the Soviet Union, was paid 75 rubles a month by the Soviet government and, according to her resume, taught school on a Soviet collective farm. Boudin’s stay in the Soviet Union was not part of any student exchange program. During this period it has been reported that the CIA intercepted correspondence between Boudin and her father in which he made arrangements for her to participate in one of the Communist World Youth Festivals.

Following the March 1970 explosion of a New York townhouse which killed three Weathermen who were constructing an anti-personnel bomb, Kathy Boudin disappeared. It was reported at the time that she and Cathy Platt Wilkerson were provided with false identification documents by the Cuban U.N. Mission with which they fled the United States for Czechoslovakia.

The declassified FBI report on foreign contacts of the Weather Underground Organization produced by the FBI’s Chicago Field Office reported that “OnFebruary 10, 1976, a source in a position to possess such information advised that Leonard Boudin...had indicated to a friend that Kathie [sic] was presently in Cuba.”

Dana H. Biberman, born February 24, 1951, is a veteran of the Columbia University SDS chapter. Biberman’s sister, Nancy, was also a veteran of the Columbia University SDS. In 1968 Dana Biberman joined the NLG national office staff where she remained for some four years, organizing mass defense of demonstrators and support work for the Panther 21 and doing NLG organizational work.

During 1974 and 1975 she played an active role in the formation of the WUO’s overt arm, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). The FBIreport states that in March 1975 Biberman traveled to Cuba as a member of the Venceremos Brigade (VB) 8th contingent. Internal PFOC documents circulated in 1976, summing up the group’s accomplishments during the previous year, noting that two PFOC members had been sent to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade.

Biberman was an active member of the New York PFOC chapter, and its successor, the May 19th Communist Organization (M-19 CO). The M-19 CO can be characterized as the Weather Underground Organization’s own incipient Communist party. With Judith Clark and Eve Rosahn, Biberman was a member of the Committee for the Suit Against Government Misconduct, a PFOC-controlled group set up to publicize a damage suit by 10 WUO associates against the United States, FBI and present and former government officials.

Kenneth Cloke, born May 18, 1941, was an active member of SDS in the mid-1960s. According to the FBI report, “Cloke has directly been involved with the WUO since its submergence into the underground.” It is noted that the section of the FBI report on Cloke’s WUO activities notes that Cloke had been seen in contact with Bernardine Dohrn in the summer of 1971, when WUO fugitives were living in apartments in Venice, California. The report also contains two pages of additional material on Cloke’s work with the WUO which has been deleted as too secret to be released.

In 1967, while CPUSA veteran Victor Rabinowitz served as the NLG national president, Ken Cloke was hired as NLG national executive secretary at the same time Bernardine Dohrn was hired as national student organizer.

Also in 1967 Cloke joined the National Council of the NECLC, controlled by veteran CPUSA activists and lawyers including Victor Rabinowitz and Leonard Boudin. Cloke, and many other NLG activists with ties to the Weather Underground Organization, Black Liberation Army and Cuba,remain on the NECLC Executive Committee and National Council.

Dennis D. Cunningham, an NLG activist who has held office not only in the Chicago chapter, but has been regional vice president, had been active with the Chicago chapter of the WUO’s Prairie Fire Organizing Committee since early 1975. Cunningham’s WUO membership, and others, is readily verifiable in the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee report, “The Weather Underground,” published in 1975.

Cunningham was a member of the People’s Law Office, a Chicago group of NLG lawyers and legal workers, most of whom were members of the Weather Underground’s PFOC, or WUO/PFOC fronts such as the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence (NMSPRI), through which the WUO provides support to its terrorist comrades in the FALN and the FALN’s overt political arm, the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional(MLN).

Among the past and current members of the People’s Law Office were attorneys Michael E. Deutsch, an active PFOC member; G. Flint Taylor and Jonathan C. Moore, lawyers for violence-oriented radical plaintiffs suing the Chicago Police Department for having monitored their activities.

Michael E. Deutsch, born May 9, 1945, a member of the Chicago PFOC chapter. The FBI’s report on Weather Underground foreign contacts noted that NLG activists Dennis Cunningham and Jeff Haas hosted at least four meetings in their apartments to organize logistical support to WUO fugitives during the period January 7-10, 1971.

The FBI’s material on Deutsch’s foreign activities is deleted on national security grounds. Deutsch traveled to Cuba as part of the first official NLG delegation in the summer of 1972. According to Guild Notes (Vol. I, No. 3,Sept-Oct 1972), the NLG delegation also included Karen Jo Koonan of Los Angeles, closely associated with the WUO leadership; and Margaret Burnham, the step-daughter of the late CPUSA Political Committee member Hyman Lumer. Burnham went on to become a Municipal court judge inBoston, and an official of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), a CPUSA front directed at the prisoner-organizing and civil rights movements.

Bernardine Dohrn was hired by the NLG as National Student Organizer in 1967. While still an NLG representative she traveled to Budapest, Hungary in September 1968 to meet with representatives of North Vietnam and the Vietcong terrorists. In July 1969 Dohrn and other SDS Weatherman leaders traveled to Cuba for more meetings with the Vietnamese Communists. New Left Notes (August 29, 1969) provided an eight-page special supplement describing what took place and stating that the Vietcong wanted the Weathermen to organize violent protests in the United States against support of South Vietnam.

Martin Stolar, a leading New York NLG activist, has represented many Black Liberation Army and WUO defendants. On May 12, 1975, explosives, knives and lock picks were discovered in legal envelopes in the possession of BLA terrorists Herman Bell, Albert Washington and Anthony Bottom. The three were being sentenced for the ambush murders of New York City police officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini in May 1971.

According to the New York Times, the three defendants had been in contact“with no one except their lawyers and court and correction officials.” This was the fourth escape attempt by the three BLA terrorists.

Jonathan C. Moore, of the People’s Law Office, and an active NLG member, represented activists suing the Chicago Police Department. InFebruary 1979 a federal judge ordered current intelligence files turned over to Moore, with the proviso they not be copied.

However, copies of the Chicago Police Intelligence Unit’s case files on the FALN terrorists were found in an FALN hideout in Milwaukee in April 1980.

The police intelligence documents found in the FALN’s Milwaukee hideout included a detailed listing of potential FALN targets in the Chicago area which were being given special police protection and a listing of dates andanniversaries most likely to be commemorated by the FALN with acts of terrorism. Also among the police intelligence files which had found their way from Moore’s custody in the People’s Law Office to the fugitive terrorists were profiles of known FALN support groups and of known FALN fugitives William Morales and Oscar Lopez-Rivera, naming known associates. No wonder law enforcement had little success in apprehending the FALN terrorists. To this day our judges have not altered their submissive behavior tothe NLG and their comrades.

Martin Garbus, co-counsel for WUO leaders Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, charged with the October 20, 1981 robbery of $1.6 million from a Brink’s armored truck and three murders. In 1977 the NLG sent Garbus to South Africa to “observe” the trial of Breyton Breytenbach, a white South African who confessed to being a member of and on a mission for a terrorist support network operated from France by the late Henri Curiel. A founder ofthe Egyptian Communist Party in the 1940s, and a first cousin of George Blake, one of the KGB’s top spies in the British intelligence service who successfully escaped from an English prison in 1964, Curiel’s network,Solidarite, was financed through a Soviet-controlled Paris bank used to launder funds for the “Euro Communist” parties, Communist-supported causes and, through Curiel, terrorist groups.

William Kunstler was co-counsel for Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert with NLG activist Martin Garbus. Kunstler told Moneysworth magazine in September 1975:

“The thing I’m most interested in is keeping people on the street who will forever alter the character of this society: the revolutionaries. Whether it’s the American Indian Movement, or the Black Liberation Army, or H. Rap Brown- a person or an organization - I’m really interested only in spending my talents and any assets I have to keep the revolutionaries functioning.”

During 1977 and 1978 Ratner served on the staff of the Grand Jury Project, apro-terrorist effort co-sponsored by the NLG and supporters of the Weather Underground Organization. In 1979 Ratner became a member of the Grand Jury Project board of directors. Her clients included West German terrorist Kristina Berster, caught illegally entering the United States after undergoing a nine-month terrorist training course in Aden; and Dylcia Pagan and Susan Tipograph, the common-law wife and lawyer respectively of convicted FALN bomber William Morales, who were subpoenaed after his escape.