Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (40 page)

The use of informants and provocateurs was part of a massive
sub rosa
campaign to subvert the forces of dissent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Joining the FBI in this effort was an alphabet soup of federal agencies: the Internal Revenue Service (1RS), the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), the intelligence divisions of all the military services, and numerous local police forces. Over a quarter of a million Americans were under “active surveillance” during this period, and dossiers were kept on the lawful political activities and personal lives of millions more. Those affiliated with black militant, antiwar, and New Left
*
groups were prime targets of dirty tricks and other underhanded tactics designed to stir up factionalism and “neutralize” political activists.

During the Nixon presidency the CIA stepped up its domestic operations even though such activity was outlawed by the Agency’s charter. In 1969 the CIA prepared a report entitled “Restless Youth,” which concluded that the New Left and black nationalist movements were essentially homegrown phenomena and that foreign ties to American dissidents were insubstantial. That was not what President
Nixon wanted to hear. The “Communist conspiracy” had become an
idée fixe
in the White House, and Nixon pressed CIA director Richard Helms to expand the parameters of Operation CHAOS (an appropriate acronym) and other domestic probes. In addition to monitoring a wide range of liberal and left-wing organizations, the CIA provided training, technical assistance, exotic equipment, and intelligence data to local police departments. The Agency also employed harassment tactics such as sprinkling “itching powder” (concocted by the Technical Services Staff, the unit that oversaw the LSD experiments in the 1950s) on public toilets near leftist meetings, which drove people wild for about three days after they sat down.

The FBI, meanwhile, escalated its secret war against all forms of political and cultural dissent in America. The assault on freedom of expression included a systematic attempt to cripple the underground press, which FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover found loathsome because of its “depraved nature and moral looseness.” There was also a concerted campaign to make political arrests by charging radicals with possession of small amounts of marijuana. “Since the use of marijuana and other narcotics is widespread among members of the New Left, you should be on the alert to opportunities to have them arrested on drug charges,” Hoover stated in a top-secret FBI memo. “Any information concerning the fact that individuals have marijuana or are engaging in a narcotics party should be immediately furnished to local authorities and they should be encouraged to take action.”

Nixon made the issue of drug abuse a cornerstone of his law-and-order campaign during the 1968 election, and when he took office he pushed through a series of no-knock laws allowing police to break into homes of suspected drug users, unannounced and armed to the hilt, to search for a tiny tab of LSD or a pipeful of pot. While no-knock and other draconian legal ploys were allegedly designed to crack down on the abuse of controlled substances, the targets of the antidrug campaign were often involved in radical politics. Examples are legion: in 1969 John Sinclair, leader of the White Panther party in Michigan, was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for giving two marijuana joints to an undercover officer; Lee Otis Johnson, a black militant and antiwar organizer at Texas Southern University, was given a thirty-year jail term after sharing a joint with a narc; Mark Rudd, an SDS militant who played a prominent role in the uprising at Columbia University, was fingered for drugs by an
informant; and police in Buffalo, New York, planted dope in a bookstore run by Martin Sostre, a black anarchist who served six years in prison before Amnesty International successfully interceded on his behalf.

Drug laws were also used to persecute Timothy Leary and other counterculture leaders. An example of this type of harassment came to light in federal court when Jack Martin, a musician who’d been busted on a dope rap, testified that he was asked to turn informant and assist the Federal Narcotics Bureau in framing Allen Ginsberg on a marijuana charge. The FBI and the CIA kept tabs on Ginsberg’s activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while the narcs maintained a file that included a photograph of the well-known poet “in an indecent pose.” The picture was placed in a special vault at BNDD headquarters and marked for “possible future use.”

A number of big-name rock musicians were also targeted for surveillance by the FBI. Hoover’s men shadowed John Lennon after he and Yoko Ono got involved in radical politics in the US (Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” became the anthem of the antiwar movement). In addition the FBI kept tabs on Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, the Fugs, and other rock stars, many of whom were prosecuted on drug charges. The harassment of rock musicians was part of a crusade against the emerging counterculture and the alternative lifestyles associated with radical politics in the late 1960s. Some rock groups took explicitly political stands, and their music received wide airplay despite halfhearted attempts at government censorship. As a result large numbers of young people were exposed to the rhetoric of radical politics. While rock music certainly did not politicize its entire audience, it reinforced a pervasive anti-authoritarianism and provided an audacious soundtrack to the hopes and anger of the younger generation. High energy rock songs were clarion calls to revolt: the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” the Doors’ “Break on through to the other side,” Jefferson Airplane’s “We are all outlaws. . .” “All of these and many more items of popular culture thrived in
and reproduced
an apocalyptic, polarized political mood,” noted former SDS president Todd Gitlin. “
In ensemble
they shaped a symbolic environment that was conducive to revolutionism out of context, to the inflation of rhetoric and militancy out of proportion to the possible.”

After the Chicago convention an increasing number of radicals
began to talk about the need for violence to raise the domestic political costs of the war in Vietnam. The revelations of My Lai, the tiger cages, the napalm, the cancer-causing defoliants, the carpet bombings, the delayed-action antipersonnel weapons, the images of daily carnage on television—all this and much more dislocated the sensibilities of young and old alike until it was difficult for some to see anything virtuous in “Amerika” (or “AmeriKKKa”), as it came to be spelled by left-wing militants. The imperial center had to be defeated at all costs for the sake of those who were dying in Southeast Asia.

As every legitimate gesture of dissent was rebuffed by another round of US atrocities, antiwar activists were forced to reconsider their tactics. The overwhelming horror of Vietnam made all political choices seem urgent and simple. Radicals were under tremendous pressure to translate their jargon into action, to demonstrate their revolutionary commitment by pushing militancy to the extreme. Although they did not realize it at the time, the ultramilitants were playing right into the hands of the Nixon administration, which seized upon incidents of violence by protesters to justify the imposition of repressive measures against the antiwar movement as a whole. During this period the New Left became open turf for undercover operatives who spouted revolutionary rhetoric in order to incite others to violence. But covert manipulation was not solely to blame for what happened in the late 1960s. The provocateurs’ success depended on a climate of tolerance for their wild suggestions and antics.

Some radical groups didn’t need any provocation. The “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker” collective made their antisocial debut during the New York City garbage strike in early 1968 when they set fire to heaps of rubbish and threw bricks and bottles at firemen who came to douse the blaze. Formed as the Lower East Side chapter of SDS, this band of acid-fueled fanatics supported the student strike at Columbia by occupying a building and sabotaging the school’s electrical system. After the strike was over, however, they berated their fellow communards for not slugging it out with the cops. The Motherfuckers proceeded to terrorize other radical organizations, causing havoc at meetings and protest rallies. At one point, they crashed a conference of socialist scholars and denounced the participants as “armchair book-quoting jive-ass honky leftists. . . .who are the VD of the revolution.”

In pursuit of “total revolution” the Motherfuckers divided into small affinity groups and introduced “motion tactics” or “trashing” to SDS. The idea was to get loaded on drugs and run wild through the streets, breaking store windows, spilling trash cans, and smashing windshields in an improvised war dance. It was sheer bravado, a blow for a blow’s sake, but there was something almost mystical about it. The political efficacy of trashing was less important than how it felt, the sense of psychic liberation, the existential buzz that came from “doing it in the road.” They just wanted to let loose and do whatever they could to put some hurt on the oppressor.

The Motherfuckers saw their role as “a permanent fermenting agent, encouraging action without claiming to lead.” In a poster disseminated on the Lower East Side they denounced Timothy Leary and his apolitical followers for “limiting the revolution” with their lightweight metaphysical theories and gooey religious rhetoric. Shortly before they dispersed in 1969 the Motherfuckers issued a manifesto called “Acid Armed Consciousness,” which spoke in grandiose terms of picking up the gun and correcting the cosmic imbalance: “We are the freaks of an unknown space/time. . . . We are the eye of the Revolution. . . . Only when we simultaneously see our magic drugs as an ecstatic revolutionary implement, and feel our bodies as the cellular macrocosm and galactic microcosm will our spiral/life energy destroy everything dead as it races over the planet. . . . Blown minds of screaming-singing-beaded-stoned-armed-feathered Future-People are only the sparks of a revolutionary explosion and evolutionary planetary regeneration. Neon Nirvanas finally overload their circuits. . . as we snake dance thru our world trailed by a smokescreen of reefer.”

The Motherfuckers might be dismissed as a lunatic fringe had they not prefigured the paramilitary fad that engulfed the New Left as the decade drew to a close. The classic photo from this period appeared on the front page of the
Berkeley Tribe,
an offshoot of the
Berkeley Barb;
it showed a hip couple posing earnestly in front of a wooded commune, the long-haired man with a rifle in hand, and his woman in a granny dress holding a baby on her back. This was the mood of the late 1960s. A lot of self-styled outlaws and freaky-looking people were studying karate and learning how to handle shotguns. Former pacifists were now talking about bloodshed as a necessary evil in political struggle. The underground press published instructions on bomb making, and Yippie tactics of humor and guerrilla
theater were supplanted by real guerrilla attacks.
The Anarchist Cookbook
included a recipe for concocting Molotov cocktails as well as LSD. “Acid armed consciousness”—a far cry from flower power, but that was what the Movement had come to since the Summer of Love.

There was no containing the violence any longer. Across the country militants blew up power lines, burned down ROTC headquarters, trashed draft board offices, and traded potshots with police. All told, major demonstrations occurred at nearly three hundred colleges and universities during the spring of 1969, involving a third of the nation’s students. A plethora of radical groups sprang up: the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican organization), the Brown Berets (Chicanos), the GI resistance movement, the Gay Liberation Front, the American Indian Movement, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the car factories of Detroit. High school students were becoming more militant, and women’s liberationists were going after
Playboy
magazine, Wall Street, the Miss America Pageant, and other bastions of sexism. Whether all these groups could cooperate in a comradely way was another matter entirely, but the sum total of their efforts produced a thunderous cacophony that almost sounded like a revolution.

Ironically, just when the New Left was experiencing an unprecedented wave of support, its leading organization, SDS, which claimed almost a hundred thousand members and a million supporters, was being torn asunder by internal contradictions. Chapter meetings throughout the country degenerated into ideological squabbles as the Progressive Labor party (PL), a disciplined Old Left cadre, made a power play and tried to take over SDS. The PL people were cultural conservatives; they wore their hair short, dressed straight, mouthed Marxist dogma, and dismissed lifestyle as a peripheral concern that diverted attention from the true working-class struggle. On repeated occasions PL castigated SDS regulars for being “escapist” and “objectively counterrevolutionary” when they spoke in favor of turning on. (Quite a few SDS members would have agreed with Arthur Kleps when he said, “Marxism is the opiate of the unstoned classes.”) PL also criticized propaganda tactics like guerrilla theater and rock bands at rallies as “creeping carnivalism,” and they even claimed that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent who pushed acid on the Movement as part of an imperialist plot.

The drug issue wasn’t the only axis of division within SDS. Action
freaks taunted the “wimps” who emphasized day-to-day grassroots organizing; hippie elements were angry at hard-core militants; and women started to leave the organization in droves, criticizing the New Left for its ingrained male chauvinism. Through it all the ubiquitous FBI and CIA stoked the fires of internal dissension at every given opportunity. A CIA document of April 1969 forecast the fatal rupture that occurred two months later: “The SDS prize continues to be fair game for takeover by any organized communist group on the American scene with the power, prestige, and cunning to do so. . . . It can be predicted that such efforts will continue until someone succeeds. Then SDS will split and their influence on the American campus can be expected to diminish.”