Here Come the ‘60s, With FBI in Tow

Do you recall the prediction that the 1990s will amount to a replay of the ‘60s? I’m not certain about its origins, but I believe this prognostication was based on the observation by historian Arthur Schlesinger that American culture revolves in 30-year cycles.

If the Schlesinger theory holds, the ‘90s should flower into a decade of social turmoil and yearning for higher truths. This may or may not turn out to be the case, of course, but it behooves us to watch for the early signs. And sure enough, the last few weeks have revealed a California tableau that seems to spring straight from 1969.

I am referring to the case of Earth First!, a militant and hirsute crowd of wilderness-lovers that has out-radicaled every other conservation group in the country. You might think of Earth First! as the SNCC (pronounced “Snick,” remember?) of the environmental movement.

A few years back Earth First! and its leader, Dave Foreman, promoted the idea of booby-trapping trees with steel spikes so any chain saws that dared penetrate their bark would promptly disassemble. This notion quickly earned Earth First! a big blackball from old-liners such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society.

This year, in what appears to be a strategy to go legit, Earth First! is organizing a season of demonstrations in the big timber country of the North Coast. Named Redwood Summer after the famous Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi, Earth First! is hoping that thousands of college kids and fellow travelers will show up to do battle with the timber harvesters.

Nothing electrifying about that, but stay with me. Now we get to the good part. Somewhere along the way Earth First! learned the trick of pushing the government’s buttons and thereby resurrected another artifact of the ‘60s: a full-blown campaign to wipe them out.

The latest manifestation of this campaign took place last month in Oakland. As Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, the chief organizers for Redwood Summer, rolled through the streets in their Subaru, a pipe bomb exploded in the back seat. Cherney was not seriously hurt. Bari suffered a broken pelvis and some hearing loss.

How did law enforcement react? Before the smoke had cleared, they arrested Bari and Cherney on the suspicion that the two blew themselves up with their own bomb. What was the rush, and what was the evidence?

No one knows because the police won’t say, but on Friday, six weeks after the bombing, the Alameda County DA’s office had to admit in court that it still lacked cause for bringing charges against the two.

However embarrassing to the Oakland police, this episode pales beside the operations carried out by the FBI against Earth First! Last August, several dozen FBI agents swooped down on a group of Earth Firsters outside of Phoenix as they allegedly prepared to hack down some power transmission lines. This bust was the result of a 2 1/2- year investigation and 1,000 hours of secretly recorded conversations. One thousand hours is roughly 42 days of conversation, running 24 hours a day.

Foreman, the Earth First! founder, was not in this group. But the next day more FBI agents raided his home in Tucson and busted Foreman for conspiring with the purported hackers.

Sense the deja vu here from the old days, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s every phone call was tapped by the FBI? When any lefty group with more than a dozen members had a couple of undercover agents among them?

You could argue, of course, that Earth First! is a dangerous bunch. Hacking down a major electrical transmission line is not, after all, an innocuous act, if that truly was the intention of the crowd in Phoenix.

But was crime-busting the motive of the FBI? Maybe not. Buried among those 1,000 hours of tapes was a conversation between the chief undercover agent and his FBI contact that was inadvertently recorded and submitted to the court. The undercover agent first refers to Earth First! as “low-budget” and confides they are not involved in the “hurtin’ of people.” Then he refers to the upcoming Foreman bust:

“This guy (Foreman) isn’t the guy we need to pop . . . in terms of actual perpetrator. This is the guy we need to pop to send a message. And that’s all we’re really doing. . . .”

So curious. Could it be that the FBI had something to do with the hasty charges in Oakland? And what is the message that the FBI wants to send? That crime doesn’t pay? Somehow I doubt it.

More likely the message is the same one sent to Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael and Daniel Berrigan. It’s a message about control.

So welcome back to the ‘60s. We’re all here once again, and the circle is unbroken.