Last Shot in the Battle Over ‘Crazy Horse’? : Crime: Author Peter Matthiessen says another man’s confession clears Indian activist Leonard Peltier in FBI agents’ deaths.

Peter Matthiessen met the killer twice. Each time the man, his face concealed by a hood, spoke in convincing detail of the slaying of two FBI agents.

He hadn’t planned to do it, he said. But as they lay wounded in a pasture on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the agents had raised a handgun, fired and was trying to shoot again. It was a reflex almost, the killer remembered of that hot June afternoon--three shots snapped from the hip.

”. . . I wasn’t going to give the guy a second shot,” he said.

Fearing that the second agent might also have some fight left, the killer swung around and pumped two shots into him.

For Matthiessen, 63, the admission cleared the last veils from a brutal, controversial episode that has consumed a decade of his writing career. In the process, Matthiessen, widely regarded as a leading American novelist and superb chronicler of nature, has seen one of his books virtually banned because of a costly legal battle. The seven-year marathon ended last year after a federal court ruled that the book was not libelous.

“I think we are vindicated, but we’re vindicated at a terrible cost and waste of money,” Matthiessen says. “The penalty was that the book was suppressed. . . . To say we won, it’s a Pyrrhic victory to put it very mildly. . . . But in principle we have won and I don’t regret it.”

This month Matthiessen’s publisher, Viking, reissued “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” a lengthy account of the 1975 shootout in which the two agents and an American Indian died.

The core of Matthiessen’s book is a passionate defense of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement member and the only person convicted in the agents’ murders. The author argues that Peltier, who was at the gunfight, was the victim of an FBI vendetta against AIM. Matthiessen also maintains that perjury and falsified evidence were used to indict and convict Peltier.

Two other Indians charged in the case were found not guilty by an all-white jury. When they delivered the verdict, jurors deplored reservation conditions that included heavy-handed law enforcement, general violence and poverty. Charges were dropped against another Indian implicated in the case. No charges were ever filed in the death of the Indian in the gunfight.

The new edition has been updated with an epilogue in which Matthiessen reports on his encounters last year with the professed killer. A member of the American Indian Movement, the man said he had never gone underground after the killings but had remained active in native affairs: “I am hiding in the light.”

Matthiessen describes the man as small and husky with “a deep whispery voice.” Early in their first conversation the professed killer told Matthiessen, “Probably you can figure out just who I am. It would be better if you didn’t.”

By coming forward, the professed killer told Matthiessen, he hoped that the case against Peltier would somehow be weakened. But in both meetings with Matthiessen, the man kept a semiautomatic rifle within easy reach. And he vowed, “I’d rather die quickly fighting than die slowly in their prisons.”

Although Matthiessen at first doubted the man’s confession, he ultimately found it credible. “The man who killed the agents was persuasive and articulate, a man concerned for and committed to his people, and a man who is taking a brave risk. . . . “ Matthiessen writes.

“In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” begun in 1981 and first published in 1983, is an unabashedly one-sided account. It paints the firefight as an inevitable consequence of “the reign of terror” at Pine Ridge in the early 1970s, when the militant American Indian Movement and federal, state and local authorities locked in a bitter struggle.

After a first printing of about 35,000 copies, the book was blocked from additional hardback printings or a paperback edition because of two libel suits seeking a total of $49 million in damages. The suits by former South Dakota Gov. William Janklow and FBI agent David Price cost the publisher about $2 million to defend.

Janklow’s suit charged that the book portrayed him as “morally decadent,” “a racist and a bigot” and “an antagonist of the environment.” Price’s suit claimed that the FBI was unfairly portrayed as a repressive force on the reservation and that he was characterized as part of that alleged repression.

Known to the FBI as the ResMurs--Reservation Murders--the 16-year-old case began when the agents, in separate cars, followed a red pickup truck onto the Jumping Bull farm at Pine Ridge. It is unclear why the agents followed the truck but their instincts were right--the vehicle was loaded with explosives, according to the professed killer.

In the confrontation that followed, an exchange of shots quickly evolved into a deadly gun battle. Armed Indians from nearby houses and campsites ran to the scene, taking high ground and surrounding the two agents. Estimates vary widely, but 15 or more Indians are thought to have been involved.

Both agents were soon wounded, one seriously. As the shooting abated, the professed killer recounted, he and a companion drove their truck into the pasture, intending to take the two agents hostage and negotiate their way through the cordon of police that was already assembling on nearby roads.

The professed killer told Matthiessen he was surprised that either agent could move:

“I’m absolutely sure it was self-defense, though I understand why others might question that. . . . I thought, ‘You stupid bastards, coming in there where you were warned there would be trouble . . . and then not getting the hell out while you still could--you got yourselves killed. . . .’ ”

While the suits against him dragged on and the price of a first edition of “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” rose to $200 or more, Matthiessen continued to write. A co-founder of the Paris Review and winner of the National Book Award in 1978 for “The Snow Leopard,” Matthiessen last year published “Killing Mr. Watson,” a critically acclaimed novel that popped up on several bestseller lists. He is now at work on a sequel, set in the same remote region of Florida.

Always an indefatigable traveler to remote places, the ardent environmentalist who probably is more comfortable with rogue elephants than with politics continues to roam the globe. Last year he visited Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union, a remote, huge and mysterious body of fresh water whose depths have barely been plumbed by man. This summer he’s leading an African wildlife safari to Namibia and Botswana.

But Matthiessen, tall and rangy with a weathered face and a low-key presence, has never quit trying to clear Peltier’s name.

Working closely with Peltier’s defense committee, he speaks about half a dozen times a year on behalf of Peltier, who is serving two consecutive life terms at the Leavenworth federal penitentiary. And if he’s been invited to speak on another topic, Matthiessen reveals with a grin, he plants someone in the audience to raise the Peltier issue.

The Peltier case is the reason Matthiessen has flown across the country from his home on the far reaches of Long Island to this mountain-rimmed city.

In the afternoon, he signs copies of “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” and other works for about 20 fans at a downtown bookstore.

In the evening, after a hurried dinner of shrimp and bamboo shoots at a Chinese restaurant, Matthiessen speaks to a small crowd at Salt Lake Community College.

The gathering, numbering 75 to 100, has the usual underdog staples--T-shirts that proclaim “Free Leonard Peltier” and fund-raising brochures. A few Indians stand out prominently in the group, most wearing the bold red and black Peltier T-shirts.

Many attending appear knowledgeable about the case and firmly committed to the cause. But in a question-and-answer session after the talk, a few reveal that they know little or nothing about the case.

And it is these few who make the cross-country jaunt worthwhile for Matthiessen. Small conversions are the most he can hope for, he says, in a practically invisible case.

From the start, Matthiessen has acknowledged that the fatal gunfight was “sad and ugly” and that it lacked the magnetism of other celebrated campaigns against alleged injustice. Indeed, he had his own doubts about the case at first and was put off by the militancy and rhetoric of AIM. But once persuaded of Peltier’s innocence, he became a devoted convert and the cause’s most well-known proselytizer.

“We’ve had a terrible time putting it on the map,” he concedes. “. . . it’s very controversial. Two young agents get their heads blown off. This is a very emotional issue. . . . A young Indian got killed, too. He’s never mentioned, of course.”

In fact, Matthiessen has compiled a list of suspicions and suspicious happenings that he maintains have kept his book and the Peltier case out of public consciousness.

He wonders why American newspapers and television ignored the presentation to the White House of a petition on behalf of Peltier signed by 17 million persons in the Soviet Union.

“I’m sure a lot of people didn’t know what they were signing, and they (the Soviets) were trying to counterbalance (Andrei) Sakharov,” he says, referring to the late physicist and political dissident who became a symbol of Soviet oppression.

But Matthiessen adds, “Well, whatever the reasons were, that’s a lot of signatures. How much of that did you read in the paper?”

Furthermore, Matthiessen still bristles when he discusses a batch of unfavorable reviews that greeted the book’s initial publication. In particular, he remains nettled by an Alan Dershowitz review in the New York Times.

The Harvard Law School professor and renowned defense attorney pronounced that Matthiessen “inadvertently makes a strong case for Mr. Peltier’s guilt” and that he took “at face value nearly every conspiratorial claim of the (Indian) movement, no matter how unfounded or preposterous.”

Other reviewers disagreed, finding the book a powerful detective story and a moving depiction of the modern Indian’s plight.

But despite what he perceives as establishment rejection, Matthiessen takes heart from the hard-core support that the Peltier case has maintained for the last eight years.

And there are signs that the Peltier case is on the verge of wider exposure. Two network news shows are considering segments on the affair, a documentary on the case is in the works and a dramatic film version may be produced, Matthiessen says.

In addition, movie maker Oliver Stone filmed Matthiessen’s second interview with the man who says he, not Peltier, killed the FBI men. Although the admission is not legally useful, it may be an attention-grabbing publicity tool, Matthiessen believes.

Moreover, he has some hopes that Peltier eventually will be pardoned. A federal appeals judge recently endorsed this move, he says. Earlier, 50 members of Congress called for a new trial for Peltier.

Meanwhile, Peltier is in remarkably good spirits for a man who has spent 15 years in prison, says Matthiessen, who speaks to him several times a week on the phone.

“He’s holding up great. He’s phenomenal. He never complains,” Matthiessen says.

The author was pleased to learn recently that Peltier has been working on designs for monument to the Indians who died at Custer’s Last Stand, the 1876 Montana battle that wiped out George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry.

That Peltier might enter a design for the proposed monument could raise a small firestorm, Matthiessen notes with pleasure.

And he grins when a dinner companion repeats an ironic Indian joke about Custer and the storied Battle of the Little Big Horn:

“I don’t know why there’s such a fuss about Custer. He only went there for the afternoon.”