Page 8-Sunday, February 12, 1978-The Michigan Daily dirty tricks (Continued from Page 3) - In a semi-annual progress report early in the Cointelpro-New Left cam- paign, one Detroit-based agent wrote: "In student confrontations with University Administrators, par- ticularly in intensive past student agitation at UM, experience has demonstrated that University ad- ministrators cannot be expected to react, other than to solve, the im- mediate demands and end the disruption. With rare exception, pressures from outside the Univer- sity are predictably most promising of productivity."' , .FBI efforts to "neutralize" the New Left in the campus area focused on per- suading University President Robben Fleming to take a tougher stance against student activists on campus. Working out of second floor office above the Huron Valley National Bank's Stadium branch-one of 15 FBI branch offices in the state-the eight or nine Ann Arbor-based agents plotted devious roundabout methods for dealing with Fleming. However, the agents never approached him directly, and their attempts met with only moderate success at best.- LEMING-WHOM the FBI labelled "weak"-says his policy for handling student dissent was to "roll with the punch and keep things contained without having to stir up a lot of hatred." He contends his policy was more effective in quieting the thunder of dissent on campus than the hard-nosed tactics the FBI and others preferred. "Students are like a family," he told the Daily. "Among themselves they argue and fight. But when they feel threatened from the outside, they tighten their ranks and become that much more effective." The FBI, however, thought a ''show- down" between University officials and student activists was the only method for dealing with the movement. The Bureau complained that "virtually every student demand (at the Univer- sity) in recent years has been met ... (and) no University-made rules are en- forced or are enforceable." To persuade Fleming to crack-down on anti-war groups and prohibit them from using University facilities, the FBI secretly lobbied two primary sour- ces of University income-the state legislature and various alumni groups-and covertly solicited the University's Regents. FBI records reveal that the local bureau maintained contact with several informants-particularly one retired faculty member, an uniden- tified "good and close friend" of the Michigan FBI for more than 20 years. Armed with "pertinent" information about leftist student activities, the in- formants were dispatched to ask the Regents privately if the University's policy-making body could twist Fleming's arm to encourage tighter control of the campus. HOWEVER, THE Cointelpro documents concerning infor- mants are sparingly referred to in the mountain of papers at FBI Washington headquarters. More detailed information about their role may be in the 15,000 pages of documents still snuggly hidden in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building. Frequent mailings of anonymous let- ters to the Regents, another popular FBI technique, are better documented. Usually signed "A Friend of the University" or "A Fed-up Taxpayer" and with other similar monikers, these letters were mailed only after security measures were taken to protect the FBI from being identified as the source. As a precaution, the letters were mailed on commercial stationery, and, because of an order from headquarters, took on an "amateurish approach." One letter, delivered to each Regent at home, poses the question: "Why must the taxpayers of Michigan be for- ced to subsidize the efforts of those dedicated to the overturn of our existing society?" The Regents, the let- ter urges, should order Fleming to break-up anti-war activities on cam= pus, especially a "Convention of Radicals" scheduled for August of 1968. The eight page letter dwells on four University profs. (their names were inked out in the released FBI documen- ts) who were committed to ending the war in Vietnam. Quoting liberally from the Daily and other public sources, the letter details how the four organized the nation's first "teach-in" against the war, and how the profs. used the classroom to corrupt the susceptible minds of students. A check of the Daily issues referred to in the letter reveals that the four were Chemistry Prof. Julian Gendell, Psychology Prof. Richard Mann, Sociology Prof. Thomas Mayer and Anatole Rapoport, a research prof. at the Mental Health Research Institute. Only Mann still teaches here, However, none of the four former Regents contacted could remember receiving the anonymous mail from the FBI. "Normally I don't pull much credence on unsigned letters," _said Frederick Matthei, a Regent from 1967 to 1969. SEVERAL MONTHS later, when Gendell and Mayer were refused tenure and Rapoport left on his own accord, the Detroit office bragged that its letter was responsible for the dismissal of the two profs. "It would appear. . . that three faculty members may have therefore been removed from the U of M faculty as a consequence of Detroit's earlier COINTELPRO ac- tivity," they informed headquarters. The confirmation of FBI harrassment is "not surprising" to Gendell, who, when he remarried, changed his name to Genyea and is now teaching at Oakland University. "There were a large number of prominent people in the University who were involved in perpetuating the war. . . I'm sure that my politics were a factor in the decision to refuse me tenure," Genyea recalls. "But I'm not so sure what an anonymous letter to the Regents would have done. Although its im- mediate effect is unclear, letters like that must have added to the general hysteria." Unless the earlier Cointelpro activity referred to was something other than the FBI's anonymous letters to Regent-and the FBI is not revealing all the information about this specific assignment-it appears the smear campaign played no role in deciding the fate of the two profs. Not only is it likely that not one of the Regents heeded the eight-page unsigned letters, but tenure decisions are made by faculty commit- tees from each University department -not the Regents. T MAY BE that the Detroit office claimed responsibility solely to please' FBI headquarters, where supervisors graded the results of each field office. Hoover often spoke of the fine work of the Los Angles and the Chicago offices, but Detroit never merited such praise. Also meeting with success in the Bureau's own eyes, were the FBI ploys designed to push Fleming into taking harsher measures against student dissent. Several months after FBI in- fomenants began private talks with the Regents, the eight-member board met twice to discuss "the control of the SDS and the New Left at the UM," one FBI report related. Not long afterwards, the FBI repor- ted that Fleming had "commenced giving at least 'lip service"' to demands for tighter control of the University. Still, the FBI was upset that police squads could not break-up protest marches on campus unless specifically ordered by Fleming himself. And when a sit-in demonstration left his office in "shambles," Fleming or- dered "an immediate redecoration done overnight sothat the Regents would not learn of it," the FBI report sputtered almost in disbelief. By early 1970, however, the Detroit office began writing gleeful messages to headquarters, claiming victory in its effort to pressure the University to crack down on student movements. Af- ter SDS members ransacked the ROTC offices in North Hall, Fleming decided to place criminal charges against more than a dozen participants, and, accor- ding to the FBI, "have the SDS organization thrown off campus." A memorandum dated Feb. 24, 1970 says that, according to confidential sources close to the University ad- ministration, Fleming's decision was partly due "to the fact that he was con- tacted personally by every member of the Board of Regents. The Regents, af- ter unknowingly consulting secret FBI informants, urged Fleming to "react vigorously.. . to New Left disruption." HILE THE FBI may have learned of the decision-mak- ing process in this instance from their own covert sources, Univer- sity students had learned of it nearly three weeks earlier when The Daily printed virtually the same information. At about the same time, because of "limited administration harrassment of the New Left leadership," intense factionalism developed in the ranks of the Ann Arbor Students for a Democratic Spciety (SDS) chapter, the FBI noted. "This has partially developed because of UM administrators 'taking sides' and favoring one fac- tion of SDS over another. Whereas there was formerly one, large SDS chapter which served as an 'um- brella' organization to all other campus activist groups, there now exists three separate groups. . . The in-fighting among these groups has appreciably reduced the effec- tiveness of SDS at UM." To multiply existing differences within various campus radical organizations, the FBI engaged in another letter-writing spree. One such letter, designed to widen an ideological gap between the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Michigan and local SDS chap- tersbegins: "Dear Brothers and Sisters, Since when do us Blacks have to swallow the dictates of the honky SDS? We say to hell with the SDS and its honky intellectual approaches which only perpetuate control of Black people by the honkies." The letter, signed, "Power! Off the Pigs!! !," accuses the "damn" SDS of being "a paper organization with a severe case of diarhea of the mouth." It claims "the few idiots" known as the weathermen-a militant SDS fac- tion-coming "from well-heeled families even by honky standards ... run around like kids on halloween." The letter concludes by calling for a return to "a pure black revolution by Blacks and for Blacks," and advocates a complete break with non-black groups, "especially those nit-shit SDS." A LTHOUGH originally written in a more conventional tone, the letter was rewritten when the Chicago FBI office requested it be pit- ched in "more obscene and vulgar ter- ms." Chicago, which had had more experience with Panther activities, felt the revised version was closer to the group's jargon. The FBI claimed no particular vic- tories from this letter, nor have they claimed results in this letter writing campaign. Most probably, the records of informants-many of which remain snuggly hidden somewhere in the gargantuan FBI Building-will contain more clues to the FBI's participation in splintering the movement. Former University SDS leaders, such as Carl Ogelsby, currently scrambling through mounds of FBI records about the Kennedy assassination for the Assassination Information Bureau, maintain that the FBI was the primary force behind the splintering of SDS. "The destruction (of the anti-war movement and the SDS) had to do with factions," Ogelsby lamented. "But the story of those factions is a different story, one of FBI motivated police sub- version, which in the end, really marked our doom." Today, only pockets of student radicalism remain on campus. Despite the FBI's recent public disclosures, it is still impossible to determine the extent the agency's dirty trick campaign played in the demise of grass-roots student lobby groups. However, the recent disclosures did bare the FBI's contemptuous attitude to the public's scrutiny. Ns l% sanday imita z ine Co-editors Patty Montemurri Tom O'Connell Books Editor Brian Blanchard Cover Photo of Choreography Assistant David Marshall at "West Side Story" tryouts by Andy Free- berg inside: The FBI's plots, ploys and pranks: subverting subversion Books: Universil poets and their contemporaries 1, A -m .Supplement to The Michigan Daily , . k * J. * # A 1# , - A # - r A i k * s t * s A _- , Ann Arbor, Michigan-Sunday, February 12, 1978