Note: This article first appeared in an FBI monthly in early 2006.

PBS Fare?

       Thirty-three years is a long time. But not so long that I don’t remember what happened at Checkpoint #3 on the late afternoon of March 8, 1973. Four of my soldiers, pinned down behind an armored personnel carrier (APC), were in danger of being overrun by heavily armed militants. I was on duty at the Command Post when the emergency call came over the radio loudspeaker. With a surge of adrenaline, I hastily organized a sizable troop of reinforcements armed with M-16s. In mere moments, we were racing to the scene in an anxious forty-five minute trek across desolate terrain. En route, we received a grim update. The troops had run out of ammunition and were hunkered down, awaiting the endgame. Amid the steadily closing gunfire, they wondered who would arrive first, us or the enemy.
       Viet Nam, you say? Not quite. The arena of battle was the bowl-shaped, barren terrain surrounding the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The “war” began on the dusty plains of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation when armed invaders, most of them reservation outsiders, led a nighttime raid on the village. My soldiers were FBI Special Agents, including the Bureau’s first female Agents. As the senior FBI official on the scene, I made the fateful decision to erect roadblocks around the village in an attempt to contain the violence. With the help of U.S. Marshals and Indian Police, we hoped to end the conflict quickly in order to minimize loss of life. Little did I know that the raid I had initially viewed as similar to a bank robbery in progress—with demands for the release of hostages—would drag on for 71 long days. And the story of what happened became fodder for propagandists and reporters.
       The crisis in the village featured a historical imperative, or so the instigators claimed. In December of 1890, Wounded Knee was the site of unexpected warfare between blue coats and Indians. What began as a heated exchange erupted into absolute bedlam, and the last battle of the Indian Wars. Before it was over, elements of the Seventh Cavalry—Custer’s old regiment, no less—unleashed cannon fire on 350 Indians, mostly innocent women and children. There were approximately 50 Indian survivors. The Army has long attributed the carnage to the warriors’ refusal to hand over their weapons after formal surrender. Wounded Knee became a symbol of the white man’s atrocities against aboriginal Americans and a simmering cauldron of resentment.
       Fast forward 80 years, to when a new awareness of Indian culture ushered in a period of Indian activism. Arriving on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the “Red Power Movement” promoted sovereignty claims and restitution for broken treaty agreements. Against a historical backdrop of government-sponsored subjugation, the message resonated with a public willing to listen to Indian rights groups. Regrettably, many Native Americans placed their hopes and dreams with the most radical of these, the American Indian Movement (AIM). Wounded Knee was where AIM leaders hoped to stage a reenactment of 1890, the bloodier the better. Media-hungry militants brought along women and children, ensuring comparisons whatever the outcome.
       By the time they had plotted to take the village, AIM chieftains were seasoned confrontation experts with several violent demonstrations under their belts, much of it reported with positive spin. But the tide would turn on AIM’s status as special pleaders. Even before the occupation ended, Indians and non-Indians alike would begin to question the favorable media treatment given gun-wielding intruders proclaiming themselves saviors of impoverished Natives. Thanks largely to the efforts of the FBI, Wounded Knee would also mark the beginning of the end of AIM’s national presence.
       Today, FBI veterans of Wounded Knee remember the ten-week standoff as having all the elements of combat. The Wounded Knee Special, as it was known in FBI parlance, was by far the largest operation in FBI history, yet, a reluctant assignment for the Bureau. My Agents were pressed into service in performance of a paramilitary operation for which they were neither trained nor, at least initially, adequately supplied. They faced nightly assaults from emboldened young riflemen who ventured out of the village to open fire on the half dozen roadblocks cordoning off the area. Through it all, the men and women of the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service displayed amazing patience and restraint. In many instances, the lawmen did not return fire at all, choosing instead to dive for cover in an APC or behind a hill, rather than risk hitting misguided militants. Had Agents and Marshals responded to these attacks by returning aimed fire, as they were certainly capable of doing, there would have been many more casualties than the two that occurred in the last desperate weeks of April.
       The March 8th firefight—Day 10 of the standoff—was, of course, a different matter.  The Agents at the roadblock, three men and one woman, had suddenly found themselves locked in a death fight with pumped-up young men wearing war paint. The Agents had no choice but to return aimed fire. Armed with long-range rifles, makeshift warriors were on a mission given them by AIM war chiefs—capture one of our APCs. They happened to choose the one manned by a few U.S. Marshals who might have perished had it not been for the unexpected firepower of my Agents.
       By pure happenstance, three Agents had been sent to the northern roadblock to interview Wounded Knee residents wanting to leave the besieged hamlet. Moments after they arrived, young gunmen driving stolen vehicles streamed out of the village and took up positions in the trees, eventually surrounding the APC in a classic pincher maneuver. Luckily, the fourth Agent, on a re-supply mission, had just left the roadside barrier and upon hearing the distress call, returned with life-saving ammunition. This bought them precious minutes but did not deter the aggressors. With certain dread, the Agents and Marshals soon realized they were hopelessly out manned and outgunned.
       I was reminded of this brush with death—one of several near disasters at Wounded Knee—while viewing a documentary entitled “A Tattoo On My Heart - The Warriors of Wounded Knee 1973.” Sadly, “Tattoo” is little more than a fact-challenged and shabbily researched rendition of the Wounded Knee confrontation. It is full of distortions and factual inaccuracies, including an outrageous attempt to characterize the March 8th attack as one initiated by the government.
       “Tattoo” opens with an interesting collage of black and white photographs depicting the Indian boarding school experience set to music. But the film quickly turns from folksy Ken Burns-style storytelling to a shameless front for the same old AIM propaganda, the media snow job for which the group is now famous. “Tattoo” follows suit by casting the men and women of the FBI as the villains, while the brave young warriors who “liberated” the village are the heroes. Much of the film consists of old news reels sprinkled with updated interviews and commentary from second-tier AIM activists, all of whom freely admit their role in the occupation where looting and shooting led to the complete destruction of the village.
       For those of us familiar with these brazen attempts to rewrite Pine Ridge history, it is not surprising that another cheap imitation has surfaced. The film’s producers are, of course, free to peddle their wares to anyone who is willing to fork over the money, even if it is at the expense of historical accuracy—or on the backs of the dead. But now comes the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and its distributor, American Public Television (APT), entering the fray with all the caution of a first-year history major. Seventy-three stations from across the country have reportedly agreed to air “Tattoo” without so much as an inquiry as to truthfulness or historical legitimacy.
       Had anyone at PBS or APT bothered to check, they could have easily spotted the distorted narration that wrongly associates roadblock APCs with AIM’s threatened takeover of the Pine Ridge tribal building several miles away, and several days earlier. The APCs were never used to safeguard buildings, but rather served as metal cocoons to protect Agents and Marshals from daily gunfire at Wounded Knee. PBS programming directors might have also wondered how a “poorly armed” contingent of warriors were able to hold off a far superior government force for over two months. Might that have something to do with patient lawmen who refused to yield the moral high ground to the occupiers? How about the Justice Department’s unending attempts at negotiation? Did this have anything to do with preventing casualties? Do the historians at PBS know who invaded the village, evicted the residents, and held eleven hostages?
        If PBS cares about accuracy in the media, then perhaps someone in their research department should contact the FBI’s Society of Former Special Agents, or any of the hundreds of Agents who served at Wounded Knee. There are undoubtedly many people who can set them straight on “Tattoo’s” inadequacies and contradictions.
       The film’s interview with AIM member Webster Poor Bear is a good place to start. Poor Bear suffered an injury to his hand when, according to fellow wounded warrior Milo Goings, “The Marshals opened up on us...on our perimeter.” Goings’s appearance comes courtesy of an old news reel, which is just as fraudulent today as it was 33 years ago. Goings and Poor Bear, you see, were among the cowards who opened fire on my Agents at Roadblock #3. What the producers of “Tattoo” do not want to publicize is that AIM warriors came very close to killing the female Agent, armed at the time with only her short-range service revolver.
       The battle of March 8 ended when my team of Agents arrived in time to save our fellow officers. As the sun began to set over the hills of Pine Ridge, five carloads of Agents skidded to a stop fifty yards east of the roadblock. We low crawled under a curtain of incoming .22 and .30 caliber, finally arriving at the APC where the now desperate group had begun to wonder if they would ever see their families again.
       In case the folks at PBS are wondering, the Agents performed magnificently. They instantly took up flank positions in all quadrants and opened up a deafening fusillade of multiple M-16 fire. The surprised militants dove for cover and hightailed it back to the village. Fortunately, Poor Bear’s and Goings’s wounds were the only apparent injuries. Both of them recovered without benefit of government-offered medical treatment. And the real heroes, my Agents, resumed their roles as peacekeepers.
       Today, many of those same Agents are left scratching their heads over the historical treatment they have received at the hands of political opportunists. They also know they do not have to pay for it. If PBS is really there for the public, then perhaps the public should hold PBS accountable when they promote anti-law enforcement propaganda. Perhaps it is time for viewers to be as indifferent about funding the enterprise as programming directors were at screening this highly partisan film project, especially one easily exposed as amateur history telling.
       American Public Television, PBS’s main outside supplier of content, likes to remind its viewers they offer Alternative Programming you can Trust. Sorry, not in this case. APT and PBS should remember that FBI agents and their supporters number in the millions. They do not have to put up with historical abuse from their publicly funded television stations. If you feel as they do, contact your local PBS affiliate and tell them to pull the plug on “Tattoo.”

Note: This article appeared in the Rocky Mountain News April 17, 2006.

This article appeared in the December 25, 2006 issue of News From Indian Country:

Grave’s Mistakes

       Lately, there’s been much discussion about Pine Ridge history of the 1970s, or the version of it that militant members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) would have us believe. Most historical texts follow suit: AIM was essentially an altruistic group of folks somehow badgered into committing acts of mayhem and murder. Few have challenged the fiction largely because books which promote the myths are usually well received; the more fraudulent the better. At the top of the heap is Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, best known for breathing life into the Leonard Peltier legend. Spirit slimed its way into mainstream acceptability, so that it is now considered common knowledge that the FBI defeated AIM with a secret undermining operation, while it railroaded Peltier into prison. About the only fact not in dispute is Peltier’s 1977 conviction for aiding and abetting the cold-blooded execution of FBI Agents Ron Williams and Jack Coler. If you believe Peltier’s boast, he shot Agent Williams in the face as he pleaded for his life.
         Shortly after meeting Peltier, Matthiessen proceeded to swallow just about every whopper Peltier and his prison buddies conjured up. Spirit opens with claims of a vast government conspiracy to orchestrate Peltier’s prison escape, to effectuate an FBI assassination. Why? Well, after apparently changing its mind about the permanency of two consecutive life sentences, the Bureau needed to eliminate the political threat posed by America’s "Nelson Mandela." Matthiessen’s gullibility grew. On national television, he informed news anchor Tom Brokaw that Peltier’s alibi, the mysterious Mr. X—who had appeared wearing a hood over his head—was just too familiar with the crime scene not to be the real deal. "I don’t believe the guy could possibly be faking it," assured Matthiessen. But—as we later learned—faking it he was, and the only newsworthy item at NBC was how easily Peltier and friends managed this trainable myth chaser.
       Now comes young Steve Hendricks, Matthiessen’s heir apparent to conspiracy theory and shoddy research. Hendricks’s book, The Unquiet Grave, enlarges the government plot against AIM with new falsehoods deemed necessary to protect the legacy. Think Matthiessen Lite: all the attitude, zero gravitas.
       Grave’s war against the FBI follows Spirit’s same damned-if-they do/don’t reasoning. If the FBI investigated serious crimes on the reservation, it was interference and harassment. If the FBI failed to investigate, it was callous indifference or, as Hendricks often suggests, a cover-up. Rather than show new insight into AIM’s well-kept secrets, Hendricks shows only that he is another partisan who dares not look at the takeover of Wounded Knee village or any other AIM-led disaster with a critical eye. The politics just won’t allow it.
       I should know, because I was there. While Hendricks was still learning to walk, I made the fateful decision to cordon off Wounded Knee, after AIM members and reservation outsiders looted the store, ousted the residents, and began posing as aggrieved villagers. The media bought it, and eventually, so did the history books. Hendricks informs that, earlier, U.S. Marshals had converged on the nearby BIA building in order to subvert an attempted impeachment of the tribal chairman. He either does not know or does not care to know that Marshals were sent to protect the building, after AIM threatened to do to that structure what they had done to BIA Headquarters in Washington.
       Grave is rife with similar falsehoods, owing to a persistent failure to reference informed sources. At the center of Grave’s mistakes, the Aquash murder investigation. Anna Mae Aquash was executed after AIM leaders found her "guilty" of being an FBI informant. As it turned out, AIM murdered the wrong person. Until her dying breath, Anna Mae remained a loyal member.
       Hendricks asserts the FBI did as much to cover up the murder as did AIM. For this, our first-time author must not only find proof but also motive. No problem. Hendricks relies on old FBI memos that show an investigation in progress, with Agents engrossed in formulating possible subjects. Evidence of conspiratorial mischief? How suspicious indeed, that more than one investigator visited the crime scene—at different times, no less.
       To be judged worthy of vindication, FBI Agents, not AIMers, must prove with documents and photographs and who knows what else, that their hands are clean. And of course, no investigator associated with the case meets the criteria of innocence. Hence, they must all be guilty, the rascals. Setting aside the imbecility of murderous AIMers somehow in cahoots with Federal Agents tasked with investigating them, Hendricks’s smoking gun of complicity is limited to report semantics, a few perceived statement inconsistencies, and horror of horrors, an assumed date discrepancy.
       That Hendricks had to pry some of these documents loose—vis-à-vis a lawsuit—only pricks him into more suspicions. What is not fully considered is why the government resists sharing details of a still active murder investigation with a pretentious upstart. Hendricks has no idea he is handing the guilty a new raft of alibis of the sort that has enabled them to escape justice for the better part of 30 years. If Grave is an indication of how thoroughly one book can muddle a murder investigation, officials are rightfully concerned.
       In the ultimate tale of good intentions run amok, Hendricks has become a de-facto accomplice to murder cover-up. Like Matthiessen before him, he sustains conspiracy enthusiasts with the same paltry journalistic standards that have lured readers into believing in Peltier’s innocence. But then, why should we expect anything better from a book Hendricks acknowledges Matthiessen helped him manufacture?
       Recently, Hendricks got into trouble because he reported a truthful aspect to the saga: the AIM murder of Wounded Knee’s Ray Robinson. AIM blowhard Russell Means reacted by knocking the peepers off Hendricks at a recent book signing. If he were true to his logic, Hendricks would have to attribute Russell’s bad manners to FBI undermining. This is, after all, the same reasoning he uses to excuse AIM’s sordid past.
       Interestingly, when Hendricks had the chance to ask me about topics he obviously needed help with, he passed—no sense ruining a good book idea. In any event, he ought to consider himself lucky. All he got was a shove. In the 1970s, many innocent people fared far worse.

Note: This article appeared in the June 30, 2007, edition of News From Indian Country:

Anna Mae Awaits Justice 

       June 26, 1975: A date not easily forgotten by FBI Agents. On that horrible day, Special Agents Ron Williams and Jack Coler were gunned down in an open meadow on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Following the initial hail of fire from the assailants, three gunmen approached the injured Agents and finished them off at close range. Ron Williams and Jack Coler are known as Service Martyrs, a special designation reserved for Federal Agents who gave their lives while engaged in direct adversarial action. Their sacrifice is also remembered as the only two Agents in Bureau history to have been executed in the line of duty. Leonard Peltier, a member of a militant group of Native Americans, later bragged about being the one who shot Ron Williams in the face, as he sat pleading for his life. With the exception of a few days on the lam following a prison break, Peltier has spent the last 30 years behind bars. Many of his brothers-in-arms, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), have tried to construct plausible alibis to support his claimed innocence. None of it has stuck, and many of the cover stories have only served to implicate AIM members in other killings, such as the execution-style murder of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Anna Mae was a member suspected of cooperating with law enforcement. There’s an old Lakota saying when roughly translated means that medicine comes to those who need it. Put another way, what goes around, comes around. Well, here it comes.

       June 26, 2007: The Supreme Court of British Columbia orders the extradition of John Graham to the United States. He is the alleged trigger man who carried out the executioner’s mandate against Anna Mae. According to Arlo Looking Cloud (Graham’s convicted helper), Graham put a gun to Anna Mae’s head, pulled the trigger, and pushed her off a cliff. For the last several years, he has been under house arrest in Canada. Like Peltier before him, Graham has surrounded himself with supporters, some of them pitifully uninformed. But unlike Peltier’s murderous rampage, Graham’s pre-meditation was evidently known to several others. In fact, dozens were said to be involved as co-conspirators, among them AIM legends, their lawyers, and the group’s lesser lieutenants. The commonality of dates underscores other parallels (the medicine at work). Jack Coler left two young boys. Anna Mae left two young girls. Ron, Jack, and Anna Mae were in the prime of their lives, all about the same age, 28, 29, and 30. In both cases, the killers acted on false information. Peltier thought the Agents were after him because he was a wanted fugitive. The Agents were actually looking for someone else and didn’t even know Peltier was on the reservation. AIM leaders thought Anna Mae was an FBI informant. She was not. As it turned out, oblivious to the leadership, Anna Mae was loyal to the end. Ron pleaded for his life, hoping to prevail upon the humanity of his killer. In her final moments, Anna Mae did the same and when she realized the end was near, she asked to pray on her knees. (The request was denied.) Months before he placed a gun to Ron Williams’s head, Peltier had placed a gun in Anna Mae’s mouth, in one of her early interrogations. She died six months after the Agents, partly because it was feared that she would repeat Peltier’s boast which she heard “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

       People familiar with the case believe that once Graham is on American soil, AIM’s legacy is up for grabs. As the embattled Professor Ward Churchill likes to say, the chickens have come home to roost. The professor, however, would presumably not want the description applied to his old warhorse buddy, AIM leader Russell Means. On a cold morning in 1976, Means and his brothers boycotted Anna Mae’s funeral, evidently believing her guilty as charged. AIM war chiefs and Anna Mae’s erstwhile friends must now reposition themselves for the coming storm. An old rusty prosecutorial engine is finally turning over, powered by an unlimited statute of limitations for murder in the first degree. Former members know that aiding and abetting carries the same penalty that awaits Graham: life in prison. And so they are naturally concerned that Graham may cut a deal and sing like a canary. Stay tuned. This could get very interesting.

Note: This article is in response to a recent blog posting by Washington civil rights attorney, Paul Wolf.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

     “Anna Mae Aquash was executed by a single gunshot to the back of her head on orders from the American Indian Movement because they believed her to be an informant for the F.B.I.”

     That statement by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in June of last year points to a renewed interest in solving this 33-year old murder case. The alleged trigger-man, John Graham, was the subject of the Canadian Court’s order which sent him in chains to South Dakota. He will stand trial later this year. Another person implicated, American Indian Movement (AIM) attorney Bruce Ellison, was labeled a possible co-conspirator in a 2004 trial that found AIM member Arlo Looking Cloud guilty of aiding and abetting the murder. 
     Bringing the perpetrators to justice and telling the true story of the American Indian Movement’s crimes against the people of Pine Ridge is good news for Indian Country. But not everyone is happy that the truth is finally seeing the light of day. Particularly bothered are the self-anointed “historians” of the AIM legacy, usually found wearing a trench coat of conspiracy theories and half-truths. They do not like their version of Pine Ridge history challenged by anyone, even by people who were there.
     A good example was recently provided by Washington-based attorney Paul Wolf. In 2001, Wolf oversaw a report presented to the U.N. Human Rights Commission about civil rights violations against AIM and other dissident groups. Central to Wolf’s argument are alleged abuses of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counter-intelligence program originally designed to disrupt the Communist Party’s infiltration of America. While there were some abuses of COINTELPRO, Wolf’s presentation has proven to be a distinctly unreliable source of information for telling us about it. After reading my book, American Indian Mafia, you’ll see that all of Wolf’s assertions regarding the American Indian Movement, for example, are either distortions or outright lies. Also telling, Wolf’s report overlooks the fact that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover formally terminated all COINTELPRO operations on April 28, 1971, well before AIM violence attracted the attention of federal investigators.  
     Not surprisingly, Wolf blogged that my book should be ignored, mostly because I’m old and cranky. You gotta love that, a civil-rights lawyer in favor of age discrimination. Curious as well, Wolf chose to air his views at indianz.com, where Indian Country bloggers are often critical of fat-cat, white lawyers. (Note to the red-haired attorney: I know Indians. Indians are my friends. Mr. Wolf, you’re no Indian!)
     And while it’s true I’m getting up there in years, I’m still young enough to spot an impostor trying to save his own legacy. The problem with Wolf’s report, as he surely knows, is that it is mostly propaganda designed to advance a political agenda. Its credibility is not helped by virtue of its co-authors, among them John Conyers, Cynthia McKinney, and Sheila Jackson Lee, all members of the Congressional Black Caucus. These politicians were evidently enticed into endorsing Wolf’s political nonsense based on assumed government abuses against the Black Panthers, a holdover group of extremists from the violent 1960s. Again, while there may have been some truth to the allegations, it is impossible to tell from this highly falsified report.
     Want more proof that Wolf’s rant is political horse hockey? Consider that defrocked Professor Ward Churchill lent his expertise in research, and that Left-wing ideologue Noam Chomsky is listed as an unbiased contributor. Wolf howls about everything from the assumed subversion of the press to the plight of “political prisoner” and convicted killer Leonard Peltier. The unsuspecting reader is thus treated to the usual mantra of an all-powerful government subverting the rights of the common man, with solutions founded in rank socialism. Even Jimmy Carter is implicated in a vast conspiracy to deprive citizens of their rights under the guise of promoting American security. Wolf’s report also proved to be the perfect vehicle from which Bruce Ellison could construct plausible alibis for the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. That’s right, the same Bruce Ellison who, for over 30 years, has been in the business of blaming the FBI for the crime, while skillfully diverting attention away from his own alleged involvement in the murder—nice work if you can get it.  Do you suppose the U.N.’s High Commissioner, Mary Robinson, to whom the report was presented, had a clue about any of this?
     Of course, the real travesty of justice was not the actions of government Agents who faithfully and legally did their jobs. It is rather the legitimacy granted those who practice the same type of dishonesty and recklessness in print they accuse others of having committed in upholding the law.    
     Wolf did not get very far before another blogger pointed out that he failed to note numerous references to COINTELPRO in my book. No wonder. Referencing the inconvenient truths in American Indian Mafia would have exposed his report for the fraud that it is. Wolf and his ilk cannot afford to analyze my book on its merits; that would require far too much honesty and integrity. I am proud to say that, so far, Native Americans who are not fooled by the usual AIM smoke and mirrors are among my strongest supporters. They know the truth and they see through Wolf’s sheepish attempts to run from it. Your turn, old man.