IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 159US defense contractor for the Pentagon in most years, tells us everything we need to know about the
relations of the Ayers family to the intelligence community. Rumors that Bill Ayers was a spook
circulated in SDS in the late 60s. One Weatherman leader who appears obsessed by the appearance
that his old terrorist gang was in fact a tool of the FBI is none other than Mark Rudd. (Or, at least,
Rudd chooses to harp on the FBI, perhaps to draw attention away from his more likely sponsors in
the intelligence community, such as the domestic counterinsurgency operations of the Ford
Foundation, with which Rudd has been linked by published sources.) At the time of the SDS split
convention in Chicago in the summer of 1969, Mark Rudd was without question the most famous
Weatherman leader because of the media attention to his role at the Columbia strike, and it was he
who was chosen as the national secretary of the rump faction of SDS controlled by the Weatherman
crazies after the expulsion of the Progressive Labor Party, the International Socialists, the Labor
Committees, and a number of smaller Trotskyist groups. Rudd had been chosen by the New York
City television stations as the authentic student anarchist voice of the Columbia University strike in
April 1969, and this had given him a significant national profile. Rudd was sent on a national tour
of university campuses and SDS chapters to make the case for the lunatic Weatherman point of
view. The bomb throwing and cop killing Weatherman faction, however, considered Rudd as a
lightweight and intended only to use him as a disposable figurehead. These crazies soon drove
Rudd out of the Weatherman organization. In the following decades, Rudd appears to have
developed some rudimentary understanding of the precious services rendered to the FBI and the
intelligence community in general through the destruction of SDS by the Weatherman action
faction. Rudd returns again and again to the idea that the Weathermen were doing exactly what the
FBI wanted them to do, even though he also hysterically asserts that the Weathermen were not paid
agents, conscious agents, or witting operatives. Here is a sample of Rudd’s ruminations, dating back
to an interview recorded in 2004: ‘... we in the leadership of Weatherman (predecessor to the
Weather Underground Organization) made a historically criminal decision at the end of 1969 to
scuttle Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student anti-war and radical organization, with
over 300 chapters on college campuses and high schools. We mistakenly believed that we could
bring into existence a revolutionary movement, led by an underground revolutionary army; SDS,
with its purely legal above-ground existence and its reform agenda, was seen as an impediment to
the growth of the revolutionary army. Our faction was in control of the national and regional offices
of the organization, plus its newspaper. I remember sometime in January, 1970, dumping the
membership lists of the New York Regional Office into a garbage barge at the W. 14th St. pier. How
could we have done the FBI’s work better for them? I believe that we weakened the larger
movement, whose goal was uniting as many people as possible to end the Vietnam War. Besides
causing people to drop out, we gave the government ammunition to smear the whole anti-war
movement as violent crazies bent on destruction of the society. Did our actions help attract the huge
middle of American society who might otherwise have joined the anti-war movement, public
opinion being vastly against the war? “Bring the War Home,” was as counter-productive a line in
1969 and 1970 as it was in 2001 at the World Trade Center. Last, and probably most important, the
Weather Underground forced a debilitating ideological debate in the much larger anti-war
movement over the “necessity” of engaging in armed “revolutionary” actions. In the summer of
1969 Weather-organized actions even disrupted the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam
(“Mobe”) mass anti-war events and demonstrations. People became demoralized and left the anti-
war movement because they didn’t want any part of an armed revolution. We destroyed SDS
because it wasn’t radical enough (it couldn’t take the final step of anti-imperialism to armed
action), thereby doing the work of the FBI.’ (Radical History Review, Spring, 2006, emphasis