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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 20, 1972)
FBI hunts mysterious bomb suspect By SANFORD J. UNGAR The Washington Post WASHINGTON — When the FBI announced last Thursday that it was seeking Ronald Kaufman as the man who allegedly planted time bombs in nine banks last summer, “movement people” across the country began trying to figure out if he was one of them. The facts published about him made Kaufman eligible for several different slots on the spectrum of American radical left politics. One-time member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Former shepherd of Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman. Recent resident of Berkeley, Calif. A 33 year-old AWOL Army private with a Ph.D. in psychology. But the “movement people” drew a blank. Most had never heard of Kaufman, not even under one of his several aliases. Those who once knew him hadn’t seen Kaufman in at least a year. Radical priest Dick York at the Episcopal ‘‘free church” in Oakland, Calif., .aIked with some activist friends and found them as mystified as he was himself. A Chicagoan who had known Kaufman during the demon strations at the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago said Kaufman had always op posed the tactics of the Weathermen, a militant faction of SDS which has taken credit for other bombings around the country. Besides, as a long-time activist at the University of Wisconsin pointed out, Yippies seldom return to SDS. At 33, he said, Kaufman would be “a real old-timer” in SDS, and if he had an important role, that would be widely recognized— “Everyone who’s ever been on the SDS side of the movement knows everybody else who has, and we don’t know him.” The only clue in the movement’s own internal manhunt for Kaufman seemed to lie in the identical letters he sent to newsmen, announcing the locations of the bombs and providing the keys to safety deposit boxes where they had been placed. To some people, the letters (which the FBI says were in Kaufman’s handprinting) were a polemical contribution to a search that has been going on within the movement in the last year for new modes of action. “Kidnapping people and demanding property (or money) in exchange for their lives exemplifies the anti-life property value of our sick and brutal society,” the letters said. “The movement in America would do better to kidnap property and offer it in exchange for the freedom of our people.” The letter went on to say that it would be simple, for example, to “kidnap a luxury hotel, a cor porate office building or a superhighway and demand the release of political prisoners as fansom.” The device used in the “kid nappings,” the letters explained, could be seven-month time bombs like the ones discovered in the safety deposit boxes, but substituting “highly reliable, nearly silent electronic watches” and “compact plastic explosive” for the cordless electric clocks and slow-burning power used in the bank bombs Such a bomb, it said, “could easily be embedded in the structure of a building under construction )e.g., the new FBI building in Washington) or under the roadbed of a highway not yet paved over. “In 3 or 4 months continued construction would make the device virtually undetectable. The authorities and the public would then be told who is to be freed in exchange for the exact location of the device. They would also be told how much time remained on the timer.” Should “the power structure” refuse to go along, the letters concluded, “they would then have the option of sitting around for months waiting for some portion of one of their empty toys to blow up. “Who will want to vacation in that hotel, meet in that boar droom or drive on that super highway for the next few mon ths?” It was a chilling proposal, not only to the government but also to movement groups that have been increasingly rejecting violence as a tactic. But how the proposal might be viewed by the weathermen and other “un derground” groups was im possible to determine. Con ceivably, someone among these could be sheltering Kaufman and other radical fugitives sought by the FBI. In St Louis — where Kaufman re-enlisted in the army last summer under the name of James Edward Jensen — Chris Hayes found it inconceivable that Kaufman could have been in volved with the local religious radical movement in which Hayes is active. Whatever the government may think, he said, violence of any sort is now unacceptable among them. But several people interviewed suggested that if the person who planned the bombs was already in the underground movement, he may have been a maverick “because of his extreme concern for lives.” If the FBI’s information on the bombings is correct, and if the identification of Kaufman is as certain as the bureau says it is. he apparently planned the action over a long period of time. Using the name of Christopher Charles Mohr, the man the FBI says is Kaufman rented safety deposit boxes at nine banks in New York, Chicago and San Francisco a year ago and returned in July to plant the bombs. 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