Bits From the Past: Spy Times

Sam Smith - I was already 30 by the end of 1967, too old to be trusted anymore, they said. In fact, there were a lot of older people around who, to a degree not widely recognized, held things together in the sixties, especially old leftists who actually knew how to organize marches and rallies and fight in court and keep offices going even when overfilled with people who were just passing through or trying out a new direction for a little while or using the moment in history as a crash pad for their souls. There would come to be the notion that the sixties were an act of immaculate conception. In fact, they were more an act of conversion, conversion of the isolated, unfocussed, dispersed and inarticulate alienation of the 1950s into a mass movement with direction, common language and rules. One of those rules was that nothing good and pure had ever happened before.

So if you had come of age in the fifties you were something of an anomaly, especially if you were a big guy and white and easily mistaken for a cop. Under a tree by the Lincoln Memorial's reflecting pool during a big peace march in 1967, the tie-died, pony-tailed protester next to me was quiet for a long time. Then he turned and asked softly, "CIA?" I puffed on my pipe. "Nope" "FBI?" "Nope." "Smoke?" I took the pipe out of my mouth. "Half and Half, all day long." "Cool," he said and gave me his love beads.

 I did not get off as easily at later demonstrations. At an early environmental protest, an alternative video squad from upstate New York found me in a dark blue T-shirt and baseball hat taking notes. With camera rolling, they quizzed me at length as to my law enforcement affiliation, finding my answers profoundly unconvincing. Later, I sent them some copies of the DC Gazette along with a note saying that even 220-pound iron pumpers might want to save the environment. I never heard from them.

 Once, a demonstration against a proposed Potomac River bridge was joined by New York City radicals in town for another, more macro-political protest. There was no more ostentatiously radical tribe of activists than that nurtured on the polemics of New York City. They were, as Oscar Wilde once put it, more certain of everything than I was of anything. In this case, the New Yorkers' tactics included throwing rocks at the police. There had not been much of that sort of thing in Washington. As I wandered down Georgetown's M Street -- which had turned into a sort of free fire zone with the helmeted cops on one side and the protesters on the other -- the prop wash of a rock lapped my face and I decided it was time to leave the scene.  Others did likewise, propelled by the cops. The whole protest reformed on the campus of Georgetown University where I was soon accosted by several screaming, camera-grabbing, visiting radicals absolutely convinced that I was an undercover cop. This misapprehension annoyed me, since I was instead one of the few anti-freeway journalists in town. I was about to disregard my Quaker education when a local demonstration leader stepped in and vouched for my bona fides.

 In truth, undercover agents were all around. Throughout America, police were spying on, infiltrating and disrupting movement groups. Even outside America, students took notes on other students for the CIA. You knew it was a problem, you saw it, it had names on it. I tried to be pragmatic. I had lived several summers in a house in Maine with a crank telephone and a party line. Anyone on the line could listen in on anyone else and the operators could listen in on everyone in town. I thus had never thought of the phone as a device for private conversation. Further, I figured that one of the best ways to handle the problem was not to overload one's life with secrets and conspiracies. I told friends that the worse thing that could happen if my phone were tapped was that the intruder might actually learn something.

 I considered myself something of a missionary and who better to convert than a member of the intelligence community? I therefore found it interesting but not unduly alarming when a subscriber I thought affiliated with the CIA bought two subscriptions year after year. I was somewhat flattered when this subscriber introduced himself and invited my wife and I to dinner and then was somewhat disappointed when nothing more was heard from him after the dinner except for his annual renewals. Apparently my policy of non-conspiratorial openness was too boring to pursue.  Similarly, I enjoyed my conversations with a 9th Precinct police officer who would drop by the Gazette office with his dour squad car partner. I may be the only underground newspaper editor in the country who was periodically visited by a non-undercover cop to discuss politics, both of us on company time. To be sure, I had known the officer over the years, mainly as his sister's brother.  He had first come around to my office shortly after graduating from Harvard to discuss what he was going to do with his life. One of the options had been to join the police department. I attempted to discourage him but to no avail. He took the job and ended up in my own precinct and with my own office on his beat. Officer Don Graham has continued to ignore my advice in his later employment as publisher of the Washington Post. I assumed Graham was filing reports about me with someone, just as someone had filed a report on another alternative paper in town, The Colonial Times, when it ran a cover showing a fat lady protesting a local revenue proposal with a button reading, FUCK THE FOOD TAX! A postal inspector, apparently assuming that our papers were locked in mortal combat, came by my office one day to suggest I file an obscenity complaint against The Colonial Times.  Instead, I gave the fellow a lecture on the First Amendment and called my friends at the Times to warn them of the danger afoot.