The arrest and subsequent indictment of Leslie Bacon was based on information provided by an informant for the DC. metropolitan police department, the FBI official said. The perjury charge that was lodged against the 19year-old was subsequently dropped by the government, whose agents decided against making public the electronic information they had gathered against her

It was reported earlier this week that the US attorney s office here is conducting an extensive investigation into detailed allegations that undercover agents for the DC. police department and the FBI planted possibly illegal "bugs" in premises orcupied by various radical antiwar groups here during the war protest years.

Persons involved in that investigaton would confirm yesterday only that Bacon's name had surfaced in the probe. but said there was no indication she was the object of a questionable wiretap or bug.

The FBI official's com. men:s came after Rolling Stone magazine published an

account of the Capitol bombing in which five members of the Weather Underground — a radical antiwar group that has claimed responsibility for several bombings in the 1970s

reportedly described how they planted two bornhs in the U.S. Capitol. The first one failed to go off, they said, until detonated by the second.

The account was the first detailed public explanation of how the bombir.g on March 1, 1971. was carried out. A massive FBI investigation file designated "CAPROM" contains numerous leads on suspects including those persons quoted in the Rolling Stone interview -- but does not contain a description of the bombing itself, one source said

The FBI official, who had direct knowledge of the investigation, said the FBI was stymied on the case from the start.

"We didn't know a damn thing." said the official, who has since left the agency. "Leslie Bacon was the only thing we had and that was just a fishing expedition.

"She was called before a grand jury in Seattle (rather than in D.C.) because we thought we were more likely to get an indictment out there," the official continued. He described the selection of the Seattle location as "deliberately rigged... to get an indictment.

He said further then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

ordered FBI agents not to cooperate with the D C. police in the investigation, saying that "if they (the police) have the informant, let them solve the case."

The FBI ultimately com. piled a lengthy list of suspects in the case, and most of them were menihers of the Weather Underground who are now fugitives.

Rolling Stone magazine quoted underground fugitive Jeff Jones as saying the Capitol was chosen as the honbing target to dramatize "the fact that Congress was completely in Nixon's pocket. There was nobody in Congress that was taking an honest, principied position against the war in Vietnam

He said several “volunteers cared the explosive materials in on their bodies and planted them in an ob scure room chosen by studying a map of the Capitol.

"As they were putting it in the place where it was sup pose l'o go. it fell, there was a slanted ledge where they thought there was a shelf. When they realized what had happened and that they were still there they took a couple of deep breaths and came out," Jones was quoted as saving. The press was alerted there would be an explosion that might, but the bomb did not go off, ne added.

The next day the borers devided to plant a second, scatier device in order to detonate the first explosive Charge, he said._______

Charles E. Goodell

"From a legal to a political engine"

"Describe for the grand jury every occasion during the year 1970 achen you have been in contact with, attended meetings which were conducted by, or attended by, or been any place when any individual spoke whom you knew to be associated with or affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, the Communist Party or any other organization advocating revolu tionary overthrow of the United States, describing for the grand jury when these incidents occur. red, where they occurred, who was present and what was said by all persons there and what you did at the time you were in these meetings, groups, associations or conversations.

-Guy Goodwin, prosecutor
Tucson grand jury, 1970

Mand con, cation,

EETINGS, GROUPS, associations,

Amendment building blocks of our political process. Unless the government is engaged in a bona fide presentation of evidence of criminal activity to a grand jury, it has no business probing into such activities, frightening citizens away from them, or punishing people who resist revealing them to hostile authorities. Yet, for more than two years, Guy Goodwin and other "special prosecutors" from the Justice Department have been mak g Kafkaesque demands, like the ne above, of hundreds of citizens hom they force to appear before grand juries in cities scattered around the country.

The supposed function of grand juries in our system is to sit in judg. ment on the exercise of discretion by prosecutors; to grand jurors we entrust the sensitive job of weighing whatever evidence a prosecutor has gathered, authorizing or forbidding him to proceed further against individuals in a public trial. For this purpose we have given grand juries extraordinary powers to compel testimony and to punish recalcitrant witnesses. But, as the questions that are being asked before today's polit

Harper's

MAY 1973

Copyright 1973 by Charles Goodell. From his forthcoming book, Political Prisoners in America; printed by permission of Random House, Inc. Former Senator Goodell, a Republican, was a Justice Department attorney in the 1950s and now participates in the defense of Daniel Ellsberg. Mr. Goodell finds that civil liberties, at a high point today, are more threatened than ever before as the urge to repress dissent flows through less visible channels.

FOUNDED IN 1850/VOL. 246 NO. 1476

In my opinion, the inquisitions are intended to punish and inhibit pro-. tected expression and political activity and to break down the private and professional relationships, of academic liberals and of political activists. This must be a matter of goncern for all of us. The power to compel testimony behind the closed doors of grand jury rooms belongs to whatever political faction wins control of our institutions of government. Today the targets are liberals and radicals tomorrow's victims may be the Daughters of the American Revolution or the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

ро

Because the grand jury operates behind a cloak of secrecy intended to protect suspects from public condemnation, its powers, and their tential for abuse, have gone largely unnoticed. But in a criminal system that relies on due process and public scrutiny to safeguard the individual's rights and the system's integrity, the grand jury has always been an anomaly. Persons ordered to appear before it have no right to be told what crime, if any, is being investigated or whether they are being questioned as potential defendants or as mere witnesses. There are no rules of evidence restricting the scope of the prosecutor's inquiry. Unprotected by the presence of either judge or legal counsel, witnesses face

interrogation that can reach into virtually any corner of their lives. The prosecutor's unfettered discretion to issue subpoenas to anyone, anywhere, whom he wishes to interrogate is easily transformed into a power to intimidate and harass advocates of disfavored ideas. Most importantly, those who are subpoenaed can be jailed if they refuse to cooperate.

T

THE GRAND JURY has been a sort of time bomb ticking away in the Anglo-American legal system for over eight hundred years. Occasionally it served the people well, particularly when it investigated the very authorities who ran the system and brought the corrupt and lawless among them to trial. But the effec tiveness of the "people's panel" has always depended on its independence from authority. On several occasions in the past, a grand jury, jealous of its rights, actually excluded the prosecutor from its deliberations in or der to be free from the biases and self-interest of those with political power. Over the years, however, the complexion of grand juries has changed, their anti-authoritarian tradition has been diluted, and they have become subservient to the interests of the prosecuting authority over which they were assigned to watch.

Colonial panels twice refused to indict John Peter Zenger for seditious libel of the Royal Governor. In 1765 a Boston grand jury, elected by the radical-controlled town meeting, refused to oblige Royal officials who wanted it to indict suspected leaders of the Stamp Act Riots. In 1768, another panel refused to indict editors of the Boston Gazette who were accused of libeling the Royal Governor.

The Constitution, when it went in to effect in 1789, made no mention of grand juries. Several state ratifying conventions expressed uneasiness that the new Constitution left citizens to rely on the unfettered discretion of federal authorities to protect them against repressive prosecutions; the Fifth Amendment was ratified in 1791 to eliminate that danger. It provided that "no person shall be held to answer for a capital, or other. wise infamous crime." unless a grand jury authorized the charge. The hopes of those who drafted the Fifth Amendment with activist pre-Revo

lutionary grand juries in mind have been largely disappointed. Thomas Jefferson charged that by 1791 the Federalists had already transformed grand juries "from a legal to a polit ical engine" by inviting them "to become inquisitors on the freedom of speech."

In the 1920s and 1930s the grand jury's power to compel testimony proved useful to prosecutors trying to unravel and expose complex corruption and illegality in municipal governments, prison administration, police departments, and organized crime. People all over the nation followed Thomas E. Dewey's racketbusting grand juries in the mid-Thirties. At the time that grand juries were beginning to be used in this way, they had already become reliable "rubber stamps" for the conclusions reached by prosecutors who merely borrowed the panels' power to conduct their investigations. F. Lee Bailey voiced the sentiments of many lawyers today when he called the modern grand jury “a flock of sheep led by the prosecutor across the meadows to the finding he wants." From these two developments--the grand jurors' increasing tractability and the prosecutor's increasing dependence on the panel's investigative powers - evolved today's pattern of grand jury political investigations.

During the anti-Communist hyste ria of the 1950s, a stream of sus pected Communists was brought be fore grand juries where federal prosecutors pressed inquiries into wit nesses' political beliefs and affiliations, and those of their acquaintances. It as rarely made clear what crime, if any, was being investigated, and indictments were not forthcom ing to justify the probes. Instead, witnesses were handed summary contempt sentences and reports were is sued to pillory those who had been subpoenaed and those whose names, had been mentioned in the secret testimony.

The politically targeted grand juries of the McCarthy era resemble nothing in American experience so much as the Congressional antisubversive investigating committees of the same period. The Nixon Administration's fondness for the people's panel is rooted in this aberration of the Fifties, not in the colonial grand juries and the tradition underlying the Fifth Amendment. In the 1970s, the grand jury has almost completely

replaced the moribund and poverless antisubversive committees of the earlier era.

IN THE FALL of 1970, a grand jury in Tucson, Arizona, was investigat ing the purchase of some dynamite by an alleged Weatherman who had driven away in a car registered to a woman in Los Angeles. The grand jury indicted the buyer for illegal interstate transportation of the explo sives. For several months FBI agents conducted heavy surveillance of the car owner's home in an attempt to confirm their suspicions that a plot was brewing, but they found nothing. Case closed. At this point, after the grand jury had performed its proper function, Guy Goodwin flew to Tuc son to reopen the investigation. Goodwin is a member of the Special Litigation Section of the Justice Department's Internal Security Division--a division that had been relatively inactive since the McCarthy period, until it was revitalized in 1970. The Special Litigation Section takes responsibility for prosecuting political cases wherever they arise in the federal system.

Goodwin obtained subpoenas requiring five young people who lived at the California address on the car's registration to come to Tucson to testify. Although he asked them a few questions about the use of the car, his probing generally had no bearing on any legitimate area of grand jury inquiry. For instance:

Tell the grand jury every place
you went after you returned to
your apartment from Cuba, every
city you visited, with whom and
by what means of transportation
you traveled, and who you visited
at all of the places you went dur
ing the times of your travels aj
ter you left your apartment in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May of
1970.

Goodwin made these demands of persons subpoenaed as witnesses. They were not, and were not to be, accused of any criminal activity.

When the witnesses refused even to try to detail the travels and habits of friends and political associates, they were given full immunity from prosecution and asked again, this time under threat of imprisonment if they refused. They chose jail in early December 1970, and there they remained until the expiration of that

particular grand jury's term at the end of March 1971. They were the first of a new class of political prisoners. When they were finally released, each was greeted at the cell door with another subpoena to appear before yet another grand jury. Grand juries in the federal system have a life of eighteen months, Faced with Goodwin's persistence and a potentrally endless string of eighteenmonth jail sentences, three agreed to testify, telling Goodwin nothing he did not already know about the dynamite purchase, Goodwin pushed on, however, with his fishing expedi tion into their personal and political

affairs. The two witnesses who held out were again cited for contempt but avoided jail during a string of appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court and back. Twenty months passed before their contempt convictions were reversed. Recently, in the Camden 28 case, a federal court of appeals upheld release of a couple who had spent fourteen months in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury In a precedentshattering decision, the court held that their continued jailing had be come punitive rather than an effort to induce testimony. F

With the methods he had refined in Tucson, Goodwin looked for a new angle of inquiry into the amorphous organizations and ad hoc coalescings of the New Left. On March 1 a bomb had exploded in the Capitol. In late April radical organizers converged on Washington to plan and execute a Mayday protest against continua. tion of the war in Vietnam. On April 27 FBI agents arrested nineteen-yearold Leslie Bacon She was held on $100,000 bail as a material witness in the Capitol bombing, and she was sensationally characterized to the press as a link between the bombers and the organizers of the imminent Mayday demonstrations. By September it became clear that the characterization was false, the Court of Appeals ruled that the FBI had acted arbitrarily and illegally in arresting her without sufficient evidence.

Even before the Mayday demonstrations began, however, Leslie Bacon was flown to Seattle and subjected to Guy Goodwin's questioning. In the three days before an experienced lawyer entered the case on her behalf, she answered more than two hundred and fifty questions touching on nearly every aspect of

her fe for the previous six months. She was cited for contempt and jailed when she refused to cooperate any further with Goodwin's probe. His persistence in pressing for her testimony cannot be explained by a need for information on the Capitol bombing: she had none, she was the only witness called in the investigation, and no one was indicted. He wanted raw data about radicals. The "independence" of the grand jury. it freedom from rules governing the scope or relevancy of interrogation, its secrecy -- all have invited him to abuse it

In her three days of cooperation, Leslie Bacon supplied Goodwin with a great deal of the intelligence data he sought. She had traveled extensively throughout the United States and attended a number of radical conferences in the previous year. Her work on the Mayday demonstrations had put her in touch with still others about whom Goodwin wanted to i know more. About a purely social visit to California, Goodwin asked her where she went and what she did, whom she saw, visited with, or stayed with." the names of those with whom she traveled, and "what were the conversations in the car during the fifty-six-hour drive?"

When he questioned her about the organizers of the Mayday demonstrations, he traced her every movement, asking how she traveled from one place to the next, who was pres ent at all times, what was said by each person, and even who slept with whom in which rooms of what house. Leslie Bacon revealed enough names and information for him to launch grand jury investigations in New York. Washington, and Detroit, which he subsequently did.

In New York Goodwin subpoenaed seven witnesses. The questions went into familiar Goodwin territory and only one of the seven would testify. In Washington, Goodwin subpoe naed three Mayday organizers. Two were sentenced for contempt for refusing to testify but appealed and won release on the ground that the government could not refuse to dis close whether illegal wiretapping formed the basis for the questions. Goodwin was not willing to proceed if he would have to reveal the illegal activities of the FBI, so he moved on to Detroit. There he issued subpoenas to seven others connected by Leslie Bacon to the Mayday activi

ties. One testified, but six refused, raising again the embarrassing question of governmental wiretaps,

HE BASIC TIRI ST of the Nixon

Tamministration's plan for the

people's panel is dear. From Leslie Bacon's initial Seattle testimony. Goodwin launched three grand juries and questioned a score of witnesses. If no lituit is imposed upon or ac cepted by Goodwin and his superiors, the Justice Department can smother radical political dissent in this coun try with a blanket of special grand juries.

The Nixon Administration has also bent the grand jury's compulsory process in an attempt to turn newsmen and scholars into investigators for the FBI's political intelligencegathering effort. In Boston, where the Justice Department conducted an investigation purportedly aimed at uncovering the facts behind publication of the Pentagon Papers, a stream of scholars, journalists, and writers were subpoenaed and asked to identify the sources of their infor mation and opinions about the Viet nam war. The effect of this probe, and its likely purpose, was to dry up the flow of government information unclassified as well as classi fied) that contradicted the Nixon view of the tragic events in Indochina.

The grand jury earned its popular title, "the people's panel," when it served as an instrument of popular government and as the citizen's counterforce to the otherwise unlimited discretion of prosecutors and other officers of government. It was thought to be a crucial link in our system of checks and balances. In the hands of the Nixon Administration its powers have been loaned out to the FBI. The FBI has no authority to force citizens to disclose the de tails of their personal lives, their political beliefs or associations, their sources of information, their travels, or their conversations with others. The FBI, which got almost anything J. Edgar Hoover asked of Congress, was denied the subporna power he requested to assist his men in gathering just such information. Now this important safeguard has been circumvented. By coupling the unique powers of the people's panel with the FBI's continuing surveillance of political dissenters, an institution de