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The two "moles" (spy jargon for longtime double agents) quickly learned that Josie Bissell and Esther Mullin had other prophets, among them Kate Millett and Betty Friedan. Indeed, the Revolutionary Committee had formed as a separate faction because Bissell and Mullin found too much "male supremacy" in the Weather Underground. The women refused any special treatment from the men and forbade them to use such words as bitchy, ballsy or aggressive when talking about women. They also never wore dresses or makeup, except as disguises, condemning them as symbols of male exploitation that were also out of keeping with Mao's dictum of depersonalization. The four lived in the Echo Park-Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, a pleasant older part of the city. Bissell and Perry shared an apartment, while Justesen and Mullin lived together in a small, old house nearby.
The women claimed to have been involved in many bombings and said they knew how to build explosive devices but needed help on firearms. Within two weeks of meeting the agents, they asked for weapons training and were taken by Ralph to the Mojave Desert, near Barstow, Calif. They used various rifles and handguns in target practice, but never became good shots. Ralph made sure their lessons were models of misdirection.
The revolutionaries held regular jobs. Josie Bissell was a nurse's aide, while Michael Justesen worked as a pressman at a lithography firm. To avoid detection, the group scheduled all meetings with Ralph and Dick by calling them at predesignated phone booths. The radicals never went to any political demonstrations for fear of being spotted by lawmen. When driving in cars, they always monitored police radios. The fugitives among them went out only at night. None had any contact with their families. All had aliases and would change them as often as once a week, but they never used counterfeit forms of identification. Instead, they got genuine driver's licenses and other documents from sympathizers within governmental agencies.
The undercover men also had let their hair and beards grow long and scraggly. They dressed shabbily and took on menial jobs-yard work, house painting, truck loading-that did not demand Social Security cards, driver's licenses or other forms of identification that could have been traced by the militants' friends.
While Reagan and Gianotti were moles, they were debriefed once a week by another agent dressed in street people's sloppy garb and then would dictate a long report to an FBI stenographer. After the arrests were made, they at first wanted to keep their cover, but now, after a month of enjoying the real world again, they are happy to be in from the cold.