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State and federal law-enforcement officials admit that they know little about California's revolutionary underground. Charles Bates, chief of the San Francisco FBI office, points out that the groups are small, tightly knit, deeply suspicious of strangers, and thus virtually impossible to infiltrate.
What is known is that the groups are growing increasingly violent. FBI officials suspect that radicals have committed some of the state's recent unsolved murders. Among these is the slaying of Wilbert ("Popeye") Jackson, a black activist who the FBI believes was killed because radicals suspected—incorrectly—that he was a squealer. Last year the radicals claimed responsibility for 19 bombings in California; so far this year they have set off 50.
Their bombs have caused millions of dollars of property damage in the Bay Area but only one death. Typically, the bombs are set to go off at night or after telephoned warnings. The targets are carefully chosen for maximum effect on businessmen and politicians. Says a federal official: "If the underground radicals read much at all, it is the business pages of newspapers. They take what they can out of them to justify their bombings in their communiqués."
The radical groups are so small that it would be a grave mistake to take them too seriously. Some of them are hardly more than a dozen or two people with a catchy name and a talent for publicity. Their methods are crude. They are the sort of people that Karl Marx would have contemptuously dismissed as senseless anarchists. Many California radicals follow the teachings of Mao, Che Guevara, French Revolutionary Regis Debray and Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian terrorist tactician. Marighella advocates violence as a way to encourage government authorities to overreact. He theorizes that a government will inevitably impose harshly repressive measures that will "radicalize" nonviolent citizens and thus bring on the revolution.
Law-enforcement officials feel certain that the terrorists in California total no more than 200 people, loosely organized into fewer than a dozen groups that frequently dissolve and form again under new names, to the confusion of police investigators. Members include middle-class whites, Chicanos and, more recently, black ex-convicts recruited by white radicals who infiltrated seemingly legitimate prison groups. Several white members of the S.L.A. first met their future "spokesman," Donald DeFreeze, at meetings of the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville prison for mentally disturbed criminals. Warns a California legal official: "The radicals are still actively recruiting in the prisons, and we think there are potentially at least a dozen DeFreezes either in jail or on parole."