[LAF] Fwd: [smygo] Sorry About All the Bombs

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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/20/sorry-about-all-the-bombs.html
Sorry About All the Bombs
William Powell wrote a terrorist bible. Forty Years Later, he revisits
his work.
by Tony Dokoupil
February 20, 2011

It’s the original guide to “everything illegal,” from pot loaf and hash
cookies to tear gas, dynamite, and TNT. There are frank tips on
demolition, surveillance, sabotage, and the gorier parts of hand-to-hand
combat, including how to behead a man with piano wire and make a knife
“slip off the rib cage and penetrate the heart.” In the introduction,
the then-teenage author makes clear his wish that the book be of more
than just theoretical use. “I hold a sincere hope that it may stir some
stagnant brain cells into action,” he wrote.

William Powell, author of The Anarchist Cookbook, succeeded all too
well. His slim, 160-page volume democratized the nuts and bolts of
terror. Published in 1971, it would sell more than 2 million copies
worldwide and influence dozens of malcontents, mischief makers, and
killers. Police have linked it to the Croatian radicals who bombed Grand
Central Terminal and hijacked a TWA flight in 1976; the Puerto Rican
separatists who bombed FBI headquarters in 1981; Thomas Spinks, who led
a group that bombed at least 10 American abortion clinics in the
mid-1980s; and the 2005 London public-transport bombers.

Just last spring, after a father-son team of British white supremacists
drew on the book to make a jar of ricin, a London judge joined police in
calling for a ban on the title and the many copycat volumes it has
inspired. But retailers refused, and the book’s Arizona-based publisher,
which acquired the rights in 2001, declined to comment. So the work
lives on, and so does its author. Just not in the way you might expect.

Powell, now 61 years old, long ago renounced the best-selling terrorist
bible he penned. He left the country in 1979, bouncing around the Middle
East, Africa, and Asia, working as a teacher and administrator in a
series of State Department–backed private schools. He wrote more books,
about pedagogy and professional development. And he gained a reputation
for—wait for it—conflict resolution.

Powell has not spoken publicly about his role in fostering a generation
of anarchic rebellion. Until now. In an exclusive interview with
NEWSWEEK, he talked about the origins of the Cookbook, his reinvention
as a teacher of diplomats’ children, and how he processes the unseemly
acts that are tied to his name. Taken together with a batch of recently
released FBI records on Powell’s case—including more than a hundred
pages of civilian letters, internal memos, and intelligence reports
discussing the book’s dangers—his comments tell the story of a lost
chapter in the history of American radicalism, one that still resonates
wherever established order is under attack today.

“It’s part of who I am,” says Powell of the Cookbook. “In the context of
1969 and the Vietnam War and a wide-eyed 19-year-old,” he adds, “some of
the sentiments contained in it make sense.” But in a subsequent
conversation, he takes a step back. “I’m sorry that it has been used by
people for violent purposes.”

In 1969 Powell was living in a tenement in lower Manhattan. Vietnam vets
bought and sold drugs in nearby Tompkins Square Park. Outside his door,
as war dragged on, the glow of the Summer of Love was wearing off. The
peaceniks were beginning to get violent. In the course of 1968 and 1969
alone, there were well over a hundred politically inspired bombings, not
including arson and vandalism, according to The Sixties, a history of
the era by former activist Todd Gitlin.

Powell had come to New York from Westchester County, dropping out of
high school and fleeing to the city the first chance he got. The son of
a United Nations press officer, he spent his early boyhood in the leafy
London suburb of Harrow, enrolled in a private school where 8-year-olds
studied Latin and Greek and were made to recite Scripture from memory.
If they faltered, they were beaten. “I was caned fairly regularly,” he
recalls. He moved back to America as a middle-schooler, sticking out
because of his British accent and impatient with school.

Settling in Alphabet City in an apartment “with the proverbial bathtub
in the kitchen,” Powell became part owner of an off-off-Broadway
theater, more interested in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud than radical
movements. But he wanted to become a writer, and he got a letter—one
that threatened to tax his personal liberty and force him into war. The
arrival of a draft card in the mail “made me very angry,” he recalls.
Suddenly, his research for a book took a decidedly political turn.

Between 1968 and 1970, Powell devoured the “U.S. Combat Bookshelf” in
the New York Public Library, reading decommissioned government manuals.
He supplemented those with Boy Scout guidebooks, electronics catalogs,
and a stack of obscure insurrectionist pamphlets, including Abbie
Hoffman’s F--k the System. The result—produced longhand at home on legal
pads—was a brisk volume infused with the first-person authority of
someone who had deep experience doing drugs and toppling governments.
“There are basically two methods of booby-trapping pipes … Explosions
can be a really thrilling and satisfying experience … Banana skins
really do contain a small quantity of Musa Sapientum Bananadine.”

The problem—besides the fact that banana skin is not, alas, a
psychedelic—is that Powell had little personal experience with the
activities that he was expounding upon. His guerrilla tactics and
bomb-making recipes were “for the most part accurate,” as the FBI’s own
laboratory later concluded. But his voice was the invention of an
aspiring novelist, and so were most of his anecdotes. He never drove a
hot-wired car to Miami, made LSD in his kitchen, or fed cops a fake name
when busted at an antiwar demonstration, as the book suggests. In fact,
Powell’s only appearance before a judge involved his theater, when
Paramount Pictures sued for an illegal run of The Little Prince. (Powell
closed the show, and the suit disappeared.)

The book, however, did not. As he was finishing the writing, he took the
SATs and applied to Windham College, a now-defunct liberal-arts school
in Vermont, where enrollment tripled with kids hoping to sit out the war
with an “education” deferral. Powell then sent his manuscript—titled The
Anarchist Cookbook for the simple reason that it contained recipes for
would-be hell-raisers—to perhaps the most daring publisher of the time.
Lyle Stuart had just blown the mind of square America with The Sensuous
Woman, which purported to be the first sexual how-to book written by a
lady, for ladies, and he liked Powell’s offering right away. “No one
else did,” Stuart told an interviewer in 1978, “and of course no other
publisher would touch it.” In other words, a perfect match. It was
“published verbatim,” Powell adds.

The Cookbook debuted in mid-January 1971. Almost immediately, as the
FBI’s recently released records show, letters poured into the bureau
from citizen snoops around the country. “This is not a cookbook!” wrote
George Kellog of Glendale, Calif. “Why is this allowed to happen!!!”
added Earl C. Levering, who didn’t bother with a return address. Joseph
Singleton of Titusville, Fla., simply scrawled his message on a news
clipping: “Danger!” he wrote to the office of director J. Edgar Hoover.
“What are you doing about this???”

Officially, the answer was nothing. Hoover (or his PR team) responded
with reassurances that “I share your concern about this matter,” but
“the FBI has no control over material published through the mass media.”
Internally, however, the teletype machine came alive. “Urgent”
correspondence flew between senior members of the White House, the
Department of Justice, and the FBI, including President Nixon’s lawyer,
John Dean (who later did time for the Watergate cover-up), and Hoover’s
associate director, Mark Felt (later revealed as the informant known as
Deep Throat). The conclusion: this is “a manual for revolutionary
extremists,” and “the effects on a civilized society could be devastating.”

The effect on Powell was devastating, too. In the 12 months after the
book was published, bombings increased to an average of five a day,
according to FBI data. Citizens who blamed Powell stuffed his Vermont
mailbox with death threats. Anarchists weren’t happy, either, accusing
him of war profiteering, and setting off stink bombs at his only press
conference in New York. The FBI never bothered Powell personally
(deciding that he would leverage it for publicity). But they questioned
his father and his father’s colleagues at the U.N., and they tracked
which stores were selling the book. He drew increasing
publicity—NEWSWEEK and others profiled him and attacked his work—but he
shrank from the limelight. “I can’t say I enjoyed the notoriety,” he
says, “and I didn’t expect it.” Amid it all, Powell himself soured on
the book, purging his home of copies and declining to discuss it with
friends. “I didn’t anticipate the ramifications,” Powell says. “I don’t
think I was as emotionally intelligent as I might be now.”

Powell dropped out—way out. He signed on as chief timekeeper on the
Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He volunteered as an English instructor in a home
for disturbed boys. In 1975 he moved back into his parents’ house in
Westchester, volunteering as a special-ed teacher, earning a master’s
degree in English, and eventually landing a paid teaching job upstate.
He met the woman who would become his wife. And he tried to forget about
the destructive cultural force that bore his name. “Actually, the book
had stopped selling and the royalties at this point were negligible,” he
says, unsure why sales ever picked up again. “I just assumed that the
book would go out of print.”

Powell reinvented himself as an educator on the international stage. He
lectured at the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia (he wrote a history
of the royal family that got him banned from the kingdom), and rose
through the ranks to attain top positions in schools packed with
children of the international elite in Dar es Salaam, Jakarta, and Kuala
Lumpur. He was commissioned to write three books by the Office of
Overseas Schools. But even as his star ascended, he never completely
escaped his past.

In 1991, interviewing to become headmaster at a Tanzanian school, a
member of the parent board asked Powell how to make a Molotov cocktail.
Powell swallowed hard. But the chairman, who knew about the Cookbook,
had his back. He dismissed the work “as a youthful folly or symbol of
protest,” according to the school’s official history. Powell got the
job. A similar incident occurred two years later; on the strength of his
record, Powell again prevailed.

The spread of the Internet only triggered more questions from students
and colleagues. A senior asked Powell to sign a copy of the Cookbook on
his graduation day. Then Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania,
and another in Nairobi. The Anarchist Cookbook played no known role in
the attacks, but anonymous mudslinging ensued, with parents warning the
board of “a secret organization within the school.” Powell resigned the
following year (not, he says, because of pressure). But he struggled to
land another job.

He decided to go on the offensive—in a modest way. In the hopes of
preempting critics and relieving “the discomfort of pretending it’s not
there,” Powell added reference to the book to his résumé. He also posted
an eight-paragraph note on the book’s Amazon.com sales page, calling it
“a misguided and potentially dangerous publication” and expressing his
wish that the book be taken out of print. Yet his views don’t hold any
sway: the rights belong to the publisher, and always have, so Powell has
been a helpless observer, forced to watch his work inspire new
generations of evildoers.

“I don’t like to think that I contributed to people being killed,” he
says—taking no responsibility for the deeds associated with the book
(because “I did not do them”). He believes that serious terrorists would
have found a way to wreak havoc without him. Friends, family, and
colleagues obviously agree. (A State Department spokesperson says
they’ve “known for several years” about Powell’s past.)

Earlier this month, almost 40 years to the day after he became a
best-selling author, Powell flew from Beijing, where he and his Chinese
wife often work as education consultants, to San Francisco. There, in
the Grand Ballroom of the downtown Hyatt, some 500 members of the
Association for the Advancement of International Education gathered to
give Powell a lifetime-achievement award. Powell and his wife are “both
highly, highly respected,” says Elsa Lamb, executive director of the
group. “He’s awesome!” adds Toni Mullen, an American-born alumni
director at one of the schools where Powell served as headmaster. The
day after he received his award, the FBI released documents containing
an honor far sweeter: a memo clearing Powell’s name. “We have studied
the contents of the book itself, as well as the information contained in
the Bureau reports,” the 1971 memo states, and “we have concluded that
the book does not urge ‘forcible resistance to any law of the United
States.’?” There is also “insufficient evidence that the author or
anyone else used the book as a guide,” and “we cannot establish
necessary intent.” For these reasons, “no further action is in order.”

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