Who Bombed Judi Bari? - Interview with Beth Bosk

Interview by Beth Bosk - New Settler Interview, January 1995

NEW SETTLER: The last my readers know of you with regard to the bombing, you are in an Oakland hospital, near comatose. Outside, the FBI and the Oakland police are accusing you of the act of transporting the bomb that blew up your car as you were careening down a street in Oakland. I'd like you to begin with your recollection of the day you were bombed: why you were in Oakland?

JUDI: I'm going to start the day before in Willits, because I think it is more logical that way... It was the eve of Redwood Summer and we were calling for people to come in from all over the country to engage in non-violent civil disobedience to stop the over-cutting; and the timber industry was mounting a campaign to portray us as violent, and to whip up hatred against us. This included my receipt of increasingly frightening death threats, and fake press releases that were being distributed not only to the press, but were being passed out in the lumber mills and on the logging jobs. The fake press releases had the Earth First! logo on them -- but they weren't written by us, and in contrast to what we were really saying, they were calling for violence and tree spiking. One of the fake press releases actually spelled Darryl's name wrong, so it was easy to prove it was fake -- as we were asserting -- yet these were still being distributed as if they were real, and treated by the press as if they were real.

And perceived real by the increasingly-angered men who work in the industry.

JUDI: We've documented all this stuff since. Louisiana-Pacific, for example, in at least one plant (I suspect in more) held a meeting -- on the clock, that workers were forced to attend -- where they passed out the fake press releases -- presented them as real -- and encouraged the workers (in the words of the plant manager) "to go to public meetings wearing your hard hat and work boots and role up your sleeves and sit down right next to one of them so they won't talk too freely." I know this because the union filed a grievance against L-P for making them listen to anti-Earth First! propaganda on company time.

The companies were very actively trying to discredit us. G-P canceled their mill tours because of the alleged "terrorist threat." That's how they were doing their part. MAXXAM (and I have actual proof from their internal company memos) MAXXAM distributed these fake press releases calling for violence to the press after they acknowledged privately that they were fake. L-P put a barbed wire fence around their Ukiah plant. There was a whole bunch of things going on to portray us as terrorists and make people afraid of us. The bombing didn't happen in a vacuum.

Our reaction, though, was to try to head off the violence. We knew a lot of contract loggers -- the gyppos -- and we wanted to meet with them face-to-face and explain to them who we really were and to allay their fears and to work things out so that we wouldn't have to face violence that summer.

We had asked Art Harwood to help us set up these meetings of local gyppo operators, in that he was one of the largest ones, and he did that and we had two mediated meetings with a paid mediator in Willits. There were some rank-and-file loggers, but mostly it was contract loggers, company owners -- Bill Bailey was there, he owns a big logger supply outfit in Laytonville. Jerry Philbrick was there. Tom Loop was there.

And we had actually been making progress: first in humanizing each other -- in learning that each other were human beings, that we really had more in common than we thought; -- and then in allaying each other's fears. At the second meeting, we had reached an agreement that we called "The No First Strike Agreement": we had assured them that we had no intention of monkeywrenching their equipment, and they had said that they would not assault us if we don't. [laughs]

So we really felt that we were making progress and that things were going well. So, that's where I was on Tuesday of the week I was bombed. That meeting was held in the evening.

I left that meeting and went back to my house. Utah Phillips, who is a folk singer, Dakota Sid and Joanna Robinson were traveling with me. We spent the night at my house and then went down to Berkeley the next day where we were going to attend an organizing meeting for Redwood Summer. The organizing meeting was held at a Seeds of Peace house on California Street in Berkeley. The meeting was very long and there were lots of things to do -- setting up committees . . .

Seeds of Peace? What are seeds of peace? Where have they been sown?

Did it seem to you that these were coming from lone nuts, or from organizations? How did you guess the source?

JUDI: Some of them were obviously from the Sahara Club, which was an organized right wing hate group. But for most of them, it wasn't clear to me. I didn't have any experience with this. I mean, I've been an organizer for twenty-five years now, and I'd never received death threats like this before or since.

But now in retrospect as I look at it, all the death threats came within a three and a half week period. None before and only one afterwards (which I'll talk about later). It all came during a certain time period, and I now think it was an organized campaign.

At the time, though not knowing the source, I was terrified of the death threats and I tried to turn them in to the local sheriff and asked that they be investigated. I met with Burl Murray and Steve Satterwhite, two Mendocino county deputies, and I showed them the death threats -- I went in carrying the originals with me intending to turn over the originals to them.

But when I showed them the death threats they said, and I quote -- and there are three witnesses -- "We don't have the manpower to investigate. If you turn up dead, then we'll investigate." Steve Satterwhite said that. And when I heard that, I allowed them to xerox the death threats but I wouldn't give them the originals because it was clear to me I wasn't going to get any help from them.

Still very scared, I took the death threats to the Board of Supervisors and complained about the sheriff's lack of response. And Marilyn Butcher, one of the supervisors, said: "You brought it on yourself, Judi." That was the response I got from county officials! So I considered going underground.

But the thing about Redwood Summer: when we put the call out the call for Redwood Summer, we had no idea the response it was going to get. We expected it to be much smaller; we expected it to be much more manageable. But this hit a chord and it went national, and we were being deluged with . . .

Mississippi Summer in the California Redwoods.

JUDI: And it was simultaneously called "Redwood Summer". We used both. We couldn't decide on the name, so in typical Earth First! fashion, we said we'd call it both and see which one sticks.

But the images of a Mississippi Summer in the California redwoods was the busloads of students of the sixties riding into the south and attempting to change totally the regional moré.

JUDI: We had drawn a parallel: a parallel between the situation we were working in and the early days of the civil rights movement in the south. We felt we really had broad support amongst the general population in the country, but that information was being blocked by what we called the "Redwood Curtain." We felt that if the people of the United States knew that they were clear-cutting the Redwoods and beating up the activists that they would be appalled -- just as the public was appalled when they found out they were beating up black kids in Mississippi.

But because of the stranglehold of the timber companies on our local economy and social structure (which we found parallel to the stranglehold of the racists in Mississippi), as long as the crisis remained local, we didn't think we would be able to stop either the violence against us or the violence against the forest.

We thought if we could bring in people from all over the nation, we could bring national attention to it and people would be appalled. So we very consciously and deliberately modeled it on campaigns of Freedom Summer in Mississippi, including the call for the use of formal non-violence tactics, in order to combat both the violence being done to the forests and to the activists.

That was the image, and I think the image really grabbed people and so we were being deluged with requests to come in. So just from an organizing standpoint, it was very hard to send all the key organizers out of town at the same time.

But it was also because of the campaign to discredit us, that I felt like if I were out of town for two whole weeks, things that would be said unresponded to, and the ground we would lose at home would be too dear a price. There were other people who could do the slide shows, give the talks, and even play the music. I felt I was more needed at home -- for one thing, because I was the individual target of these attacks, and I felt I needed to be there to respond to them. And also, I was trying to build support among the watershed groups ...

Because there was suspicion among the longer-established watershed groups who had worked hard and long interpreting the new deep ecology ethic along their valleys and ridge roads, the suspicion that all these people coming in would mean twenty-year long relationships with straight neighbors down the drain, because of these nomadic and somewhat more feral Earth First!ers.

JUDI: Yes. And I felt I needed to personally be there, because it was my neighborhood, that it had to be somebody who already knew the people in these communities. I felt that the place I needed to be was home.

But I was still going to go to Santa Cruz. And Berkeley. Of this whole tour, I only did two of the cities. But I wasn't traveling with Darryl. Darryl was going to do the whole tour. I was just going to come and do this one gig, and then go back home and work on organizing the watershed groups and continue the meetings with the loggers to try to head off the violence.

Then how does Darryl end up in your car?

JUDI: I told you that I had gone to Dave Kemnitzer's house and spent the night. Darryl had spent the night at Seeds of Peace house. The next morning Darryl came over with Shannon Mar, who's also from Seeds of Peace, and they had come over in Shannon's car. Darryl was traveling with George Shook, who was the banjo player -- the three of us constituted a band. Darryl and Shannon were working on a grant request to pay for some of the food and necessities for the base camps, and Darryl had come over so we could get together and rehearse before we played that night. He had been on the road and I'd been home and we hadn't rehearsed together for awhile. Our intention was to leave for Santa Cruz in the afternoon. The gig down in Santa Cruz was at seven o'clock.

We went into the living room and started playing music together, and we said: "this is silly for us to be rehearsing without the banjo player. Let's go get George and all three of us rehearse together."

So it was completely unplanned. It was not expected that we would be traveling at all at that time -- it's late morning -- and it was certainly not expected that we would be traveling together. On the spur of the moment we said, "Let's go back to Berkeley and get George and all three of us will rehearse together."

So you were not on your way to Santa Cruz?

JUDI: Eventually -- but at that particular moment... We were on our way to Berkeley to pick up George. And I didn't know the streets of Oakland then -- although I certainly do now, as often as I go down there for depositions -- but at any rate, I did not know the streets of Oakland yet, so Shannon volunteered to lead the way in her car and I was going to follow her. And I had asked Darryl to ride with me because I had wanted to work out some of the things that we were going to be doing in the show: who was going to be doing the slide show -- the details of the show. So I had asked him to ride with me rather than Shannon, so he got into my car rather than her car and I began following her.

But it was hard to keep up with her because she drove so fast -- she drove like a bat out of hell; she was a really fast driver -- and I was trying to follow, and we got a couple of blocks from Dave Kemnitzer's house . . . and you know, I have a memory of this, but I have to say I don't totally trust my memory because what happened next was so traumatic that I don't know what is real and what isn't real, but the memory I have is of hitting my brakes: that I was trying to follow her, that she had gone around a corner suddenly, and that there was traffic coming -- something -- I have a memory of hitting my brakes, and then the next memory was of the bomb blowing up.

JUDI: And I knew it was a bomb immediately. I never experienced a bomb in my life, but there wasn't any question in my mind what it was. It was the loudest noise I'd ever heard. The noise of the explosion was so loud, that the sound had a physical force of its own, it was that loud.

The most violent thing I had ever experienced thus far was being rammed by a log truck, which had happened a year earlier -- and it certainly immediately brought that to mind -- but it was twenty times, fifty times more violent. I felt the bomb rip through me. And as opposed to the log truck, which was one, single metallic smash, this was diffuse: it came up from underneath me. I felt it. I know exactly where that bomb was because I felt it rip through me.

I don't remember blacking out, though I know that I did. I have no memory of losing consciousness. I thought I had retained consciousness the whole time, but now that I've been through all the crime scene stuff, I found out that I didn't.

So the bomb exploded, and I was knocked out for awhile, and my car drifted -- it's like explosion ripped through the car, people heard it all over: people who were Vietnam veterans say in the report that it reminded them of Vietnam: they had never seen anything like this other than that. Nobody had any questions that it was a bomb.

I slumped to the side of my seat and my car drifted out of control, and it drifted for about two blocks, drifted into the opposing lane, and it came to rest on the opposing curb. But I have no memory of that at all . . . But I regained consciousness very quickly afterwards, and the pain -- I didn't know that pain like that existed.

Can you compare it with childbirth? To anchor it at least for many women readers.

JUDI: I can. And that is a comparison in one way. It was so horrible -- no comparison as far as the level of pain, but what was the comparison: I'm described in the police reports as "screaming in pain." I wasn't screaming. The sounds coming out of my mouth were guttural and involuntary -- similar to the guttural and involuntary sounds that come out of your mouth during childbirth. That part really reminds me of it. I had no control over it. It was more like kia in karate than it was like a conscious scream. I wasn't screaming saying: Help! Help! Guttural, involuntary sounds were coming out of my mouth.

There is no way I can describe the pain. I always thought that if you were in enough pain, eventually, you would pass out. Not true. It just went beyond any level I could imagine. I couldn't move either of my legs. I had no feeling in my legs, but my back -- I knew my back was broken. All the reports say that all I would say was: "My back is broken. I'm dying."

I have no memory of what I said. All I remember is the pain.

And I remember that it hurt so bad that I wanted to die. And I felt that I was dying. I could feel the life force draining out of me. And I just wanted to die. And I tried to picture my children's faces to try to find a reason to stay alive.

During this time, Judi, did you hear Darryl's outpouring of love for you?

JUDI: I remember very vaguely -- kind of at the side of this pain I was immersed in, I hear him saying: "I love you. I love you." I don't have any memory of seeing him. I couldn't move. I knew I was paralyzed. I thought of Brian Willson. . . . Another one of the fleeting thought that went through my mind at the time was: this is what men do to each other in war. I remember vividly thinking that, and of comprehending the horror of it for the first time. I mean, you can intellectually think about the horror of war, but that human beings could do this to each other, this horror -- it was really a shocking thing in itself.

But mostly, I was so overwhelmed from the pain, and from the horror of seeing -- my legs were in weird positions and I couldn't move them. But my back hurt so much that it was overwhelming every other sensation. I begged the paramedics to put me out, and they wouldn't ...

Why!?!

JUDI: Because when you have internal injuries, they need you to be conscious so they can monitor your internal injuries. As I found out later, as a matter of practice, they want you to stay conscious so they can help save your life. So they wouldn't put me out, and moving me -- I thought there couldn't be any pain worst than what I was suffering, but when they moved me, it went up by another magnitude of ten. It was so awful, it is indescribable. All I wanted to do was die, and I began to think there are worst things than dying, there are worst things than dying -- and I couldn't picture my children. I began to think it's time for me to die."

I remember when I got to the hospital, they had to move me again, and I remember how horrible that was. I now read from the police files that the Oakland police met me at the hospital, and were questioning me as they wheeled me into surgery! I was outraged to learn that. (Finally, during depositions, when we interviewed the person who questioned me he said: "Of course I did that. It could have been a death bed confession.") Death-bed confessions, I have since learned, have a different legal weight. They are not considered hear-say, because when you are that close to death, you are not capable of lying.

And so they were following me into the operating room saying: "Who did this?"

I said, "Timber." "Well, who?"

I didn't know who. I just said, "Timber."

That's what I said according to the police reports. I didn't say, "Oh, it's my bomb and it exploded, " I said "Timber." -- because the people who had most recently confronted me were a kind of Fort Bragg Nazi group.

I said, "Fort Bragg."

I said, "Nazis."

I said, "Death threats."

I said all those things as I was being wheeled in.

-- At least according to the police report. I have zero memory of this. I don't remember being questioned. I don't remember a policeman being there. All I remember is feeling the life-force draining out of me, wanting to die, thinking: "Gee, it's not so horrible to die.

And I remember drifting, finally feeling like I was leaving my body and drifting, and then everything blacked out and I remember right before blacking out, feeling as if I was being jerked back. That was the last memory that I had.

Later on, you learn on site, immediately, the FBI determines you are a terrorist carrying a bomb in the back cavity of your vehicle. Do you remember any kind of interaction with the man who makes that determination while you were there in colossal pain?

JUDI: I was gone. I was in the ambulance in probably ten minutes. Nobody from the FBI admits to being there before I was gone. I don't even remember the paramedics. I remember being taken out of the car. But I don't remember having an oxygen mask put on my face. All I remember is being moved and how bad it hurt to be moved.

After I drifted off -- they were giving me anesthetic at this point, which by the way, this is like sodium pentathol. This is truth serum! They knew I wasn't lying when I said these things. They knew I wasn't capable of lying in this state, and yet they ignored it.

JUDI: [laughter] Seeds of Peace is a group that was based in Berkeley -- I'm not even sure if they still are. They began at the Nevada Test Site actions -- and I believe in the earthquakes, also. They are a group of non-violent activists who feed people and run base camps and they have the capacities and the skills to feed many people. They had offered themselves to Redwood Summer, to help us run the base camps and help us run the non-violence trainings, so they were working in coalition with Earth First! By this time, Redwood Summer had become a coalition action.

So they were going to play this principal role, and we had held that meeting at their collective house...

And the meeting was very long, it didn't end until 11 p.m. or so, and after the meeting, Utah and Dakota went back to Nevada City, where they lived, and there were a bunch of people staying at the Seeds of Peace house, and then one of the people, Dave Kemnitzer, told me he had a spare bedroom nearby in Oakland, and did I want to use it? Well, there were many people sleeping on the floor at Seeds of Peace so I took up the offer of the spare bedroom and I left with Dave Kemnitzer and I went to his house.

The next morning Darryl came over to practice with me. Darryl and I were doing a tour of the colleges in northern California to recruit students to come to Redwood Summer. Actually, Darryl was doing them all; I was staying home a lot and organizing from there. But I was going to go to Santa Cruz -- which was where we were going to do our concert that evening. We had the most support in Santa Cruz. Two local kids who had grown up here -- Lisa Henry and Zack Stenz (Liz Henry and Anna Marie Stenberg's daughter and son) were the sponsors. They had publicized the event well and had a lot support for it. This was going to be our biggest gig ...

I need to ask you about your personal relationship with Darryl at this point because the nature of that relationship became part of the accusation against you -- that together, as lovers, you were not only going down to address a rally of students, you were also transporting a bomb. An electrical transmission tower in the Santa Cruz mountains had been blown up a month or two before and the FBI had tried to link Darryl with that ...

JUDI: Actually, it was not blown up. That is part of the FBI disinformation. It was sawed down.

There were three towers, actually, that were taken down, and they were done with a handsaw and with a cold chisel. They were done very low tech. There were no explosives involved.

And it's very interesting the way you relate the story, because for people who know the story or know part of it, it is widely perceived that those tower lines were blown up, and in fact, they were not. And, it had happened a month earlier, and as I said at the time, I was home in bed with five witnesses. [laughs] I had nothing to do with this.

It was Darryl who was being investigated

JUDI: Darryl was not involved in it either. And actually, the FBI tried to implicate both of us; at the time, they were targeting me more than Darryl.

And Darryl was not expected to be in my car when the bomb exploded. One of the reasons that I describe myself as the target of the bombing is not that I'm self-centered [laughing] -- although I may be -- but that Darryl was not expected to be traveling with me. We were traveling separately because I thought there was so much work that needed to be done yet at home, I couldn't afford to be gone for two weeks.

Darryl and I had been officially "broken up" for several months by this time. But although we were broken up as lovers, we had remained friends and had remained organizing partners. We still associated with each other, but we were no longer a romantic couple.

And why was that?

JUDI: It was really just personal reasons. We didn't just get along. We fought too much. He didn't get along with my children well enough, which was really an important thing for me. I think that if a man forces you to choose between your children and him, in my case, I'm going to choose my children every time.

The things that were behind our break-up were really very personal. They didn't have to do with the organizing: So we were still organizing together. And we were still playing music together. But I wasn't going to go on the whole tour because I felt that I was needed at home too badly -- especially with this disruption campaign. We needed to be able to counter the idea that we were terrorists being spread in the community. I felt I needed to be home to answer these charges.

On the other hand, I remember you being very fearful -- for the first time since I'd known you.

JUDI: I was scared to death. It was terrifying. I considered going underground because I was so afraid from the death threats I was receiving.

There were a whole series of them: and they were very elaborately done -- even artistic -- very well done. The scariest one was a photograph of me from a news story, with a rifle scope and cross-hairs drawn over my face and yellow ribbons stapled to it.

Another one said: "Judi Bari get out, go back where you came from. We know everything. You won't get a second warning." -- that's an example. There was one called "Stompers," and it had a picture of these stomper logger boots and it said they wanted to "stomp the following low-life scum" and they named Darryl and Greg King and myself. and they said, "If you want to be a martyr, we'll happily oblige."

JUDI: And so, I was taken into the operating room. . . . I don't know how many hours later I woke up. I was very groggy and certainly in shock, and I woke up to find myself absolutely immobile. My pelvis was broken in ten places; I was incapable of movement at all. My leg was in a traction device...

There was a sizable hole in your buttocks...

JUDI: I wasn't aware of that yet. I'm basically talking about my awareness: I couldn't move at all, my leg was in traction and there were tubes coming from all parts of my body. I kind of began to remember that I had been bombed. And as I began to focus in this groggy state, the first thing I focused on was two uniformed police, and they wanted to question me about bombing myself.

And in this devastated state, in which I was drugged and in absolute shock, I couldn't deal with these cops trying to talk to me, and I said: "I won't talk to you without a lawyer."

They went away, but it's in the record that I said that, and my refusal to talk to them at that point becomes one of the things that they point to to say: "Oh, she must be a suspect because she wouldn't talk to us." Well, it was a reflex. I just couldn't deal with them. I just wanted them to go away.

Then I drifted back into unconsciousness. And for the next ten days, I was unconscious most of the time. I would drift in and out of consciousness. People would come, go. I wasn't allowed visitors because I was under arrest. I was placed under arrest while I was in surgery -- three hours after the bombing is the time on the arrest warrant.

My next memory remember my lawyer coming. I remember [Santa Rosa Press Democrat reporter] Mike Geniella coming. But these events don't connect for me. I would drift in and out of consciousness and I would remember people being there, but it all didn't make much sense to me at the time -- although I hear I was quite lucid when I talked, giving people a false impression of how conscious I really was. Really, I have few memories and little understanding of what was going on. At a time like that you are reduced to your core, your gut. What's coming out of you is what's really deep inside you.

And I'm certain that the police, with their experience with people near death, knew this. Yet they pretended that this was all a conspiracy, and a ruse on our part.

I remember participating in the vigil at your bedside on the day Nelson Mandela came to Oakland. We listened to his speech together on the radio, and my memory is of you lucid in your response to that speech, floating above the pain, with this excruciatingly large, weeping hole in your rump, your leg up in plaster. In some way managing to float above the pain as an act of will. You had just rejected your pain killers.

JUDI: I was on morphine for ten days -- and I was wasting away. I wasn't eating. I was being fed with intravenous tubes. And I began, again, to feel myself dying. And I didn't have any will to live. But as I began to become more conscious, I realized this, and that if I didn't get off this morphine, I was going to die. So I asked them to stop giving me morphine, and they did. But they replaced it with Demerol, and then they replaced the Demerol with codeine.

So I wasn't off of drugs. But once I got off the morphine, I began to regain consciousness. I had a calendar in my hospital room, and I remember I drew a big eye on the day that I decided I was going to live -- the day I decided I was going to stop taking the morphine and I was going to live. I drew an eye to represent my return to consciousness, and that was probably shortly before you saw me...

Fearful for your life ...

JUDI: Terrified. There was an unknown assassin out there who had tried to kill me. Then, this incredible thing happened. Activists from all over the region came to take turns sitting vigil in my room to protect me.

While I was fully under arrest, there were cops guarding me. They had these cop guards outside. One of the things they did in order to make people think that they had caught a "major terrorist" was the way they manipulated the bail. Normally, the bail for transporting explosives (the charges against me) is $12,000. But that wasn't enough for a "major terrorist." The Oakland police had gone to a judge and gotten what is called a "bail enhancement."

I've found out since that they raised both Darryl's and my bail simultaneously. At the time, they sealed the bail enhancement request from us (in which they have to list the reasons why they need so much bail.) Finally, after years of bantering with them, we got to see my bail enhancement request -- we've never seen Darryl's -- and all it says is that "Judi Bari was transporting explosives to an unknown location, and that bail should be increased because she is a flight risk and a danger to the public."

I mean! I was unconscious in the hospital with my leg in traction! and I'm a flight risk and a danger to the public!

Our lawyers, the FBI and the Oakland police had a battle over the bail. Eventually, people raised the bail money for Darryl so that he could get out, and the lawyers convinced the judge to release me on my own recognizance -- in the hospital. But as soon as I was "released" the police guard went away and there were no guards.

I want to back up a bit: While I was in the intensive care unit -- this is before you saw me, while I was on the morphine, while I was under arrest still, and they were raising the bail, and I was officially a prisoner -- at some time during that time period somebody from the police said that since I was a prisoner I should be in the jail ward, and without the doctor's knowledge or consent, they body-snatched me.

They stole me out of the intensive care ward and took me up to the jail ward. And I remember the feeling of absolute despair. I was removed from any sympathetic care, and placed on this ward where there is one nurse for the entire floor. I was very very sick at the time. I should have been in Intensive Care. This was far, far from intensive care.

They put me in a room with a woman from the prison who was in labor. There was a curtain between us so we couldn't see each other. I was very very sick, but I remember her asking me what I was there for, and I remember saying something about being bombed, and I remember her asking me if she could have my drugs, and my saying, "Sure," which shows how absolutely unconscious I was, because I couldn't have survived without them.

I don't know how long I was there because I have no consciousness of time during that period, but when the doctors found out I was missing, they were furious, and they came and body-snatched me back.

Actually, they were having this battle over me that went on some days, so I was also terrified of being sent back to the jail ward because if I was not released on my own recognizance, then I would be sent back up to this jail ward where I would be treated like shit and not have the care that I needed to even survive.

So, I was very scared of being taken to the jail ward, and I was very scared of assassination. I was scared that whoever tried to kill me would come back and finish the job. It was like a hole in my gut. It was like my life-forces were reduced. I didn't have anything inside me, anything to go on. At all the other junctures -- death threats, being rammed by a logging truck, whatever -- I was able to reach down inside myself and find some resources to go on. But in the hospital, there was nothing left of me. I was too terrified. And it was at that point when the Movement came forward and provided me with that resource.

Karen Pickett, an Earth First! organizer in Berkeley -- a really wonderful person; long, long term solid, responsible, wonderful person -- she organized people from the Movement from all over to take shifts to guard my hospital room so I wouldn't have to be alone. And I was not alone for a minute for six months after that. I was too afraid to be alone, too afraid to be unguarded.

(I was not really very aware of this at the time, but the doctor who operated on me was very understanding of my needs, and even though the hospital rules had certain visiting hours, he allowed those rules to be broken so that I could have 24 hour support. )

There was not one minute when there was not somebody there. Not one minute the whole time I was in the hospital. People did shifts. People guarded the door. People came in and held my hand.

When I didn't have the resources to go on, the Movement provided that for me. It was an incredible experience of learning to really appreciate who we are. I really learned what collective action meant. I learned the individual is only a piece of it. The tremendous outpouring allowed me to survive the bombing, allowed me to begin to rebuild my inner resources.

NEW SETTLER: In Mendocino county, immediately after the bombing, there is a sense of runaway history gone wild. Fear is spreading through the activist community: who is going to be next? In Fort Bragg, Anna Marie Stenberg, herself residing in the middle of timber town, organizes a candlelight vigil on Main Street in front of the burnt library building. From all over the coast, people find it within themselves to be counted. Lawyers who have never been there before are there. The whole knoll is filled with people who will not let this bombing scare off what Redwood Summer might accomplish.

On the outskirts of the vigil lurks Jerry Philbrick and some of his guys -- drunk, skunk drunk, jeering -- expressing an enormous sense of betrayal that you who had pledged non-violence were carrying a bomb. The FBI and the Oakland police are attempting to block any other interpretation of the event. They have called KZYX and so intimidated the general manager, Sean Donovan, that Donovan has a notice taped to the door of the studio that if anybody mentions anything about the bombing that does not come from the FBI, they will immediately lose their show. I'm at home and somebody from the station calls me and says, there's this notice here, what should I do? I said, "Tear it down. That's 'prior restraint'." I'm telling this tale because the attempt to control the story was immediate. And wherever that attempt at control exists, people have got to learn to resist, automatically.

JUDI: And I want to say it's still going on. KPFA had me on a year and a half ago to talk about the bombing for a half hour show with Larry Bensky, and the next day the FBI called and asked for a tape of it. And KPFA just turned it over. They didn't even demand a subpoena.

I went on KPFA and talked about the SLAPP suit, and the next day, L-P subpoenaed the tape. And it really had a chilling effect on KPFA. They don't give me access on that station anymore. These two incidences, where immediately the authorities moved in and threatened the station, I too believe it is important to resist that. Because what this was about was creating an image.

The charges they were leveling against us, I'm sure they knew they were not going to stick. But they didn't even care. What was important was to discredit not just me, but to discredit our whole Movement, discredit Redwood Summer in the moment. They would worry later about the repercussions. They needed to stop this thing right now.

Also the meshing of gyppos and activists -- the human contact. That had to be interrupted. And I saw that happen at the vigil for you in Fort Bragg. I went to talk to Jerry -- he'd been my eldest son's football coach. I knew him in his sweetest most mentoring role. Chief Bickel (thank god) hovered over us during the whole, short, shout: Jerry and his guys were so mad, so sure you blew yourself up, so sure armed Redwood Summer activists would be swarming in from all over the country next, bent on blowing up their equipment.

JUDI: And I really like Jerry Philbrick, by the way. Jerry and I kind of have the same personality. We're on different sides, but we get along. And we had established something of a personal relationship in these mediated meetings. And that's why he felt so betrayed. I didn't see him after the bombing until probably a year and a half later. He hugged me. He was clearly very moved. I have maintained a friendly relationship with him. And I have to say, I can understand how he felt. I've seen a pictures of some of the timber supporters with these very vicious looks on their faces. They were carrying signs that said: "Non-violent people don't carry bombs."

Even within the Movement, there was some question as to well, if not both of you, might Darryl be capable of carrying a bomb? He had been associated with what was thought of as the "bombing" down in Santa Cruz. Or if not Darryl, Judi was wearing camo when the car blew up, maybe she was capable of it ...

JUDI: [laughs] Actually, Darryl was wearing camo. I was not.

The point is, even within the Movement, though there was never a willingness to say both of you were transporting a bomb, but there was an openness to divide, to separate. All that was based on the FBI's story coming out of Oakland -- almost immediately. What have you learned four years later as a result of your monumental effort to hold the FBI accountable for its treatment of you following the blast. This resolve of yours, not to let what they did fade away?

JUDI: Before we get into that I need to address the fact that all along there has been a level of suspicion, and I guess the most recent one was the thing that came out in the AVA, in which Bruce said that "fair-minded people" believed I blew myself up. I said who are the "fair-minded people?" He said you.

Me! Hey I've always held to my Lord's Avenger theory. It just gets more elaborate, the more information you turn up.

JUDI: Anyway, saying that "fair-minded people now think I was transporting explosives" -- and saying it right after I had uncovered the new FBI information in discovery -- was a vicious, personal attack. His reasoning was: 'well, she's not important enough for anyone else to have bombed, so she must have bombed herself.'

It hurt so bad when I read that. In fact I was out of town. (I go out of town a lot these days; people don't realize that, but it puts me at a disadvantage because I don't even hear some of these things until after they've been out for more than awhile.)

Anyway, I was out of town that week, deposing the scariest FBI agent I've ever sat in a room with. I mean, this guy Frank Doyle -- he's the bomb school teacher, he's the one at the scene quoted vilifying me -- he is a very evil man. He's the most evil person I've ever sat in a room with for several days. Sometimes the Depositions are fun (as you know), but Frank Doyle was very traumatizing, and I came home from that and picked up the AVA and there was this article from Bruce saying that fair-minded people think I bombed myself and that I have a horrible personality.

It was devastating to read that. I cried for days. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I loved Bruce Anderson, and at the time of the bombing, he was one of the closest people to me in the world.

Although many, many people did many things to help me survive that bombing, there is no individual I can name more than Bruce. He came every week. I looked forward to his visits. He held my hand in the hospital. Even when people stopped coming, he kept coming for a year. He came up to my house. He used to drive up here and visit me every week while the AVA was being printed -- long after everybody else had gone away. And I loved him. And I thought he was my best friend.

Of course we had had falling outs over feminists issues. But I didn't think that was important enough for him to write what he did. Bruce Anderson knows I didn't bomb myself. He knows that! He held my hand in the hospital. And for him to say something like that felt like such a deep betrayal. I began to understand how I think that Geronimo JiJaga must have felt when the party turned on him and Huey Newton ordered people not to testify in his behalf when he was charged with murder. I felt how David Hilliard of the Black Panthers must have felt when he was expelled from the party while he was in jail. It was such a deep betrayal, because Bruce knows that isn't true.

I hadn't read that about myself for four and a half years, and to read that again felt so bad. It brought back all those feelings. It was such a blow. It's hard to deal with to this day. Now Bruce is saying: "I didn't say I think she bombed herself. Just fair-minded people." Well, right! It still hurts. And people say: "You shouldn't pay any attention to him. He's just a jerk." But he's not just a jerk to me. He was a very important person in my life and it hurts to have him attack me like that. It hurts to have him repeat the FBI lies, even if he's just doing it to be provocative. People say: "He's just trying to sell his paper. He always does that." If he wanted to sell his paper, why isn't he exposing the FBI instead of trying to "expose" me? This is an outrageous case. And it's gotten very little publicity. And I tried to have him be the conduit. I told Bruce about Bomb School long before I told Mike Geniella, and he dismissed it -- didn't think it was important. I don't know why he's chosen this course. Why he has chosen to attack me instead of the FBI. It's certainly safer. I'm not going to put a bomb in his car. If his goal is to sell papers its a pretty short sighted method. He could -- and I had thought he would -- be the vehicle through which this information would be released. And he seems unwilling to play that role.

To think Bruce accused you of bombing yourself just to sell papers underestimates his complexity . . . We can get back to that Judi. Let's talk now about the new information and what it counters. What happened at the site and who these people are who were putting out the story that you bombed yourself: the new 'Who's Who' in your case.

JUDI: Within minutes -- literally within minutes of the bombing -- the first FBI agent arrived on the scene. And it's interesting because usually a bombing is the purview of the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) not of the FBI. It would only be the FBI's area if it was a terrorist bombing: so if I was the bomber, then it would be the FBI's case; but if I was a victim, then it would be the ATF's case. But strangely, the FBI shows up right away. They are among the first respondents.

And have you ever found any explanation for that?

JUDI: Well, they have a pretty funny one. In the files, the first guy who shows up right away, an Agent McKinley, he says: "I was driving through Oakland on my lunch hour, trying to find an apron for my child to use in a school play when I heard on the radio this explosion had taken place and I went over to see what was going on."

That's his excuse: he was looking for an apron.

He was among the very first responders. Within a half hour to an hour (different records show different times -- certainly within an hour, and I think within the half-hour), twelve to fifteen members of the FBI Terrorist squad -- Squad 13 -- had arrived on the scene. There were also twelve to fifteen Oakland police. There were one or two ATF agents. Quite a few people had converged on this scene.

But the FBI had a huge presence there, and Squad 13 were the main respondents. The guy with the apron was not on the terrorist squad. He called them. Frank Doyle is the bomb expert from Squad 13. He's what they call a certified bomb technician.

NEW SETTLER: What is his background, Judi? How old is he? How long with the FBI? His church affiliation? What do you know about him?

JUDI: Not much. He appears to be in his 50's -- he looks like one of the attaches. He's a very scary guy. He's sneery and sarcastic. Most of them maintain a decor. Not this guy.

We asked him his background, and he said he'd been employed by the FBI for twenty-five years, and twenty-four of them, he'd worked in the San Francisco office.

We said: "How long have you been on the terrorist squad?" And he said: "Since before its inception."

Which I would have to presume means that he was involved in some of the Black Panther things, because that was within this time frame. So I presume this man has been a COINTELPRO agent -- back when they still called it COINTELPRO.

Cointelpro...

JUDI: COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program is what it stands for) was J. Edgar Hoover's program to, in his words, "disrupt, misdirect, isolate and neutralize" progressive movements in this country. The techniques of COINTELPRO included the use of agent provocateurs, fake documents, disinformation (false rumors), threats, harassment, framings and assassinations of political organizers. It got so out of hand in the 1970s in cases like the Black Panthers and AIM, that the US Congress eventually declared COINTELPRO unconstitutional, and ordered the FBI to stop using it.

Frank Doyle kind of impresses me as a rogue element. Most of them were very controlled and very in control of themselves. Doyle was sneering and sarcastic. He really had a different kind of demeanor than the other FBI agents we've deposed so far.

He's not the head of the terrorist squad, but he is their bomb expert. He's what they call a "Certified Bomb Instructor," which means he's taken this three-week course in the Redstone Academy in Huntsville, Alabama, where you learn to make bombs as well as to respond to bombings. It allows him to be an instructor as well as a respondent. Every year, you have to take a refresher course to maintain your status as a Certified Bomb Technician. He's also the teacher of Bomb School. -- We'll get to Bomb School in a little while.

Anyway, he was among the first respondents, and he took over. He began to direct the response to the bombing. They gridded off the scene and collected evidence within the different grids. Doyle did the gridding and assigned the people to collect the evidence. He directed the response to the bombing, so essentially he became the supervisor at the bomb scene, and he directed both Oakland police as well as the FBI. Pretty soon, he told the ATF to get lost, and they didn't have much to do with the response.

The FBI says they never heard of us before the bombing (and all this other crap that I don't believe for a minute), but according to the Oakland police, literally within minutes of the bombing, the FBI came up to them and said: "We know these people. They're terrorists. These are the type of people who would be carrying a bomb."

This is Sgt. Sitterud, an Oakland police homicide officer who said this. He was the homicide detective assigned to be in charge of this case from Oakland. During his deposition, he testified to us that the FBI corralled him before he even got a look at the car. He doesn't remember which FBI agent, but he said (and this is an exact quote): "He told us that these were the type of people who would be involved in carrying a bomb. He told us that these people, in fact, qualify as 'terrorists'."

And in his police log, according to notes that he wrote at the time, Sgt. Sitterud arrives at the bombing about 15 minutes after the bomb exploded. Ten minutes later -- that would be 25 minutes after the explosion -- he writes in his log: "the victims are radical activists, Earth First! leaders associated with power lines downings, threats to nuclear plants, suspected of Santa Cruz power line sabotage.. "

On and On, this whole list of crimes. Within a half hour of the bombing, the FBI, who claims they never heard of us, have already briefed the Oakland police and prejudiced them as to who we are. We asked Sgt. Sitterud, "How did that effect you?" And he testifies: "It made me think they were carrying the bomb."

How did you get access to all this information Judi? -- To the right to deposition the cast at the site?

JUDI: We sued the FBI and the Oakland police for false arrest, illegal search and seizure, and denial of equal protection, and civil rights violations: specifically, conspiracy to violate our First Amendment rights. -- This is the COINTELPRO charge: We've said: Not only did they false-arrest us, but the reason that they falsely arrested us was in order to discredit us as organizers, in order to sabotage Redwood Summer and to disrupt Earth First! And we've stayed in court with these charges. And that's not easy. It's not easy to sue the FBI. They have a lot of immunities.

At any rate, Frank Doyle comes over to the car -- there's a picture of that -- and the police's own photos show that the frame was bent right under the driver's seat: the driver's seat was collapsed to the ground, there was a large hole in the driver's seat -- according to Lt. Sims of the Oakland police: "you could see right through to the street below."

You have not talked about the large hole in your buttocks, Judi. There could be no more vivid proof that the bomb had been carefully placed under the driver's seat, not tossed nonchalantly in the back, hidden under guitar cases and clothes, as the FBI contended.

JUDI: Right. I was impaled on a spring! When the bomb exploded, it exploded right under me. It ripped a hole right through the seat, right into me. And now I've seen all this stuff: I've seen the bomb, the bomb parts; I've seen the car; I've seen the blown-up seat -- it's smithereens! But if you put the pieces back together, there is a hole right in the middle.

When the bomb exploded right through the seat, one of the springs in the seat exploded, and I was impaled on the seat. That's what broke my back.

My back, to this day, is broken and dislocated.; there is a ninety degree turn. Most people's backbones curl around under their butt, and that's what you sit on. Mine does a ninety degree turn and sticks out, so I don't have anything to sit on. I have to sit on an orthopedic pillow or on soft surface. I have to shift all the time. The hole in my butt that went right through to my bone, took a year to heal. And that was from the spring that I was impaled on.

And I can't think of another wound more significant in locating where a bomb was placed. What on earth was the FBI's excuse?

JUDI: What indeed! There was no damage to my back. It's so clear looking at the pictures.

In order to sue the FBI (because they have this thing called "qualified immunity", which means if they make a mistake in the course of their duties -- even if they accidentally shoot you in the head in the course of their duty -- as long as it is a mistake, you can't sue them for it) you have to show that they consciously, knowingly and maliciously did something. And we have managed to stay in court with these charges, because the photos we have of the crime scene show how very clear it was that this bomb was hidden under the car seat.

Frank Doyle looked at this car and he said: "The bomb was on the back seat floor board, therefore, they must have seen it, and therefore they knew it was there."

He's quoted in the search warrant issued after we were arrested They sign out a search warrant in which they give the details as to why they should be allowed to search our house for the bomb parts.

At the scene they removed the front seat from the car. -- Frank Doyle says he doesn't "recall" them removing the front seat, but we've got the pictures.

When they removed the front seat, there was a huge hole at the clear epicenter, right smack under my seat. But this hole narrows on its ends and extends up to where the accelerator and the brake are, and it also extends back towards the back seat. And you could see a little bit of hole in the back seat floorboard, you certainly could, but you could also see the front seat was collapsed into the floor and that it was all black from the explosion. The back of the front seat was bent outwards, from the front -- rather than bent forwards as if the bomb had been in the back.

And the back seat itself is pristine. It's amazing. It's untouched. It doesn't have any bomb residue on it. It's not damaged. But Frank Doyle said that the bomb was in the back seat. And in the face of his statements ("These people are terrorists! We've caught these big terrorists!") every single FBI agent and Oakland police officer at that scene -- even though they could see with their own eyes that he was lying -- went along with Frank Doyle.

NEW SETTLER: Emperor's clothes -- why? It's not until several years later that you pick up another piece of evidence to indicate why a seasoned Oakland homicide detective as well as the other members of the Terrorist squad either went along with this hoax, or simply did not believe what they were seeing with their own eyes...

JUDI: Before I do that, I want to do one more piece: When we were arrested, we were arrested based on two physical pieces of evidence. The first, as it says in the search warrant: "the bomb is in the back seat, therefore, they should have seen it and knew they were carrying it." And that's attributed to Frank Doyle. And then Frank Doyle says, in the same document:" And we found a bag of nails in the car that is identical to the nails in the bomb." (The bomb was wrapped with nails for shrapnel effect.)

I have seen this bag of nails now: the nails in the bomb are finishing nails; the nails in the bag that they found separately in the car -- there's two bags of nails in the car: one of them was roofing nails, and the other one was 8 pound sinkers, vinyl-coated. Framing nails.

And you were carrying them because?

JUDI: I was a carpenter. I worked as a commercial carpenter for California Yurts, and I had been given a leave of absence for Redwood Summer, so I wasn't working for pay as a carpenter right then, but I had just rented the place where I live now, and it was all run down, and I had rented it in exchange for the labor of fixing it up. And, as a matter of fact, I was in the middle of putting a new roof on when I got bombed, and when it poured down rain for days, this place got soaked, because the roof was half off. They were tools that I was working with!

So both of those were blatant lies. Not only were the nails not identical. They didn't even resemble each other. And not only was the bomb not in the back seat, it was clearly hidden under the front. But, every one went along with it.

Was there evidence of a motion device on site, at that point?

JUDI: Yes. When they collected the bomb parts -- which they did within hours -- one of the things they found was a ball bearing, a big ball bearing a half inch across (it surprised me when I saw how big it was). It was covered with bomb residue. And they also found a piece of looped, heavy-gage wire.

Now as a bomb expert with Frank Doyle's training certainly must have known -- because we learned this from the FBI bomb expert from the lab -- these are components of a motion device. And what these meant was that the bomb was triggered by the motion of the car. The ball bearing sits in a hole that's drilled in the plywood (if you want an easy-to-trigger motion device, you drill and small hole; for a hard-to-trigger motion device you drill a large hole, and it has to be dislodged from this hole, and roll, to connect itself to this looped wire -- copper wire -- and that would complete the circuit, and that's what triggers the bomb.)

There was also a clock. There was both. The clock was a delay mechanism, so that the bomber could get away from the bomb before it exploded. So, the clock had to expire, and the motion device had to connect, before the bomb went off. The point is, they had in their hand, within hours of the bombing, this ball bearing. They knew the bomb was triggered by a motion device. They knew it was hidden under my car seat.

There's another thing -- and we don't have to hire experts because the FBI's own bomb expert from the lab is who told us all this stuff. When they eventually came out and examined it, he wasn't willing to go along with Frank Doyle's lie.

The other thing the bomb expert said was that it was very clear where the bomb was, because of the "end cap impact points". That told him not only where it was placed, but which direction it was sitting. Because when a bomb explodes, the first thing that happens is the end caps blow off.

I've now seen the car, and I've seen the end cap impact points as he described them to us. I went and looked for them and they were very clear. There's a round indentation on one side near where the gear shift is, and the door -- and you can't see this in any of the photos, but in person it's really obvious -- the whole door is bent out. There is like a fist-size hole in the lower part of the door where the end cap blew through the door, and the whole door is distorted. It's pushed out where the end cap blew through is. Any idiot could have seen that. You didn't have to be a bomb expert to know where this bomb was placed.

But here's this guy who's one of the most highly trained people in the country, and he's an instructor, and he's saying he didn't see any of this stuff. Bull shit.

And everybody goes along. The question is why?

JUDI: One of the reasons, it turns out, which we didn't find out until three years later (which is how long it took us to get a judge to say we can continue with this case and start this process known as depositions and requests for documents) is that four weeks before the bombing, the FBI had conducted what they call "Bomb School" in Eureka California at the College of the Redwoods on a Louisiana-Pacific clearcut. And in this bomb school, which they say is routine training, Frank Doyle was the instructor, and among the students and some of the sub-instructors below him, were at least four (and I believe more) of the people who responded to the bombing -- including the Oakland cop.

So, the teacher of bomb school was the supervising agent at the bomb scene, and the students at bomb school were the people who worked under him. One of these people, Sgt. Hanson from the Oakland police, when we said: "Look at these pictures. How can you say the bomb was in the back seat?" He testified: "Well, I deferred to Frank Doyle. If he was my instructor, I wasn't about to tell him anything different."

Doyle used his position as instructor to influence them. And he also used this information -- "these are terrorists, these are the type of people who carry bombs" -- to get people, with just a wink and a nod, to go along with it. What they did at bomb school is significant, also. . . .

Before we go further, Judi, there is a tape made at the site of the bombing -- rather, where your car finally comes to a halt, where you can overhear two of the officers talking. One says to the other...

JUDI: Let me tell what happened at bomb school first and come back to that, because it will make more sense . . . Bomb school was this week-long course at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, open to police only. First they had a briefing on terrorism and terrorist threats. Bomb school took place the week that the Santa Cruz power lines went down, which was considered a terrorist act in the FBI files. You can be sure that that briefing included the Santa Cruz power lines, which, I believe, was falsely blamed on Earth First!

It was also the same week that Earth First! climbed the Golden Gate bridge. It was right on the eve of Redwood Summer. And although they all claim they don't remember the content of the briefing, I think we can safely assume that the briefing on terrorism included descriptions of Earth First! and Redwood Summer.

After they did the briefing on the terrorist threats, they showed them slides of different kinds of bombs; then they took them out to an L-P clearcut. where they blew up cars with pipe bombs and practiced responding.

They blew up three cars. Each using different explosives and different methods so that the people could learn to respond to a bombing.

Now in the Bomb school, according to the testimony we've gotten so far, the instructor (and they don't remember who -- although they've said elsewhere the instructor was Frank Doyle, so we can surmise this is Frank Doyle here), told the class that when people bomb each other, they very rarely place the bomb inside the passenger compartment -- because it's allegedly so hard to break into a car (tell that to the manufacturers of car stereos!), so bombers strap the bomb underneath the car, or place it in the engine compartment.

So they described the scenario of a bomb inside a car as not being consistent with the victim of a car bombing, but being consistent with somebody transporting a bomb.

And then they blew up these cars.

So even after they've taught people that this is a very rare scenario, for a bomb to be inside a car, two of the three cars that they blew up at bomb school in 1990 had the bombs inside the car.

Where?

JUDI: Nobody remembers where. We said: "Was it under the front seat?"

"I don't recall."

What we've gotten out of them is that two-out-of-the-three cars that they blew up, they did place the bomb inside the passenger compartment -- creating virtually the same crime scene that was about to happen in Oakland a month later, and practicing responding to it, and telling them that this crime scene was not consistent with the victim of a bombing -- right after they had briefed them on the terrorist threat of Earth First!

Whether bomb school is routine or not is debatable -- they certainly had other bomb schools both before and after. But what they did in bomb school was prepare people in their minds -- whether this was done intentionally or not, I can not prove; but I can say that the effect of what happened in bomb school was to have people see this very bomb scene and then come and respond to it after they have already been prejudiced as to what it means.

And we have the FBI video of the crime scene, and on this videotape you can hear them: they're standing around, waiting to be cleared to be allowed to process it. (The experts had to go in and make sure there weren't any more bombs). So the bomb school buddies, the FBI and the Oakland police, are standing around waiting to be allowed to process the car, and they're yucking it up -- they're laughing -- presumably about terrorists blowing themselves up -- and at one point you can hear somebody saying: "This is it, don't you think? This was it: this was the final exam." -- clearly, a reference to bomb school; and I will add, a reference to the fact that they had practiced responding to this very crime scene in that context.

So I think that all those things were used to prejudice the respondents, and to influence them -- like you say, with the Emperor's clothes -- to go along with this clear and obvious lie that the bomb was in the back seat, that the nails match, to ignore the existence of the motion device, to ignore the end cap impact points -- all of those things were done, because Frank Doyle had created a context in which these lies could be floated and gone along with.

Who bombed Judi Bari? Lets address some of the old suppositions: Is it possible that that bomb was placed in your car in Willits while you were meeting gyppo loggers trying to desensitize them to the smell -- get rid of the feral barrier.

JUDI: No. Absolutely not... I said the bomb contained both a motion device and a timing device. The timing device consisted of a stop watch with the minute hand broken off, and a screw drilled in the clock face that was attached to a wire, so that the hour hand had to tick down until it touched the screw.

Now this was not an accidental explosion. It was a wind-up pocket watch, so it had to have been set, consciously wound, and expire. I believe that the screw was in the nine. So the most hours it could have taken for that thing to expire would have been twelve. More likely, the hour-hand started at the twelve and it took nine hours.

So there was a timer on the bomb that had to be set and expire that could not have taken more than twelve hours, so the bomb must have been set within twelve hours of explosion, and I was in Oakland -- possibly in Berkeley, but more likely, in Oakland. My car was parked on a quiet street, in front of Dave Kemnitzer's house in Oakland at the time when the bomb was set. And the bomb was set: it was armed, it was set; it wasn't just placed in there and accidentally exploded. It was very conscious: the clock was wound, and the time expired. And once the time expired, the motion device was deployed.

Now the motion device is very important. Because they didn't want this bomb to explode and blow up my car; that would bring sympathy to me. They wanted me to be in the car. The intention of the bomb was to kill me.

The FBI expert from the lab has expressed incredulity that I survived it. And when I first looked at the pictures, I was pretty incredulous too. I don't know how or why I survived that bomb. When I look at what it did to the floor of my car -- the hole in the floor of the car is three feet by five feet. It's huge. I don't know why I survived that bomb. Maybe I survived it so I can find out the answer to that question: Who Bombed Judi Bari?

JUDI: So the bomb could not have been placed in Willits at the logger meeting two days before it exploded. The Willits police quickly determined this. But the FBI pretended (because the Lord's Avenger wrote that the bomb was placed in Willits), the FBI pretended to believe this, and they spent much time interviewing everybody from the meeting at Willits that we described at the beginning of our interview. They interviewed Jerry Philbrick -- they didn't interview Tom Loop, interestingly enough. Though both me and Darryl Cherney, in the minutes after the bombing, said: "Fort Bragg. Nazi movement. Death threats." -- both of us, without talking to each other said the same thing -- the FBI steered totally clear of Fort Bragg. They interviewed the police in Ukiah and Willits, but they never went to Fort Bragg.

While you are in the hospital under arrest, Darryl is in the Oakland jail. He is wounded. His hearing is gone in one ear, he's suffered a scratched cornea, and he's being kept without food or water, interrogated as if Oakland is some third world country. Then he's released. Days later, Mike Geniella of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat -- the Ukiah bureau: timber is his beat -- receives a letter signed by someone who calls himself "The Lord's Avenger."

I was arrested three hours after the bomb went off. Darryl was arrested twelve hours after the bomb went off. They claimed he was uncooperative, that he acted suspicious. The truth is he was very scared, very traumatized, and he agreed to be questioned without a lawyer. He signed a consent to allow them to search his van without a warrant. He didn't behave in a way that a bomber would have behaved. He behaved in a way a victim would have behaved. But after they had interrogated him for four hours, and he signed away all of his rights, all of a sudden -- according to Darryl's description -- they leaned down and squinted into his good eye and said: "We can tell if this is your bomb, so you might as well confess."

The reason I have pointed to the fact that the Lord's Avenger letter was received by Mike Geniella within a day or two of Darryl's release from jail is that some people suspected Darryl of writing that letter to deflect suspicion, and timewise, it would have been impossible for him to do so.

JUDI: The Lord's Avenger letter was very skillfully used. It's literature. It's so well written, nobody I know can write that good: "I built with these hands the bomb that I placed in the car of Judi Bari. Doubt me not, for I will show . . . " And it says that the Lord told him to bomb me when I spoke at the abortion clinic the year before. That he saw "Satan's flame shooting from [my] mouth and ears, proving that this was no natural woman born of Ruth."

It goes on and on in this Biblical language. Very misogynist. It says, "Let the woman learn in silence, but suffer not a woman to teach or to usurp authority from the man." And it says that they targeted me for my pro-abortionist activity. I've done one clinic defense in my entire life, and that was it...

But that clinic defense was outrageous...

JUDI: Absolutely outrageous without a doubt.

You were singing songs about dead fetuses -- fetus-blaming songs. Really disgusting songs, Judi. Compared to the weight of the decision a woman must make when she chooses to abort, truly disgusting songs.

JUDI: I guess you've never heard the whole story: They were going to try to open an abortion clinic, the first one in Ukiah. It was a Planned Parenthood clinic that would have abortion amongst other services. And as soon as they announced this, the clinic director began to be harassed, particularly by a man named Bill Staley. There were bomb threats called into the clinic. I heard that Bill Staley followed her children home from school and told them: "Your mommy doesn't love you; she's out killing babies."

There were dismembered baby dolls with red paint strewn around her house. Bill Staley personally broke into the clinic once and threatened to rape her and make her have his baby. She called the cops on him several times.

So Staley is this kind of rabid, right-wing, ex-professional football-player, hometown fundamentalist. And when I heard the way he was harassing the woman (and I'd never met the woman who was the clinic director), I was outraged, and I wanted to defend her; I wanted to mount a defense of this clinic. When Operation Rescue vowed to shut down this clinic, I vowed to myself to keep it open.

There were three local Earth First! groups as the time, and I went to each of them and asked them to help, but none of them wanted to sponsor the event. They all said: "This is not an Earth First! issue" -- incredibly. So I just took a sign-up sheet, and I said, "Okay, it's not an Earth First! demonstration, but anyone who wants to go sign up." Then I went to the lesbian coffee house in Ukiah, and interestingly, the lesbians didn't say "it's not a lesbian issue." Then I went and I recruited health care workers. So I put together this odd coalition of people under this ad hoc group that we called "Ukiah Anti-fascist League" to counter Operation Rescue. And it was important for us to have as many numbers as them -- and we did. Though there was no more than fifty people at this demonstration total -- twenty-five from each side. And there are many pictures of it. It's not a hard thing to document. What we decided to do is this: Well, if they were going to be bullies we were going to give them a taste of their own medicine,

So Darryl and I, the night before, sat down and wrote some songs for this demonstration, and we published them in a little book called "Songs to Abort Fascism By."

And the most outrageous of the songs we wrote was called, "Will the Fetus Be Aborted?" -- because we decided we had to do this to a hymn, which was in keeping with the style.

The most outrageous verse had all the reasons people would have an abortion in it; so the most outrageous verse went: "Bridget had two kids already /and an abortion is what she chose. /The Christians showed her a bloody fetus/ she said, 'That's fine, I'll have one of those.'"

So we were truly outrageous. And Darryl was expecting the anti-abortionist to come and smash his guitar over his head so he was using a cheap guitar for that purpose, and we had photographers poised to take the pictures. We thought we would discredit them as violent. But they were so shocked at our behavior -- and I wasn't really aware of the ideology of the fundamentalist yet; I didn't really see how I would be perceived by them until I read the Lord's Avenger letter.

Not only by them. When I first heard the lyrics of that song, I was dumbfounded. I think of abortion as a sacred act, a sacrificial act. No woman does it without deep delving into her soul...

JUDI: [laughs] I did. I said, "That's fine. I'll have one of those."

I was shocked -- not knowing any of the precursor pressures on that clinic and the clinic directors -- I was shocked you would be so insensitive to Right To Life sentiments and the folks who show up to express them ...

JUDI: That was exactly the intention. When we wrote that song, with each verse another reason to have an abortion, we did it with the intention of pushing their buttons, to counter their -- what we thought were -- shocking tactics, by giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Well, what happened was: instead of coming after us, they formed little prayer circles. They said" They're sick. They're sick." And I must say now, I was naive as to the ideology of the people I was going against -- as to how I would be perceived. I've always had a flippancy that has gotten me into trouble many times. But the song was too hilarious, and I'm not sorry that I wrote it, at all. Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon actually put out a punk version of it which is even funnier than ours.

I was convinced that song got you bombed. I have always believed the authenticity of the Lord's Avenger letter -- that whoever wrote it held those beliefs, was present at that rally in Ukiah, and placed the bomb... then felt compelled to take credit.

JUDI: And I don't believe that anymore. I believed it at the time. Because the letter was chilling. It seemed so real. And in the Lord's Avenger letter, not only did they tell their motives, they said that not only was it my defense of this abortion clinic, but that my "paganism festered," and I "attacked the men of toil in the woods", and tried to teach people that "trees were not gifts from God but that they were objects of worship themselves." The letter attacked me for my forest activism as well as for my "paganism."

And then he says: "Doubt me not, for I will describe the components as only I will know." And he then went on to describe (in a very different voice than the flowery, Biblical language) two bombs: one that was placed at the Cloverdale L-P mill two weeks before the bombing (that matched the bomb in my car), and the one in my car.

And he described them in exact detail. He described wires, the colors of the wires, the methods. -- But interestingly, he left out the motion device. The only thing wrong with the Lord's Avenger's description is that he left out the motion device.

And he said: "I placed the bomb in her car while she was at the meeting with the loggers in Willits. The wicked shall know no refuge."

Well, of course, this is refuted by the 12-hour timer.

But the Lord's Avenger has an explanation. He says: "The Lord stayed the hand of the clock for two days until [I] was joined in [my] car by the very man who had helped mock the good Christians at the abortion clinic years ago," and that way "God could take us out "with one fell swoop. "

Clearly, this isn't true.

What I began to see later, is what the Lord's Avenger letter did -- especially when I found out about the motion device, and that his very accurate description omitted the motion device...

The FBI says: "the person who wrote this letter must have been the bomber because they knew the construction of the bomb."

But there were two entities who knew the construction of the bomb at that point. One of them was the bomber. The other one was the FBI. And not only the FBI, but the San Francisco office.

JUDI: This was a big priority case, supposedly. When they took the bomb components to the lab, they said: TOP PRIORITY, DROP WHAT YOU'RE DOING. They said that to the person who helped carry the bomb parts and helped catalog them. And yet those bomb parts sat in the San Francisco office for a week.

They sat in the San Francisco office for a week, under twenty-four hour guard, until the Lord's Avenger letter came out. And when they were finally sent to the lab in D.C., three things were sent together: the Cloverdale bomb, the Lord's Avenger letter, and the bomb in my car.

And they were listed by the lab in that order: first the Cloverdale bomb -- it gets the first "Q numbers", which stands for "Questioned Items" (I have learned what all these FBI codes mean.) The Cloverdale bomb was 1-15; 16-19 was the Lord's Avenger letter, then 20- 200 or whatever, was the bomb in my car. So they really connected all of these three things when they sent them to the lab.

I now realize the FBI also had access to the information in the Lord's Avenger letter. And I realize what a ruse that letter proved to be. By the time the Lord's Avenger letter came out the FBI knew 1) that I didn't die. They knew I was going to live. And that was going to really hurt.

If somebody bombed me with the intention of killing me and I had died, and if Darryl hadn't been in the car (which was the intention) we wouldn't have legal access to these photos. We wouldn't have legal access to this testimony. There would be no case, because there would be no [plaintiff]. Like Karen Silkwood, there would be a question that would never be resolved. Some people would think I bombed myself; some people would think I didn't. But there would be no way to get legal access to the information.

But by the time the Lord's Avenger letter was written, it was clear that I was going to live. And also, it was clear that their accusation wasn't going to hold up -- who I was. I think the FBI misjudged me. I don't think they did their homework well enough. I don't think they understood how much support we had in the community. And I don't think anybody has ever acknowledged the incredible thing our community did standing up to that act of terror with non-violence the way we did. I don't think we've ever given ourselves credit for it...At any rate, by the time the Lord's Avenger letter came out, it was clear that this was probably not going to work: saying that we bombed ourselves. And so they needed an alternative: the Lord's Avenger posed a plausible, lone assassin, not associated with timber or the FBI, and it removed the investigation from Oakland, where the bomb was really placed, to Willits, where the bomb was not placed, and where there were an infinite number of suspects...

Including Bill Staley. . . Bill Staley was from Potter Valley, had worked at the L-P mill in Potter Valley -- or Covelo -- both mills were closed down by L-P the previous year. Staley it was told, had at one time showed up at a Baptist church to guest preach in a helmet, carrying a sword: imagery from the Lord's Avenger's letter.
And, he had been at the infamous abortion rally.

JUDI: So he became an obvious suspect here. And it muddied the waters. It made the motivation for the bombing unclear. The motivation obviously had to do with timber activism, but all of a sudden, this extraneous element comes in of the abortion thing. And it muddied the waters in many ways. We, ourselves, had very limited investigative capacity, and our investigators -- just like myself -- went trotting up to Willits to look for the Lord's Avenger, instead of doing what you're supposed to do, which is: you start from the crime scene. And you say: "Twelve hour timer." Those kinds of methodologies were abandoned because the Lord's Avenger letter was so convincing.

Do you feel the Lord's Avenger letter was written by somebody in the FBI?

JUDI: I don't know that. I can't say that for sure. But I believe so. And I think it was a classic COINTELPRO; it was so well written.

The first person who told me that was Ward Churchill. He called me while I was still in the hospital, and he said, "This Lord Avenger letter is a fake."

I said, "Nah, nah. It's real."

Well, Ward Churchill, is the author of "Agents of Repression," and is one of the most expert people about COINTELPRO. He said, "This is a classic COINTELPRO letter. It's written in the style of . . ." And then he told me of this abortion clinic bomber (I think his name is Dennis Malvino). He said this man was in jail at the time for seven different abortion clinic bombings, and each one of them had been accompanied by a letter written in the style of the Lord's Avenger letter.

He said he believed the Lord's Avenger letter was what I now think it was: a ruse, and to sow confusion. And that the place they got the style was from this real, existing guy.

The Lord's Avenger letter was tremendously, skillfully used. Because at the same time they used it to distract from the investigation, to distract from the motivation, they simultaneously maintained their contention that I bombed myself.

The FBI was saying: "Since Judi and Darryl are the only suspects, the Lord's Avenger must be their accomplice." So the only investigation of the Lord's Avenger letter at that time consisted of raiding my house a second time, and confiscating every typewriter they could get their hands on, looking for matching "exemplars" -- "typewriter exemplars" is their word for it. And although they had much publicity over the second raid on my house, and the fact that they were looking for matching typewriters, they never mentioned that they didn't even find one that vaguely matched.

You started out by saying Darryl was suspected of writing the letter. That may have been so in the press, but it wasn't so in the investigation. They didn't raid Darryl's house a second time looking. They raided my house. I was unconscious in the hospital! I couldn't have written that letter. So I don't think the FBI had any interest in finding out who wrote that letter. They never conducted a reasonable investigation of it. They looked in the places where it wasn't going to be found. I don't think they wanted to find the Lord's Avenger.

Because "The Lord's Avenger" (who I have always believed exists as a tortured, out-of-control person) was FBI. Rogue FBI, I'm thinking now. Probably at bomb school -- watching, learning, or teaching -- and was at, or somehow had very direct knowledge of, the abortion demonstration the year before. I think what this investigation needs to do now is check the photos taken at the abortion demo in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Ukiah against the list of people present on the L-P clearcut during bomb school.

JUDI: The Lord's Avenger showed absolute, direct personal knowledge of the abortion demonstration. There were fifty people at the demonstration, many photos, but it was never covered in the news. That demonstration was so outrageous that even Bruce Anderson calmed it down when he reported on it. Nobody reported it, so he could not have gotten that description: "I saw Satan's flame shoot from her mouth and ears" -- [laughing] which was the most accurate description of that demo I had ever read. I believe that the person who wrote that letter -- or somebody who collaborated in the letter was at the demonstration! They must have been to have known that.

A very logical course of investigation, had the FBI been interested in finding the Lord's Avenger, would have been to see who was at that demonstration. And you, very reasonably, suggested that to the newly elected sheriff, Jim Tuso...

Whose campaign I had worked on, and who at Redwood Summer day in Fort Bragg, blithely walked down the middle of Main Street, shaking hands with people on both sides of a double police line. Who else should I take my supposition to?

JUDI: And you do. And this memo shows up in the files . It's dated August 1990, and it's addressed to John Reikes, who is the head of the Terrorist squad. It is from Special Agent Donahue, who is one of the FBI agents working on the case. It says: "John, Please have someone who knows something about this case call Jim Tuso, the new sheriff of Mendocino county regarding this. He thinks its bull -- underlined -- but doesn't want the flow of info to stop on his shoulders."

Now what the tip Jim Tuso thinks is "bull," is: "Jim Tuso, new sheriff of Mendo county", then it has a phone number, and then "Beth Bosk, editor of Mendo magazine." Then it goes on to say: "Judi Berry (spelled wrong) involved in abortion rally two to three years ago. Some didn't like her platform and may be responsible for the bombing." Then he draws a smiley face -- he draws a smiley face on the memo ridiculing the tip! It ends with : "Tuso has additional information. Please call him."

And so they ridicule your very reasonable suggestion to look at the abortion movement -- which they never did -- even though looking at photos taken at the rally was the most reasonable course of investigation that had been suggested to them yet. They ridiculed it by drawing a smiley face, and they never followed up on it. These are some of the reasons why I've increasingly come to believe the FBI didn't want to find the Lord's Avenger. Or, already knew who the Lord's Avenger was.

That's where my theory comes in, Judi. I had heard that there were many many photographs taken that day of everybody who had been at that rally, and indeed had even tracked down the photographer from the Ukiah Daily Journal who had been at the demonstration and subsequently moved on to another paper. My impulse came from a radio show I did with Darryl Cherney -- which we taped on the headlands overlooking the Mendocino bay. I remember we crawled into the bushes to pre-record the show because it was only undercover that Darryl could spill out his story of the bombing, he was still so scared.

I broadcast that interview on Fourth Gate Gazette, and it was heard by a man who works in Fort Bragg, who called me and he said: "This is my name. This is where I work. Please don't make either public. I just want you to know I am for real. I overheard a conversation between two people in Ukiah associated with Bill Staley talking about slaying women who openly advocate abortion." And he gave me these guys names.

Bill Staley was living on what you could characterize as a one-acre Christian commune outside of Ukiah. It came to me, that is was not necessary for the bomb to be placed by a lone avenger. It could have been a small conspiracy of men who were part of the anti-abortion movement in Mendocino county and in one way or another linked to the timber industry through jobs they had lost or jobs they felt were threatened by forestland activism. And I'm thinking: Well, maybe they've been infiltrated by an agent of the FBI. We know the FBI infiltrated the Sahara Club ... I had seen a copy of the Lord's Avenger letter so explicitly describing the abortion rally. I figured the faces at that rally should be checked out against people who worked in the timber industry, and FBI agents themselves. Because by then, Sharon Doubiago (whose son went to Utah to play football, and she followed) had picked up that the imagery in the Lord's Avenger letter came straight out of Mormon doctrine, and she'd called me about that to see if that line of inquiry had been checked...

JUDI: And there are many Mormons in the FBI. There is a whole Mormon movement in the FBI. The FBI goes out of its way to recruit Mormon men. And I don't know who in my case is a Mormon -- I know who I think is the Mormon ...

There is something else I need to say about the bombing: Was this bombing done by a lone person? -- by a lone, angry logger or whoever. I don't think so. And there are several reasons why I don't think so. First of all: I've never received that kind of death threats treatment before or since, and I now think of it as an organized campaign. At the time I didn't know whether it was coming from individuals. But if it is just that I am so abrasive that I incite people to death threats, why don't I continue to get them? Because I continue to be abrasive. So, it more looks like a campaign from the distance of four years.

What I am going to say is why I believe that the whole thing, including the arrest, was a conspiracy that happened in advance.

And I can't prove FBI complicity, but it is certainly implied. That's why the bomb school stuff is so shocking. What a level of coincidence this would have to be if there wasn't prior knowledge that I was going to be bombed.

JUDI: Two weeks before I was bombed in Oakland, a bomb partially exploded at the Cloverdale L-P mill. This bomb turned out to have the identical construction of the bomb in my car, absent the motion device. It had the timer, it had the same kind of colors of wires, it had the same solder -- they tested the solder, it was from the same tube of solder. They tested the tape, it was from the same roll of tape. It was made from identical components. And this bomb at the Cloverdale L-P mill, instead of being attached to a motion device and placed in a car, it was attached to a can of gasoline: it was an incendiary bomb, and it's supposed intention was to light the gasoline and burn down the mill. Placed near by -- and this is a strange thing for somebody who intended to burn down a mill -- was a cardboard sign that said: L-P Screws Millworkers.

The bomb partially exploded -- in fact, it barely exploded: it exploded just enough to pop off the end cap (there's where your weak end cap is, it's in Cloverdale) -- it popped off the end cap and it dented the can. But it didn't explode the gas can and it didn't burn down the mill. So what it left them with was an intact model of the bomb in my car. That's what was left.

This happened two weeks after the bomb school and two weeks before the bomb exploded in my car in Oakland.

Now I don't believe that anybody who thinks that L-P screws millworkers would have wanted to bomb me. I believe that I was the only public advocate for L-P millworkers at the time.

I think that this bomb was a footprint that was left in the world to be traced back to me later. And if you look at my files, they say: Judi Bari was a labor organizer targeting L-P; therefore she is suspected of the Cloverdale bomb; therefore she is also suspected of the bomb in her car.

The night of the bombing -- within hours -- within seven hours of the time the bomb explodes, the FBI held a briefing meeting for the Oakland police, and at that meeting they said that I was the chief suspect in the Cloverdale bomb. So this was already set up.

Now I believe the Cloverdale bomb was a deliberate dud. I believe its intention was to leave an intact model that would then later be matched to the bomb in my car, in order to give an additional reason to say that it was my bomb.

So what is the implication of that? The implication is that two weeks before I was bombed, somebody knew that not only was I going to be bombed, but I was going to be arrested for that bombing, because they planted something so that the bomb could be traced back to me.

And that's a pretty incredible fact. As I've learned these things little-by-little, I've been constantly astounded -- and confounded... Let's not leave out L-P, either. I don't know where they came from.

You feel there could have been a conspiracy between some one at Louisiana-Pacific and the FBI?

JUDI: Or anybody... My knowledge of the history of the FBI shows that it is quite unusual for them to do the actual bombing themselves. More likely, they keep the things at arms length. They kind of have a generalized knowledge of it. But as we've been pursuing this case, these little bits and pieces have been coming out piece by piece, and sometimes it is so overwhelming -- I mean, when I found out about bomb school, I hid under my covers for two weeks.

It was a complete post-traumatic reaction. I had serious panic attacks where I had to pull over my car at the side of a road and I broke out into a cold sweat. For four days after I learned about bomb school -- it was so scary.

And realizing this thing about the Cloverdale bomb, that the Cloverdale bomb was a footprint. That somebody must have known that not only was I going to be bombed, but I was going to be blamed for it two weeks before it happened. Those things have been really hard. This has been a very emotionally hard thing to do, to pursue this case and to find these things out.

The Lord's Avenger letter (which still seems so valid to me, Judi, so abruptly episodic, remembering what it was like that week -- the whole region focused on this bombing, you and Darryl still firmly the suspects. Even yet I feel it could have been written during a legitimate psychotic episode, an abrupt spiritual need for confession.) That letter also takes credit for the Cloverdale bomb. You and Darryl had written and recorded a song about the layoffs at the Potter Valley mill. The Christian fundamentalist, Bill Staley, certainly cognizant of who you were because of the abortion rally, was a mill worker who had been screwed ...

The Lord's Avenger explains the Cloverdale bomb. He says: "The Lord told me that I had to rid the earth of this demon. But the devil whispered in my other ear to use subterfuge, and so I bombed in Cloverdale -- instead of bombing her -- I set this bomb in Cloverdale, in order to bring infamy down upon her."

Purporting to explain the language of the sign, the use of the word "screwed".

JUDI: Well, I can't buy this. If he wanted to bring infamy down upon me, why didn't he write: "L-P screws millworkers, Earth First!" This bomb was not associated with me until the bomb went off in Oakland. I don't think Bill Staley did any of those things.

The person who called me after hearing Darryl on the air, suggested that the bombing of your car was a conspiracy among men within the anti-abortion movement who also had ties to the timber industry. Fundamentalist men. ... Four years go by; then, just recently, a New Settler aficionado sends me a long feature California magazine published in October of 1988 about Mormon renegades in the California bureau of the FBI: how they go so long, not so much undetected, but undisciplined. The "Mormon Mafia" is how writer, David Weddle, characterizes what is clearly a phenomena. "Spiritual conferences" on FBI time. Mormon agents, engaged in all kinds of crazed, illegal activities , covered up by their Mormon superiors. My theory, at this point, is whereas the bombings may not have been a conspiracy on the part of FBI leftovers from COINTELPRO, it might well have been rogue elements within the FBI who engaged in a plot to kill you -- because you are the kind of woman who you are: men who were at bomb school together, at least one man who was at the abortion rally in Ukiah.

JUDI: And the connection between FBI and timber. The first time we've seen this connection demonstrated was in the memo that we got about bomb school that revealed to us that the bomb school was held on L-P land.

"Well," says L-P, we always cooperate with authorities."

And they certainly do. Both Doug Goss and Frank Wigginton, L-P security officers, used to be county sheriff deputies before they started working for L-P.

So I think it is not unreasonable. I think there is a revolving door relationship between the local police, L-P security, FBI -- all these groups associate with each other. And I certainly think it is reasonable to suspect rogue elements within them, possibly linked.

Finally, there is a large Mormon church in Willits, the belly button of the "Redwood Empire."

JUDI: The Mormon church link is speculative. We don't have a concrete link of any Mormons to this case yet.

A lawyer working on your case, a guy named Simpich, called me two years ago, when he first heard of Sharon Doubiago's intuitive piecing together of imagery, with a likewise suspicion.

JUDI: But nothing came of that. He compiled a lot of information but none of it connected. I'm not saying there isn't a connection; I'm saying we haven't found one. I suspected a connection between timber and the FBI for many years, and we didn't find any evidence of it until a month ago. So I'm not saying that evidence isn't going to emerge.

But what I'm trying to learn is a level of caution. Because I've seen how I myself was vilified by people taking innuendoes and implications, and extending them as if they were facts, I'm trying not to do that back. Even if I have suspicions.

I have many suspicions that I haven't voiced here. And I haven't voiced them because even though I consider them very reasonable courses, I don't have any evidence of them. I think it is very important to rein ourselves in and not make accusations, and not make leaps of logic.

One of the things COINTELPRO does (assuming the Lord's Avenger letter is a COINTELPRO letter), it leads you down false paths. Bill Staley is the obvious suspect for the Lord's Avenger letter. The Lord's Avenger letter, if it were written by the FBI, could have been written with the idea of let's have them go chase after this false suspect.

Another person, who's vilified like that is Mike Koepf. I don't believe Mike Koepf had anything to do with the bombings at all, and yet, at one point the FBI concludes Mike Koepf wrote the Lord's Avenger letter -- he's a published author, placed the bomb in Cloverdale, placed the bomb in my car, and that he was responsible for an anti-war vandalism in Petaluma and a note that went along with it. I mean, they come with these great leaps of logic! And they focused them down on Mike Koepf, who I believe is innocent. I think that these are false leads that are there to lead us off the track.

One of the things they do in COINTELPRO is give you false leads, and what I've learned over the years of going down these paths and getting excited about these false leads and having them come to nothing, is that we have to be really cautious. What seems to be isn't always what is.

I have to say, I don't know who bombed me. I think I have evidence that it was a conspiracy. I think I have evidence that the conspiracy included the arrest as well as the bombing. But I don't know who did it. I know who is responsible for the set-up. I think the set-up was directed by the timber industry: the lynch mob atmosphere that I was describing: the false perception that we were terrorists, those things were consciously and deliberately done by the timber industry. I know who did the arrests and who did the cover-up of the bombing and who did the false vilification of me and Darryl and Earth First!, and that was the FBI. But I don't know who placed the bomb in my car.

And you don't know who or if someone told or ordered that bomb to be placed.

JUDI: I'll tell you something else I know about this bomb, though. This bomb was not made by an amateur.

This bomb was made by a professional. That's something that is very striking about it. We've had testimony from different police officers to the effect that they've never seen a bomb this complex. The bombs you see in Oakland, the bombs you see in Humboldt county, they're not like this. They're just little fuse devices.

The person who is the bomb expert from the FBI lab in Washington, D.C. (his name is David R. Williams), eventually he came out and conducted a thing where he showed them that the bomb was completely hidden under my seat; he said that it was triggered by a motion device. He said -- in his words: "I don't believe this bomb exploded accidentally. I believe this bomb functioned as planned. I believe the motion device was the trigger."

We asked: "Why do you believe that?"

He said, "Because of the craftsmanship involved in the making of this bomb." This was a complex bomb. They learned about this type of bomb in bomb school, but none of them has ever seen this type of bomb on the street. In fact, there is one point in the Depositions where we say to Sgt. Hanson (the Oakland police officer who told us about bomb school in the first place -- one of the students at bomb school) -- we show him a picture of the Cloverdale bomb: "did you learn about bombs like this in bomb school."

He said, "Not exactly."

We said: "What's different?"

He pointed to a single component. He said, "Well, this component was different."

When we were interviewing the bomb expert, David R. Williams -- he's the same bomb expert who convicted the World Trade Center bombers. He's one of the six top bomb experts in the United States. He's very knowledgeable and he loves his work. This man loves his work! He loves bombs. He loves everything about them. At one point we called him a "bomb expert," and he said, "No, I'm a bomber."

He knows how to make bombs and he said: "This bomb was very well made. It was made with excellent craftsmanship and it was well conceived."

He said: "It did not come out of Anarchist Cookbook; it did not come out of Poor Man's James Bond. It was a complex bomb, very well made."

So the level of expertise that went into making this bomb also makes me believe that this was not a crazy, lone angry logger. Because this was not the kind of bomb that would be consistent with that profile. This was somebody who knew about bombs.

A crazy FBI agent?

JUDI: Years ago I said the FBI should find the bomber and fire him. And I still feel that way in my gut, but I don't think I can make those accusations until and unless I get that evidence.

What I can say is that the FBI framed me, and they behaved in a very suspicious manner: their immediate arrival -- all of those things -- the way they prejudiced the scene with what went on in bomb school.

Now the bomb school in 1990 was one of a series the FBI conducts and it was planned far enough in advance that I think it's a leap of logic to say that they planned the bomb school just for the bombing.

I think the bomb school was an already-existing police training. But what every person has testified so far that has knowledge of this is that there are various blocks of material that can be taught in bomb school; it is up to the individual instructor what is taught in that particular bomb school and what isn't. I think that they took advantage of this existing training session to teach what they wanted to teach . . .

And who is "they", Judi?

JUDI: Well, Frank Doyle was the director of bomb school. He was the one who decided what was taught. They won't tell us the name of the range safety guy. We said: "Who put the bombs in the car in bomb school? Who decided that two bombs would be inside the cars and one would be in the engine? Who decided the components, what types of bombs would be used?"

The answer: "The range safety officer."

"Who was the range safety officer?"

"I don't recall."

"It might have been me," says Frank Doyle. "I've been the range safety officer. But I don't recall if I was that year or not."

Of course, I don't believe a word of his "I don't recalls".

There's also a roster of who participated in bomb school. The memo that we got says: "Attached is the roster of all of the students and their evaluations of the course."

The roster is missing.

We say: "We want this roster."

"Oh, we'll go look for it, but we don't think it exists."

Now this thing is filed in many, many places. And there is no way this roster is really missing.

I suspect the roster contains the name of the bomber...

JUDI: It contains the names of the students: we know that much. But the students at that bomb school didn't learn how to make bombs. They just learned how to respond to a bombing. It's the Certified Bomb Technicians who learn how to make the bombs.

We went to the College of the Redwoods. We asked them for the roster. The roster exists. One of the people on our investigation team has seen the roster, and we subpoenaed the roster. And they almost gave it to us, and then I guess someone in authority told them not to. They said: "Oh, no. Academic confidentiality. We can't give you this."

So we are now going to court to force the release of the roster. We know the roster exists. We certainly believe the FBI has a copy of it. And if they are not giving us the roster, they're not giving it to us because there is something on it that they don't want us to see. And I think one of the things on it they don't want us to see is how many respondents at the bomb scene were students at the bomb school.

From the memos we have so far, I've identified four and possibly five...

When I say possibly five: Stockton Buck was a very active participant in the response to the bomb scene and to the bogus investigation that went on up here later. We deposed Stockton Buck, and without our even asking, he said: "Yeah, I'm on the Terrorist squad. I've been to bomb school too."

And we said: "Oh, did you go to bomb school in 1990?"

He said, "I don't recall. It was either 1990 or the year before. I don't recall."

He doesn't recall if he went to bomb school four weeks before I was blown up? Bullshit. And it's not that hard for him to find this information. If he looks in his personnel file, I'm certain it will tell what year. It was called: "The Bomb Investigator's Seminar". It's much less than the Certified Bomb Technician course. What you learn in that bomb school is how to investigate a bomb crime scene. We've since found there was no bomb school in 1989.

But I can't prove yet that Stockton Buck attended.

NEW SETTLER: How have your injuries altered your life?

JUDI: Pain has changed my life in a lot of ways. Levels of pain that I didn't know existed, I experience every day. Not only is my back broken (which leaves me with a constant low-level pain), but I also have this nerve damage that makes the nerves to my paralyzed foot randomly fire, and when they fire, it feels like an electric shock. There are two places it does so in my foot, and sometimes, it does it in the back of my leg. The back of my leg hurts more because it is a larger area, and because my foot's paralyzed, it can't contract. But in the back of my leg, the muscles actually contract and I can't move when it does that.

The level of pain of that is so horrible. People who used to hold my hand in the hospital saw me experiencing that pain; it was excruciating. Now I've learned to not change my expression. I've learned to tolerate those episodes (which last anywhere from three to ten seconds -- those zaps of electric shock-like pain) I've learned to tolerate them without changing my expression, because I've discovered that it warps my relationships with people so much.

My relationships with people have been destroyed by the bombing anyway. It's very hard for me to have an equal relationship with anyone. My pain makes other people feel so uncomfortable with me that they avoid me. It just warps the interaction between me and other people to express pain. So I've learned to suppress it. When nobody's around, I will grimace, I'll moan. I experience these zaps of electric shock anywhere from twenty to one hundred times on any day, and every once in awhile, I'll have an episode where I'll be taken out by it. I lose whole nights of sleep from it. I'll even lose whole days. If I lay absolutely still in bed I can calm it down a little bit.

The whole thing has warped my relationships. I used to be able to have equal relationships, but because of this weird kind of notoriety that I've gotten, where anything that I say has more weight than it deserves; if I express an opinion, it's considered a pronouncement. I can't relate to people as equals because they won't relate to me as an equal.

As a result of the bombing, you've become an icon activist...

JUDI: And people have these incredible standards of behavior for me. And if I meet them, I am resented for being too saintly; and if I don't meet them, I'm vilified for not being saintly enough.

And nobody can look at me without thinking of the bombing. I can't just be myself.

You know, I used to organize for a couple of years, and get into these intense public situations -- like I did in the unions -- and then I'd drop out for a couple of years, and I'd go get a job and I'd be a mom, I'd just live my life as a normal person. And then when I had recovered enough from the glare of the public exposure, I would be ready to go out.

I haven't been able to do that since the bombing. First of all, I can't work at a normal job because of my injuries. Secondly, people can't look at me without thinking of the bombing. And it's ruined my relationships. It's ruined my friendships. Since you're famous for asking everyone about sex, I'm going to volunteer that one of the unspoken results of the bombing is that it has ruined my sexual response. I don't have any. That part of me is numb. If this had happened to a man, nobody would expect them to perform sexually. They blew my butt up and all else associated.

There is this wonderful scene in the movie "Coming Home" where Jane Fonda goes down on the paraplegic -- off camera it is clear she is either kissing or nuzzling his penis -- and then she looks up and she asks: "Can you feel that?" And he, in total bliss answers, "No, but I can see it." ... Did the blast destroy the ability that necessitates the trust it takes to be overwhelming in love, and therefore sexual with someone else?

JUDI: I don't know, because I haven't had the opportunity. Before the bombing, I always considered myself a lesbian trapped in a heterosexual body. Although I've always mentally attracted to women and my close friends have always been women, I've always been sexually involved with men, and I've always had boyfriends or lovers or long-term relationships -- serial monogamy has been my life history.

But two thing happened after the bombing: I lost my physical sexual response; and I lost my sexual attractiveness -- because my body became distorted. This really changed my relationships with men. It made me realize how much of the day-to-day interactions with men that we think are interactions among humans are really fueled by sexual tension. Because that doesn't exist anymore...

But it does for men, with regard to you Judi ...

JUDI: It doesn't that I know of. There are no men in my life, and there haven't been since the bombing.

Yet one man after another -- especially in the timber industry -- fell in love with you, Judi. Became enamored with you and allied to you...

JUDI: But that's not falling in love. There's a difference between a physical alliance and a political alliance ...

What about the Pardini men -- in the middle of the Enchanted Meadow uprising? Or the logger who left his wife to be with you in the hospital ...

JUDI: I very much love Ernie Pardini -- I love his wife and kids too -- but we are not lovers. There's a big difference between the two...

Whenever Ernie Pardini was in your presence, the same kind of crackle one associates with sensual attraction was evident.

JUDI: But I don't see it. One of the aftermaths of the bombing has been that it has changed my relationships with men very much. They don't treat me the same. And there just are not very men in my life anymore. I don't have many friends that are men. Ernie is one of the few. It changed very many things, and it left me with a sadness, in a way. And in a way it left me with a sense of relief.

The last time you interviewed me -- years and years ago it seems, though it was just before the bombing -- we were talking about men and women activists, and I said something like, no matter who they are, no matter how much you think they're really right there, eventually when you get to know them well enough, you'll find that deep down, they have a misogynist streak. I don't have to deal with that anymore. I'm done with that. They're either going to be interested in me as a human being, or they're not going to be around. And I've found, in general, that they are not around. And it's been kind of a revelation to me to see how much my relationships with men changed when I ceased to be a sexual being. It really surprised me. And it has caused me a lot of sadness to see that. At the age of 40 to be rendered asexual is pretty shocking.

It's amazing to me that you are blind to your own draw

JUDI: I am. I'm not aware of it. I'm extremely self-conscious of the way my body was left. I never had a positive body self-image of myself to start with, but having become physically disfigured, I'm extremely physically self-conscious, and it takes a lot for me to overcome that and stand up and speak, and do those things, because I am very self-conscious about how distorted my body is. . . . Maybe I'm more aware of it than others, but I am very painfully aware of it.

Especially when you were confined to a hospital bed, and then when you were in hiding, there was your attraction as the victim-woman

JUDI: Yes. A strong woman rendered helpless, I discovered, is irresistible to many men.

Many men came on to me in the hospital. I mean, it was disgusting. I actually fired one of my night bodyguards. I was very offended that in that state of devastation, some man would be trying to take advantage of me. A lot of men were attracted to me then. But when I came strong enough to be a whole person -- although I'll never be as strong as I was before the bombing; there was definitely permanent damage on many levels.

After that, those kind of men became threatened by me. Bruce being the perfect example, I would say. Became threatened by me, rather than attracted to me.

Timber Wars... they're called, you call them, you've named your new book.

JUDI: Hagiography -- instead of a biography -- it's where you create a myth... [laughs]

But not really. After the bombing, when I was no longer as physically immobilized, I began to write a lot. I used to write once a week in the AVA, practically. I rarely missed a week. I began to spend a lot of my energy I used to spend hiking around the woods, documenting the struggle.

People kept asking me for copies of the articles, so after awhile, I collected them and self-published them. I got the typesetting from the AVA, then made the print a little bigger (because nobody can read the small type in the AVA), and I published it into a collection which I called Timber Wars.

Eventually, a book company called "Common Courage Press" contacted me and asked if I would be interested in publishing this as a real book. This was two years ago. I negotiated it with them and we eventually worked it out. I have this standard book contract where I get 10 percent of the net profits. And what I did was I upgraded it.

The articles start in 1989 and finish in 1994. About two-thirds were in the AVA. But they are also from the Earth First! Journal, MS. Magazine, one of them even from the New York Times. It's not a coherent book -- it's not even what I would call "a book", because it is a collection and my ideas change from the beginning to the end of the book. But from the front lines, in the time frame it happened, it documents the struggle that's been going on here -- and, of course, from my own warped perspective.

Have you seen the book? The cover is beautiful. And the company that did this, the most famous person who they publish is Noam Chomsky -- they're kind of a lefty, intellectual book company. They're not a big company, they're a small company, but for some reason, they chose to promote this book out of their fall selection, and they paid for a full page ad on the back of The Nation. I didn't even know it was coming out. Being an interminable intellectual, I subscribe to The Nation, and the New York Times, and all these other things that I really shouldn't because they are full of shit. But anyway, I get my Nation in the mail, and I look at the back cover, and the whole back cover was an ad for my book.

So as a result of this, all of a sudden, I'm getting all this attention -- and not as a result of the tremendous revelations!

NEW SETTLER: The press had virtually ignored your revelations about FBI incompetence or complicity up till then?

JUDI: Eventually I got discouraged. When we first got the photos of the blown-up car that showed without a doubt that the FBI was lying, we did everything right: we held a press conference, we put out a press release, we called the people to make sure they'd be there, and because it was going to be for TV too, I made a very TV-genic display board of the photos -- in color, blown up big -- I gave a concise speech about it. We gave out press packets with black and white glossies of the photos in them.

I was told by sympathetic reporters that we did a very good job of presenting the information, and I was sure that all those newspapers that said I had bombed myself would print these photos from the FBI that showed that I didn't. And they wouldn't do it.

The Press Democrat wouldn't print the photos! This paper spent more ink saying I bombed myself probably than any other paper in the region, and when I came up with the police photos, they said: "This isn't a story." I had to pay them $2500 for a half page ad to get them to print the photos at all.

This was the same publication that sent Mike Geniella to Canterbury for an interview he did with Lynn Dahl for the AVA, one respectful of you and respectful of the goals of Redwood Summer.

JUDI: He told the truth about Redwood Summer...

And having done so in print -- all be it in someone else's paper -- the FBI called the Press Democrat (by then owned by the New York Times) and said, "Get rid of Geniella," and they did.

JUDI: I want to correct that a little bit. The excuse that the Press Democrat gave when they took Mike Geniella off the timber beat, the excuse that they gave was because he did an interview with the AVA, and showed bias. (In that interview he says the thing he likes about being a news reporter is that he gets "a front row seat in the parade of events." Ha! There are no spectators in this parade. ) But that excuse is not what shows in my FBI. In my FBI files, as I was sorting through these six thousand pages, to my great surprise, I come upon this memo, and it is from Richard Held, himself, the head of the San Francisco office...

Used to be head of the San Francisco office of the FBI...

JUDI: ...Who resigned, by the way, the day we released those photos that showed that they lied!

But anyway, the memo's from Richard Held, himself, and it says: "Attached is an article written by Mike Geniella," (and it's not the article in the AVA; it's an article that Mike Geniella wrote in August of 1990, and it was called "FBI Targets Earth First! in Terror Probe." ) It was a horrible headline, it made it sound like we were terrorists -- but that wasn't the point of the article.

The article is the only article I've ever seen in any mainstream media -- any media written by anybody other than me, actually! -- in which they connected the operations that the FBI had against Earth First! in Arizona, Montana, and California. This article had a little map with three different places, and people who were the targets of the FBI; and it pointed out that there were these simultaneous discrediting campaigns of Earth First! with various aspects to them, including spending millions of dollars to infiltrate with an agent provocateur in Arizona to get the people to drop a power line and then arrest them in the act of it.

Geniella documented these three operations against Earth First!, and he connected them to each other; nobody had ever done that; and that's the article that is attached to the FBI memo.

It says: "Attached is an article by Mike Geniella about the FBI and Earth First! . . . Mike Geniella knowingly and deliberately lied to make the FBI look bad." And then Richard Held goes on to say:: "So I'm going to contact the editors of the Press Democrat about this, and I suggest that you (William Sessions, the head of the FBI) contact the New York Times, the parent paper."

I immediately gave this to Mike Geniella (he'd never been told the real reason), and the Press Democrat's editor said: "Oh yes, but the FBI never contacted us, so this is just a coincidence that you were removed from the timber beat shortly afterwards."

We deposed the head of the Terrorist squad, John Reikes (the one who received the Smiley memo), and he actually, physically wrote the memo to Sessions (because Richard Held doesn't actually write memos. And we discovered the little code: they sign Richard Helm's name with John Reikes initials after it, and that means that he's the actual author.)

We go: "why did you write this memo?"

"Richard Held told me to."

Why did he tell you to?

"Because it was inaccurate. He wanted to correct it. He's really tired of people accusing him of COINTELPRO. He doesn't do these things anymore and he wants people to understand he is very annoyed with the accusation. So, it was just correcting a misunderstanding."

We said: "Why this hostile language?" (We read him the language: "Mike Geniella consciously and deliberately...") "Why this language? It seems so personal and so hostile."

"Richard Held wanted that language in," he said.

We said: "Did the FBI contact the Press Democrat?"

And he said, "Yes."

We said: "How did they do that?"

He said, "I don't know: it was either by letter or by phone."

We said: "Well if it were by letter, would it be in my file?"

"No, I think it would be in a different file."

So we requested a copy of the letter, and if the letter exists I believe we'll get it because the letter is not going to say: Fire Mike Geniella, so it would be in the FBI's interest to produce the letter if it exists.

We said, "Well how do you know the call or letter was actually made or sent?"

Then he showed us these initials at the end of the memo, and it said PUCB and he told us that meant "Proceed Unless Countermanded by the Bureau." So that meant Richard Held said: "I'm going to contact these editors and I will proceed unless countermanded by you, and he was not countermanded. And John Reikes seemed to have an independent memory that Richard Held did so. We haven't deposed Richard Held yet.

Meanwhile for a year, Mike Geniella, silent and fearfully survived Canterbury. Never talking to anyone about why he had been thrown off the timber beat, he the most knowledgeable and painstaking -- and only -- reporter from the straight press covering the struggle over Northcoast forestland.

JUDI: He collected dust in his office for a year. I mean he was deposed from the timber beat in an area where there is nothing happening but timber!

Meanwhile, most of the activists thought the screws had been turned by....

JUDI: ...By L-P, or MAXXAM -- corporate pressure. It never occurred to us that it would be the FBI.

NEW SETTLER: And that leads credence to the most prevalent theory these days, that the bomb comes out of the FBI.

JUDI: Well, there is this other aspect: I think my activities came at the intersection of two campaigns... We were talking some about the pain. The bombing absolutely ruined my life. It ruined me physically. I don't know what it is going to be like to grow old with these injuries; I already know what it feels like to be eighty. And it has ruined my opportunities -- what I can do. I have to focus on this no matter how hard it is to do. It's very much changed who I am and what I can do with my life...

And it's hard to contemplate. Why did this happen to me? I really agree with Bruce Anderson. I don't think I was enough of a threat to the power structure to merit this kind of action. I think the attack on me was way out of scale to the real threat that I posed to the timber industry or to the capitalist system. And I've had to try to explain to myself: why did this happen?

I think my activities came at the intersection of two campaigns: one of the campaigns was timber industry and Wise Use, which, both, historically are riddled with thugs -- the labor movement -- all through the history of timber.

I think it goes with all the extractive corporations: the worse they do to the earth, the worse they do to the people. And the timber industry has a very long history of physical brutality to people who would oppose them.

I think I was targeted by the timber industry because I was posing somewhat of a threat to them by exposing what was happening here in the redwoods, bringing it into a national forum so people could see it. And I think I was posing a threat to them by building alliances with the workers, by defining the problem as the community vs. these out-of-town corporations, instead of environmentalists vs. loggers.

I think I posed a threat to them just by restating the question in that manner. So, I think I was a target of the timber industry's own discrediting campaign. See, not only do we have a resurgence of COINTELPRO in this country, we have the privatization of COINTELPRO. The tactics that used to be used by the secret police, are being used by private industry.

But in addition to that, I also think my activities intersected a separate FBI campaign to discredit Earth First! This campaign was focused in Arizona. In Arizona, they spent over two million dollars to infiltrate and disrupt the group over a period of more than two years. The target, in particular was Dave Foreman. They wanted to discredit Dave Foreman for the same reasons that the timber industry wanted to discredit me: he was taking these very radical ideas of deep ecology (profoundly radical ideas which question the foundations of this corporate/capitalist society), and he was popularizing these ideas. He was inspiring people into a mass movement -- into a very decentralized mass movement that had its own energies separate and apart from him.

So he was a threat, and they wanted to neutralize him. And they wanted to neutralize him by discrediting him and by discrediting Earth First!.

There is this chilling photograph of Dave Foreman, bare but for his skivvies, still in his bed, several long assault weapons pointed at his head. The FBI mobbed his bedroom to arrest him. Ergo: he must be a dangerous terrorist! Shades of the campaign against the Black Panthers.

JUDI: Yes, they wanted to tar him. And they had a hard time implicating him in the power line thing. They infiltrated the Arizona group (and the COINTELPRO word for this is "misdirect." They don't make up what they do; they take your real flaws, your real weaknesses ... and Earth First! tended to this blind advocacy of monkeywrenching without really analyzing what is really appropriate with public support: this very naive, kind of mythological belief that a few people sneaking around in the desert or the woods can bring about massive social change.

These were weaknesses of the Earth First! ideology. It was really kind of a romanticism that Earth First! was based on. And the FBI exploited these things, took the real tendencies of Earth First! and misdirected them into something that would be discrediting. When Earth First! acted to preserve sacred places, they inspired people and the movement grew. But the FBI misdirected this into "dropping power lines" and "attacking civilization" (and "attacking nuclear power plants" in particular. ) That was the FBI's idea. That was not Peg Millet or Mark Davis. They weren't targeting nuclear power plants. That was Michael Fein's idea, the nuclear power plant.

Fain who was sent in by the FBI to infiltrate Earth First!

JUDI: And why was it so important they target nuclear power plants? Because in the FBI's own regulations (which I have now read in the bomb school manual) one of the reasons they are allowed to designate you a "terrorist group" is if you threaten nuclear facilities.

So they took this Earth First! group dedicated to the preservation of wilderness and preserving sacred places, and they turned it into dropping power lines and attacking nuclear facilities.

The FBI agent provocateur infiltrated the group, won their trust, and then led them to take down this power line in the desert, with the FBI waiting to pounce on them, and they were busted in the act. And of the core group who took down this power line -- the core group consisted of five people -- two of them were FBI agents.

So I describe this as a joint FBI-Earth First! action. [laughs]

I suspect that the same is true in Santa Cruz: the timing of the Santa Cruz power lines, the methodology by which it was attached to us, how it was used to vilify public Earth First!ers who were using public, non-violent mass organizing techniques. The Santa Cruz power lines came down the night of Earth Night Action -- which was a response to Earth Day and corporate co-optation.

What the real Earth First! did (which, I thought was stupid, by the way, and I boycotted the action), was to gather their crack team of tree climbers from all over the Northcoast, and they were going to climb the Golden Gate Bridge and hang a banner.

To me, that was a tremendous risk to take for a mere banner hanging. I think direct action needs to be focused on stopping production at the point of production, and actions that just depend on media to send a message aren't worth taking that kind of risk. So I didn't participate. But that was the Earth First! Earth Day response.

Well the night before this, these power lines all of a sudden go down. And in the media coverage of the two events, they are absolutely blended. The stories about Earth First! climbing the Golden Gate bridge are accompanied by photos of downed power lines, and the two became blended.

Likewise, the two are blended in the FBI files. The FBI's file on the Golden Gate bridge climb is captioned: "Earth Night Action group" (which is the name of the group that took down the power lines in Santa Cruz) and they treat the people who climb the Golden Gate bridge as if they were the power line droppers.

These were very separate actions. In fact, they happened so close together, I'm not even sure if anybody could have physically participated in both of them. Because the people who climbed the bridge, met the night before. They stayed in a motel in the City; they planned their action. They weren't out dropping power lines in Santa Cruz; they were getting psyched up to climb this bridge and practicing what their different roles would be. Yet these two actions were blended.

And I don't think the Santa Cruz power lines was an all-FBI action, because explosives weren't used. In Arizona it was called "Operation Thermcon" by the FBI. Now what would that mean? 'Thermite Conspiracy 'or 'Con-Them-Into It.' -- like AbScam.

We've asked them what does Thermcon mean?

"I don't know. It's just a word."

How about: 'Con them into using Thermite.' The two FBI agents talk constantly about thermite: "We can get thermite. " ... "Let's use thermite." They tried to get them to use explosives. Even the "evil" book, Ecodefense, says, "Don't use explosives. Stay away from guns. Stay away from explosives." The real Earth First!, even those that advocate the worst of the monkeywrenching, did not believe in using explosives, and the FBI was trying to bring that element in.

So, I think if the Earth Night Action group that took down the Santa Cruz power lines had actually been an all-FBI action, they would have blown up the power lines. Instead they sawed them down. Very low tech. Hand saws and cold chisels.

I think that Earth First! was being targeted in the same way that the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement were -- although I don't think Earth First! ever represented the threat that either AIM or the Black Panthers did. I've called it the "Iraq Effect," where they've run out worthy adversaries, so they now use overwhelming force against really small adversaries. I mean, if there are not terrorists there are no reasons for the Terrorist Squad to exist.

It's a job program.

JUDI: Right. So they had to invent a terrorist threat, and we were it.

Having seen that happen. Having seen myself stumble so naively into this trap... and that's what I mean when I say I think my activities came at the intersection of these two events: timber wanted to get rid of me -- or neutralize me in one way or another -- because I think the local organizing really was -- and is -- on a certain level, a threat to L-P, to MAXXAM; and the FBI wanted to discredit Earth First! as a whole. And they have a hierarchic view of the world based on their own organization. So it was: We'll take out Dave Foreman; he's the head of Earth First! and that will kill Earth First!

So they took out Dave Foreman (Dave Foreman became inactive at the very least, and now, no longer associates with Earth First!), and instead of Earth First! dying, this new incarnation of it pops up in northern California that's calling for national mass actions, that's gaining a level of credibility that was never gained by the more isolationist tactics of the Arizona group -- because I was combining Dave's ecological ideas with my leftist mass organizing background, and moving Earth First! away from the discrediting things.

Renouncing tree spiking was a tremendous step for Earth First! When I was working for California Yurts, I was working in a prefab carpentry factory where we used large saws -- nowhere's near as large as a sawmill -- but my working conditions were similar enough. (And before then, I had worked industrial jobs; I had worked in big factories where I had seen accidents. I was on a shift when somebody's arm was sucked into a machine and ripped off.) I really had a sense of industrial accidents, and I really identified with the mill workers in that manner.

When George Alexander was nearly decapitated working a shift at the Cloverdale mill, I was just getting interested in Earth First! and it kind of backed me off, because of this tree spiking thing. (Not that it was an Earth First! spike, but Earth First! continued to advocate tree spiking, and would not even make a sympathetic statement about George Alexander)

But I liked Earth First! so much. Their spirit. The music was wonderful. Earth First! was the only one that would put their bodies between the chainsaws and the trees. What I saw of Earth First! was not a terrorist group, were not people uncaring about other humans. They were loving, wonderful, progressive people.

And so I sung the tree spiking songs with Darryl, and I put it all aside in my mind. But as I began to work more and more with the timber workers, they brought it up; they didn't let me forget it. They didn't let me ignore it. And eventually, at their urging (and once I had got enough sway within Earth First! to have this much influence to do it) I led northern California and southern Oregon into publicly denouncing tree spiking.

Now the workers could ally with us. Even workers who supported us before, had to be very quiet about it because of tree spiking. This really opened up the alliance between us. If we could disassociate from tree spiking (even advocating other forms of monkeywrenching -- which are quite different: those are attacks on machines, as opposed to something that could target a person), it would give Earth First! a lot more opportunity to expand its base. And Redwood Summer was a very conscious and deliberate expansion of our base and a coalition action.

We'd never initiated violence, but we were too macho to call ourselves "non-violent" before that. Now we openly embraced non-violence, we openly rejected tree spiking, and now the peace movement could ally with us. Now Seeds of Peace, now what was left of the Acorn Alliance -- the long-term peace activists in our communities could now comfortably ally with Earth First! And we could call for national actions and spread this message in that way.

That was a threat to them for several reasons: for now Foreman's ideas were being spread, not only to a broader audience, but to an audience that included blue collar workers. One of the ways they limit the influence of the environmental movement is by keeping us ghettoized to professionals and privileged people, even though environmentalism is very much in the interest of blue collar workers. They're the ones who bear the brunt of the destruction of the earth. The Wise Use movement seeks to portray environmentalists as espresso-sucking pavement dwellers...

But now you are describing yourself as a very relevant target for timber, the FBI .

JUDI: And that's what I'm trying to say: that the activities that I was doing, the FBI tried to misdirect, isolate and discredit by having us -- Earth First! -- be this elitist, crazy, threat to society. And here, they thought they had knocked out Earth First! in Arizona, and we rise up in California in a different incarnation in which we have much more credibility and much more possibility for forging these alliances. So I was a threat to the FBI's attempt to discredit Earth First!, because I was leading Earth First! away from the discrediting tactics.

I think that my activities came at the intersection of those two campaigns: the timber industry's campaign to stop this activism against them, and the FBI's campaign to isolate and discredit Earth First! And I was the target of this: I was absolutely the target.

That's demonstrated not just by the arrest and by whose seat the bomb was under, but also by the fact, for example, that only my house was raided for the Lord's Avenger letter. I was the specific target of this campaign, because my efforts were countering their efforts to isolate and discredit Earth First! So, if they could portray me as a terrorist, me in particular who was the principal advocate of these non-violent tactics, then they could take out Earth First!

Whether or not they planted the bomb, if they could portray you in this light.

JUDI: Right. And I think that they misjudged -- that's the other thing -- because I'm not going to say these tactics haven't been done. Look what just happened to Leroy Jackson a year ago (the Native American forest activist who was murdered). But they haven't done this kind of thing to white people, and in this racist culture, I think they could have gotten away with it if I were Black or Indian or Brown. I think they misjudged. I think they misjudged who I was; I think they misjudged the support for our ideas. And I think it backfired in a lot of ways, and now they are trying to cover up for it.

But it did happen to Karen Silkwood.

JUDI: But Karen Silkwood wasn't arrested, she wasn't blamed for killing herself. The last time this has happened in the United States, that I know of, is the Civil Rights Movement, is Mississippi Summer -- when activists were bombed (and in their case killed) and then blamed for the bomb. Their cases have never been resolved, as I suspect would have happened with mine. And I have this vision of Richard Held sitting around going: "All right, she wants Mississippi Summer, lets give her Mississippi Summer."

But there is one exception to the fact that white people are not treated as badly as other races in this country, and that's labor. The one place where white people have been treated the same is labor organizers. In the coal mines, they aerial bombed strikers in the 1920s. The history of the Wobblies is the best known, with the history of the lynchings. Karen Silkwood was a labor organizer.

To link two parts of this story together: after Timber Wars is published, and the back page ad occurs in the Nation, all of sudden I'm getting requests for interviews from radio stations all over the country, and reviews -- but no calls from the Press Democrat; they're not interested in reviewing the book. KPFA doesn't want to interview me. Interestingly, it's been blacked out within this range [laughs] I guess it's like the Super Bowl where they don't put it on TV within a certain area of the bowl.

But radio stations in Canada and Detroit and Arkansas, North Dakota, Washington D.C., they're calling. And last week I got a call from Washington, D.C. Dave Burnham. He identified himself to me as a freelance journalist. He was the New York Times reporter that Karen Silkwood was going to meet -- she was going to deliver documents to him when she was run off the road and killed. He identified himself to me as the reporter she was going to meet, and I responded: "Oh, so I suppose you want me to deliver you some documents."

What he said was that he was writing a book about the Justice Department and the FBI as part of the Justice Department, and the tremendous level of corruption and violation of people's rights that goes on within that department, and he was looking for a horror story to start a chapter with, and somebody had referred him to me -- because the descriptions of the bombing were on the back page of the Nation. He had called me up to ask me about it, and I said: "If you want horror stories, we've got horror
stories," and I told him some of the basic things about the case.

He was particularly interested in the bogus investigation that took place: the violation of a broad range of people's rights. I talked to him about that for a little while, about some of the evidence, and the bomb school, and the photographs, and when I finished he said: "Boy, they really did a job on you. Up until this moment, I just thought you were some kook who blew herself up with her own bomb." And this is the person Karen Silkwood was going to meet!

Of course, he's from the east coast, and I was on the front page of the New York Times (the parent paper of the Press Democrat) for having bombed myself. But you don't see the New York Times printing any of this new stuff, nor the Washington Post . And you know, if you ask most people what they know about Earth First! they'll say two things: tree spiking, blowing themselves up with their own bomb. That's what's they've done to this movement to discredit it, and I think that a lot of us, with wishful thinking, try to pretend that they haven't been successful. Because locally, here, where we live in these small rural communities, where we know each other, even my worst enemies know I didn't bomb myself. Jerry Philbrick knows I didn't bomb myself -- though I don't think of Jerry as an enemy... Bobby Simpson knows I didn't bomb myself.

NEW SETTLER: Talk more about the bogus investigation, Judi.

JUDI: Well, for eight weeks after the bombing, the FBI said that not only were we suspects, but we were the only suspects. And the only investigation of the bombing consisted of raiding our houses and confiscating materials and trying to match them to the bomb. And despite all of the headlines about matching nails -- which turned out not to match. Nothing matched. They could find nothing in our possession to connect us to the bomb.

(And by the way, that's the reason I think the FBI didn't bomb me. If the FBI had access to the bomb components, they could have planted them in my house. That's another reason I think they did not directly bomb me.)

And a reason why I think somebody from the FBI did -- acting independently, in rogue fashion -- is because there was one piece of information in the Lord's Avenger letter that was only available in the then-secret FBI report -- the diameter of the pipe bomb left at the Cloverdale mill. The Sonoma county sheriff's report and the press had another dimension ...

JUDI: But that turned out to be a false lead. It turned out that the FBI and the Lord's Avenger were right and the Sonoma county police were wrong. Because I saw the actual bomb.

But it doesn't make a difference who was right and who was wrong. The only place the information occurred at the time the Lord's Avenger letter was sent was in the FBI document.

JUDI: But, the real bomber would have known that information, too. Before, when I thought the information was false, it definitely linked it to the FBI. But it turned out the information was true: that it was an inch and a half bomb.

But you're saying the real bomber did not write the letter ...

JUDI: I don't think they did. But I can't prove it by that information, as I could have if the information was wrong.

At any rate, when they were unable to connect the bombs to us, finally, after three tries in court and eight weeks of vilification of us as the only suspects, the Alameda county District Attorney refused to press charges against us for lack of evidence. So at that point, the FBI was left in an awkward position. And I'm sure they would have liked to just drop the case at that point, but right then -- to show how important public support is -- there was this huge outpouring of public support. All these people were writing letters from literally around the world, demanding an investigation, demanding that the FBI find the bomber. Pressure was being put on Congress. A coalition of mainstream groups was demanding an investigation.

Under the glare of this pressure, William Sessions ordered the San Francisco office to begin an investigation to broaden the pool of suspects and to provide weekly reports proving that they were investigating this case. So at that point, the FBI was forced to embark on some sort of an investigation.

They only spent a couple of months up here, Stockton Buck being the lead agent. They came up here and conducted what was supposed to look like an investigation of the bombing, but they never investigated the bombing -- as demonstrated with your Lord's Avenger lead -- they ignored all leads that could have reasonably led to the bomber...

And when they left, hastily, their excuse was: "Well, the Iraqis may be infiltrating through the Mexican border. We have to go down there."

JUDI: And: "The environmentalists wouldn't cooperate" -- which is also not true. All Betty Ball said, for instance, was, "I want a lawyer here." She didn't say, "I won't talk." When she tried to set up an appointment with a lawyer present, they canceled the appointment.

What they did was: instead of investigating the bombing, they used the bombing as a pretext to conduct a broad surveillance campaign on Earth First! and the environmental movement, first locally, and then nationally. (Early in the 1980s, the FBI was caught and chastised for doing this to CISPES and the Central American movement: that they had collected names and information of the thousands of people who did nothing but go to meetings).

Well, in Earth First!'s case you didn't even have to go to a meeting. What they did was, they came up here and began to collect names of activists. Mostly, they just made a data base. In some cases, they went further. And this was any activist -- hemp activists, Civil Liberties Monitoring Project folks. One of the methods was: they sent a letter to all the local newspapers and they said: "The FBI is looking for the Lord's Avenger. We want to look through your letters to the editor for letters that resemble it on abortion and redwood timber issues." (When they got out into the field, they forgot about the abortion letters and only looked for the redwood timber ones.)

The Press Democrat wrote them back and said: "No this is a violation of freedom of the press and confidentiality of sources; and think of the chilling effect on our letter writers if they knew we were turning over the letters to the FBI."

But the other papers -- nearly all of them in this region -- these rural papers, the editors, flattered by the attention, said: "Sure, come right in." And they let them leaf through their files; the FBI said: "Give us some names," and they suggested names. The Laytonville Observer said: "Well, Louis Korn works at the Environmental Center" -- just completely extraneous stuff -- and they went through and they picked out letters, and the letters were nearly universally from environmentalists: things like "on healing the earth" by Forest Featherwalker -- none of which had any apparent connection to the bombing.

They claimed that they were looking for a similar typewriter, but the documents they gave me shows a very dirty typewriter: it looks like its been xeroxed fifteen times (and a lot of the FBI documents look like that), but I know this was the document they were bringing around, because when they went to the Willits News, they say: "Okay, lets look at this typewriter. It's an old typewriter. See, it's really dirty. blah, blah, blah."

Well the real Lord's Avenger letter is not typed on an old typewriter. It's typed on a new one...

How can you tell that?

JUDI: I know that because I went to Mike Geniella... Two years after this bombing. I've been looking at these "old Royal typewriter" samples that we got from the FBI, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could get something closer to the original if I went to Mike Geniella. So I went to Mike and I said, "By the way, before you turned that letter over to the FBI, did you xerox it?"

He said, "Yeah."

I said, "Can I see your xerox?"

He showed it to me, and to my surprise, it was crisp and clean. It was not dirty at all. The FBI xeroxed this over and over so many times as to change the character of it. And they went around with this letter that did not resemble the Lord's Avenger letter and confiscated Letters To The Editor written on old typewriters.

So they weren't really trying to find the Lord's Avenger at all. They used it as a pretext and they used it to look through Letters-To-The-Editor files, and they compiled these letters. In most cases, they did nothing with them. But in one case, a letter to the southern Humboldt Life and Times, for no discernible reason, they decided this guy was a suspect, and they sent his letter to the FBI fingerprint lab and behavior analysis lab. -- They refused to do that with the death threats, by the way. The death threats to me -- we turned over the originals of the death threats, and they never finger printed them, they never analyzed them. I've seen them. They still have them.

Some of those death threats use the same language that you see in the Sahara Club newsletters, Judi.

JUDI: And they came from southern California. I believe the Sahara Club put out what we call the "Mail Merge Death Threat", and it was addressed to everybody on the Earth First! contact list in the Earth First! Journal. All of us received them. And there were two versions: one for men, one for women, and it said Dear Judi -- or Dear Pam, or Dear Betty -- We know that you are an Earth First! lesbian whose favorite pastime is to eat box lunches in pajamas. We know that you live at -- and they had the mail merge insert the right address -- and we know that your phone number is:" and it's signed by The Committee for the Death of Earth First! And those letters certainly seem to come from the Sahara Club.

What do you know about the Sahara Club.

JUDI: The Sahara Club is an organized hate group. It's an anti-environmental hate group. It's based in southern California, and they publish a paper called The Sahara Club Newsletter that uses very boorish and incendiary language. They target individual Earth First!ers. They go around and they do surveillance on us; they collect our license plate numbers and publish them.

Do you think this is for real? That these are really rednecks doing this?

JUDI: Some of them, of course, are. But I don't think the group itself is. I think the Sahara Club shows signs of being an FBI construct.

 

What do you mean by that?

JUDI: For example, take Richard Held, who was in charge of my case. In the early 1970s, there was a group that appeared under his watch in the San Diego area, and it was called The Secret Army Organization. It was a right-wing paramilitary group, similar to the right-wing paramilitary group that is rising up in Fort Bragg these days. What this group did was: it spied on anti-war activists in the Student Movement. It burned down a Black community theater. It wrote death threats to various activists to try to intimidate them. And eventually, it tried to assassinate an activist graduate student named Peter Bohmer at San Diego State. They shot into his house, but they missed him and hit an associate of his named Paula Thorpe.

I've met Peter Bohmer, and he's given me the death threats that he got, and one of the things I found out was that the Secret Army Organization symbol was a rifle scope and cross-hairs -- that's the symbol on their death threats, and that's what was used on me.

Another thing is the language. The language of the SAO death threats is very similar to the language of the Sahara Club death threats -- and the methodology: they spy on them, they get their license plates, they publish them. They publish your home phone number. They encourage people to call you up and harass you. They encourage people to beat you up.

And then I discovered another thing: I have these old SAO memos, and they have these little quotes. They say something like: "Those who will sacrifice vigilance for liberty deserve neither." It's a quote from Benjamin Franklin. I find the same, exact quote in the Sahara Club papers! There's another one also. Two quotes that are the same...

But why do you think this is an FBI construct?

JUDI: First I wanted to point out the similarities in methodology and language between the SAO from the early 1970s and the Sahara Club today. What happened was: after they did this drive-by and attempted to shoot Peter Bohmer, the whole operation was exposed. The driver of the car was a man named Howard Godfrey, and it turned out he was an employee of the FBI working under Richard Held. That Godfrey was the number 2 man in the SAO, and that the SAO was armed, and basically, given immunity from prosecution by the FBI.

You're saying someone from the FBI was running this organization?

JUDI: When he was caught the FBI "fired" him. He's a "rogue element." Eventually, he went public with this information, and a long story was published in the Los Angeles Times, which is why I know this. But although he was "fired" by the FBI, he was actually given a bureaucratic transfer, and he became the "bomb expert" in charge of bomb investigations for the State of California, stationed in Sacramento. Up until 1990.

Was he fired in 1990?

JUDI: In 1990, he went crazy. His girlfriend broke up with him and he began planting pipe bombs around his girlfriend, and then rescuing her from them. And he was caught placing these pipe bombs, and then responding to them. He actually went to jail for a little while -- a very short while. And he was removed from his position on a "psychological disability."

Was he available to bomb you that day in May that you were bombed?

JUDI: He was in jail the time that I was bombed. He was out of jail at the time of the Cloverdale bomb. I don't think he's the bomber, but it's not off the scale. There are so many places you can go with leads, it can make you crazy.

But the point of it is: that the SAO (the Secret Army Organization) appeared to be an independent right-wing paramilitary group. But was revealed eventually to have been sponsored and promoted and funded by the FBI.

I'll give you another example: the Goons in the reign of terror at Pine Ridge during the American Indian Movement. GOONS stood for Guardians Of the Oglala Nation, and they were a right-wing thug group of native people, and they worked under Richard Wilson, this reactionary tribal chief. And it turned out they were also funded and armed and given immunity from prosecution by the FBI. They attacked 300 AIM associates, and they killed 69 of them before AIM picked up the gun to defend themselves. That's another example.

Well, I think the Sahara Club certainly shows many signs of being an FBI construct. The people in Arizona came to the same conclusion completely separately from me. And one of the reasons they decided this was because the Sahara Club began harassing them also, and they noticed the timing of it: that they had also never received death threats before, and all of a sudden, they began to, and the timing of the beginning of the Sahara Club's activities against Earth First! corresponded precisely with the time they later found out that the FBI began Operation Thermcon against them.

I don't know if the Sahara Club is an FBI construct. I don't know whether they are or not. I know the Sahara Club serves that role. They're definitely connected with the timber industry. They've come up here. They've conducted dirty tricks workshops in Humboldt county.

Candy Boak, who works with MAXXAM and with the Wise Use Movement up there, and Paula Languager, (who works with We Care and the Wise Use Movement up there) co-sponsored, along with the Sahara Club, a dirty tricks workshop in August of 1990, in which they taught people how to use COINTELPRO tactics to harass and discredit Earth First!. A day after this workshop, a man was actually arrested (because Karen Pickett chased him into a bar) planting a fake bomb in the Arcata Action Center. And he was bailed out of jail by Candy Boak and said he was affiliated with the Sahara Club.

Also the day after the dirty tricks workshop, Candy Boak and friends held a press conference in which they released these "road spikes" and "tree spikes" allegedly from Earth First! during Redwood Summer. And yet, we have photographs of them doing the same press conference in southern California with what appears to be the same road spikes and tree spikes accusing another environmental group down there. And there was no road spiking, no tree spiking during Redwood Summer.

So its these methods of both scaring us and discrediting us that are taught in these dirty tricks workshops. And they go around the country; they are very incendiary. This year they put out a manifesto of techniques that they want to use against us. They include not only surveilling us, getting our phone numbers, printing them; they also tell people to call up talk shows and pretend that you are one of those environmentalist and say the craziest, most rabid thing you can think of. They actually put this in writing: these instructions for people to do.

One of the results to being on the receiving end of dire threats to your life is the feeling, well, if I can die any minute I might as well take the next radical step to stop this corporate killer culture (this 'corporate death culture' as it is known) from going any further. What did you find within yourself?

JUDI: It really changed me. I've never been a Gandhian; I'm not pious enough to be a Gandhian. I believed that non-violence was the only appropriate tactic in this context, but I never really felt it was a moral issue. For instance, monkeywrenching -- industrial sabotage -- is a standard tactic in the labor movement, so to apply it to environmental struggles didn't seem illogical to me at all, because I had learned these techniques in labor organizing. But I began to realize (even just from working in the community) that it wasn't an appropriate tactic here -- including bulldozer dismantling -- because the way the timber industry is set up, the corporations don't own the bulldozers. Small logging company owners who are our neighbors, whose children go to school with our children, that's who own the bulldozers, and we're targeting the wrong people. So I quickly learned from experience that it wasn't an appropriate tactic here. Yet the idea was not untoward.

When the death threats became frequent, I never thought of responding to the death threats with violence. People kept telling me to get a gun: "Why don't you have a gun to protect yourself?"

And I said, "I don't feel that will protect."

I thought that lack of political isolation was more important than a gun to protect me. I thought that being very public, being very principled, refusing to stoop to these techniques, that was the only thing that I thought would be protective.

But again, these were strategy considerations. And I always did, and still do, support armed struggles of revolutionary people. I support the Zapatistas. I support the FMLN. But that doesn't mean that those tactics are appropriate here. But it does mean that a point must come where those tactics are appropriate. Like if they had done to my children what they did to me, maybe I would feel differently. I know the Mothers of the Disappeared in El Salvador feel pretty strongly. I'm not arrogant enough to impose my privileged perspective on them, and to judge anybody for picking up a gun.

But after I was bombed, the level of violence, the way that it felt, it made me very aware that the violence itself was wrong. That I don't think we will ever change things that way. That part of what is wrong with the society that is destroying the earth and destroying the people is the violence itself. That there is something to being subjected to such an unspeakably horrible thing, as the bombing was that has made me realize that nobody should do this to anybody. That in the act of doing it, you have to be so dehumanized to do this to somebody else -- the level of violence that has to be inside you to commit that -- I think that that is part of the problem itself. And I think its part of our relationship to the earth and our relationship to other humans.

I now think -- as I didn't think the last time you interviewed me -- that the violence itself is part of the problem. And I'm not saying, that in some cases, in revolutionary situations, part of the solution might not be picking up a gun to defend yourself -- I don't think that is appropriate here. I want to make that very clear. I do not think that is appropriate here. And I think we have really demonstrated that. I think that our reaction to the bombing -- it certainly would have been emotionally understandable if people had reacted to the bombing by saying: "Well then, the hell with this non-violence! Let's go out and monkeywrench everything. If they're going to bomb us, we're going to trash their machines."

That would have been an emotionally justifiable response, even though, I think, an incorrect one. But our response was so principled. I think that we should be so proud of ourselves for what we did. We stood up to lethal force -- not only without violence, but without hatred. We did not respond with hatred to the timber workers -- and even though I don't think the timber workers were responsible for the violence, I think that part of this was to drive a further wedge, to make environmentalists distrust timber workers and timber workers distrust environmentalists.

And we didn't respond that way. We responded with absolute principle: we didn't go away; we didn't fail to demonstrate; we stood up, and we stood up with non-violence; and we stood up without hatred.

JUDI: That was an incredible accomplishment, and maybe it's going to take us a lot of years to remember that we did this. Because I don't think that our community even remembers that we did this.

We may break into packs or wrestle like young wolves at times, but the moral fiber and the bravery within the environmental community makes me cry with joy as often, like watching an epic movie -- and then, there is the moral fiber of the FBI. What else have you learned about the FBI's bogus investigation?

JUDI: Simultaneous to snooping through the Letters files and compiling names, the FBI went around and interviewed local police. And they said things like: "Name the prominent environmentalists in your town."

The police -- and I don't think they were doing this to be hostile: an act of terror had been committed in their community, and they were the police and they were trying to help solve the crime. So they just named: Ellen Drell, Walter Camp. The Ukiah police named Norman de Vall, Alexander Cockburn and David Colfax! They just gave out names! And the FBI compiled these lists of names.

Then they went and interviewed the timber executives -- they didn't interview the loggers! They went through the phone book and called up each timber company, but only the big ones responded -- and Harwood, and some of the others who knew us. And they said: "Tell us anything you know about the environmentalists. Give us names of environmentalists." MAXXAM submitted 50 names of people.

They said: "These are Earth First! trespassers. Well, they were never arrested or prosecuted. But! They are Earth First! trespassers anyway." Fifty names of people. They gave them leaflets -- Hemp Liberation Day. Come to the Hemp Rally. Come to the Air Pollution Hearing. Things that were so innocent it's ridiculous. And all these materials were turned into the FBI and compiled.

So in this method they compiled 150 names of local activists -- interviewing the newspapers, the police, the timber executives, and the members of the Wise Use Movement (they interviewed Candy Boak and Paula Langager.) And in the course of these interviews, for example, Paula Langager says: "Well, Dave Cruzan from the Wise Use Advocate wrote the fake press releases."

The FBI never interviews Dave Cruzan. And they continue to treat the fake presses releases as if they were real, even after they get this confession! It's a very one-sided investigation to put it mildly.

Another example: the sheriffs, both of Mendocino and Humboldt, came up with what they called a list of 'Core Group Capable of Violence.' Well, here we are: we've never committed any violence before; we're in the act of standing up to lethal force with non-violence; and we've not committed any violence since. They've ignored all of the documented attacks on us by timber people. They're not defining any timber people capable of violence. But they come up with this list -- given with no evidence what-so-ever -- of "a core group capable of violence. "It includes Darryl. It includes Greg King. It includes Lisa Henry. People who are absolutely innocent.

Then the FBI says of this group in their memos -- and they won't reveal to me who all of them are: "We have discovered that there is a core group whose association with each other includes getting arrested together," -- as if they have never heard of non-violent civil disobedience -- "so in order to pursue this case further, we are going to have to compile and monitor the phone calls of this core group." There are fourteen people, it says in the memo, whose phone calls are going to be monitored.

Strangely, they only do our out-of-state calls. Now every incident in this bombing case takes place in California, but they never monitor our California calls -- at least it's not in the files. They get this list, and from April to May 1990, the two months around the bombing, these fourteen people, who we don't know who they are, they compile a list of all of their out-of-state phone calls. They had a computer sort these phone calls by area code, so they came up with a list of 634 people across the country who had received a phone call from somebody in this "core group capable of violence" who has never committed any violence.

They then send these numbers out to all the FBI offices around the country, and they ask them to send back information. And so for the next year and a half, information trickles back in from all over the country. And on these 634 people, whose sole crime is receiving a phone call from an Earth First!er, they come up with name, address, place of employment, criminal record if any, and political associates. It's like the 'red scare' all over. But it's the 'green scare' now.

Here's one case: agents ask the phone company, and the phone company says: "This phone number belongs to somebody called Louisa Hemacheck. But besides this phone number, she also has another phone that she calls the 'Green Line'. Based on that information only, the FBI then interviews the sheriff. They say: "What do you know about Louisa Hemacheck? "

"Oh, she's a hippie and an environmentalist." Environmental activity is treated as criminal on its face. In this method, they came up with the names of close to 800 Earth First!ers, environmentalists and our associates. . .

It sounds like Germany in the '30s!

JUDI: Yes. And it's no crimes committed. No leads to lead to the bomber.

Was anybody from L-P present at bomb school, Judi? The detonation actions took place at an L-P clearcut after all.

JUDI: We asked Frank Doyle that question in the depositions, and he said, Frank Wigginton of L-P security would have been there to secure the company's interests. And he said he remembers Frank Wigginton at bomb schools, but he doesn't remember what years -- which is how they get out of answering a question straight on.

I want to add one more outrageous thing that happened in the course of this investigation which I think shows there is some level of connection between the FBI and local police and timber. I said that all the death threats came during one time period before the bombing, except one.

When I tried to move back to the community, they tried real hard to keep me out. It was very scary. I was terrified. I went into hiding when I got out of the hospital. I stayed with some Quakers in the middle of nowhere, because I was too scared to come home. Meanwhile, the Building Department busted my ex-husband's, my landlord's house, and my house. The Child Protective Department was asking around about my children. People who let me stay at their house overnight were busted by CAMP the next day. The FBI came and talked with somebody's employer who let me stay at their house. There was a very concerted effort to make it hard for me to move back here.

I persisted, and the scariest part was just as I was getting ready to come back, a death threat was posted both on my landlord's mailbox and downtown in Willits, that gave the exact directions to my house -- which it called my "Hideout." The notice said: "Bari get out of Willits." and it offered a case of Coors "to the stud who burns (me) out", and a "six pack for every hippie shack you take out on (my) road."

That was very scary, and the whole neighborhood had a meeting. Even the timber people in this neighborhood came to the meeting. I came, and Bruce Anderson came with me. And my neighbors said: "You have a right to live anywhere you want to." The whole neighborhood stuck up for my right to live here, despite the threat to them. And Karen Smith, Walter Smith's wife, wrote a letter to the Willits News publicly offering me and my children to live with them, for protection -- after which, they were harassed. So the community didn't let them drive me out, and I have to express my appreciation to the community for that. But I was very terrified by this threat. I never knew where it came from.

Then I got my FBI files last year -- through the [discovery] process -- and in my FBI files, there is a notice. It is from one of the FBI case agents, and it's a list of things to do: "Intelligence has revealed that Judi Bari has a hideout northeast of Willits where she lives without electricity that she is trading labor for the use of."

It goes on to say that Stockton Buck, the FBI agent, is instructed, with Steve Satterwhite (now don't forget, Satterwhite is the Mendocino county deputy who didn't have the manpower to investigate the death threats) to find my "hideout" -- and that's their word. So, I'm supposedly not being charged with any crime at this point, and yet, Steve Satterwhite has time to find my hippie shack!

So, they conduct this investigation. (They actually do; I have evidence of it in my file.) They look through the land titles trying to find out who my landlord is, and they investigate the propane companies to see if they can find who delivers propane here to try to find out where my hideout is. Then, in the middle of August, they record in the FBI files, that the Willits News has received a phone call from somebody who gives exact directions to my house (and it has certain wording for the directions. )

One week after this is recorded in the FBI files, I get this death threat, and the death threat says: "The hippies up String Creek have built a hide out (same word as from the FBI files) for Earth First! terrorist Judi Bari." (The tip to the Willits News said: "They're building a national headquarters for Earth First!")

"We don't want national headquarters for Earth First! in Willits," says the death threat. Same, exact language. And then the directions it gave to my house and the death threat are identical to the directions recorded in the FBI file.

Are you saying the FBI was involved with this death threat? Sgt. Satterwhite, who by the way, in preparation for Redwood Summer, was giving self-defense with small arms workshops to gyppo logging groups just before and after the bombing.

JUDI: I'm saying they are both possibly involved. So what we did with this threat -- the Mendocino sheriff's weren't very helpful -- we turned it over to the Willits police, which were the only police force that ever helped me. But the Willits police had to turn it over to the county, because I live in an unincorporated area, and the county never did anything with the death threat. Including, they never turned it over to the FBI, or the FBI never admits to have received it.

So here's the FBI conducting this big bombing investigation, finding my "hideout", and they don't know I've received a death threat with the exact same wording as they've used the week before? I find that very hard to believe. I don't know what this means. I don't know if this means Satterwhite or Stockton Buck or either of them was involved in the last death threat. It's certainly hard to believe that they didn't know about it. The Willits Police says they told them about it.

Language that occurs in the FBI files occurs in the Lord's Avenger's letter, in tips to the Willits News, in death threats to you. You've spent the past four years uncovering these buried links. Finally, what do you think they mean?

JUDI: It raises very serious questions about FBI prior knowledge, about FBI involvement, about police involvement. All of these questions are raised. We don't have the answers yet. I hope we can get them.