How to Grab the Brain Child

He can be kept blindfolded, and participants can wear stocking masks & disguise their voices. Grabbing our angel would involve 2 or 3 mos. discreet work. I would imagine that he would have devices in his car to call for police assistance at the slightest danger. The thing to do is find out where he goes for weekends, or where he shacks up--if he shacks up.

ACCORDING to the Justice Department, those are the words of Roman Catholic Priest Philip Berrigan in a letter to Sister Elizabeth McAlister about a plan to kidnap Henry Kissinger, the President's national security adviser. The full letter and another the Government contends was written by Sister Elizabeth to Father Berrigan were released last week as part of new indictments issued against the pair by a federal grand jury in Harrisburg, Pa. The new indictments, replacing ones issued in January, dropped Berrigan's brother Daniel, who is also a priest, from a list of nondefendant co-conspirators but increased the number of persons charged with conspiracy in the case from the original six to eight.*

In the rewriting of the indictments after questioning more people, the grand jury added charges that the group also conspired to steal and destroy Selective Service records and that some of the members last year had "committed depredations" against draft board offices in Philadelphia and Delaware and had vandalized a draft office in Rochester, N.Y. The original charges of conspiring to kidnap Kissinger and to blow up heating tunnels for Government buildings in Washington were retained.

Citizen's Arrest. The release of the letters disclosed much of the Government's case. It contends that at least ten letters were exchanged between Philip Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth between May 24 and Aug. 22, 1970, while Berrigan was in the U.S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., serving a sentence for destroying draft records at Catonsville and Baltimore, Md. The two, as well as Eqbal Ahmad, are charged with sending these letters in and out of the prison. The actual smuggler of the correspondence, however, is not charged, presumably because he cooperated in giving copies of the letters to the FBI.

The letters, if they are authentic, indicate that Sister Elizabeth wrote to Berrigan "in utter confidence" on Aug. 20, 1970, that she had attended a meeting in Connecticut at which a plan "to kidnap --in our terminology make a citizen's arrest of--someone like Henry Kissinger" was discussed. He was picked "because of his influence as policymaker yet sans Cabinet status, he would not be as much protected as one of the bigger wigs," and because "he is a bachelor, which would mean if he were so guarded, he would be anxious to have unguarded moments where he could carry on his private affairs--literally & figuratively." The letter suggests that the plan was to hold Kissinger for about a week, perhaps kidnap some other "bigwigs of liberal ilk," stage a mock political trial, film it--and then release everyone and deliver the film to the television stations. "The impact of such a thing would be phenomenal," the letter says.

The kidnapers, according to the letter, would also demand the end of B-52 bombing in Indochina and the release of "political prisoners" held in U.S. jails, apparently a reference to youths convicted of draft evasion and crimes related to radical activities. The letter indicates that the writer had no illusions that the demands would be met. But if the plot were not attempted, it said, someone else might do it "badly," and it would "end in fiasco or violence & killing."

Passionate. According to the Government, a reply by Father Berrigan termed the project "brilliant but grandiose." Kidnaping any more than just Kissinger, said this letter, would require too much manpower. Continued the letter: "Why not grab the Brain Child, treat him decently but tell him nothing of his fate --or tell him his fate hinges on release of political] people or cessation of air strikes in Laos. Then have batteries of movement people--Brain Child blindfolded--engage him on policy. Get it filmed and recorded. One thing should be implanted in that pea brain--that respectable murderers like himself are no longer inviolable. And that if he doesn't work to humanize policy, the likes of him will be killed by less scrupulous people. Finally, that political prisoners are the best guarantee of his sweet skin's safety, and that he better get them out of jail."

The letter includes an ambiguous reference to the possibility that murder can flow from a political kidnaping and adds: "When I refer to murder, it is not to prohibit it absolutely ... it is merely to observe that one has set the precedent, and that later on, when govm't resistance to this sort of thing stiffens, men will be killed."

The tone of the letters is warm. At one point, the Berrigan letter addresses Sister Elizabeth as "love," and the Government is known to possess other letters of a more passionate and poetic character. How did the Government get these letters? They were carried in and out of the prison by Boyd Douglas, 30, a prisoner serving time for passing bad checks, pointing a gun at an FBI agent, and violating his parole on a previous fraud conviction. Douglas was trusted enough by prison officials to be allowed to leave his cell daily to attend history and political science classes at Bucknell University, also in Lewisburg. Douglas charmed at least two coeds, told one he was dying of cancer and wanted to marry her to gain "six to twelve months of happiness." He even had an off-campus apartment, where he kept modish clothes. Douglas also asked to meet members of the campus peace movement, and they seemed to accept him. He became friendly, too, with Berrigan in the prison.

Douglas carried letters out of the prison to Bucknell. Knowing that what he was doing was illegal, he protected himself by copying each letter he handled on a campus duplicating machine. The letters were in double envelopes. The outer envelope was addressed and mailed to acquaintances of Sister Elizabeth in New York, who then conveyed the inner envelope to the nun. Letters to Berrigan were handled similarly--mailed to friends Douglas had made on the Bucknell campus. He picked them up from his friends, duplicated them, and normally also had coeds copy them into his course notebooks, which would be less conspicuous if prison guards searched him. He usually retained the originals and kept his own mimeographed copies in a briefcase, which he left either on campus or in the apartment of coed friends.

No Violence. One theory of how Douglas became an informer was that guards became suspicious that he might be carrying letters when they found a letter in Father Berrigan's cell. The FBI confronted Douglas, and he turned over his copies. He then proceeded to deliver future letters to the FBI. It seems likely, however, that the defense will contend that Douglas was not discovered passing the letters, but that he was planted at Bucknell by the FBI as an informer on campus radicals. So far, defense attorneys will only say, as did Leonard Boudin last week, that release of the letters "violates standards of fair procedure and rules of the court."

The Government contends that the letters are authentic. If so, a kidnap plot certainly was discussed, although it is also clear that no violence to Kissinger was planned. The notion of kidnaping Kissinger and grilling him while cameras grind and tunnel explosions provide a sonic background seems a fanciful and irrational exercise for well-educated clerics. But to the Government, at least, the matter is too serious to be dismissed as the surrealistic musings of excited crusaders.

*The two new defendants are Mary Cain Scoblick, 32, a former nun and wife of Defendant Anthony Scoblick, 30, a former priest, and John Theodore Glick, 21, who is in prison for vandalizing draft offices. Other defendants are two priests, the Rev. Joseph R. Wenderoth, 35, and the Rev. Neil R. McLaughlin, 30, and Eqbal Ahmad, 40, a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs in Chicago.

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