The Gainesville Eight

"Fire teams" using crossbows, wrist-rocket sling shots, automatic weapons and homemade grenades would roam the streets of Miami attacking police, knocking out electric transformers, and firebombing stores. According to FBI Informer William Lemmer, those bizarre, bloody plans to disrupt the Republican National Convention last year were hatched by a group of Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. Lemmer says he attended a secret meeting in May 1972 in a Gainesville, Fla., attic, where plans for the disruption were discussed and the plotters demonstrated the use of crossbows, carbines and explosives.

Lemmer's story was a major factor in the arrest of six members of the V.V.A.W. in July 1972 on charges of conspiring and crossing state lines to incite a riot (subsequently, another vet and a civilian ally were also charged). Denying the charges, the defendants insisted that the arrests were purely political, designed to embarrass the leadership of the veterans and prevent their legal anti-Nixon demonstrations at the convention. Now the case of the "Gainesville Eight" has come to court as the latest --and possibly last--of the celebrated conspiracy trials of recent years. Those often traumatic trials, like the Gainesville case, were the result of a controversial Justice Department practice of prosecuting antiwar, anti-Administration activists for allegedly illegal plots. The prosecutions have involved at least 100 investigations in 36 states that have returned more than 400 indictments, but led to only one-tenth as many convictions, many on lesser charges.

There was a sense of dej`a vu in Gainesville last week as Lemmer, the Government's star witness, took the stand. In a reminder of the Angela Davis trial, tight security was in effect at the Gainesville courtroom as more than 100 green-fatigue-clad members of the V.V.A.W., who had set up camp outside town, marched with other supporters through Gainesville chanting "Jail Nixon, Free the Eight!" Past Conspiracy Celebrities Tom Hayden (the Chicago Seven) and Anthony Russo (the Pentagon papers) flew in to condemn the trial, and Lemmer's part in the proceedings recalled the key role of the Berrigan brothers' informer, Boyd Douglas.

Fantastic Plot. In two days of testimony, Lemmer, a former paratrooper in Viet Nam, described a fantastic plot that he says he watched develop while serving as Arkansas-Oklahoma coordinator for the antiwar vets. He outlined the scheme that he says Veteran Leader Scott Camil called "Phoenix II" (named after a CIA-sponsored project to eliminate Viet Cong cadres in Viet Nam). Lemmer told the jury that early in 1972, Camil said he was conducting training operations for political assassination squads on an isolated Florida farm with facilities for rifle, pistol and mortar practice. Lemmer, who spent approximately two years as an FBI informer, testified that the plotting veterans had traded "dope for weapons." He related that once Defendant John W. Kniffen had demonstrated how to use a crossbow by firing a steel shaft through a door. He also claimed that Camil had asked him to "fill a contract," presumably for a gangland-style murder.

Defense attorneys began cross-examination of Lemmer at week's end hoping to undermine his credibility by trying to prove that he has a history of mental disorders, a charge Lemmer vehemently denies. The defense would also like to show that Lemmer acted as an agent provocateur as well as an informer, planting the very type of plans he says the veterans developed. Finally, they may point out to the jury that Lemmer himself calls the disruption scheme only a "contingency plan."

In a setback, the defense was frustrated in its efforts to have a mistrial declared. Two FBI agents with an attache case full of electronic gear had been discovered poised over telephone circuits next door to the defense attorneys' conference room. The defense claimed the agents were bugging their lines. Judge Winston Arnow, a tough, conservative Lyndon Johnson appointee, who has shown little patience with either defense or prosecution tactics, ruled last week there had been no bugging. When the Gainesville case goes to the jury it will face a decision not unfamiliar in conspiracy trials: Was the strange plot planned by the defendants or merely visualized in the mind of the informer?

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