CALIFORNIA'S UNDERGROUND

The two attempts on President Ford's life and the arrest of Patty Hearst with her revolutionary companions took place within a 100-mile radius of San Francisco Bay. Many of the trends that have shaken the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s--the hippie movement, the drug culture, widespread sexual laxness, campus revolts and ghetto riots--seem to have emerged first in California. Moreover, since the Free Speech Movement started at Berkeley in 1964, the Bay Area has been a festering center for radical political activity, though the number of people involved has greatly declined since the leftist movement's heyday during the Viet Nam War. Thus the events of September 1975 seemed to reinforce the area's reputation as a hothouse for kooks and revolutionaries.

Yet the FBI found no direct links between the attempts to kill Ford and the state's hard-core revolutionaries. Lynette Fromme was a follower of the psychopathic murderer Charles Manson; Sara Jane Moore tried to move from the left fringes and join the extreme radicals, but was never accepted. On the other hand, the underground radicals helped Patty Hearst and the other Symbionese Liberation Army fugitives elude the FBI for a year and a half.

Law-enforcement officials try to draw a careful distinction between the couple of hundred hardcore, bomb-hurling revolutionaries and the above-ground activists, who number in the thousands. The Bay Area has uncounted tiny study groups that regularly meet to debate the application of Communist theories to American society. There also are several radical communes, among them the Revolutionary Union and the October League, that seek to organize leftist groups within labor unions. Still other Bay Area activists work in behalf of prison reform, improved veterans' benefits, black rights and increased help for the poor; indeed, new groups and new causes spring up as fast as a poster can be pasted to a utility pole.

Within this array of leftist activity hide the underground revolutionaries. They strike and burrow underground again in such places as the working-class neighborhoods of Los Angeles and the Mission District in San Francisco or the squalid slums of East Oakland and Sacramento. In addition, many terrorists are believed to be hiding among the students and transient street people of Berkeley's South Campus section. Furtive meetings between the underground and aboveground activists undoubtedly take place in the area's many coffeehouses, bars and parking lots. Other good meeting places are the parks known to students as People's Park and Ho Chi Minh Park.

Through contacts like these, the revolutionaries win new recruits.

Among them were Patty's lover, Steve Soliah, and his sisters Kathleen and Josephine. All three had been active and apparently nonviolent leftists. In 1974 Kathleen addressed a rally of radicals in Berkeley that was attended by Sara Moore. But the Soliahs have turned out to be members of the violent underground, and now the FBI is hunting Kathleen, who was accompanied in flight by Josephine, for questioning about Patty. Asks a bewildered police official: "How do you know when someone like them has gone over the edge from being merely a radical dissident to being an urban guerrilla willing to commit illegal acts? When do they require watching?"

State and federal law-enforcement officials admit that they know little about California's revolutionary underground. Charles Bates, chief of the San Francisco FBI office, points out that the groups are small, tightly knit, deeply suspicious of strangers, and thus virtually impossible to infiltrate.

What is known is that the groups are growing increasingly violent. FBI officials suspect that radicals have committed some of the state's recent unsolved murders. Among these is the slaying of Wilbert ("Popeye") Jackson, a black activist who the FBI believes was killed because radicals suspected--incorrectly--that he was a squealer. Last year the radicals claimed responsibility for 19 bombings in California; so far this year they have set off 50.

Their bombs have caused millions of dollars of property damage in the Bay Area but only one death. Typically, the bombs are set to go off at night or after telephoned warnings. The targets are carefully chosen for maximum effect on businessmen and politicians. Says a federal official: "If the underground radicals read much at all, it is the business pages of newspapers. They take what they can out of them to justify their bombings in their communiques."

The radical groups are so small that it would be a grave mistake to take them too seriously. Some of them are hardly more than a dozen or two people with a catchy name and a talent for publicity. Their methods are crude. They are the sort of people that Karl Marx would have contemptuously dismissed as senseless anarchists. Many California radicals follow the teachings of Mao, Che Guevara, French Revolutionary Regis Debray and Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian terrorist tactician. Marighella advocates violence as a way to encourage government authorities to overreact. He theorizes that a government will inevitably impose harshly repressive measures that will "radicalize" nonviolent citizens and thus bring on the revolution.

Law-enforcement officials feel certain that the terrorists in California total no more than 200 people, loosely organized into fewer than a dozen groups that frequently dissolve and form again under new names, to the confusion of police investigators. Members include middle-class whites, Chicanos and, more recently, black ex-convicts recruited by white radicals who infiltrated seemingly legitimate prison groups. Several white members of the S.L.A. first met their future "spokesman," Donald DeFreeze, at meetings of the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville prison for mentally disturbed criminals. Warns a California legal official: "The radicals are still actively recruiting in the prisons, and we think there are potentially at least a dozen DeFreezes either in jail or on parole."

Often the groups are led by women, partly because of the radicals' active support of the feminist movement. Their heroines are Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weather Underground, and Joanne Chesimard, a highly visible member of the Black Liberation Army. Their martyrs include Diana Oughton, who accidentally blew herself up while making bombs for the Weather Underground, and Tamara Bunke, known as "Tania," the Argentine-born revolutionary who was killed while fighting with Che Guevara in Bolivia and from whom Patty Hearst took her own revolutionary name. Wrote Dohrn in Prairie Fire, the Weather Underground's heavily illustrated manifesto: "Women fighters are frightening apparitions to the enemy and an example for us."

The transformation of middle-class youngsters into terrorists baffles and unsettles many parents, who almost uniformly describe their children as having been wellrounded, industrious and studious until they went off to college and became captured by drugs and radicalism. Typically, Steve Soliah and his sisters were regarded by their father Martin, a high school English teacher in Palmdale, Calif., as "good right-wing Republicans who got up every morning and pledged allegiance to the flag." Steve was a crew-cut football hero in high school. Kathleen was a church youth leader and an energetic pep squad member. And Josephine once wanted to be a nurse. Martin Soliah believes that his mistake was sending them to college in California, where they were initiated into radical politics. Now his hopes are pinned on his one remaining son. Says Soliah: "We tried three kids in California schools, and they all went bad. So we sent this one to Iowa."

Federal and state law officials have compiled sketchy dossiers on several of the terrorist groups. Among them:

NEW WORLD LIBERATION FRONT. Composed of about 25 middle-class whites and possibly some black ex-convicts, the group has claimed responsibility for 23 terrorist bombings in the Bay Area and Sacramento since Sept. 3, 1974. Targets have included buildings occupied by General Motors, Pacific Gas & Electric and subsidiaries of ITT Corp. The front is believed to have close ties with the remnants of the S.L.A. After Patty repudiated the "army" in her affidavit last week, the front castigated her in a statement as having returned to the "ruling-class vipers."

THE RED GUERRILLA FAMILY.

Probably an offshoot of the New World Liberation Front, with a membership of unknown size, the "army" has claimed "credit" for three bombings since March of this year, including that of a building in Berkeley that houses FBI offices.

WEATHER UNDERGROUND.

Originally known as Weatherman, the all-white group changed its name partly because it is now made up almost entirely of women.

Highly mobile, the W.U. has hideouts across the nation. but about 50 members--one-fourth of the total--are believed to be in California, most in the San Francisco area. This year, police believe, the W.U. has been responsible for one bombing in California--of the Federal Building in Oakland.

THE CHICANO LIBERATION FRONT. With at least 15 hardcore members, the group apparently is centered in the barrios of Los Angeles. Last year a message purportedly from the front claimed responsibility for the slaying of Police Chief William Cann of Union City, Cal., but a subsequent communique denied it. This year the group said that it was behind the bombing of four buildings on the night of March 10 in San Jose and the San Francisco area.

TRIBAL THUMB. With 25 members, predominantly men, the group is centered in Palo Alto. Its leader is Earl Satcher, a reputed black karate expert and ex-con with an 18-year criminal record. When some members were arrested for parole violations recently, they were found to have quantities of revolutionary tracts. But one member said that the pamphlets were for show; he asserted that the organization sought money from radicals but actually is chiefly interested in nonrevolutionary crime.

BLACK GUERRILLA FAMILY. An offshoot of the terrorist Black Liberation Army, the family has several hundred members inside California prisons. After being released, some former family members have gravitated to other underground radical groups but have found the transition difficult. Explains a state law official: "They often bristle at the notion that the leadership is likely to be female. Some of them just can't hack it and move out of the radical scene."

The underground life is austere and squalid. Using phony names, many hard-core radicals collect welfare payments and food stamps. Their time is largely spent shoplifting food and other necessities, stealing purses, cashing forged checks, searching for new hideouts and plotting. "It's a tough, dirty life," says Larry D. Grathwohl, 27, a San Francisco area resident who is the only FBI informant known to have successfully penetrated the Weather Underground. Although his experiences took place from November 1969 until April 1970, law officials believe that they still accurately reflect underground life in California and elsewhere. Last week TIME Correspondent John Austin interviewed Grathwohl. His report:

hile living in Cincinnati, Grathwohl was recruited after a chance meeting with two Weatherpeople. He was just the type of person that the organization, which was overloaded with upper middle class members, wanted to recruit. His background was working class, and the recruiters wrongly believed that he had become a munitions expert during four years in the Army.

During the next six months, he met many of the radical organization's top members. He recalls one memorable strategy session in Flint, Mich., when Bernardine Dohrn exulted over the grisly details of the murders committed by the Manson family. At one point, she exclaimed: "Not only did they kill those pigs, they shoved a fork in [Sharon] Tate's stomach and then sat down and ate dinner there." Dohrn's details were wrong--it was Leno LaBianca who was stabbed with a fork--but her enthusiasm was catching. Says Grathwohl: "For the next several days, we all went around giving a sign of three fingers extended. It was to symbolize the fork."

After the Weatherpeople went underground in February to escape police surveillance, they adopted a pyramidal organization. At the top was the Weather Bureau, a leadership council that included Dohrn, Jeff Jones and Bill Ayers, the group's theoretician and son of the chairman of Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Co. Through members acting as couriers, the leaders kept in touch with a nationwide network of four-or five-member cells which were constantly on the run. Known as "foco," the Spanish word for "focus" or "center," they each operated independently, recruiting new members and carrying out bombings and other terrorist acts that had been cleared in advance by the Weather Bureau. Says Grathwohl: "We were all paranoid as hell. We never parked cars closer than two blocks from where we were staying. We never left or came back in groups. If we had the slightest idea that we were being followed, we spent hours losing the tail by riding buses endlessly or dodging through big stores." For defense in case the police raided the cell, Grathwohl's foco was armed with two .38 revolvers, a .45 automatic pistol and a short-barreled shotgun.

Life underground for the 200 members was a grubby odyssey of communal apartments, petty theft and clandestine meetings. Supported by as many as 4,000 sympathizers, the hard-core members lived in "safe houses" that were typically located in rundown working-class neighborhoods or near campuses. In addition, several havens were provided in middle-class neighborhoods by wealthy sympathizers.

An average day began at about 10 a.m. Says Grathwohl: "We'd get up and start with physical exercise--push-ups, situps, that sort of thing. If there was anything to eat--and often we'd go for days with very little--we'd have a quick meal. The day's activities would vary. The women frequently were sent out to steal. If we were near a university, they would go into women's dorms and steal purses. If they managed to get an ID and a checkbook, they'd go out as fast as possible to kite the checks." Another technique was to comb birth records in city halls to find a child who had been born at about the same time as a cell member but who had died in infancy. The name and birth date would then be used in applying for a driver's license or for identification.

Planning a bombing required a "political struggle" session, usually at night, in which members debated tactics. Often the sessions evolved into heated and bitter "criticism-self-criticism" marathons, a Maoist technique to solidify political beliefs and reaffirm revolutionary commitments. Grathwohl was once badgered by other cell members for 16 straight hours for not showing enough interest in becoming a leader of the cell. Another time, cell members pressured a young mother to give away her four-year-old daughter because they thought that she interfered with her work. Was the woman into maternity or was she into revolution? Recalls Grathwohl: "She was weeping, the child was crying. But the next day she gave her up."

After the Weather Bureau approved a proposed bombing, logistics were carefully plotted. Undercover agents studied the target. Other members bought dynamite at rural stores or stole explosives from construction sites. Couriers contacted sympathizers to ready safe houses in case flight became necessary. Grathwohl helped plan the bombing of the Detroit Police Officers Association headquarters in February 1970; at the last minute Ayers called off the attack.

For relaxation the cell members drank cheap wine, occasionally smoked marijuana and tumbled into bed with one another. Says Grathwohl: "There was supposed to be a political basis for having sex, but there didn't have to be much of one. After spending all day together in the political struggle, why not continue the political struggle in bed?" Indeed, so indiscriminate were their couplings, that members kept passing around a strain of gonorrhea that proved to be difficult to treat; they regarded it as a badge of honor.

Grathwohl's travels took him to Madison, Wis., Buffalo and eventually to New York City, where he was directed to meet with Linda Evans, a member of the Weather Bureau, who was accused of conspiring to bomb police and military installations in four cities in 1970. Informed of his plans, the FBI decided to arrest her. To protect Grathwohl's cover, the agents also arrested him. But the Weatherpeople were still suspicious. He recalls: "They figured that Evans was informed on and that I was the only one who could have done it. I was out."

Since then, except for a few threats made by telephone and in underground newspapers, the Weatherpeople have left him alone. Instead of revenge, they have paid more attention to tightening and purging their organization. Says Grathwohl: "I think they learned something from their experience with me."

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