Tommy the Traveler

In the annals of bizarre homefront stories from the Vietnam War, the tale of Tommy the Traveler stands out. I came across him purely by serendipity. From the FBI down to the local cops, the authorities – trying to keep track of young New Left antiwar activists – most likely experienced no shortage of willing undercover informants, paid or otherwise. Tommy, however, was in a class by himself; beginning in 1967 on his own initiative, he undertook surveillance on a number of college campuses.*

A little background. Tommy, born in 1944, was half American and half Thai with an unusual family history. Through his father he was related to the royal house of Thailand, while his paternal grandmother was a Russian from the tsarist period. Apparently Tommy’s father had worked with the CIA and Army intelligence in Thailand, presumably during early Cold War days. As a boy, he had a typical American childhood, although his fascination with guns and playing cowboys and Indians was somewhat extreme. After high school, he went out west and for a time rode rodeo. Tommy had a very patriotic upbringing.

I was talking with one of my former students from Union College about Indiana University (IU) in the Vietnam War era. I was telling him about the undercover informant in IU’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter (see Blog post for 3/30/11), and he in turn said that a similar character passed through Union College while he was an undergrad there. News to me. It was a guy nicknamed Tommy the Traveler.

Tommy had been a traveling salesman, and his beat was upstate New York which took him through a number of college towns where he styled himself a free-lance agent provocateur. He reportedly visited State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, University of Rochester, Hobart, Cornell, Union, and SUNY-Albany, among other schools. He’d appear on campus and connect with the activists. SDS’s lack of national hierarchy, or often even local structure, made it easy for Tommy to get close to them.

A handsome young man with neat, close cropped hair, three-piece tweed suits, and a snazzy new Ford Mustang, SDS activists on several campuses suspected him as an undercover cop. However, Tommy skillfully dropped names from one relatively isolated campus to another and managed to ‘pass’ undetected. His modus operandi was to persuade activists to carry out violent actions on their campuses. Though he had little success, turmoil followed in his wake. By early ’69, Tommy had parlayed his networking into a major speaking role at a regional SDS meeting held at SUNY-Albany.

'Tommy the Traveler'

After he’d developed an extensive network of contacts, Tommy apparently sold his services to the Buffalo FBI field office, a hundred-strong outfit, because of long-time concern over Old Left activity in the industrial heartland. But because he was extreme in his proposed provocations and considered a little nutty (he had a lot of military gear including an M-1 rifle, grenades, and a pistol), the FBI cut him loose, recommending him to the Ontario County Sheriff for undercover drug work on the campuses. When later interviewed by CBS’s Walter Cronkite, the sheriff defended Tommy showing students how to build bombs as “perfectly proper behavior for a police agent attempting to infiltrate student radicals.”

In his narc role, Tommy finally succeeded in realizing his violent anti-antiwar agenda. At Hobart College in Geneva NY, he persuaded a couple of impressionable freshmen to toss a Molotov cocktail into the campus offices of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in the basement of a dorm with students sleeping above. The culprits received short jail sentences, while in the end Tommy the instigator got off nearly scot free. During that campus visit he’d also set up and fingered several other students for a NY State Police drug bust which had turned into a riot. The bust briefly brought Tommy local celebrity, and he even considered running for the office of county sheriff. He went on to study criminology, worked as a police officer in Pennsylvania, and later in life became a horse and cattle breeder. More recently, he was spotted as a Civil War re-enactor in Oklahoma. Tommy still gets around.

*Esquire, July 1971

Surveillance at Indiana University

When secret surveillance files turned up at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) a few years ago, I thought, hey, Indiana University (IU) probably did the same thing. The two universities had much in common, big public institutions in conservative states with legislators fretting about ‘unpatriotic’ student protest against the Vietnam War. For me, the main difference was that Brother Jeff Sharlet was in the thick of antiwar protest at IU in Bloomington from 1964-67.

What could I learn from the Texas story? The Texas trove came to light when the UT campus police chief of the Vietnam era died not long ago. Upon retirement many years earlier, he had simply taken the files home and kept them from public view. They revealed close collaboration and fairly ambitious surveillance ops between the university administration, campus security, and the City of Austin police in keeping clandestine tabs on student activists as well as local hippies.

I assumed the IU campus cops had been similarly hard at work keeping an unobserved eye on their student protestors, especially those like Jeff and his housemate, Bob Johnson*, organizing demonstrations against pro-war campus speakers such as former Vice President Richard Nixon, General Maxwell Taylor, and General Lewis Hershey, the director of Selective Service. The university was headed by Elvis Stahr, President Kennedy’s former Secretary of the Army, who had become increasingly critical of the campus New Left. I expected IU’s surveillance files, once we got our hands on them, would provide the university’s bird’s-eye view of the activist minority at the school.

Bob Johnson under arrest, IU campus demo

I turned first to the Indiana University Archives, but after an extensive search nothing showed up. They had files from the offices of the president and the deans, but other than an odd document or two, nothing from the campus police on the most turbulent period in the institution’s history turned up. Next move was to have Karen contact the current campus police chief as to whereabouts of the files. His answer: there were no files on activists from that period. That might well have been the reply at Texas, I thought, if the old retired chief had not died. I suspected cover-up. Karen and I set out to find the top campus cops of the era, relying for names on the captions below grainy fotos of demonstrations from the IU student paper as well as the fading memories of Jeff’s old friends. Came up with the relevant names, but most were deceased while a few couldn’t be found 40 years later. Turned out they’d been mostly retired senior officers of the Indiana State Police, middle-aged men when hired by IU.

Capt. Dillon, IU security, and Jeff Sharlet

Despair was setting in when a couple of former SDS activists came up with another name, Larry B, a young man they referred to as IU’s one-man 'Red Squad' in the late ‘60s. That sounded promising. He’d probably created the files and surely would know where they were. But first we had to find Larry. We found his candidate profile on the Internet from 1990 when as a deputy sheriff he had run unsuccessfully for sheriff in Monroe County, home of IU. By then, Larry had an extensive law enforcement career behind him as a State Police Academy graduate, head of campus security at two colleges, and a former detective-captain of the IU police. Fortunately for us, he ran again for sheriff in ’06, again with no luck, but this time we located him. Larry B, now deceased, lived in Bloomington, his wife was principal of a local school, and we had a phone number.

Karen rang him in early ’07. He was quite forthcoming. Yes, he’d been the IU 'Red Squad' after finishing his BA degree at the university in ’67. In that capacity, he’d briefed the President Stahr weekly on student activism and served as the university’s liaison with the FBI in nearby Indianapolis (Indy). The catch: the briefings were verbal, hence no paper trail, no surveillance files. Larry didn’t work alone by choice; the campus police wanted to cast a wider net, but didn’t have sufficient personnel or budget to keep track of all the student activist groups. For a time, IU enlisted the State Police in the effort, but the complex task of surveilling a campus of about 30,000 students proved too much for them.

However, Larry was undaunted by his task. He sat in at open meetings of the student left, was easily spotted. He looked younger than he was, could pass for a student, but was familiar to the activists as the personification of the campus 'Red Squad'. He told us he shared an undercover informant, a recent law school grad working for the Dean of Students, who’d infiltrated Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the university.

During Jeff’s term as rotating president of SDS, he and Jim Wallihan were virtually certain the guy in question was an administration plant and relegated him to stapling newsletters to keep him out of the inner information loop. As Jim said, no doubt the informant rushed copies of the SDS newsletters hot off the press over to the dean’s office. No great coup since it was not ‘classified’ information, but when Karen asked the informer’s name, Larry would only tell us the man had died young. Jim didn’t remember his name, so his reports may well never be known.

However, local, state, and federal law enforcement authorities were not passive at IU. In 1965 a new grad student who’d been involved in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of ‘64 learned his West Coast police file had already been sent to the Bloomington police. In summer of 1966, IU activists who drove to Indianapolis to protest President Johnson’s speech were intercepted by the Indy police and Secret Service and arrested. Karen was one of the group. The local cops had provided their license plate numbers. That fall, officers of the IU Dubois Club, an ‘Old Left’ group, defied a university ban by showing up at the Student Activities Fair, were arrested, and brought before the county court. A year later when a Dow Chemical interviewer was blocked by a sit-in at the IU Business School, Bloomington cops, county sheriffs, and the State Police responded in full riot gear. There was blood.

Dwight Worker being dragged, IU, Dow demo '67

Last but hardly least, the Indianapolis FBI was active on campus, even going as far as writing warning letters to parents of student activists. One of Jeff’s SDS co-leaders, whose house was used for meetings was regularly visited by an FBI agent. She never let him in, figuring it was an intimidation tactic. Decades later, when another young IU woman who’d been a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance filed a FOIA request for her FBI file, she received a packet the size of a small city phone book. Although names on the FBI field office’s documents were blacked out, it was evident from context that agents had the cooperation of 10 sources at the university. Although once considered a serious threat to US national security, the woman went on to a stellar career as New York State Assistant Attorney General.

Finally, the FBI employed a favorite disinformation mechanism at IU – they covertly distributed an underground paper to compete with the campus alternative press, The Spectator. The FBI called theirs Armageddon News, but it fooled no one, was even criticized as clumsy by J. Edgar Hoover himself, and ceased publication after a few issues.

*We’ve searched for Bob Johnson for several years without luck and hence listed him on the Web site for Jeff’s missing friends at http://jeffsharlet-and-vietnamgi.com.yolasite.com/

'60's Surveillance Culture

Searching for brother Jeff Sharlet hasn’t always turned up friendly sources. Occasionally, I’ve stumbled across hidden adversaries of the Vietnam antiwar movement, in effect, spies working for the FBI, for university authorities, state police, and occasionally even for the odd sheriff here or there. That the civilian arm of the antiwar movement, not to mention the manifestations of GI protest, troubled the government should surprise no one. Not just the federal government writ large, but its parts such as the Department of the Army; municipal governments which spawned their own undercover outfits; and a number of public universities, especially in conservative states where legislators took a dim view of the New Left, were also in the surveillance game.

The FBI operated through its field offices in every major and large provincial city, the Army through its counter intelligence units. Certain city police departments, such as Chicago’s, created a ‘Red Squad’. Surveillance methods varied from university to university – at the University of Texas, campus security collaborated with the City of Austin police, whereas Indiana University made do with a one-man Red Squad which liaised with the FBI in the state capital.

Methods varied. The FBI was fond of surreptitiously sowing disinformation so as to create mutual distrust within and between student groups. Army intelligence was not terribly creative, just basically hunting down soldier-editors of underground papers on bases, and harassing GI coffee houses located off-base in nearby towns. City cops detailed for Red Squad work usually busied themselves with maintaining clipping files on ‘known agitators’ in their communities, while university police favored planting secret informants at student left meetings, not awfully difficult to pull off since most campus meetings were open by design.

The breakthrough in public awareness of the ‘60s surveillance culture came in 1971 when anonymous activists styling themselves the ‘Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI’ broke into a small town FBI office in eastern Pennsylvania and carried away over 1,000 documents revealing past and current FBI activities to suppress dissent, including the New Left and antiwar movement. Soon after, the activists who made the break-in began anonymously mailing packages of FBI documents to major media outlets which in turn made them public. Among the documents for example were several describing an operation against Swarthmore College activists for which the FBI recruited the services of a local police chief, the mailman, and a college switchboard operator.

Discovered in the trove of stolen papers was the acronym for the FBI’s secret umbrella program for countering dissent in America – COINTELPRO or ‘Counter Intelligence Program’. Later in the ‘70s, it also came to light that the CIA was secretly and illegally conducting anti-dissident operations against American citizens within the United States under a far-reaching program called CHAOS. At the local level, the campus newspaper at Chicago’s Roosevelt University exposed many of the city’s Red Squad’s capers.

Based on the FBI's COINTELPRO documents from the '71 break-in

In recent years, a liberal periodical, the ‘Texas Observer’, got hold of and published the long secret surveillance files of the Austin police and the campus cops at University of Texas. Finally, a few years ago, a former Vietnam-era Army lieutenant published a memoir, ‘Vietnam Awakening’, about his time as an intelligence officer at Fort Hood in Texas. One of his assignments, which he quietly botched, was to set up and compromise the antiwar GI coffee house in nearby Killeen, the ‘Oleo Strut’, so it could be declared off-limits to military personnel, no doubt a template for similar military intelligence ops at other training bases throughout the country.