CFIA Bombed

At 12:38 a.m. on the morning of October 14, 1970, Harvard police received an anonymous phone tip:

"This is not a joke. Remember the Brooklyn courthouse and California. Get the janitor out of the building. This is not a joke."

Twenty-four minutes later, as two Harvard policemen and a Cambridge Fire Marshal were entering the building, a bomb exploded on the third floor of the Center for International Affairs, tearing apart three offices and heavily damaging the Center's library.

The CFIA had long been the object of attacks by Harvard radicals who were critical of its role in American foreign policy. Although the Center has always been rather tame by Washington standards, it includes on its letter masthead such policy stalwarts as Robert R. Bowie, once a prominent figure in John Foster Dulles' State Department, and Henry A. Kissinger, now President Nixon's special assistant for natural security affairs.

During the year before, no less than four major protests had made a target of the CFIA. In September 1969, a group of about 20 Weathermen invaded the Center, painting slogans on its walls and roughing up several of its members. Two weeks later, the November Action Coalition led a group of about 250 students on a noisy "tour" of the building. The following April, NAC sponsored a demonstration which entered the Center and broke up a meeting of its Visiting Committee. And a month afterward, another group organized by NAC held a "mill-in" on the CFIA's second floor.

This activity had prompted the CFIA to creat safeguards against further physical attack. Valuable files were removed by nervous professors, and Harvard policemen stepped up their patrols in the area.

The bombers, however, appeared unconnected with any student campaign against the CFIA. In a letter to Boston newspapers shortly after the bombing, a group calling itself "the Proud Eagle Tribe, a group of revolutionary women" claimed responsibility for the act, proclaiming, "The Center figures out ways for Pig Nixon to try to destroy people's wars in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. . . . This, our tribe's first action, is part of a national fall offensive by tribes of kids all over to attack the enemy everywhere he shows his ugly face."

The bombing provoked a torrent of critical reactions on campus-much of it from student radicals. NAC condemned the bombing on tactical grounds, as did SDS and PL, who chanted "Mass Actions, Not Mad Bombings." Most students and Faculty were unanimous in their denunciation of the bombing, and a Young Americans for Freedom rally in protest against the bombing drew more than 200 people.

The only group which did not react with zeal to the bombing, it turned out, was the police. The Cambridge police issued confused and contradictory statements in the days immediately following the bombing. Detective Sgt. James A. Roscoe claimed hours after the blast that police had identified two women as suspects. That figure was subsequently reduced to one, whom police then claimed to have under surveillance. Roscoe then stated that "this seemed to be a very sophisticated bomb [which] women wouldn't be able to build. . . . It could be a national organization." The investigation later fizzled out.

And the outfit equipped to deal with "national organizations"-the FBI-also played a confused role in the case. After signing an anti-crime bill allowing federal agents to enter campuses without permission from University officials, President Nixon ordered the FBI to investigate the bombing. But since he had signed the bill after the blast, the FBI's function was never precisely defined. Bureau spokesmen would alternatively state that the FBI was, and was not, involved in the case. Their activity, too, was a dud.

The remainder of the year saw the death of the radical student movement against the CFIA. SDS challenged Center officials to a debate; after weeks of dickering over the procedures, the two groups participated in a widely attended but otherwise uneventful exchange in mid-January. Following the failure of their campaign against the CFIA, SDS then decided to personalize the issue and demand the firing of Samuel P. Huntington, Thompson Professor of Government, who has consulted with a number of government agencies on the Vietnam war. But after a few angry responses from perturbed Faculty members, that campaign too died a hard death.