This is the 10-year anniversary of the death of Larry Grathwohl, who, as his obituary stated, “risked his life to defend his nation, first in Viet Nam as a member of the 101st Airborne Division where he was awarded the Bronze Star, and later with the FBI to combat terrorism in the form of the Weather Underground.”

I had met Larry in 2010 at a conference sponsored by America’s Survival. I got to know him better in April 2013, while we were speaking to tea party groups in Florida with a friend who had republished Larry’s 1976 memoir Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen — more accurately, the only “FBI Informer with the Weathermen.” Few today, given our history books and lessons, can appreciate the danger and importance of Larry’s mission, as well as the work the FBI did back then.

Obama’s Corrupted FBI and Howard Zinn

In 2013, I discussed my book Bill Ayers: Teaching Revolution, about Weatherman co-founder Bill Ayers’ post-underground career as a professor of education, debunking his toxic pedagogical nonsense. (Even on Fox News, Ayers was presented as a “respected educator.”) But on July 18, 2013, Larry, sadly, passed away.

In spring 2013, President Barack Obama, who had done more than “pal around” with Ayers, had begun his second term. As David Garrow’s 2,661-page book — published in 2017 — reveals, Ayers was not just “some English professor down the street,” as Obama claimed. Larry had tried to warn Americans during the 2008 election season but was not given much of a media platform. Obama warred on patriotic Americans through federal agencies such as the IRS and the FBI, including my Dissident Prof nonprofit application, which was stonewalled for nearly two years.

As we know now, Jack Smith of Obama’s Justice Department pressured the IRS to hold up applications from conservative groups, especially those with the words “tea party,” to silence them during the 2012 election. Smith was recently appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead the DOJ’s investigation of Donald Trump. Not satisfied with two terms, Obama also put in place the machinery and personnel to weaponize the FBI to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections, to implement censorship, and to bring down Trump through Operation Crossfire.

Though evidence points to Burisma’s payment of bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden, the agency has leaked false information implicating Rudy Giuliani. The FBI had authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2019, yet in 2020 FBI agents added their signatures to a letter calling it disinformation.

As a result, some conservative commentators have called for abolishing the FBI. One called it “Biden’s Federal Bureau of Intimidation.” Another, calling former director J. Edgar Hoover “a political extortionist,” said that the FBI’s past was “prologue” to what we have today.

To me, they were beginning to sound like the abolish-the-police crowd and Howard Zinn. And then I came across one who actually invoked Zinn, linking to Zinn’s speech “Federal Bureau of Intimidation,” which claimed that among those the FBI unfairly targeted were the Black Panthers and other “civil rights” activists. It also linked an article about Democrat Rep. Steve Cohen’s bill to remove J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI building because Hoover’s FBI spied on and harassed “Americans exercising their Constitutional rights to dissent and seek justice” — such as the terroristic Black Panthers.

Leftists rail against the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) strategies designed to combat the Communist party when they were used against Weatherman and the Black Panthers, but not when they were used on the Ku Klux Klan. Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, once second in command at the FBI, notes in Hoover’s FBI that in 1964 Hoover sent agents to Mississippi to build up search efforts for three missing civil rights activists and “to intimidate the Klan further.”

Even Yale historian Beverly Gage, who admittedly does not like Hoover, admits in her biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century that with “the FBI’s ongoing campaign of exposure, surveillance, and disruptive measures,” the KKK began to fall apart between 1965 and 1968.

Weatherman deserved the same measures. As DeLoach recounts, even early on in 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called for “a revolution.” The conference in 1968 in East Lansing, Michigan, featured a workshop on “‘sabotage and explosives,’ during which participants discussed such activities as firing Molotov cocktails from shotguns, jamming police radio equipment, and dropping thermite bombs down manholes to destroy communications systems.” In 1969, SDS broke into two factions, with the one advocating violence — Weatherman — surviving alone.

This was the situation Larry Grathwohl encountered in 1969. James Simpson praised Larry for his “fearlessness and patriotic dedication” in agreeing to do “undercover work, which started with the Cincinnati police — on a strictly voluntary basis while he held down a full-time job [on a loading dock] and tried to raise a family — and ultimately led to his work for the FBI.”

Larry Grathwohl Encounters the Weatherman

Larry’s origins were humble. He was born on Oct. 13, 1947, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Larry’s father left 2-year-old Larry, his newborn brother, and their mother for his other “wife.” Two years later, his mother married a man who only allowed Larry and his brother to live with them after his mother argued that Larry’s asthma required “extra attention.”

Held back for two years in fourth grade, Larry by grade five was “a 12-year-old chain-smoking member” of the “Stompers” gang; they displayed their toughness by shoplifting and wearing “black leather jackets, pegged pants, and ducktails.” After Larry’s high school girlfriend, Donna, told him about a 19-year-old in the neighborhood who had been shot and killed by police after breaking into a supermarket, Larry decided to drop his gang membership, drop out of school, and join the Army. Six days after turning 17, Larry enlisted and got his requested assignment to the 101st Airborne. He had been inspired by an uncle, a World War II Screaming Eagles paratrooper.

Larry doesn’t say much about his time in Vietnam, only that he was soon disabused of his “John Wayne” views of war after seeing a fellow soldier get “his arm and leg blown off war became a living horror.” His unit took “more than 25 percent casualties.”

In his tribute, however, Simpson gave Larry the credit Larry was too modest to take:

Larry was a member of a Hatchet Force unit of the 101st Airborne Division. This small force of 40 or fewer men was sent in to rescue other Special Operators in trouble and/or challenge the Vietnamese Communist forces operating in the area. They were among the toughest of the tough.

After he returned, Larry became a drill instructor at Fort Knox and married Donna, who gave birth to their daughter 11 months later. He finished high school and was accepted to the University of Cincinnati.

It was there on Sept. 21, 1969, that he encountered the Weatherman. Separated from Donna, he had hitchhiked to the campus area to hang out with friends. He was approached by two hippies who were recruiting for the “Days of Rage” to protest the trial of eight charged with initiating the anti-Vietnam riots the previous summer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They needed “greasers” to give their group working-class authenticity.

Larry told his father-in-law, Don, a former policeman, about what was clearly intended to be a violent “action.” He took up Don’s challenge to contact police.

After he got the go-ahead from a detective, Larry went to an organizing meeting and then participated in a training session involving karate kicks and calisthenics.

Weatherman’s Days of Rage began on Oct. 6 with what Gage calls a symbolic bombing of “a statue of a policeman at Haymarket Square, the site of the dramatic 1866 anarchist bombing.” Gage downplays the event:

On the evening of October 8, a few hundred young people gathered early in Lincoln Park, armed not with guns but with less lethal fare: metal chains, blackjacks, lead pipes. Then, despite the nationwide call to arms, nobody else showed up. They went through with their rampage anyway, tearing through Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood en masse, smashing windows and glass doors along the way. The police chased them through the streets, shot six of them (though none fatally), beat several dozen, and arrested even more than that.

However, she leaves out some pertinent details that one could find by reading Grathwohl’s book and contemporaneous newspaper accounts. The statue commemorated seven policemen killed in 1886. The helmeted mob of Weathermen carried “clubs, bats, bricks, and Viet Cong flags” and made their way down Clark Street, throwing bricks and smashing windows of businesses and cars. They ran into a line of police, “swinging clubs and fists” and splitting ways. The following day, they marched and rioted down Madison.

As the Chicago Tribune reported on Oct. 10, Weatherman used the “hit and run” guerilla tactics of Che Guevara. (Some Weathermen had received training in Cuba.) The same page reported that southside police officer Leroy Berry, working alone because his two partners had been sent to the north side to deal with the Weatherman “disorders,” was shot and killed.

Assistant Corporation Counsel Richard Elrod’s neck was broken after he tried to stop Weatherman Brian Flanagan. By Oct. 14, the Chicago Tribune had reported that 290 Weathermen had been arrested “on charges including felony and attempted murder, and 57 policemen were hospitalized, at least one critically.” Gage leaves out Elrod, who was left paralyzed, the 57 hospitalized policemen, and black Officer Berry, who died. This was no group of prankster youths; a “vast majority” were out-of-towners between the ages of 19 and 22, most unemployed non-students. These men severely beat an undercover policeman at their meeting at the Emmanuel Methodist Church, until they were stopped by the pastor.

Larry understood that the same — and worse — could happen to him. As he told me in 2013, his experience in Vietnam prepared him for dealing with the domestic enemy. He knew that he could betray nothing by actions, expressions, or silences.

Larry Grathwohl, Undercover

Bringing Down America is a riveting account of Larry’s quick-thinking and quick-acting amidst a group of upper-class psychopathic revolutionaries, whose actions ranged from the Weatherwomen running topless through classrooms to bombings and assassination plots.

On Oct. 28, he went to a meeting at the Student Union Building and then participated in invading a classroom in protest, waving Viet Cong flags and shouting about Ho Chi Minh. At the War Council in Flint, Michigan, on Dec. 27, 1969, Larry, pretending to take the LSD being passed around, joined in the denunciations of police.

Paul Kengor in The American Spectator recalled Larry’s story about the celebrations of the murders by Charles Manson’s followers there, with Bernardine Dohrn exclaiming:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork in the victim’s stomach [Sharon Tate’s pregnant belly]! Wild!

Larry described to Paul the group dance with the four-finger fork salute inspired by Dohrn’s sick speech. (READ THE ARTICLE: RIP Larry Grathwohl, Weather Underground Infiltrator)

Larry’s acting skills were so good that he was chosen to become a part of an elite group that would “select and destroy major targets.” The organization went underground, and Larry was assigned to Detroit. The lifesaving efforts that Larry would make in that city began on the journey there, when he instigated a brawl at a dance at Ohio State University to prevent a bombing.

In Detroit, Larry writes, he was ordered by Bill Ayers to bomb the Police Officers Association building in retaliation for the killing of three black men at the Algiers Motel during the 1967 Detroit riots. (Ayers thought Larry’s experience in Vietnam made him an expert on explosives.) When Larry objected that the bomb’s placement at the side of the building might kill people at the nearby Red Barn restaurant, most of whom were black, Ayers replied: “We can’t protect all the innocent people in the world. Some will get killed.”

Larry told Ayers that his design of a primitive bomb would work, knowing that it would be easy for police to dismantle. Because Larry informed the agents about the bomb in the alley — frequented by people leaving a movie and the restaurant — and about one in the women’s restroom in the 13th Precinct, the bombs were safely defused, and citizens’ and police officers’ lives were saved.

After Larry’s cover for Weatherman was blown because of a decision “in Washington” to get an “arrest,” his mug shot was featured on Weatherman’s “wanted” posters. Nevertheless, Larry continued spying and, in 1974, testified before Congress about the bomb that killed San Francisco Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell; he said that Ayers had told him where the bomb had been placed (on the window ledge of the police station), who set it (Dohrn), and “what kind of shrapnel was used in it.” The case remains unsolved.

In a documentary aired in 1982, Larry described sitting in on a discussion held by about 25 members of Weatherman and hearing their plans for reeducation camps for those less than enthusiastic about the revolution, when various parts of the United States would be occupied by Cubans, North Vietnamese, Chinese, and Russians. Those who refused to be “reeducated” — an estimated 25 million — would have to be “eliminated,” i.e., killed.

As Simpson wrote, “Despite [Larry’s] unimpeachable testimony, Ayers and Dohrn were able to squirm out of convictions for their treason and murder on a technicality.” In 1980, they emerged from hiding in luxurious safe houses. Ayers famously bragged, “Guilty as hell, free as a bird,” and went on to academic life, enjoying quick advancement and perquisites that few, even legitimate, scholars enjoy.

Today, the teachers taught by Ayers and his ilk present Black Panthers and Weatherman as unfairly targeted by the FBI.

The FBI Needs to Be Reformed, Not Abolished

The FBI today is focused not so much on going after such terrorists as Antifa but on entrapping conservatives. G-Men raid family homes of those protesting abortion. Today’s FBI still cannot find the individual who set two pipe bombs on Jan. 5, 2021, but has found over 1,000 “wanted” individuals who were “trespassing” or “parading” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Christopher Wray on July 12 refused to answer the question about FBI informants in the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Suggestions for reforming the FBI have been put forward by presidential candidate Ron DeSantis and the Heritage Foundation. Retired agent Thomas J. Baker, in his recent book The Fall of the FBI, describes the changes he has seen since 1967, when he joined and Hoover was still the “boss.” During training, he and classmates received “weeks of lectures” by agent attorneys “on the US Constitution, particularly its first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights” — “particularly the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.”

Baker suggests undoing the “centralization of case management at FBI headquarters in Washington implemented by Robert Mueller” to allow those in the field to serve “as a level of review” against misconduct. Rep. Jim Jordan backs the idea of moving FBI headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Huntsville, Alabama, in order to “depoliticize” the agency. Baker, Jordan, and others have suggested reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Baker also calls for “a renewed emphasis on the US Constitution.” His instructor in 1967 had told the class to keep their pocket constitutions in their breast pockets: “If we did that, we would think about it when interviewing a suspect or conducting a search.” Baker admits that it “may sound corny” but pledges that keeping the Constitution “close to our hearts” did work.

Larry, in addition to telling tea party groups about his days infiltrating Weatherman, invoked the Constitution, which was in abundance in pocket format at tea party meetings. I think Larry would have approved of Baker’s “corny” suggestion as a good place to start.