MHCHAOS Agents & Johnny Acid-seeds (Pt. II): Confidential Informant Infiltrations

We’re picking our hammer, our chisel, our level, and our arc welder back up, scaling back up the Kwikstage scaffolding erected around the outside of this behemoth of the MHCHAOS Agents & Johnny Acid-seeds primary & secondary source assemblage.

What’s on the docket for today?

Well, we’re going to put the finishing touches to our Drugs as Weapons Against Us base, wrapping off the majority of the excerpts from the Potash book that I wanted to work into this series. We’re going to hammer our way thru John's coverage of SDS’s history for the most part, including the Columbia Uprising and up to the traditional leadership’s gradual mutation into the Weather Underground, triggered in part by the incident where Mark Rudd was involuntarily dosed by an FBI informant. We’re also going to introduce the Grateful Dead’s manager and a retelling of their smuggling into the locked down Columbia campus by bread van to perform & likely dose the protesters, affixing the anecdote to one of the towers flaring out from our source assemblage. We’re going to learn about their manager Rock Scully, his civil rights protesting, & month long imprisonment (a situation that puts a person at risk of turning by the feds, just saying).

Speaking of informants & undercover agents, we’re going to introduce a number of them today, working them into our MHCHAOS Rogue’s Gallery w/in this constantly expanding & renovating structure...

These CIs include:

• George Demmerle (who infiltrated a smattering of the New Left groups we’re focusing on in the NYC & Lower East Side scenes)

• Bob Pierson (a Chicago cop who attached himself to one of the Yippie leaders like a remora during the Chicago Convention protests)

• Richard Aoki (one of the few non-black Black Panther Party members & onetime Minister of Education who infiltrated & surveilled everyone from CPUSA, YSA, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the Third World Liberation Front-organized strike at UC Berkeley in the late ‘60s and more besides on behalf of his FBI handler Burnie Threadgill… We’re even going to read some redacted docs from his FBI file which will set an exciting precedent for our cont’d investigation into other informers.

• We’re going to introduce the Youth International Party and its loud mouthed leadership made up of Abbie Hoffmann, Jerry Rubin, & Paul Krassner, which brings us to Hoffmann’s drugging by literal MKULTRA agent Manny Schreiber and his targeting by George Demmerle, who would come to be known as Prince Crazy, attending protests adorned in a purple plumed Spartan helmet & gas mask, I believe, wrapped in a cloak… And the Yippies will also bring us to a brief foray to the Democratic Convention Festival of Life protests in ‘68 which were clamped down on by a massive police riot (as so frequently happened)… And they’ll also bring us back to the Pentagon levitation protest the year preceding, learning a little bit more about Yippie & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker affinity group raid collaboration there. The Yippies also force us to confront member Paul Krassner’s lurid meta-satire “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book” that seeded a very macabre rumor about LBJ’s behavior following the Kennedy assassination…. Let’s see, what else can you expect in this one… Ah, we begin to layout the the death & violence that followed Up Against the Wall Motherfucker in their wake, unpacking more of the extreme protest antics & inflammatory activities, including Ben Morea’s attempted murder case in Boston & their hostage-taking of Fillmore East, which brought them head to head w/ Bill Graham, once again showing the crisscrossing of the hippie countercultures on the East & West Coasts in the ‘60s. And we prefigure the eventual STP Family Colony in Denver by exploring the Tim Scully & Owsley Stanley production lab & safehouse that was based there for a time. 

  Some additional resources referenced in this installment (will include a fully updated Works Cited eventually):

  • Charles Perry - The Haight-Ashbury: A History

  • Aaron Leonard & Connor Gallagher - A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union - 1962 - 1974

  • Seth Rosenfeld - Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power

  • The Richard Aoki FBI Files

  There’s a ton more besides & much more yet to come.

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Music & Clips:

| Love - "Alone Again Or" |

| 1968 Anti-Vietnam War Protests at Columbia (Periscope Doc) |

| A Clip of a '68 Uprising Veteran Speaking to Columbia U Occupiers this Year |

| The Shadows - "F.B.I" |

| Grateful Dead Live at the Student Union Columbia, May 3rd, '68 |

| Anti-War Protests at the Democratic Convention Turn Violent |

| Bob Dylan - "A Pawn in their Game" |

| Jefferson Airplane - "We Should Be Together" |