FBI Tracking Device on my car
L to R: Stew Albert, Attorney William Kunstler and me.
Wide World Photos 12/14/75
October, 2010
A story surfaced about Yasir Afifi, a 20 year old Egyptian American student, who discovered an FBI homing device on his car. Thirty-five years ago, the FBI put a homing device on my car. To my surprise, given current technical advances in miniaturization, my device appeared to be not much larger than the one Afifi found. I discovered my device because a wire hung down suspiciously, so did Afifi. Both devices were attached to our cars by magnets. FBI agents visited Afifi to retrieve their device; in my case, the FBI stole it back out of our lawyer’s office. The agent did this, I learned subsequently, because the cost of the missing device came directly out of the agent’s pocket.
In 1975, putting a homing device on my car without a warrant was against the law. My late husband Stew Albert and I sued the FBI. Bill Kunstler and the Center for Constitutional Rights represented us. Defendants in our lawsuit were Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt of Deep Throat fame and Assistant Director Edward Miller. In 1978, Gray, Felt and Miller were indicted for approving such illegal acts. Gray resigned because of Watergate, Felt and Miller were convicted then subsequently pardoned by President Reagan.
My daughter is the lawyer in the family, not me, but I believe what the FBI did last week to Yasir Afifi is entirely legal today under the US Patriot Act and FISA.
The air around my ancient white Volvo felt charged with negative ions. I couldn’t put my finger on it, exactly. Perhaps my queasiness came from a half-formed memory of a man in a beige trench coat and fedora who I may or may not have spotted the night before lurking in a semi-dark stairwell, next to Bill Kunstler and Margie Ratner’s red brick home on Gay Street in the Village. This is New York, I tell myself, everybody lurks in New York.
Stew and I return to our Volvo before tow-away alternate side of the street parking kicks in. A man in what I hallucinate to be a black trench coat, scurries down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street..
Gumbo, are you going nuts or what? Then
I notice it. Smack in the middle of the Volvo’s rear bumper is a well-defined white
patch, serene amid the spewed up brown dirt the car accumulated on yesterday’s drive
down from our beloved isolated cabin in the Catskill Mountains. Hanging down in
the very center of the clean spot is a 6 inch long wire.
“Hey
Stew, cummere.” I say. “ Look at this. I think there might be something the
matter with the car.”
“Whaddaya
think it is?” Stew asks. He knows nothing about cars. A Brooklyn boy, he’s
never learned to drive. This is
fine by me. For me, car equals freedom although I’m feeling momentarily insecure
about my knowledge of automotive issues. Three weeks earlier I’d sent much of
this poor Volvo’s electrical system up in smoke when, in a fit of know-it-all
feminist machismo, I’d installed a new battery by myself, poles reversed, and
fried much of the Volvo’s wiring.
“Maybe
something else happened to the electrical system.” I say. Still,
I’m not deterred. I kneel down and put my arm up behind the bumper where I think
the weird wire comes from.
I’ve
chewed on this moment for years and yet never been fully able to explain to
myself what prompted Stew and I to do what we did next.
“Ok,
so, I’m going to try and start the car and see if anything happens.” I tell
Stew, “Wait over there on the sidewalk.”
“Well….uh……..no!.”
Stew is adamant. He sits down heavily
in his customary place in the passenger seat then brushes his famous blond
curls back off his forehead. Stew jokes later that he did not want to see a news
headline reading: “Sexist Survives.”
I
get behind the wheel, insert the key and turn the ignition key. No click. No
terrorizing silence. No explosion.
The car starts. I feel my breath rush gratefully back into my lungs.
I open
the driver’s door, get back out, go back to the rear of the Volvo and kneel
down in the gutter, avoiding as best I can the cold running water and dirty gray
slush left behind from the previous day’s pre-winter storm. This time, when I reach up along
the wire, my hand emerges clutching a size C battery, with a piece of black
electrical tape wrapped around it.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here.” Stew says at the exact same time I think it.
We
cut across town on 79th through Central Park. The more I drive, the
more visible is the trail of cars behind us – two yellow cabs, three basic black
Detroit four doors and, if memory serves, one Central Park horse and buggy taking
up the rear. I pass fashionable
Madison Avenue shops; then make a left at 86th to cross the Park. My new best friends stay close, never
out of range. They make no attempt to conceal themselves.
I
panic. “Let’s go for Chinese,” I say.
Stew agrees instantly. Chinese food is comfort food for Jews of my generation. That
it might be foolish to leave the Volvo exposed and unattended on Upper Broadway
does not cross my mind. The sweet-smelling hot and sour soup filled with slices
of squirmy black mushrooms and seaweed fans of cloud ear fungus does its job; Stew’s
and my rationality is restored; we head back to Bill and Margie’s. After all,
if you think you may be in trouble with the law; it’s best to be in the company
of lawyers.
“Bill?”
“Yeah?”
“We think we’re being followed. I know
we’re being followed. I drove through Central Park and there was a parade of
cars behind us. And look, look here, look at this wire. It’s not a bomb. The
car drives.” The tale tumbles simultaneously out of both our mouths.
Bill
bends down and, with his long arms and large fingers, reaches far up under the
Volvo’s rear bumper. He grunts, pulls out a 6” by 4” black box, with two intact
batteries and the ubiquitous wire hanging down. Bill places the device in his kitchen
freezer, which, he says will cut off its capacity to transmit. Then, always a Yippie,
Bill contacts the press.
Over
the years, I’ve often wondered who of us were the bigger schmucks -- Stew and
I, who gave the FBI access to our car by consigning it to the street, or the Keystone
Cop FBI agents who installed a second, new and completely functioning homing
device.
Three
years after these events, Attorney General Griffin Bell charged Acting FBI
Director L Patrick Gray, the FBI’s number two man Mark Felt, and Assistant FBI
Director Edward Miller with violating constitutional protections against
unreasonable search and seizure of ‘acquaintances and relatives’ of the Weather
Underground. Gray was, at the
time, a leading candidate to succeed legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Felt, the FBI’s key decision-maker on domestic spying, spilled the beans about
the 1972 Watergate burglary to Washington Post reporter Carl Woodward, which
led, ultimately, to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Miller, the
third person indicted, was an Assistant FBI Director of Intelligence between
1971 and1974. Miller made his appearance in my FBI files as the “go-to” person
for the New York City agents who tailed me. In the early 1980’s close to twenty people received
settlements for the FBI’s illegal actions of $10,000 each – which comes to
approximately $60,000 for Stew and I in today’s money.
If I could offer any comfort to Yasir Afifi, it would be to say: don’t be afraid, hang in there. I wish I could promise that, one day, he’ll laugh about his homing device experience the way I can. Although we live in fear-based, anti-Arab, racist America, I nonetheless strongly encourage Yasir Afifi to exercise whatever remains of his constitutional right to legal redress.
This piece also appeared on The Rag Blog. Judy Gumbo Albert is an original Yippie, along with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan, Paul Krassner, and Judy’s late husband Stew Albert. Judy has remarried, lives in Berkeley, California and is currently writing her memoir, Yippie Girl. She can be reached at www.yippiegirl.com.