Columbia University's Public Health School and NYC's `Corona-Gates' Scandal: Part 3

Chinese Government's NIVDC Funded Its Joint Research Lab "Arrangement" In China

Columbia U. Public Health School’s Chinese Government Connection Revisited

One reason the Center for Infection and Immunity [CII] of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health may have neglected to spend enough of its time between 2013 and 2019 focused on preparing New York City’s public health system to respond more effectively to the spread of expected viruses like COVID-19 is that the Columbia’s CII director, Professor of Epidemiology Lipkin, was, instead, also apparently spending his time serving as one of the scientific directors of the “market socialist” Chinese state-capitalist government’s National Institute for Viral Disease Control[NIVDC]-funded Joint Research Laboratory for Pathogen Discovery in Beijing, China between 2013 and 2019.

According to a May 28, 2013 Columbia Mailman School of Public Health website article, titled “In An Historic Arrangement, Columbia University and the Chinese CDC Open Joint Pathogen Discovery Lab In Beijing,” the purpose of this “historic arrangement” was “to conduct surveillance, identify new infectious microbes, establish novel platforms for diagnostics, and develop drugs and vaccines to treat diseases in humans and animals..” And the same 2013 article also quoted Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity [CII] Director Lipkin as claiming that the Columbia’s arrangement with the Chinese Center for Disease Control [CDC]’s NIVDC would “enable CII and Chinese CDC investigators to work side-by-side developing solutions for pandemic threats to global health.”

Yet between 2013 and 2019 no effective “drugs and vaccines to treat” the over 21,000 estimated New Yorkers who possibly died from COVID-19 in 2020 were apparently developed from Columbia’s Chinese government connection; and Columbia’s “historic arrangement” with the Chinese CDC did not apparently help New York City’s public health system develop particularly “effective solutions for pandemic threats” to New York City’s public health.

Another reason the Center for Infection and Immunity of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health may have also neglected to spend enough of its time between 2013 and 2019 focused on preparing New York City’s public health system to respond more effectively to COVID-19 is that the Columbia’s CII director, Professor of Epidemiology Lipkin, predicted in 2013 that “in 2013 the threat is not the SARS coronavirus—this time the imminent threats are the H7N9 influenza virus and the new coronavirus emerging in the Middle East,” according to the same May 2013 press release. Yet by 2020 the threat to New York City ‘s public health, which produced so many elderly patient fatalities and deaths of patients with underlying health conditions in New York City, apparently turned out to be a “coronavirus” that did not emerge “in the Middle East.”

After receiving an email from this writer, asking him why he predicted in May 2013 that “the threat is not the SARS coronavirus—this time the imminent threats are the H7N9 influenza virus and the new coronavirus emerging in the Middle East,” Mailman School of Public Health CII Director and Professor Epidemiology Lipkin, by email, provided the following reply:

“It seems that you are asking why I did not predict the emergence of SARS-Co-V-2 and suggesting that this failure means that the Mailman School of Public Health has failed to protect the health of New Yorkers.

“Perhaps your disappointment is rooted in nomenclature. COVID is not SARS. SARS-CoV-2 is not the same virus as SARS CoV.

“We do our best to promote public health. I told my colleagues at the NIH and the CDC about a new coronavirus circulating in Wuhan in December. I went to China in January and related my concerns in interviews while I was there and after my return. We have also produced public service messages, developed diagnostic tests, evaluated the utility of drugs, and are running plasma trials.”

Yet in an article posted on Apr. 6, 2020 on the Science Alert website, University of Texas A& M University-Texarkana Professor of Biology Benjamin Neuman noted that “SARS-CoV-2 is genetically very similar to other human respiratory coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV;” and “SARS-CoV-2 has all the same genetic equipment as the original SARS-COV…but with around 6,000 mutations sprinkled around in the usual places where coronaviruses change. Think whole milk versus skim milk.”

Ironically, despite the “historic arrangement” between “Columbia University and the Chinese CDC Open Joint Pathogen Discovery Lab In Beijing,” in a March 27, 2020 International Federation of Journalists website blog post, Louisa Lim asserted that “with its latest propaganda blitz on the novel coronavirus...Beijing is attempting to gaslight the world as it escalates its propaganda push to obscure the source of the disease;” and involved in “an effort to distract attention from accusations that its initial cover-up is responsible for the rest of the world’s plight, in particular the looming economic catastrophe.” According to Lim:

“The composition of China’s coronavirus task force highlights its priorities: Two out of nine members are from the propaganda bureau. They faced a challenging job in shifting the narrative when Beijing’s cover-up of the initial outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year allowed the virus to spread unabated. There was further dismal publicity after nine doctors who tried to raise the alarm were punished. When one of them, Li Wenliang, died from COVID-19, the domestic groundswell of anger was so intense that a gratitude campaign thanking the state for its efforts had to be dropped. That popular rage is still evident. Touring a residential compound in Wuhan, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan was greeted by a chorus of shouts of `Fake! All this fake!’ resounding out of the safe anonymity provided by high-rise apartments….”

According to an Apr. 17, 2020 TASS article, however, China’s Ambassador to Russia Zhange Hanhui claimed in April 2020 that “the virus was imported to China’s Wuhan, instead of emerging there;” and “although the novel coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, there are no facts determining that the source had originated from there.” The same Apr. 17, 2020 TASS article also reported that the Chinese government’s diplomat claimed “that in late December 2019, the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control (China CDC) discovered the previously unknown pneumonia cases;” and “starting Jan. 3, 2020, China `promptly and timely provided the World Health Organization (WHO), the US and nations’ relevant agencies with information on the epidemic" and, in addition, on Jan. 4, 2020 “the head of the Chinese CDC contacted the US CDC Director and briefed him on the epidemiologic situation," the envoy said.”

Coincidentally, in New York City-- on the same day that China’s Ambassador to Russia claimed that China “promptly and timely provided the World Health Organization [WHO], the US and other nations’ relevant agencies with information on the epidemic”— Professor of Epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health Lipkin (who was also a scientific director of the Chinese CDC Open Joint Pathogen Discovery Lab after 2013) was presented with a medal at the Chinese Consulate in new York City. According to a Jan. 7, 2020 article on the website of Columbia University’s School of Public Health:

“The government of China honored Ian Lipkin with a medal…During the Jan. 3 awards ceremony in the Chinese Consulate in New York, Counsel General Ping Huang presented Lipkin with the medal...The medal...was issued from the Central Government, Central Military Commission, and the State Council. Among attendees were Columbia Mailman School Dean Linda P. Fried and members of China’s Counsel of Science and Technology.

“`It is a great honor to receive this medal,’ said Lipkin. `I will cherish it as a reminder of my dear friends and colleagues in China and all we have accomplished together for the health of the Chinese people and all people around the world.’”

The same Columbia University School of Public Health website article also noted that “today,” Lipkin “continues to consult with the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Science, and the Ministry of Health.” And in 2019 “the Chinese Academy of Sciences awarded funding for a collaborative project between” Lipkin’s “CII and Sun Yat-Sen University in zoonotic diseases.” In addition, in 2016, the Columbia University professor of Epidemiology “was honored with the China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award, presented in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, presided by President Xi Jinping.”

Yet if China “promptly and timely provided the World Health Organization [WHO], the US and other nations’ relevant agencies with information on the epidemic” on the same day Professor of Epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Lipkin was presented with a medal at the Chinese Consulate in New York City in early January 2020, why did Columbia University’s School of Public Health apparently fail in January 2020 to help New York City’s public health system adequately prepare to either prevent the virus from spreading rapidly in New York City or to provide effective treatment medication for the many New Yorkers, with underlying health conditions or living in local nursing homes, who contracted the virus a few months later, as effectively as the Cuban government’s public health system apparently did in January 2020?

According, for example, to an Apr. 17, 2020 article by Charles McKelvey, titled “Covid-19: Lessons from Cuba”:

“In late January, a short time following the confirmation in China that the new coronavirus could be transmitted from person-to-person, Cuban scientists formed two teams, one to assess the knowledge and resources that Cuba had available, and another to focus on the application of measures to respond to the pandemic. They determined that Cuba essentially had the medical personnel, medical equipment, and medicines necessary to respond, but they possibly were short on hospital beds. So, the Ministry of Public Health established the necessary conditions with respect to hospital beds, making adjustments in the hospital infrastructure and incorporating tourist lodging. At the same time, Cuba intensified its previously established structures for the surveillance of incoming travelers at airports and other points of entry. Subsequently, international tourism was stopped, as was the entrance of Cuban citizens living abroad, except for those on medical and educational missions. “

Yet in New York City in late January 2020, instead of apparently helping New York City’s public health system prepare more effectively prepare to confront the COVID-19 virus, Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity Director Lipkin arrived in China on Jan. 30, 2020 (after saying in an article, updated Jan. 28, 2020 on Columbia University's website, that the novel coronavirus was not expected to spread to the same extent as SARS, which reached 33 countries), before he, himself, later eventually tested positive for COVID-19. As a Feb. 3, 2020 Xinhua website article noted, “Ian Lipkin, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, told Xinhua in a written interview Saturday that he” wanted “`to work hand in hand with Chinese scientists to create vaccines, drugs, diagnostic tests to address this outbreak, and to reduce disease and death among the Chinese people;” although the estimated number of New York City resident fatalities from COVID-19 is apparently turning out to be much higher than the number of estimated fatalities from COVID-19 in China. (end of part 3)

Columbia University's Public Health School and NYC's `Corona-Gates' Scandal: Part 2A

Columbia University Public Health School: Spent 2009-2011 working for `Contagion' filmmakers

Columbia University Public Health School’s Hollywood Connection Revisited

One reason the Center for Infection and Immunity of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health may have neglected to spend enough of its time between 2009 and 2011 focused on preparing New York City’s public health system to respond more effectively to the spread of expected 21st-century viruses like COVID-19 is that the Center for Infection and Immunity’s director, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology W. Ian Lipkin (whose lab was then on the 18th floor of the Rosenfield Building at 722 West 168th Street), apparently also worked during those years as a scientific consultant for the producers of the Hollywood movie Contagion-- which cost $60 million to make, but eventually grossed $135.5 million after the film was released in September 2011.

According to an Aug. 27, 2011 Columbia Mailman School of Public Health website article, Hollywood movie director Steven Soderbergh and Contagion screenwriter Scott Z. Burns “sought out” Columbia Professor Lipkin “to tap his scientific expertise” for use in their commercially-oriented Hollywood movie project; and “after early conversations about the movie concept, Lipkin signed on as technical adviser to Contagion in March, 2009 and played an active role throughout production,” suggesting “the movie’s plot might be triggered by an outbreak of a virus similar to Nipah, a deadly virus that has, on occasion, migrated from animals to people.”

The same Aug. 27, 2011 article also noted:

“Dr. Lipkin also coached Contagion actors on the practices and process of scientific research. Kate Winslet and Jennifer Ehle visited the Center for Infection and Immunity to learn the mechanics of being a bench scientist, working with the lab’s equipment to do technical procedures. And Elliott Gould, who plays a research scientist named `Ian,’ talked to Dr. Lipkin about the intellectual process of making a scientific breakthrough. Suggesting to the actor how to look through a microscope and reflect on what it reveals, `I told Elliott it’s important that you get this right, because you are playing me,’ Dr. Lipkin recalls.

“The laboratory at the Center for Infection and Immunity, where Dr. Lipkin and his team of 65 conduct their research, also has an invisible role in the movie….Contagion’s production crew traveled to the lab to record centrifuges whirring, liquid nitrogen hissing, and even the squeaky noise of opening animal cage doors for the film’s soundtrack.”

In a Sept. 10, 2011 interview with Wired magazine, Columbia Professor of Epidemiology Lipkin also described his School of Public Health department’s role in helping to make the Hollywood movie in the following way:

“Actors met with people whose work they represented in laboratories and the field. Where feasible we used bona fide equipment in lab scenes. My colleagues and I were on set for critical scenes to address questions from Soderbergh, actors and other artists, or to help with dialogue or makeup on the fly….”

Then, on the eve of Contagion’s film premiere in late September 2011, Columbia School of Public Health Professor of Epidemiology Lipkin announced that a tax-exempt $500,000 endowment--named after the Hollywood director and screenwriter with whom he and his Center for Infection and Immunity had collaborated with in making the commercially-oriented Contagion movie--the “Scott Z. Burns and Steven Soderbergh Fellowship in Emerging Infectious Diseases,” was being set-up; to purportedly “support postdoctoral research in global infectious diseases at the center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health.”

But neither the research work nor the work for the Hollywood’s Contagion filmmakers that the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia’s School of Public Health did between 2009 and 2011 apparently did much to prevent the deaths of the over 21,000 New York City residents, many with underlying health conditions or local elderly nursing home residents, who are estimated to have lost their lives since COVID-19 reached the Big Apple in 2020—although Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity claims to be “establishing and implementing programs for diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of acute outbreaks of infectious disease.” (end of part 2)

Columbia University's Public Health School and NYC's `Corona-Gates' Scandal: Part 1

Columbia University's Public Health School at 722 W. 168th St. in Manhattan

“…What is this medical Columbia all about? It is a medical teaching, research, and service complex concentrated in the Washington Heights-Harlem-Upper West Side area in Manhattan…It is one of the richest medical centers in the world…The medical center has vast real estate holdings in the Washington Heights area…When the School of Public Health’s reputation began to skid in the early 1960s, it was commented that much of the faculty was doing consulting work or was active somewhere else in the nation or world…and was not spending the time doing…service…in the immediate environs…”
--from a 1970 report of the Health Policy Advisory Center, titled The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics

“Columbia University's Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health has been awarded $50 million from Bill and Melinda Gates…”
--from a May 19, 1999 Columbia University Record website article, headlined “GATES FOUNDATION GIVES $50 MILLION TO PUBLIC HEALTH “

Did Columbia’s School of Public Health Fail To Protect NYC’s Public Health?

One reason over 21,000 New York City residents, many with underlying health conditions or living in local nursing homes, are estimated to have died from COVID-19 in 2020 is that New York City’s public health system in the 21st-century was apparently unprepared to either prevent the virus from spreading rapidly or to provide adequate medical care and effective treatment medication for many New Yorkers who contracted the virus.

Yet according to a Sept. 4, 1998 Columbia University Record article, titled “Mailman Foundation Gives $33 Million to Public Health,” then-Columbia University President George Rupp “said that this landmark gift will help the School of Public Health continue to play a leadership role in influencing and defining health care well into the next century;” and the then-Columbia University president was also quoted as claiming that “`Over the years, the School has made many important contributions to our nation's health and is widely considered one of the country's leading schools of public health.’”

In addition, the same 1998 Columbia University Record article quoted Columbia’s then-vice president for the health sciences and dean of the faculty of medicine, Herbert Pardes, as also claiming that “`the School of Public Health is taking the lead in the development of a Medical Center-wide program of research on quality of care, use of technological innovation, cost effectiveness studies and many other important health services research questions of concern to the health and well-being of the American people.’”

But if tax-exempt Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health was purportedly developing since 1998, at its 722 West 168th Street location in Manhattan, “a Medical Center-wide program of research on quality of care” and “many other important health services research questions of concern to the health and well-being of the American people,” why did it apparently fail to prepare New York City’s public health system in the 21st-century to more adequately prevent COVID-19 from spreading so rapidly in 2020? And why did Columbia’s School of Public Health apparently fail to create and provide more effective treatment medication for the thousands of New Yorkers with underlying health conditions or living in nursing homes, who are estimated to have died after becoming infected during the last few months? (end of part 1)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Conclusion

SNCC Worker Ralph Featherstone  and Attorney Bill Kunstler

Revisiting March 8, 1970 Attack on Black Panther Party Office in Philadelphia

Coincidentally, less than 48 hours after Upper West Side Movement organizer and 1967-68 Columbia SDS vice-chair Ted Gold was killed, and on the same day Ted’s body was identified, a firebomb exploded in the office of the Black Panther Party’s Philadelphia chapter, at 47th and Walnut St. in Philadelphia. According to a March 8, 1970 Liberation News Service article:

“A firebomb exploded in the Black Panther Party office…early Sunday morning, March 8 [1970]. It was the fourth attack against the office in recent months.

“A bystander reported he saw smoke and flames pouring out of the first floor Panther office about 2 a.m., Sunday. He observed the plate glass window of the office was broken as if an object had been thrown through it. He called the police and fire department and went to get the residents of the upper floors out of the building. It took the police 25 minutes to arrive. The fire department made it to the scene a few minutes after the police even though the nearest firehouse is only six blocks away.

“`Someone is out to get us,’ said a Panther spokesman at the office…Two days before the firebombing, the mimeograph (chain and all), a record player and an electric heater were stolen from the office.

“The Panther spokesman said, `This is part of the national attack against the Panthers.’”

How SNCC Staff Members Ralph Featherstone and “Che” Payne Were Killed 50 Years Ago

Just 3 days after the three explosions at 18 W.11th St. in Manhattan, on March 9, 1970, SNCC staffers Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne “were driving along Route 1 in Maryland when a bomb exploded beneath the floorboard of their car,” according to the SNCC digital.org website; and, as the New York Times reported, “the explosion” that killed Ralph Featherstone and “Che” Payne “occurred two miles from the courthouse where pretrial hearings were being held for Mr. Featherstone’s close friend,” former SNCC chairperson “H. Rap Brown, who” was being “charged with arson and incitement to riot” (and who, after changing his name to Jamil Al-Amin, was later sentenced to life without parole in Georgia in 2000, in a different court case, despite maintaining his innocence).

Jet Magazine published an article about the explosion, that killed the two SNCC staff members 50 years ago in Bel Air, Maryland, in its March 26, 1970 issue, which noted that “Featherstone, a long-time friend of Brown’s and reportedly a key witness in Brown’s defense, was hurled 50 feet from the car he was driving when a blast ripped through the right side of his 1964 blue and white auto;” and “Blacks in predominantly white populated Bel Air insisted that Featherstone and Payne were murdered since they were returning to Washington [D.C.] when the blast occurred.”

Police in Maryland originally claimed that the two SNCC staff members were planning to bomb the courthouse where H. Rap Brown was being tried in Bel Air or a police station there. But as the Medium.com website observed, “SNCC members and other supporters believe the two men were assassinated; killed by a car bomb placed in or on their vehicle” and “even the police” later admitted “that Featherstone and Payne were driving back to Washington at the time of the explosion, thus casting doubts on the original claim of them planning on bombing the courthouse.” In addition, a community leader from Baltimore, former Urban Coalition of Baltimore Director Walter Lively, told the Jet Magazine reporter 50 years ago that “we don’t want the police to push the idea that here were two fools, who were expert with explosives who just blew themselves up,” according to the March 26, 1970 Jet Magazine article.

An article in the March 11, 1970 issue of the New York Times also reported that the then-attorney for H. Rap Brown, antiwar and Civil Rights Movement attorney William Kunstler, “who also visited the wreckage at the state police barracks, rejected any inference that Mr. Featherstone had knowingly transported "explosives." According to the same article:

“He said he had known Featherstone for years adding `I don’t think that sort of thing was Ralph Featherstone’s bag.’ Besides, he said, Featherstone’s car was heading away from Bel Air…`Why should they be leaving town if they came here to blow something up’ Mr. Kunstler asked…” 

Following Ralph Featherstone’s death, SNCC also released a statement to the press asserting that “he was murdered by the powerful forces in America that in their fear have decided to behead the Black militant movement” and “they are blaming the victim for the crime, still acting as if they can blot out ugly truth by destroying the people who speak it.”

In an article that appeared in the March 23, 1970 issue of Hard Times magazine (that was included in Harold Jacobs’ late 1970 Weatherman book), Andrew Kopkind noted that “in the months before he was blown to bits by a bomb in Bel Air, Maryland, Featherstone and several others were running a book store, a publishing house and a school in Washington” and “Featherstone and his companion, Che Payne, were most probably murdered by persons who believed that Rap Brown was in their car.” According to Kopkind, “Featherstone had gone to Bel Air on the eve of Brown’s scheduled appearance at the trial to make security arrangements” since the former SNCC chairperson “had good reason to fear for his safety in that red neck of the woods;” and “no one who knew the kind of politics Featherstone was practicing, or the mission he was on in Bel Air, or the quality of his judgment, believes that he was transporting a bomb—in the front seat of a car, leaving Bel Air, at midnight, in hostile territory with police everywhere.”

According to a March 14, 1970 Liberation News Service article, “the explosion happened two miles from the courthouse where…Rap Brown was to go on trial for having made speeches which `caused’ the 1967 rebellion of Cambridge, Maryland’s black community;” and “before Payne’s badly mangled body was identified there had been speculation that Rap might have been the second passenger in the exploded car.” The same article also noted:

“Bel Air police, worried about the reaction of Black communities in Baltimore, Washington and around the country, almost immediately put forward to the press the idea that the two young black men must have blown themselves up in an inept attempt to blow up some police station or something. Maryland’s governor Marvin Mandel put the National Guard on alert, and the prosecuting attorney in Rap’s case showed up at the site of the explosion to proclaim that the police theory seemed like a good one to him.

“`All those who have known Ralph Featherstone know that the brother would not have been carrying incendiary devices in his car’ said a close friend and fellow worker of Featherstone’s. A SNCC spokesman said, `Nobody who knows Maryland and nobody in the black community believes they were carrying that bomb themselves, but that it was planted or thrown into the car specifically for the murder of Rap Brown. 

“`The people who are spreading the story that they blew themselves up are trying to build a panic, a bomb scare, to crush all public opinion against the repression that they’re building up,’ the SNCC spokesman continued. `They’re laying the groundwork for revitalizing the McCarran Act, for “Operation Dragnet” to round up all dissidents.’

“`You’d have to be a fool to ride to Rap Brown’s trial in a well known movement car knowing you’re being watched and followed, and carrying a bomb with you,’ another movement veteran remarked.

“Black movement people in Maryland are convinced that Featherstone and Williams, who were in Maryland trying to prepare a safe entry for Brown into Bel Air, were killed by KKK or John Birch Society forces, both of which are active in the area, or by some of the more official right-wingers often closely associated with them. `It is significant to note that the car that was driven and destroyed had been used over the past five years throughout the black belt of the South,’ a movement leaflet here explains. `The car was well known to state and federal authorities, Ralph and William’s presence in Bel Air was almost certainly known. A bomb must have been planted at some point during the night under the right front seat of the car.’

“Featherstone, a former SNCC National Programs Secretary, was [nearly] 31 years old at the time of his death…Che Payne was [around] 29 at the time of his death…”

But as Sue Thrasher observed in another March 14, 1970 Liberation News Service article, “the authorities in Maryland, or nationally for that matter, are not interested in finding out who is responsible for the death of Ralph Featherstone and William Payne” because “it is too easy to exploit their deaths in such a way as to make further repression even easier” and “to try to make sure that the left in this country is intimidated and destroyed.” 

Time to Re-Investigate Featherstone-Payne Deaths and Fully Release FBI’s “Townhouse Papers”?

So perhaps there needs to be a new official investigation into how Ralph Featherstone and Che Payne were killed 50 years ago on a highway in Bel Air, Maryland launched in 2020? And 50 years after the deaths of former Columbia SDS vice-chair Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins on W. 11th Street in Downtown Manhattan, perhaps any remaining still-restricted pages in the National Archives related to the FBI’s investigation of what happened there on March 6, 1970 should be deposited on the Upper West Side in Columbia University’s Butler Library in 2020?

(end of article)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 7

1967-68 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Fifty years after the death of Columbia SDS’s 1967-1968 vice-chairperson Ted Gold, it’s still difficult to ascertain to what degree Ted and the other New Left antiwar Movement radicals meeting in the 18 W.11th St. townhouse were under FBI, NYPD and/or CIA surveillance between Feb. 24, 1970 and high noon on March 6, 1970. One reason might be because no FBI documents containing references to Ted that were produced by FBI informants or FBI agents between Feb. 16, 1970 and March 9, 1970 were apparently released to 2003 Family Circle book author Susan Braudy, after Ted’s FBI file was de-classified.

Another reason might be that although “all FBI documents” related to its surveillance of Weatherman organization members “can be found in the National Archives under Record Group 60, Department of Justice File 177-160-33,” as late as 46 years after Ted’s death there were still “thousands of still-restricted pages concerning the FBI investigation of the March 6, 1970 New York explosion,” according to Professor Arthur Eckstein’s 2016 Bad Moon Rising book. But, as Bryan Burrough noted in his 2015 Days of Rage book, after NYPD Detective Albert Seedman “set up a command post in a basement across the street” from the burning site of the collapsed townhouse, the command post was “soon filled with…a milling squadron of clean-cut FBI men…”

What Happened Before, During and After First Explosion 50 Years Ago On W. 11th St.?

As J. Kirk Sale indicated in his Apr. 13, 1970 Nation magazine article, “the details of what happened in this tragic explosion” that killed Ted, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins “are still murky”—even 50 years after Ted’s death. According to Newsweek’s March 23, 1970 “The House on 11th Street” article, after the first of three explosions that demolished the townhouse, “neighbors helped two young men over a backyard fence and saw a third escape by the same route.” And in his 1973 book SDS, Sale also noted that “out through the back garden …at least three people…made their way over the walls into adjoining gardens” and “they immediately disappeared and were never identified.”

In addition, according to footnote 3 on page 260 of Professor Eckstein’s 2016 Bad Moon Rising book, “Nina Herrick, who in March 1970 lived at 19 West 10th Street, and whose small backyard thus backs on the small backyard of the Wilkerson townhouse” told Eckstein in a Feb. 8, 2016 interview that “she and her husband heard the explosion and saw three people…running from the back of the townhouse and west toward Sixth Avenue.” Yet Herrick also told Eckstein that “neither she nor any of her neighbors on West 10th Street were ever interviewed by the New York Police Department or the FBI;” although, according to the same book, “as for the townhouse explosion,” the FBI’s New York office “had sent an initial report to” then-FBI Director J. Edgar “Hoover on March 13” in 1970, Hoover “had ordered a vigorous `correlative’ investigation,” and “the order from Hoover to begin conducting a specific investigation on the townhouse explosion went out on April 2” in 1970.

Ted’s body was found by NYPD officers “crushed in the rubble with his mouth wide open” at “around 7” p.m. on Friday, March 6, 1970, according to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 Days of Rage book; and “police found” Ted’s “body beneath the collapsed front wall” of the townhouse and “an autopsy showed” that he “had died from asphyxia compression,” according to a March 10, 1970 Columbia Daily Spectator article. A de-classified FBI document, dated March 26, 1970 (contained in Ted’s de-classified FBI file), stated that Ted’s death was “caused by a crushed chest.” And, coincidentally, the Associated Press reported that, on the same evening when Ted’s body was found at 18 W.11th St in Manhattan, a speech by Chicago 8 Trial Defendant Jerry Rubin at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey was “delayed by a bomb scare.”

 But it wasn’t until Sunday evening on March 8, 1970 that the body “crushed in the rubble” was identified as Ted’s body. According to a de-classified March 9, 1970 teletype document marked “urgent” (also contained in Ted’s de-classified FBI file), “as of March eight seventy cause of explosion had not been determined by NYCPD Bomb Squad” and “Identification Division of FBI on March Eight Seventy identified fingerprints of dead man found at site of explosions as Theodore Gold aka Ted Gold, BuFile One hundred-four five zero six seven eight, NY File one hundred one six one six-eight three.” The same de-classified teletype also noted that “Gold was a key activist” and “Gold had been characterized as head of WF of SDS in NYC.” In addition, an article by Linda Charlton that appeared in the March 9, 1970 issue of the New York Times noted that “”the identification of” Ted “as the former Columbia student was made at the morgue” by “a New York Times reporter and morgue personnel on the basis of photographs.”

The same March 9, 1970 New York Times article also initially reported that “Mr. Gold, according to a news editor at” WCAU-TV in the Philadelphia area, “was a founder of a New York City group calling itself the Mad Dogs.” But a March 11, 1970 Village Voice article noted that “a Times story implying that Gold was one of the founders of the Mad Dogs, a Columbia SDS faction, was said to be `absolutely incorrect’ by someone who knew Gold.”

In a 2007 book, titled Flying Close To The Sun: My Life and Times As A Weatherman (that was published 37 years after Ted’s death and 32 years after Dave Dellinger’s 1975 More Power Than We Know book), Cathy Wilkerson (who, with Kathy Boudin, was soon named as one of the two identified Weatherman group members who escaped from the front of the destroyed townhouse) wrote that after a second explosion, “I was barely able to notice another explosion as I concentrated on climbing, still holding on to Kathy and both of us barefoot, out through the hole and over more debris onto the sidewalk,” “Teddy had left the house I thought” and “it never occurred to me that Teddy had still been in the house.”

And in a 2001 book, titled Fugitive Days (that was published 31 years after Ted’s death and 26 years after Dellinger’s 1975 book), former Weatherman faction leader Bill Ayers wrote that “I met with two of the comrades who’d come out of the explosion alive, burned and bleeding” and “we talked about time before the blast, and I pressed for details, but they didn’t know a thing beyond speculation about what had gone on in the last hour.”

But in a 2012 book, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, The Weather Underground and Beyond (that was published 42 years after Ted’s death and 37 years after Dellinger’s 1975 book), the still-imprisoned co-founder of Columbia SDS and former Weatherman, Dave Gilbert, wrote that his Weatherman collective in Denver, Colorado received a telephone call in “the middle of the night” (apparently on either March 6 or March 7, 1970) in which the caller stated:

“Three of our people, including Teddy, were killed in an explosion yesterday. I can’t go into details on the phone, but we think the police did it.”

Dave also recalled that “while I knew Teddy was in New York City, I had no idea who was in his collective or what they were doing;” and “in the context of what was being done to the Panthers,” the “`police attack’ version was entirely credible…and in Denver we were under intense surveillance.” (end of part 7)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 6

1967-68 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Was Ted under FBI, CIA or NYPD Surveillance during His Last Three Weeks Alive?

In the month before 1967-68 Columbia SDS vice-chairperson Ted Gold's death, two underground collectives of the Weatherman faction of SDS were apparently operating in Manhattan. According to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 Days of Rage book, “one…was headquartered in a Chinatown apartment under [former Columbia SDS member and Weatherman] J.J.’s supervision” where Mark purportedly also “took a bed there;” and “the second underground Weatherman faction collective active in Manhattan in February 1970 apparently included a “dozen or so members” who “were initially spread across several” other “Manhattan and Brooklyn apartments,” according to the same book.

Ted apparently only first visited the 18 W.11th St. townhouse, on the street where he was killed, on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 1970 (just 10 days before his death), according to the 2015 Days of Rage book; and by “the following day,” Ted and four other members of the Weatherman collective he was in “had moved” into the townhouse, according to the same book. But the Days of Rage book also claims that 9 days before Ted’s death “at least a half-dozen members of the collective” still “lived elsewhere.”

On Feb. 21, 1970, three days before Ted first visited the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse, the Weatherman collective “cell” he was in apparently had “set off three fire bombs at the home of Judge John Murtagh, then presiding over the case of the New York `Panther Twenty-0ne’” (that a jury later found innocent of then-Manhattan D.A. and Columbia University Trustee Frank Hogan’s trumped-up Apr. 2, 1969 charge that these arrested members of the Black Panther Party’s New York City chapter were about to “bomb” department stores and public places in New York City), according to J. Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS book. And in its Feb. 24, 1970 issue, the Columbia Daily Spectator student newspaper also reported that “detectives at the 26th Precinct” had “found shreds of glass on the floor of the burned room” of the Columbia Law School Building’s International Law Library and believed “the fire was set off by Molotov cocktails.” In addition, Spectator noted that “the same night as the fire at the Law School, three bombs were detonated at the home of State Supreme Court Justice…Murtagh” but “police officials declined to speculate a possible connection between the two incidents.”

According to Professor Eckstein’s 2016 Bad Moon Rising book, on Monday, March 2, 1970 (4 days before Ted was killed) then-U.S. President Richard Nixon next “ordered” his White House Chief of Staff H.R. “Haldeman to begin a nationwide campaign to politically isolate the antiwar radicals;” and “Richard Nixon in early March [1970]—before the townhouse explosion—was urging the FBI to use investigatory and surveillance techniques against the New Left which the FBI itself thought were dangerous,” “Nixon was impatient with any hesitation on grounds of legality regarding methods for going after the radicals” and he “offered to give political cover to the FBI.” And on Monday evening on March 2, 1970, Nixon “spoke at 9:47 p.m. at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, at a dinner given in honor of” then-French “President Pompidou,” in which then-Columbia University and Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] trustee and CBS board member “William A.M. Burden…presided at the dinner,” according to the Public Papers of Richard Nixon 1970 book.

In addition, Professor Eckstein’s 2016 Bad Moon Rising book observed, for example, that a March 2, 1970 memo from Nixon stated that “from now on we are going to take a very `militant’ position against these people,” “I consider this new direction being of the highest priority” and “I want absolutely no deviation from it.”  Jeremy Varon’s 2004 Bringing the War Home book also noted that “a month before the explosion” in which Ted was killed “FBI Director Hoover had” apparently “characterized Weatherman as the `most violent, persistent and pernicious of revolutionary groups.’”

On Tuesday, March 3, 1970 (the day after Nixon wrote his March 2, 1970 memo), “neighbors” of the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse that Weatherman faction member Cathy Wilkerson’s father owned “on 11th Street” apparently “watched” as Ted “supervised the unloading of crates from a van” (3 days before he was killed), according to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 Days of Rage book. And a member of an FBI surveillance team on W. 11th St. may have also been possibly watching Ted both supervising the unloading of crates from a van on March 3, 1970 and at the moment when Ted was killed at the front of the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse, at around noon on Friday, March 6, 1970. For, as Susan Braudy noted in her 2003 Family Circle book:

“In front of the burning house, an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals quickly snapped pictures of the house’s crumpling brick Greek-revival façade. Since the buildings on the block were of significant design interest, he had been posing as an architectural historian.”

Yet if "an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals" was present on the W.11th Street block on the day Ted was killed, why did the FBI's surveillance team apparently allow, according to Kirkpatrick Sale's 1973 SDS book, "a white station wagon" to double-park" in front of the Town House "while several heavy boxes were unloaded" and "carried into the cellar" by the young radicals on the morning of March 6, 1970, where there were "perhaps a hundred other sticks of dynamite" and "a number of already constructed pipe bombs," without at least questioning the young radicals who were under surveillance on that morning?

According to an article by James A. Naughton, titled “U.S. To Tighten Surveillance of Radicals”, that appeared in the Apr. 12, 1970 issue of the New York Times, “a Nixon aide who is aware of the Justice Departments intelligence operations” also “said that `We knew of the New York bomb factory in a Greenwich Village townhouse, but only just before it exploded on March 6 [1970].’”

On Wednesday, March 4, 1970, Columbia SDS’s former chairperson, Mark Rudd, was apparently first told by the leader of the Weatherman collective holding meetings inside the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse, Terry Robbins, “what his group was planning;” and that same day (while the townhouse was apparently under FBI surveillance) Mark “dropped Terry off at 18 W.11th St.” without going inside, according to Mark’s 2009 Underground book.

In his 2015 Days of Rage book, Bryan Burrough wrote that one of his unidentified sources purportedly claimed that the following incident occurred inside the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse the night before Ted was killed:

“There was…at least one naysayer. He will be called James. He was one of the Columbia alumni; he had been J.J.’s roommate at one point. James was a member of the collective who did not live in the townhouse. According to a longtime friend, `the target had been bothering him for days. Finally, right at the end, he went nuts. This was the night before. He just went crazy, crying and screaming. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” And you know what Teddy Gold told him? [He said] `James, you have been my best friend for 10 years. But you gotta calm down. I wouldn’t want to kill you.’ And he was serious.”

Yet at least one of the Columbia alumni who was one of Ted’s best friends for many years denies that he “had ever been J.J.’s roommate,” denies that he “was ever a member of the” Weatherman “collective who did not live in in the townhouse” and denies that Ted allegedly “told him” that “I wouldn’t want to kill you” on “the night before” Ted, himself, was killed. (end of part 6)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 5

1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Ted’s January 1970 Political Activity and Arrest in Pennsylvania 

In January 1970, 1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chairperson Ted Gold apparently “was among those who argued shortly after Flint against putting a picture of” Charlie “Manson on the cover of” an early 1970 issue of the Weatherman group’s FIRE! newspaper because “he felt, and most concurred, that there was ultimately nothing progressive or even political about Manson’s violence,” according to the New School University Professor Jeremy Varon's 2004 Bringing the War Home book.  That same month Ted “was arrested along with seven other Weathermen” for protesting at “a Philadelphia television station” on Jan. 10, 1970, “after it broadcast what they called a `slanderous’ TV documentary on the Black Panthers,” according to an article that appeared in the Apr.13, 1970 issue of The Nation magazine. Ted and the other arrested Weathermen explained the reason for their protest action at CBS’s WCAU-TV station, according to an article that appeared in the Jan. 12, 1970 issue of the Philadelphia Free Press newspaper, in a leaflet which stated the following:

“On Tuesday, January 6, Pig AmeriKKKa escalated its brutal attack on the black liberation struggle by means of a slanderous TV documentary about the Black Panther Party. Behind the façade of liberalism, CBS henchman Mike Wallace accused the party of wanton violence, the desire to be martyrs, and even of corrupting little children’s minds about the good things in AmeriKKKa…We want Channel 10 in Philadelphia to publicly refute these lies, since they spread them in Philly…”

During January 1970, Ted had (according to March 1968 to September 1968 Columbia SDS chairperson Mark Rudd’s 2009 book Underground) apparently also “argued for keeping the” SDS National Office in Chicago “open and maintaining some presence on campus” in the 1970’s, “even as part of” the Weatherman “organization went underground.” 

Former Columbia SDS Member and Weatherwoman Dionne Donghi’s February 1970 Arrest

According to an article, titled “Unsettled Accounts” that appeared in the Berkeley Tribe antiwar underground newspaper on Aug. 21, 1970 (and was republished in the late 1970-published Weatherman book that Harold Jacobs edited), a former Columbia SDS member and New York SDS regional office organizer (with whom Ted had both searched in late June 1969 for a house to rent in Queens for a Weatherman collective to move into and been, along with Ted, a member of the Weatherman group that returned from visiting Cuba in mid-August 1969), Dionne Donghi, “was busted by the FBI for interstate transportation of stolen weapons” in Chicago in February 1970. But, according to the same Aug. 21, 1970 Berkeley Tribe article, “the U.S. Attorney threw the case out, and told Dionne and her lawyer that the bust had been set up by an informer inside Weatherman.”

In his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives sub-committee on Oct. 18, 1974, the now-deceased FBI informant Larry Grathwohl claimed Dionne (whose father, a former CBS-TV News foreign assignment desk head in the 1950’s and early 1960’s named Frank Donghi, had also been NBC News’ Saigon Bureau Chief in Vietnam during the last six months of 1968, prior to later dying in California of an apparent overdose of sleeping tablets in March 1969) had been the “primary leadership person” of the Weatherman collective in Cincinnati in February 1970.  In addition, Grathwohl also testified that “when the collective was disbanded” that month, he sent a revolver to Dionne in Chicago “which the FBI turned over to the IRS, and she was arrested on that charge, but charges were dropped because the FBI would not let me testify.”

Yet during the same month that Dionne and her lawyer “were told in Chicago by the U.S. Attorney that Dionne’s arrest had been set up by an informer inside Weatherman,” Ted and Mark Rudd (according to Mark’s Underground book) apparently loaded together “a VW van full of New York” SDS “regional office files and mailing lists” and dumped “them onto a garbage barge at the sanitation department’s pier on West Fourteenth Street” in Manhattan. (end of part 5)