In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen & Martin Garbus

Author:Peter Matthiessen & Martin Garbus [Matthiessen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101663172
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1992-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

The federal case against James Theodore Eagle was abandoned a few weeks after the verdict at Cedar Rapids, despite all the people, including himself, who allegedly claimed he had participated in the killings. On August 9, 1976, “Director Clarence Kelley conferred with U.S. Attorney Evan Hultman, prosecutor in the RESMURS trials. . . . Present were Associate Director Richard G. Held [and others]. . . . USA Hultman stated that the RESMURS case on James Theodore Eagle was weak . . . and all present concurred with the Director and USA Hultman that this case be dismissed, so that the full prosecutive weight of the Federal Government could be directed against Leonard Peltier.”

Richard Held—now second in command of the FBI—had been promoted on July 20, not long before the vanquished Hultman had been summoned to Washington. This was the same man who in 1967, on the Rosebud Reservation, had concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” to support Jancita Eagle Deer’s charges against William Janklow; he was also that Held who as SAC, Minneapolis, administered COINTELPRO activities in the region (and may or may not have signed his Christmas cards to Judge Alfred Nichol), and who as SAC, Chicago, was a chief FBI observer at Wounded Knee and the first signatory on the ultimate report on “paramilitary law enforcement”; in 1974, he was made head of IS-1, the Internal Security Section, and he returned to Pine Ridge in this capacity during the ResMurs investigation, remaining on the reservation for three months, although most people never knew that he was there. An old friend of Clarence Kelley, Held was transferred from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in 1976, while his part in the FBI cover-up of its own role in the Black Panther murders in Chicago was being investigated, and in 1977 his agents were harshly criticized by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals for obstruction of the judicial process and other misconduct in that ugly case.1 Held’s long history of counterintelligence expertise is inseparable from his anti-AIM activities, which suggests that for the FBI any AIM case was political, just as Peltier’s defenders had always said.

Throughout the Cedar Rapids trial, Leonard Peltier had simply been included in most of the descriptions of events, and no good evidence that his actions had differed in a meaningful way from those of the defendants had been brought forward; had he been tried with Butler and Robideau, it seems almost certain that he would have been acquitted. But now, because of the strange collapse of the case against Jimmy Eagle, he represented the FBI’s last chance to obtain a conviction in the killings of the two agents. Knowing this, his defense attorneys fought desperately to block his extradition from Canada, while the Justice Department applied extraordinary pressure to obtain it, assisted by a thunderous report on AIM from Senator James Eastland’s Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (the same report cited by R. D. Hurd in protesting the reduction of Crow Dog’s sentence), which appeared in September 1976, just prior to Peltier’s appeal hearing in Canada.

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