The murder trial of Dino Butler and Bob Robideau was conducted in Cedar Rapids, Iowa during June of 1976. Although Jimmy Eagle had been in custody even longer than they, and had supposedly confessed to participation in the killing of Coler and Williams, he was not docketed as a defendant. The trial was marked by a concerted effort on the part of the F13I and federal prosecutors to shape local opinion - especially that of the jury - against Butler and Robideau by casting AIM as a "terrorist" organization. Despite the fact that, during the course of scores of trials, AIM had never attempted to free any of its members through armed action, the FBI launched a pretrial campaign to convince the citizenry and local law enforcement that they should expect "shooting incidents and hostage situations" to occur during the proceedings. 165 Then, on May 28, just before the trial began, the FBI began circulating a series of teletypes within the federal intelligence community alleging that AIM "Dog Soldiers" were planning to commit terrorist acts throughout the midwest. This was followed up on June 18 by the accompanying entry on AIM in the FBI's widely-circulated Domestic Terrorist Digest.
The COINTELPRO Papers
Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars
Against Dissent in the United States
by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall
South End Press ISBN 0-89608-359-4
Chapter 7
COINTELPRO - American Indian Movement (AIM)
Continued
The RESMURS Trials
On June 21, the Bureau leaked one of its "Dog Soldier Teletypes" to local law enforcement and, not coincidentally, the media. It contended that, "Rudolfo 'Corky' Gonzales, a leader of the Brown Berets [sic: Gonzales was a leader of the Denver based Crusade for Justice] reportedly [had] a rocket launcher and rockets either in his possession or available to him along with explosives, hand grenades and ten to fifteen M-16 rifles with banana clips." Gonzales' organization, the teletype went on, was on the verge of joining with AIM's supposed Dog Soldiers and the long-defunct SDS to use this array of weaponry "to kill a cop a day," using "various ruses" to 'lure law enforcement officers into an ambush." On June 22, the accompanying follow-up leak was made, asserting that 2,000 Dog Soldiers, trained for guerrilla warfare in the "Northwest Territory," were to meet at the residence of AIM supporter Renee Howell in Rapid City, and begin an incredible campaign of "terrorist acts." Although Butler-Robideau defense attorney William Kunstler put FBI Director Clarence Kelley on the stand and forced him to admit the Bureau had "not one shred" of evidence to support these allegations, the disinformation continued to generate headlines through the remainder of the trial. 166 And, as the accompanying June 28, 1976 memo from J.G. Deegan to T.W. Leavitt makes plain, this was by conscious design of the FBI rather than through the story's having simply acquired "a life of its own."Memo showing Richard G. Held's continuing involvement in RESMURS after his departure. Note Held's intention of meeting with judge Andrew Bogue who, in the preceding document, appears to have been coordinating the prosecution's case.
AIM's inclusion in the FBI's Domestic Terrorist Digest.
Application of such time-honored COINTELPRO expedients was hardly the only step undertaken by the FBI in seeking to undercut the judicial process at Cedar Rapids. The Bureau also managed to get trumped-up allegations of an attempted jail break by Butler and Robideau into the trial record 167 brought in a demonstrably bogus witness named James Harper to claim that both defendants had confessed to him in their cell 168 and - if their subsequent testimony during the trial of Leonard Peltier is any indication - allowed agents such as J. Gary Adams to perjure themselves. 169 It was also established in court that Adams, Olen Victor Harvey and other agents blatantly coerced false testimony from several key witnesses. 170 Still, presiding judge Edward McManus - "Speedie Eddie," certainly no friend of AIM allowed the defense to base its case in an argument for self-defense, contingent upon examination of the context of anti-AIM violence fostered on Pine Ridge by the FBI and its GOON cohorts from 1972 onwards. Butler and Robideau were thus able to call expert witnesses such as Idaho Senator Frank Church, who had headed up a major investigation of COINTELPRO and who testified that what the defendants were contending was quite in line with known FBI counterintelligence practices. 171 Similarly, U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigator William Muldrow went on the stand to testify that the Bureau had implemented a "reign of terror" at Pine Ridge. 172 Butler and Robideau never claimed not to have fired on Williams and Coler; they claimed instead that, under the circumstances the FBI itself had created on the reservation, they were justified in doing so. On July 16, 1976 the jury agreed, returning verdicts on "not guilty by reason of self-defense" upon both men. 173
Confronted by this unexpected defeat in court, the government was placed in something of a quandary as to what to do next. By July 20, 1976, as is shown in the accompanying teletype sent by ASAC Norman Zigrossi to Director Kelley and his associate, Richard G. Held, the Bureau had begun to analyze "what went wrong" during the Cedar Rapids prosecution. Zigrossi's conclusions - such as the defense being "allowed freedom of questioning of witnesses" and the allowing of testimony "concerning past activities of the FBI relating to COINTEL PRO [sic]" - had been accepted by the Bureau leadership. As is evidenced in the accompanying August 10 memo from B.H. Cooke to Richard J. Gallagher, a meeting was convened between Kelley and Held, along with FBI officials James B. Adams, Gallagher, John C. Gordon , and Herbert H. Hawkins, Sr., on the one hand and U.S. Attorney Evan Hultman, along with his director, William B. Gray, on the other. At the meeting, it was decided to pursue Held's strategy of prosecuting only non-Oglalas by dropping charges against Jimmy Eagle "so that the full prosecutive weight of the Federal Government could be directed against Leonard Peltier."The second of the so-called "Dog Soldier Teletypes".
The next step was to do a bit of shopping for a judge. Just as McManus was used to replace Judge Fred Nichol after the latter reached conclusions unfavorable to the prosecution during the Banks-Means trial of 1974, so too was McManus arbitrarily replaced after allowing a semblance of due process during the first RESMUR trial. He was replaced by Judge Paul Benson, a former AUSA from North Dakota and Nixon appointee who had made considerable personal investment in Indian lands. After a series of meetings conducted in Rapid City with ASAC Zigrossi and his FBI colleagues, as well as prosecutor Hultman (defense attorneys were neither invited nor informed) - ostensibly held, in contradiction of every tangible shred of evidence concerning the organization's conduct during the many trials of its members, to develop security plans countering "expected AIM terrorism" - Benson staged a pretrial hearing on January 14, 1977. 174 During the proceeding, he announced the trial of Leonard Peltier would be moved from its scheduled location in Cedar Rapids, where AIM had developed strong support, to the far more conservative Fargo, North Dakota. He also began a sequence of evidentiary rulings which precluded Peltier's attorneys from developing the sort of self-defense case - centering on the FBI's COINTELPRO operations against AIM and other dissident groups - which had proven successful in the Butler-Robideau trial. 175
Memo discussing sharing of RESMURS information with the CIA.
June 1976 teletype analyzing the recently concluded Cedar Rapids trial of Dino Butler and Bob Robideau. The purpose of the document is to determine "what went wrong" with the case against the first two RESMURS defendants, with an eye towards rigging the rules of the upcoming Peltier trial in order to obtain a conviction.
August 1976 memo capsulizing the decision to drop RESMURS charges against Jimmy Eagle in order to place "full prosecutive weight of the Federal Government" upon Leonard Peltier. It should be noted the FBI earlier alleged that Eagle had "confessed."
