US vs LEONARD PELTIER FEDS & Disinformation

Jimmy Eagle Deer

In June of 1975, approximately forty agents were transferred into the South Dakota area, all of them stationed in or around Pine Ridge.  Among them was Jack Coler from colorado who carried on him a map of the various known or suspected AIM houses and camps on the reservation.  Also in the squad of agents was Ron Williams who had collaborated with Special Agent David Price in soliciting perjured testimony against Banks and Means from Louis Moves Camp.  On June 25, 1975 young AIM supporter Jimmy Eagle visited the home of his friend Teddy Paul Pourier.  Two white farm hands, Jerry Schwarting, twenty-three, and Robert Dinsmore,fourteen, arrived and the four stayed up late drinking.  During the course of the evening an argument ensued, and one of the white youths later complained to the BIA police that Eagle had stolen his cowboy boots. On the morning of June 26,  FBI agents Coler and Williams drove two cars toward Oglala; they  carried high-powered rifles, several hundred rounds of ammunition and the AIM camp map.   The official reason for being on the reservation was to serve a warrant on Jimmy Eagle for the alleged crime of stealing the white boys cowboy boots.  They drove directly to the home of Celia Jumping Bull.  For a few minutes they chased a red pickup truck in which they may have expected to find Eagle who had been known to drive a similar vehicle.  after losing the pickup they stopped a quarter mile from the Jumping Bull residence.

The two agents had stopped their car in the late morning; a few hours later, by 2:30PM, Coler, Williams and an Indian man Joe Stuntz, were dead from rifle fire.  Within the next twleve hours the FBI had released nationwide press statements dealing with the deaths of the two agents who they claimed were "executed" in an "ambush".  National news media, for the most part, cooperated witht he FBI version of the incident.  United Press International (UPI) was the first to respond with a wire bulletin in the early hours of June 27.  They reported:
 

OGLALA, S.D. - (UPI) TWO FIB AGENTS WERE AMBUSHED AND KILLED WITH REPEATED BLASTS OF GUNFIRE THURSDAY IN AN OUTBREAK OF BLOODSHED APPEARING TO STEMFROM THE 1973 OCCUPATION OF WOUNDED KNEE.
THE OFFICE OF SOUTH DAKOTA GOV. RICHARD KNIEP SAID THE AGENTS, ON THE OGLALA SIOUX RESERVATION TO SERVE A WARRANT, WERE SUCKERED INTO AN AMBUSH, DRAGGED FROM THEIRCARS, AND SHOT UP TO 15 TO 20 TIMES WITH AUTOMATIC WEAPONS.
THE FBI CONFIRMED THE REPORT.  AN AGENT SAID:" THIS IS A REGULAR COUP DE GRAS [SIC] BYTHE INDIANS."
THE AGENTS WERE TAKEN FROM THEIR CARS, STRIPPED TO THE WAISTS, THEN SHOT REPEATEDLY IN THEIR HEADS.

OGLALA, S.D.(AP) TWO FIB AGENTS WERE DRAGGED OUT OF THEIR CARS WHEN THEY TRIED TO SERVE WARRANTS ON PEOPLE WHO WERE HOLED UP IN A HOUSE ON THE PINE RIDGE RESERVATION, GOV. RICHARD KNEIP SAID EARLIER TODAY.

Neither wire service, nor the FBI mentioned the dead Indian , Joe Stuntz.

Attorney General Janklow told AP, "It looked like an execution.  They were riddled with bullets." Rapid City Journal,Jun 27, 1975  The Rapid City Journal quoted Kneip, Janklow and FBI "authorities on the scene."   They reported that the FBI had said "the two men were lured into an ambush....as many as 30 persons were waiting inside the house when the agents arrived."

Across the country headlines proclaimed that the agents had been brutally slain by Indians.  ...Stories told how the agents had been attacked from "sophisticated bunkers", and had been "stripped to the waist", before being "executed."
....the impression that was overwhelmingly created was one of savage, violent Indians attacking innocent white people who were just trying to do their job of  keeping peace.  AIM national chairman John Trudell said later," The FBI would have us believe their agents were out there picking flowers for their grandmothers when  the wolves got them."

The area was immediately cordoned off by the FBI; media representatives were kept away from the Jumping Bull residence and FBI publicist Tom Coll was brought from Washington, DC headquarters to provide the media with the official version of the story.  That official version underwent some revisions as details from the first FBI statements were exposed as being untrue.  Joel Weisman, working for the Washington Post, was turned back from the area at gunpoint by an FBI agent.  Weisman,his journalistic instincts aroused by the aggressive secrecy of the FBI, continued to investigate the case, and eventually exposed many of the FBI lies in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review.  One of the first falsehoods exposed was the fact that the agents were supposedly serving warrants on people in the Jumping Bull house, had no warrants in their possession, a fact confirmed by the US Civil Rights Commission.  It was also later proven that Jimmy Eagle, the subject of the phantom warrants, was not at the house, but was staying with his grandmother, Gladys Bissonette, in Pine Ridge.  Coll, speaking for the FBI was forced to revise the Bureau's position on that issue, and he announced that although the agents had no warrants in their possession, "they were trying to effect an arrest under a warrant," that had supposedly been issued.

The US Commission on Civil Rights launched an investigation of the FBI reports,concluding that"Media representatives felt that the FBI was unecessarily restrictive in the kind and amount of information it provided.  It is patently clear that many of the statements that have been released regarding the incident are either false, unsubstantiated, or directly misleading."

By the time Clarence Kelley had given a press conference in Los Angeles on July 1, he had dropped the ambush story, admitted the shirt removal had been for a tourniquet and had not been stripped to the waist by the Indians, and acknowledged the agents had not been shot 15 or 20 times..later inspection by media proved there were no bunkers.  The entire execution story was a lie.

Blood of the Land: The FBI and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement, Rex Weyler, pp.178-180
[ Don Schwarting, owner of the Arrowhead Inn, White Clay Neb....see Camp Justice releases 1999]