DIRTY WARS

The memoirs of the first, and only, person in American history to carry
out an FBI sting operation, on the FBI. In his own words, this account tells
how David R. Sannes publicly exposed J. Edgar Hoover's now notorious
clandestine operations. It is now common knowledge that the FBI utilized
burglary, mail covers, blackmail, extortion, electronic eavesdropping and
wire-tapping, smear and hate campaigns, planted agents provocateurs, and
obstruction of justice, as tactics to discredit and suppress minority political
parties and organizations. This is the story of a man who helped to break the
news accounts by penetrating illegal FBI activities, participating in them, and
coming forward to reveal them to the public.

Google W. Mark Felt, a.k.a. "Deep Throat" and David Sannes, F.B.I.
find the spider web with Sannes at the center.

by

DAVID RICHARD SANNES

1
 DIRTY WARS

INTRODUCTION

David R. Sannes was just a politically active, liberal, political science

student at the University of Washington, in Seattle, until the Vietnam War
came along. Then he became:

1. A scared, reluctant Army volunteer draftee in July, 1965;

2. A dedicated inductee into the National Security Agency;
3. An NSA counter-intelligence agent in Vietnam;
4. An NSA electronic eavesdropper on the CIA's "dirty wars" in
Southeast Asia;
5. An aerospace company engineer and then a designer and builder
of nightclubs and restaurants who was an anti-war activist;
6. America's "mole" inside FBI bombing and obstruction of justice
plots;
7. The "whistle blower" who alerted the American public to the
criminal conduct of the FBI, and the cover up by the U.S.
Department of Justice headed by John Mitchell;
8. The man who forced the convening of a federal grand jury to hear
his unimmunized testimony to FBI directed participation in
conspiracies to commit bombing, felony murder, and multiple
counts of obstruction of justice;
9. The man whose sworn affidavits were utilized in the quashing of
37 federal felony indictments;
10. And, the man who was instrumental in obtaining the public
confessions of two other men who had been bombers for the FBI.

2
DIRTY WARS

(An Outline)

3
GREYHOUND BUS DEPOT, SEATTLE September, 1961

The young farm boy got off the bus, collected his luggage, and started
to walk toward the nearest stop of the #7 line. He was on his way to Terry
Hall, his new home, at the University of Washington. The young freshman's
curiosity pulled him from his path before he had strolled 100 feet. It was the
oddity of the enormous canvas sign, proclaiming: "Seattle Miracle Temple,"
draped across the run-down front of the cavernous warehouse building, that
beguiled him. The blasting sound of a jazz band drew him inside. A rapt
congregation of over 400 sinning souls sat spellbound as Brother Al Wyrick
exhorted them to make a very special offering to purchase a "faith
ambulance," with which to gather up sick and demon afflicted folks. The
sufferers were to be delivered to the church for healing by God, working
through Brother Al. The entranced farm boy watched as about 30 believers
came forward to be healed of a potpourri of deadly diseases and devilish
possessions.

That did it. The young man was hooked on exploring the ideas,
customs, and motivations of those active in religious or political groups.
Three days later, a deaf-mute quadriplegic, garbed in filthy rags that bespoke
a life spent sheltered in alleys and doorways, was carried in by four of his
new college friends. After strenuous exertions, he was healed by a
flabbergasted faith healer. More astonishing, the formerly crippled wretch
leaped to his feet and began to preach. He had a Biblical knowledge and
power that induced a perfect pandemonium and an outpouring of offerings by
over 450 hysterical listeners. And so, the farm boy's first job was as a
"miracle worker's" warm-up man. He stayed only a few days, and refused
payment.

4
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE 1961-1965

Throughout his college years, the young man could be found observing
political or religious groups. He attended meetings of the John Birch Society,
the Communist Party USA, the Christian Crusade, the Christian Anti-
Communist Crusade, the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, the SDS, and
a wide variety of other political groups. There was hardly an organized
religion that he did not study, and attend the services of, during this period.

SEATTLE July 27, 1965

The political science and history student's first day as a volunteer

inductee into the United States Army became a turning point in his life. He
intensely feared being sent to fight a war in Vietnam that he felt ambivalent
about. On the other hand, he strongly believed that it was his duty to
volunteer to serve in combat to fulfill his citizenship responsibilities. His
considered opinion, right or wrong, was that he had a duty to volunteer for
military duty when his country went to war, or alternatively, to put his future
on the line by active political opposition to any such war.

To him, there were powerful arguments both for and against America's
growing involvement in Vietnam. He knew he did not have the wisdom or
the facts necessary to make a decision to oppose the foreign policy of his
country, so he saw himself as duty bound to support it. He had tremendous
respect for people who put their lives on the line by volunteering for combat
duty, or by defying the draft for principled reasons. (In the end, America's
deadly meddling in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia decimated whole peoples,
glorified military force as a fashionable arbiter of diplomatic disputes, and
morally corrupted a self-righteous America. David only came to this
understanding much later.)

FORT WAINWRIGHT, ALASKA October, 1965

Basic training at Fort Ord was followed by a posting near Fairbanks.

Languishing in a transient bay, Pvt. Sannes was pleased when a parka-clad
sergeant came for him. The happiness turned to concern when his silent
guide drove up to an isolated, fortress-like concrete building, surrounded by

5
security fencing. The fence was replete with "No Trespassing – Use of
Deadly Force Authorized" signs to welcome visitors. The young soldier's
concern deepened while his escort dialed the combination locks on two steel,
bank vault type doors to gain entry to an interior office. He mused about
whether or not he was being taken to a military intelligence unit to be
questioned about his college associations. One can imagine his astonishment
when he was met by Mr. N, who told him that he had been recruited by the
National Security Agency. He began training as a cryptographic
communications security agent. His new commanding officer not only knew
about the farm boy's history of involvement with groups ranging from the
International Flat Earth Research Society to the Anti-Vivisection League; in
fact, the NSA had picked its new man partly because of that past. The NSA
unit members laughed heartily when told that the rookie had evaded transient
bay work details for the previous 13 days by assuming the guise of a mildly
retarded Gomer Pyle.

The trainee counter-intelligence agent had found his calling and his
home. There his psychological quirks and emotional bents were applauded;
they constituted prerequisite credentials for employment. He took to
instruction in weapons, explosives, and espionage tradecraft like a rainbow
trout to rapids.

The arcane world of cryptography spilled open its secrets for him. Top
secret communications traffic from around the world became his dream
library. He had grown up in a veritable war zone, now he had been chosen
for membership in a top secret organization that always operated on a war-
time basis. Gung ho would have been too mild a phrase to describe his
enthusiasm, indeed his exuberance, in carrying out his assignments. He
could hardly wait to be trained enough to volunteer for duty in Vietnam, the
veritable cockpit of the espionage world. War represented opportunities to
meet many of the ultimate challenges to the skills of a fledgling counterspy.
There was no waiting list for Vietnam volunteers; hell was not full.

QUI NHON, REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM October, 1966 – February, 1968

NSA agent David R. Sannes traveled to Saigon under secret orders

assigning him to the HQ of the Strategic Communications Command,

6
Southeast Asia, in Saigon. He had volunteered for duty at the NSA's
command center, expecting to serve in a relatively safe staff position. He had
wanted to be at the war's nerve ganglion; he wanted a front row seat from
which to observe the war, but he wanted to be out of harm's reach.

Fate dealt him revised orders that sent him to Qui Nhon, a coastal city
at the edge of the central highlands. There he met a senior NSA man who
had just come from commanding the NSA operation in Berlin. Together,
they opened a branch office of the NSA in Qui Nhon, assuming responsibility
for: 1) the cryptographic materials and equipment utilized by all allied forces
operating in the central third of South Vietnam; 2) the security of all
classified communications emanating from or received by our units operating
in that region; 3) the security of all communication facilities, fixed and
mobile, that had cryptographic capability within the region; and 4) the
loyalty, reliability, and security clearance of cryptographic equipment
operators, cryptanalysts, and cryptographic equipment maintenance
personnel.

As a practical matter, Mr. A ran the headquarters, and Sannes ran the
field operations. In the words of his boss, Mr. A: "Now you are going to
find out why I lived through three wars. One of us has to be out in the field,
and I am going to be staying right here." Operating under the cover of a
cryptographic code and equipment courier, Sannes made hundreds of
inspections of communications centers during his three tours of duty in
Vietnam, daily crisscrossing the central highlands by Huey helicopters, C-
130s, or trucks. When weather conditions grounded flyers during the
monsoon seasons, he often traversed hostile or disputed territory to deliver
the codes necessary to keep the communications network up. He also
commanded an air-mobile, 45 man reaction force whose mission was to
make sure that outlying communication facilities did not suffer the loss of
cryptographic materials or equipment as a result of ground attacks by Viet
Cong or North Vietnamese troops.

This elite unit's task was to drop in on crypto-centers that came under
such assaults, and to either protect the codes and equipment, or to make
certain that it was totally destroyed by thermite incendiary devices. Sannes
also had a responsibility, at the Qui Nhon Communications Center, to

7
monitor the hard copies of highly classified messages for compliance with
transmission procedures. It was there, at the third largest crypto-center in
Vietnam, that he read other people's top secret mail. Sannes often read
messages to President Johnson before the White House received them.
Perusal of the top secret traffic provided epiphanies tripping over epiphanies.
Indeed it gave Sannes a ringside view of not only the military and political
aspects of the war, but also the underlying intelligence gathering and
reporting facets of the regional conflict.

This top secret message reading also laid bare to Sannes' gaze the
nature and extent of the dirty wars carried out by the administration. There
were not only the CIA's covert efforts to finance the war in Laos by muscling
in on the opium trade; there was not only the CIA run Phoenix Program to
assassinate village leaders who were less than enthusiastic about the effects
of the war on their villages; there was most disturbing of all to David, the
insane pattern of deceit and self-deception in evaluating, planning, and
executing the military and political strategies and tactics of the war.

By way of exemplification of that last point, we were winning the

hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, as President Johnson assured our
nation. So what went wrong? Sannes saw on a daily basis what was
concealed from the American public, but was well known to those with
whom it was at war. National security too frequently meant keeping secrets
from the American people that would make them ashamed of their own
government. This was very disturbing to Sannes, but he knew that he did not
have the wisdom to judge which state secrets should be exposed and which
should not But his brain and his gut both told him that the Founding Fathers
would not have been pleased with the war.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE 1969

Dimly seen figures appear in a thickly wooded area of the campus, late
on a cloud-shrouded night. Some of them drift silently toward the Air Force
ROTC Building, while others post themselves as lookouts. Cans are
withdrawn from bulky packages carried by the furtively moving people at the
building. The acrid fumes of gasoline rise into the night as frantic splashing
of the building's entrances takes place. Fleeting glances are seen of fleeing

8
shadows in the forest. A tiny line of fire reaches the building and explosively
erupts into a curtain of fire that boils up over the facility. Fire alarms and
sirens signal the coming of help. Firemen valiantly battle a fire that fully
engulfs the structure. Only the imposing stone edifice adjacent can be saved.
A caller takes credit for the terrorist act on behalf of the anti-war movement.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 1969

A Seattle Police Department dispatcher takes a late-night bomb threat.

The claimed target is the U. of W. Administration Building. Police and fire
units, including aid cars, are rolling before the caller abruptly terminates the
conversation. An unexploded bomb is found and defused. Seattle and U. of
W. Campus Police search the campus.

QUEEN ANNE HILL AREA, SEATTLE February, 1970

A late model sedan slides up to a public telephone booth. An

unremarkable, but well trimmed and tailored, young man gets out of the car
and steps up to the telephone and dials. In a rundown home nearby, on a
battered plastic kitchen counter, a telephone rings. A groggy, long-haired
nebbish slowly staggers into the room to answer the insistent phone. A
mumbled hello is answered by a cold, commanding voice that tells Jeff
Desmond to leave his mother's house in fifteen minutes, and to walk toward a
pick-up point a few blocks away. Jeff knows that Federal Bureau of
Investigation Special Agent Louis M. Harris does not want to meet him to
discuss coffee bean futures. He follows Harris' instructions.

QUEEN ANNE HILL AREA Minutes Later

A shifty-eyed Jeff Desmond gets into an unmarked FBI car and slumps
down in the back seat, virtually out of sight to passersby. Desmond is told by
Harris and his partner that he has committed multiple violations of his 10
year parole for the interstate transportation of an automatic machine gun and
narcotics. Jeff says, he is also told that they know he is shooting heroin and
buying large amounts of codeine with forged prescriptions. The agents then
tell Jeff that they are going to overlook those serious infractions, and not send
him to the state penitentiary where they would put a snitch jacket on him, if

9
he will cooperate with them. Desmond agrees to help them. Harris then
instructs Desmond, according to Desmond, to penetrate groups of anti-war
radicals, and build and supply such people with dynamite bombs.

Jeff is further told that he will encourage and help willing radicals to
detonate these bombs. Jeff tries to demur, but is told that he has to make a
choice. The FBI agents, it is safe to presume, already know that Jeff had
previously been gang-raped at the King County Jail. So, a pathetic, defeated
Desmond agrees to the deal, is given a phone number to make regular reports
to, and is taken back near his home. The well-experienced powder monkey
then tells his mother, Maude, who had listened in on his calls from the FBI,
that she has to drive him to the Harvey Powder Co., in Snohomish, and
purchase some dynamite, fuse, caps, and fuse igniters, because he is working
for the FBI. Maude later reports these facts to Mike James of King TV in
Seattle, and to Walter Wright of the Seattle P.I. (FBI agent Louis M. Harris
never publicly comments on Desmond's charges, despite wide disclosure.)

UNITED STATES COURTHOUSE, SEATTLE February 17, 1970

An anti-war protest march through downtown Seattle, co-sponsored by the

Seattle Liberation Front, culminates in a raucous rally against the war and
Federal District Court Judge Julius Hoffman of Chicago Conspiracy Trial
notoriety. Riot-clad police confront the large crowd of demonstrators. As
tensions mount, sticks, stones, and clubs begin to fly. The denouement is a
trashing of the front of the U.S. Courthouse and a few nearby storefronts.
The rally participants scatter in the face of charges by the police units and
their tear gas barrage.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, ARCHITECTURE BLDG.

February 20, 1970

Along one edge of the beautiful and peaceful campus, we notice the
skeletal frame of a massive building under construction. A street light faintly
illuminates a seedy-looking, straggle-haired young man as he walks slowly
along the construction site's perimeter fence. The man stops, pulls a package
from a shopping bag, yanks a fuse igniter, and hurls the sputtering bomb into
the building's interior. Then, the youth heaves a second explosive device into

10
a stack of scrap lumber near the vehicle entrance to the construction site. The
bomber then retreats slowly into the shadows of a nearby alley.

Minutes later, in a telephone booth outside a tacky, 24-hour diner,

nervous fingers dial a telephone number. The telephone is answered with a
simple hello. The caller reports that he has just planted a bomb at the
construction site to establish his cover. The caller then walks to a nearby
acquaintance's apartment, shoots up, and slips into a bathtub. Luckily, no
passersby are injured when the bomb blast rips through the site.

Responding police and fire units are crowding the bomb scene as an
investigator discovers the second bomb, concealed in a lumber scrap pile.
The site is cleared. Bomb squad experts theorize that the second bomb had
been set to go off much later than the first bomb, the better to kill or injure
emergency units responding to the first blast.

SEATTLE February 23, 1970

Seattle Police Department Sgts. R.V. Jackson and P.T. Cruse pay a
surprise visit to Jeff Desmond's home. Telling Jeff that they are extremely
upset that he had planted a second bomb, meant to kill or main cops
converging on the architecture building site, the lawmen tell him that he is
going to coordinate all his future bombings with them. Desmond realizes that
FBI Agent Harris must have told the Seattle Police about that bombing. Jeff
agrees.

UNIVERSITY DISTRICT, SEATTLE March 3, 1970

In the early evening, John Van Veenendaal, Jan Tissot, and Michael
Reed watch a man's arrest and become infuriated by what they believe is
brutality by the arresting officers. Jeff later runs into the three men near the
Blue Moon Tavern. Jeff suggests that they carry out a retaliatory bombing at
the Wallingford Police Station. This suggestion is rejected, and the
University Way Post Office is mutually decided upon as a target. Jeff tells
the others that he could supply a dynamite bomb, if they drive him home to
pick one up. Michael Reed drives Desmond home, and while the others wait
outside in the car, Jeff makes a bomb and telephones FBI Agent Harris and

11
the Seattle police. The group then drive into the alley behind the United
States Post Office; Jan Tissot gets out of the car, pulls the fuse lighter, and
throws the bomb against the building.

Twelve waiting Seattle police officers then leap from cover and arrest
the four men. Van Veenendaal then demands that the cops move them away
because the bomb is going to go off. The fleeing suspects and police officers
are ducking for cover as the bomb blast resounds throughout the district.
Angry and frightened cops beat the handcuffed four.

The Trojan stumping dynamite, the Ensign-Bickford black wax

dreadnaught fuse, and the Atlas No. 6 blasting cap utilized in this bombing
are from the same lot signed for by Maude Desmond at the Harvey Powder
Company, 9721 Airport Way, Snohomish and recovered by police authorities
from the unexploded bomb at the University of Washington Architecture
Building construction site bombing on February 20, 1970. By 10:05 pm,
about 10 minutes after the bomb went off, the arrestees are on their way
downtown to the central jail. The lone federal employee on duty in the Post
Office when the bomb went off, is being treated for his injuries and for
shock.

Title 1, of the United States Criminal Code, in pertinent part, defines

the bombing of a federal facility that is occupied as first degree felony
bombing. By 2:30 am on March 4, Jeff has been released from jail, is given
$500 cash and confiscated heroin by Seattle Police Assistant Chief Richard
Schoener, and is on his way to an FBI safe-house. Before noon on March 4,
1970, King County Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecuting Attorney William L.
Kinzel sends Judge William J. Quigley a note: "O.K. to release Jeff
Desmond on P.R." Bail for the other three remained at $25,000.

A UNIVERSITY WAY RESTAURANT March 4, 1970, 7:30 pm

David Sannes is reading the Seattle P. I. And the Seattle Times as he

eats his supper. He has just completed the work of designing and
constructing Seattle's largest live-music and dance emporium a few blocks
away. With the eyes of an expert, he carefully studies the newspaper articles
concerning the University Way Post Office bombing. Several facets of the

12
accounts disturb him. He has personal knowledge that one two-man patrol
car is the normal deployment of Seattle police officers in the district in
question. He knows that it is not normal for 12 cops to be staked out in an
alley behind the Post Office.

He knows that it is not normal for one alleged bomber who is caught-
in-the-act of bombing an occupied United States facility to be released on a
P.R. within 5 hours of arrest, while his alleged accomplices are being held on
a $25,000 bail. He is very disturbed that a postal employee had been
wounded by the blast, when obviously police officers were aware of the
potential danger to him, and wouldn't have compromised the security of the
massive stakeout by removing the worker. Sannes realizes that somebody
must have tipped the police as to the time and location of the prospective
action. The obvious candidate for the tip was the P.R.'d Desmond.

Intrigued by the mention in the newspaper articles that two bombings

had taken place within three blocks and two weeks of each other, and by the
fact that the earlier incident included a suspected booby trap, Sannes leaves
the restaurant and walks over to and examines both bombing sites. Two
bombings within a few blocks of the 700 seat tavern that he had just opened
makes him concerned that his place might be a target of bombing. As a
some-time civilian undercover Seattle police agent, Sannes has a great deal of
knowledge about their police procedures. (Sannes has been working
undercover, a hayseed potential mugging victim of police targeted "whore-
less pimps," with Seattle Police Officer Patrick Wright and other vice
officers. Sannes also has been acting as a civilian police agent in prostitution
investigations at organized crime connected strip joints in Seattle.)

It stands to reason that a stretched-thin police force would not commit

12 men to any stakeout unless they received a tip that they absolutely knew to
be from a reliable source with precise information. Late into the night, David
is wondering how a bomber happened to have the status of a reliable
informant. He thinks perhaps Desmond had been given immunity for his
testimony against the other suspects; but that doesn't make sense because
there were 12 police eye-witnesses to first degree bombing of federal
facility. He decides to find out.

13
KING COUNTY COURTHOUSE, SEATTLE March 5, 1970

At the arraignment on state bombing charges, Reed, Tissot, and Van

Veenendaal are brought in wearing leg irons, handcuffs, and chains;
Desmond stands unfettered in the midst of bodyguarding lawmen. Sannes
watches the proceeding, noticing that Desmond is bumming cigarettes from
the police officers like they are chums. What is really interesting though is
the fact that Judge Quigley orders Jeff back into custody over the objections
of surprised and protesting deputy prosecutors. Desmond is obviously
surprised too.

KING COUNTY COURTHOUSE March 6, 1970

The King County Prosecutor files an amended complaint, dropping

charges against Jeffrey Desmond, and naming him only as a material witness.
Someone posts his $1000 bail, and he is again released.

THE DOGHOUSE RESTAURANT, SEATTLE Mid-March, 1970

In an isolated booth, a Seattle cop and Sannes sit talking. The

policeman, who works as an aide to Police Chief George Tielsch, reveals to
David that the FBI had called the Seattle Police Department prior to both the
February 20, and March 3, bombings. Sannes asks why then the FBI had not
been involved in either the arrest, indictment, or arraignment of the Post
Office bombing suspects. Sannes' friend responds that the FBI had asked the
Seattle Police to provide covert police protection to Desmond as a police
informant.

Chief Tielsch was said to have been angry about that arrangement, but
to have reluctantly agreed. Chief Tielsch had agreed to the FBI plan even
though he knew that the plan was to vacate the state charges in favor of
federal bombing charges to be filed later against Desmond's three
accomplices. The FBI could then tell U.S. Attorney Stan Pitkin that they
could not locate Desmond for questioning by lawyers for the three
defendants.

14
 The FBI had supposedly told Tielsch that they needed to keep
Desmond under wraps to protect much more serious federal investigations.
The cop believes that included the fact that Desmond had carried out the
architecture building bombing. The cop only says about that that there was
some kind of funny business going on with the investigation of the earlier
bombing. He will not elaborate.

LEON HARDCASTLE REALTY, SEATTLE May 15, 1970

A coroner's jury later held that Larry Ward died by "criminal means."
There was never any doubt that the young black man was shot to death by
Seattle Police Office John Hannah. Sannes heard the shotgun blasts that blew
Larry Eugene Ward into his grave. The execution was carried live on
Hannah's walkie-talkie. The only eye-witness to the incident testified to the
King County Grand Jury that he had heard a shot, run to a window of his
home across the street from the shooting, and watched Ward being pursued
by the unmarked police car, and saw Ward fall after the final shotgun blast.
(According to his statements to newsmen as reported by Lou Corsaletti of
The Seattle Times.) King County Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll declined to
press charges against the officer because, he said, there was insufficient
evidence.

Police reported that they found an unexploded bomb near a doorway of

the Hardcastle Realty at 23rd Avenue and East Union Street. There was
never any serious dispute that ward had been placing a bomb when he was
interrupted by the squealing of tires as the staked out patrol car hurtled
towards him. (Sannes had heard the staked out Hannah report on his walkie-
talkie to the effect that a young black male was putting a bag down in front of
the realty office.)

There was never any doubt that Ward was running from the scene of
the crime when Hannah shot him from the back seat of the police car as it
closed in on Ward. The roaring engine, squealing tires, and the shotgun
blasts were transmitted over the cop's radio, as clear and unambiguous
sounds. The neighbor, Melvin Duncan, had seen it and the officers
confirmed it. The only question at the site was whether or not Ward had
turned back toward the pursuing men before the fatal shot was fired.

15
 The problem with the shooting really stemmed from the televised
statements by Alfred Burnett that he had been directed by FBI Agent Stephen
Travis to pay Ward for planting the bomb, the FBI's tip to the Seattle police
that the bombing, by an unknown radical, was to take place, and the fact that
the FBI did not arrest Ward earlier.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARY Late March, 1970

At a study carrel, surrounded by stacks of periodicals, David Sannes

sits examining articles on bombings, arsons, and other acts of violence linked
to the political and civil rights movement in the United States. He begins to
focus on such acts committed after the inauguration of President Richard
Nixon, with particular attention to violent acts attributed to anti-war activists
or groups. Sannes also examines the pattern of Nixon administration reports
and pro-war articles in periodicals. The review pointed to a pattern of White
House, Justice and Treasury Department positions that postulated a scenario
of Soviet influence or control of anti-war groups and their actions and
philosophies.

As a student of politics and history, Sannes knows that staging acts of

violence to justify the imposition of martial law to restore order, or utilizing
agents provocateurs to discredit political opponents, has ancient and
dishonorable traditions. He knows, as a former NSA agent, that President
Johnson had staged the Gulf of Tonkin incident in order to sway Congress to
support the war effort in South Vietnam.

History offers literally thousands of such examples, or suspected

examples. Sannes begins to think the unthinkable. Nixon, after all, had been
elected with about 44% of the popular vote; Nixon had campaigned with a
theme of having a secret plan to end the war. As of March, 1970, that plan
was still a secret from the American people. Was it possible that the Nixon
White House was encouraging or permitting right-wing elements of the FBI,
ATF, and other intelligence and police agencies to foment or encourage
bombings, etc. on American soil, in order to discredit the anti-war and civil
rights movements in the United States?

16
 At first blush, such thoughts seemed like so much conspiracy theory
crap. However, Sannes had electronically eavesdropped on CIA flights to
Yao villages in Laos, flights that delivered gold to the hill people, and
returned with opium paste to be refined into heroin and put into the
smuggling networks to be shipped to this country – to provide off-the-books
financing of our secret war effort in Laos.

Sannes knows that the CIA had been running a Murder Incorporated
operation in South Vietnam that had killed, to his knowledge, hundreds of
innocent village elders whose only crimes were to have objected to some act
of corruption or cruelty by the military juntas or the Thieu/Ky regime.
General Thieu he remembered for his involvement in the CIA's opium trade.
Could not people who committed such violent crimes overseas not commit
them on our soil? However unlikely, it seemed like an idea worth exploring.

VOLUNTEER PARK, SEATTLE Later in March, 1970

While attending a rock concert in order to hear rock bands that might
prove suitable for hiring to perform at either the Checkmate or District
Taverns, Sannes is handed a flyer entitled: "Jeff Desmond, Police and FBI
Agent." The Flyer claims that Jeff is wanted dead or alive for leading Tissot,
Reed, and Van Veenendaal into a trap at the University Way Post Office.
The flyer proclaims that Desmond and police agencies had entrapped the
three.

Merde! Did Jeff hold three people at gunpoint and make them help him
plant a bomb? But the thought of prosecutorial misconduct that rose to the
level of criminal obstruction certainly is a possibility to Sannes. The plain
fact is that defense attorneys were not being told by the Seattle police where
to find Desmond to question him. Sannes knows that Chief Tielsch knew
where his men had taken Jeff to at the behest of the FBI. Sannes calls to
invite a friend for supper.

SEATTLE That Night

Over supper, Sannes shows his policeman friend a copy of the wanted
poster on Desmond. Asked about whether or not the Seattle Police were still

17
keeping Jeff on ice somewhere, out of the reach of defense attorneys, the cop
responds that he doesn’t even want to know, because it could be dangerous to
know. Sannes then responds that it looks like to him that the FBI had pulled
off a brilliant sting operation against the radicals.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARY Early April, 1970

In the periodical stacks, Sannes sits scanning magazine articles on acts

of violence connected to the anti-war and civil rights movements. He finds
too many questions lacking answers. The peace activists that he had been
associating with since his return from Vietnam just didn't fit the
psychological profile of a mad bomber. Explosive and incendiary devices, he
knows from very extensive observation, just plain scare the bejesus out of
ordinary people. Even combat experienced soldiers shrank from the setting
of claymore mines. Untrained people just have a visceral fear of explosives.

During the opening minutes of the Tet Offensive in Qui Nhon, he had
witnessed the desertion of all of the army guards of the 41st Signal
Battalion's ammunition dump. He always had a healthy respect for the
dangers involved with the handling of or making of explosives. The picture
of dewy-eyed, pot-smoking peaceniks walking into powder monkey classes
to learn how to stuff waxed fuses into sticks of dynamite just didn't ring true.

The idea of federal agents provocateurs supplying explosive or

incendiary devices to mentally unbalanced radicals did seem plausible.
Why? For instance, because Sannes did learn while an NSA agent that the
FBI had recruited a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy,
George Lincoln Rockwell to found the American Nazi Party.

A bleary-eyed Sannes walks out determined to find out whether or not

the FBI was conducting a dirty war against the Constitution it was sworn to
uphold. He decides to infiltrate the FBI to find out. He fairly skips out of the
Henry Suzallo Library; he has again broken the bounds of everyday life by
finding a noble rationale for living on the edge, an addiction spawned by his
childhood. He has found a good war to fix himself.

18
SUNDANCE COLLECTIVE, SEATTLE Early April, 1970

A roughly dressed Sannes, at the collective to pick up one of his

District Tavern barmaids, quietly observes the household. This is the home
base of the Seattle Liberation Front.

SANNES' FAVORITE STEAK HOUSE, SEATTLE April 16, 1970

J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John N. Mitchell, in a joint press

conference, are shown on the TV newscasts. They are announcing the
indictments of eight Seattle Liberation Front members in connection with the
February 17, 1970 attack against the U.S. Courthouse in Seattle. A
fascinated Sannes watches as local news broadcasters confirm that six of the
eight have been arrested and that Charles (Chip) Marshall and Michael T.
Justesen were still being sought. An excited Sannes left the restaurant to go
to the District Tavern, sensing that he has an opening to penetrate the FBI by
infiltrating the SLF.

THE DISTRICT TAVERN, SEATTLE Late Evening, April 16, 1970

Sannes talks to his Sundance Collective barmaid about the indictments

and the arrests that day. She says the charges are simply a government
attempt to suppress the anti-war movement. Sannes tells her that he wants to
become more active in the anti-war effort.

BON MARCHE DEPARTMENT STORE, SEATTLE April 17, 1970

Sannes is at a counter purchasing a small tape recorder, blank tapes,

and a telephone eavesdropping device.

A PUGET SOUND BEACH, SEATTLE April 17, 1970

Sannes sits in his car parked in a parking lot and starts talking into the
tape recorder: "It is April 17, 1970 My preliminary investigation leads me to
believe that there is a strong likelihood that the FBI has elements within it
that are fomenting violent acts within the United States. I have decided that
the refiling of federal indictments today against Jan Tissot, John Van

19
Veenendaal, and Michael Reed, by U.S. Attorney Stan Pitkin, for first degree
bombing in connection with the March 3, 1970 University District Post
Officer bombing, given the circumstances, indicates this.

Jeff Desmond has not been charged, and has been hidden from defense
attorneys by the Seattle Police at the request of the FBI, according to my
extremely reliable police source. It has also been reported to me that Jeff
Desmond called in the warning to the FBI about that bombing, and the FBI
called the Seattle Police, who had also been called by Jeff prior to the
bombing. Ergo, Jeff must have been working for the FBI and had their
permission to have carried out the bombing, or he would at least have been
given some type of immunity, or been indicted himself. He is not a material
witness, he is a witness who has been hidden to some purpose that smells like
obstruction of justice to me.

The Seattle Police evidently have been convinced by the FBI to forget
about their belief that Desmond set two bombs, one meant to kill responding
police and fire personnel, on February 20, 1970.

I intend to penetrate the FBI as an undercover agent infiltrating the

most radical and potentially violent elements of the anti-war movement. My
goal is to find out if the FBI has inspired, directed, or carried out alone, arson
and/or bombing attacks on America. If the FBI is indeed fomenting violence
across this country, then they pose an extraordinary threat to the continuation
of our system of constitutional government.

If the White House and elements of the executive branch have

embarked on the historically ancient and dishonorable strategy of setting
"Reichstag Fires" to discredit opponents of the war in Vietnam, and the civil
rights movement, then there can be no higher purpose for my life than to
dedicate it to carrying out a sting operation against the perpetrators of this
operation.

My overall plan is to: 1) penetrate the Sundance Collective and the

Seattle Liberation Front, utilizing my relationship with Jill, a barmaid at the
District, who lives at the Collective, and is part of the SLF; 2) I must
demonstrate my sincerity to the SLF as an anti-war activist with a violent

20
antipathy toward the government, capitalism, and the proponents of the
Vietnam War – while noting my wartime experience with explosives and
weapons; 3) I must then convince the FBI to recruit me as an undercover
agent, but I must not seem to seek recruitment, or I will have little credibility
with them; 4) I must then become a triple agent by becoming a reporter of the
activities of anti-war activists; 5) I must then penetrate illegal operations
conducted by the FBI and become an integral part of them; 6) I must then
figure out a way to break off the activities and expose them; 7) I must find a
way to force the federal government to prosecute me for any of the criminal
acts that I commit at their direction, and thereby expose these criminal
operations of the FBI. The real trick will be to survive if my working
hypothesis proves correct.

If I am right and the FBI has implemented a "Reichstag Fire" approach

to maintaining mainstream American support for the war and racism, then I
could hope to attain the following objectives: 1) a chilling of future attempts
to engage in violent criminal acts to crush political opponents – since
someone else could destroy any such plot from the inside by exposing it; 2)
the press and the people would become sensitive to the possibility of such
attacks on the Constitution; 3) the government could find that it was dealing
with a less gullible press and public in all areas of its activities.

As for me, if I am right, then I must proceed on the assumption that my

life is forfeit. I must be prepared to lie, to commit criminal acts, to lobby for
my own prosecution and conviction for these criminal acts, to spend my adult
life in prison, and/or to be assassinated by federal agents or by
revolutionaries. Even if I succeed in my efforts, I will be a pariah. One only
gets one chance to blow a whistle. You never get a chance to learn any
secrets after the first time.

If I am wrong, and if the executive branch of the federal government is

not engaged in a broad, systematic, covert attack on our Constitution by
virtue of a "dirty war" against the civil rights and anti-war movements, then
my efforts will be directed to helping the FBI ferret out bombers and bringing
them to justice. I believe in the active agitation of our society for the
purposes of ending the war and ending discrimination against women and all
ethnic or religious minorities.

21
 Why me? So far as I can discern the truth, it is because I love shit
disturbing, the Bill of Rights, Socrates, undercover work, Cincinatus, Nathan
Hale, equal protection under law, a free and vigilant press, and freedom from
government. I suppose also because Thomas Jefferson said: "I have sworn
eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the minds of men." I
want to live like that.

A real citizen is willing to give his life to defend the fragile notion of
this country, and to extend its benefits to the point that it lives up to its
promises to all of its citizens. These rambling ruminations constitute tape
number one of a dogface's diary of another dirty war. The tapes will be
hidden to be released upon the occasion of my demise to the press.

SEATTLE CENTER, SEATTLE April 18, 1970

Thousands of anti-war protesters, boisterous but peaceful, march

through downtown Seattle to a rally at the foot of the Space Needle.
Unexpectedly, one of the FBI's most sought fugitives, Chip Marshall,
appears, to speak at the rally. Federal and local authorities are prevented
from arresting him by a human blockage. The potential for embarrassment of
the FBI is tremendous if Marshall escapes. Sannes, at the rally with his
barmaid, sees this as a wonderful opportunity to gain the notice and
appreciation of the FBI. Slipping through the packed throng, Sannes eases up
to the crowd around Marshall. Hearing Marshall tell a friend that he would
meet him at the Century Tavern at 5:00 pm, Sannes moves away from the
mob scene.

DOWNTOWN SEATTLE April 18, 1970

In a quiet telephone booth, Sannes calls the Seattle office of the FBI,
identified himself, gives his address, and tells the agent that he has
information that Chip Marshall will be at the Century Tavern at 5:00 pm.
The FBI agent asks Sannes to repeat his name and address; then he asks how
the caller knows that Marshall will be at that location. Sannes tells him that
one of the bastard's roommates at the Sundance Collective worked for him at
the District Tavern, and he had gone down to the rally to see what the

22
Commies were up to. The FBI agent politely thanks Sannes for the tip, and
asks if he will go to the tavern to see if Marshall shows up; and if Marshall
does, to call the FBI again. Sannes says: "Yes, sir!" The conversation is
then terminated.

CENTURY TAVERN, SEATTLE April 18, 1970

Marshall does show up at the Century Tavern about 4:50 pm. A staked
out Sannes casually goes into the tavern and slides into a telephone booth to
call the FBI. Minutes later, as Chip Marshall and David Dellinger of Chicago
Conspiracy trial fame sit sipping suds, a massive raid goes down. More than
twenty FBI agents and Seattle Police rush the tavern. Just before the sounds
of screaming tires, crashing doors, and shouts of "FBI. Freeze." rend the
beer joint's air, Sannes sits down in a booth with a policeman friend of his.

When the off-duty cop asks what he is doing, a smile crosses Dave's
face as he answers: "Working. Just put your hands on the table and sit
quietly, no matter what happens." The raid establishes Dave's identity as an
undercover FBI agent with his friend, David Franklin, a University of
Washington Police Officer. It is an incredible coincidence, but an
opportunity Sannes exploits. Sannes knows he has the FBI hooked.

The FBI doesn't have to suffer through network and local newscasts
showing a fugitive figuratively thumbing his nose at J. Edgar Hoover's
troops. Hoover will get a report on the circumstances of the capture. The
FBI will have to be intrigued by the transcript of the telephone tips. Hoover
will care little about the arrest, but he will care everything about the near
disaster to the FBI's public relations.

The FBI will conduct an investigation of the background of the tipster.

That search will lead to the National Security Agency and the Army. The
NSA will tell the FBI that Sannes was a genuine bemedaled counterspy, a
veteran of three combat tours of duty in Vietnam. The FBI will have to take
the bait.

23
DISTRICT TAVERN, SEATTLE Early Morning, April 27, 1970

"District Tavern," answered a telephone ring awakens David Sannes in

his tiny office/apartment above the enormous beer hall. The anonymous
voice asks if he is alone. An instantly alert Sannes answers in the
affirmative. The caller then says that he has called to thank Dave for his help
to the FBI and tells him that he wants to meet. The two thereupon arrange for
a meeting to take place an hour later, in a parking lot, miles across town from
Sannes' normal haunts.

When Sannes asks how he will recognize the caller, he is told that he
will be recognized. The "Marshall gambit" had worked – the FBI wants to
recruit him, thinks Sannes in a sweating, dry-mouthed moment of scared
spitless dread and exultation.

A DOWNTOWN PARKING LOT, SEATTLE April 27, 1970

A composed, carefree-looking, once and future counterspy wheels his

new Pontiac into the parking lot, and quickly spots the FBI agent. As he
casually slips into the passenger seat of the waiting car, Sannes notices the
freshly trimmed, unstylishly short haircut, the intense, intelligent face, the
pinstriped and vested blue suit, and the FBI wingtip shoes. A second glance
picks up the famous white, button-down mandatory for Hoover's troops. The
identification confirms that the driver is Louis M. Harris, Special Agent of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Harris conveys the gratitude of

Director Hoover and the FBI for Sannes' assistance in apprehending Chip
Marshall. Then Harris wants to know how Sannes had been in a position to
so help. Sannes explains that he has been monitoring the growth and the
actions of the anti-war movement since he returned from Vietnam. Sannes
further tells Harris that his opinion is that the war in Vietnam has largely
become just a convenient horse to be whipped by every grand-standing, self-
aggrandizing, America-hating anarchist and communist dope-headed stooge
that has come down the pike.

24
 Sannes also unburdens himself of the fervently articulated belief that
Congress has kept up a half-hearted effort that is turning into a sell-out of the
South Vietnamese people, due to the fact that the politicians know that
Americans aren't willing to make much of a sacrifice to defend the free world
form an ideologically committed world communism. Sannes also notes that,
from his personal observations, all the radical leaders are really interested in
is anarchy, personal power, drugs, and groupie sex. In his nervousness, he
almost over-sells the pitch.

But Harris reels himself in by asking Sannes if he will continue to

infiltrate radical groups under the control and direction of the FBI, becoming
progressively a more violent radical. The objective is to identify, target, and
penetrate groups of radicals interested in carrying out violent attacks. Sannes
then asks why Harris thinks he could do that. Harris responds by telling
Sannes that the bureau has been making an intensive investigation of his
record and knows that Sannes has the training and experience to do the job.

Harris adds the statement that Sannes has come highly recommended
by Ft. Mead (NSA). After Sannes says he wants to help, Harris explains to
him that all contact with the bureau will be by the code name, "TJ", through a
mailbox dead drop, and a confidential telephone number. Sannes is to work
under deep cover, and will be paid $1,500 cash, per month, plus expenses.
The pay will be net, and never reported.

Sannes agrees to work for the FBI per that deal except he refuses to
take pay or expense money. He tells Harris that his citizenship
responsibilities are not for sale. Harris objects by observing that he gets paid.
Sannes rejoins by noting that Harris only has one job, and that he has a
regular job designing, building, and managing taverns and restaurants.

Sannes also states that he would not put his life on the line by
becoming an undercover agent for money; he does not want his thinking
prejudiced by a salary, or his cover compromised by having almost three
times the spending money he should have. Harris reluctantly consents to this
condition. Sannes then asks about the FBI secretly authorizing him to carry a
concealed weapon and obtaining a standard Army 45 semiautomatic for him.
Harris agrees. Finally, Sannes inquires about what he could do if he was

25
picked up in the performance of a credibility establishing criminal act, by the
local police authorities.

Harris instructs Sannes that his job is to not get caught, but that if that
does happen, as a last resort he is to tell the arresting officer to telephone
Capt. Williams of the Seattle Police Department, before they take him
anywhere. But Sannes is warned by Harris that any such action could blow
his cover. As a final thought, Sannes is asked to try to find out where
Michael Justeson is, and that the bureau's information is that Justeson is a
Weatherman.

SEATTLE May to October 5, 1970

Sannes gradually develops his undercover role by participating in all of

the marches and rallies staged by the anti-war movement in the Seattle area
during a hot political summer. He also writes and distributes hundreds of
mimeographed copies of his seminal work: "Betty Crocker's Home
Cookbook of Explosive and Incendiary Devices." In meetings to plan
marches and actions, he becomes an idea man for more and more daring and
radical plans. But he always stays in the background. When several
thousand protestors march near the I-5 Freeway, he personally leads them
onto the freeway. That becomes a popular tactic in Seattle.

The marches and rallies are generally peaceful but always have the
potential for violence. Sannes relishes the idea of having federal instructions
to be an agent provocateur – a free pass to throw stones at the police tactical
squads that always shadow anti-war demonstrations. Many times he has to
run from charging, riot-equipped police; once narrowly escaping capture. He
calls in to report radical plans for demonstrations on a fairly regular basis.

By dint of these efforts, Sannes is able to penetrate a radical commune

whose members are at least theoretically interested in carrying out a bombing
attack on an appropriate target. By patient cajoling and entreaty, Sannes
convinces the group to at least plan such an action. A reluctant communal
group agrees to help with the planning of such a strike. The target talked up
by Sannes is the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. The idea is to dislodge the
Seattle end of the several mile long bridge by planting 1,700 pounds of

26
explosive around the pilings at that end of the massive, floating, concrete
structure.

When the pilings attaching one end of the bridge are blown up, the
freeway bridge itself will act as a wind and wave powered lever that will rip
itself away from its moorings at the Bellevue end of the Bridge. Thus set
adrift, the bridge will be a several mile long, concrete barge, packed with
rush hour motorists, that is subject to breaking up by further wind and wave
action. The bombing will be a bombing heard around the world. Sannes
touts the idea as one that will bring the war home to America and help to
trigger an American withdrawal from Vietnam – saving thousands of lives on
both sides.

The explosive will be 100 pound bags of ammonium phosphate, a

fertilizer, fitted in oversize plastic bags with enough buoyancy to tow, barely
submerged, behind Sannes' powerboat to a point underneath the west end of
the bridge. There the bags will be tied to the pilings, and detonated by a bag
filled with ammonium phosphate mixed with fuel oil, triggered by a blasting
cap.

Sannes makes several telephone reports to Harris on his luck in

penetrating a potentially radical group. Harris encourages him to continue
his bomb attack planning, and to make more of an effort to penetrate the
defense teams in the Seattle 7, and Air Force ROTC Fire Bombing 8 cases.
The focus here is the FBI's instructions to get close to all of the defendants
and to the defenses.

Thrilled by the success he has made in penetrating covert FBI

operations, but terrified by the prospect of blowing the whistle on elite agents
of the United States Department of Justice who could casually countenance
mass murder, Sannes makes arrangements to assist the FBI in a truly
repulsive assault on the rights of some American citizens to a fair trial.
Meantime, Sannes makes arrangements through his University of
Washington policeman asset to clear the bombing plot with FBI management.
He asks an unsuspecting asset to arrange a meeting for him, by means of a
request from U.W. Police Chief Shanrahan to FBI Special Agent-in-Charge J.

27
Earl Milnes of the Seattle office, with Milnes to verify that he is to direct the
members of the radical commune in carrying out the bridge bombing.

Chief Shanrahan does arrange the meeting between Sannes and

Assistant Special Agent-In-Charge, of the Seattle office, Bert Carter. That
meeting takes place on October 12, 1970. Sannes' asset, officer David
Franklin, is told by Sannes that the purpose of the meeting is to have FBI
management direction in whether or not a plot to bomb the Evergreen Point
Floating Bridge should be stopped or permitted to continue to mass murder.

The cop is assured that Sannes will not let the bombing take place. He
only communicates to his boss, Shanrahan, that a nervous person wants to
talk to Milnes about an extremely sensitive matter, and is using this method
of contact to make sure he gets through to the top man. Officer Franklin is
not told that the FBI has instructed Sannes to act as an agent provocateur in
the lot.

ACLU OFFICES, SMITH TOWER, SEATTLE

October 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,1970

Posing as a radical political volunteer, who wants to use the taverns he

helped manage to hold benefit concerts to contribute money to the legal
defenses of the Seattle 7, and Air Force 8, Sannes goes to these offices on a
daily basis. He participates as a volunteer to confidential client/attorney
conversations between defendants in the Seattle 7, Air Force 8, and
Longview Army Truck Bombing 3 cases and their attorneys. He purloins
confidential documents, copies them, and returns them. He helps plan benefit
concerts.

He overhears, for instance, attorney Michael Tigar ask the Longview

Bombing 3: "First of all, did you guys do it?" He hears the defendants
answer that they had. He cases the ACLU offices for a prospective break-in
and photographing, on a wholesale basis, of defense files in these and any
other cases the FBI might be interested in. He has gained the trust of the
defendants, while he is engaged in a conspiracy to deprive them of their
protection to a fair trial under the Bill of Rights.

28
BALLARD DISTRICT, SEATTLE October 12, 1970

At the specified time and place, an unmarked car picks up Sannes. The
driver is never identified, the passenger is Assistant Special Agent-In-Charge
Bert Carter, of the Seattle office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Sannes sits in the back seat with a tape recorder taped to his upper thigh.
After Carter has presented his FBI identification, and Sannes has inspected it,
Sannes makes his report on the status of the bridge bombing plot. Bert Carter
orders Sannes to carry out the bombing, and to booby trap the 1,700 pounds
of explosives so that the commune leader, who is to be with Sannes in setting
the explosive device, dies in the blast. Carter wants a radical to be found at
the site.

Sannes would then be transferred by the FBI to another area of the

country, where he would be accepted as a master terrorist, he would have
made his bones. Sannes also briefs Carter and his partner on what he had
found out in becoming part of the defense teams the previous week, and
volunteers to burglarize the ACLU offices and photograph everything of
significance. Carter instructs Sannes to concentrate on the Seattle 7
penetration because the case will soon be in trial, but not to worry about
doing a black bag job on the ACLU offices.

From the statement, and the tone in which it is spoken, Sannes knows
that the FBI already has an informant in the ACLU office in Seattle. Carter
said such a burglary would be too dangerous, after Sannes explained how
easy it would be for him to hid until the staff went home. Too dangerous!
When Carter has just finished ordering Sannes to carry out mass murder, and
the assassination of a bomber? It only adds up one way, the FBI is already
running a covert operation at the ACLU office. When he is dropped off,
Sannes practices counter-surveillance techniques for several hours, then takes
his tape recorder and tape to a dead drop. It is time to come out from the
belly of the beast.

It is time to activate the espionage ring that reports to spymasters in the

Peoples Republic of China. It is time to think again and again about how to
surface in public and yet survive. It is time for Sannes to fully realize that
local FBI management is willing to fight the influence of political radicals by

29
carrying out, or permitting, the mass murder of innocent Americans – so why
should they stick at assassinating a traitor who exposed their criminal
methods to the public? Why not, indeed?

The stink of fear begins to cling to Sannes, like a coat he cannot ever
take off. He is no John Wayne, he knows that unless he is very good, and
very lucky, the FBI will kill him. He believes that the FBI threat to the
Constitution and its Bill of Rights is worth dying to counter, but he doesn't
want to die. But Sannes does not intend to make a fatal mistake if he can
help it, even though he is willing to risk it.

He most fears that he just has delusions of grandeur to think he can

figure out a way to force the FBI to stop its criminal operations, and stay
alive to see that day. The horror of spending his adult life in prison he deals
with by denial – it would be a quiet place to study and make a real scholar out
of himself. But death is forever.

SEATTLE October 13, 1970 – March, 1971

Sannes breaks off contact with the FBI and the radical community with
but one exception. He had cultivated contact with one brilliant member of
the defense collectives working on behalf of the Seattle 7 and the Air Force
Fire-Bombing 8, a man by the name of Thurman Fremsted. After the trial of
the Seattle 7 had started in November, in the court of U.S. District Court
Judge George Boldt, Sannes takes Fremsted out for a few drinks. Having
already involved Thurman in a plot to obstruct justice in the case, while
reporting to the FBI, Sannes feels that he could be trusted. Sannes reveals to
Fremsted that he has been an undercover FBI informant while working at the
Smith Tower, and that he has been working there at the direction of the FBI.
Sannes tells Thurman that he wants to testify as a surprise witness for the
defense, in the Seattle 7 case.

A stunned Fremsted agrees to, at an appropriate time, inform one

defense attorney, Carl Maxey, of his availability. The contacts with Maxey
could only be just prior to the day of such testimony in open court. What
finally happens is that just before Sannes is to come forward in the public
trial, the word of the mystery witness is given to other defense attorneys.

30
There is a leak about a mystery witness, it is speculated when Judge Boldt
holds all seven defendants in contempt for courtroom antics, and declares a
mistrial. A defeated Sannes is too afraid to work, and breaks off contact with
Fremsted. Sannes lives in an unheated basement, and works on completing a
book of war experience poetry mixed with love poetry.

The involvement of Sannes in his red Chinese espionage ring continues

while a cryptic clue to its existence is obliquely sent to the FBI. An
anonymous Chinese speaking caller warns of the espionage ring, although not
its nature or purpose, to a Chinese language translation capable FBI. When
the poetry book project reaches a suitable point, Sannes contacts the
Managing Editor of the Seattle Post Intelligence, a Hearst newspaper.

Jack Doughty, who was also a top Hearst newspaper chain authority on
Asia, reviews the poetry manuscript, and asks Sannes if he can help get it
published by Avon Books. Sannes declines, but several luncheon discussions
of the war follow between the two men. Sannes has obtained another asset.
Jack Doughty appears to have great respect for Sannes.

SEATTLE Late March, 1971

In a wretched little apartment on Highway 99, Sannes carefully surveys

the deliberately left mess, puts his two carefully prepared waste baskets of
garbage into one bag, takes it to the apartment house disposal container, and
catches a bus downtown to the law offices of Jeffrey Steinborn, a Seattle 7
defense attorney. At his apartment, he has left an unusual scene. The
garbage carefully placed in the apartment house dumpster contains the usual
detritus of urban life, and some very unusual items. These include two
plastic bags, one smaller than the other, one clean, and one soiled by moss
and earth from across town. A burned piece of paper, with a couple of
fragments containing a series of numbers, are scattered in the same bag. In
the apartment itself, a cookie crumb has been carefully placed under a section
of carpet that has been lifted and replaced.

The cookie would crumble to testify that an intruder had stopped by.
One of the few books in the place contains a padlock key secreted in the
spine, and a few of the pages have a single word underlined. Even a rookie

31
FBI bagman would notice the smell, a sour one, when he crept into the room.
Just before leaving the converted motel room, Sannes urinates on the tired old
mattress and bottom bed sheet. Empty beer and wine bottles, with many sets
of fingerprints that would not be traceable also act as props. FBI laboratory
experts would easily put the national security nightmare together when
shown photographs of the dog-eared paperback stuffed under the sodden cot.

Sannes has been preparing for this day by doing more than trying to
develop some measure of credibility with the managing editor of the Seattle
P.I. He has also been wrestling with the problem of how to prevent the FBI
from assassinating him after he crosses over. He has developed a notional
espionage network, directed by communist China, and has planted clues to its
existence. The idea is to prevent the FBI from taking violent retribution until
after public exposure made such a course unproductive. He calculates that
the FBI would quietly suffer his public denunciations of its criminal
misconduct if it could be convinced that he was the agent of a Chinese spy
ring, and if it believed that it could wrap up the operation.

The American public would countenance the FBI's commission of

criminal acts if they resulted in the uncovering of foreign spies. Sannes
knows that he has an edge in this high stakes game; the FBI would not be
inclined to believe that one man, acting alone, either could or would carry out
a sting operation against them. Plotters tend to be easily convinced of plots
by others. Moreover, there would be no positive outcome for Sannes. He
would either be killed, imprisoned, or live out his life as a pariah.

The government holds most of the cards. If the FBI professionally

carries out a black bag job on Sannes' dwelling, and connects the other clues
left by him, its leadership should conclude that Sannes has been turned while
an NSA agent in Vietnam, and was being forced to cooperate with China's
intelligence service.

As Sannes rides the bus to Steinborn's office, he worries that the FBI
will not find the tape recorder in the flour, or the marked up pages of lawyers
in the telephone book. Mainly though, he just worries about sudden death at
the bloodstained hands of his own government.

32
 Jeffrey Steinborn is startled to hear that Sannes wishes to have a few
minutes of his time on a matter of extreme urgency. Jeff is taken aback when
Dave Sannes begins the conversation by demanding; "Do you know me
What is my name? Where have you seen me?" Jeff says: "What is this all
about?" Dave then responds: "Just bear with me for a moment and answer
my questions, please." So Jeff answers: "You are Dave Sannes. I met you at
the Smith Tower and saw you there a number of times when we were
working on the Seattle 7 case."

Sannes then asks: "Did you see me participating in what you would
consider privileged client/attorney conversations?" Jeff, now focusing
intently, answers: "Yes." Sannes then observes: "Would it surprise you to
know that I was working as an undercover agent of the FBI at that time, on
that case, and my FBI code name is TJ?" As a visibly shocked Steinborn sits
down at his desk, Sannes tells him that he is willing to make out a sworn
affidavit detailing his participation in an FBI plot to obstruct justice by
denying the Seattle 7 defendants their rights, under the 4th and 6th
amendments to the Constitution, to a fair trial.

Steinborn jumps to his feet and asks Sannes if the FBI knows that he is
at Steinborn's office. Steinborn then makes immediate preparation to have
Sannes' confession in the ROTC Air Force Annex fire-bombing case dictated
and transcribed, after being informed of Sannes' desire to make a statement
then in that case alone. Sannes tells Steinborn part of his involvement, on
behalf of the FBI, in the Seattle 7, ROTC Annex, and Longview Army Truck
Bombing cases; since those were the cases that Jeff had personal confirming
knowledge concerning.

As soon as Jeff has made copies of Dave's sworn confession in the

ROTC case, he passes out copies of it to some of his partners, and informs
them of his plan to confront the U.S. Attorney, Stan Pitkin, with it in an
attempt to gain dismissal of the 15 federal felony indictments against the 8
defendants in the fire-bombing case. Steinborn then calls Pitkin and sets up a
meeting on a one-half hour notice basis.

Jeff who had armed himself with a 38 caliber pistol during Sannes'
visit, then calls a cab to take him to Pitkin's office. He is afraid to go by

33
driving his own car, he tells his secretary. Steinborn's pitch to the U.S.
Attorney is to be that Sannes has grown to feel great revulsion to the FBI's
tactics in the case, does not want to testify in open court about his activities
on behalf of the FBI, and will go away quietly, if the federal government
dismisses the charges in the ROTC case. Steinborn believes that, but of
course the ROTC case is only step one in Sannes' plan to expose the criminal
actions of the FBI.

Within an hour of his departure, an excited Steinborn is back in his

office, telling Sannes that a shaken Pitkin has called J. Earl Milnes, the
Special Agent In Charge of the Seattle office of the FBI, and that Milnes has
confirmed that Sannes is an undercover informant, code-named TJ, has been
assigned a dead drop, and has had several contacts with FBI agents. Milnes
refused further comment. Hearing that, according to Steinborn, Pitkin has
made the deal subject to approval by the Department of Justice.

Steinborn is in a celebratory mood; for Sannes, there is a mixture of

exhilaration and numbing fear – he has crossed his Rubicon. Sannes knows
that if perchance the criminal operations of the FBI were not sanctioned by J.
Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell, then he and several FBI
agents will soon be facing criminal charges of truly staggering proportions.

If, on the other hand, the local FBI crimes he has been involved in were
carried out with the Approval of the Nixon administration, then he is in great
personal danger. He knows that the initial reaction of the FBI will be stunned
disbelief that anyone would have the nerve to confront them in this manner.
He also knows that the FBI will respond by launching a massive investigation
of him.

They cannot afford to terminate him until they could assess the risk to
benefit ratio. He can only hope that the FBI will have come up with a legal
or illegal entry and search of his rooms.

With a couple of his signed confessions in the ROTC case in his

pocket, Sannes takes the stairs down to the lobby. Three FBI agents trail him
as he walks outside. It is less than two hours after Steinborn met Pitkin, but
there they are. As he walks up to a bus stop, the three FBI agents gather

34
around him, in a menacing manner, and mouth silent death threats. Sannes
has no trouble in acting afraid, but the mouthed death threats, and the hands
molded into the shape of firing guns tell Sannes two things. Number 1, the
FBI has found the tape recorder hidden in the floor, and number 2, he is not
dealing with a rogue operation.

An unsanctioned operation would have been ducking for cover. The

FBI agents do not follow him onto the bus, they jump into cruising cars.
They have made another mistake. After transferring to his second bus which
starts onto the limited access, divided Highway 99, Sannes gets off the bus,
runs across the busy traffic lanes, and eludes the watchers by hiding until
after dark. A differently dressed Sannes slips into the offices of the Seattle
P.I.

Sannes waits until Jack Doughty is alone, then goes up to him to tell
him that he needs a few minutes to speak with him alone. An incredulous
Doughty is told the story of Sannes' help to the FBI in effecting the capture of
Chip Marshall, and of his subsequent recruitment by the feds.

Doughty is not told of the details of the reasons for Sannes' work with
the FBI, and is only told of the obstruction of justice conspiracy in the Seattle
7, ROTC, and Army truck bombing cases. Doughty brings in his top
investigative reporter, Walter Wright, who is shown a copy of the affidavit
made earlier that day. Neither the managing editor nor Wright express much
belief in what Sannes has to say about the FBI being involved in directing an
obstruction of justice conspiracy.

Sannes swears them to silence, and explains to them both that the proof
of what he had told them will be established if the Justice Department files an
executed motion for dismissal with prejudice with the 6th District Court.

35
FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, SEATTLE April 8, 1971

Seattle P.I. reporter, Maribeth Morris, picks up a copy of a motion for

dismissal with prejudice, executed personally by Attorney General of the
United States John N. Mitchell, as to all 15 federal conspiracy and fire-
bombing felony charges against the 8 defendants in the University of
Washington Air Force ROTC Building case.

SEATTLE March to November, 1971

The carpet cookie had been crumbled. The FBI took the bait. After two
weeks of attempts to investigate the story and countless fruitless attempts to
get the FBI to comment, the Seattle P.I. and the Hearst newspapers broke the
story. An AP correspondent in Seattle takes Sannes for dinner to the 13
Coins Restaurant, one of Seattle's finest, and during the meal asks for
exclusive rights to Sannes' obituary, and a photograph to be used in the event
of his untimely demise. Don Oliver of NBC films an exclusive story on the
bridge bombing plot.

Another sworn Sannes affidavit is filed with the 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals in connection with the appeal of the contempt of court citations
against the Seattle 7. A third Sannes affidavit confessing to conspiracy to
obstruct justice is filed as part of a motion for dismissal of the felony charges
against James E. Green, a defendant in the Longview Truck Bombing case.
The federal judge, George Boldt, is picked by President Nixon to head the
Pay Board a few days before Sannes is scheduled to give open court
testimony in that case.

Sannes is followed everywhere by FBI agents mouthing silent death

threats, until a disguised John Kifner, a correspondent for the New York
Times, watches this action for three hours. The FBI hunt for the notional
espionage ring. The FBI safe house where they had stashed Jeffrey Paul
Desmond proves not to be very safe. Sannes, with the assistance of political
radicals, finds Desmond. A knock on the door brings an unsuspecting
Desmond to be confronted by a grim faced Sannes who quietly tells Jeff to
come outside and walk slowly ahead of him. Desmond had been snared by

36
the old finger in the raincoat trick. Desmond physically shrinks when he
approaches the waiting car and sees John Van Veenendaal standing beside it.

Jeff is politely asked to get into the front seat of the car between
Thurman Fremsted and Van Veenendaal. Sannes gets into the back seat next
to a silent Walter Wright of the Seattle P.I. When Dave asks Jeff if he wants
to have a chance for a new life, a terrified Jeff says yes. Then Sannes asks
Jeff to start at the beginning of his involvement as an informant, and to
recount his role in as much detail as he could remember. Sannes tells Jeff
that if he caught him in a lie, there will be no more questions. Desmond
confesses non-stop for two hours.

Jeff tells of his recruitment by Louis Harris, and of his work in carrying
out the bombings of the University of Washington Architecture Building and
the University Way Post Office. Jeff tells it all. Walter Wright's tape
recorder gets it all. Then Jeff is fed and taken to KING TV to be interviewed
by Mike James. When the video taped interview is concluded by the NBC
affiliate, Desmond calls back to the safe house, where the call is answered by
a very irate FBI agent who orders Jeff to get back there. Sannes, who
recognizes the voice of the FBI agent, says Jeff can't come out to play until
he has completed his media interviews.

The FBI agent breaks the connection, and Sannes, Fremsted, Van
Veenendaal, and Desmond go into the underground for the next two weeks.
After the Seattle P.I. and KING TV have run their stories, Sannes goes to a
radical house to live. He has need of new quarters due to a very unusual
incident just before he found Desmond.

That had started when John Kifner had come to Seattle to interview
Sannes for the New York Times. Kifner checked into the Olympic Hotel
under an assumed name, to await his interviewee. Sannes, accompanied by
his bodyguard (by this time, Sannes had been subjected to months of intense
FBI surveillance and literally hundreds of death threats from agents who had
taken to walking in front, in back, and on his sides, in a moving pocket),
Fremsted, had been walking along the west side of the hotel until they came
abreast of the 6 story parking garage and the entrance to its 4th floor sky
bridge. Suddenly Fremsted and Sannes ran from the agents and raced up the

37
stairway to the sky bridge. Running a few paces ahead of the nearest FBI
goon, the pair raced across the bridge and slipped into a normally locked
hotel stairwell door that had been left ajar by a confederate. They slammed
the door shut on the FBI agents and raced up to the 10th floor room occupied
by Kifner.

After 7 hours of interviewing, the 3 went down to dinner in the

Olympic Grill Restaurant, with Kifner dressed in old denims as had been
arranged before Kifner left New York. The 3 had barely been seated in the
elegant hotel restaurant before the first FBI agent walked in and spotted them.
Throughout the leisurely supper, 3 FBI agents, each alone at tables
surrounding them continued with their pattern of persistent, silent death
threats directed at Sannes.

At the end of the meal, Kifner got up and approached the agent who
obviously was in charge. Taking out his New York Times identification, he
introduced himself and asked for the man's name and ID. The 3 shocked
agents jumped up, almost as one, threw cash down on their tables, and rushed
out of the restaurant. Kifner had watched the dozens of death threats by men
acting under color of their badges. It was, he said later, one of the key things
that convinced him that Sannes had been telling him the truth.

With the FBI surveillance team in a momentary panic, Sannes,

Fremsted, and Kifner sprinted out the door and across to the parking garage,
where a woman waited in a car with the engine running. She jumped out,
Fremsted jumped behind the wheel, and the 3 raced off going down the
sidewalk against traffic on a one-way street. The surveillance vehicles were
lost within a couple of blocks. Then Kifner went to the place where he was
to meet the U. of W. police officer for another interview.

When hours later, they all went by Dave's place to drop him off, they
walked him to his door. Sannes' rooms had been methodically destroyed. All
the fixture and cabinets had been smashed, the carpet cut to shreds, all of the
furniture and personal belongings had been slashed and/or trashed. Although
Sannes was not a rocket scientist, it seemed possible that the havoc wreaked
had something to do with the tricks he had played on the FBI that day. He

38
moved to the radical house that night, and found there a brilliant, lovely
woman named Lyda Held.

When the media had come out with the confessions of Jess Desmond to
being a bomber for the FBI, Sannes came out of hiding and moved back to
the radical house, where Lyda lived. The seeds of mutual passion, that first
night back, planted so lustily, soon turned into love; they were married that
December. Lyda was a political idealist and activist; her father was one of
the most senior scientists working for the Atomic Energy Commission. He
had worked on the Manhattan Project, he still worked for the A.E.C. But
what made his daughter happy, made him happy.

N.E.T. and P.B.S. filmed a story on Sannes, Desmond, and another FBI
bomb plotter, Alfred Burnett. Burnett, at the direction of FBI Special Agent
Stephen Travis, according to Burnett, had given a bomb to Larry Ward, paid
him to set it off at the Leon Hardcastle Realty, and had come forward to tell it
to the King County Grand Jury, which Sannes had been lobbying to
investigate the case. Sannes also publicly called for a federal grand jury
investigation of the FBI and U.S. Attorney Stan Pitkin concerning their
actions in his and Desmond's cases. White House and Justice Department
pressure caused N.E.T. to cancel their story on Desmond, Burnett, Sannes,
and the FBI.

Public protests caused P.B.S. and N.E.T. to make the cancelled story to
be run the following week in October as the subject of a two hour special on
205 public television stations. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed
the contempt citations of the Seattle 7. Stan Pitkin, after a decent interval,
dismissed, without explanation, all charges against the Seattle 7. Former
United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had become a critic of J.
Edgar Hoover, financed a trip by Sannes to participate as a speaker at the
Committee on Public Justice conference at Princeton University.

That conference, sponsored and/or attended by such people as Clark,

Burke Marshall, Arthur Schlesinger, Mrs. Marshall Field, Norman Dorsen,
Jules Feiffer, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Frank Donner, Martin Peretz,
and many other prominent ACLU supporters, heard from Sannes many of the
facts of what he had done. National media attention to Sannes was intense at

39
the meeting. Sannes did not tell anyone how it was that he came to be an
agent provocateur for the FBI.

He did not believe that he would have had the same impact if he had
presented himself as a patriot who had decided that the preservation of the
Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and our reasonably democratic way of life,
called him to arms. He did not present himself as an American Hero in the
tradition of his idol, Nathan Hale. He did not even present himself as an
ordinarily decent citizen. He just publicly detailed his commission of
criminal acts and implicated FBI Special Agents Bert Carter and Louis Harris
as his crime partners.

Sannes hunted down and brought forward two other self-confessed

bombers, who also implicated FBI agents as crime partners. He publicly
taunted President Nixon and the Justice Department of John Mitchell to
convene a general grand jury to inquire into his allegations, and to either
indict him for his confessed criminal acts or to conversely, indict him for
perjury and obstruction of justice in executing affidavits in the Seattle 7,
ROTC Fire-Bombing, and Longview Army Truck Bombing cases. He
publicly accused J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon, and Mitchell of running a criminal
operation to discredit political opponents, and of directing a criminal cover-
up of the parts of this gang that he had publicly exposed.

Sannes gave a detailed account of his participation in crimes carried out

at the direction of the Justice Department. He spoke at the University of
Washington on this same theme. It was perhaps significant that Sannes
drafted a very long and highly detailed letter to United States Senator Sam
Ervin pleading for a Senate investigation of his charges. He argued, in that
letter, that it was an incontestable fact that serious federal crimes had been
committed, and that nobody was being prosecuted for them.

The letter argued that Sannes had either committed serious crimes for
the FBI or he had perjured himself in affidavits that had been put before
federal prosecutors and judges as part of defense attorney efforts that had
resulted in the quashing of 37 federal felony indictments. The letter to Sam
Irvin also detailed the public confessions of Desmond and Burnett.

40
 The FBI surveillance of David R. Sannes never stopped, but the
constant death threats against him stopped after the Kifner incident. Sannes
even called J. Edgar Hoover's office to demand an investigation and staged a
sit-in at the FBI office in Seattle for the same purpose. The FBI agents in the
office fled into interior offices and had the Seattle Police arrest Sannes. The
FBI refused to press charges, and Sannes was released before he could be
booked. Sannes also collected a great many sworn affidavits from witnesses
to his FBI sponsored acts. The Justice Department took no action.

SEATTLE December 28, 1971

An article in the Seattle Times details the seven major changes in the
FBI leadership that had been made by J. Edgar Hoover in the months
following Sannes' public charges of FBI criminal acts. Charles D. Breman,
appointed just a year earlier as assistant director for domestic intelligence was
demoted to the rank of inspector. William Sullivan, assistant director of the
general investigative division, came to FBI HQ one day and found Hoover
had changed the locks on his office door, and that he had been terminated.
James H. Gale, the assistant director in charge of the special investigation
division, had his letter of resignation accepted. The list went on, almost as if
Hoover had become upset by something. But what could it be?

Sannes reads the article and hopes it wasn't anything he had said.
Perhaps there was a problem in heretofore pristine public image of the FBI.
One thing was for sure, no FBI agent had ever been indicted or convicted for
any felony. It was also true that before Sannes went in from the cold to the
law offices of Jeffrey Steinborn, no stain had ever sullied the escutcheon of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover guarded the public reputation of
the FBI like a corpulent queen bee protects her eggs. It was much the same,
for the FBI was Hoover's own. Who could tell the reason for the massive
shakeup. Sannes thought perhaps it was something he said to the assembled
law students at Yale University.

SEATTLE March – September, 1972

Efforts by Sannes to force a federal grand jury to investigate continue.

On a daily basis, for many weeks, he stands in front of the U.S. Courthouse in

41
Seattle passing out literature detailing the allegations and the unanswered
legal questions. When that fails, he tries to get before a federal judge by
chaining himself to the main entrances that he chained shut. He is cut loose
without charge. He then tries to physically force his way past the federal
police guarding the lobby in an effort to force the U.S. Attorney, Stan Pitkin,
to have him arrested and brought to trial before a judge. Day after day he
wrestles with the same two federal policemen in the main lobby of the
courthouse.

On one occasion, Sannes has one federal cop down on the floor in a
punishing headlock. It is the lunch hour, the lobby is packed, Jurors,
prospective jurors, deputy federal prosecutors, private attorneys, courthouse
visitors, and clerical people have to walk around Sannes and the two
struggling policemen. No one would arrest Sannes. Finally, Sannes comes
armed with a 5 gallon pail of loose cow shit, splatters it around the lobby and
kicks it on the two stinking federal men.

No one would arrest Sannes although about 15 Deputy U.S. Marshals

converge on the lobby in response to one cop's plaintive walkie-talkie
message that: "Sannes is down here in the lobby kicking cow shit on us."
The marshals throw Sannes bodily out of the courthouse. Outside, as Sannes
wipes the shit off of his shoes, a lawyer acquaintance warns Sannes to get off
of the grass lest he be arrested. Sannes asks him if he is kidding, telling him
that he has just splashed liquid cow manure all over the lobby, kicked it on
two federal cops, and couldn't buy an arrest.

The lawyer laughs, and while approaching the main doors, continues to
look back at Sannes, and pushes his arm against one of the doors to open it.
With a look of shock, he looks down at his suit sleeve and left arm. It is
covered with shit. As Sannes leaves the courthouse, he tells a federal marshal
that he will have to be back the next day and take a lot sterner measures.

The next morning, as Sannes nears the main courthouse entrance, he is

arrested by over 30 federal agents and charged with littering federal property.
At his trial, before Chief U.S. District Judge William T. Beeks, Sannes gets a
judge to listen. Beeks orders the U.S. Attorney to convene a special federal
grand jury to investigate Sannes and his allegations, and orders that Pitkin

42
recuse his office from running the grand jury. Sannes then pleads guilty to
littering.

Beeks then asks Sannes what kind of sentence he would give himself
for the littering conviction, a misdemeanor. Beeks says that he ordinarily
would be inclined to sentence Sannes to a few days at the honor farm at the
McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, but due to Sannes' proven propensity to
mishandle certain farm products, that was out. Sannes replies that he would
recommend that the judge sentence him to 10 days in the King County Jail.
Beeks says, so ordered. Beeks then gives Sannes until after Labor Day to
begin serving his sentence.

THE WATERGATE BUILDING, WASHINGTON D.C. June 16, 1972

There was a burglary there that night.

U.S. COURTHOUSE, SEATTLE June 20, 1972

One of Attorney General John Mitchell's trusted associates hears the

testimony of David R. Sannes. Sannes does not testify with any grant of
immunity. He testifies about his background, the facts of his help to the FBI
in apprehending Chip Marshall, his recruitment as an undercover agent for
the FBI, about his involvement in a conspiracy directed by FBI Assistant
Special Agent-In-Charge Bert Carter to commit bombing and felony murder,
about his involvement in a conspiracy to obstruct justice at the behest of FBI
Special Agent Louis M. Harris. He testifies about the circumstances of his
coming in from the cold, and he testifies about his efforts to have these
criminal acts examined. He pleads with the grand jury to either indict him for
his participation in FBI crimes, or if they don't believe him, to indict him for
perjury and obstruction of justice.

He delivers his sworn testimony in a narrative form because the federal

attorney declines to ask him questions. He does not mention why he had
become an FBI undercover operative. He wants to go to trial. But John
Mitchell controls the grand jury. The federal grand jury takes no action. In
fact, it disbands soon after Sannes completed his testimony.

43
SNOHOMISH COUNTY JAIL, SNOHOMISH, WASHINGTON
September, 1972

Sannes is transported, in chains and leg irons, to the jail from Seattle by
two deputy U.S. Marshals. He is booked and taken back to maximum
security. Four men are housed in solitary cells. They are locked down. One
man, who is on a parole violation hold from the Montana State Prison at Deer
Lodge, is out of his cell. He has just served 19 years, 8 of them on death row
(for murdering the deputy warden and another inmate who was a snitch), in
prison. He went to Everett, WA within 30 days of his release on parole, to
visit his sister. Within an hour of being reunited with her, he beat her
senseless.

On the day of his arrest, he had held a guard captain at the Snohomish
County Jail hostage for several hours. He had originally gone to prison after
he had made a man into a paraplegic in a barroom brawl. At Deer Lodge, he
made a vegetable out of one inmate, killed another man by knocking him out
and putting him in a bakery oven, and shot a deputy warden to death in a
famous prison riot and takeover. Time Magazine had reported that the wife
of the deputy warden had asked that he be released, and the man had told her
that she could have him as he kicked the man's body off the top of the wall of
the besieged prison.

Sannes is not locked in his cell by the jail guards. They put him into
the common area in front of the 9 solitary confinement cells with the
murderer. The man from Deer Lodge, as soon as the guards leave them, asks
Sannes why he is in jail. Sannes tells him for littering. The giant gets a
funny look on his face as he asks how a person could get maximum security
for littering. Dave tells him that he had splattered a 5 gallon pail of cow shit
around the U.S. Courthouse and kicked some of it on two federal policemen,
and maybe that has made him unpopular with the guards.

The man gets Sannes to tell the story of his arrest, and then laughs and
shakes hands with him. The man then recounts how his best friend on death
row had been beaten to death for shit-bucketing a guard, one too many times.
On death row there had been no toilets, only buckets. Periodically, the
inmate had to be let out to the front of his cell to empty his bucket into a

44
honey cart. On the day he died, the man's friend had flipped a full bucket
over a guard's head and then punched him in the stomach. The guard gasped.
Later a goon squad had taken the bucketeer to the hole. He died there,
allegedly while resisting. The laughing giant then tells Sannes that he had
been told by a guard that Sannes was an unreliable snitch, and if he died back
in maximum, the guards would claim Sannes had attacked the giant with a
shank, which would be found with Sannes' fingerprints on it. The giant is
criminally insane perhaps, but not stupid. Sannes has no trouble in jail, but
he has wearied of the war.

SEATTLE 1976

The Church Committee has begun an investigation of the FBI and CIA.
On a cold, wet day in Seattle, Jeff Desmond finds Sannes at the Corner
Market Building, an historic building that Sannes is managing the
rehabilitation of. Desmond says that he is going to be interviewed by a staff
member of the Church Committee within a week's time. He wants a safe
place to stay until then. Sannes takes him to a radical house where Jeff is
taken in.

A few days later, Sannes gets a telephone call at the project site. An
anonymous caller tells him that he could end up just like Desmond. A few
hours later, Sannes hears a radio broadcast account of the murder of Jeffrey
Paul Desmond, alone in a room at the not-so-safe house. The next morning's
Seattle Times and Seattle P.I. carry the statement of Seattle Chief of Police,
George Tielsch, who says Desmond had been assassinated by a professional.
Desmond had opened the door for his killer, been seated on a couch while a
couch cushion had been placed against his chest, and a 22 caliber bullet had
been fired into his heart. Sannes does not contact the Church Committee.

45
 EPILOGUE

From the moment that he walked out of the Snohomish County Jail in
September, 1972, until the present time, Sannes has lived in an unspoken
truce with the FBI. He has never stopped living in fear of an FBI ordered
assassination. He had learned to live with that fear. The FBI had been
informed that tapes would surface if Sannes died. But the FBI, under 3
Presidents after Nixon, and several Directors after Hoover, had never given
up their interest in him. The FBI has never stopped shadowing Sannes.

Sannes until this day has a miner's canary dangling so the FBI has an
alternative to murdering him. Dave has waited long enough to set the record
straight. He is filing for his FBI files. Why? He has lived a full life. The
story must be told, the lessons must be learned, or American is doomed to
repeat its history of elevating men like Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover,
Richard Icord, Richard Nixon and John Mitchell.

A few words must be written to acknowledge the inestimable value of

the love and support given to David by Lyda Held, his friend, lover, and wife
during this extraordinarily difficult period. From the time that their romantic
involvement began in July, 1971, through the traumatic events of the next
few years, she helped to give Sannes the strength to carry on. She shared the
dangers of Sannes' life when few others cared enough about democracy in
this country to put their lives on the line for it.

She endured the death threats by FBI agents, even after the ever-
following agents of the Bureau forced her car off the road, even after J. Edgar
Hoover publicly released a letter claiming that he was "refer(ing) this matter
to the Department of Justice," i.e., the prosecution of Sannes. She worked to
support them both while he was out working to expose the criminal acts of
the FBI.

She tirelessly helped her husband to build a free dental clinic and
pharmacy to serve the indigent. She put her life on the line to help excise the
growing cancer of tyranny from the body politic of the country she loved so
well.

46
 It was a labor of love for Sannes to help repay her love and support by
supporting her through her undergraduate studies and dental school. Lyda
graduated from the University of Washington Dental School near the top of
her class. She won a fellowship for study to become a periodontal surgeon.
She had a dental practice in Seattle area for more than ten years.

A FINAL NOTE

The struggle to preserve the Constitution and Bill of Rights and to

extend its rights to every American citizen was not won at the Battle of
Watergate, nor when Oliver North was put on trial. The fight goes on in
daily battles all over the globe. It will be left for others to judge my actions
in this war. As for me, I am proud of myself, and my undercover work
against criminal elements of the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Nixon's
White House. To those that helped me, my thanks. To the ACLU, my
special thanks.

47