Matthew Steen

Matthew Landy Steen
New Left Activist
Born	(1949-08-22)August 22, 1949 San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Occupation	Community Organizer/Public Policy Advocate
Known for	Weather Underground, AntiWar Activist, 60 Minutes Interview with Dan Rather

Matthew Landy Steen (born August 22, 1949) is a former member of the Weather Underground, a New Left activist and editor of Berkeley Tribe in the 1960s. He was indicted for numerous bank robberies nationally in the early 1970s used to finance underground Weathermen activities; he was convicted of federal conspiracy and received consecutive five-year sentences. Steen was also once suspected of involvement in the San Francisco Police Department Park Station bombing in early 1970.

Steen was serving a ten-year term at the Federal Bureau of Prisons U.S. Penitentiary in Lompoc, California when several of the convicted Watergate Seven defendants arrived at Lompoc "Honor Camp" to begin their own sentences. The U.S. Justice Department had earlier convened twin special federal grand juries in 1972 in Portland and Seattle to investigate his suspected involvement in a conspiracy to plant pipe bombs at the embassies of S. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in 1971 in Washington, D.C.; the March 1971 U.S. Capitol bombing; throwing a tear gas canister at Vice-President Spiro Agnew's motorcade in Boston in the spring of 1971 during a violent student anti-war protest at the Sheraton Hotel; and a simultaneous break-in at a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Media, Pennsylvania, resulting in the release of more than 1000 secret files outlining Nixon-era COINTELPRO domestic spying abuses later revealed by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ineptitude in the Watergate burglaries.

Witnesses were subpoenaed by Internal Security Division head, Nixon-appointee Robert Mardian and his deputy, Guy Goodwin, as part of a federal COINTELPRO domestic spying program used to neutralize white and black radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. These grand juries were widely known as "fishing expeditions." All witnesses refused to testify and were held in contempt; their charges were later reversed in 1972 by a federal appeals court ruling in their favor when the government refused to divulge its sources of illegal electronic surveillance. This court decision eventually caused federal charges to be dropped against Bernardine Dohrn and other "most-wanted" Weatherman, and for convening of the Church Committee Senate inquiries into illegal domestic counterintelligence activities during the 1960s through the middle 1970s by the CIA and the FBI.

In autumn 1977 Steen was featured on the lead segment of 60 Minutes in an interview with Dan Rather. This was the first and only time a former Weatherman had appeared on national television; the news show was viewed by more than 45 million American households. He was queried about his life underground, false identities, and the whereabouts of fugitive Weathermen. Among the many viewers were future President Jimmy Carter, who commuted Steen's convictions under his amnesty program for draft resisters, acting to "heal the nation". Another person watching was David Byrne, composer for the rock band Talking Heads, who wrote the popular song Life During Wartime to memorialize the 60 Minutes episode. In the interview with Rather, Steen stated that it "was time for members of Weather Underground Organization to emerge and engage change at the community level in this post-draft, post-Vietnam era." Mark Rudd resurfaced within two months and the remainder of the fugitive Weathermen surrendered to authorities over the next 22 months. In 2012, Steen became one of the last of the former radical-era Weatherman to publicly surface.

Steen attended Mission High School, growing up in the city's first postwar housing project. His father enlisted in the United States Navy shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, serving in the Pacific Theater, and as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean hostilities. His mother served in the WAVES auxiliary during World War II and his uncle, Sherman Block was elected Sheriff of Los Angeles County in the 1970s. His younger brother, Scott Steen, is an internationally known jazz trumpeter and session man, recording on more than 20 albums. Steen resides in the Mission District in San Francisco working as a community organizer around social justice, anti-poverty, affordable housing and homeless policy issues.

Early life

While in and out of youth prisons for juvenile status offenses, including Preston School of Industry and the infamous Paso Robles School for Boys, later closed for cruel and unusual punishment, Steen spent time in foster homes and on the streets, slowly attracted by the burgeoning post-beat, counter-cultural hippie movement in the early 1960s. Living in Hollywood in 1966, he was arrested during the Sunset Strip riots for a curfew violation with 500 other underage youth, a cultural snapshot in time preserved by Stephen Stills in his song For What It's Worth performed by Buffalo Springfield.

After his release from detainment on the heels of the Sunset Strip riots in 1966, Steen enrolled at Merritt Community College in Oakland, soon joining Black Student Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There he met Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and other Black Panther Party (BPP) members, soon expelled for helping organize the seizure of the college bookstore and holding faculty hostage while distributing the contents of that bookstore in a free giveaway to the student body. Steen was elected president of the local SDS chapter, working with the BPP on rallies to free Huey Newton, then joining Rolling Stone magazine in 1968, in its infancy at its original headquarters in San Francisco, as an intern and soon after Berkeley Tribe as a graphic artist, photo-editor and reporter

Before his political involvement, Steen was described as a hippie flower child, attending some of the original "love-ins" held at Golden Gate Park in 1966-67. He became friends with Augustus Stanley Oswald, who gave Steen his first LSD experience in North Beach before it was made illegal in early 1967 and was featured in a photo-essay volume on the local counter-culture. He worked with the Grateful Dead on the "Death of the Hippie" ceremony in the Haight-Ashbury as a roadie with their road crew at many Dead concerts in the Bay Area. In 1966, Steen volunteered at Oracle, a psychedelic underground newspaper, working briefly with Stanley Mouse lithographing some of the original Fillmore Auditorium psychedelic concert posters.

Early political activities

Black Panther Party Free Meals

Steen became involved in numerous civil rights and community organizing projects including the "Free Meals" program run by the Black Panther Party in West Oakland and helped establish the first Berkeley Soup Kitchen with members of the Diggers and interfaith church leaders, evolving into what is now known as 'Quarter Meal', Berkeley's largest homeless feeding program.

1969 People's Park riots

During those turbulent years, Steen became involved with the People's Park struggle as part of the Organizing Committee, along with Stew Albert and other student leaders. Their efforts, along with hundreds of others, resulted in the planting of People's Park on nearby vacant University property. During violent confrontations with local police and National Guard troops over the next few months, Steen and 120 other students were shot by police, one student, James Rector, killed, and another blinded by a shotgun blast.

1969-1970 Third World Liberation Front strike

Steen was instrumental in beginning the Third World Liberation Front student strike at U.C. Berkeley in 1969-1970, when he organized the first contingent of white students from Merritt College to "man" the picket lines in the first six weeks of the strike; this student strike led to the creation of a Third World Studies (Ethnic Studies) Department, first at Berkeley, then system wide. During the bitter strike, Steen was seriously injured while protecting the leader of the Chicano Student Union, Jaime Soliz, who was permanently paralyzed during the police attack. Steen, parenthetically, was finally admitted to Cal in 1989, where he majored in the ethnic studies and history departments.

1970 Community Control of Police ballot measure

He was an organizer, along with Tom Hayden, of the Community Control of Police campaign in Berkeley, resulting in the first ballot measure in the United States on this issue. If passed, the measure would have required police to reside in the community they work in; the electorate rejected the measure 54% to 46%.

Draft boards, Venceremos Brigades, drugs and the Cuban Embassy

Covering the 1970 murder trial of Los Siete de la Raza (The la Raza Seven) in a superior court for Berkeley Tribe, Steen was arrested for possession of tear gas bombs and became a fugitive, disappearing as a member of the Weather Underground. Steen was also under indictment for possession of Molotov cocktails in Alameda County, suspected of firebombing the local draft board in Berkeley upon the heels of the Kent State shootings. Two years before, along with members of War Resisters' League, he had broken into the same draft board and poured cow's blood into Selective Service System file cabinets containing more than 2500 pending draft files of young men waiting for the draft lottery to learn whether Vietnam was the next stop. Earlier he traveled to Mexico to join the second contingent of the Venceremos Brigades but was rejected by staff from the Cuban Embassy for being "too counter-cultural", having long hair and "looking like a hippie drug user". The Cuban government was adamant in its opposition to illegal drugs, one aspect of the Weatherman agenda Cuban officials vehemently objected to.

Berkeley Tribe and underground newspapers

Berkeley Tribe was organized by former staff members of Berkeley Barb, who had gone on strike against the Barb's owner Max Scherr over the issue of "pornography" and sleazy ads Scherr accepted to pay the printing bills. The staff walkout resulted in the corporate formation of Red Mountain Tribe and the first issue of the new weekly Berkeley Tribe. Steen began as an ad manager, working his way to co-editor in chief in 1970. During his tenure, Steen worked with Stew Albert, Marge Piercy, Diane di Prima, Art Goldberg, staff photographers Stephen Shames and Jeannie Raisler, Phineas Israeli, Judy Gumbo, Lee Felsenstein, Hank Dankowski and others writing, editing and developing a distribution network for the paper. Early in Tribe's history, staff voted to remove the staff masthead for security reasons but not until after the paper's contributors became known to the FBI and local police. Berkeley Tribe's two editorial and production offices, located on old Grove Street, were firebombed and subjected to sniper fire on several occasions during its publication heyday.

Radical feminism, male chauvinism and staff divisions

In early 1970, the first of several staff splits happened when the paper's female staff objected to the placement of sexist, offensive advertising to raise revenue to pay the printing bills. The issue was a full page ad by Jovan that portrayed women in a subservient role. It was at this point that many of the more chauvinist male staff resigned, including Lee Felsenstein, one of the inventors of the personal computer. Advertising was purified and revenue began shrinking. From then on, New Leftists controlled the direction of Berkeley Tribe. The Jovan ad was rejected and the feminists had won. Similar struggles were occurring in underground newspapers around the country, including Chicago Seed, New York's Subterranean Rat and East Village Other, created by a similar staff walkout from Village Voice, and Sabot in Seattle.

Circulation

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), Berkeley Tribe had a weekly circulation of 45,000 in 1969, which grew to a high point of 53,000 copies, the largest circulating underground newspaper in the country. The printer was a stolid Republican who said he "firmly believes in freedom of speech, no matter the political content." He later suffered a loss of printing business after clients switched printers in protest. Steen signed off on the ABC forms and was signatory to the original incorporation papers of Red Mountain Tribe, submitted to the California Secretary of State and Franchise Tax Board.

Red Mountain Tribe commune

Steen lived in the Berkeley Tribe commune on Ashby Avenue, along with other production and editorial staff. During his two years with Berkeley Tribe, the commune hosted numerous fellow travelers, bands, fugitives, film directors, and actresses including MC5, Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Fonda, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Paul Kantner from the Jefferson Airplane, Pun Plamondon, White Panther Party co-founder with John Sinclair, and Hunter S. Thompson, whom Steen met while at Rolling Stone and, again, at the world premiere of Woodstock in Hollywood, paid for by Warner Bros.. He would work with Hunter, showing him some of the tools of participatory journalism during the People's Park riots in Berkeley; this style of news reporting, along with the Yippie approach to social change, would profoundly affect Hunter's future approach to media sensibilities, with his invention of gonzo journalism. The commune was a leased two-story residence above College Avenue, with a secluded backyard where the cover photo of the Tribe's well-known "Call to Arms" issue was staged. The commune was located cheek-by-jowl with tony neighbors and served as a way station for leftist political fugitives and the base of operations for International Liberation School, a self-defense weapons training center complete with a gun range in the Berkeley Hills.

New Left radicalization of underground newspapers

During the spring and summer of 1970, Berkeley Tribe became more radicalized, with the continuing war in Vietnam and assassination of black leaders. The paper first published a Governor Ronald Reagan quote on its cover, "If It Takes A Bloodbath", expressing his sentiment toward student radicals. Then Berkeley Tribe published the entire "Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla" by Tupameros revolutionary Carlos Marighella, the first North American edition. After this, the paper published a centerfold expose on FBI infiltrator Larry Grathwohl, supplied by Weather Underground; Grathwohl traveled to Berkeley and personally threatened to kill Steen. The editorial offices of Berkeley Tribe were firebombed and staff were forced to barricade the front windows with stacks of old issues after shots were fired into the offices twice while the paper was in production. These incidents heightened the sense of paranoia then sweeping the country, fueled by the tactics of Nixon's COINTELPRO domestic spying apparatus

Final staff split of Berkeley Tribe and feminist takeover

Subsequently, Berkeley Tribe published "Blood of a Pig" on its cover, a photograph of a murdered Berkeley police officer. It was at this point that more than half the staff and editorial board resigned in protest of the cover and the underground newspaper was taken over by the radical feminist faction. Steen was responsible for producing these newspaper covers and for the earlier "Call to Arms" issue. And then Berkeley Tribe began publishing original communiques from the underground, including the Declaration of War written by Bernardine Dohrn and others claiming responsibility for the numerous bombings and arson attacks around the Bay Area. One of the last issues Steen produced was the special Black Panther Party issue promoting the United Front Against Fascism Conference in Oakland

With declining ad revenues to underwrite weekly $1100 printing bills, less issues were printed and circulation declined. Over time, the paper's news articles suffered, degenerating into diatribes but with still excellent graphics and layout. Steen, soon after, went underground, sought for firebombing a local draft board office and possessing tear gas bombs in a San Francisco courtroom. The Berkeley Tribe disbanded within two years.

Other newspaper activity

Steen worked with the Ann Arbor Argus and New York Rat, publishing poetry and prose while underground, including "Ode to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark", "How Does It Feel to Be Inside An Explosion", "Airports". He was also a correspondent with Liberation News Service and worked with the Underground Press Syndicate, Radical Education Project and North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). With NACLA he co-wrote "Every Soldier a Shitworker, Every Shitworker A Soldier", widely distributed within the New Left student community

Steen was also an editor at Dock of the Bay, from which Otis Redding derived the title of his best-known recording, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay". He was hired to join the staff of The Leviathan, a monthly socialist publication edited by Todd Gitlin, from which Steen was fired for writing a non-Marxist review of Oh! Calcutta, the first off-Broadway show with an all-nude cast. While with Yippies he contributed a chapter on "phone hacking" to Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Bookas well as contributing to the development of the Blue Box, the original "hacking" device; Ramparts magazine later published the schematics which caused the entire print run to be seized.

1969 SDS convention and Weathermen

Steen attended the 1969 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) convention in Chicago as a West Coast delegate, fresh from the People's Park riots in Berkeley, voting to elect the Revolutionary Youth Movement slate and form Weatherman, along with over 700 other delegates. When he arrived on the leased 727 jet at O'Hare Airport, passengers were greeted by a disguised Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) van with agents filming them. While there, he attended plenary sessions of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) who were gathered several hundred strong in caucus, keeping Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) leadership apprised of PLP tactics prior to the dissolution of SDS on the final day of their last national convention. In the afternoon, RYM members held a sudden rump session on the floor then seized the platform and dais with the help of some local Black Panthers, announcing a mass walkout to an adjacent hall. Members of the PLP, Young Socialist Alliance, Socialist Workers Party and an opposition RYM 2 faction loudly protested and there were some fistfights, however, the die that had been cast would not be broken; the new Weather leadership would not allow the organization to be usurped by outsiders. In this the new student leaders had succeeded, while leaving the larger organization as dead letters.

The RYM faction was the largest and most activist by far, being composed of long-term members of SDS, some with the student group since its inception in 1962 with publication of the Port Huron Statement. The RYM rank and file exited, electing the nascent Weatherman leadership by voice acclimation only to adjourn and meet in a nearby African-American church basement that night to start planning for the future and a new day for "bringing the war home"; the need for "smashing monogamy" would come later. In so doing, SDS remained the largest national student organization in name only. And in the 43 years since Chicago there has been no national student group that has ever reached the stature or size of SDS.

One of the pivotal events at the convention was the performance of members of the Illinois and Chicago Black Panther Party one morning. Several dozen armed, bandoliered members marched down the aisles to center stage informing the more than 1400 students present that "the only place for women in the revolution was on their backs." Then the assembled Panthers led a chant, "pussy power", among themselves to, at first, stunned disbelief. And it was repeated, over and over. Pandemonium erupted with a mass of booing voices, many in anger, some of those crying in abject disappointment at their icons in the flesh. This faux pas chauvinism had two direct results on subsequent Weatherman gender relations. First, the male-dominated movement had imposed a false ceiling on student feminists forcing a reexamination of the validity of gender roles; this open and hostile public display of overt chauvinism from "heroic figures" was like cold salt water in the face of the young female students gathered; militant feminism was awakened in the radical left as a result.

Secondly, this event spurred many young women to develop new feminist theory consonant with revolutionary ideals and underground life. In popular song, this egregious male conduct led to the cynical lyrics in "Woman Are the Niggers of the World", written by John Lennon in New York City in 1972, words that Steen had himself written and published in Ann Arbor Argus, which was at the time an underground newspaper run by the White Panther Party (WPP). One his partners was the national Minister of Culture of the WPP who was earlier arrested during the Days of Rage and sentenced to 90 days in Cook County Jail. For this, Steen penned "Airports", published in the Tribe, reprinted in underground papers around the country. His other partner had been a member of the Cincinnati Weatherman collective who had earlier traveled with the first contingent of the Venceremos Brigade to harvest sugar cane in Cuba and later traveled to San Francisco as part of the Weatherman collective in that city.

Steen returned to Berkeley organizing, with the Red Star Collective and Tom Hayden, while editing Berkeley Tribe and Dock of the Bay. He was also busy with developing public support for the strikes at Berkeley and San Francisco State College. Steen soon went underground with his collective after being arrested for tear gas bombs during the San Francisco trial of Los Siete de la Raza and firebombing a Berkeley draft board. He was later arrested in a bank in Seattle for multiple bank robberies and federal conspiracy, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison.

1977 60 Minutes interview

His conviction was commuted by President Jimmy Carter following an appearance on the lead segment of CBS's 60 Minutes in November 1977. Interviewed by Dan Rather, Steen urged Weather Underground members to resurface "and engage in local change at the community level in this post-Vietnam, post-draft era." Watched by more than 45 million households, this was the only time an ex-Weatherman had ever appeared on the CBS news show. Within sixty days of this interview, Mark Rudd surrendered to authorities and over the next eighteen months the entire Weather Underground leadership resurfaced to face a variety of charges, in two separate highly publicized group surrenders. As with the more recent Academy Award-nominated film, Weather Underground, CBS producers encouraged the use of "props" in filming 60 Minutes.

A final result of the 60 Minutes interview was the resignation of the U.S. Passport Office director and a Congressional inquiry into how Steen acquired official passports while underground years earlier This 60 Minutes interview became one of the principal reasons for the emergence of Weatherman after nearly ten years underground, the difficulty of living underground in America was another. The desire of Weatherman rank and file to re-engage at the community level, working to steward institutional changes wrought by the political, cultural and racial upheavals arising from the paradox of America in the 1960s and 1970s, was an overarching reason; the persuasive need to embed this newly emerging social paradigm in the national fabric, going beyond fading extra-legal means now that the war was over, became a prime conviction of many former Weather members.

Logistical support for Weather Underground

Steen's primary role with Weatherman was the establishment of a network of "safe houses" for the underground and raising more than $1 million in bail funds to pay off bonds for those arrested during Days of Rage and the earlier The Day After protests over the guilty verdicts reached in the trial of the Chicago Seven. Steen, along with Nancy Rudd, provided valuable logistical support for the underground with training in the acquisition of bulletproof false identifications, driver's licenses, official passports and manipulation of bank funds to finance underground activities while avoiding detection.

These actions sustained Weatherman members underground for many years after his own arrest on federal bank robbery and conspiracy charges. During Steen's time underground, his collective stayed with housewives, civil engineers, sorority sisters, defense industry workers and the common people. He was one of the few Weathermen ever captured over the twelve-year period members of Weather Underground Organization (WUO) were fugitives. In this time span, WUO claimed more than 34 bombings of government and corporate offices throughout the United States; only a handful of these "urban guerrilla war" actions were ever solved by the FBI. Together with other underground collectives, several hundred bombings around the nation still remain unsolved.

Cambridge Women's Center

In keeping with his intense interest in the empowerment of women and radical feminist issues, Steen and his partner provided the initial seed funding for the first Women's Center in the United States in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the spring of 1971. This action was consonant with earlier feminist positions he had adopted at Berkeley Tribe.

N.Y. State water bonds, Afeni Shakur, Sam Melville and the Piggy Bank Six

His financing proved to be instrumental in the use of New York state water bonds to free numerous political prisoners, including imprisoned members of the Panther 21 and, in particular, Afeni Shakur, the mother ofo Tupac Shakur, who was pregnant with her baby when arrested on bombing conspiracy charges and being held on $1 million bail Steen was the conduit, along with a small Catholic church in Greenwich Village that he posted funds with in order to leverage state water bonds and meet her bail requirements.

Financial contributions to Steen were made by the John Lennon backup band Elephant's Memory to provide bail for members of the Piggybank Six, who earlier planted milk cans filled with benzene in entrances to several First National City Bank branches in 1970 in Manhattan. One of the persons Steen could not bail out was Sam Melville, later convicted and sentenced to Attica State Prison then murdered by prison guards during the legendary Attica prison uprising in 1972. Steen was able to assist in providing bail funds for the release of Jane Alpert who had been arrested with Sam Melville and others in several bombing of corporate headquarters including ITT, Anaconda Copper and United Fruit Company. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, John Lennon was to be investigated for his association with and support of radicals, including Steen, in New York City in 1971 and 1972 by the FBI as part of the deportation proceedings pending in Lennon's case.

Police murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark

The assassinations of Fred Hampton, Chair of the Illinois Black Panther Party, and his deputy, Mark Clark galvanized many, if not most, Weatherman to seek armed struggle as the only solution remaining to battle the American government and its local police counterparts. Steen was deeply affected by this treacherous event, having met with Hampton and Clark in Chicago earlier at the SDS convention and shortly after at UCLA. There was a palpable change in attitude in the antiwar and black power movements after this. "A new tilt to Weatherman ways and means, away from anti-Vietnam actions and more exclusively toward black liberation objectives occurred with these murders. A more subtle but intense social anomie had developed with white, educated middle-class students as a result of invested empathy and altruism tempered by a strong dollop of disillusionment," according to Steen.

Weatherman theory of "white-skin privilege"

Steen became a major proponent of the new Weatherman theory of white-skin privilege and the emerging school in radical psychology that considers racism a form of mental illness unfairly excluded from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual by the self-interest of white professionals, thereby confirming the institutional bias of the entire psychology establishment. Many former SDS members strongly felt that white-skin privilege oppressed and objectified American blacks and other ethnic minorities. These ideas were derived from the writings of Franz Fanon, a radical black Algerian psychiatrist, who posited that mental illness in black Algerians was the result of internalized racial stereotypes from the French colonialist as a form of racial and class conditioning that preserved the white-skin privileges of the colonial bourgeoisie.

Armed propaganda and direct actions

While underground, Steen was implicated in several direct actions including an attempted 1971 triple bombing of the embassies of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in Washington, D.C.; sabotaging the I-395 beltway during the May Day demonstrations on July 4 in D.C.; the earlier bombing of the U.S. Capitol building; the break-in at the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania; the Park Precinct police station bombing in San Francisco; and throwing a tear gas bomb at Vice-President Spiro Agnew's motorcade during his visit to Boston in March 1971. For this last action, Steen was placed on the U.S. Secret Service watch list, where he remained throughout the 1980s.At the time Steen resided in Santa Barbara, home to the Western White House during President Ronald Reagan's two terms of office.

Indictments for bank robberies and conspiracy

In late 1971 Steen was arrested in a bank in Tukwila, Washington and charged with several dozen counts of bank robbery and conspiracy in multiple indictments issued in Seattle, Portland, Denver, Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago and other cities Coincidentally, this was the same bank branch that members of the Seattle Liberation Front (SIF) attempted to rob three years later, resulting in a police gun battle that killed Bruce Seidel and snared SLF members. Steen had worked with former staff of Sabot, an underground paper, including radical feminist Susan Stern, some of whom later formed SLF, prior to his own capture in Seattle. He was then shuttled by federal marshals between Seattle and Portland, subpoenaed by special federal grand juries, which operated as 'fishing expeditions" to trawl for information regarding the whereabouts of Weather Underground political fugitives, based upon leads developed from illegal sources under the nefarious and unconstitutional domestic spying apparatus, revealed by the ineptitude of a Watergate burglary, as what has since become widely known as COINTELPRO.

Steen was then implicated in operating a massive national financial fraud with traveler's checks that was estimated by the FBI to exceed $1 million. He later plead guilty to two federal counts of conspiracy and sentenced for two consecutive five-year terms, partially as a result of his non-cooperation with the U.S. Justice Department. As it turned out, he had obtained funds from more than 100 banks around the country, using a staggering number of aliases including William Hollis Coquillette, William Talbot, James Bombardier, Tariq Aziz and many others.

U.S. penitentiary at Lompoc

While in prison Steen was cellmates with Alvin Glatowski, who had been convicted of the only peacetime mutiny in American history after he and a fellow merchant marine hijacked the SS Columbia Eagle at gunpoint in 1970. The merchant marine ship (loaded with more than 100,000 tons of munitions) was taken from the coast of Vietnam to Cambodia. The following day Central Intelligence Agency operatives sponsored a coup d'état deposing Lon Nol as head of state, installing Prince Norodom Sihanouk and retrieving the ship, rescuing 14 merchant seamen held in a Phnom Penh prison. Steen, while in prison, defended Glatowski on a federal attempted escape charge, losing a split decision in the federal court of appeals. One of the panel members, Judge Shirley Huftstedler voted to reverse based on Steen's arguments in the appellate brief. He was thrown into solitary confinement after the court's decision. While in Lompoc, he received death threats from members of Hells Angels. The notorious motorcycle gang had publicly vowed to "kill any Weatherman they found as a favor to the police because they were communist".

Steen organized an Inmate Advisory Council and led work stoppages in the prison industry electronics assembly plant in coordination with Women for Peace. The federal prison manufactured wiring and electronic components for the military's use in its missile launches from Vandenburg AFB, which is adjacent to the prison complex. The Inmate Council was split up by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, with members transferred to other prison gulags in far flung locations. Again, Steen was thrown in solitary. While at Lompoc he ran the law library, working as a paralegal and freeing more than a dozen marijuana and hashish smugglers under the 1969 United States Supreme Court decision in United States vs Timothy Leary, which declared the federal Marijuana Tax Act unconstitutional. During his imprisonment, Steen had been adopted by Amnesty International in 1973 as one of its first political prisoners in the United States, sponsored Robert Langenfelder, the only person ever convicted in the infamous burning of a branch of Bank of America in Isla Vista in 1969.

Political federal grand juries and COINTELPRO

During Steen's initial imprisonment special federal grand juries were empaneled by Nixon-appointee Robert Mardian to investigate his activities with the International Liberation School (where he was a weapons instructor); the whereabouts of Weathermen leadership;an attempted triple embassy bombing in Washington, D.C.; a break-in at an FBI office in Media, Pa.; and the U.S. Capitol Bombing in 1971. These grand juries became known as "fishing expeditions" and subpoenaed numerous friends and their family members to testify about Steen. All refused and were held in contempt, sentenced to jail for the life of the grand juries in Portland and Seattle. The contempt charges were appealed by the National Lawyers' Guild to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals; charges were vacated and the case remanded to the federal district court in Portland, forcing the U.S. Justice Department to drop its investigations. The FBI had refused to divulge its sources of information. These sources were subsequently determined to be illegal "black back operations", including wiretaps, mail openings and residential burglaries by FBI field agents.

The proceedings in Steen's case, and others, with the release of the secret COINTELPRO FBI files stolen in the earlier raid on FBI offices in eastern Pennsylvania, led directly to:

• Dropping of federal charges against Bernardine Dohrn and others by the FBI in 1973;
• Convening of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Investigations Into Illegal Domestic Spying Activities, better known as the Church Committee;
• The resignation of FBI Director, L. Patrick Grey and indictments of Mark Felt, or Deep Throat, Robert Mardian and Edwin Miller for authorizing illegal mail openings, wire tapping and black-bag jobs involving burglaries by FBI agents. Mardian had earlier prosecuted Steen in the Northwest.

Legacies

Upon his release, Steen was paroled to Santa Barbara and elected to the Isla Vista Municipal Advisory Council, later becoming Executive Director. Steen would go on to found the Isla Vista Legal Defense Center, still in operation in 2013 as part of University of California Santa Barbara. He also spearheaded efforts to spur community reinvestment and combat "redlining" which ultimately led to the State of California adopting the Community Reinvestment Act allowing government agencies to transfer deposits into credit unions. Steen later served as vice-president on the Board of Directors of the very first community federal credit union in the country. While with the Council, he coordinated grant proposals to fund a variety of local service organizations, including the Free Medical Clinic, Women's Center, Youth Projects, Children's Center and the Isla Vista Community Federal Credit Union.

None of the Above ballot option

Back in Isla Vista, Steen worked on a groundbreaking effort to place a new voting option, None of the Above, on the election ballot, the first example in the United States of this electoral ballot alternative, in what Steen described as an "anti-institutional Yippie up-yours." Steen and fellow council member Walt Wilson introduced this novel motion which was adopted unanimously by the entire Council This action had a ripple effect, with the State of Nevada officially adding this option to the state ballot in 1986 And in 2000, a citizen initiative to place None of the Above on the official state ballot in California was qualified; the proposition was voted down 62% to 38% in the general election. From the experimental political workshop of Isla Vista spread across the nation the name and Yippie spirit of this unexpected ballot initiative in the form of musical festivals and groups and other social phenomenon associated with the counter-cultural youth movement, into a new century and newer generation.

Incorporation of a City of Isla Vista

During his time with the Council, Steen authored the second proposal for the Incorporation of a new City of Isla Vista, submitted to the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) for placement on the local ballot; the agency refused, on the basis of Isla Vista's "transient" student population and lack of a commercial tax base. He then became involved with a county split proposal to cut Santa Barbara County in half. Soon he was involved with a new incorporation proposal to form a City of Dos Pueblos out of Goleta Valley, being appointed to the Goleta Valley Planning Council. This was the largest unincorporated urban enclave in southern California which, in 2003, became the newest city in the County, without Isla Vista in its boundaries, which remains unincorporated to this day.

Steen returned to school in Santa Barbara becoming friends with David Lawyer, Jr., Chair of Ethnic Studies, who, in a twist of fate, was the first black man to graduate from Princeton University, in 1971. Among the few black alumni he could count was Michelle Obama, current First Lady of the United States. One of Steen's schoolmates while at the University was Matt Groening, creator of the long-running television series The Simpsons, who later caricatured him as a hippie radical in several episodes over the years.

Continuing the war on poverty

Steen became an anti-poverty official for many years in Santa Barbara County operating countywide full-service energy conservation, solar, housing and employment training programs for low-income residents with Community Action Commission of Santa Barbara County, the local Community Action Program. He also implemented the initial federal pilot Access California program, removing architectural barriers to the disabled in public places throughout the County. Steen initiated a seminal low-income solar energy program in the County that was replicated by Community Action Programs throughout the State; for this he was elected vice-president of the Association of Southern California Energy Programs, appointed by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Gas Company and Southern California Edison to their respective State-mandated residential services advisory committees. Before returning to San Francisco he was selected to operate the City of Santa Barbara's homeless shelter program in conjunction with Coalition on Homelessness.

Aboveground public service

The middle-aged radical worked with Mensa, becoming Vice-Loc Sec and Chair of the Scholarship Committee. In 1980 Steen had gone into the vinyl record business, starting "Audiophilia Records" in southern California, winning national awards from Goldmine magazine and contributing to several international price books.

He then attended law school, registering with the State Bar; questions of "moral turpitude" arose over Steen's past affiliations with the Weather Underground and he did not take the bar exam. This occupational disability also plagued Bernardine Dohrn in Illinois and David Fine in Oregon. During this time frame, Steen was the recipient of several "poison pen letters" published in the local press under pseudonyms attacking his earlier Weatherman affiliations. Poison pen letters were one of the tactics utilized by the FBI in its COINTELPRO campaign to discredit and marginalize black and white student radicals, well into the late 1970s.

Steen was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to a seat on a State Energy Conservation committee with oversight of federal Residential Conservation Service (RCS) funds in the 1980s; he was a founding member of that RCS Advisory Committee. In his earlier post-prison days, Steen had been treasurer of Students for Jerry Brown for President in 1976. He was then elected to the board of trustees of a community college district in Santa Barbara. Later, Steen was picked as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy National Center for Appropriate Technology, training low-income CAP staff throughout California in developing low-income solar service programs locally, in partnership with the State Office of Economic Opportunity.

The aging radical finally returned to Berkeley, attending the University of California, twenty years after he first applied. In Berkeley he was involved with Copwatch and led anti-Iraq invasion marches taking over Highway 101 and the Bay Bridge in 1992. He then went on to work in executive management for a major New York Stock Exchange corporation for several years. This prominent company had no inkling of his former notoriety or ties to Weatherman; among his co-workers were a number of retired FBI special agents. Shortly after, Steen was viciously attacked and beaten with baseball bats in front of his residence, suffering head trauma, with speech and vision problems.

See also

• Weather Underground
• Students for a Democratic Society
• List of Weatherman members
• New Left
• COINTELPRO
• Berkeley Tribe
• None of the Above
• U.S. Community Federal Credit Unions
• Black Panther Party
• Black Liberation Army
• Fred Hampton
• Mark Clark
• Stew Albert
• Isla Vista Municipal Advisory Council
• Isla Vista, California
• Erhard Seminar Training
• Talking Heads
• Underground Press Syndicate

• "The Weather Underground (2002)". Documentary directed and produced by Sam Green, Bill Siegel and Carrie Lozano. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)

• Underground (1976). Documentary directed by Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson.

• The Company You Keep (2012). Fiction directed by Robert Redford

External links

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