American Anarchist

The book, as I read it,

advocates the violent overthrow of the American government.

I was very fed up with the government.

But it wasn't...

It wasn't a call to action.

There's no call to action in the book itself.

How often do you read the book?

I haven't read it since I wrote it.

I don't have a copy of it.

On the original, it was just the warning.

"Keep in mind that the topics written about here

"are illegal and constitute a threat.

"Also, more importantly,

"almost all the recipes are dangerous.

"This book is not for children or morons."

It's true.

It's not a book for children, and it's not a book for morons.

Um...

The book is published in 1970.

You were equipping people with this knowledge to do what?

I'm... Yeah, I don't think that...

I don't think I hoped they would do anything with it, quite frankly.

"This is a book for anarchists...

"those who feel able to discipline themselves

"on all the subjects, from drugs to weapons, to explosives."

I don't think the book actually says,

"This is what you should do with this information."

In fact, it doesn't.

"A freedom fighter can never surrender,

"for if he does, he becomes part of the problem.

"There is no trial in times of trouble.

"Just torture and death."

It's not, you know, "let's go and burn the government down."

I... That's not there.

"The only laws an individual can truly respect and obey

"are those he instills in himself.

"There is only one choice for a real man,

"and that is revolution."

"This country, with its institutions,

"belongs to the people who inhabit it.

"Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government,

"they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it,

"or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

So, what were you advocating?

I think I was advocating people to think for themselves.

Bomb-making is essentially open-source information.

And it has been that way for a long time.

It has been that way since before the Internet.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s,

the US went through a period when we had lots of bombings.

Bombs went off in Southern California, Northern California,

also in New York City.

From the middle of that morass emerged this:

"The Anarchist Cookbook."

So many bombings in the '70s,

large dynamite bombs all over the place.

And we would frequently find "The Anarchist Cookbook"

at the bomber's house when we served the search warrants.

"The Anarchist Cookbook"...

A do-it-yourself bomb-making manual

written in the early 1970s by William Powell.

Would you say you are uncomfortable

identifying yourself as an American?

I'm not comfortable with an identity

that links me with one patriotic group.

Over the years, have you been contacted by the media?

Oh, there was a string of invitations to interview.

Requests from BBC, "Newsweek,"

"The Guardian," Charlie Rose...

I didn't know who Charlie Rose was.

There were several others, which I turned down.

Kind of out of touch with the media

and the media culture.

And I've been living outside the United States

for the last 36 years.

That's where I'm comfortable.

In 1967, I was 16, 17 years old.

Started to hitchhike towards New York City.

It was the summer, Lower East Side.

The pot and psychedelic cult. They reject square society,

and claim they can build a better one.

Power to the people!

Power to the people!

It was heady times.

People were left wing, they were certainly anti-war.

People were very much aware of the Civil Rights movement.

Feminism was coming into its own.

You had the beginning of the Gay Pride Movement.

I was living on 10th Street just off Avenue A.

It was a railroad apartment.

It had the bathtub in the kitchen.

I worked at Book Masters,

a chain of bookstores that really prided itself

on being into whatever was hip.

Book signings by Salvador Dalí,

Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground,

Edward Gorey, Richard Avedon, the photographer.

It was very exciting.

I can remember a phone call that I got from the manager,

and he said, "The police are on the way.

"We've just been busted for selling 'Zap Comix No. 4'

"and Ed Sanders' 'Fuck You/ a magazine of the arts.'

"Get 'em off the shelf, the cops are on the way."

At that point in time,

some of the raunchiest bookstores in the world

were on Times Square.

X-rated pornography shops.

The police couldn't care less.

They were interested in the counterculture.

So that was a real eye-opener

in terms of the morals squad of the police department.

I was in the process of forming opinions

about politics, about myself.

I went to two or three

of the marches on Washington, the Moratorium.

I felt that I was really involved in something larger than myself.

A cultural sea-change.

We were going to move from irresponsible power

in the hands of a few old white men

to a much fairer society

where people of color and women had equal opportunity.

Where we didn't make wars of choice

halfway around the world that didn't make any sense.

I was increasingly angry about the war.

The increasing fatalities

on both the Vietnamese side and the American side,

which I thought was a complete and utter waste.

Peaceful demonstrations started to become more and more violent.

The days of putting flowers into the barrels of rifles

was rapidly coming to an end.

Up until this time, there wasn't a real radical movement.

There was a movement of the mouth.

I believe that it's now time for new tactics in the anti-war movement.

Mass demonstrations are ineffective

because power is so removed from the people.

People became impatient.

And demonstrators came to demonstrations

more and more with the intention of provoking violence.

So you move from protest to armed conflict.

Those pigs in Washington,

every time they try to devour one warrior,

we're gonna take our fists

and put it right into their fat gut.

Washington police used tear gas to drive them away,

and arrests were made.

Attorney General John Mitchell characterized this instance

as evidence of the violent nature

of the Moratorium protest.

"The Village Voice" announced that there was going to be

a "Yip-in" at Grand Central Station.

A celebration of life. It was enormous.

And people were dancing, and bongo drums,

and singing, and people were smoking dope openly.

Really in your face to the establishment.

Something exciting, something possibly dangerous was happening.

There was a police presence.

Just before midnight, two young men climbed up

onto the information desk

that's in the middle of Grand Central Station...

and there's a clock above it...

and they ripped the hands from the clock.

Why? I don't know. I suspect that they were stoned.

But that was a signal for the police to intervene.

They did. And it turned very bloody very, very quickly.

Police came in swinging batons,

they were absolutely indiscriminate.

At one point, I watched a girl

having to run the gauntlet of police with batons.

I don't remember how many were arrested,

but it was over 100, and a lot of people were beaten.

But it was a classic police riot.

I was sickened by it.

I was angry, I was frightened.

I felt very strongly that change needed to happen.

I thought the government was out of control.

I was going to write.

I was going to turn my hand at writing "The Anarchist Cookbook."

I had become very insular.

It was a project that I was engaged in

entirely by myself.

I didn't talk about writing the book with anyone.

Nobody knew.

I started out by locating

the section of the library that had military manuals.

Army, Marine Corps, special forces.

The shelf wasn't locked.

I mean, it wasn't a rare book room

where you had to get the librarian to unlock it.

They were just there on the shelf, and I took them down.

The information about explosives

came primarily from "Explosives" and "Boobytraps."

One was called "Escape and Evasion."

Things on sabotage.

The diagrams in the book, some of them came from manuals.

Others, I drew myself.

I took about three and a half, maybe four months to write it.

I wrote it in solitude.

No one read the manuscript before it went to the publisher.

So your goal was what?

To take what the military had,