(Newsmax) – Ronald Fliegelman, the “bomb guru” for the leftist American terrorist group Weather Underground, never served time in prison for his actions, instead teaching special-education classes in New York City schools for a quarter-century, the New York Post reports.
The Post cites the new book, ”Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” by Bryan Burrough.
Fliegelman is proud of his actions as a “Weatherman,” Burrough told the Post.
Three Weathermen died when a bomb they were making exploded in their Greenwich Village townhouse. Killed on March 6, 1970 were Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold.
Fliegelman told author Burrough that he then stepped in as the group’s “bomb guru.” Weather Underground members came from middle-class homes that had a more intellectual bent. They weren’t able to work with their hands.
“Fliegelman was the one person who knew how to strip down and reassemble guns, motorcycles and radios, who knew how to weld, who could fix almost anything,” Burrough writes.
So he was tasked with making the group’s bombs after that and teaching others how to do so.
“When you’re young and you’re confident, you can do anything. So, yeah, you play with it, and try to build something. The timer is the whole thing, right? It’s just electricity going into the blasting cap,” Fliegelman told Burrough.
“Eventually, I came up with a thing where I inserted a light bulb, and when the bulb lit, the circuit was complete, and we were able to test things that way,” he said. “If the light came on, it worked. The rest of it is simple.”
Without Fliegelman, there would have been no Weather Underground, former member Brian Flanagan told Burrough.
Yet Fliegelman was able to escape prosecution, quietly fading into the background after the group began to splinter after a Vietnam peace accord in 1973. He moved in with his parents in Philadelphia in a “seamless” transition to a normal life, he said.
“No one — the FBI, no one — ever came looking for me,” Fliegelman said.
Fliegelman was part of a group of 13 Weathermen indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit bombings and assassinations in 1973, but those charges were dropped after the Supreme Court ruled against the use of electronic surveillance without a court order.
Since the charges had a five-year statute of limitations, Fliegelman had no trouble becoming a school teacher in New York City in 1983.
He taught at two schools in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, retiring in 2006. The 70-year-old collected $40,035 in retirement last year, the Post reported.
The Weather Underground bombed New York City Police Headquarters, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol building, among others. Fliegelman said he built the bomb in police headquarters and believes he built the one that bombed the Capitol.
Burrough says that Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers refers to Fliegelman in his memoir, “Fugitive Days,” as “Aaron.”
“Aaron was the backbone of the group — entirely committed and trustworthy, hardworking and dependable . . . A guy we all believed could easily survive in the Australian Outback or the Siberian wilderness for weeks with nothing but a pocket knife … The model middle cadre,” Ayers wrote.
Though Ayers has long maintained the group did not intend to harm anyone, another former Weatherman who spoke to Burrough disagrees.
“The myth, and this is always Bill Ayers’ line, is that Weather never set out to kill people, and it’s not true — we did,” Howie Machtinger said. “You know, policemen were fair game.”
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/bombmaker-taught-nyc-schools/2015/03/29/id/635115/
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