A friend and former blogger who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this, and I’m just gonna repost it here in its entirety:

Friends: That’s a pretty unusual title for this e-mail, and I’m about to deliver on it. Every word is true. Most of you know I’m not someone to overstate this sort of case, so I hope you’ll take time to read the attached article.

I was googling around to find more about FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, who mentioned some fairly outlandish claims about William Ayers in this video. There’s more about Grathwohl at Dr. Sanity’s blog here. But whether you believe Grathwohl or not, Googling Grathwohl led me to an article in the New York Times that leaks a top secret FBI report (I know, in the New York Times? Shocking!) about Communist influence on American radical groups.

The Times seems rather smug about the report, which suggests that Communist governments’ agitation among American youth was not that big a problem at all…in fact,their subversive efforts were mostly just limited to the Weather Underground.

-Three years before militant members of the students for a Democratic Society split off to form the Weather Underground Organization in 1970, North Vietnamese and Cuban officials were influencing radical antiwar strategy through foreign meetings. Many of these meetings were held in Communist countries, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia and North Vietnam,

-The conduit for contact in the United States was a group of intelligence agents assigned to the staff of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. These agents arranged for American youths to be inculcated with revolutionary fervor and, occasionally, to be trained in practical weaponry by Cuban military officers through the so-called Venceremos Brigades.

-After the Weathermen went “underground” in 1970 and many of them were being sought by the F.B.I. on criminal charges, Cuban intelligence officers were in touch with them from both the New York mission and the Cuban Embassy in Canada.

-Cuban officials helped several Weather Underground adherents who feared arrest in the United States to travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then to reenter the United Slates surreptitiously.

The report linked the growing militancy of certain members of the Students for a Democratic Society, which resulted in the so-called Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969; to North Vietnamese advice the year before to choose youngsters who would battle with the police.

The North Vietnamese, according to S.D.S. literature of the time, had suggested that the antiwar movement needed not just intellectual protesters but also physically rugged recruits.

Perhaps a more sensational aspect of the story, in light of the upcoming election, is this:

It said the ultimate objective of the D.G.I’s participation in setting up the Venceremos Brigades “is the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.”

The report said this conclusion was based on information from former officials of the D.G.I.

The Cuban intelligence officers were described as particularly eager to recruit Americans who had political contacts or who were related to United States government officials.

(Note that information was obtained from Cuban intelligence, not just Larry Grathwohl’s account.)

I’m not anxious to start up another round of Obama=Manchurian Candidate speculation, and so I’m sending this to you bloggers who I think will weight that accordingly and treat this story as another example of Obama’s cataclysmically bad judgment in aligning himself with Bill Ayers, rather than as a skeleton for some sort of case that Obama has been recruited by the DGI. That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone started up that rumor pretty quickly. If that serves to draw America’s attention to Obama’s lack of judgment, then so be it. I hope you won’t be the ones to traffic in it.

Wait, there’s more: who were the Undergrounders that the Cubans helped?

In another incident, the report said, four Weathermen who had been in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades were sent back to the United States through Czechoslovakia rather than through Canada with other brigade members to lessen their chances of being arrested by the United States authorities. The four wanted to get back to the United States safely after the explosion of a house in Greenwich Village killed two members of the Weather group, Dianna Oughton and Ted Gold, and the Cubans “obliged” them by making the European travel arrangements, the report said.

Did Bill Ayers train in Cuba? He would certainly want to get back after Diana Oughton died. I don’t think we can answer that question (I don’t know, maybe there’s more out there in Ayers’ books), but maybe we can make the media pose it.

The text of the article is available for free here, but I took the precaution of buying the article from the New York Times archive. I’ve attached the .pdf copy and a cursory examination reveals no differences with the text of the linked version (though you may wish to verify that.) I encourage each of you who is intersted in this story to do buy a copy, BEFORE you write about it, in order to preserve the article should it suddenly…succumb to technical problems, if you know what I mean.

Yes, you have to buy it; the article is from the archives, way back on October 9, 1977. (You didn’t think the New York Times would publish an article like this today, did you?)

He asked that I include the newsclipping image attached to the e-mail, which I’ll put below the fold: