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The Eagle Has Eyes
 latinos in the united states series

series editor
Rubén O. Martinez, Michigan State University

editorial board
Adalberto Aguirre Jr., University of California–Riverside
Robert Aponte, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
Teresa Cordova, University of Illinois at Chicago
Julie Leininger Pycior, Manhattan College
Rogelio Saenz, University of Texas–San Antonio
The Eagle Has Eyes
THE FBI SURVEILLANCE OF CÉSAR ESTRADA CHÁVEZ
OF THE UNITED FARM WORKERS UNION
OF AMERICA, 1965–1975

José Angel Gutiérrez

Michigan State University Press • East Lansing

 Copyright © 2019 by José Angel Gutiérrez

i The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

p
Michigan State University Press
East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Gutierrez, Jose Angel, author.
Title: The eagle has eyes : the FBI surveillance of César Estrada Chávez
of the United Farm Workers Union of America, 1965‒1975 / Jose Angel Gutierrez.
Description: East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, [2019] | Series: Latinos
in the United States | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020123| ISBN 9781611863079 (pbk. : alk. paper)
| ISBN 9781609175863 (pdf) | ISBN 9781628953503 (epub) | ISBN 9781628963502 (kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Chávez, César, 1927‒1993. | United Farm Workers. | United States. Federal Bureau of
Investigation. | Domestic intelligence—United States—History—20th century. | Labor unions—Political
activity—United States—History. | Civil rights—United States—History—20th century. | United States—
Politics and government—20th century.
Classification: LCC HD6509.C48 G88 2019 | DDC 331.88/13092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020123

Book and cover design by Charlie Sharp, Sharp Des!gns, East Lansing, MI
Cover art is “Huelga,” 1970s, The United Farm Worker (UFW) Collection: Poster & Graphics, #31870.
Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

G
Michigan State University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative and is
committed to developing and encouraging ecologically responsible publishing
practices. For more information about the Green Press Initiative and the use of
recycled paper in book publishing, please visit www.greenpressinitiative.org.

Visit Michigan State University Press at www.msupress.org

To all of us who have been the target of surveillance by local,
state, and federal governments (U.S. and Mexico) over the years. To those
who have not escaped that vigilance, entrapment, character assassination,
dragnets, and have been or still are incarcerated or in exile. And to those
among us, the fortunate ones, who have remained unindicted, not con-
victed, and unjailed for any length of time.
I can only imagine what greater successes at fundamental social
change we could have achieved but for the counterintelligence operations
of governments that viewed us as subversives because we opposed their
governance, their policies, and only sought a better quality of life. They used
the “people’s” resources illegally to enhance their police power and thwart
our every move.
To my wife, Natalia Verjat, and our blended children, Adrian, Tozi Aide,
Olin Roldan, Avina Cristal, Lina Maria, Andrea Lucia, Clavel Amariz, Ian
Scott, Nadia Gabrielle, Alan Jude, and Mara Isabella. Thank you all for put-
ting up with me: the piles of books, FBI files in boxes everywhere, my daily
grumpiness, and not paying enough attention to your needs and wants
during the years of research and manuscript production.
To the Next Generation of Activists, including my most recent grand-
children, Analee Lynne Rotolo and Lucia Luna Price: Be prudent with in-
ternet connectivity; watch out for the hegemonic power of technology over
your lives; learn new tactics and strategies to protect your privacy; and cope
with your paranoia. They are watching and listening to you.
Contents

acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
onomasticon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xli
chronology of key events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . li

chapter 1. The Target and the Architects of Oppression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

chapter 2. Hoover’s “Commonist” of 1965 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
chapter 3. The UFW Eagle Comes to the Lone Star State, 1966–1968 . . . . . 69
chapter 4. The Arizona Battlefield, 1969–1972 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
chapter 5. The Price of Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
chapter 6. The Six-Year War with Teamsters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
chapter 7. End of Hoover and Nixon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
chapter 8. The Unraveling of Chávez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

epilogue. Chávez and the FBI Surveillance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291

appendix 1. Methodology and Research Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
appendix 2. Explanation of Exemptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389
index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to all who have helped me gather documents

dating back to 1976 and the Free Ramsey Muñiz campaign, which led us
to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We found a treasure trove of
redacted FBI documents, but documents nonetheless, on ourselves and
the Chicano Movement. And more documents with the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS), which audited me every year in the 1970s while I served as
board president of the Crystal City Independent School District; later as
county judge for Zavala County, Texas; and founder and national president
of the Raza Unida Party. I thank them because I learned then that there
were intelligence agencies in existence other than the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), such as the
IRS and the NSA, for example.
Over the years, many others have shared their documents with me, begin-
ning with Harry Ring (now deceased), longtime writer and activist with the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Their case against the FBI for release of with-
held documents remains the longest litigated battle by citizens suing their
government for spying on them, thirty-five years. There were many others.

n ix
x n Acknowledgments

Mauricio Mazon provided copies of military intelligence files on the West

Coast military and the police, state and local, from San Diego to Los Angeles.
Rodolfo Acuña shared his Red Squad file, aka Los Angeles Police Intelligence
Unit, collected by an informant in his classes at California State University–
Northridge. Ernesto Vigil, Richard Romero, and John Haro, all high-level
members of the Crusade for Justice in Denver, have given me many records
on that organization, themselves, and its leader Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales.
An anonymous source gave me the files gathered and held by the Mexican
government on my activities during the years I maintained relations with
various Mexican presidents and other influential people in Mexico. Yolanda
Garza and Walter Birdwell let me copy their FBI files; both were active in
the Mexican American Youth Organization in the Houston area. Reies Lopez
Tijerina, one of the “Four Horsemen of the Chicano Movement,” as Matt
Meier and Feliciano Rivera (later Ribera) termed us, let me copy his FBI file.
I also thank the graduate students in my classes and conference attend-
ees who sat in on my lectures and presentations utilizing these documents
over the years. They posed questions and analyzed content with different
lenses that have made my own views and interpretations clearer. On more
than one occasion they saw things in the files I missed.
My deep gratitude goes to Rubén Martinez, director of the Julian Samora
Research Institute at Michigan State University, who took an interest in my
work and did some fine editing of the draft manuscript. He afforded me
time and resources to spend writing this book. I also thank Ernesto Vigil for
his work and views on the subject. I dare say he is the most knowledgeable
scholar on the surveillance of Chicanos, Mexicans, and Native Americans.
And, thank you Bonnie Cobb for your careful copyediting and Michigan
State University Press for publishing my analysis of these documents.
Foreword
Rubén Martinez

César E. Chávez was a remarkable man. Like few others, he rose

from poverty to have great political influence on the American conscious-
ness and the nation’s institutions. He led the building of a powerful farm-
worker organization, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), influ-
enced statewide elections in California, and directly challenged the power of
federal agencies, local law-enforcement officials, and decisions by the courts.
The younger generations of Americans may know about his nonviolent ide-
ology, the nationwide boycotts of nonunion grapes and lettuce, his hunger
strikes, and the 340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, California, in
1966. Those who are older may remember Chávez breaking bread with Sena-
tor Robert Kennedy to end a 25-day fast in 1968. They are not likely, however,
to know about the struggles with the growers in California and Texas; the
repeated violence against him, union members, and supporters who joined
him on the front lines; and the bitter struggle with the Teamsters Union.
And, least known of all is how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
the nation’s most powerful internal security and law enforcement agency,
tracked and monitored Chávez’s movements and the union’s activities, all

n xi
xii n Foreword

the while taking a hands-off approach toward the perpetrators of violence

against the union’s leadership, members, and followers.
Given Chávez’s influence, it is little wonder that surveillance of him by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation may seem to some, or perhaps to many,
as both reasonable and appropriate, especially given that the unionization
struggles of farm workers had a long history of industrial strife and violent
opposition, especially in California. Violence, for example, was common-
place against Filipino farm workers attempting to organize labor unions
in California in the 1930s, when numerous agricultural strikes occurred.
In 1933, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU)
organized several strikes in the agricultural fields of California, gaining
partial wage increases for striking farm workers. This was a period of in-
tense labor organizing throughout the country that culminated in passage
of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act,
in 1935. The act gave labor the right to organize workers and form unions
to bargain collectively with employers, but it excluded agricultural and
domestic workers from its protections.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, Dr. Ernesto Galarza attempted to organize
farm workers in California, but growers used braceros, Mexican guest work-
ers, to break strikes and quash organizing. It was not until the Bracero
Program came to an end in 1964 that Filipino and Chicano farm workers
were able to organize themselves in pursuit of collective bargaining rights
and better wages and working conditions. On September 16, 1965 (Mexican
Independence Day), leading a fledgling labor association (National Farm
Workers Association), Chávez joined striking Filipinos (Agricultural Workers
Organizing Committee) in what became known as the Delano Grape Strike,
which became a turning point in the unionization struggles of farm workers
in California. That strike set in motion the enormous gains made by farm
workers over the next ten years, leading to passage of the Agricultural Labor
Relations Act in California in 1975. Chávez gained national prominence
through the struggles of farm workers against growers and the Teamsters,
but he also endured violence and threats to himself and his family.
The domination of ethno-racial minority groups in this country has
involved and continues to involve the most powerful institutions in society,
 Foreword n xiii

beginning with the military and law enforcement and ending with institu-
tionalized propaganda that yields compliance. While the concept of “insti-
tutional racism” pushes us to examine how the dominant group maintains
and perpetuates the subordination of classes and minority groups through
the control and use of government agencies at all levels, few studies have
been conducted that shed light on how domination occurs through the
day-to-day activities of societal institutions. José Angel Gutiérrez has made
a major contribution to our understanding, as he has done throughout his
life as an activist and a public intellectual, of how institutional power in the
form of national law enforcement is organized and exercised against the
poor and those viewed as threats to the powerful in society. This time he has
done so by focusing on the FBI and how it diminished Chávez’s influence in
improving the lives of farm workers.
This volume, based primarily on the documents made public at the
FBI’s Vault (available online) and those the author received through Free-
dom of Information Act requests, provides a glimpse into the violence
endured by Chávez and the UFW during the period from 1965 to 1978. It
also provides insight into the FBI directors’ stances toward Chávez and
the union, and their unwillingness to investigate the violations of civil
rights by local law-enforcement officials. The task undertaken by Gutiér-
rez was an enormous one, as the files released by the FBI on Chávez were
highly disorganized, requiring as a first step both time and resoluteness
to organize them. Next, analysis of the documents required a broader un-
derstanding of the period and of Chávez’s aims and activities in order to
produce a meaningful account of how the FBI’s activities influenced his
efforts to improve the lives of farm workers. Gutiérrez’s account is informed
by his experiences as a leader of the Mexican American Youth Organization
and the electoral-power thread of the Chicano Movement (roughly 1965 to
1980). This account of the FBI’s surveillance of Chávez’s agricultural-labor
organizing work was done with redacted documents that constituted an
enormous puzzle demanding knowledge not only of the period but also, at
least at a rudimentary level, of the FBI’s organizational and internal com-
munications structures and processes, its language, and its codes.
The product of Gutiérrez’s intellectual labor reflects dedication, courage,
xiv n Foreword

and vast knowledge of the Chicano Movement, the Civil Rights Movement,
and dominant group institutions. The volume is the result of “slow re-
search” that yields enormous insight, in this case, into the FBI’s hidden role
in agricultural-labor struggles. By focusing on Chávez, it is the first of its
kind in an emergent scholarly subfield that demands the systematic study
of the nation’s law enforcement agencies and their activities surveilling
and undermining leaders of organized civil- and human-rights struggles in
Latino communities across the country. Those types of activities continue
today, such as the FBI investigating Standing Rock activists opposing the
Dakota Access Pipeline as terrorists, using live feeds and infiltrating their
ranks.
What Gutiérrez’s work does is point us, as critical scholars during a time
when higher education is under siege by America’s Republican Party, to the
examination of the changing forms of social control in the American social
order, which has evolved from a social democratic to a neoliberal order
over the past forty years. This includes the latest forms of technology and
the most sophisticated communications network, the internet, which the
dominant classes use to achieve high levels of ideological domination and
government control—today represented by the regressive political agenda
of President Donald Trump. Beyond the audio/video recording devices of
yesteryear, surveillance today is aided by drones, facial recognition technol-
ogy, multiple tracking devices, and other tools of the “technology of power.”
Ironically, even as the FBI seems to reject Trump as a capable president, it
continues to engage in many tactics, expanded following 9/11 by the Patriot
Act, to contain organized challenges to today’s plutocracy. Indeed, there are
many indicators that Trump would prefer an expanded, more intensive, and
more secretive system of social control in American society.
Preface

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and its “G-men,” has

been among the most revered institutions in American society. J. Edgar
Hoover, the FBI director, headed the list of America’s top cops during the ad-
ministrations of eight presidents and seventeen attorney generals. In 1934,
shortly after the apprehension and shooting of John Dillinger by FBI agent
Melvin Purvis, Hoover ensured that all credit for FBI work, particularly in
apprehending criminals, went to him. The following year he created the
Crime Records Section, with Louis B. Nichols as head of that section. Nich-
ols was an aficionado of public relations and a consummate networking
practitioner. He set out over the next twenty years to massage the national
data of “crimes” to reflect the FBI’s success at crime fighting.1 More im-
portantly, the duo of Hoover and Nichols made sure the 1935 movie G-Men,
by Warner Brothers, cast Hoover and the FBI men in heroic light. Nichols
saw to it that Hoover always made front-page material, beginning with the
apprehensions of Kate “Ma” Barker, with her Thompson machine gun and
its 100-round circular drum, and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, bank robber and

n xv
xvi n Preface

murderer of policemen, later that year. For this latter event, Hoover flew into
New Orleans to be present as if he had made the arrest.2
Hoover, from his first appointment as Director, was the first to conduct
surveillance operations without authority from his superiors on persons
in opposition to administrations’ politics, programs, domestic policies, and
foreign affairs. He continued to do so to the day he died. His successors have
not discontinued many of these practices and programs despite congres-
sional oversight and mandates to cease such operations.3 The American
public, it seems, is more concerned about safety and security as guaranteed
by the FBI than a trouncing of civil rights by that same FBI. Yet, not many
Americans can name the components of the United States intelligence
community beyond the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), and perhaps the National Security Agency (NSA).
Most Americans cannot tell you what these agencies do for our national
security, notwithstanding the daily media reports on these agencies. And,
all these agencies within the umbrella of overseeing national security as
part of the U.S. intelligence community have in many instances since 9/11
increased, enhanced, expanded, devised, created, and implemented new
methods of surveillance to disrupt, destroy, and eliminate opposition to U.S.
policy, particularly foreign-policy objectives, and in some cases domestic-
policy objectives in place to stop homegrown “terrorists.”4
Once again, in 2016 the FBI was the subject of distrust and disgust,
scrutiny and suspicion, and concern and circumspection not only by the
American people but by other components of the United States intelligence
community. The impact of the role played by the director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, in the 2016 presidential election
will be the subject of continued investigation and debate for years to come.
Why did he release a press statement of a new FBI investigation into more
emails found on another server that were allegedly sent by Hillary Clinton,
the Democratic presidential candidate, with days remaining to Election
Day? And, why did he again release another press statement on the eve of
Election Day that the investigation revealed no federal crime? These actions
were a very public display of how politicized the FBI has become. Comey
did not continue in his job under the new Trump administration; he was
 Preface n xvii

fired on May 9, 2017. He had a ten-year appointment lasting to 2023.5 The

dismissal is now the focus of one of several congressional investigations
and that of the appointed special prosecutor Robert Mueller, himself an
ex–FBI director.
This period, 2015–2016, is the third time in FBI history the agency has
come under severe criticism and investigation. The last time was after the
post-9/11 attack by terrorists in New York. Why did the FBI’s intelligence-
gathering procedures fail to warn about this attack? The first critical time
the FBI was investigated by Congress was during the post-Watergate era,
stemming from the burglary of an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania.6
The American public was horrified to learn that since the 1930s the FBI
had been conducting illegal break-ins, telephone taps, harassment, disrup-
tion of legitimate First Amendment rights, and basically conducting more
surveillance of persons for their political beliefs and actions rather than
apprehending criminals.
The surveillance of César Chávez was just one of the many FBI ac-
tions of surveillance of activists and dissenters in the twentieth century.
Since the inception of the Bureau of Investigation and its progeny, the FBI,
presidents, and U.S. attorney generals have permitted and encouraged the
agency to conduct surveillance on dissidents and suspected subversives.
From Franklin D. Roosevelt to Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Kennedy,
and Nixon, all relied on Hoover to harass and disrupt any anti-government
group and its leadership. Nothing was put into writing authorizing such il-
legal and unconstitutional activity by presidents or attorney generals. All of
them involved over the decades, however, knew Hoover was knee-deep into
busting civil rights activists and not as preoccupied with apprehending
criminals.7 William C. Sullivan, a top FBI administrator in charge of domes-
tic intelligence during many years with Hoover, writes in his tell-all book:

As far as I am concerned, we might as well not engage in intelligence

unless we also engage in counterintelligence. One is the right arm, the
other the left. They work together. Actually, these counterintelligence pro-
grams were nothing new; I remember sending out anonymous letters and
phone calls back in 1941, and we’d been using most of the same disruptive
xviii n Preface

techniques sporadically from field office to field office as long as I’ve been
an FBI man. In 1956, under Assistant Director Belmont, five years before I
came in to take over the Domestic Intelligence Division, the decision was
made to incorporate all counter intelligence operations into one program
directed against the Communist Party. I merely redirected the use of those
techniques toward investigating the Klan.8

Admittedly, not a single report in the declassified Chavez file is specifi-

cally marked in the subject heading as a COINTELPRO (counterintelligence
program), leading some scholars to infer that Mexicans and their progeny
of Mexican ancestry, Chicanos, were never under FBI or government sur-
veillance. My files have various code names for identifying the material
ranging from Internal Security–Spanish American to Communist Infiltra-
tion, or COMINFIL, and New Left, certainly all COINTELPROs. The code
“Mexican American Militancy” has been found in documents by others,
indicating a link to the huge COINTELPRO operations the FBI had going at
the same time aimed at other Mexican American groups and leaders.9 The
first FBI COINTELPRO operation was directed at the American Communist
Party in 1956, and the second in August 1960 against the Puerto Ricans
striving for independence.10 Jo Thomas of the New York Times wrote about
this FBI harassment of Puerto Ricans on the island, in New York, New Jer-
sey, and elsewhere in the country.11 The first COINTELPRO operation that
targeted Mexicans and Mexican Americans discovered during my research
on FBI surveillance was the Border Coverage Program, or BOCOV by its code
name. This FBI program was aimed specifically at Mexican and Mexican
American organizations along the U.S. Mexico border to prevent their as-
sociation and collaboration on mutual interests.12
The methods and tactics utilized against Chávez parallel those outlined
in three “smoking gun” memos issued to special agents in charge (SACs)
across the country by the FBI Director. “Smoking gun” is a prosecutor’s
term for having incontrovertible evidence to convict an accused person of
the crime in question (e.g., the accused arrested with the gun still smok-
ing from the firing of bullets into the victim). These memos were the first
time the Director wrote out the specific orders to his agents on the goals
 Preface n xix

and targets of the COINTELPRO for African Americans—namely, the Black

Panthers and the youth of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). The targets were coded “Black Nationalist–Hate Groups” under
the rubric of “Internal Security”—just like the first reports filed on vari-
ous Mexican American groups and persons, including Chávez. And as FBI
Assistant Director William Sullivan writes, he just used the instructions
for one counterintelligence operation on another—all the same. The first
Hoover “smoking gun” memo was issued on August 25, 1967, then expanded
and clarified with much specificity in memos of February 29 and March 4,
1968.13
These memos clearly state the purpose of the new Black Nationalist
Hate COINTELPRO: “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise
neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and
groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters,
and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.” These
specific instructions were followed by the field offices, SAC, and other
agents investigating Chávez, per the declassified FBI documents analyzed
in subsequent chapters. The March 4th memo expanded the counterintel-
ligence program designed to neutralize militant black nationalist groups
from twenty-three to forty-one field offices to cover the great majority of
black nationalist activity in this country. This memo has underscored this
instruction: “personal attention for all the following sacs.” For
clarification purposes the FBI Director listed under “Goals” the five specific
activities his agents should undertake to neutralize the targets. In sum-
mary fashion:

For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and

to prevent wasted effort, long-range goals are being set. 1. Prevent the
coalition of black militant nationalist groups . . . 2. Prevent the rise of
a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist
movement . . . 3. Prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups
. . . 4. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gain-
ing respectability, by discrediting them in three separate segments
of the community . . . the responsible Negro community . . . the white
xx n Preface

community . . . to “liberals” who have vestiges of sympathy for militant

black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes . . . 5. A final goal
should be to prevent the long-range growth of militant, black nation-
alist organizations, especially among the youth” [capitalization in the
original memo].14

I ask the reader to substitute the words “Chávez and UFW” for black
nationalist, and “Chicano” or “Mexican” for Negro in the text of these
COINTELPRO memos. It is very doubtful that any SAC, field agent, and
FBI informant, particularly in the Southwest and major urban centers
with large concentrations of people of Mexican ancestry, would make the
distinction that the goals and specific instructions for each goal were to
be applied only to black nationalists and organizations and not to Chicano
militants and their organizations in their field office cities, such as Chicago,
Denver, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Albuquerque. Assistant Director
Sullivan of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division did not, and had not
done so since 1941 by his own admission. Counterintelligence was part
and parcel of intelligence/surveillance. Moreover, a cursory reading of the
Chavez file documents reveals the use by local police and the FBI of the very
tactics listed and emphasized in the COINTELPRO memos. In the 1960s all
dissenting groups—black, white, brown, yellow—were viewed by the FBI as
constituting the New Left, the target of another COINTELPRO.

The Declassified FBI File

The FBI declassified the extensive file on Césario Estrada Chávez, aka César
Chávez, in the late 1990s.15 Richard Steven Street first analyzed these docu-
ments, after extensive newspaper coverage of their existence, in an article
for the Southern California Quarterly in 1996.16 In this pioneering work on the
FBI surveillance of Chávez, he concluded:

What becomes abundantly clear in Chavez’s FBI file is that after Hoover’s
men wrapped-up their spying, bound up their foot-thick dossier,
 Preface n xxi

cross-referenced and indexed their material, and analyzed hundreds of

reports, they came up empty. They found nothing in Chavez. No commu-
nist leanings stained his reputation. No ugly incidents detracted from his
reputation. No misappropriation of funds marred his union administra-
tion. No extramarital affairs undermined his reputation as a family man.
No subversive activities cast suspicion on the movement he championed.
In all of his actions, and in all of his associations, Chavez never displayed
even one iota of disloyalty. All that the FBI was able to show through its
spying was a man with a single-minded devotion to farm workers and
ever-present vigilance against those who would harm his cause with their
self-serving ideology and petty politics.17

Street, like many of the secondary sources published prior to 1996, was
effusive in praise of César and ignored the FBI files. Perhaps if Street were
to rewrite his conclusions now after the spate of critical books on Chávez,
make a closer examination of the content in the files, and review books
available on the dark side of the U.S. government’s abuse, repression, and
illegal activity, he might retract his words. For example, Mike Yates, in a
review of a critical book on Chávez, writes, “Most accounts of UFW history
speculate that something happened to Chavez after the lost initiative, and
he somehow went off the deep end. Certainly, bizarre and ugly things began
to happen.”18
Indeed, if Chávez did go over the deep end after the defeat of Proposition
22 in California in 1974, were the “bizarre and ugly things” early manifesta-
tions of emotional and mental instability? Chávez had won and lost other
electoral battles before; why was this one so life-changing? What other fac-
tors or events may have caused him to change his character and behavior?
The declassified FBI files may offer new clues. The FBI files released to the
public account for nearly a decade of monitoring Chávez and his union
activities. These declassified FBI files on Chávez consist of seven parts ar-
ranged into seventeen packets beginning with a document dated October
8, 1965. They end with a document dated August 1, 1975. The notes on my
methodology and research are in appendix 1.
The surveillance of Chávez continued well past 1975 until his death in
xxii n Preface

1993. I have other FBI files on Chávez that are not posted on The Vault, the
FBI website, including some dated December 2, 1977, and February 4, 1982
(see appendices 2B and C). Obviously, the FBI files released to the public are
what the FBI wanted made public regarding 1965 to 1975; but by no means
are they the entire set of FBI files on Chávez or the union.
Regardless of the surveillance time frame, does not the sustained and
ubiquitous presence of police agents—local, state, federal—and their in-
formants take a toll on the subject under surveillance? How about those
around the subject? Is paranoia due to the surveillance a normal state of
mental affairs for the target, family, and core staff? If Chávez was not found
to be a criminal by the FBI, as Street concludes, perhaps the surveillance
was not intended for that purpose. Could it have been for strictly political
purposes? This would be an illegal activity on the part of the FBI, would it
not? Would not ignoring, derailing, suspending, ending, and not authoriz-
ing investigations by the FBI, and the U.S. attorney’s failure to prosecute not
be obstruction of justice?
This book is about the government surveillance by the FBI of César
Estrada Chávez, a migrant farm worker who founded the first successful
labor union for seasonal agricultural workers in the United States. The fun-
damental question is why the surveillance? If Chávez was simply trying to
form a labor union, how was that subversive or a threat to national security?
And, if answers can be found to that fundamental question in the files, then
why did the U.S. government and the FBI thwart that goal and destroy the
Chávez persona? The files will reveal some answers.

Prior Scholarship

No further scholarly study of these documents has ensued since Street

published his article. For that matter, not much scholarly work has been
done on the government surveillance of Chicano groups, organizations, and
leaders.19 These FBI documents—2,085 pages—are my primary sources of
information, despite the documents being heavily redacted, disorganized in
the released format, and not the entire file.20 On appeal, I was able to wrest
 Preface n xxiii

63 more pages dated 1988–1989. Chávez was the best known Chicano leader
of the 1960s. He generated much interest as a research subject for academ-
ics and journalists. The body of knowledge and information on Chávez in
secondary sources is extensive.21 I rely on these for the construction of
narrative to accompany the analysis of FBI documents. In other words,
what Chávez was doing according to the secondary sources will help me
ground the primary-source documents in the file around specific dates,
events, and activities to determine the scope and nature of governmental
intrusion into Chávez’s organizing of Filipino, Mexican, African American,
Anglo, and Chicano farm workers, primarily in California, then Texas and
Arizona, plus a few other locations such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Oregon,
and Washington.22
In 1976, while finishing my doctoral work at the University of Texas at
Austin, I began a serious study of government surveillance of Chicanos and
Mexicanos. With each request, new doors of inquiry opened, and I system-
atically continued to make several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) re-
quests over the years to the present time. I never had the money to finance
litigation nor the assistance of pro bono attorneys to sue the intelligence
agencies, primarily the FBI and the CIA, to turn over redacted or missing
documents, and reexamine their reasons for redacting huge portions of
material. The FBI files have large gaps in reporting on a target of interest
such as César E. Chávez that are unexplained and unexplainable without
court orders. I have acquired and reviewed so many files that I can general-
ize that the FBI has probably surveilled every Chicano leader and organiza-
tion since the 1930s—perhaps earlier, but those first records were either not
kept, had been destroyed, or were lost in some warehouse or basement. And,
letters of inquiry and proposals have been submitted without success to the
major foundations and other related funding sources. It seems that govern-
ment surveillance is a topic of interest to the public and scholars, but not
the surveillance of Chicano leaders or their organizations. No program or
department of any university has made the gathering of these documents
a major research agenda, and neither have any Chicano or Latino studies
programs or departments.23
xxiv n Preface

FBI Surveillance of Others

There are files dating to the 1940s, during which time the FBI did a national
survey of where the Mexican-origin population resided, complete with
names of organizations, officers, and addresses. The FBI also targeted as a
matter of course many, if not all, African American leaders and organiza-
tions from the early 1920s as well.24 Japanese Americans came under sur-
veillance with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.
Over 110,000 Japanese Americans and permanent residents were rounded
up and held in detention centers for most of the period of war with Japan.25
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such an order in
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).26 These surveys of Mexican and
Japanese communities were very much like the post-9/11 FBI survey of Arab
Americans living in the United States. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act of 1996 specifically targeted persons from Iraq, Iran, and
Libya residing in the United States.27 Are COINTELPROs continuing into the
twenty-first century?28
With passage of the USA Patriot Act and the National Security Entry-
Exit Registration System (NSEERS) after 9/11, Arab Americans and per-
manent residents from twenty Arab/Muslim countries were targeted for
registration; it did not matter that the prime candidates for registration,
63 percent of them, were young Christian males over the age of sixteen, ac-
cording to James Zogby’s poll from the late 1990s.29
In April 2015, perhaps since 2003, the FBI began operating a fleet of spy
planes over U.S. cities in eleven states and the District of Columbia. This
operation is a huge leap into collecting metadata and placing all persons
in an area under surveillance for unknown reasons or no reason at all. The
FBI utilized no less than thirteen fake companies registered to post office
boxes in Bristow, Virginia, and another box shared with the Department of
Justice. These 115 or more 182T Cessna Skylanes were used for video surveil-
lance and cell-site simulation. Video footage assists in vehicle description
and registration data, facial recognition of occupants, and even vehicle des-
tinations. The cell-site simulation tricks cellphones on the ground, regard-
less of being on or off, into sending their signals to the airplane instead of
 Preface n xxv

a cell tower. Such a practice, termed “cell-site simulation,” reveals personal

data and other subscriber information about the cellphone owner/user to
the FBI airplanes, plus the video feed.30

First Glimpse of FBI Abuse

In January 1971, the FBI office raid in Media, Pennsylvania, the Citizens’ Com-
mission to Investigate the FBI, and three months later, the literature gener-
ated by Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers in March was the
most useful exposé of the FBI since its founding.31 Recent developments in
government surveillance of citizens and residents in general, and intelligence
metadata-gathering by electronic means by the United States have renewed
interest in this field. For example, in Chávez’s day, an actual boots-on-the-
ground type of surveillance was necessary and aided by phone taps, break-ins,
and other illegal practices and agency abuses. Today, the power of technology,
the internet, has given way to the technology of power, metadata collection
of personal information that makes possible huge databases or “Big Data.”
“Dataveillance,” as some scholars like Roger Clarke call it, is the new name
of the government’s activity of “watching,” listening, gathering, analyzing,
disseminating, storing, and utilizing the information gleaned.32 The intel-
ligence agencies mine the data from the internet and other electronic devices
to gather information on individuals at will. Government agencies now wait
for “self-reporting” by individuals rather than seeking out persons for physi-
cal observation. Self-reporting is done by monitoring the use of electronic
devices such as postings on social media, emails sent and received, credit card
purchases, GPS devices on vehicles (personal or rental), toll permit stickers,
passports, and phone calls, for example. The current whistle-blowers such as
Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Elizabeth), with the help of Julian Assange
of WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden are contemporary examples of private
action to expose ultra vires acts by public agencies.33 The National Security
Agency is under high scrutiny by Congress and civil libertarians for its mas-
sive collection of personal records obtained from servers, internet providers,
and host server companies, as well as telephone service providers.34
xxvi n Preface

These recent revelations of continual U.S. government abuses of indi-

vidual civil liberties—namely, the right to privacy—make the study of the
FBI role in preventing Chávez from reaching success sooner even more
important. From this look back in time, we can glean lessons of what the
government can do once again, perhaps already is doing to some if not
many U.S. citizens and residents, as in the case of the FBI Cessna spy planes.
The FBI documents will also reveal the methods, tactics, scope, initiatives,
and actions utilized by the agency against Chávez. This information is
useful to contrast with the rise and failure of recent activists, such as the
Occupy Wall Street movement that collapsed almost as soon as it began,
perhaps because of the violent police actions taken in city after city to re-
move the protesters. Analyzing the Chávez documents will also be useful in
making the case for renewed efforts at reform by these rogue agencies that
have operated outside the law while making the case that civilians need to
follow the rule of law.
The overall importance of this type of study is also to focus on the issue
of formulating limits on the nation-state and its police power. Ultimately,
the question post-9/11 is what rights to privacy must the citizenry of a
democratic society forego for security? Is the constant reframing of a post-
9/11 terrorist threat era a ruse driven primarily by the U.S. executive branch
to push for a permanent state of war that requires primacy for vigilance of
its citizens and foreigners over the erosion of civil liberties?

Why the Surveillance?

What were the fundamental reasons for the FBI monitoring and interven-
ing in the Chávez movement to organize farm workers? In the early 1950s,
the John Birch Society was in full operation against any and all enemies of
the United States, including Mexicans in the United States. John Burma,
in his book of 1954, presented five reasons for the discrimination against
Mexican Americans. First, color of skin; second, their poverty; third, a
belief that their culture was different and deficient; fourth, that they were
predominantly Catholic in a Protestant United States; and lastly, that they
 Preface n xxvii

spoke Spanish in public places to offend, exclude, insult, and talk about
whites.35 Are these reasons for the discrimination also the foundation for
FBI suspicion of disloyalty and evidence of anti-Mexican sentiments and
bias?
There could be other reasons. Was it because Chávez was a pacifist
during the Vietnam era? Was it because the United States is a capitalist
system and diametrically opposed to labor unionization drives in any
sector? Was it because Chávez was a devout Catholic, a papist with
strong allies within the organized Church? Was it because Chávez was
an environmentalist warning the public about pesticides and herbicides
that poisoned not only farm workers but also consumers? Was it because
he was a Democrat in a California dominated by Republican presidents
such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and governors such as George
Deukmejian (1983–1991) and Pete Wilson (1991–1999)? Was it simply that
he was a Chicano of Mexican ancestry? Or because Chicanos should not be
leaders of labor unions?
Was the reason for the surveillance because Chávez not only was de-
veloping a labor union but also an effective political machine with which
to elect Democrats supportive of his politics? Was he seeking political and
economic power to challenge economic and political elites in California
and the nation? Was the intelligence gathering a manifestation of anti-
Catholic sentiments among FBI agents and the director? Hoover had great
affinity with the hierarchy of the U.S. Catholic Church for their shared anti-
Communism, according to Steve Rosswurm; not so among the Mormon
and Protestant FBI agents.36 Are the roots of this religious hostility against
Catholics by U.S. Protestants to be found in the break with the pope by
Henry VIII dating to the sixteenth century? Was the Catholic global empire
built by the Spanish in the New World during those times a final determi-
nant of open warfare between the two European powers? In hindsight, we
can respond affirmatively. The Spanish accused the British of having per-
petuated the black legend of Spanish cruelty toward natives in the Ameri-
cas and previously in the Netherlands. The English view also included the
Spanish as the model of racial impurity based on skin color and religion,
while they reserved whiteness as the symbol of purity and goodness and,
xxviii n Preface

more importantly, Christianity for themselves. If the Spanish were the low
rung on the ladder of God’s chosen children, then the Mexicans and their
Chicano progeny did not even get onto a rung.
Was the basis for the surveillance economic or environmental? That
California became a huge agricultural engine after the Depression and into
the 1950s and 1960s is a foregone conclusion. After water was piped into
the central arid regions of California, agriculture boomed. And, agricultural
interests relied on stoop labor from every ethnic group they could find to
labor in their fields. Sam Kushner in Long Road to Delano details these eras
in California’s agribusiness.37 Del Monte Corporation, based in California,
became the agribusiness model not only in the United States but also in
Latin America.38 Specifically, this was the case in the fruit and vegetable in-
dustry, from dried and fresh fruits and vegetables to wineries and emerging
food processors such as the California Packing Corporation, which became
Del Monte. DiGiorgio and Gallo, also based in California, became the name
brands for American wine and an integral part of the national economy.39
The Chávez labor strikes in California and national consumer boycotts
of grapes, wine, lettuce, other produce, and specific growers crippled this
national economic engine. Adding the charge that California growers were
contaminating the nation’s food supply with chemicals made Chávez the
slayer of the Jolly Green Giant. As president, both Nixon and Reagan sided
with the growers against Chávez and used their presidential powers, in-
cluding control of the FBI and other federal agencies such as the Immigra-
tion and Naturalization Service (INS), to break strikes, cross picket lines,
and seek to halt the unionization of field hands. On the flip side, as Chávez
signed more growers to contracts, his economic power grew exponentially.
He could not only provide his union members with benefits but also invest
monies in more international consumer education programs, domestic
voter registration, citizenship drives, and get-out-the-vote campaigns. Con-
ventional wisdom in California particularly was that Chávez both elected
Jerry Brown as governor and handed the presidential primary victory to
Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) in 1968. Chávez was Mr. National Democrat, even
nominating RFK for president during the Democratic National Convention
that year. During the early years of the Raza Unida Party (RUP) in the 1970s,
 Preface n xxix

upon my invitation, Chávez campaigned for RUP candidates in nonpartisan

elections in Texas cities and school districts.40
The answer to “why the surveillance” is found in all these plausible and
possible reasons because Chávez did all those things.

Are Persons of Mexican Ancestry the Historic Enemy

of the U.S. Government?

In the early 1800s, the people of Mexican ancestry and the scores of Native
American tribes, dating to early battles over their lands in what is now the
Southwest and West, were perceived by whites as the historical enemies of
the United States. Native Americans were subjected to genocide, and those
that survived were removed to military-supervised “reservations” to live
out their lives. Surveillance of Mexicans and their progeny in the United
States has been in place since the first violent encounters dating to the
movement for independence by Texas in the 1830s, increasing in scope and
intensity by 1846, and the advent of the U.S. invasion of Mexico. With that
successful land grab from Mexico, the United States perpetrated acts of
aggression against Spain in a quest to take more of its possessions: Florida,
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Philippines. Between 1848
and 1851, the United States financially and militarily backed attempts by
Narciso López to take Cuba from Spain.41 Quarrels with Canada in the 1870s
over boundaries and fisheries led the United States to conduct military re-
connaissance (Army) and establish a Military Information Division (MID).
The U.S. Navy had already established within its command an intelligence-
gathering division on information about foreign countries, friend or foe,
and neighbors north and south. When rebellion resurfaced in Cuba against
Spain, the United States declared neutrality but supported Cuban exiles
such as General Calixto García. He was unsuccessful in dislodging Cuba
from Spain in La Guerra Grande (1868–78) and La Guerra Chiquita (1879–80).
In 1895, Calixto García was at it again, organizing support in New York City
for yet another invasion. U.S. designs on making Cuba a colony originated
with Thomas Jefferson. During Grover Cleveland’s term, MID spies were
xxx n Preface

sent to Cuba; Andrew Rowan was the principal figure. By 1898 the United
States had declared war on Spain, which resulted in a vast gain of lands in
the Caribbean and Pacific.42 The new sovereign not only changed flags and
boundaries, it looked the other way as the private property of those who
“lost” the war literally lost their private landholdings and homeland. They
became strangers in their own land—the Other.
Shortly after the war when military occupation was totally complete,
the U.S. War Department, precursor to the current Department of Defense,
ordered the Joint Army and Navy Board in 1920 to prepare war plans for
every country in the world, coded by color. These plans were updated in 1939
and became known as the five Rainbow Plans based on a U.S. war waged on
multiple fronts. The plan for Mexico was coded Green and implemented
during the latter stages of the Mexican Revolution, which began November
20, 1910, and lasted until normalcy reigned in the late 1920s.43 The first per-
manent police and military action institutionalized along the U.S.-Mexico
border (not Canada) was the Border Patrol in 1924.44 The militarization of
the U.S.-Mexico border has continued unabated into the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries—first, with the implementation of low-intensity
warfare in the area, and second, with the implementation of Operation
Gatekeeper in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. And third, the building of a
physical barrier, a fence, between the two countries in 2006 by President
George W. Bush.45
President Barack Obama has been referred to as the “Deporter-in-
Chief” by immigrant advocates because during his years in office more
Mexicans were deported, over 3 million, than in all prior years combined,
regardless of administration, dating to the 1950s. During the Eisenhower
years, when Operation Wetback was implemented in the mid-1950s, the INS
deported millions of Mexicans as well. President Trump was threatening
in 2017 not only to build a bigger physical wall between the United States
and Mexico but also to deport all immigrants without papers, particularly
Mexicans, from the United States. The new Department of Homeland Secu-
rity Customs and Border Protection agency has increased its roundups and
deportation activity since January 1, 2017.
Racism has been made part and parcel of U.S. armed intervention in the
 Preface n xxxi

affairs of other peoples and their countries in Latin America, the Caribbean,
and Pacific islands. Robert J. Rosenbaum posits that

the victors can use their win as evidence that the losers are a benighted,
backward people who will benefit by the change in the long run . . . A third
attitude takes the speed of conquest as proof that the defeated are a cow-
ardly and inferior branch of humankind, patently unfit for self-determina-
tion and prosperity in God’s chosen land. Anglos expressed all three, often
simultaneously, to justify and explain U.S. expansion into the Southwest.46

Arnoldo De León, in They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward

Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900, states:

The evidence is heavy that Anglos perceived the physical contrasts of

Mexicans as indicating mental and temperamental weaknesses. Moreover,
my findings square with recent scholarship which argues that racism
originated either in the Western psyche, in capitalist social development,
or in religion, and that native peoples in the path of white civilization
have historically been either exterminated or reduced to a hereditary
caste because of the peculiar strain of that racism.47

The animus between Mexicans and whites has long roots.48 In the
United Kingdom, the British viewed the Spanish with contempt, and after
the defeat of the Spanish Armada as inferior to other Europeans. Both
Spaniards and British brought with them the doctrine of Pax Dominus to
the New World, conquests to justify taking land from the indigenous tribes
as ordained by God. Once settled into their role as empire builders in the
Americas, the British, now calling themselves American Anglo-Saxons,
turned to the Spanish holdings and those of their newly independent
progeny, Mexico, the nearest enemy to their goal of One America, north
to south, east to west, in this hemisphere. Joseph Smith in The Spanish-
American War refers to the gradual whittling away of Spanish possessions in
North America as the “Laws of Gravitation,” taken from a House document
penned by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams on April 28, 1823.
xxxii n Preface

The United States acquired the Louisiana Territory when Napoleon

had his brother, Joseph, whom he installed as king of Spain, sell the land to
Thomas Jefferson in 1803, hoping to curry favor with the Americans against
the British. This was followed by the taking of Florida in 1819, and finally in
1836 by the insurrection fomented by southern whites in Mexican Texas/
Coahuila.49 The hostile attitudes formed as a result of taking Texas, and later
adopting Manifest Destiny as the political slogan of the white racial frame
are well developed in Arnoldo De Léon’s work and in Reginald Horsman,
Race and Manifest Destiny.50 Although Mexicans were considered “white”
racially because of the slim thread of Spanish genetic lineage some three
hundred years previously during Spanish colonization of the Americas,
North and South, the Mexican-ancestry group had never been treated or
afforded the privileges of being classified racially as white.

The White Baptism

In 1940, the U.S. Census Bureau made the white racial designation for Mexi-
cans official government policy and regulation. School officials continued
the practice of segregation of Mexican-origin children in the public schools
across the country, not because they were of “Mexican” race, but because
the children lacked sufficient English language skills. A spate of court
cases filed decades before Brown v. Board of Education by Mexican Americans
became useful precedents in that case.51
The contradictions in U.S. racial policy regarding Mexicans as white
are juxtaposed in two court cases: one in California in 1946, and the other
in Texas in 1952. The California case involved a Mexican American woman,
Andrea Perez, seeking to marry an African American man, Sylvester Davis.
She was considered racially white. The couple was denied a marriage li-
cense because in that state, miscegenation laws prohibited whites marry-
ing nonwhites, and Davis was black. The California Supreme Court ruled in
their favor and struck down the ban; this case was a precedent for the U.S.
Supreme Court nineteen years later in ending all miscegenation laws in the
Loving case.52 Interestingly, Texas never passed miscegenation laws because
 Preface n xxxiii

too many white males took up with Native American women, Mexican
women, black women, and mixtures of these categories to acquire and hold
title to land when it was under Mexican rule.
In Texas, the case of Pete Hernandez against the state is illustrative
of the racial classification of Mexicans as white, but not being consid-
ered white enough by Anglos in jury selection. Hernandez had murdered
another Mexican American. He was tried by an all-Anglo, male jury. The
defense proved that no Mexican American had ever been considered for
jury service despite being white. Blacks and women, even white women,
were excluded by law from serving on a jury. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that Mexican Americans, despite being classified white for racial purposes,
were not treated equally as white; therefore, this group constituted a class
apart and could seek constitutional protection from discrimination in the
future.53
In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reopened the door
to the racial classification of Mexicans and other Latinos by providing four
racial categories for Hispanics to choose from: White, Black, Asian, and
Native American. It also created only one ethnic category with a new U.S.
government-imposed ethnic group label: Hispanic.

The Door to Governmental Transparency Cracks Opens

Recent aphoristic statements by former CIA and NSA director General

Michael Hayden (“We kill people based on metadata”), during a debate with
David Cole at Johns Hopkins University over the collection of metadata
by the NSA, took me back in time to 1976.54 That year was the apogee of
the electoral gains made by the Raza Unida Party (RUP) in Texas, and the
beginning of the lifetime incarceration of its candidate for governor in
1974, Ramsey Muñiz. He jumped bail while awaiting trial on various drug-
related charges, and when apprehended declared his innocence alleging a
frame-up by the DEA and FBI. As national party chair of the RUP, and with
the help of Armando Gutierrez—now deceased, but then a tenure-track as-
sistant professor of government at the University of Texas-Austin—I began
xxxiv n Preface

a long, drawn-out ordeal trying to get documents under the Freedom of

Information Act. We sought records held by the FBI on Ramsey, the RUP,
and Chicano Movement activists of the time such as Reies Lopez Tijerina
from New Mexico, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales from Colorado, César E. Chávez
from California, and me.55 My principal question then was, and still is today,
“Why the surveillance on the leadership of the Chicano Movement?” Is en-
gaging in a social movement a federal crime? Is the building of an electoral
power base in the Southwest a federal crime? Or was it that the adherents
of the Chicano Movement and these leaders, en masse, were vocal in their
public opposition to national policies such as the administration of the War
on Poverty and the war in Vietnam, for example?
The FBI and other documents obtained began to offer clues in their
content, albeit heavily redacted but nonetheless indicating scope, methods,
time periods, locations, use of informants, and names of personnel in the
surveillance loop within the FBI. The most startling find was the sharing
of files by the FBI with other intelligence agencies, known as “cross-fertil-
ization,” and the White House. It seemed everyone in the executive branch
was aware and approved of the surveillance. Was the surveillance directed
by the president or was it directed by the FBI director? Who wags the tail
on the dog? Who wagged it then? They know, and try to keep their illegal
activities secret. Those of us unaware and ignorant of this government
activity, and those in opposition to federal government policies and politics
became easy targets for surveillance. Not so much those who are also inside
the government, such as members of Congress and the judiciary.

The Cannikin Papers

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) heard
a case filed by a member of Congress, Patsy T. Mink (D-Hawaii) et al. against
the Environmental Protection Agency et al., seeking to obtain from the
executive branch information concerning effects of nuclear testing on the
island of Amchitka done in 1971. The island is a National Wildlife Refuge
created by Executive Order 1733 by President William Howard Taft on March
 Preface n xxxv

3, 1913. More importantly, it is 1,400 miles southwest of Anchorage—a part

of the Aleutian chain of islands off Alaska’s coast, but only 700 miles from
Russia. Japan and Canada were also very concerned about these nuclear
tests, closer to their nations than was mainland United States, and voiced
their objections. The case, while it involves both environmental and foreign
policy, became known as the “Mink case,” filed originally as an FOIA request
under the 1966 law by thirty-one members of Congress. Release of informa-
tion was declined on national-security grounds, and on another amazingly
novel assertion that the president had the sole and absolute right to protect
data from disclosure by the FOIA’s list of exemptions. The case was first
heard by the District Court for the District of Columbia, which ruled against
them. On appeal, the case won some concessions and lost on other issues.
Central to the victory at the appellate level was that henceforth, responses
to FOIA requests had to have the exemption claimed by the government
specifically enumerated section by section, and not applied to entire docu-
ments or files. Furthermore, the plaintiffs won another victory in that in
camera inspections of documents would occur at the trial court’s discretion,
and not be an absolute denial of inspection based on a single affidavit
filed by the president’s office. The government sought certiorari of the case
before SCOTUS, which was granted, and held that the executive branch
could withhold information, and could do so without need for in camera
inspection. The case, while it reduced the power of both the legislative and
judicial branches of government over the executive branch, and disclosure
and transparency to a mere passive role, did bring about some favorable
changes.56

Non-Disclosure Continues Even on the Texas Rangers

(Not the Baseball Team!)

Dozens of FOIA requests were made in the 1970s with little result, includ-
ing a local request to the Texas Department of Public Safety on the Texas
Rangers, trying to find answers to a number of questions.57 Without money
and human resources to pursue appeals much less litigation, I settled for
xxxvi n Preface

what documents were released to me from various intelligence agencies

on Chicano leaders and organizations dating back to the 1920s through the
1990s.58 Others also requested files, particularly from the FBI, and some of
us have shared and exchanged documents.59 By 1986, I had published my
first article on the surveillance of Chicano leaders and groups, and had
uncovered an unreported, much less admitted, FBI COINTELPRO operation
by the code name of BOCOV, for Border Coverage Program. This program
consisted of counterintelligence operations conducted in Mexico and the
U.S.-Mexico borderlands to divide and disrupt activities between Chica-
nos and Mexicans, namely, building alliances and coalitions.60 Mauricio
Mazon two years previously had published his work on the Zoot Suit Riots
in Southern California utilizing FBI and military intelligence documents
shared with him by Rodolfo Acuña, professor emeritus of Chicano studies at
California State University at Northridge.61 The burning question as to why
the surveillance occurred continued to beg for an answer.

Hispanic FBI Agents Sue over Discrimination

Much to my surprise and that of others, the national media reported on a

federal class-action suit filed by Hispanic agents against their employer,
the FBI, in the Western District of Texas in January 1987.62 These FBI agents,
a total of 311 Hispanic agents among the ranks of 9,000 non-Hispanic FBI
agents, alleged discrimination in assignments, promotions, and unfair
disciplinary actions. In some cases, according to the news reports, it was
for speaking Spanish. Some sixty agents testified in the two-week trial and
put forth some damaging testimony against their white, mostly Mormon
counterparts known as the “Mormon Mafia.” No Hispanic was a special
agent in charge (SAC) of a major U.S. field office, only in Puerto Rico. They
were assigned low positions in major offices along the U.S.-Mexico border
the FBI higher-ups called the “Taco Circuit.” The lead plaintiff was Bernardo
Matias “Matt” Perez, then forty-eight, who sought $5 million in damages
and a change in the way the FBI treated Hispanic agents and other employ-
ees. A year later, they won their case. In a 95-page ruling, the judge found
 Preface n xxxvii

that the FBI had discriminated racially against Hispanics and ordered then
FBI director William Sessions to make some immediate changes in the
treatment of Hispanic agents. By 2012, however, out of the 12,000 FBI agents
only 7.1 percent were Hispanics.63
After the disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri, forced the FBI to look into
local police misconduct in the treatment of African American residents in
that city, the FBI’s lack of diversity among its agent staff came into ques-
tion again. In 2015, FBI Director James Comey revealed that only 915, or 6.8
percent, of 13,455 FBI agents were Hispanics. The percentages had dropped
from three years prior. Only 2.8 percent were special agents, and only one
was an assistant director at the top level in Washington, DC, headquarters
on March 12, 2015, according to the Washington Post.64

Some Literature on the Subject of Surveillance

The documents obtained revealed lawful actions by Chicano activists that

did not justify the constant monitoring. Regrettably, this meager body
of knowledge about Chicano leaders and organizations is the extent of
research utilizing FBI and other intelligence agencies’ files during the
Chicano Movement. The published works on the FBI and its activities dur-
ing the Hoover years completely ignore any mention, citation, listing, or
reference to surveillance of Chicanos. The ignoring of this community and
its leadership in the annals of FBI abuse by major scholars is tantamount
to erasing our history of struggle against great odds, including against the
U.S. government. But for the work of Ernesto Vigil, Mauricio Mazon, and
mine in this area of research and study, we would have no history, no body
of knowledge in academe of this government surveillance. Most recently,
David Correia published an article and subsequent book that incorporated
some FBI documents in his narrative, probably from Tijerina’s deposit at
the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico.65
xxxviii n Preface

Organization of the Book

These issues and questions will be paramount in the analyses of the docu-
ments spread over eight chapters utilizing FBI files and secondary sources.
Chapter 1 will present mini-biographies of César E. Chávez, the FBI target,
and Hoover, one of the architects of oppression. This is the story of “CC,”
César Chávez: who he was, from migrant to pachuco; why he became im-
portant to farm workers, Catholics, Chicanos, consumers, and recognized
the world over. The narrative will trace his early formative years, military
service, marriage, and first major non-agricultural job with the Community
Service Organization (CSO). I will describe aspects of J. Edgar Hoover as one
of the architects of oppression in making the United States a police state, by
tracing his career, training, and the radical right-wing currents promoting
the Palmer Raids, Red Scares, McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and
Hoover’s early forays into creating indexes for all types of targets to spy
on. The Hoover COINTELPRO operations as the crux of his police state—or
Seat of Government, as he signed his correspondence—will be examined.
Chapter 2 will feature an examination of how Chávez and his coleaders
Dolores Huerta, Gil Padilla, Antonio Orendain, and Philip Vera Cruz built the
UFW union, and first drew FBI attention as allegations were made in 1965 of
their Communist affiliations.66 Chávez’s early successes, which prompted
copycats in other states that wanted affiliation with his union, are the
content of chapter 3. He rejected affiliation with other startups in Texas,
Arizona, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, not wanting to dilute the efforts
in California, or with any other union insisting on an independent union
of farm workers, then changed his mind in the cases of Arizona and, for a
short time, Texas. Chávez also resisted becoming a Chicano leader despite
pleas from Chicano groups and organizations nationally. He did participate
with other Chicano groups in their events, activities, and conferences, but
rejected any leadership mantle. Chapters 4 through 8 will examine the FBI
files by years from 1969 to 1975. These narratives will also detail the Johnson,
Nixon, Ford, and Reagan roles in opposing Chávez when mentioned in the
documents and the Teamsters’ role as competitors in the fields. Operation
Hoodwink, another of Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, and local police
 Preface n xxxix

and Teamster violence against the farm workers will be detailed in chapter
7. The last chapter covers the unraveling of César Chávez to the end of FBI
documents in 1975. The epilogue will summarize the methods, scope, activi-
ties, tactics, and outcomes of the FBI surveillance with conclusions on their
impact on Chávez and the union. The epilogue will also review the chang-
ing nature of U.S. intelligence operations post-9/11 to the current state of
permanent war and recent governmental abuses of the rights of citizens
and residents. Central to this portion of the narrative is what I term the
“technology of power,” or how those in power are using technology not to
improve our quality of life but to oppress our every effort at improving our
lives that they disagree with or dislike. The work also contains appendices:
methodology and research, some select FBI documents and an explanation
of FOIA exemptions, and a list of FBI directors, presidents, and U.S. attorney
generals. A bibliography of sources is also provided as well as an index.
A copy of the entire FBI declassified file used in preparation of this
manuscript is on deposit with the Julian Samora Research Institute at
Michigan State University and can be downloaded at https://vault.fbi.gov;
search for César Chávez. Another copy, but not arranged in chronological
order, is at the University of Texas Benson Latin American Collection in
Austin, Texas, under my name, as are the rest of my personal papers.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Le prêtre, ami d'Antoinette, n'était pas seulement un joyeux
compagnon. Parmi les excellents enseignements qu'il avait donnés
à son élève, figuraient de très belles idées sur la résignation, qui
préparèrent la jeune femme à subir courageusement ses devoirs
d'épouse chrétienne. Comme elle était, avec cela, une personne
bien élevée, pleine de tact, et fort polie, elle évita de laisser voir au
marquis tout l'ennui que lui causaient les corvées conjugales. Mais
son éducation n'allait pas jusqu'à lui faire simuler une satisfaction
qu'elle était si loin d'éprouver et qui eût entretenu la fougue, un peu
assagie déjà, de son époux. Il espaça peu à peu ses visites. Quand
elle s'aperçut qu'il venait obéir, chez elle, à un devoir de galanterie,
elle sut lui faire comprendre qu'elle l'en dispensait, en alléguant des
migraines auxquelles il feignit de croire. Si bien que la séparation
s'effectua entre eux insensiblement. Tous deux reprirent une
indépendance complète. Et aucun des deux n'en fit mauvais usage.
Elle était trop contente d'être tranquille, et d'être exemptée de ces
obligations dont Hubert n'avait pas su lui révéler l'agrément
compensateur. Quant au marquis, les femmes ne l'occupaient plus.
Ce n'était pas que toute ardeur juvénile fût éteinte en lui. Mais il était
occupé de tant d'autres choses! Et puis, il lui eût fallu, pour faire la
cour à une dame, suivre une idée pendant quelques minutes, et il
n'en était plus capable. Et puis encore, les femmes lui semblaient
toutes identiques. Elles ne lui apprenaient rien de nouveau.
Antoinette n'avait jamais eu à se plaindre de lui. Pour rien au monde,
elle n'eût voulu le mécontenter. Il lui avait donné une grosse fortune,
une vie mouvementée, et qui passait pour agréable. Cette existence
était assez vide. Mais elle ne s'en aperçut que rétrospectivement le
jour où elle connut Julien. Et, de même qu'il avait poussé au
tragique, en les lui narrant, les petits mécomptes de sa vie, de même
elle exagéra l'ennui qu'elle avait éprouvé depuis son mariage.
Mais le diable, c'est que depuis que Julien lui faisait la cour, elle ne
s'ennuyait plus du tout, et ne souhaitait aucun changement dans sa
vie. Pourquoi cet homme exigeant demandait-il autre chose? C'était
le plaisir même qu'elle prenait à ces tendres et chastes entretiens, à
ces conversations un peu plus ardentes, le soir, sur la terrasse, qui
la faisait se contenter du «statu quo». Or, le meilleur adjuvant d'un
séducteur, c'est cette horreur naturelle que les dames ont pour le
«statu quo».
Et puis, vers quel inconnu le jeune homme voulait-il l'entraîner? Il
voulait recommencer avec elle tous ces gestes discrédités par le
marquis. Pour elle, le mystère avait été défloré sans plaisir; l'inconnu
n'avait plus de charme.
Heureusement pour Julien, Antoinette était une femme de devoir.
Les mêmes habitudes de sacrifice qui l'avaient fait si docilement se
soumettre aux formalités du mariage l'habituèrent à envisager,
presque avec résignation, un dévouement adultère. Vraiment ce
pauvre garçon paraissait si malheureux!
Le jour où elle se dit cela, elle vit avec clairvoyance qu'elle était sur
une pente fortement inclinée... Jusqu'à ce moment, elle n'avait pas
encore lutté contre sa vertu. Elle n'avait pas eu peur: alors les bons
principes n'avaient pas donné signe de vie. Mais elle s'aperçut tout à
coup que, sans s'en douter, elle était allée très loin du côté du
péché. A cet instant-là, il fallait appeler tout de même les principes à
la rescousse. Il était temps. On eût dit une personne assaillie par les
cambrioleurs et qui pousse en toute hâte les meubles les plus lourds
contre une porte menacée. Mais, hélas! les principes se discutent,
de même que les meubles se déplacent. Et puisqu'elle avait eu
assez de force pour les pousser contre la porte, l'assaillant aurait au
moins autant de force pour les repousser.
Le meilleur rempart d'Antoinette eût été sa vertu naturelle. Mais
Julien en avait triomphé par de lentes et insensibles pesées. La
vertu est un secours plutôt préventif, qu'il ne s'agit pas de faire
donner à la dernière minute.
 CHAPITRE XXIII
Rapprochement.
Cependant l'être simple et lubrique, qui habitait en Julien,
s'impatientait. Et, pour tromper ses impatiences, il cherchait autour
de lui des distractions. Un après-midi, comme Antoinette était partie
en auto, Julien se trouva seul avec madame Jehon et, par politesse,
lui proposa de faire quelques pas dans le parc. Ils allèrent s'asseoir
sur le talus herbu où, jadis, le matin, Julien s'en allait attendre le
facteur avec Lorgis. Là, madame Jehon, qui avait décidément pris
Julien en affection, se mit à parler de sujets sérieux, et qu'il n'écouta
pas. Il ne pensait qu'à une chose: se précipiter sur elle, la posséder
vigoureusement, pendant qu'elle continuerait à dire des choses
raisonnables. Mais il est bien rare que l'on passe de ces rêves
fantaisistes à leur brutale réalisation. Le Julien sage ne songeait pas
une seconde à écouter le Julien bestial. Si encore on avait été sûr
que madame Jehon se fût laissé faire! Dans le doute, il valait mieux
s'abstenir, renoncer à ces idées passagères. Mais, alors, du moment
qu'elle n'était plus un objet de tentation, madame Jehon devenait
une dame bien ennuyeuse. Il n'y avait plus qu'à prétexter une lettre à
écrire et à quitter cette personne au plus tôt.
Julien monta dans sa chambre, essaya de se mettre à lire. Il se
sentait désœuvré. Il était furieux contre Antoinette, qui le faisait ainsi
languir. Ma foi! tant pis! d'ici un jour ou deux, sous n'importe quel
prétexte, il irait passer vingt-quatre heures à Paris.
En principe, la villégiature à Bourrènes devait se terminer dans les
premiers jours d'août. Depuis une vingtaine d'années, en effet, le
marquis allait habiter au mois d'août sa villa des environs de
Deauville. Jadis, il avait possédé des chevaux de course; c'est-à-dire
qu'il avait eu une part d'association dans une écurie importante.
Puis, le propriétaire titulaire étant mort, on avait vendu les chevaux
aux enchères. Ils s'étaient vendus de bons prix et le marquis n'en
avait pas racheté. Il continua à aller aux courses pendant quelque
temps... Ce goût lui passa. Mais la villa de Deauville restait en sa
possession. On continua, par tradition, à aller à Deauville pendant la
semaine des courses. Cette année seulement, comme le marquis
s'était décidé à faire d'importants travaux à Bourrènes, il préféra
prolonger son séjour dans le pays jusqu'à la fin août, époque à
laquelle il se rendrait dans ses terres de Bourgogne.
On avait beaucoup insisté auprès des invités pour les garder tous.
Les Jehon s'étaient fait prier, mais avaient fini par consentir. Ils
étaient propriétaires d'un petit domaine à Saint-Valéry. Jehon y avait
installé un atelier. Le travail le réclamait. Mais le marquis s'était
écrié: «Vous travaillerez ici!» C'était l'occasion pour lui d'organiser un
magnifique atelier, de faire venir de Paris tout le matériel nécessaire.
Comme le sculpteur avait la commande d'un grand monument pour
une ville algérienne, et qu'on devait y faire figurer un dromadaire, le
marquis insista beaucoup pour faire venir un de ces animaux du
Jardin d'Acclimatation. C'est avec peine qu'on le fit renoncer à cette
idée.
Le diplomate n'était plus là. Un château du Midi le réclamait à cette
date. Depuis dix ans, il s'y hospitalisait dans le courant d'août, et il
ne pouvait s'exposer à perdre, les années suivantes, ce refuge d'une
partie de l'été. Quant au colonel et à ses enfants, ils étaient partis
dès le lendemain de la matinée de verdure. Les jeunes filles et le
jeune homme trapu avaient des engagements à remplir dans
d'autres représentations mondaines. Ils continuaient, de château en
château, leur petite tournée d'été.
Les Lorgis consentirent à rester. Leur fils aîné, ayant terminé son
année scolaire, était revenu de Paris dans l'auto paternelle. Firmin
n'était plus le seul mécanicien de la maison et l'arbitre dictatorial des
promenades. N'empêche que le lendemain du jour où le mécanicien
des Lorgis, un gros joufflu d'aspect timide, était arrivé au château, on
ne put avoir à sa disposition un seul des chauffeurs. Firmin faisait à
son camarade les honneurs du pays. D'après des racontars, il
entretenait des relations adultérines avec la femme d'un forgeron,
qu'il devait balader secrètement en automobile. Toujours est-il que
les mécaniciens furent invisibles pendant toute une journée. On
décida qu'on se priverait à jamais des services de Firmin. Le
marquis, dès qu'on signala le retour du fugitif, se dirigea vers le
garage pour procéder à l'exécution. Mais, l'instant d'après, on les vit
qui causaient très amicalement. Le marquis se borna à dire, en
revenant: «Je l'ai tancé sérieusement. Il ne recommencera plus.» On
savait bien qu'il le garderait toujours, et qu'il ne voudrait pas se
séparer d'un interlocuteur si précieux.
Cet après-midi, où Julien s'ennuyait si furieusement, Antoinette était
allée se promener dans l'auto des Lorgis avec madame Lorgis et les
enfants. L'auto de la maison avait emmené Lorgis et le marquis
jusqu'à un village industriel assez lointain, où Hubert voulait montrer
à son cousin des habitations ouvrières. Julien trouva la journée
d'une longueur invraisemblable. Une lettre à sa famille, des cartes
postales à ses amis de Paris ne lui tuèrent que trois pauvres petits
quarts d'heure. Il lut un journal de la veille jusqu'au bas de la sixième
page, s'intéressa à des mouvements de bateaux, à des tarifs de
boucherie, à des ventes par autorité de justice...
Il finit par jouer à l'écarté avec le sculpteur Jehon...
Enfin l'auto qui ramenait ces dames fit entendre sa rauque clameur.
Julien se sentit tout heureux. Il était comme un petit enfant qu'on a
laissé seul à la maison et qui voit revenir sa mère.
Mais il souffrit, quand Antoinette descendit de voiture, de ne pas
pouvoir la prendre dans ses bras et l'y serrer avec une tendre
frénésie. «C'est l'être, pensait-il, que j'aime le mieux sur la terre, et je
ne peux pas m'approcher d'elle. Et non seulement le monde
m'écarte d'elle, mais elle-même s'écarte de moi. Cependant je sais
qu'elle m'aime aussi!» Tout cela le peinait et l'indignait comme une
injustice monstrueuse. Et pourtant, c'était un garçon bien élevé, et
respectueux des barrières établies. Mais il était à bout. Cette journée
de solitude l'avait exaspéré...
La seconde auto avait ramené ces messieurs, et la cloche du dîner
sonnait. Julien, tête nue, était reparti dans le parc, et marchait à
grands pas. Il fut sur le point de remonter dans sa chambre, de faire
comme les enfants boudeurs qui veulent persuader à leurs
méchants parents qu'ils sont malades. Mais il ne voyait pas à quoi le
mènerait ce manège. Et d'ailleurs il avait faim.
Il se contenta, à table, de garder autant qu'il put le silence, et de ne
reprendre d'aucun plat. C'était l'homme qui se soumettait aux
formalités de l'existence, mais qui n'avait aucun goût aux joies
terrestres. Il fut d'ailleurs le seul à donner à son attitude cette subtile
interprétation.
Depuis le départ du diplomate, le bridge sévissait sans retenue.
Aussi était-il facile à Antoinette et à Julien de s'isoler sur la terrasse.
Ce soir-là, il n'y voulut point aller. Il resta derrière les joueurs, à
suivre leur jeu. Il fallut qu'Antoinette, qui était déjà sortie, rentrât au
salon, et lui fit, avec précaution, signe de la suivre.
Il la suivit, sans se presser, l'air impassible et dur. Mais elle ne
remarqua pas cette expression de son visage.
—J'ai des choses à vous dire.
L'après-midi, elle était allée goûter dans une ferme avec Anne et les
enfants Lorgis. Pendant que les enfants jouaient, elle avait eu une
grande conversation avec sa cousine. C'était le pendant des
entretiens de Lorgis avec Julien. Évidemment le couple s'employait
de toutes ses forces à empêcher un rapprochement entre Julien et la
marquise. Antoinette, parlant à Julien, racontait cela comme une
alliée, et rapportait les discours d'Anne Lorgis comme on rend
compte des arguments d'un adversaire. Mais elle eut l'imprudence
de dire que certains de ces arguments l'avaient touchée... Julien, ce
soir d'énervement, n'était pas d'humeur à supporter cela.
Il se prit à déclarer qu'il ne voulait pas être la cause de débats aussi
douloureux dans l'âme de la marquise... Elle ne devait pas souffrir
pour lui: on ne souffre que pour un homme que l'on aime vraiment.
Or, à n'en pas douter, les sentiments qu'elle croyait avoir pour lui ne
répondaient pas à la passion qu'il avait pour elle.
Il sentait qu'il parlait sans ménagements. Mais il avait cette
impression qu'il valait mieux, à cette heure, ne pas la ménager. Elle
eut un regard si touchant de tendresse, qu'il eut besoin d'un effort
sérieux pour ne pas s'attendrir à son tour. Il déclara encore qu'il n'en
pouvait plus, qu'il menait au château une vie anormale, que c'était
au-dessus de ses forces... Puis il ajouta:
—Ah! j'oubliais de vous dire que je m'absente demain pour deux
jours. Je vais à Paris.
Il avait dit cela, en changeant ostensiblement de ton, comme s'il
semblait désirer qu'elle n'établît aucune liaison entre ce projet de
voyage et ce qui avait été dit précédemment. Comme il l'espérait,
elle vit très clairement cette liaison, se leva, et, très irritée:
—Si vous vous en allez à Paris, vous pourrez y rester!
Allons! c'en était fait entre eux des délicatesses de pensée et
d'expression qui jusque-là avaient maintenu leurs relations dans un
si bon ton d'élégance!
Il répondit:
—Soit! J'irai à Paris, et j'y resterai.
Mais il ajouta, par crainte d'avoir prononcé une parole trop définitive:
—Et c'est, au fond, ce que vous souhaitez!
Elle haussa les épaules (ce qui n'avait rien de si désobligeant). Puis
elle lui tendit la main et lui dit, avec une grande politesse:
—Je vous prie de m'excuser si je me retire. Je suis un peu fatiguée
ce soir.
Elle rentra sur la terrasse, dit bonsoir à quelques personnes et, pour
empêcher Julien de la suivre, emmena avec elle Anne Lorgis, qui
avait fini sa partie.
Cette dispute puérile laissa Julien très agité. Il se sentait le cœur
plein de désespoir, et aussi d'une âcre joie. Il descendit dans le parc
et marcha comme un fou. Quelques minutes après, il se trouva
devant la fenêtre d'Antoinette. Cette fenêtre n'était pas éclairée.
Comment se faisait-il? Sans doute la marquise était allée jusque
dans la chambre d'Anne Lorgis pour y causer un instant avec son
amie. Alors Julien se persuada qu'il fallait absolument, le soir même,
revoir Antoinette. On ne pouvait pas passer la nuit sur cette rupture
incomplète. Il fallait s'expliquer plus nettement, se séparer si c'était
nécessaire, mais ne pas se quitter aussi méchamment. Il fallait se
dire n'importe quoi; il fallait se parler encore... Autrement, c'était pour
lui et peut-être pour elle une nuit abominable.
Si la marquise avait été dans sa chambre, et s'il avait jugé
impossible de la revoir le même soir, il en eût peut-être pris son parti.
Mais c'était la possibilité de cette entrevue qui l'amenait à la
considérer comme indispensable... Il se précipita vers l'escalier le
plus proche, de façon à gagner le couloir qui conduisait de la
chambre de madame Lorgis à celle d'Antoinette. Précisément dans
ce couloir donnait une porte de la bibliothèque. A la rigueur, Julien,
s'il était rencontré par là, pouvait dire qu'il allait consulter un livre. Ce
n'était pas très vraisemblable, mais c'était plausible à la rigueur.
Il arriva jusqu'à la bibliothèque. Le petit escalier par lequel il était
monté débouchait presque à côté. Il entra dans la grande pièce
haute et sombre, et laissa la porte légèrement entr'ouverte, après
s'être assuré qu'au bout du couloir il y avait sous la porte de
madame Lorgis une raie de lumière. Par contre, il n'y en avait pas
sous la porte de la marquise: par conséquent, Antoinette était
encore avec son amie.
Il était effrayé à l'idée du temps qu'il allait passer là. L'attente le
rendait fou, et il ne supportait pas les minutes qui semblent des
siècles. Le destin eut pitié de lui. Presque tout de suite, la porte de
madame Lorgis craqua. Une lumière éclata au bout du couloir.
Antoinette et Anne n'avaient pas fini leur conversation. La porte de la
bibliothèque, qui s'ouvrait en dedans, s'entrebâillait de telle sorte que
Julien pouvait apercevoir les deux jeunes femmes. Il s'impatientait
moins. Il avait vu avec satisfaction qu'Antoinette avait un bougeoir à
la main: ainsi madame Lorgis ne serait pas tentée de laisser sa porte
ouverte jusqu'à ce que son amie eût regagné sa chambre.
Julien était un peu ennuyé à l'idée qu'il allait faire peur à Antoinette,
et qu'elle aurait, en le voyant subitement devant elle, un
tressaillement désagréable. Mais il n'y avait pas moyen d'éviter ça...
Il vit, avec une émotion oppressante, les deux amies se donner la
main. La porte d'Anne se referma, et la marquise, lentement, son
bougeoir à la main, s'avança vers l'endroit où Julien était caché...
Il valait mieux se montrer tout de suite, pour qu'elle le vît face à face,
et qu'elle le reconnût bien. Il sortit brusquement, pour se montrer
plus vite. Elle eut le tressaillement attendu; son visage, cependant,
n'exprima aucun effroi. Elle ne l'attendait pas; mais elle n'était pas
très surprise de le voir.
—Je n'ai pu me coucher sans vous avoir revue, lui dit-il, à voix très
basse...
Elle lui fit signe de se taire.
Il allait rentrer dans la bibliothèque...
—Non, dit-elle, c'est au-dessous de la chambre des Jehon.
Il n'osait lui demander d'aller dans sa chambre, à elle. Et puis le
marquis couchait tout à côté.
Ils gagnèrent alors le palier du petit escalier.
Tous ces petits détails d'organisation se donnaient de part et d'autre
à voix basse, mais avec un certain ton de tristesse et de gravité, qu'il
importait de ne pas perdre pour la suite de l'entretien.
Elle avait soufflé sa bougie, pour éviter que du dehors on vît de la
lumière par la fenêtre du petit escalier. Car Lorgis se promenait
volontiers la nuit dans le parc, et les chauffeurs rentraient
quelquefois assez tard. Ils s'approchèrent de la fenêtre fermée. La
nuit n'était pas très claire, mais au bout d'un instant ils se virent tout
de même un peu.
Elle était devant lui, toute blanche et toute triste. Julien n'y put tenir,
et lui dit d'une voix étranglée:
—Pourquoi m'avez-vous fait de la peine?
Elle fondit gentiment en larmes, si bien qu'il ne put se retenir de
pleurer. Ils ne savaient ni l'un ni l'autre exactement pourquoi ils
pleuraient. Mais ils avaient été très énervés; ça leur faisait du bien.
Et ils s'aimaient tous deux infiniment de pleurer ainsi. C'était un
langage sans paroles, un langage animal, qui les unissait bien l'un à
l'autre.
Pour la première fois, il approcha ses lèvres du visage d'Antoinette.
Il pensa qu'il la mouillait avec son visage tout humide, mais comme
elle le mouillait aussi, ça n'avait pas d'importance... Elle lui rendait
ses baisers; les bouches rencontrèrent les joues au hasard; puis des
baisers s'échangèrent tant et tant, que les lèvres à la fin se
rencontrèrent aussi. Mais alors ce fut un peu autre chose. Antoinette
eut un sursaut. Était-ce un sanglot encore? Ce sanglot s'achevait
comme un frémissement. Julien l'avait serrée dans ses bras. Elle se
raidit d'abord, puis, abandonnée, la bouche tremblante, il sembla,
quand elle lui rendit son baiser, que tout son souffle s'exhalait.
C'est à juste titre que dans les anciens récits d'amour le baiser sur la
bouche était le symbole de la possession. Vraiment, c'est, pour
certains êtres, un rapprochement aussi parfait que l'acte définitif:
c'est moins complet et moins officiel, voilà tout.
Il est possible que si Antoinette et Julien avaient disposé à ce
moment d'une installation plus confortable, ils ne s'en seraient pas
tenus au symbole. Quand ils se désunirent après cette étreinte,
Antoinette était si lasse qu'elle dut s'asseoir sur une marche de
l'escalier, et Julien, qui n'était pas très vaillant non plus, ne fut pas
fâché d'être aussi autorisé à s'asseoir.
Ils restèrent l'un près de l'autre sur les marches, ils ne surent jamais
pendant combien de temps. Julien avait passé son bras autour de la
taille d'Antoinette, et lui posait des baisers recueillis sur les tempes
et sur le front. Il commençait à être gêné, et à se demander ce
qu'Antoinette attendait de lui. A ce point qu'il aurait presque souhaité
entendre un bruit dans la maison, qui les obligeât à se séparer.
Alors, machinalement, il tendit l'oreille pour guetter ce bruit... Elle vit
son geste, et elle eut peur... Elle se leva.
—Il faut vous en aller, dit-elle.
Il l'attira tendrement à lui, et voulut encore rencontrer ses lèvres,
mais elle détourna la tête, et il ne put que la baiser un peu au-
dessous de l'oreille. Il n'avait d'ailleurs pas de quoi s'en plaindre, car
ce baiser fut d'une douceur infinie, bien que moins émouvant, moins
significatif, moins solennel que le précédent.
Puis elle le repoussa légèrement, lui fit un gentil signe de tête et
disparut du côté de sa chambre.
Il fallut que Julien descendît avec précaution, et ouvrît aussi
doucement que possible la petite porte qui donnait dans le jardin.
Dehors, il fut tranquille. Il avait, somme toute, le droit de faire le
noctambule. Mais, une fois tranquille, il sentit le besoin de se gâter
son bonheur, de se faire des reproches, de se dire qu'il n'aurait pas
dû s'en tenir là, qu'Antoinette attendait de lui une preuve d'amour
plus complète. Le succès l'inquiétait toujours, et il avait besoin d'un
grand effort d'énergie pour faire tête à la bonne fortune.
 CHAPITRE XXIV
La passion parle.
Très énervé, il ne pouvait arriver à s'endormir. Le baiser sur la
bouche, décidément, ne signifiait pas pour lui la possession.
Et puis il lui semblait que ce n'était pas suffisant pour s'assurer sa
conquête, et qu'elle pouvait encore lui échapper. Il sentait bien
pourtant que ce n'était pas un baiser ordinaire, que celui-là
comportait un acquiescement absolu. Mais, comme on dit dans les
affaires, tant qu'un traité n'est pas signé... Elle avait donné des
arrhes; elle pouvait les laisser perdre, et se dédire.
D'autre part, mais cela il ne se l'exprima que plus tard, c'était un
plaisir bien plus savoureux que de s'arrêter, comme il avait toujours
fait, aux étapes, de profiter de toutes les phases de son triomphe,
pour ne pas gâcher, en poursuivant hâtivement la série progressive
des satisfactions, le bénéfice de chaque joie partielle.
Quelle Antoinette allait-il retrouver le lendemain matin? Il frissonna à
la pensée qu'elle se serait ressaisie, qu'il ne reverrait pas tout de
suite dans ses yeux cette expression d'abandon, qui l'avait enivré
l'instant d'auparavant.
Julien, cependant, ne pouvait s'endormir. Il se leva, mit son pantalon
de chambre, et alla s'accouder à sa fenêtre. Au bout d'un instant,
pour être mieux à son aise, il tira près de la croisée une chaise-
longue de paille. Quelle joie de contempler ainsi le ciel nocturne, un
ciel un peu couvert, pas trop éclatant, un ciel d'une paix infinie!
L'extase de Julien le conduisit enfin au sommeil. Une demi-heure
après, il se réveillait courbaturé, fermait brutalement sa fenêtre au
nez de la Nature, puis courait se blottir dans son lit, en se
cramponnant au sommeil fugitif.
Le lendemain matin, Antoinette ne vint pas au petit déjeuner, mais
Julien ne pensait pas qu'elle descendrait. Il lui semblait qu'elle ne
pouvait se remettre aussi vite des émotions de la veille, et même,
quand elle apparut à la terrasse, à midi, il lui en voulut d'être si
calme, et de parler aux gens comme à l'ordinaire. Julien aurait dû
sentir que jamais, cependant, cet air de tous les jours n'avait été de
tous les jours à ce point...
Il était un peu à l'écart, en train de causer avec Jacques de Delle.
Antoinette vint de leur côté; mais elle ne le regarda pas en lui disant
bonjour; elle lui attrapa seulement la main au passage et la lui
secoua hâtivement. Puis elle tendit une main plus franche à Jacques
de Delle, et partit au plus vite dans une autre direction, comme une
maîtresse de maison qui a oublié de donner quelque ordre
extrêmement important.
Julien, l'esprit ailleurs, écoutait avec force hochements de tête
Jacques de Delle, qui devait s'en aller le lendemain, lui expliquait
pourquoi ce n'était pas lui qui organisait une grande représentation
chez les Grevel, comment il l'avait proposé gentiment, pour quelles
raisons secrètes on s'était adressé à un autre, et à quel point, lui,
Delle, se félicitait hautement d'avoir échappé à cette corvée. Il osait
parler de son besoin de repos, ce personnage agité que Lorgis
comparait un jour à une bicyclette, qui ne peut conserver son
équilibre qu'à la condition d'être en mouvement continuel! Il s'en
allait passer quelques semaines dans la famille de la petite rousse,
des gens très simples, très près de la terre. Il parlait d'eux avec un
ton de sympathie visiblement emprunté, et qui ne dissimulait pas,
pour les personnes averties, le mépris et la haine que lui inspirait
cette humble famille de richards.
Cependant, la cloche du déjeuner ramenait lentement vers la salle à
manger le troupeau dispersé des convives. Antoinette, pendant tout
le repas, remplit ses devoirs de maîtresse de maison de la façon la
plus vigilante, veilla au bien-être de chacun, écoutant avec une
grâce parfaite un des invités qui parlaient, juste au moment où elle
se dérobait d'une façon insensible pour aller grossir d'une unité
attentive l'auditoire un peu restreint d'un autre causeur. Jamais elle
n'avait été autant à son affaire. Elle était comme un soldat craintif qui
fait l'exercice avec plus de conscience et plus de précision qu'à
l'ordinaire, parce qu'il lui est arrivé, la nuit précédente, de sauter le
mur.
Quant au marquis, son innocence peinait Julien. Le loyal jeune
homme faisait tous ses efforts pour ne pas lui parler avec une
complaisance exagérée, et même, dans une discussion sur la
marine, il le contredit au hasard, pour ne pas lui donner toujours
raison.

—Je vous en prie, lui dit Antoinette, je vous en supplie... Vous êtes
sûr de moi. Est-ce que vous n'êtes pas sûr de moi?
—Si, je suis sûr de vous...
—Hé bien, ne me pressez pas... Je vous demande, comme une
preuve d'amour, de ne pas me presser.
Elle disait ces mots: une preuve d'amour, d'une voix rapide et
presque honteuse, comme une petite fille qui récite, et n'ose donner
un sens à ses paroles.
Ils se promenaient bien gentiment dans le jardin, après le déjeuner.
Tout le monde était sur la terrasse et les voyait. Alors ils étaient
simplement un monsieur et une dame, assez liés, qui s'en vont en
causant de choses insignifiantes le long d'une allée. Même ils
affectaient de ne pas se regarder. Elle faisait ses tendres
supplications, les yeux droit devant elle, et en jouant d'un air
indifférent avec une petite branche coupée. Lui regardait à droite et
à gauche, distrait et presque impoli, semblait-il, pour un invité,
cependant qu'il implorait avec passion:
—C'est moi qui vous supplie de m'écouter, et de vous rendre compte
du tourment que j'endure. Je vous sais entourée de gens qui en
veulent à mon bonheur. Anne Lorgis vous a encore parlé ce matin?
—... Ce matin? Oui, elle est venue dans ma chambre...
—J'en étais sûr! Ah! ils sont tous mes ennemis... Anne, Lorgis,
Henri...
—Henri, dit-elle avec une moue, ce n'est pas lui qui me préoccupe...
Ce qui était, en somme, excellent, c'est que leurs appréhensions
n'étaient pas les mêmes. Chacun d'eux avait donc des arguments
pour combattre les scrupules de l'autre. Ainsi, le souvenir d'Henri
obsédait presque constamment Julien. Il avait encore à l'esprit les
paroles de Lorgis: Henri, c'était celui qu'il trahissait dans la maison.
Le volage et sautillant Hubert ne semblait avoir de droits sur
personne; il avait délégué le souci de son honneur familial à ce
sensible adolescent. Mais Antoinette, en parlant de son beau-fils,
corrigea l'idée romantique que s'en était faite l'imaginatif Julien.
Certes Henri souffrait de voir les assiduités de Julien auprès de la
marquise. Il n'en souffrait, dit-elle, que lorsqu'il en était témoin... Il
avait tout de même un peu le caractère de son père. Il était plus
sensible et plus inquiet. Seulement il changeait sans cesse de sujet
d'inquiétude, comme son père de marotte.
L'autre ennui de Julien, c'était l'attitude de Lorgis.
—Il vous bat froid? demanda Antoinette.
—Pas précisément.
—Il ne sait pas bouder. Il vous parle moins, n'est-ce pas? Il a l'air de
vous fuir?
—C'est bien cela.
—Je connais Lorgis. Il fait son possible pour être froid avec vous. Il
suit les recommandations d'Anne. Vous savez qu'elle le mène
comme un petit garçon?
—Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que cette femme-là? dit-il avec irritation.
—Une femme très gentille, croyez-moi. Je n'ai pas d'amie plus
dévouée, plus sûre. Elle a peur pour moi: elle se dit que je vais
bouleverser ma vie... Et c'est vrai... Ne vous fâchez pas, mon ami!...
... Voilà qu'il se fâche! continua Antoinette, la voix pleine d'angoisse.
Est-ce que j'hésite? Je n'ai pas dit que je ne savais pas si je
bouleverserais ma vie. Je dis que je suis résolue à la bouleverser.
—Mais pourquoi employez-vous ce mot? Vous parlez de cela
comme d'un malheur...
—Ce n'est pas un malheur, mais c'est un bouleversement.
... Vous ne pensez pas, ajouta-t-elle avec gravité, que je vais
continuer à vivre comme je vis, et à mentir et à trahir...
Ils étaient arrivés au bout d'une allée. Ils tournèrent sur la droite,
derrière un massif, de façon à n'être plus en vue des gens de la
terrasse.
—Je serai à vous, dit-elle à Julien, mais pas ici... Vous
m'emmènerez...

Il la prit dans ses bras, et l'étreignit avec transport, en lui baisant un

coin de la tempe, que ses lèvres avaient rencontré... Ce transport
était sincère, mais tout de même il le sentait un peu forcé... Non pas
qu'il ne l'aimât pas immensément, non pas qu'il ne fût pas prêt à
l'emmener et à vivre avec elle. Mais l'inconnu l'effrayait toujours.
Dans son étreinte, il n'y avait pas seulement de l'amour, mais de la
résolution et du courage.
Puis il pensa qu'il fallait tout de même prendre une date...
—Partons tout de suite! s'écria-t-il, pour prouver son empressement.
Ce fut au tour d'Antoinette d'être un peu effrayée.
—Non, écoutez! dit-elle... Ne me pressez pas... Puisque nous
partirons sûrement!
—Que ce soit le plus tôt possible, dit-il avec une sombre énergie.
J'ai tellement peur de tous ces gens...
—Ce sera bientôt, dit Antoinette. Et elle lui tendit ses lèvres.
Ce fut un baiser charmant, mais un peu préoccupé... Ce voyage à
organiser...
 CHAPITRE XXV
La passion continue à parler.
Le grand souci de Julien, c'était de n'être pas un pleutre. Or, il avait
fait la cour à une femme, sans savoir exactement comment
l'aventure tournerait. Maintenant que la conquête était faite, il fallait
en subir toutes les conséquences, et les responsabilités. Il allait offrir
à Antoinette une existence beaucoup plus modeste que celle à
laquelle elle était habituée. Certes, il ne s'était jamais dit, quand il
avait souhaité conquérir la marquise de Drouhin, qu'il lui ferait perdre
sa haute situation mondaine. L'avait-il aimée à cause de son titre?
Non, non, cent fois non! Il ne voulait même pas se poser cette
question...
Il l'aimait pour elle-même et il l'aimait avec toutes les obligations que
ce noble mot comporte.
En présence de cette chose grande et magnifique, un amour
partagé, qu'est-ce que pouvait bien peser son goût naturel de la
tranquillité?
Ce qu'il voulait bien s'avouer cependant, c'était sa crainte d'entraîner
cette pauvre Antoinette dans cette aventure hasardeuse. Il
garantissait ses sentiments, à lui. Mais pouvait-il être sûr de ceux de
la jeune femme? Étaient-ils assez puissants, seraient-ils assez
durables pour que la joie de cet amour partagé compensât dans le
cœur de la marquise la perte de tant d'avantages matériels
considérables, et les lui fît oublier pendant des semaines, des mois,
des années?
Mais, même cet argument, honorable en somme, Julien ne voulait
pas l'examiner. Quand l'amour commande, il n'y a pas à discuter: il
faut lui obéir, et ne pas se demander où il vous conduira. Julien s'en
allait vers l'inconnu. Il bouleversait la vie de plusieurs êtres. Le
scandale évidemment serait affreux.
Voilà pourtant quelle était l'œuvre indirecte de Lorgis et de sa
femme! Ils avaient voulu détourner de la famille de Drouhin un
événement fatal, et leur intervention, non seulement n'empêchait
rien, mais avait pour résultat de donner à cet événement un
retentissement énorme! En somme, c'était bien fait pour eux!
Julien revint lentement vers la terrasse, où Antoinette était déjà
repartie. Il marchait dans l'allée, tête baissée. En levant les yeux, il
aperçut la marquise, qui semblait regarder de son côté. Mais il était
loin d'elle, et eut le temps de l'aborder avec un visage paisible, le
visage tout à fait remis d'un amant confiant et ingénu.
Hubert, assis sur un fauteuil d'osier, parlait avec une animation
joyeuse. Comme cet homme était heureux! Et comme tout semblait
heureux aussi autour de lui! Julien aperçut, à gauche du château,
une pelouse creusée en son milieu d'un petit vivier très poissonneux.
Comme on passerait de bonnes heures au bord de cette pièce d'eau
à regarder les poissons glisser dans l'eau, se poursuivre et se
disputer les miettes qu'on leur jetterait!
Mais, en dépit des conseils du sage, on ne sait jouir du présent que
lorsqu'on est menacé par l'avenir...
 CHAPITRE XXVI
En route.
Quand s'en iraient-ils?
La marquise n'était pas fixée. Serait-ce dans huit jours, dans trois
jours, ou le lendemain? Non, ce ne pouvait être déjà le lendemain.
Julien souhaitait, du moment que c'était décidé, que cela fût le plus
tôt possible, car il prévoyait que cette attente lui serait insupportable,
en la présence continuelle de ce petit monde paisible et menacé. Il
était gêné par cette fréquentation constante de ses futures victimes.
Rien, maintenant, ne détournerait la marquise de sa résolution. Elle
n'avait avec elle que cette amie dangereuse, Madame Lorgis.
Certes, Madame Lorgis s'opposerait de toutes ses forces à une fuite.
Mais jamais Antoinette ne la mettrait au courant. La marquise
n'aurait donc personne qui lui ferait entendre une voix prudente,
puisque Julien, lui, n'avait pas le droit de combattre ses projets, et
qu'il devait, au contraire, passer son temps à les encourager et à lui
demander avec instance quand elle y donnerait suite. Il représentait,
lui, la Passion, et n'avait pas à prendre la parole au nom de la
Raison.
Quand il était seul avec elle, il trouvait des accents fort vifs et fort
pressants. Aussitôt qu'ils seraient partis, il l'aurait toute à lui. Ah!
quelle ivresse de la tenir dans ses bras, comme une proie si
longtemps convoitée, de ne penser qu'à cela, d'oublier toute
l'incertitude de l'avenir dans la joie de cette heure admirable!
Ses entretiens avec Antoinette étaient cependant moins libres et
moins aisés que par le passé. Il ne pouvait lui parler que de leur
prochain départ. Toute sa vie, toute la vie autour de lui était
suspendue.
Le couple Jacques de Delle avait quitté le château. Il avait été
remplacé, séance tenante, par un neveu du marquis, le comte Le
Harné, un très haut gaillard roux, qu'accompagnait sa jeune femme,
une petite Américaine brune, aux yeux fiévreux. Le Harné était un
admirable joueur de lawn-tennis, une des meilleures raquettes du
monde. Ils étaient venus passer deux jours. Mais quand il vit le court
remis à neuf, il s'y installa à demeure, comme un homme qui ne s'en
ira plus. Et, faute d'adversaire, il entreprit de former Julien, qui savait
à peine tenir une raquette, s'y mit par complaisance, et se passionna
tout à coup pour ce jeu, qui lui était révélé par un vrai champion. Le
Harné lui trouvait des dispositions extraordinaires, et avait déclaré
qu'il ferait de lui un joueur de tout premier ordre. Julien, après s'être
dit: «A quoi bon? puisque ma vie est consacrée à Antoinette,» finit
par s'intéresser si fortement à ce sport, qu'il ne bougea plus du
court. La première fois qu'il y passa quatre heures, l'après-midi, il fut
un peu gêné en retrouvant Antoinette, qui pouvait lui reprocher de
l'avoir délaissée. Mais la jeune femme l'accueillit très gentiment, et
parut sincèrement heureuse qu'il se fût amusé. Souhaitait-elle le voir
un peu distrait de leur grand projet? Au bout de trois jours, on se
contentait d'en parler à la fin de la soirée, en se quittant... Julien
demandait:
—Hé bien, êtes-vous décidée?
Elle souriait tendrement et disait:
—Bientôt.
Quand ils étaient seuls, il la prenait dans ses bras; leurs lèvres
s'unissaient dans un baiser frénétique. A mesure que l'idée de
l'enlèvement s'éloignait, moins précise, il recommençait à désirer
plus franchement sa chère Antoinette.
Ah! si elle avait voulu, en attendant... puisqu'il était convenu qu'on
devait s'en aller...
Mais il n'osait encore lui demander cela. Il médita un guet-apens, de
l'attirer un jour dans sa chambre à une heure favorable...
Seulement un événement imprévu vint déjouer cette combinaison,
en leur offrant brusquement une occasion facile de s'en aller tous les