CIA File on Ray, Manuel

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

and the all protection of automatic wreps.

Though the Minutemen are now deeper underground than ever, they occasionally break out in small mindless pits. At Volunteen Conn., on Aug 24, these men described in the fill as "secret, extremist and anti-communist" shot it out with Connecticut state police in a pre dawn raid on an encampment of pacifists.

Masked and armed the Minutemen broke into a training camp. They were old Army fatigue and carried bayonet-tipped rules. Pilot men had alerted the state troops and both were waiting for the attack.

"When the Minutemen were spotted," said State Police Commissioner Leo J. Mulcahy, "we identified ourselves and the firing began."

Six persons (four riders, one state trooper and a woman resident of the camp) were wounded, none fatality.

The fact the raiders earned only bayonet-tipped rules indicates they are low on the totem pole when it comes to being combat-equipped. Because subventions are experiencing no trouble in getting automatic weapons straight from CIA factories and, indeed, from Uncle Sam's arsenals.

Shortly before Christmas last year (1967), Marine Corps officers at Camp Pendleton, Calif., discovered that 18 M-79 grenade launchers, each capable of destroying tanks and armored cars, had vanished from the military post. It was a serious, though not highly unusual, theft. In the hands of extremists, they could be devastating.

Word was flashed to the FBI, the National Guard, the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and police units the length and breadth of the country. The 13 grenade launchers joined an alarming list of guns and ammunition currently being stolen on an almost continual basis from military installations all over the United States.

The reaction of Lt. Col. G. W. Ferguson, spokesman for the Marines at Camp Pendleton, was almost one of resignation. "There are 43,000 Marines, plus special units of the Navy and Army, in training here," he said. "We cannot search each and every one of them each time he goes out of the gates. Wearers and ammunition can be stolen anytime some guy decides to walk off with them and go over the hill."

Each week a long list of stolen arms is circulated to police and military intelligence officials who are no longer surprised to see on it such items as the grenade launchers, or even machine guns. These losses are rarely made public.

Nor is news of their recovery-if any-broadcast. In fact, police and the military go to extraordinary, and sometimes ridiculous lengths to cover them up.

While Lt. Col. Ferecson admitted the 18 M-79s had vanished the civilian police who recovered them denied they were ever stolen!

Lt. Col. Ferguson declared that credit for their recovery should be either to the Santa Ana Police Department or to the Orange County Sheriff's Office: he

conjin't be seen in the air from the Marine missile, were captured less than 10 days after the M-2 were taken and returned to the USMC. But official apologies for both civilian police departments, one of whom was in charge of his unit when the case broke, denied any knowledge of the affair.

"If any Marine weapons were stolen, that would be a federal case," one high ranking civilian officer and Standby Pressed for details, he insinuated the white matter was now FBI-controlled and refused to discuss it further.

Not all theils from the military are statewide. Recently, the Post Office Department in San Francisco, through which most Vietnam mail passes, announced that it had spot-checked packages being shipped home from the war zone. What postal inspectors found rocked them to the core . . . No to rules, Grenades, live ammunition, even bullets, dismantled machine guns! They did not reveal the names of the senders or the potential receivers. They did not even report what means they were taking to prevent future shipments.

In fact, the clash of aceroy which surrounds ilegal weapons activities is being drawn tighter and tighter, sometimes with embarrassing results.

This past summer, as the nation braced itself for an outbreak of civil violence and a possible race war, Los Angeles Police Chief Thomas Bridgin told a press conference he had definite information that well-armed guerrilla groups existed in his city.

Los Angeles still shaking from frequent shoot-outs in Watts and the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, reacted nervously to the news. So did Chief Redlin and sources above him.

Before the day was out, he called two other news conferences—the second to explain what he meant by the first announcement, and the third to deny his original statement. At least one Los Angeles radio station broadcast all three of the chief's statements consecutively. It made highly interesting, if confusing, listening and left people wondering who had slipped Reddin the word.

When Watts did explode with another gun battle not long afterward, it left Angelenos more confused than ever. Three civilians were slain and 51 persons, including six cops, were wounded. But a news blackout was imposed. "Who shot whom and with what?" demanded The Los Angeles Times, a newspaper with nearly 1,000,000 daily circulation.

One of the less confused persons in Los Angeles was Celos King III, head of the L.A. Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

A calm, collected moderate leader of the black community, highly respected in all civic circles, knew declared LA had a right to not only be confused but to be scared. The city, he said, was then, and is now, in a "touch and go" situation. "It could explode any minute," he said.

"There are more sons here than in Saigon." he said flatly.

King added he was considering only registered guns. The number of unregistered weapons, including fully automatic firearms, was beyond his speculation.

Many of them, he insisted, from an active gunrunning operation which fugitives between Arizona, Nevada and California, in the two previous states they are easier to obtain than in California. Handguns are bought cheap there, run into California by car and plane by both white and black gunrunners, and then sold at tremendous profit to buyers who want to avoid a five-day waiting period and a police investigation.

Until May 1963, it was possible to buy a fully automatic machine gun without transferring it in accordance with federal law.

Thanks to Uncle Sam's generosity, it was possible for subversive groups and individuals to purchase them over the counter for as little as $99.

Thousands of them are now secretly owned by individuals and groups all through the United States, the IHS admits, as it futilely pleads for the owners to come into government offices and pay a $200 fee to register each one. Few have done so, an IHS spokesman admits, recalling sadly, "I think there was one fellow. He said he wanted it for a wall decoration. Anyway, he paid the $200."

The story behind their manufacture and sale is both fascinating and shocking many of the details still hidden by embarrassed government officials.

It begins in Phoenix, Ariz., where on a quiet street in a nondescript building a small organization called the Spitfire Manufacturing Company set up shop some time ago. Its purpose was to make and sell a featherweight, 45 caliber carbine as a "sporting weapon."

At $99 each retail, they were something of a sensation among certain "sportsmen." Anti-Castro Cuban groups, planning on hunting big game on their native isle, snapped them up. After all, there's no law against non-citizen Cubans owning sporting games.

So groups like the recently reborn Bay of Pigs brigade and Enilio Cubano hurried to their local gunshops and stocked up. Then many of them took to the mountains and deserts to practice hunting, maneuvers which, strangely enough, included ambushes, patrolling, scouting, and wild charges which are not ordinarily associated with California jackrabbits and coyotes. Such critters stood in little danger because the Cubanos sometimes accidentally used each other as targets.

Minutemen, black nationalists, and paramilitary "home defense" troops eagerly bought the lethal little Spitfires. And all because they, like the Cubans, knew something it took Uncle Sam many months to learn.

The "sportsman" learned that what one branch of the government considered a simple carbine, but which actually resembles a submachine gun, could be made fully automatic merely by depressing the safety lever at the same time the trigger was pulled!

"That thing." said a disgusted IRS man charged with enforcing the law against illegal machine guns. "doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to a sporting gun."

Then, requesting his identity be protected, the IHS man disclosed that

"As I get it, the company that made them was fully aware of their automatic