Thread by @BTH_Bill

At 3:35am on August 24, 1970, Karl Armstrong and Leo Burt parked a stolen Ford Econoline van outside the loading dock of Sterling Hall on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

In the back of the van: 1,700 lbs of nitrogen fertilizer in four large barrels, mixed with approximately 100 gallons of fuel oil, some sticks of dynamite, and Primacord (detonating cord).

Karl’s 18-year-old brother, Dwight, followed the pair to Sterling Hall in the Armstrong family’s yellow Chevrolet Corvair that was to become their getaway car.

Dwight parked nearby and joined Karl and Leo in the back of the van. After spending a few minutes observing the building, and allegedly listening to Leo Burt express second thoughts, Karl lit the Primacord and the three sprinted to the Corvair.

At 3:40am, the fourth member of the group, David Fine, 18, stood at a nearby payphone. As the Armstrongs and Burt zoomed past him, Fine made a call to the Madison Police Department, saying:

The getaway car slammed on its brakes, Fine jumped in, and the four sped away. At 3:42am, the Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil (ANFO) bomb exploded. The force of the blast shook houses in the surrounding neighborhood and was heard as far as 30 miles away.

Inside Sterling Hall, Robert Fassnacht, a 33 year old postgraduate Physics researcher, was dead.

The Corvair was spotted by Dane County Sherrifs at the scene; the make + model relayed to dispatch. A short time later, a Sauk County deputy pulled it over headed north on Hwy 12. The men inside admitted they'd come from Madison, and said they were on their way to a camping trip.

Despite their vehicle matching the description of the one that fled the scene, and the lack of camping equipment inside the vehicle, the four young men (Karl Armstrong, Dwight Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burt) were detained for an hour and then released from custody.

Their release could have been a stroke of luck, right? But it does seem a little suspicious, and is only the first suspicious part of this story.

Information on the bombing is scant and scattered, so my motivation for the following thread is to condense as much as I can into one place. My sincere hope is that it spurs further research by smarter and more skilled parapolitical investigators (easy qualifications to hit).

Because something smells fishy, here, and I’d love to find out what it is.

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To set the stage: some background on the political climate at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-to-late 1960s...

Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were very active in protesting the Vietnam War.

The Madison chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society was particularly robust, and the Faculty-Student Committee to End the War in Vietnam was a major force in campus life in the latter half of the 1960s.

A student-led protest to a Dow Chemical (manufacturer of napalm) recruiter coming to campus in the fall of ‘67 ended with the police injuring up to 40 students and professors, many of whom were not involved with the original protest action whatsoever.

“Dow Day,” was chronicled in the 1979 documentary “The War at Home” and this UW retrospective (1967.wisc.edu). It was the “first Vietnam protest at a major University to turn violent.”

It was during this protest (again, in 1967) that tear gas was deployed for the first time on a college campus.

For the next three years, large-scale protests were the norm in Madison. In February 1969, the Black Student Strike was so successful that the governor activated the Wisconsin National Guard to occupy the campus. In May of that same year, the Mifflin Street Riots took place.

Karl Armstrong, a Madison native, had been a demonstrator at Dow Day in ‘67. He’d also attended the ‘68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, IL, where he & other anti-war protestors were beaten by police. He later identified these events as his moments of radicalization:

However, despite the large number of student and civic anti-war organizations in the city, it appears Karl and his younger brother Dwight operated entirely outside any organization, at least in an official capacity.

Karl flunked out of UW-Madison in late 1968, and his younger brother Dwight dropped out of high school the following spring. By December 1969, they started to act, and this is where things started to get a little strange.

First, 12/27/69 - Karl set fire to Temporary Building #16 on the campus of UW-Madison, which is where the campus Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) classrooms were held. The fire was quickly confined to some damaged furniture.

1:30am, New Year’s Day, 1970: Karl and Dwight stole an airplane from a Middleton, WI airport for the purposes of bombing the Badger Ordnance Works munitions plant in Baraboo, WI. This plant made weapons that were shipped to the US Army in Vietnam.

Apparently, Dwight had some flying lessons under his belt, but had never flown without an instructor, or at night, or in a snowstorm. By some miracle, he’d gotten himself and Karl in the air, where Karl was ready to hurl mayonnaise jars (no, really) full of ANFO down at the plant

Karl didn’t even light the crudely-made bombs, assuming they’d explode on impact. They did not; they landed harmlessly in a snowbank. Nothing came of the attack, but the attempt still made national news.

A few nights after the insane airplane stunt, Karl firebombed the Armory on-campus, where some ROTC offices were held. It caused damage to some athletic equipment, but the ROTC offices were untouched.

Then, he allegedly attempted to set fire to the Selective Service headquarters, but “mistakenly” torched the Wisconsin Primate Research Center, one building over, instead.

A month after his monkey adventure, Karl took some dynamite to a transformer station in Sauk Prairie, WI, which supplied power to Badger Ordnance Works. But he couldn’t go through with that, either - he got spooked by a night watchman and fled without lighting the fuse.

In summary of his militant actions thus far:

Despite all his efforts being objective failures, Karl was undeterred by his ineptitude. He would send anonymous messages claiming responsibility for each escapade, published primarily by the Madison Kaleidoscope (an underground paper). He hoped to “inspire widespread militancy.”

That part is important: Karl kept calling the press, identifying himself as a member of the New Year’s Gang or the “Vanguards of the Revolution.”

The student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, had published an editorial supporting the New Year’s Gang’s actions, which resulted in national outcry and nearly resulted in their shutdown by the University.

However, none of Karl’s excursions had resulted in any real damage to any of his stated targets. He couldn’t light the right locations on fire, nor did he seem to understand the basics of how bombs worked.

So, for his next trick, on August 24, 1970, Karl would… pioneer the use of Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil (ANFO) car bombs. 

The Sterling Hall bombing was, apparently, the very first “malicious use” of ANFO: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO

And this time, he would include a member of the “press” as one of his co-conspirators: Leo Burt.

Karl and Dwight allegedly learned how to make an ANFO bomb from a WI Conservation Department pamphlet called “Pothole Blasting for Wildlife.” The original intention of the pamphlet was to teach farmers safe/responsible ways to blast & therefore create wetland areas for waterfowl.

Instead, the pamphlet became a handbook for how to make ANFO bombs. I’d feel weird sharing a link to it, suffice it to say, you can find it if you’re so inclined.

It’s very detailed, with clear diagrams on how to wire up the primacord, ideal fuel types to use, recommendations for nitrate/fuel ratio, etc. But I digress......

The bombers’ target was the Army Mathematics Research Center (Army Math, for short), housed on 2nd-4th floors of Sterling Hall in the middle of the university campus. The university insisted the center did purely theoretical work for the Army, nothing “actionable” or concrete.

There was reason to doubt these claims. The student paper, the Daily Cardinal, had been given some unredacted quarterly reports from the Army by mistake, revealing the center’s assistance on Project MICHIGAN, which dealt directly with optimizing conditions for the use of napalm.

Secondly, the head of Army Math, J. Barkley, Rosser, had been head of the US ballistic missile program at the end of World War II and had been a longtime, decorated civilian contributor to weapons development and analysis.

His bio, littered with prestigious stops, looks like the bio of a relatively important scientist to the war machine:

But just like Karl’s other escapades the stated target escaped unscathed. Army Math was more or less untouched by the blast, and its employees were back to work two days after the bombing.

Robert Fassnacht, the lone fatality, was a postgraduate researcher in physics, working in the basement, and had nothing to do whatsoever with the military or the Vietnam War.

So what did the bombing accomplish? Remember, in May of 1970 the Kent State shooting had taken place. Autumn, 1970 figured to be as contentious as ever on campus, with continuing US operations in Cambodia adding new fuel to the protestors’ cause.

Instead - after the August 24 bombing, just as the new term was about to begin - the wind was out of their sails: the335.journalism.wisc.edu/a-legacy-of-vi…

Secondly, the FBI was quickly granted jurisdiction over any bombing case involving any college, university, or other research institution receiving federal funds, an expansion of their powers.

Third, anti-war organizations in Madison faced internal strife over whether to condemn (or how strongly to condemn) the bombing attempt, as well as the other incidents leading up to August 24th.

Karl Armstront had essentially splintered the on-campus anti-war movement from the inside, all without actually being “inside” of it. 

Okay, we’re near the end, if you’ve made it this far, god bless you.

Right, so - I have no hard evidence that Karl Armstong, Dwight Armstrong, Leo Burt, or David Fine were federal informants or compromised by a COINTELPRO deep undercover unit. But I do wonder: if they had been, how would their actions have differed in any way?

"Officers went to every damn rally," former Assistant Wisconsin Attorney General Mike Zaleski said in an interview years later. "They knew everyone from every radical group. Nobody knew these guys.”

“The Sheriff's Department had people working undercover. University security, too. So did the Department of Justice, the FBI, and even military intelligence was in the streets. And we gelled all of it together.” - Herman Thomas, Chief Inspector, Madison Police.

The Armstrong brothers, Burt and Fine had caused a sensation on campus and among the anti-war movement by taking “violent action” - all without actually damaging any ROTC, Selective Service, weapons manufacturing, or Army Mathematics research capabilities whatsoever.

They drove a wedge into the left, rallied liberals and moderates to the side of condemning violence (as if it was close to symmetrical, when it wasn't), and expanded the FBI's jurisdictional footprint.

It had been just over three months since the massacre at Kent State, in which the security state had killed college kids. Would a counterstrike, an act of violence going the other direction, help dispel some of the heat that was coming the government’s way?

And what happened to these four guys later on? Karl was caught in Canada in ‘72 and served just 7 years of a 23 year sentence. Dwight was caught in ‘77, served 3 years of a 7 year sentence. Fine was caught in ‘76, also served 3 years of a 7 year sentence.

And Leo Burt is currently the longest-running fugitive from justice in FBI history. 

Three of the four served short sentences for the “worst act of domestic terror” in US history (up to that point), and the fourth just vanished into thin air.

Of the four bombers, David Fine is the only one I'd be surprised was compromised or an informant. He did his time, tried to become lawyer but was forbidden entry to law school over his ties to Sterling Hall, and now lives an apparently quiet life in Oregon working as a paralegal.

But the other 3 (Karl Armstrong, Dwight Armstrong, and Leo Burt) all seem fishy. Were the offices of the Daily Cardinal or the Kaleidoscope alt-paper bugged? Could Karl’s post-"action" phone calls have been recorded and used to turn him? Was Burt a journalist or a handler?

Sidebar on Dwight: apparently he spent some of his time on the run in San Francisco hanging out with the Symbionese Liberation Army. (Alarm bells are ringing.)

I cannot find any reliable sources on that stint with the SLA but I would looooove to find some, so if anyone comes across anything, please let me know!

Another thing we know about Dwight is that he was arrested in connection with running a meth lab in Indiana in 1987. And Karl was arrested in 2012 with $800,000 cash and drugs in his RV. What does it all mean? I wish I knew.

I have already enlisted some like-minded twitter friends who are better-versed in the legal system to pull court documents. I hope to know more about the four bombers as I expand the research. Tips/suggestions/reading recommendations are more than welcome.

Final piece of information to chew on: the Sterling Hall bombing was an ANFO bomb and did damage that looked like this:

And this:

And the ANFO bomb Timothy McVeigh allegedly used in Oklahoma City did damage that looked like this:

And this:

Pretty weird right? Anyway, in conclusion, ANFO bombs are a land of contrasts. If you spot an error in any of the above thread, I am all ears. I’m just a dumb guy who dives way too deeply into this random stuff. Thanks for humoring me.