The 1980s Capitol Bombing Campaign: America's Forgotten Domestic Terror

In 1983, the U.S. Capitol was bombed. In 1984, they struck again. This is the true story of a domestic campaign the country forgot—and the hunt to stop it. Based on real events. Told as a cinematic thriller.

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America Was Watching the Cold War While the Bombs Were Already Here

On November 7, 1983, somebody called the United States Capitol and warned that a bomb was about to explode, and then, at 10:58 that night, it did. The device had been hidden beneath a bench in the corridor outside the Senate chamber, where the explosion ripped through a wall, damaged the Republican cloakroom and the office area of Senate Democratic Leader Robert Byrd, shattered glass and plaster, and tore apart a portrait of Daniel Webster that had been hanging in the Capitol for generations. Nobody died, which sounds miraculous until you realize that the Senate had unexpectedly gone home earlier than planned and a nearby reception had already ended, meaning one of the biggest reasons we are not talking about dead senators, staff members, reporters, or visitors is that everybody happened to leave work before the bomb went off.

That story is strange enough by itself, but the thing that caught me was learning that this was not even the first bomb. By the time somebody blew a hole in the United States Capitol, a domestic bombing campaign against American government and military targets was already underway, and somehow I had gone most of my life without knowing much of anything about it.

The Bombing Had Already Started

Months before the Capitol attack, a bomb exploded at the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., followed in August 1983 by another explosion at the Washington Navy Yard Computer Center. After the Capitol bombing came more attacks, including the Navy Yard Officers Club and targets in New York connected to government, law enforcement, Israel, and South Africa. These were not random buildings picked because someone happened to know how to make an explosive device. The targets represented military power, American foreign policy, law enforcement, capitalism, and institutions the people behind the attacks considered part of a larger system of imperialism and oppression.

After the bombings came communiques under names such as the Armed Resistance Unit, Revolutionary Fighting Group, and Red Guerrilla Resistance, and although the names shifted, the reasoning stayed reasonably consistent. The people behind these attacks believed they were not simply destroying property; they believed they were attacking institutions that deserved to be attacked because of what those institutions represented. This is where I have to separate understanding an argument from accepting what someone does with it, because I can understand someone believing the government is wrong, corrupt, immoral, imperialistic, or whatever other description they would like to attach to it, but once you decide that political disagreement entitles you to start building bombs, we are no longer talking about protest in any useful sense of the word.

A Bomb With a Political Point

Before the Capitol explosion, someone claiming to represent the Armed Resistance Unit called with a warning and tied the attack to American military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon. The organization apparently tried to strike institutions without creating a body count, which is an important fact even if it does not make the act itself acceptable. Warning calls were sometimes made, buildings were generally attacked when they were expected to be relatively empty, and the pattern suggests the perpetrators wanted damage, spectacle, fear, and political attention more than they wanted dead civilians.

There is a temptation to treat that distinction as either everything or nothing, when it is really neither. It matters that they apparently attempted to avoid killing people because intent matters when you are trying to understand why someone does something, but it also matters that they were planting explosives in public buildings and depending on schedules, warnings, timing, and luck to keep people alive. A bomb does not know that your manifesto says you are attacking an institution instead of a human being, and it certainly does not know that the Senate happened to adjourn early. The fact that nobody died outside the Senate chamber does not mean the operation was controlled; it means the people who planted the device were fortunate that reality cooperated with their plan.

The Revolution Did Not Disappear With the 1970s

I believe most of us carry around a fairly neat version of American radical politics in our heads. The 1960s happened, Vietnam happened, campuses erupted, the Weather Underground blew things up, everyone fought about Richard Nixon, and then eventually people grew older, Reagan became president, MTV showed up, and the whole country apparently moved on to shoulder pads and microwaves. The problem with that version is that some people never moved on. By the early 1980s, there was still a small but committed revolutionary underground in the United States that believed political violence remained a legitimate tool if the cause was important enough.

Names including Linda Evans, Marilyn Buck, Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, Timothy Blunk, Alan Berkman, and Elizabeth Duke would eventually become part of the federal case surrounding the bombing campaign. These were not teenagers who became emotional during a protest and threw a brick through a window. They were adults with political histories, underground connections, relationships with radical organizations, access to weapons and explosives, and a worldview in which revolutionary action had not become some embarrassing phase from college. While much of America was focused on the Soviet Union and threats coming from overseas, people inside the country were still operating within an underground political network and somehow getting explosive devices into federal and military facilities.

The Real Investigation Was Messier Than My Version

When I originally produced the companion episode, I told the investigative side of this story through an FBI agent named Jack Connors. Jack is tired, overworked, suspicious, living on bad coffee, staring at evidence boards, walking through bombed buildings, and slowly pulling together connections from wiretaps, names, addresses, and fragments that nobody else seems to notice. He also does not exist. Jack Connors is a composite character I created because the actual investigation involved multiple federal agents, prosecutors, police departments, intelligence leads, arrests, cases, evidence trails, and years of work that do not conveniently arrange themselves into a nice two-hour thriller. The original script says that directly in the disclaimer: Jack is fictional, his dialogue is fictional, and his investigation represents the work of many people.

Reality was considerably less tidy. Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were arrested in New Jersey in November 1984 with a substantial cache of weapons and explosives, while other people connected to the radical underground were arrested at different times and under different circumstances. Some were already facing enormous prison sentences from unrelated or overlapping cases before prosecutors ever brought the broader bombing conspiracy case. There was no glorious morning in 1985 where federal agents simultaneously kicked in every door, arrested everybody on Jack Connors' suspect board, and wrapped the entire thing up before breakfast. That was part of the dramatization. In the real world, the investigation stretched for years, wandered through other criminal cases, collided with questions about overlapping evidence and prosecutions, and eventually became the kind of legal mess that makes for poor television but very interesting history.

Five Years After the Capitol Exploded

The major federal indictment did not arrive until May 1988, nearly five years after the Capitol bombing. Seven people were charged in connection with a conspiracy involving the Capitol attack and other bombings: Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans, Marilyn Buck, Susan Rosenberg, Timothy Blunk, Alan Berkman, and Elizabeth Duke. Federal prosecutors alleged that the conspiracy ran from 1982 into 1985 and involved selecting political and military targets, constructing explosive devices, placing bombs, and then issuing political communiques explaining the reasoning behind the attacks.

Even then, prosecution was not simple. Several of the defendants were already serving lengthy sentences from other cases involving weapons, explosives, robberies, fugitives, and related criminal activity, while some evidence overlapped with cases that had already been prosecuted. Eventually, in 1990, Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans, and Marilyn Buck pleaded guilty in connection with the bombing conspiracy, seven years after the Capitol explosion that had put this particular story into the national headlines. The enormous prison terms you sometimes see attached to people associated with the campaign also need some explanation because those numbers did not all come from the Capitol bombing case itself. Susan Rosenberg's 58-year sentence, for example, came from a separate weapons and explosives conviction. That may make the story slightly less convenient, but if I am going to complain that people forgot the history, I do not get to fix that problem by replacing it with cleaner history that did not happen.

How Do You Forget Somebody Bombed the Capitol?

This is the part I keep coming back to because somebody bombed the United States Capitol in 1983, not 1883, and somehow this has been reduced to something a lot of reasonably informed Americans have either forgotten or never learned in the first place. Return of the Jedi was in theaters, Michael Jackson was everywhere, Ronald Reagan was president, cable television existed, CNN existed, and millions of people who were adults when this happened are still alive. An explosive device detonated just outside the United States Senate chamber, after two other government and military targets had already been bombed, and the campaign continued afterward.

I knew about Oklahoma City. I knew about the Unabomber. I knew about the Weather Underground. I knew about plenty of domestic terrorism, political violence, and anti-government extremism, but this story somehow never took up much space in my understanding of the period. Part of the reason is probably that nobody died. There were no funerals that became national events, no photographs of victims permanently attached to the attack, and no death toll repeated so often that it became part of the country's vocabulary. The Capitol was repaired, the Senate went back to work, security became tighter, and the news moved on. There is also an ideological inconvenience to the story because these were radical left-wing revolutionaries attacking American institutions in the name of anti-imperialism, communism, and revolutionary struggle, which does not always fit neatly inside the political categories people prefer to use when talking about terrorism today.

Political Violence Is Still Political Violence

Understanding why someone becomes radical is not particularly difficult. Governments do terrible things. Military actions can be wrong. Foreign policy can be hypocritical. Institutions can abuse power, and people can legitimately decide that their own government is behaving immorally. That is where debate, protest, journalism, activism, elections, organizing, writing, speech, and about a hundred other things come into play. Once you build a bomb, however, you have crossed into something entirely different because you have decided that your political belief gives you some right to determine how much physical danger everybody else should be forced to accept.

The people behind these attacks apparently believed there was a meaningful moral difference between attacking institutions and intentionally killing people, and I believe there actually is a difference worth recognizing. But recognizing a distinction is not the same thing as excusing the behavior. The person cleaning the Senate chamber at eleven o'clock at night does not become an acceptable risk because your target is technically the government, and the security officer walking down a hallway does not magically become part of an institution instead of a human being because somebody wrote a revolutionary communique before setting a timer.

The Fiction Is Fiction, but the Bombs Were Real

The companion episode tells the story as a thriller, and I still like that way of telling it because Jack Connors gives an enormous, complicated investigation a single set of eyes through which the audience can experience it. He walks through bombed buildings, follows clues, chases people he cannot quite catch, and represents the investigators who spent years trying to understand an underground network that operated across different cities, organizations, and criminal cases. Jack is fictional, his dialogue is fictional, and portions of the investigative timeline were compressed or dramatized for narrative purposes.

The National War College bombing was real. The Washington Navy Yard bombings were real. The attack on the United States Capitol was real. The communiques were real. The underground political organizations were real. The FBI investigation and federal indictment were real, and the people who eventually faced charges were real. That is why I do not have much interest in pretending the dramatized version is a documentary. The actual history is strange enough without needing me to lie about which parts happened.

The Bombs We Chose to Forget

The campaign ultimately failed at almost everything its perpetrators wanted it to accomplish. It did not create a revolution, overthrow the government, end American military involvement overseas, or produce some enormous uprising against the institutions they despised. If anything, attacks like these helped create tighter security around the very institutions the bombers wanted to weaken. The ideology largely disappeared from public memory while the metal detectors, restricted access, identification requirements, cameras, and security procedures stayed behind.

Maybe that failure helps explain why the story faded. Successful terrorism changes history, while failed terrorism eventually risks becoming trivia. Maybe the absence of casualties meant there was never enough national trauma to keep the bombing campaign alive in public memory, or maybe Americans simply remember threats from somewhere else more easily than the ones that develop inside our own borders. I do not know exactly why we forgot it.

What I do know is considerably simpler.

On November 7, 1983, somebody planted a bomb outside the United States Senate chamber and blew part of the Capitol apart. Nobody died largely because the building happened to be nearly empty.

And it was not the first bomb.

That seems like something we should remember.

Hear the Episode

The companion episode, The Bombs We Chose to Forget, tells the bombing campaign as a dramatized thriller built around the fictional FBI composite Jack Connors, while the history underneath the story comes from the real attacks, investigation, people, and prosecutions surrounding the campaign.

Hear The Bombs We Chose to Forget on Paul G's Corner.

The thriller is dramatized. The part where somebody bombed the United States Capitol is not.