The Saboteurs of Swim

Nobody got very excited when Paul Raymond Juhala wrote a letter to the President last year bitterly complaining that he had been turned down for a loan from the Farmers Home Administration; the complaint was rather routine. Then Juhala escalated. Last March he sent a second hostile letter to Nixon, this time demanding $2,000,000 in exchange for certain information about bombs at Air Force bases. Federal agents grew more interested and began to investigate him. He was committed for a short time to a mental hospital in Michigan. When a bomb went off at Kincheloe Air Force Base in Michigan last month, the feds decided that Juhala was just as dangerous as he said he was.

Juhala, in fact, admitted that he had set off the bomb. Arrested for destroying Government property, he also owned up to another piece of sabotage. At his direction the Air Force and local authorities drained an 800,000-gal. storage tank on the fuel farm at K.I. Sawyer base in Michigan. Security men found 20 sticks of dynamite just where Juhala had indicated. Had it gone off in the tank, it would have ignited a death-dealing fireball half a mile in diameter.

Worried. Juhala's bizarre attempts at sabotage are the latest in a series of attacks on Air Force bases in the U.S. that have authorities puzzled and worried. Saboteurs first struck last May when they cut the electrical conduits and hydraulic lines of three C-130 Lockheed Hercules transports at Willow Grove Naval Air Station, Pa. It took 3,000 man-hours to repair the aircraft at a cost of $50,000.

In July, the same kind of damage was done to a pair of F-111 fighter-bombers at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. The sabotage was discovered when a preflight electronic check-out indicated trouble. Then, in August, four RF4 Phantom jets at Bergstrom Air Force Base, Texas, were more ineptly sabotaged. Electrical plugs under the cockpit instrument panels were pulled out --a fact that was instantly perceived when the panel lights failed to go on.

No great damage has been done to date, and no one has been hurt. While the Air Force has tightened security at its bases, it is still reluctant to say that these isolated acts add up to a trend. From all appearances, Juhala was acting alone in Michigan, taking private revenge for fancied governmental insults. The motive in the case of the other acts of sabotage remains a mystery. A Weatherman type group called Citizens Committee to Interdict War Materials (CCIWM, pronounced Swim) claims responsibility for the damage and has been duly infiltrated by volunteers working for the feds. But it has not yet written to the President to explain itself.

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