She Exposed the FBI, Then She Went Underground

In 1971, eight activists broke
into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, where they removed more
than a thousand files on
COINTELPRO, the bureau’s program to infiltrate and disrupt
political groups. The documents were then mailed to the media, a
key early event in the decade’s
investigations of the national security state’s crimes.

All but one of those proto-Snowdens revealed their identities
this year in Betty Medsger’s book
The Burglary. Now the eighth burglar, Judi Feingold,
has come forward as well, allowing Medsger to tell her tale in a
long, fascinating
article for The Nation. Unlike her confederates,
Feingold went underground after the break-in, disappearing into a
radical-rural world of feminist colonies out west:

Feingold’s first home in the underground was on a goat
farm north of Taos. Like several other places she would stay, this
farm was owned by a woman and was part of an informal network of
rural properties in the West known as “women’s land”—places where
lesbians built alternative communities that were intentionally free
of patriarchy.

Feingold thought it was the
ideal place for her at that time. As she points out, she could have
hidden anywhere, but she welcomed the chance to live underground in
the country instead of in a city. She loved the outdoors and the
physical work required in such places. Growing up in New York City,
she had yearned to live in those wide-open spaces she saw as a
child on countless television Westerns. Now she had that life. She
dug irrigation ditches and learned how to make goat cheese and
gather eggs. She remembers living happily in those old cowboy
landscapes that recently had been reclaimed by women. Until then,
roaming Central Park was as close as Feingold had come to her dream
of living in wide-open rural spaces.

When the woman who owned the farm near Taos decided to use it for
other purposes, Feingold and others who lived there drove in a
caravan of pickup trucks to other women’s land in California. They
had heard about the new place at one of the large gatherings of
women that took place twice a year in large rural settings in the
west, summer and winter solstice celebrations. After a relatively
short stay on that California land, she lived for several years on
women’s land in Oregon….

A frightening episode took place when she lived with some other
women in a house near a hilltop in Oregon, part of a horse farm.
The owners and their three children lived in the main house at the
foot of the hill. One day one of the children ran up the hill and,
with a sense of urgency, told them, “Mom says you have to leave.
The FBI is here.” Feingold never knew why the FBI was there. She
assumes the reason was unrelated to her, but she took no chances.
She and the other women grabbed their few possessions and left
immediately, going down the other side of the hill and never
returning to that location. Someone who lived nearby gave them a
ride to Portland. No one at the farm knew exactly why Feingold was
concerned about being caught by the FBI, just that she was. And
that was enough to cause them to protect her.

If this story doesn’t inspire a feminist acid western, I’ll
be deeply disappointed.

Feingold didn’t surface from the underground until 1980, and it
took her a while to reestablish her life. (She studied to be a
forest technician, for example, but abandoned the job when the
former fugitive realized the actual job amounted to “Wearing a
government uniform and turning people in for running stills on
federal property.”) She didn’t tell anyone what she’d done until
this year.

Read the article here.

Elsewhere in Reason: The subject of feminist separatist
settlements also comes up in this
piece about Mormonism, of all places.