Feb. 16, 1965 - A plot by a small group of Negro extremists to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument was broken up today by the New York City police and the FBI with the help of the Royal Canadian Police.
The major credit for exposing the plot was given to a 31-year-old rookie New York City patrolman, Raymond Wood, who infiltrated the group.
“I just tried to do my best,” Wood said as he was given an on-the-spot promotion to detective.
Explosives for the plot were brought to New York from Montreal yesterday, the police said, in a car driven by a young blond woman, a member of an organization seeking secession of Quebec from the rest of Canada.
Thirty sticks of dynamite, which Army experts said were enough to blow the head off the Statue of Liberty, were seized today in a quiet, residential section of Riverdale, the Bronx, as excited housewives milled about.
Arrested on charges of planning to destroy Government property were Miss Michelle Duclos, 26, of Montreal, and three New York Negroes, among them the self-styled leader of the Black Liberation Front, an extremist group formed six months ago.
Police Commissioner Michael Murphy described the three men as pro-Castro and pro-Communist China. The leader of the group, Robert Steele Collier, a 28-year-old employee of the New York Public Library, traveled to Cuba last year and had bragged of meeting Premier Castro’s righthand man, Maj. Ernesto Che Guevara, during the latter’s visit to the U.N. in December.
Collier was reported to have given a bizarre motive for the planned assault on the three national shrines. A tall, well-muscled man who had been convicted of slashing a man during a fight in London in 1956 while serving in the U.S. Air Force, Collier said he wanted to maim these symbols of American democracy to dramatize the plight of the Negro, the police reported.
Arrested with him were two aides, Walter Augustus Bowe, 32, a judo instructor at the Henry Street Settlement, described by the police as a supporter of the now defunct Fair Play for Cuba committee; and Khaleel Sultarn Sayyed, 22, of Brooklyn, a graduate of the Howard University School of Engineering.
Following the arrests, security was tightened at the three national monuments.
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