James William Kilgore, the United States fugitive who was arrested in Cape Town, was nailed because he remained in contact with people from his past.
Kilgore, who has been working as a researcher at the University of Cape Town since 1998 under the name John Pape, was sought by the FBI for nearly 27 years.
He is a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which advocated the violent overthrow of the US government in the 1970s.
FBI Special Agent in charge Mark Mershon and US attorney Kevin Ryan this week declined to give full details of how they managed to track Kilgore down but said “fugitives do not cut off ties with their former life”.
They said the FBI received information about Kilgore’s whereabouts 10 days before his arrest at his house in Claremont, Cape Town. They also claimed that they did not wiretap Kilgore but that his arrest was a result of “good, old-fashioned legwork”.
They denied claims that they received information from four SLA members who were convicted last week. They said Kilgore’s arrest last Friday and the court proceedings in the Sacramento, California, court the day before were “simply a coincidence”.
The developments in the US came as Kilgore’s friends and associates in South Africa rallied behind him, saying the 55-year-old gave two decades of his life to social justice in the region.
Kilgore’s Johannesburg friends and colleagues Geoge Dor, Ulrika Kistner, Jean Knopperson and Darlene Miller described him “a tireless campaigner for social equality”.
Wits academics Tom Lodge, professor of political studies; Dr Greg Ruiters, senior lecturer in political studies; and Dr Noor Nieftagodien, researcher, history workshop, said it would be a pity if the public perception of John Pape in Southern Africa was that of a fugitive seeking to evade justice in his own country.
“The John Pape familiar to colleagues and friends at Wits University is someone we know as a socially committed citizen and a gentle though principled personality. In the two decades that he has worked in the subcontinent John has enriched the lives of many people,” they said.
John Samuel, CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said it would be “tragic and ironic if John were not able to continue providing inspiration and encouragement through his work and his desire to build a better world”.
The National Union of Metal- workers of South Africa also came to Kilgore’s defence. In a sweeping statement the union said Kilgore was a “fighter against poverty and friend of the poor”. His former employer, the International Labour Resource and Information Group (Ilrig), established the John Pape Legal Aid Fund to help pay for his defence.
The staff and board of Ilrig said they had received a number of calls offering assistance and solidarity.
“In this regard we will be setting up a John Pape Legal Aid Fund and will be sending bank details within the next few days,” the group said.
In the US, however, the mood was different.
US law enforcement boasted about how the Kilgore case “was a model of law enforcement working together across international boundaries”.
Mershon said: “After more than a quarter century we have the last of the SLA fugitives in custody. As a result of the proud and tenacious work of FBI special agents, we will now have closure concerning a well-known domestic terrorist group whose crimes allegedly included murder, bombings, kidnapping and bank robbery.”
The SLA is most noted for the 1973 murder of Marcus Foster, superintendent of Oakland schools in Oakland, California, and the 1974 kidnapping of media heiress Patty Hearst in Berkeley, California.
The SLA was also responsible for numerous bank robberies and bombings. In August 1976 Kilgore was charged by federal indictment with possession of an unregistered explosive device — a pipe bomb.
Kilgore is also charged with the 1975 murder of bank customer Myrma Opsahl during an armed robbery in Carmichael, California. Last Thursday four former SLA members, William Harris (57) of Oakland, his former wife Emily Montague (55), Michael Bortin (54) and Sarah Jane Olson (55), pleaded guilty in the murder case.
They now face prison terms of six to eight years in terms of a plea bargain with prosecutors. The plea bargain sparked speculation in the US this week that the four had given law enforcement agencies information about Kilgore’s whereabouts in exchange for a lesser sentence.
The FBI and the US Justice Department have denied this. Debby Young of the US Assistant Attorney’s Office in the Justice Department this week told the Mail & Guardian that the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office said they did not have any direct contract with the prosecution of the four SLA members.
She said the case of the four SLA members was solely handled by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, which is independent of the US Attorney’s Office and the FBI.
Mershon and Ryan also said the information that led to Kilgore’s arrest did not come from informants, and therefore no one was eligible for a reward.
The FBI had offered a $20 000 reward for any information that could have led to Kilgore’s arrest. Since his disappearance in the late 1970s Kilgore has been the subject of several stories and an age-enhanced bust of him was regularly aired in the America’s Most Wanted television programme.
Despite this he managed to start a new life. He became a prominent left-wing critic and published books and articles opposing globalisation. He is believed to have arrived in Africa in the 1980s.
The Wits academics say that during the 1980s Kilgore worked as an evening class teacher in Harare and later as a lecturer at Harare Polytechnic, designing and administering courses in development studies.
While living in Zimbabwe he obtained an Australian PhD for a history of Zimbabwean domestic workers. He came to South Africa in the 1990s. Here he worked at Khanya College in Johannesburg, initially as a teacher and later as a director.
He moved to Cape Town in 1997 where he jointed Ilrig. Sue Fawcus, Kilgore’s friend in Cape Town, told the M&G this week that she first met him in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, but did not know him personally then.
Fawcus said Kilgore never spoke about his past.
“He loved soccer and his son and my son play together for one of our local soccer teams. He was a gentle person and he was warm-hearted to children,” Fawcus said.
The term symbionese, derived by the group from the word symbiotic, refers to different types of people — black, white, young and old — living in harmony.