A Hoax

To the Editors of The Crimson:

On March 12, The Crimson carried a frontpage story, gruesome in content, that I believe to have involved a vicious hoax.

"A self-professed Marxist terrorist-turned-minister," named--he says--Bruce C. Williams, a native of North Carolina, after having been a self-professed "militant activist" in the civil rights movement, was "recruited to join the communist revolutionary cause in Cuba." After being trained in terrorism in Cuba and the Soviet Union, and participating "in bombings and killings" in the Middle East, he saw the light, and twelve years ago became a minister in the Ethiopian Orthodox Coptic Church.

The quality of the story may be judged from the paragraph: "When six soldiers raped the four-year-old daughter of a peasant family he had befriended in Cuba and then dismembered the entire family, Williams said he realized the Marxist cause was not genuinely reformist."

The denouement emerges in the final paragraph: "Williams, who has been on a lecture tour for three months, said his aim is to alert Americans that communist forces are infiltrating and subverting American society. He said the advances of pornography, the increased acceptance of homosexuals, and gains by anti-school prayer forces are examples of "cultural terrorism."

The talk, attended by about 50 undergraduates at Phillips Brooks House, was sponsored by an organization with the cryptic name, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles.

I was sufficiently curious to make a few phone calls.

The record at Phillips Brooks House mentioned as sponsors the acronym CARP, from the Divinity School.

The man who handled information at the Divinity School said yes, CARP involves a small group of graduate students there--I think he said three--who are members of Rev. Moon's Unification Church.

Archbishop Yesehaq (pronounced Isaac) of the central Ethiopian Orthodox Coptic church in the Bronx tells me that no American named Bruce Williams or in any way following his description is a member, let alone a minister of that Church. George Wald   Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus