Six Suspects in Terrorist Plot on Olympics Sought

The FBI said Thursday that it is seeking six members of a reputed Marxist-Leninist group that purportedly planned to disrupt the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and aid the escape of a Puerto Rican nationalist leader from a federal prison by using a helicopter.

P. Bryce Christensen, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said an investigation indicated that heavy security at the Games had discouraged the alleged plotters, who he said lived in clandestine safe houses in North Hollywood and Van Nuys in 1984 and 1985. Christensen told a West Los Angeles press conference that the Los Angeles Joint Terrorist Task Force had located one cache of explosives collected by the group and is looking for another storage site in the Los Angeles area.

Members of the group, linked by authorities to the Weather Underground and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, were identified as Claude Daniel Marks, 36; Donna Jean Willmott, 36; Joan Anne Sokolower, 38; Karen Myra Shain, 38; Diana Block, 37, and Robert Bruce McBride, 39.

All six are known to have transported and stored explosives in support of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN), an organization whose stated goal is independence for Puerto Rico through violence, the FBI said.

Warrants were issued in Chicago Thursday for the arrest of Marks and Willmott, in what the FBI said was an aborted plot to free FALN leader Oscar Lopez, 43, also known as Lopez-Rivera, from the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kan., earlier this year. Lopez is serving a 55-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, plus weapons and stolen car charges.

The escape attempt, which the FBI said was to involve dropping an armed squad into the prison by helicopter, was foiled by an undercover agent who infiltrated the group by posing as a source of illegal weapons, the bureau said.