The Rag Blog

Photo by Belmer Wright published in Austin’s underground paper, The Rag, January 15, 1968.

By Martin Murray / The Rag Blog / August 19, 2025

Lt. Burt Gerding served in the Austin Police Department (APD) in the Criminal Intelligence Division from the early 1960s to some time in 1970, when he was transferred to the APD Narcotics Division. As an APD Intelligence Officer, Gerding worked in concert with the University of Texas Police Department (UTPD) and the FBI.  He was primarily responsible for monitoring the activities of suspected campus radicals and leftist student political organizations. Through his friend George Carlson (an FBI agent and Head of Security for University of Texas System), Gerding worked with agents from the FBI’s secret Counterintelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO. 

First Encounters of a Special Kind

My first personal encounter with Burt Gerding came in late November 1967, just a few weeks after I starting going to SDS meetings on the University of Texas campus.  As I was casually walking along a hallway in the University Union late one morning, I passed two middle-aged men in cheap suits, one of whom I recognized as Burt Gerding.  Burt greeted me cheerily with a hearty “Hey, Martin, so you’ve joined SDS.” I realized at that moment my presence had been noticed.  That was my introduction to the world of police spying on the anti-war movement.  

As I learned later, starting around 1963, and perhaps into late 1968, Burt and his sidekick Allan Hamilton (Head of the UT Austin campus police Department) were regular fixtures around political events on the UT Austin campus.  They monitored protest events, spied on political organizations, recorded our names, and identified our “leaders.”  We routinely identified them to everyone around whenever they appeared.  By the beginning of 1968, I rarely saw Burt Gerding again, except when he hovered around the edges of large demonstrations. 

I first learned who Burt Gerding was a few weeks earlier.  In mid-November 1967, I accidentally came upon a “sit-in” protest against Marine recruiters in a large alcove room about 30 feet long and 25 feet wide in the University Union. Around eight to 10 people were sitting on the floor, blocking access to the Marines.  They were chanting “end the war in Vietnam,” and such.  I was captivated.  I immediately joined the sit-in.  For the next several days during that week, I joined the protest as a participant.  During this week of the Marine Recruiters sit-in, counterprotesters jeered at us, pushed their way through the bodies on the floor, stomping and kicking.  I noticed several middle-aged men watching the protest from the far edge of the crowd. Some of the protesters blocking access to the Marines told me that the tall thin one with a sly grin on his face was Lt. Burt Gerding, the well-known head of the Austin Police Department Criminal Intelligence Division (euphemistically called the “Red Squad”).  

I learned that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had sponsored the sit-in protest.  I started attending SDS meetings.  At last, I had found like-minded people who shared by political views. 

Burt Gerding was a visible and ubiquitous presence at political meetings and protest gatherings.  He was always lurking around, looking puffed up and self-important.  By early 1968, as I recall, whenever we saw him, we pointed him out and heckled him.  Soon thereafter, he moved further into the background, giving up on the idea of sitting in on meetings and trying to listen to conversations. 

As the antiwar movement expanded from a small group of readily identifiable individuals into a mass movement, the Austin “Red Squad” (with Gerding at the helm) switched strategies and tactics. They began to infiltrate the growing anti-war and anti-racist movement with undercover informants.  In retrospect, I now see that police informants consisted of two types. One type was those who attended meetings and hovered at the edges of protests, taking notes and sometimes photographs.  These undercover agents pretended they were casual observers.  The second type were those who actively participated in organizing efforts, blending into the “movement” as activists, pretending to be our comrades.  

When SDS meetings grew in size, sometimes numbering well over 100 or 200 activists prior to planning a major demonstration, it was impossible to detect undercover informants patiently taking notes and preparing reports for whatever policing agency they worked for (the Austin Police Department, the FBI, or the University of Texas Public Security Unit).  The role of undercover police agents who actively participated was also difficult to detect.  But their purpose was clear: gain access to inside information by “being one of us.”  Sometimes this participation spilled over into the role of agents provocateurs, spreading rumors, exaggerating differences, and provoking dissent. 

The Gerding Papers at the Briscoe Center for American History (UT Austin)

After he left the APD and then retired from his security job at Westinghouse, Gerding donated a treasure trove of printed materials he had collected over the years to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, located (of all places) at the LBJ Library on the UT campus. These materials (and especially a transcribed series of interviews he provided to the Briscoe Center in 1994) provide a window into his modus operandi, his worldview, and his plan of attack to disrupt the antiwar movement.

The Burt Gerding Papers constitute an archive as such: they consist of materials produced at the time and gathered together and stored in six boxes, each of which is divided into individual files. These collected materials resemble something akin to a random assortment of printed materials, the most interesting of which focus on “political activism,” political protests, civil rights and black power, and organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, Student Mobilization Committee, and others.  Many of these files contain an assortment of old leaflets, occasional undercover police reports, copies of the underground newspaper, The Rag, and some newspaper clippings. 

The files are at best loosely classified, devoid of any semblance of temporal sequence, and incomplete as documentary evidence. What should be clear from the start: the Gerding Papers do not even gesture toward a history of political activism in Austin, the ideologies that drove it, or its wider meanings.  There are no reports on particular demonstrations or protest events, with the exception of the Don Weedon Gas Station Protests (3 May 1968), Waller Creek tree removals (21-23 October 1969), and the Chuck Wagon riot (10 November 1969).  But even these reports are not historical accounts.  They are surprisingly thin on recounting how SDS and other organizations planned marches, what routes protesters selected, and what banners were flown. The materials in the Gerding Papers are devoid of analysis.

The Gerding Papers do include reports from undercover informants. The principle mode of information exchange is contained in what were called “Memos of Information.”  Undercover informants submitted short (two-page) summaries of what happened at a particular meeting on a particular date.  The ritual included who called the meeting, where it was held, the date it occurred, how many were in attendance, who chaired, what were the main points of contention, what factions were present, and what decisions were reached.  Some of these reports talked about divorces, and who was responsible for breaking up marriages.   

For example, in one “Memo of Information” the informant claimed that Paul Turner and I were calling for a demonstration to disrupt the annual NAVY ROTC parade.  This event never appears in any other files.  Another example, there are several “Memos of Information” that turn their attention in late 1968 and early 1969 to the New Left Education Project (NLEP), an SDS-sponsored group, and its literature table.  Praise is heaped upon the University administration for waiting for the right moment to act.  No mention is ever made that Alan Locklear and I were brought before a University Disciplinary hearing, charged with “selling literature” without authorization on campus.  We obtained the services of an ACLU attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, and we argued that we were not “selling literature,” but only accepting donations.  Besides that, we also argued that fraternities and sororities openly sold tickets for such revolting events as “Round Up” (where sorority women were lassoed and dragged off to makeshift corrals), and the Old South Day dance and party (where frat boys on horses paid young African-American kids to hand-carry invitations to sorority houses).

Most likely police surveillance photos. Top on the left is Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, and at the lower right is Rag Blog associate editor Alice Embree.

In 1970, Gerding prepared a Report for Chief Miles, a five-page document included in his Papers.  In this document, Gerding offers his assessment of Movement organizations.  Indeed, for someone who claims to have reliable undercover informants, and to have infiltrated organizations and secretly reported on meetings, this assessment was pathetic. It was incomplete, relied on deductive tropes about Communist organizations, and was incomplete in its coverage.  As our Movement grew in strength and numbers, he seems to have fallen back on well-worn truisms that no longer (if they ever were) instructive.  His claims to have his finger on the pulse of the Movement were only matched by his woefully inadequate ignorance of what the Movement – its people and organizations – were actually doing.  We were building organizations to confront the war machine, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Gerding was trapped in old paradigms and analytic frameworks inherited from the 1950s Cold War. He was obsessed with tracing poplar protests back to one of several national “Communist” organizations – CPUSA, Socialist Workers Party, and Progressive Labor.  While these organizations had a presence in the Austin Movement, their members were certainly not orchestrating or leading popular protests.  By 1970, both the CPUSA and PL were spent forces in Austin, and we regarded the SWP and its offshoot sibling organizations — the “Trots” as we called them — as more or less irrelevant.  Gerding seems to epitomize the banality of evil: a self-deluded ordinary “little man” who believed that he could act with impunity because he operated under the official sanction of the security agencies he worked with.

In the Gerding Report, what he ignored was much more important than what he included as part of the official record.  CPUSA membership never amounted to more than three or four persons, led by Marian Vizard before she took a decided detour into countercultural and feminist politics. After the break-up of SDS in summer 1968, PL was a spent force in Austin, attracting ever-dwindling numbers to its events.  The Spartacists league, never more than perhaps five hardcore fanatics, always carried their banner to every rally and demonstration: “all Southeast Asia must go Communist.” As quasi-Maoists, their political position was that the Vietnamese revolution — both in the North and South — was hopelessly revisionist because of the support the Vietnamese obtained from the Soviet Union.  This arcane political position was never going to be a way to build a vibrant political movement in Austin.  The “Sparts” were pathetically irrelevant — a nuisance that we tolerated.