Biography
Cameron David Bishop was an anti-war radical associated with Students for a Democratic Society who became, in 1969, one of the first activists placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for an act of political sabotage. In January 1969 Bishop used dynamite to topple four high-voltage electrical transmission towers of the Public Service Company of Colorado near Denver. One of the targeted lines fed the Coors Porcelain plant, which manufactured ceramic nose cones for army missiles, and the action was intended to disrupt Vietnam War production. Bishop remained a fugitive for six years before being captured in Rhode Island in March 1975 and returned to Denver. In 1975 he was convicted on three counts of sabotage under a 1918 statute that had rarely been used since the World Wars, and was sentenced to three concurrent seven-year terms. His conviction was overturned on appeal in 1977. Bishop was among the earliest figures of the New Left to be imprisoned for armed sabotage against the U.S. war effort.
In 1984 Bishop — by then an elected school-board member, Little League coach and sheep farmer in Dixmont, Maine — was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in Boston, part of the FBI's Operation BOSLUC manhunt for eleven political fugitives, one of them his brother-in-law. He publicly refused to collaborate, declaring he would go to jail rather than inform on the movement, and joined the public campaign denouncing the operation's tactics, including the FBI's circulation of photographs of the fugitives' children (JBAKC, Stop the Grand Jury!, November 1984).
In 1984 Bishop — by then an elected school-board member, Little League coach and sheep farmer in Dixmont, Maine — was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in Boston, part of the FBI's Operation BOSLUC manhunt for eleven political fugitives, one of them his brother-in-law. He publicly refused to collaborate, declaring he would go to jail rather than inform on the movement, and joined the public campaign denouncing the operation's tactics, including the FBI's circulation of photographs of the fugitives' children (JBAKC, Stop the Grand Jury!, November 1984).
