William Powell, ‘Anarchist Cookbook’ Writer, Dies at 66
By RICHARD SANDOMIRMARCH 29, 2017
William Powell discussed his book “The Anarchist Cookbook” at a press conference in New York in 1971. Credit JP Laffont/Polaris
William Powell was a teenager, angry at the government and the Vietnam War, when he walked into the main branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan in 1969 to begin research for a handbook on causing violent mayhem.
Over the next months, he studied military manuals and other publications that taught him the essentials of do-it-yourself warfare, including how to make dynamite, how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher and how to blow up a bridge.
What emerged was “The Anarchist Cookbook,” a diagram- and recipe-filled manifesto that is believed to have been used as a source in heinous acts of violence since its publication in 1971, most notably the killings of 12 students and one teacher in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
Throughout his manual, Mr. Powell fashioned a knowing voice that suggested broad experience in warfare, sabotage or black ops, mixed with an extremist’s anti-establishment worldview.
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“As almost everyone knows, silencers are illegal in virtually all the countries of the world,” he wrote before describing how to build a silencer for a handgun, “but then a true revolutionary believes that the government in power is illegal, so, following that logic, I see no reason that he should feel restricted by laws made by an illegal body.”
He declared that his book was an educational service for the silent majority — not the one identified by President Richard M. Nixon as his middle-American constituency, but the disciplined anarchists who were seeking dignity in a world gone wrong. To them, he offered how-to plans for weaponry and explosives as well as drugs, electronic surveillance, guerrilla training and hand-to-hand combat — a potent mix that attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The book found a big audience. More than two million copies have reportedly been sold, and still more have been downloaded on the internet.
“It was inevitable that he did it,” James J. F. Forest, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said in a phone interview. “If he hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It’s human behavior to tap into a dangerous stream of knowledge, and in his case he was inspired to make that dangerous information available to anyone else who was interested.”
Mr. Powell never revised the book or wrote a sequel, but his original stayed in print, through Lyle Stuart and its successor company, Barricade Books, and most recently by Delta Press. Eventually, he renounced the book. In 2000, he posted a statement to that effect on Amazon.com. And later, in 2013, he expressed his regret in an article he wrote for The Guardian.
He chose a career as a teacher, not a revolutionary, specializing in working on behalf of children with special needs.
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A sketch from “The Anarchist Cookbook.” Credit Barricade Books Inc.
And then, on July 11 of last year, he died of a heart attack while vacationing with his family near Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was 66 and had lived part-time in Massat, France, when he was not working with his wife, Ochan Powell, on educational projects in other countries.
His family reported the death on Facebook, but few if any obituaries followed. His son Sean said that the people who needed to know had been told, and that the family had not thought of reaching out to newspapers.
It was not until last week that his death became more widely known, with the theatrical release of “American Anarchist,” a documentary about Mr. Powell. His death was noted in the closing credits.
The director, Charlie Siskel, said he had interviewed Mr. Powell over a week in 2015.
“What interested me was: How do you go through 40 years of your life with his dark chapter in the background?” Mr. Siskel said on Monday. “How does one sleep at night or get through the day?”
On camera, Mr. Powell seemed to struggle to absorb the idea that his book had apparently had an influence on a number of notorious criminals. One was Zvonko Busic, a Croatian nationalist who hijacked a TWA flight in 1976 while carrying phony bombs after leaving a real one at Grand Central Terminal that killed a police officer who tried to deactivate it.
Others included Thomas Spinks, who was part of a group that bombed abortion clinics in the 1980s; Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995; Eric Harris, one of the Columbine attackers; and Jared Loughner, who killed six people during his attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in 2011.
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“When ‘The Cookbook’ has been associated with Columbine and the later characters and killing, I did feel responsible, but I didn’t do it,” Mr. Powell told Mr. Siskel, adding: “Somebody else with a perverted, distorted sense of reality did something awful. I didn’t.”
William Ralph Powell was born on Long Island, in Roslyn, on Dec. 6, 1949. His father, William Charles Powell, was a press officer at the United Nations; his mother, the former Doreen Newman, ran a phobia clinic at a hospital in White Plains.
Mr. Powell told Mr. Siskel that after his father was transferred to Britain, he attended a school where bullying was commonplace and where the headmaster had caned him. When the family returned to the United States, he said, he felt alienated as an outsider. His fifth-grade teacher mocked his British accent. At a prep school in Westchester County, N.Y., he said, he was molested by the dorm master.
He was working at a bookstore in Greenwich Village in late 1969 when he decided to quit his job to research and write “The Anarchist Cookbook.”
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Mr. Powell, as seen in the documentary “American Anarchist.” Credit Gravitas Venture
“My motivation at the time was simple,” he wrote in The Guardian. “I was being actively pursued by the military, who seemed single-mindedly determined to send me to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam. I wanted to publish something that would express my anger.”
The book, a precursor to more recent publications like “The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook” and “Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla,” was at times angry, but it also came with cautionary notes (“This book is not for children or morons”) and common-sense tips, like one he appended to the 14 steps for manufacturing TNT.
“The temperatures used in the preparation of TNT are exact,” he wrote, “and must be used as such. Do not estimate or use approximations. Buy a good centigrade thermometer.”
In an interview at the time of the book’s publication, Mr. Powell told The Bennington Banner in Vermont, “I don’t see myself as crazed or bomb-throwing, though I could be if driven into a corner.”
By 1971, when Lyle Stuart — considered a renegade for his belief that the American people had a right to read anything — published “The Anarchist Cookbook,” Mr. Powell was attending Windham College in Putney, Vt. After graduation, he received a master’s degree in English from Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y.
His early teaching focused on children with emotional and learning needs. He moved overseas in 1979 and worked in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Indonesia and Malaysia, teaching marginalized children and training teachers in how to better include them in the classroom.
Sean Powell said in an interview that his father did not exile himself from the United States because of “The Anarchist Cookbook.”
“The book came out in 1971,” he said, “and he went to Saudi Arabia in 1979. Why would he take eight years to go into exile?”
In addition to his wife, the former Ochan Kusuma, and his son Sean, Mr. Powell is survived by another son, Colin; four grandchildren; a brother, Christopher; and his mother. His first marriage ended in divorce.
When “The Anarchist Cookbook” drew the attention of the F.B.I., agents were assigned to track which stores sold the book and to find out if William Powell was a pseudonym, according to the bureau’s file on Mr. Powell. It noted a request by John W. Dean III, counsel to President Nixon, for a copy of the book.
But agents could find no reason to take action against Mr. Powell. Though he did, as the F.B.I. wrote, “submit for consideration recipes for nearly every type of explosive” whose manufacture and distribution violated federal law, there was no evidence that he had been guilty of either.
Correction: March 31, 2017
An obituary on Thursday about William Powell, the author of “The Anarchist Cookbook,” misstated his age in some copies. He was 66, not 67. (As the obituary correctly noted, he was born in December 1949 and died in July 2016.) The error was repeated in the headline.
