On the evening of Friday, December 22nd three days before Christmas, while most of WBAI's staff was home preparing for the holiday, the executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, Bessie Wash, and a small band of producers led by Utrice Leid, a popular talk-show host at WBAI radio, began to change all of the locks on all of the doors. This action was the obvious culmination of a pre-conceived, collaborative plan on the part of a handful of disgruntled staff members who were either unaware of the consequences of their actions or who knowingly put their personal ambitions above the publicly stated desires of the overwhelming majority of the staff. The role that Pacifica played in this tragic scenario however is not so ambiguous. Pacifica employed an age-old tactic often used by those who wish to destroy organizations.
Internal contradictions are always present in every organization.
Those organizations that survive external pressures and attacks by enemy forces are the ones that are able to maintain the unity necessary to ward off the foxes. What happened at WBAI was that there were some, inside the hen house that falsely believed that they were foxes too. They discarded the mission. They lost their identity. They adopted the new identity of Pacifica.