Although these two aspects of her story have been borne out by the facts. Gill has not elborated upon the rest of her story, and the extent to which her role as an informer affected events here in the turbulent days of militant confrontation remains clouded.

Both she and veteran SDSers agreed that she never acted as an agent provacateur, that she never suggested particularly militant tactics with an eye towards setting up the radicals for a police killing.

One SDS leader from that era said Gill was prominent in the organization and regularly attended SDS meetings and took part in the organization's campaigns, but was never taken seriously. "All our meetings were open, however, and there wasn't an awful lot she could have found out that would have been of much use to the FBI," the SDSer added.

Gill lost credibility, the SDS member said, because her Mt. Auburn St. Tenants Union turned out to be a paper organization. Other sources, including one of the building's tenants then, have echoed this view, explaining that Gill never lacked energy in her organizing efforts but that the other tenants refrained from participating because they considered her an oddity.

Gill sees no contradiction between her tenant organizing activities and her work for the FBI and CIA. She favours nonviolent social change, she says, and objected to what she termed the SDS reliance on militant confrontation and its unpatriotic attitudes.

"Everything I ever did was calculated to help the poor of Cambridge," she repeats insistently.

During her tenant organizing efforts. Gill came into contact with Whitlock, who was then serving as President emeritus Nathan M. Pusey's assistant for community affairs. Whitlock remembers her as the sincere but strange "major-domo" for the Mt. Auburn St. building, who brought deteriorating conditions in the building to his attention so that Harvard could take action.

Gill would oppose Harvard publicly on every conceivable occasion, Whitlock recalled, but in private she was "friendly."

"She would come into my office every day and read The New York Times and The Crimson because she said she was too poor to buy them," he said.

Whitlock said Gill would sometimes contact him before she was going to City Council meetings to criticize Harvard and tell him "not to be offended."

He said Gill, who always dressed in army surplus clothes when he knew her, sometimes gave him surplus Krations so he and his family "could survive for a few days after the bombing or whatever."

GILL APPEARS to have been a whirlwind of activity during those years. She ran for City Council in 1969, and appeared before it often to testify about Cambridge housing conditions. She once slept out on the City Hall lawn as part of her continuing protest.

Her community work meshed nicely with her SDS activity. The radical organization was becoming in creasingly involved in criticizing Harvard's role in Cambridge, and Gill, many observers say, served as SDS's primary link with the area outside Harvard Yard.

Several observers of the scene go so far as to trace to Gill one of the six demands of the 1969 University Hall takeover and the ensuing strike--that Harvard cease its alleged expansion in Cambridge and Roxbury. This seems a bit far-fetched, but Gill undoubtedly had some influence on the SDS community policy.

Recollections of Gill's role in the occupation and its stormy aftermath are hazy. Several observers did not recall her having participated in the actions, but a Crimson article reports that she was in the vanguard of a group of several hundred SDSers that stormed Pusey's Quincy St. residence a few days before the occupation.