The Parts Left Out of the Patty Hearst Trial
January, 1977
What one cannot do to a dog is to make it salivate by telling it a story about food. This is something which can be done to a human. --"The Image"
If you feed a starving person Ex-Lax, all you get back is the Ex-Lax. --Alexander King
Groucho Marx muttered during an interview back in 1971, "I think the only hope this country has is Nixon's assassination." He was not subsequently arrested for threatening the life of a President. In view of the indictment against Black Panther David Hilliard for using similar rhetoric, I wrote to the San Francisco office of the Justice Department to find out the status of its case against Groucho. And I received this reply:
Dear Mr. Krassner:
Responding to your inquiry of July seventh, the United States Supreme Court has held that Title 18 U.S.C., Section 871, prohibits only "true" threats. It is one thing to say that "I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon" when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian. It was the opinion of both myself and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles (where Marx's words were alleged to have been uttered) that the latter utterance did not constitute a "true" threat.
Very truly yours, James L. Browning, Jr., United States Attorney
Five years later, I found myself sitting in a Federal courtroom every day to observe The Browning of America. This same U. S. Attorney was prosecuting a bank-robbery case that seemed more like some perverted vision of a Marx Brothers movie.
Originally, Patty Hearst was going to be defended by the radical team of Vincent Hallinan and his son, Kayo. Hallinan was in Honolulu when the FBI captured Patty and he assigned Kayo to visit her in jail. Although as Tania she had called Vincent a clown in a taped communiqué, now, as Patty, she said of Kayo, "He's good. Like, I really trust him politically and personally, and I can tell him just about anything I want and he's cool." It was, however, a lawyer-client relationship that would not be permitted to mature.
When Patty described her physical reaction to having her blindfold removed while in captivity, Kayo recognized an urgent similarity to reactions to LSD. Patty agreed there had been something reminiscent of her acid trips with Steven Weed in the old Hearst mansion. Besides, there was circumstantial evidence that the S.L.A. could have dosed her with LSD. The brother of Mizmoon reported that she and Camilla Hall had taken acid; in TV Guide, Marilyn Baker claimed that drugs had been found at the S.L.A. safe house in Concord; and on the very first taped communiqué, Patty herself had said, "I caught a cold, but they're giving me pills for it and stuff." Her defense was going to be involuntary intoxication, a side effect of which is amnesia. So Patty would neither have to snitch on others nor invoke the Fifth Amendment 42 times for her own protection. In response to any questions about that missing chunk of her life, she was going to assert, "I have no recollection." The Hallinans instructed her not to talk to anybody--especially psychiatrists--about that period.
But her uncle, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., editor in chief of the Hearst newspaper chain, flew in from the East Coast to warn his family that the entire corporate image of the Hearst empire was at stake and they'd better hire an establishment attorney--fast: Enter F. Lee Bailey and his partner, Albert Johnson, who visited with Patty for a couple of hours at San Mateo County Jail in order to encourage her to tell the psychiatrists everything and not say "I have no recollection." She could trust these doctors, they assured her, and nothing she said could be used against her in any way. Patty had been kidnaped again.
Ah, yes, that philosophical puzzle that has plagued the history of human consciousness--is there is or is there ain't free will?--was finally going to be weighed by a jury. This would be the crux of its decision. But it was not exactly a jury of Patty's peers. None had ever been forced to undergo an experience beyond paranoia, only to be constipated in a closet for ten days, then granted instant relief in the form of Ex-S.L.A.x, a revolutionary catharsis.
While the trial was in progress, Richard Cole reported in Sundãz!, a Santa Cruz weekly, that Research West--the private right-wing spy organization that maintains files supplied by confessed political burglar Jerome Ducote--"was purchased in October of 1969 with funds provided by Catherine Hearst" and that "after the Hearst connection became known to employees ... at least one [San Francisco] Examiner reporter was told to drop any further investigation into the Ducote case." The Sundãz! story stated not only that Catherine Hearst gave or lent most of the $60,000--$70,000 purchase price for the company but also that prior to the purchase, the foundation supported itself through "contributions" averaging $1000, provided by Pacific Telephone, Pacific Gas & Electric, railroads, steamship lines, banks and the Examiner. In return, the files were available to those companies, as well as to local police and sheriff departments, the FBI, the CIA and the IRS. The Examiner paid $1500 a year through 1975 to retain the services of Research West.
It was not an easy task for Stephen Cook to report about the trial of his boss's daughter, what with the boss sitting right there in the front row of the courtroom to oversee him, but he did not spare his employer from embarrassing testimony and, to the credit of the Examiner, he was not censored. However, another Examiner reporter, Dick Alexander, who was writing feature material on the trial, had his copy changed so drastically that he requested his by-line be dropped. The first day of the trial, he had worn a tie with the legendary Fuck you emblazoning the design. Randolph Hearst chastised him for this, but to his credit, he continued to wear the tie, as though it were a God-given mantra. Perhaps it reminded Randy of the time Patty screamed, "Fuck you, Daddy!" at his Examiner office. Now a syndicated cartoon by Lichty--with the caption "I don't know whether she was brainwashed, but she should certainly have her mouth washed out with soap!"--appeared only in the first edition of the Examiner.
The trial was also grist for the TV entertainment mill. On the Merv Griffin show, the audience voted 70-30 that Patty was guilty as charged. On Maude, the British maid studying for her citizenship test had to answer the question "Who said, 'Give me liberty or give me death'?" She was given a hint that the initials were P.H. She did not guess Patrick Henry. And Johnny Carson in his opening monolog wondered whether F. Lee Bailey would get Lockheed off "for kidnaping our money."
Soap-opera actress Ruth Warrick, who starred in Citizen Kane, now says, "My name was not printed in any Hearst paper for five years after that film was released. I could be the star of a movie and my name couldn't even be mentioned in the ads in Hearst papers." Patty has never seen Citizen Kane. Throughout her trial, there was a screen set up in the court, but instead of Orson Welles, over and over and over again like some recurring nightmare she would view footage of herself helping rob the Hibernia Bank. One witness at the bank was convinced that it was all merely an episode for Streets of San Francisco and that Patty was just an actress.
Nancy Faber of People magazine became the unofficial courtroom fashion advisor. If you wanted to find out exactly what color Patty's pants suit was, she would know that it was Iranian rust. But while Patty was wearing light-brown eye shadow or pearl-gray nail polish to indicate that she didn't have the hands of a criminal, the San Quentin Six were appearing before their jury each day in shackles and leg irons. Shana Alexander was the only journalist who skipped a day at the Patty Hearst trial to enter into the separate reality of the San Quentin Six. A rhetorical question had been asked of the press: "How can you justify extensive coverage of Patty Hearst and say little, if anything, about the San Quentin Six, in which the state has admitted not having any real evidence?" KQED interviewed media folks, who rationalized that they were only giving the public what it wanted. But when you have a TV program like Mowgli's Brothers, an animated cartoon based on Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, in which an abandoned (continued on page 100)Patty Hearst Trial(continued from page 96) baby is adopted by a couple of compassionate wolves who talk to him--and right in the middle there's a commercial with Tony the Tiger telling the young viewers they should eat Frosted Flakes--is that giving the public what it wants, or is it brainwashing? Have an equation: The San Quentin Six is to Patty Hearst as sassafras root is to Frosted Flakes.
•
Patty's mom and dad are there on view when the jury is selected, although the press is excluded. (How can the judge be sure that Randolph Hearst won't leak the story?) And now they sit here, in the front row of the courtroom each day, so that their protective image will continue to lurk behind Princess Patty in the subconscious memory of the jurors. What's really on trial is the royal nuclear family--floor sample of a consumer unit that also serves as the original source of authority. If Patty had not "belonged" to her parents, why would anybody want to kidnap her? And if the princess had lived her prekidnap life inside the safety of the castle, then how could any old S.L.A. get her? The message of this trial is clear: Destroy the seeds of rebellion in your children or we shall have it done for you. Opera glasses scattered around the courtroom focus on Patty and her parents, who are busy pretending that they aren't being watched for reactions. They have become a captive audience by being forced to listen in public--this time to a tape-recorded communiqué from the princess abdicating her right to the throne:
Mom, Dad, I would like to comment on your efforts to supposedly secure my safety. The PIN giveaway was a sham.... You were playing games--stalling for time--which the FBI was using in their attempts to assassinate me and the S.L.A. elements which guarded me....
I have been given the choice of, one, being released in a safe area or, two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army.... I have chosen to stay and fight....
I want you to tell the people the truth. Tell them how the law-and-order programs are just a means to remove so-called violent--meaning aware--individuals from the community in order to facilitate the controlled removal of unneeded labor forces from this country, in the same way that Hitler controlled the removal of the Jews from Germany.
I should have known that if you and the rest of the corporate state were willing to do this to millions of people to maintain power and to serve your needs, you would also kill me if necessary to serve those same needs. How long will it take before white people in this country understand that whatever happens to a black child happens sooner or later to a white child? How long will it be before we all understand that we must fight for our freedom? ...
At the end of the tape, Donald De-Freeze (a.k.a. Cinque) comes on with a triple death threat, especially to Colston Westbrook, accused of being "a Government agent now working for military intelligence while giving assistance to the FB" This communiqué was originally sent to San Francisco radio station KSAN. News director David McQueen checked with a Justice Department source, who confirmed Westbrook's employment by the CIA. Assassination researcher Mae Brussell claims to have traced his activities from 1962, when he was CIA advisor to the South Korean CIA, through 1969, when he provided logistical support in Vietnam for the CIA's Phoenix program; his job was the indoctrination of assassination and terrorist cadres. After seven years in Asia, he was brought home, along with the war, and assigned to run the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville in 1970, where he became the control officer for De-Freeze, who had worked as a police informer from 1967 to 1969 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department. If DeFreeze was a double agent, then the S.L.A. was a Frankenstein monster, turning against its creator by becoming in reality what had been orchestrated as a media image. When Cinque finked on his keepers, he signed the death warrant of the S.L.A. When his charred remains were sent from Los Angeles to his family in Cleveland, they couldn't help but notice that he had been decapitated. It was as if the CIA had said, "Bring me the head of Donald DeFreeze!"
•
Consider the revelations of Wayne Lewis in August 1975. He claimed to have been an undercover agent for the FBI, a fact verified by Clarence Kelley and William Sullivan. Surfacing at a press conference in Los Angeles, Lewis spewed forth a veritable litany of conspiratorial charges: that DeFreeze was an FBI informer; that DeFreeze was killed not by the SWAT team but by an FBI agent, because DeFreeze had become "uncontrollable"; that the FBI then wanted Lewis to infiltrate the S.L.A.; that the FBI had undercover agents in other underground guerrilla groups; that the FBI knew where Patty Hearst was but let her remain free so it could build up its files of potential subversives. At one point, the FBI declared itself to have made 27,000 checks into the whereabouts of Patty Hearst. It was simultaneously proclaimed by the FDA that there were 25,000 brands of laxative on the market. That means one catharsis for each FBI investigation, with a couple of thousand potential loose shits remaining to smear across no left turn signs. Patty had become a vehicle for repressive action on the right and for wishful thinking on the left.
Brainwashing does exist. Built into the process is the certainty that one has not been brainwashed. Patty's obedience to her defense team parallels her obedience to the S.L.A. The survival syndrome has simply changed hands. Bailey is Cinque in whiteface. Instead of a machine gun, he owns a helicopter company--Enstrom, an anagram for Monster. Instead of taping underground communiqués, he holds press conferences. It's all showbiz.
A three-month-old baby, whose mother wanted to expose her to the process of justice, was being breast-fed in the back of the courtroom while Patty testified that she had been raped in a closet by the lover she once described as "the gentlest, most beautiful man I've ever known."
Now, on cross-examination, Browning wanted to know, "Did you, in fact, have a strong feeling for Willie Wolfe?"
"In a way, yes."
"As a matter of fact, were you in love with him?"
"No."
A little later, he asked if it had been "forcible rape."
"Excuse me?"
"Did you struggle or submit?"
"I didn't resist. I was afraid."
Now Browning walked into the trap: "I thought you said you had strong feelings for him?"
"I did," Patty replied triumphantly. "I couldn't stand him."
It sure seemed fake. And yet ... and yet ... there was this letter to the Berkeley Barb:
Only a woman knows that the sex act, no matter how gentle, becomes rape if she is an unwilling partner. Her soul, as well as her body, is scarred. The gentleness of Willie Wolfe does not preclude rape. Rape, in this instance, was dependent upon Patricia Hearst's state of mind, not Willie Wolfe's. We must all remember that only Patty knows what she felt; and if we refuse to believe her, there can be no justice....
(continued on page 114)Patty Hearst Trial(continued from page 100)
Here was the kind of viewpoint that sends you scurrying back and forth along that certain tightrope between spontaneity and feminist consciousness, trying to keep your kite up in the air, its tail flying the ultimate political question in the wind: Is seduction the lowest form of rape?
Patty also said that her intercourse with Cinque was "without affection."
The S.L.A. women had insisted they were not "mindless cunts enslaved by big black penises."
"You need seven inches," a reporter was explaining, "for a by-line in Newsweek."
"Patty frigid after defreeze," stated a headline that was set in type but not used in The Daily Californian, campus newspaper at her alma mater.
"Hearst blows weed," stated a later headline that was used in The Daily Californian.
"Is the Government saying," objected Bailey, "that everyone who smokes grass is a bank robber?"
Oh, that's right, this is a bank-robbery trial, isn't it? "Were you acting the part of a bank robber?" asked Browning.
"I was doing exactly what I had to do. I just wanted to get out of that bank. I was just supposed to be in there to get my picture taken mostly."
Ulysses Hall testified that after the robbery, he managed to speak on the phone with his former prisonmate, Cinque, who told him that the S.L.A. members didn't trust Patty's decision to join them. Ironically, she didn't trust their offer of a "choice," since they all realized she'd be able to identify them if she went free--and so they made her prove herself by "fronting her off" at the bank with Cinque's gun pointed at her head. Out of the closet, into the bank! Patty testified that Patricia Soltysik kicked her because she wasn't enthusiastic enough at a dress rehearsal, and Cinque warned her that if she messed up in any way, she'd be killed. Before the trial, prosecutor Browning had admitted that it was "clear from the photographs she may have been acting under duress." And during the trial, Bailey, with only 15 minutes to go before the weekend recess, brought out the Government's suppression of photos showing Camilla Hall also pointing her gun at Patty in the bank. Moreover, in a scene right out of Blow-Up or an aspirin commercial, a "scientific laboratory" had used a digital computer "to filter out the grain without changing the content," then scanned the photos with a laser beam, all to indicate that Patty had opened her mouth in surprise and recoiled in horror at the firing of shots in the bank and that it was merely a shadow that made her look as if she were smiling during the robbery, although Cinque had given her strict orders to smile whenever she met anyone who was supposed to know it was Tania, because the original image of Patty, the one that was disseminated around the world, had her smiling broadly, remember?
No wonder KQED artist Rosalie Ritz was approached by a promoter willing to pay her to design a Patty doll with a complete change of clothes so it could be turned into a Tania doll.
It did not come out in any testimony that Dr. Louis "Jolly" West once killed an elephant with an overdose of LSD--U.P.I.'s Don Thackrey calls it a case of pachydermicide--nor that he once spent eight straight hours in Dr. John Lilly's sensory-deprivation tank. According to Kayo Hallinan, Patty "hated" West because she was already aware of the fascistic implications of his proposed UCLA Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, which would practice what it preaches against--violence--in the form of electrode implantation and aversion therapy. Obviously, then, some kind of coercive persuasion must have been used to get her to talk to him. Perhaps she had been reduced to a state of infantile helplessness--once again. A letter from a prisoner in the San Mateo County Jail:
I was coming out of the doctor's office when I saw Tania being taken out the front door. The guards had cleared the hallways of all prisoners and it was by mistake that I was let out at that time by the jail nurse. Tania was taken out by one female and three males.
When I called to her, I was dragged out of the hallway. Our comrade was exhausted and frightened, lethargic in her movements and appeared drugged. While I was in the doctor's office, I had noticed a three-by-five manila envelope--the type used to hold medications given to prisoners--which had written on it, Hearst. There is little doubt she is being drugged....
A.P. reported that "a source close to the specialists conducting the examination ... said that the dosages of 'anti-psychotic drugs' listed on Miss Hearst's medical report would themselves cause lethargy and disorientation." Would she eventually emerge from this psychiatric kidnaping only to proclaim, as she had previously done on an S.L.A. tape, "I have not been brainwashed, drugged, tortured or hypnotized in any way"?
There was also a question in the minds of reporters and attorneys alike: Why did Bailey put Patty on the witness stand? He asked her what Cinque had done on one occasion to show his disapproval. "He pinched me." Where? "My breasts"--pause--"and down----" Your private parts as well? "Yes." Even rape must have its foreplay. The jury mulled over this scene while celebrating the combined birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, then returned for Browning's cross-examination. Did he pinch one or both of your breasts? "I really don't remember." Was it under your clothing? "Yes." In both places? "Pardon me, I don't think that the other was under my clothing." All right, your breasts he pinched by touching your skin. The pubic area he did not touch your skin. Is that true? "That's right." Good God, this is supposed to be the Trial of the Century and the Government wants to know if Cinque got bare tit.
•
Early in the trial, I had a lunch appointment with Willie Hearst, assistant to the editor at the Examiner and grandson of Citizen Kane's prototype. Although he claims that his status as Patty's favorite cousin is a media creation, he was the very first one she requested to see after her arrest. The receptionist at the Examiner did a slight double take when I gave her my name, possibly because she had just read in Herb Caen's Chronicle column that I had been caught shoplifting at a Safeway supermarket. Anyway, Willie came out. "It's a bad day," he said. "San Simeon has been bombed." So we postponed the lunch. Later, I received a communiqué from Jacques Rogiers--an aboveground courier for the underground New World Liberation Front--in which credit for another bombing, of the Hearst retreat in Wyntoon, was taken by the Lucio Cabañas Unit of the N.W.L.F., with a repetition of the demand that Randolph Hearst give $250,000 to the William and Emily Harris Defense Fund. One underground source insisted that the Cabañas Unit was infiltrated by a Government provocateur for the purpose of spreading fear and justifying a police state, but that accusation may have amounted to speculation.
In court, Bailey fought unsuccessfully to have Patty testify about the bombing of the Hearst castle, so that the jury would know she was still, indirectly, afraid of the Harrises. But, once more, Browning let Patty trick him during cross-examination. He was asking why she hadn't taken advantage of opportunities to phone for help. "It wasn't possible for me to call, because I couldn't do it, and I was afraid of the FBI." Now, Browning is certainly not going to disagree with Bailey's contention that Patty suffered from "a misperception about the (continued on page 230)Patty Hearst Trial(continued from page 114) viciousness of the FBI"--a misperception shared by Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, Dennis Banks--so he asks Patty if it had occurred to her to turn the Harrises in.
"I was afraid. They aren't the only people like that running around ... there were many others who could've picked up right where they left off."
Browning wondered if they really had such "power over your life."
"They did. It's happening right now."
"Has somebody been killed?"
Suddenly, Patty switches from her usual monotone to a hurried delineation of the latest terrorist acts, threats and broken promises: "San Simeon was bombed. My parents received a communiqué demanding $250,000----" Your Honor, please, the witness is leading the prosecutor.
But it's too late. The jury has heard her. Browning counters weakly, "Was anybody killed?"
"No."
Before the trial, defense attorney Johnson had protested, perhaps too much, that, "contrary to what Sheriff McDonald says, [Patty Hearst and Sara Jane Moore] have not exchanged cordialities.... I don't want any inferences drawn from any conduct of the two of them simply because they are in the same institution, because there is absolutely no connection between the two cases." But there was a missing link: the murder of Wilbert "Popeye" Jackson. The leader of the United Prisoners Union had been killed, together with a companion, Sally Voye, while they sat in a parked car at two o'clock in the morning. I learned from impeccable sources that the hit was known in advance within the California Department of Corrections, the FBI, the San Jose and San Francisco police departments. But now--in mid-February, while the Patty Hearst trial was in process--a similar charge was made in the company of some pretty evil accusations when a Berkeley underground group called Tribal Thumb prepared this statement:
It has become known to the Tribal Thumb orbit that the CIA, FBI and CCS [Criminal Conspiracy Section] have made undercurrent moves to establish a basis for the total eradication of the Tribal Thumb Community.... [They] are involved in working overtime to unravel the mystery of Popeye Jackson's execution in an effort to plant Tribal Thumb in a web of conspiracy in that execution....
The FBI's heavy involvement in the case of Popeye's death largely is due to the death of Sally Voye, who in actuality was moonlighting (outside her employment as a teacher) as a narcotics agent for police forces. Moreover, she was Popeye's control agent. Popeye was an informer on the movement. Several days ago, Patty Hearst was slipped out of her jail cell by the FBI and Mr. Randolph Hearst and taken to a nearby jail to identify a man being held there (we're withholding his name for now) who was allegedly closely associated with Tribal Thumb, to make an identification of this man's alleged trafficking of large quantities of arms to Tribal Thumb and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The result is that Miss Hearst pointed the comrade out as the trafficker of such weapons....
Donald DeFreeze escaped from the California prison system with help from the FBI and California prison officials. His mission was to establish an armed revolutionary organization, controlled by the FBI, specifically to either make contact with or undermine the surfacing and development of the August Seventh Guerrilla Movement.
We make note of the fact that the first communiqué issued by the S.L.A. under the leadership of Donald DeFreeze was in part a duplicate of a communiqué issued by the A.S.G.M. Further examination of those communiqués establishes that the A.S.G.M. had surfaced and was in the process of developing some kind of operational format, when the S.L.A. hastily moved, hard pressed for something spectacular to cut off this thrust by the A.S.G.M. The result was the incorrect and unfounded death of Marcus Foster.
It is evident that the FBI through its sources of information knew of the underground existence of the A.S.G.M. and that the movement was obviously making plans to become public knowledge via armed actions against the imperialist state. Having had their attempts to infiltrate agents into the A.S.G.M.'s mainstream frustrated, they sought the diverse method of establishing an organization they could control. So they made three approaches: Donald DeFreeze, who was in contact-with Nancy Ling Perry, who worked at Rudy's Fruit Stand, from whom Patty Hearst often bought bagels and fruit juice.
DeFreeze was let loose and given a safe plan to surface as an armed guerrilla unit. That plan was to kidnap Patty Hearst--strategized by the FBI, Randolph Hearst, Patty Hearst and Nancy Ling Perry. The format of that plan of kidnaping Patty Hearst was extracted from a book, published by a publishing company named Nova owned by the Hearst Corporation, entitled Vanished.... [Tribal Thumb most likely meant Black Abductor, by Harrison James, pseudonym for James Rusk, Jr., which was published by Regency Press, a company not affiliated with Hearst in any way.]
On April eighth, after Patty had been found guilty, a front-page story in the Examiner began:
Would-be Presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore and the Patricia Hearst case are intricately linked in the web of evidence that led to yesterday's arrest of the accused murderer of militant prison-reform leader Wilbert "Popeye" Jackson, authoritative sources have told the Examiner.
These sources said Ms. Moore, now in custody in a Federal prison in San Diego, will be a star witness in the trial of the accused slayer.... And it was the arrest last September of Miss Hearst ... that led to the break in the case, according to the primary investigators in the case....
Booked into the San Francisco County Jail yesterday afternoon was Richard Alan London, 26, an ex-convict who has been in the Santa Clara County Jail in San Jose since last summer on an armed-robbery charge.... London is a member of a revolutionary band called the Tribal Thumb and was a former member of Jackson's militant prison-reform group called the United Prisoners Union....
Federal and local authorities flatly denied a report circulated by Tribal Thumb sources that Miss Hearst, convicted of bank robbery on March 20, was taken to the Santa Clara jail to identify London last week....
Why this change in chronology? The original Tribal Thumb statement alleged that Patty had identified London as a gunrunner for the S.L.A. and Tribal Thumb more than a month and a half previously. The truth is that she secretly began to turn state's evidence early in her trial. Usually, defendants tell what they know before trial, so the prosecution can decide whether or not to plea bargain and avoid a trial. But this particular trial had to be held in order to avoid giving any impression of plea bargaining. In a manner of speaking, Patty had been gang-banged behind the tent at the Hearstling Brothers Browning & Bailey Bread and Circus by both teams, prosecution and defense, while they were adversaries in a trial that was more carefully staged than a TV wrestling match.
In court, Judge Oliver Carter always seemed like Elmer Fudd about to snap, "I'm gonna git that pesky wabbit!" He had once sentenced Hedy Sarney to two and a half years for bank robbery. She claimed at her sentencing that Tribal Thumb had made her do it. Now Bailey reminded him that he had commented that her claim of coercion came too late and that she had refused to testify against the people she accused of forcing her to commit the crime, whereas, in the case of Patty Hearst, said Bailey cryptically, "Your Honor has been made aware of some facts which are relevant to him." The judge sentenced Patty to 35 years, pending the results of 90 days of psychiatric testing. He announced, "I intend to reduce the sentence. How much I am not now prepared to say." But while Patty was still being probed by the shrinks, Judge Carter died from an overdose of natural causes and it was rumored that his replacement would sentence Patty to working as a teller at the Hibernia Bank for rehabilitative purposes.
It is considered not unlikely that Pop-eye Jackson could have been killed by police agents--to neutralize yet another black leader, rather than because he was supposed to be an informer. The United Prisoners Union reasons that "if Pop-eye had been interested in snitching, he would have made all efforts to keep up his contacts with the N.W.L.F. rather than be 'cold and distant' or allow for any misunderstanding."
But is it possible, as Tribal Thumb pointed out, that Patty Hearst participated in the planning of her own kidnaping while ostensibly buying bagels?
An S.L.A. manuscript stated they had expected more trouble from their intended victim, "since we were planning on carrying her away, but she turned out to be real cooperative. She just lay down on the floor while one of the comrades tied her hands and blindfolded her."
When she was being interviewed in jail by prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Harry Kozol, Patty pulled a Raskolnikov--the character in Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment who cannot repress the force of his own guilt--by darting from the room and complaining that Kozol had accused her of arranging her own kidnaping. Bailey asked him on the witness stand, "Did you suggest that she got herself kidnaped?"
He answered, "No."
In the first interview, Kozol questioned her about Willie Wolfe. "I told her that I'd heard her speak tenderly of him [on the final taped communiqué] and I asked her this question: 'Is that the way you felt about him?' She seemed to get upset and deeply moved. I felt she was almost sobbing inside ... but no tears ran down her face.... She said, 'I don't know how I feel about him.' I said, 'I'm not asking you how you feel. Is that how you felt?' She became very much upset, began to shake and quiver, obviously suffering. And she answered, 'I don't know why I got into this goddamn thing--shit!' And then got up and left the room, terribly upset."
Got into what goddamn thing? Patty could have been referring to her agreement to talk with psychiatrists, or to her decision to join the S.L.A., or to the kidnaping itself.
In the second interview, when she described the kidnaping scene, Kozol asked if there was anything else. He testified, "There was some delay. She was sort of thinking. She began to look very uncomfortable and I told her, 'Never mind.' And she said, 'I don't want to tell you.' And I said, 'That's OK, if it makes you uncomfortable,' and then she blurted out that she was going to tell me anyway. She told me that four days before the kidnaping, while she was sitting in class, she was suddenly struck with a terrible fear that she was going to be kidnaped. This was an overwhelming sensation. It stayed with her. I said, 'What's so surprising about a girl from a well-to-do family worrying about kidnaping?' She brushed it aside and said, 'It wasn't anything of the sort. It was different.' For four solid days, she couldn't shake the fear. She finally thought in terror of running home to her parents, where she would be safe. She somehow fought that. Then the thing she dreaded occurred."
After she was arrested, there was a jail-house conversation with her best friend since childhood, Trish Tobin--whose family controls the Hibernia Bank--including this exchange:
Trish: "I had a lot of fights at Stanford."
Patty: "Oh, yeah? About what?"
Trish: "You."
Patty: "Oh--what were they saying? I can just imagine----"
Trish: "Oh, well, 'that fucking little rich bitch'--you know, on and on--and they said, 'She planned her own kidnaping,' and I said, 'Fuck you, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, I don't even care if she plans her kidnaping and everyone's in the world, so you know something, I don't wanna hear shit out of you!' " (Laughter)
The gossip was that Patty had arranged her own kidnaping in order to get out of her engagement to Steven Weed in as adventurous a way as possible--"I guess I was having second thoughts," she admitted. "I wasn't sure he was somebody I could stay married to"--but that she was then double-crossed and manipulated into becoming an informer.
The family of slain S.L.A. member Willie Wolfe hired Lake Headley--an ex--police intelligence officer who was chief investigator at Wounded Knee--to find out what had really happened. What he discovered, with fellow researchers Donald Freed and Rusty Rhodes, was that the S.L.A. was part of the CIA's CHAOS program. In that context, it was planning to kill Black Panther leader Huey Newton and succeeded in killing black school superintendent Marcus Foster after he agreed to meet Panther demands for educational reforms. At Vacaville, DeFreeze was permitted to set up Unisight--which was outasite, because convicts could get laid by visiting females. According to Headley, DeFreeze's visitors included Nancy Ling Perry, Patricia Soltysik--and Patty Hearst, then 18, not going under her own name but using the I.D. of Mary Alice Siems, a student at Berkeley. His affidavit states:
That Patricia Campbell Hearst and her parents disagreed bitterly over Patricia's political and personal relations. That a love affair between a black man and Patricia Campbell Hearst did take place prior to her relationship with her fiancé Steven Weed. That Mrs. Randolph A. Hearst subjected her daughter to extreme pressure to change her personal and political relationships.
Patty began living with Weed in Berkeley later that year, in the fall of 1972. DeFreeze was transferred to Soledad in December 1972, where he was given the special privilege of using the trailers ordinarily reserved for married trustees. He became a leader of the S.L.A. and renewed his affair with Patty for a brief time. The affidavit continues:
Discussions were held between Patricia Campbell Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army concerning a kidnaping--not her own.
Whose, then? Her sisters', Anne and Vicki. The idea of kidnaping Patty, too. was brought up--this was a year before it actually took place--but she didn't think it was such a great notion. But if true, this would explain Patty's outburst at the moment of kidnaping: "Oh, no! Not me! Oh, God! Please let me go!"
The investigators presented their findings to the Los Angeles City Council, charging that the intelligence unit of the police department--the Criminal Conspiracy Section--knew of the S.L.A.'s presence but wanted the so-called shoot-out for test purposes. Headley acquired official film footage of the massacre, showing that the FBI used a pair of German shepherds to sniff out Patty's presence so she wouldn't be inside the unsafe house.
If this is all accurate information, it means that the kidnaping of Patty Hearst is an American equivalent of the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany.
On the tape of April 3, 1974, Patty said, "I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Ché in Bolivia for the people." And on the tape of June sixth, she said, "I renounced my class privilege when Cin and Cujo gave me the name Tania." But in the New Times interview, Bill Harris said, "She chose the name Tania herself."
According to Weed, her reading matter had ranged from the Marquis de Sade to Do It, by Jerry Rubin. And, according to a trusted source, Patty and a former roommate had both read the book Tania, the Unforgettable Guerrilla a year prior to the kidnaping. Further, the roommate had been subpoenaed to testify for the prosecution in Patty's trial, but the subpoena was withdrawn. Parks Stearns, Jr.. FBI liaison to the U.S. Attorney's office, denied this vehemently, shouting at me in the press room, "You're wrong!" It could be just a coincidence, but after that incident, the head marshal began hassling me for identification, even though I had been coming to the trial every day. One time he asked for my driver's license. I told him I didn't drive a car. Another time he asked for my Social Security card. I told him I never carry that around. I would present only my press card, which he accepted because there were too many media people around and he didn't want the attention that a scene would automatically create.
In the middle of the trial--on a Saturday afternoon, when reporters and technicians were hoping to goof off--the FBI called a press conference. At five o'clock that morning, they had raided the New Dawn collective--supposedly the aboveground support group of the Emiliano Zapata Unit--and accompanying a press release about the evidence seized were photographs still wet with developing fluid. "Mr. Bates, real close to your head, please." Special Agent Charles Bates proceeded to pose with the photos like an imitation Henry Fonda doing a camera commercial. Was there a search warrant? No, but they had a "consent to search" signed by the owner of the house, Judy Stevenson, who has since admitted being a paid FBI informant. Not only did the raid seem timed to break into print simultaneously with the Sunday funnies but the investigative technique also smacked of comic-strip morality; in Dick Tracy the next day, the "Crimestoppers Textbook" depicted a trio of stereotypic hippie terrorists preparing a time bomb, underscored by the question, "Would you deny police access to knowledge of persons planning your demise?"
In 1969, Bates was special agent at the Chicago office of the FBI when police killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark while they were sleeping. Recently, ex--FBI informer Maria Fischer told the Chicago Daily News that the then chief of the FBI's Chicago office, Marlon Johnson, personally asked her to slip a drug to Hampton: she had infiltrated the Panther Party at the FBI's request a month before. The drug was a tasteless, colorless liquid that would put him to sleep. She refused. Hampton was killed a week later. An autopsy showed "a near fatal dose" of secobarbital in his system. In 1971, Bates was transferred to Washington. According to James Me-Cord's book A Piece of Tape, on June 21, 1972, John Dean checked with L. Patrick Gray as to who was in charge of handling the Watergate investigation. The answer: Charles Bates--the same FBI official who in 1974 would be in charge of handling the S.L.A. investigation and the search for Patty Hearst. Almost six weeks after that Saturday-morning raid, he sent me a letter, by registered mail, on Department of Justice stationery:
Dear Mr. Krassner:
Subsequent to the search of a residence in connection with the arrest of six members of the Emiliano Zapata Unit, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. San Francisco, has been attempting to contact you to advise you of the following information:
During the above indicated arrest of six individuals of the Emiliano Zapata Unit, an untitled list of names and addresses of individuals was seized. A corroborative source described the above list as an Emiliano Zapata Unit "hit list," but stated that no action will be taken, since all of those who could carry it out are in custody. Further, if any of the apprehended individuals should make bail, they would only act upon the "hit list" at the instructions of their leader, who is not and will not be in a position to give such instructions.
The above information is furnished for your personal use and it is requested it be kept confidential. At your discretion, you may desire to contact the local police department responsible for the area of your residence.
Very truly yours, Charles W. Bates, Special Agent in Charge
Was he trying to tell me something? Because of a lawsuit involving the Freedom of Information Act that had been won by Carl Stern--who was covering the trial for NBC News--I had received my FBI and CIA files. In fact, I was planning to sue the FBI for conspiracy to harass. When Life ran a favorable profile of me in 1968, the New York office of the FBI asked permission of the director's office in Washington--and received approval from Cartha DeLoach and William Sullivan--to write a letter to the editor of Life (signed by a fictitious Howard Rasmussen of Brooklyn College) in which The Realist was labeled "blatant obscenity" and I was classified as "a raving, unconfined nut." That's all true, of course, but in libel, it's the malice that counts. So, obviously, I was more logically a target of the Government than of the Emiliano Zapata Unit--unless they happen to be the same. Was the right wing of the FBI warning me about the left wing of the FBI? Did the handwriting on the wall read Co-Intelpro Lives!?
Questions about the authenticity of the Zapata Unit had been raised by its first public: statement in August 1975, which included the unprecedented threat of violence against the left. When a Safeway supermarket in Oakland was bombed by the Zapata Unit, they claimed to have called radio station KPFA and instructed them to notify police, so they could evacuate the area; KPFA staffers insisted they never received such a call. Now The Urban Guerrilla, aboveground organ of the underground N.W.L.F., commented:
Without offering any proof, the FBI has claimed that [those arrested] were members of the Emiliano Zapata Unit and mistakenly claimed that the Zapata Unit was part of the N.W.L.F. These FBI claims and lies have been widely repeated by the media.
As soon as they were arrested, Greg Adornetto, whom we knew as Chepito, was separated from the others and disappeared....
A close analysis of all the actions and statements ... by Chepito leads [us] to the inescapable conclusion that he is not just a weak informer, he is a Government infiltrator/provocateur. No other conclusion is possible when one considers that he led our comrades to a house he knew was under surveillance ... carrying along things like explosives and halfcompleted communiqués....
He recruited sincere and committed revolutionaries who wanted to participate in being a medium for dialog with the underground, got a bunch of them in the same room with guns, communiqués and explosives, or even got some of them involved in armed actions, and then had ... Bates move in with his SWAT teams and bust everybody....
In addition, a communiqué from the central command of the N.W.L.F. charged that "the pigs led and organized" the Zapata Unit. "We were reasonably sure that it was a setup from the beginning and we never sent one communiqué to New Dawn because of our suspicions."
Meanwhile, a member of the Santa Clara district attorney's office testified that Bates had "categorically denied" having any of the stolen documents sought by the Santa Clara district attorney for an investigation of FBI-sponsored political burglaries. Bates, after being confronted with the testimony of one of his own subordinates, ultimately turned over the documents to the D.A. Some of the stolen documents, according to Sundaz!, ended up with Catherine Hearst's pet project, Research West. But when Patty was arrested, Bates became instantly ubiquitous on radio and television, boasting of her capture. Curiously, although her own cousin Willie asserts he would not have recognized her, the arresting officer immediately said, "Patty, what are you doing here?" She was so surprised that she peed in her pants, but only for the Chronicle, not the Examiner. She was permitted to change in the bathroom. The FBI inventory did not include "pants, wet, one pair." But there was on the list a two-foot marijuana plant--as compared with almost a pound of grass not reported by the FBI that was found at the apartment she had originally been kidnaped from. There was also a bottle of Gallo wine in the S.L.A. safe house, not such a loyal gesture to the United Farm Workers they purported to support. And there was "a rock" found in Patty's purse.
Nearly six months later, after Patty told the jury that Willie Wolfe had raped her, Emily Harris was quoted in New Times: "Once Willie gave her a stone relic in the shape of a monkey face [and] Patty wore it all the time around her neck. After the shoot-out, she stopped wearing it and carried it in her purse instead, but she always had it with her." While reading the magazine in court, Browning suddenly had an Aha! experience. Later he would present that "rock" as his final piece of evidence, slowly swinging the necklace back and forth in front of the jurors, as if to hypnotize them. During this trial, we had witnessed the transmutation of this Federal prosecutor from Goofy to Svengali.
The Harrises let it be known that if called to testify, they would take the Fifth Amendment, but media fallout enabled them to have their Fifth and drink it, too. If the monkey necklace was a piece of visual evidence that came to the jury by way of print journalism, and if the film of Patty doing the Hibernia hustle was an electronic bank loan, then it was only appropriate that an audio contribution, the Trish Tobin tape, should complete that holy media trinity. Several times throughout the trial, Browning attempted to have it played for the jury, but Judge Carter kept refusing--until the final argument, when the impact of its giddiness would be especially astonishing.
The possibility that Patty was coerced into robbing the bank is not inconsistent with her jailhouse dialog 16 months later: "I'm not making any statements until I know that I can get out on bail, and then if I find out that I can't for sure, then I'll issue a statement, but I'd just as soon give it myself, in person, and then it'll be a revolutionary feminist perspective totally. I mean I never got really ... I guess I'll just tell you, like, my politics are real different from, uh--way back when (laughter)--obviously! And so this creates all kinds of problems for me in terms of a defense." An accurate forecast. Patty testified that she was influenced to say this because Emily Harris was in the visiting room.
"Was she a party to your conversation?"
"Not by any intention of ours, no."
On cross-examination, she continued: "Emily was also on a phone." (Prisoners and visitors must converse over telephones while they look at each other through a thick--bulletproof glass window.) Patty said she knew that Emily could hear her talking simply because "I could've heard her if I'd stopped and listened." But jail records show that Emily was not in the visiting room then.
While Kozol was testifying in court, Patty was writing notes to Johnson on a yellow legal pad. And while the marshal was watching me during recess, another reporter, Steve Rubinstein, copied those notes but couldn't include them in his story for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a Hearst paper. Patty described life in Berkeley with Weed:
I paid the rent, bought the furniture, bought the groceries, cooked all the meals (even while working eight hours a day and carrying a full course load), and if I wasn't there to cook, Steve didn't eat.
Another note states clearly and concisely where her head was really at in the San Mateo County Jail:
Dr. Kozol kept trying to equate the women's movement with violence. I repeatedly told him: 1. Violence has no place in the women's movement. 2. I didn't feel it was possible to make lasting social changes in our society unless the issue of women's rights was resolved. Kozol kept trying to say things like, "Isn't it more important to solve the poverty problem?" etc.... Any reform measures taken by the Government will only be temporary. The phrase bad seed growing was used by Kozol, and one could recall that in the film version of The Bad Seed, as a postscript, the mother was shown spanking the daughter while the closing credits were superimposed on that image. Other cinematic reminders: Patty as a child mimicking her mother, the way the young girl did in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds; the guy in Zabriskie Point remarking about someone in a passing car, "She used to be my sister"; the girl who is forced into an S/M relationship with a storm trooper at a concentration camp in The Night Porter continuing years later in a hotel "of my own free will," she insists. Although news items about the Patty Hearst trial were clipped out of the daily papers by U. S. marshals, who also turned the TV off in case of a related bulletin, the jurors were not immune to media influence. During the trial, they all went out to see a few contemporary films, which they voted on, presumably sitting in the same order to which they had become accustomed in court. They saw One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, which, Ken Kesey complained, made Big Nurse the target and omits his central theme, that people go crazy in this country precisely because they can't handle the gap between the American Dream and the American Nightmare as orchestrated by the same combine that Patty was forced to experience, where organized crime and organized crime fighting are merely different sides of the same corporate coin. The jury also saw Swept Away ..., reinforcing the theme that one does not transcend one's class unless one is already heading in that direction before circumstances temporarily shatter all those arbitrary rules that distinguish the classes. And the jury saw Taxi Driver--Nashville without music--once again perpetuating the myth of the lone nut assassin who, in this case, attempts to kill a political candidate not because he has been hired by an intelligence agency but, rather, because Cybill Shepherd won't stay and hold his hand in a porno-movie audience. No, the jurors do not read in the newspaper what goes on when the judge sends them out of the courtroom, but remaining in their collective subconscious is a violent spider's web of powerful imagery that can be relieved only by larger and larger doses of law and order. Deliberations in the jury room were ultimately a rationalization for the urge to punish Patty.
•
If you were Patty Hearst, would you answer true or false to the following statements?
"My way of doing things is apt to be misunderstood by others."
"I am always disgusted with the law when a criminal is freed through the arguments of a smart lawyer."
"I feel that it is certainly best to keep my mouth shut when I'm in trouble."
Those are samples from the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), a psychological test. In order to have her sentence reduced, Patty was required to undergo a psychiatric debriefing extended to six months.
The jury had found her guilty of fucking when she was 15. Or why else would such information have been admissible as evidence during the trial? They don't allow that kind of testimony in a rape trial, but for a bank robbery it's relevant.
Patty once told a nun to go to hell, and now her monkey-face necklace has been replaced by a religious symbol. Although A.P. beat U.P.I. by five minutes on the wire with the story on April 14 that Bill and Emily Harris were charged with kidnaping Patty, it took the alternative Zodiac News Service to beat them both with a dispatch of Steve Long's report on June 17 that the S.L.A.--which had achieved international notoriety as a result of that abduction--was now going to disband, inasmuch as its four remaining admitted members were all in prison.
Graffiti remain mute testaments to the whole misadventure. With the same passion with which some mene tekelers have spray-painted free squeaky and gravity is the 4th dimension, others have left legends like jail Rocky and Nixon, not Tania and we miz you mizmoon--"save the children" (only mizmoon has been yellowed out) and S.L.A. lives, which has long been hiding in among the enigmatic COLE SLAW LIVES slogan that has baffled tourists and convinced one visiting ex-Berkeleyite that a friend named Cole Slaw was dead, because there are graffiti that say he lives.
•
There had been a rumor that Patty had become pregnant by Cinque. Indeed, one of the questions that Randolph Hearst had when he met Jack Scott was to ascertain if that were so.
I wrote in my Berkeley Barb column: "Now, with their daughter on trial, the Hearsts have hired a lawyer who wears pancake make-up to press conferences, the better to transform a racist fear into a Caucasian alibi." I received a letter by certified mail:
Dear Sir:
You undoubtedly did not realize that the name "Pan-Cake Make-Up" is the registered trademark (U.S. Patent Office No. 350,402) of Max Factor & Co. and is not a synonym for cake make-up. The correct usage is "Pan-Cake Make-Up," capitalized and written in just that manner, or, under circumstances such as these, where you obviously did not intend to mention a particular brand, simply cake make-up.
We are sure that you are aware of the legal importance of protecting a trademark and trust that you will use ours properly in any future reference to our product, or, in the alternative, will use the proper generic term rather than our brand name.
So that our records will be complete, we would appreciate an acknowledgment of this letter....
Very truly yours, Max Factor & Co., D. James Pekin, Corporate Counsel
In response, I explained that there had been a slight misunderstanding--what Bailey had been wearing to all those press conferences was actually Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix--and I hoped that cleared up the matter.
Finally, although James Browning had once informed me that the Black Panthers were "an organization which advocates killing people" and that Groucho Marx's "utterance did not constitute a 'true' threat," it has since come out that the FBI itself published pamphlets in the name of the Panthers advocating the killing of cops and that an FBI file on Groucho Marx was begun and he is actually labeled a "national security risk."
"I deny everything," Groucho responded, "because I lie about everything." He paused, then added, "And everything I deny is a lie."
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