The following interview begins with a twenty-minute monologue that is the most honest, accurate description of the cause and consequences of the War on Iran available. It is followed by nearly two hours of receipts confirming that analysis given by the person most unarguably qualified to deliver that corroboration. Just about everything else circulating on the news and across the social media space on the subject is noise, contorted by self-interested ideologies poisoned by greed, entitlement, notions of racial supremacy, political graft, and/or juvenile ‘religious’ justifications.
Instead of asking for a cash ransom for the release of Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) demanded that her father, media magnate William Randolph Hearst Jr, supply poor Californians with $2 Million of free food. The demand resulted in a sea change in public opinion, especially with the radical left which the SLA had alienated with the assassination of Marcus Foster. The right exacerbated the problem with reactionary responses to the demand. Governor Reagan told the media that he hoped that the poor people who would receive the food would contract botulism.
Cinque and his SLA crew dominated the media for the next two months. It issued “communiques” decrying what it called the fascist corporate state and its institutionalized racism, peppered with criticisms of the elder Hearst’s inept execution of the “feed the needy” demands. Boosting the SLA ride to fame, Patty Hearst announced that she was no longer a kidnap victim, but instead a card-carrying member of the SLA. She participated in the SLA’s armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank in downtown San Francisco. Security camera footage with Patty lording over face-down customers with a semi-automatic weapon would be run multiple times in virtually every major media forum for the next two years. Here is Hearst with Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze during the robbery:
Cinque’s intoxicating rise to fame would be short lived. After the bank robbery, Cinque issued a communique that would seal the fate of himself and all of the SLA in his vicinity. He broadcasted a ‘death warrant’ for the man who put him up to black radicalism and SLA formation in the first place. That was the coordinator of the Berkley/prison Black Cultural Association. It wasn’t the death pronouncement that marked the SLA for massacre, it was the reason articulated by Cinque:
“Colston Westbrook: male, black, age 55, brown eyes, brown hair, 5-8, 210 pounds, Berkley language instructor, resident of Oakland is a government agent, worked for the CIA in Vietnam as interrogator and torturer in Phoenix operation and also served same purpose in other foreign countries, now working for military intelligence while giving cross assistance to the FBI.”
Apparently, Donald DeFreeze (a/k/a Cinque) had been triggered when he learned of Westbrook’s background (which had by then been published in alternative newspapers). Informed observers reckoned DeFreeze must have realized then why Westbrook had prompted him to target the beloved Marcus Foster: to turn the public against Black activists, thus justifying more military policing of them (just as called for in COINTELPRO). The Westbrook communique signified that the gloves were off and the CIA and military intelligence were being teed up for the worst possible exposure and publicity imaginable.
That prompted two credible, informed and disrelated observers to come to the same conclusion as to the ultimate fate of DeFreeze and the SLA. One was private investigator and author Lake Headley whom Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi called “the best private eye on earth.” The other was DeFreeze’s operative handler when he was serving as an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Ronald Farwell. After Defreeze exposed and targeted CIA man Westbrook, both Headley and Farwell independently predicted there would be no arrest of Cinque and his SLA. Instead, both predicted Cinque and company would all be slaughtered in a shoot-out.
Shortly thereafter, on May 17 1974, the LAPD tracked down Cinque and the SLA to a small ramshackle home in Southeast Los Angeles. They surrounded it with over 400 officers, heavily armed with several armored vehicles. The house was pummeled with over 4,000 rounds of ammunition. It was burnt to the ground by incendiary cannisters shot into it. There were no survivors. Shreiber’s Revolution’s End shares a number of controversies about the incident, including whether a meaningful chance to surrender was given, whether a woman SLA member attempted to surrender but was shot in the back, and whether Cinque’s head was removed and destroyed to cover up evidence of psychosurgery he may have received as part of MK Search ‘treatment’ at Vacaville. Schrieber also outlines the big lessons the government clearly wanted the public to take away. It was the first time, and a warning for the future, that military grade force was and would be used domestically in an overwhelming fashion against ideological resistance. It was also the first time the networks’ ‘mini-cam’ technology was put to use so that the several hour pyrotechnic massacre was broadcast live across the nation. In Shreiber’s view, these facts tend to corroborate the claim that Donald DeFreeze was an unwitting MK Ultra victim put up to incredibly ill-informed, spectacular acts of rebellion which would justify implementation of repressive police measures. Here are the remains of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s Alamo:
It was not until the coroner identified the burnt and bullet ridden bodies that the police discovered Patricia Hearst and two other SLA members, Bill and Emily Harris, were missing. Hearst and the Harris’ avoided the others’ fate by virtue of luck. The day before they had engaged in their own shoot out over a shoplifting rap laid on Bill Harris at an L.A. Sporting Goods outlet and escaped to parts unknown.
After the SLA massacre, the Harrises and Hearst went on the lam, crisscrossing America, hidden by left wing activists. During that nearly year and a half period, Hearst participated in more SLA communiques and another bank heist in which a bystander was murdered by her crew.
Finally, on September 18, 1975, Hearst was arrested in San Francisco.
Jack Ruby Redux
To fully appreciate what follows, it would helpful if you read CIA Cult Creation – The Manson Family, with particular attention to what CIA MK Ultra psychiatrist Dr. Lois Jolyon “Jolly” West did. That is, West’s going to extraordinary lengths to wheedle his way into a federal court proceeding in order to influence it’s outcome by suspicious means. Just as in the case of Jack Ruby, West apparently went ex parte (off the record) to the Federal judge assigned to hear the Hearst case to have himself put in a position to manipulate the outcome of the case from the outset. We caused the public availability of the United States vs. Patricia Hearst record, which had been mothballed in off-site archives for more than 50 years, to be scanned and made available to the public. (Hearst trial transcripts) The record is revealing. On the 23rd of September 1975, just four days after Hearst’s arraignment the judge ordered sua sponte (on his own, not upon any motion brought by either side) that Hearst’s mental fitness for trial be determined after the examination by court-appointed psychiatrists named Roland Levy, Donald Lundy, Seymour Pollack, and Chalmers Johnson.
Two days later, on the 25th inexplicably and with no rationale provided, the judge again issued a sua sponte order, amending his order of the 23rd. The new order eliminated doctors Levy and Johnson and replaced them with “L.J. WEST, and MARGARET THALER.” So apparently unfamiliar with those involved, the judge omitted the latter’s last name, “Singer”, Margaret Thaler Singer, a longtime protégé of West. There is no record whatsoever of how or why the judge suddenly substituted the CIA’s West (along with partner Singer) into the mix. But just like the Ruby case, West took charge of the stable of psychiatrists. He added another MK Ultra colleague, Dr. Martin Orne, and CIA friendly ‘expert’ Robert J. Lifton. Finally, West proceeded to dig into Patricia Hearts with an intensity that made his Jack Ruby programming look like a picnic.
Seven days after the entry of West, his Jack Ruby case defense team member, former FBI agent and high profile CIA-friendly attorney F. Lee Bailey, entered his appearance on behalf of Hearst. The odds of these two CIA birds randomly rendezvousing in the Hearst case as they did in the Ruby case are incalculably tiny. Here is West lecturing Bailey and his team of CIA-affiliated psychiatrists on Hearst trial strategy in their San Francisco hotel:
The Brainwashing of Patty Hearst?
What is known of West’s dozens of hours spent with Patty Hearst reflects a classic case of brainwashing, mind control, or as psychiatry had come to relabel it – coercive persuasion.
Hearst was resistant at first. Even after her arrest she made defiant expressions of solidarity with the American radical left. Upon booking she listed her occupation as “urban guerilla”, and flashed a closed fist leftist salute to media cameras.
By her own account in her autobiography, a strong case can be made that West practiced more effective MK Mind Control than he had on Jack Ruby. Like Jack Ruby, Hearst found West “too soothing to be trusted.” But, apparently unlike Ruby, Hearst capitulated. She wrote that West’s “creepy, hypnotic voice” somehow overwhelmed her: “I simply crumpled under his scrutiny. I cried, murmuring and mumbling out replies that were not answers to his questions.” (Quotations from Every Secret Thing, autobiography of Patricia Hearst)
Once her defenses were stripped, West lectured Hearst at length about his experience with the returning US soldiers who were ‘brainwashed’ in North Korean prison camps in the early 1950s. That included how they were saved from hanging for treason only by making the claim they had been “brainwashed” to testify to their captors about U.S. war crimes. He also committed the first cardinal sin of any legitimate counselling by telling Hearst what she ought to consider is ‘wrong’ with her. West informed Hearst that she had “traumatic neurosis with dissociative features”, “which meant simply that I was frightened out of my wits by the SLA, subjected to powerfully effective coercive manipulation by my captors, and that I would need three to four months of psychiatric treatment before I would be ‘able with full competence to aid and assist counsel in my own defense.’” (Every Secret Thing)
Just as in the Jack Ruby case (see, CIA Mind Control and the Assassination of JFK), West was originally appointed by the court to determine fitness of the defendant for trial but gaslit the court into subsequently accepting his conversion to a defense team psychiatrist. The odds of a psychiatrist successfully executing that sleight of hand in two of the most high-profile cases in U.S. history are impossibly slim.
And so, West arranged for a handpicked psychotherapist, and his mind control colleagues, Dr. Singer, Dr. Lifton, and Dr Orne to spend many dozens of hours programming his evaluation into the head of Patricia Hearst. This is a conservative characterization by comparison to U.S. Attorney James Browning’s, lead prosector in U.S. vs. Patricia Hearst.
Ultimately, he put it very bluntly to the jury:
“Did [Hearst] do all of those things, and can you really believe she did all of those things because of fear from the Harrises (SLA members), or was it because she was reprogrammed by the psychiatrists, by the defense attorneys, with a view in mind to painting the very picture that has been painted of her here to you ladies and gentlemen?” (emphasis added)
Think about that. A United States Attorney from the Department of Justice suggesting that CIA employed and/or affiliated doctors Jolly West, Margaret Singer, Martin Orne and Robert Lifton “programmed” the mind of Patricia Hearst to carry out a stage-managed fiction to present before a U.S. Federal District Court judge and jury. Why? What were they hiding?
This was no whimsical allegation by Browning. It was based on the following evidence presented to the jury.
At page 2186 of the trial transcript the prosecution read from a West/Hearst psychiatric session transcript where West instructs (not asks, counsels or exams) Hearst on what her attorney told him would be the legal strategy and how she was to play along:
“To emphasize the involuntary and violent way in which you were dragged out of a relatively normal life with a forcible and terrifying sort of indoctrination that you got, and the tremendous pressure of threats in the beginning to make you subservient and compliant with the leadership of this group so that they would be able to keep control of you.” Remarkably, West does not ask Hearst if this is accurate or bears any resemblance to reality. Instead, he tries to sell her on the presentation: “I think myself that is the best explanation for what happened. I haven’t heard anything to make me think otherwise. Doesn’t that sound logical to you?”
At page 2189 self-proclaimed expert hypnotist West’s hypnotic-sounding command to Hearst, sealing the trial strategy deal, is read into the record:
“You are relatively suggestible. I would say if sensitized, easily deceived, especially if dependent on someone. You were so successfully coerced.”
Referring to West’s conditioning, U.S. Attorney Browning summed up the jury’s duty during closing argument: “One has only to question whether [West] was asking the defendant, whether he was evaluating the defendant or whether he was telling the defendant.”
(pg. 4450 trial transcript)
Despite several days of several West coordinated psychiatrists and America’s most famous trial lawyer (Bailey) trying to muddy the waters, the jury unanimously agreed that beyond a reasonable doubt Jolly West and his fellow CIA psychiatrists were the ones who performed mind control on Patty Hearst and not Donald DeFreeze and Symbionese Liberation Army.
Hearst was convicted of bank robbery with a firearm and sentenced to 7 years in prison.
Cinque the MK Ultra Practitioner
While the jury agreed with the prosecution that the only Mind Control that was practiced on Patricia Hearst was that of Dr. Jolly West, it very nearly learned a highly protected state secret. So intent on diverting attention to DeFreeze was West that he very nearly outed his CIA brethren James Hamilton (MK Search 3 operator at California Corrections medical facility at Vacaville, during DeFreeze’s stay and participation in his medical experiments). West spit out that DeFreeze had learned effective mind control from his subjugation to Hamilton’s ‘treatment’: “Cinque was looking for a successful political conversion in the well-known revolutionary tradition (Maoist) of ‘thought reform.’ His experience in prison had taught him also that following a period of isolation, solitary confinement or ‘black hole,’ where people are kept in darkness, an inmate would be unusually susceptible to political indoctrination.”
(pg 2160 trial transcript) (Emphasis added)
Dr. Colin Ross, author of The CIA Doctors, connected the dots West left: “Where did a street hood and unsuccessful robber like Donald DeFreeze learn such sophisticated programming techniques?…My conclusion is that Defreeze was a controlled controller, created in part by Phoenix Program veteran Colston Westbrook.”
So, we wind up asking ourselves “who was brainwashing whom?”
Recall in our Manson episode that confusing picture left behind in San Francisco in 1967 by MK Ultra doctors Jolly West and James Hamilton. It was difficult to discern whether Charles Manson and the CIA crossing paths was an accident, or Manson was programmed to kill, or even Manson was taught to program to kill. The same bizarre web was left behind Vacaville prison and the US District Court by West and Hamilton. Was Donald Defreeze programmed to kill, programmed to program to kill, and was Patty Hearst programmed by DeFreeze or by Dr. West, or even by both of them?
In, out, back in, and out
After being convicted in March 1976, Hearst was released on bail pending appeal in November of 1976. After her appeals all the way to the US Supreme Court were exhausted Hearst was re-incarcerated in May 1978. Having lost at every level she disconnected from Bailey and hired a new, aggressive lawyer, George Martinez. In September of 78 he moved to reduce the sentence against Hearst. In early October, he filed material that West-influenced Bailey wouldn’t touch. That is the declaration of Clifford Jefferson a fellow inmate of DeFreeze’s subjected to the CIA MK Search mind control program at Vacaville. He summarized Jefferson’s declaration in his pleading as follows:
“Clifford Jefferson relates that Donald DeFreeze stated to him the CIA was conducting tests to try out certain drugs on inmates and that he had been in it. The tests were on the third floor of the facility in B-3 (at Vacaville). That Jefferson went there and met two CIA men who were giving the tests and who gave him drugs which wiped out his memory; that DeFreeze stated to Jefferson he had gone through the same tests and knew of certain stress tests; that Defreeze told Jefferson that when he got out of prison, they would kidnap a rich person and give him drugs and the person would become a robot and do anything he asked to do.” – ADDITIONAL EXHIBIT IN SUPPORT OF MOTION TO REDUCE SENTENCE, filed October 6, 1978
Famed syndicated Columnist Jack Anderson was tipped off in advance and wrote a column about Jefferson, spreading the news across the country. (see October 5 1978 column).
Worse still for the CIA, its biggest nemesis of the seventies, California Congressman Leo J Ryan, was clearly coordinating with Hearst’s new lawyer. He was already riding the Director of the CIA Admiral Stansfield Turner on the matter (see Ryan letter to Turner). Ryan’s September 27th 1978 letter demanded confirmation or denial regarding “CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville”, specifically referring to “Donald DeFreeze, now deceased, who was the leader known as CINQUE of the Symbionese Liberation Army” and “Clifford Jefferson.”
On October 18th, Deputy CIA Director Frank Carlucci responded. Astonishingly, he admitted “it is true that CIA-sponsored testing, using volunteer inmates, was conducted at that facility.” His denial of DeFreeze and Jefferson involvement was carefully worded: “In so far as our records reflect the names of the participants, there is nothing to indicate that either was in any way involved in the project.” It is an incredible denial given the CIA’s habit of destroying embarrassing documents en masse.
Given that the CIA’s Oct 1978 denial was contradicted by the fact that Jack Anderson had extracted an acknowledgement from Vacaville Superintendent T. Lawrence Clanon that “DeFreeze had volunteered for medical research in July 1970 shortly after he entered Vacaville” (See Anderson column), and Ryan’s history of pursuing CIA secrets like a bull dog, you can take it to the bank that as of shortly after 18 October 1978 (date of D/Director Carlucci letter) Ryan was pursuing new means of uncovering the whole truth. Why the paper trail ends in late October 1978 will be answered in future chapters. Those episodes explore another epic American tragedy which, until now, nobody had any reason to believe had anything to do with U.S. vs. Patricia Hearst.
Postscript on Hearst
Less than two months after the CIA’s Vacaville hijinks were put front and center before a Federal District Court Judge (Motion to reduce sentence) and the American public at large (Jack Anderson column), and smack dab in the middle of the CIA Director’s desk, and Leo J. Ryan’s pursuit of the CIA came to a climactic, violent conclusion (see coming chapters), the Patty Hearst affair was abruptly put to rest by the President of the United States. Despite the fact Hearst’s appeals were rejected all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, and despite her losing repeated motions to reduce or vacate her sentence, President Jimmy Carter would commute Hearst’s sentence, setting her free. After two long years of the most expensive defense ever produced in America striking out, only after the CIA’s fingerprints were presented did the Hearst saga surprisingly end.
In pursuing the whole truth from the CIA, Congressman Leo J. Ryan would not be so fortunate.
What an incredible acid test this message from Joe Kent is. Marvel the divide, the chickenhawks are squealing like stuck pigs on X and across all media channels. The viciousness with which they go after this man is remarkable. Also, behold the pundits lecturing him on international terrorism, zionism, and the like – like professors lecturing birds on how to fly.
After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this… pic.twitter.com/prtu86DpEr
Donald Trump, like every President since JFK, has become a cloying, groveling slave of Empire. Trump came to be elected by winning the decisive Independent Middle by promising to break that mold. It was embodied most by two promises in particular: reinstitution of Free Speech and ending all war, let alone not starting new ones. See for example,
In one year he has betrayed those promises in a manner more destructive of the moral fabric of this country than any betrayal by any President since Lyndon Baines Johnson. We noted Trump’s departure from “Free Speech and no more wars” on 8 August 25 A New Form of Censorship, his continued fall on 16 Sep 25Trump Is On A Slippery Slope and covered his apparent descent into war madness on 3 January 26, The Cult of War on Overt Display. While the majority of Independent Middle voices witnessed the same and rang out in loud protest, it was to no avail.
The holy war launched on 28 Feb 26, apparently on behalf of Bibi Netanyahu and historically illiterate “Zionist Christians” – against the strong dissent of 80% of Americans, is a forfeiture of American sovereignty unseen in its 250-year history. The bizarre, Middle School mentality propaganda issuing from the White House since the massacre of 168 Iranian school children on day one of the “war” is strengthening and emboldening America’s alleged competitors (Russia and China and its new league of nations, BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, et al). The juvenile, even infantile, illogical slop issuing from Trump’s “Truth Social” account and the White House press office is degrading American image and power at a dizzying pace.
If you believe there are high-minded, even the least bit defensible, goals and purposes behind the war, you are not paying attention to its two architects and drivers, Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump. The former refers to Iranians and Palestinians whom he vows to eliminate (read genocide) as “animals.” Trump refers to Iranians as ‘genetically’ inferior ‘savages’, whose only chance for survival is to cede the very land and minerals they have lived on for millennia. See for example:
Trump talking eugenics. This is 1870s all over again. Literally, Empire is talking about "obliterating", "genetically" inferior, "savages" because they refuse to cede what lies beneath their feet. https://t.co/Ef6hLH8Nq0
This is Eugenics. That is justifying genocide to purify the race. Clearing the land of “animals” or “genetically” inferior “savages” in order to exploit it is no different to what we did the Native Americans in the nineteenth Century. A cursory review of history will show the precise same justifications issuing from the genocide purveyors then that you are being repeated by Israel and the White House now. And much of the media is playing ball with it.
Wait, the media? Wasn’t it all owned by the Left and used to demonize Trump 24-7 only a year ago? Yes. But, look what has happened since. Trump himself just this morning blasted out the following piece glorifying his “reshaping” of the media.
Trump celebrates himself for using the levers of government power to take out 7 anti-Trump media figures by name, and bring virtually all major US media players under his control and command.
Here is the clearly unbalanced Secretary of “War” lecturing the media on how it is to cover the decimation of Iran. Note that he says of CNN, “The sooner that David Ellison (Zionist nepo baby of Zionist Billionaire Larry Ellison) takes over that network, the better.” This is shortly after Trump negotiated a deal for Larry Ellison to buy the most influential social media platform on the planet, Tiktok, at a bargain basement price. Netanyahu commented the Tiktok sale was the most important advance in Israel’s war of censorship across Western Civilization. The Trump administration also paved the way for Ellison to take over one of the three major U.S. networks, CBS, which in the following several months has turned into a shameless Trump regime and Zionism War cheerleader.
In one year, Netanyahu and Trump have managed to consolidate more Empire controlled and censored media than during the previous forty years.
The fascist One World government order has made more progress in one year than it did in the previous four years of unprecedented consolidation. And it did so under the command of the President elected to stop it in its tracks. And now he is overtly attempting to censor folks like you and me.
The administration is already going after its own erstwhile greatest supporters:
When you discover the CIA has been reading your texts in order to frame you for a crime. pic.twitter.com/XgoluHw8EG
After Charles Manson, the next major sensational crime story impressed upon the collective consciousness of Americans was the saga of Patricia “Patty” Hearst. For several years beginning in early 1974 the corporate media kept the public electrified with the tale as it unfolded. Like with Manson, many informed people came to believe the around the clock coverage was intentional in forwarding the deep state aim of making the American public fearful of violent activist groups and cults and thus willing to give up their civil rights to protect themselves. As far as most are concerned, it began with the 4 February 1974 kidnapping of the heiress of media magnate William Randolph Hearst Jr by a radical political group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). It continued through Hearst’s joining her captors in a high-profile bank robbery (her initiation as a participating member), then going on the lam for nearly two years, and ultimately being captured, tried, convicted and having her sentence commuted. But, unbeknownst to most, like the Charles Manson story it actually began much earlier
Fortunately, in 2016 an author named Brad Shreiber published the result of his extensive compilation of previous probes that had gone deeper than the official narrative the American public had come to accept over the several decades since the events. As Tom O’Neill awakened readers to the fact they had been snowed on the subject of Charles Manson in his groundbreaking Chaos, Shreiber alerted us to a similar psy op played upon our collective consciousness when it came to Patricia Hearst’s captor, Donald DeFreeze. While his book provides no new breakthroughs and very little original research, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA is a good reference book on the subject.
It is remarkable that forty years passed before someone would organize the evidence hiding in plain sight and use it to tell a compelling narrative that is far more credible and documented than the official one repeated ad nauseum by the media. Shreiber published what was written off in the seventies as coming from “Black radical prisoners.” Yet, those incarcerated in the California prison system were the only people situated to witness how Donald DeFreeze the revolutionary was created. As former U.S. Attorney and DEA Director Robert Bonner once said, “in a plot hatched in hell, don’t expect angels for witnesses.” In this case, Shreiber’s witnesses already had the seal of approval from the dean of MK Ultra exposure, former State Department official and whistleblower John Marks (author of In Search For The Manchurian Candidate). Marks wrote this about the same sources used for Revolution’s End: “During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed that every radical on the West Coast was saying the CIA was up to strange things in behavior modification at Vacaville (California prison medical/psychiatric facility where DeFreeze was created). Like many of yesterday’s conspiracy theories, this one turned out to be true.” (pg. 215 In Search of the Manchurian Candidate).
As we did with O’Neil’s Manson opus, we will use Shreiber’s DeFreeze account as the foundation for summarizing the narrative, enhanced and supplemented by our own follow-up investigation and the established larger CIA Mind Control (MK Ultra) backdrop context.
The Manson Parallels
The background of the alleged villain of this piece, Donald DeFreeze, had remarkable resemblance to that of Charles Manson. Like the latter, Donald DeFreeze spent his adolescence in juvenile penal institutions and most of his adult life in jails. While Manson was suspected to be a government operative based on years of unusual parole favors, there was no question about DeFreeze’s informant status. He was documented to be a government operative through the late sixties and early seventies. Like Manson, DeFreeze was an incredibly inept criminal always financially broke and caught more times than he was successful in attempting crimes. He found being an informant would net him regular cash payments from the police while remaining free to attempt bigger takes through robbery and gun trading. He worked under the auspices of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Unit and Criminal Conspiracy Units, both of which were unusually close and cooperative with the California Bureau of Investigation (then governor Reagan’s chief intel arm used against Black activists), the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Schreiber shared evidence that DeFreeze was specifically used for purposes of infiltration of black power groups and for framing and convicting their leadership. That the Feds had routinely engaged in such activity was documented in the stolen FBI COINTELPRO papers (COINTELPRO). As long as he cooperated, DeFreeze was given a get out of jail free card, allowing him to make street crime his profession and snitching, stinging and framing his protection.
After a few years of plying his trade on the streets of Los Angeles, being arrested and set free by the police on numerous occasions, by 1969 DeFreeze overstayed his welcome. He was arrested for robbery and shooting his pursuers with a gun that the LAPD had given him to sell to Black activists in order to bust them for arms violations. He had directly put the police department at risk. His protectors, burnt one too many times by DeFreeze, decided to cut him loose. He spent a year in the LA County jail awaiting and then going through trial – overlapping Charles Manson’s stay in the same facility. In December 1970, DeFreeze was sentenced to 5 to 14 years in prison with an initial stop at the California Corrections Department medical facility at Vacaville, California for psychiatric evaluation. And here is where the DeFreeze story runs smack dab into our CIA MK Ultra Mind Control narrative.
MK Ultra and MK Search
You may recall from our Manson chapter that CIA MK Ultra doctor Jolly West was working out of Stanford University when he crossed paths with the Manson family at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco in 1967. We also noted that Stanford’s leading MK Ultra psychiatrist Dr. James Alexander Hamilton was doing MK Ultra experiments in San Francisco at that very same time. Hamilton’s Stanford work had included MK Ultra Sub Project 2, the purpose of which was “To study the possible synergistic action of drugs which may be appropriate for use in abolishing consciousness.” (see, MK ULTRA Subproject 2).
On the heels of his San Francisco MK Ultra work, Hamilton headed to the very same institution Donald DeFreeze was committed to, Vacaville State Prison. He was director of the CIA’s MK SEARCH Subproject 3 (the successor to MK ULTRA) at Vacaville. MKSearch3 spanned into 1973. Marks wrote the following about Hamilton:
“Hamilton was one of the renaissance men of the program (MK ULTRA/SEARCH), working on everything from psychochemicals to kinky sex to carbon dioxide inhalation. By the early sixties, he had arranged to get access to prisoners at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville” (page 251, In Search For the Manchurian Candidate)
In January 1971, at the height of the Vacaville MK Search program, Donald DeFreeze was deposited there for psychiatric evaluation. While the average stay for an inmate was 90 days, DeFreeze would set the all-time record of over two years of Vacaville psychiatric “treatment.” Revolution’s End points to evidence that DeFreeze was subjected to experimental psychiatric drugs, some designed to coerce behavior change by making the inmate/patient violently ill. That DeFreeze participated in ‘experimental’ psychiatric drug programs was later confirmed by Vacaville Superintendent T. Lawrence Clanon. In addition to such debilitating drugs as Prolixin and Anectine, electro-shock treatment and brain crippling psycho-surgery were routine. That government backed psychiatric behavior modification was routinely used at Vacaville and throughout the California prison system (among others) was widely known through the Black community and its alternative (uncensored) history apparatus (see e.g., FIGHTING PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE: The BPP (Black Panther Party) and the Black Disability Politics of Mental and Carceral Institutions).
Operation CHAOS
Hamilton’s MK Search activities at Vacaville were date coincident with the CIA’s clandestine Operation Chaos. The Rockefeller Commission (which much like the Warren Commission was intended to cover up known CIA crimes) acknowledged that the CIA’s Chaos ran from 1967 through October 74. The Commission noted the aim of the first project under Operation Chaos was: ”’An Effort…in Acquiring Assets in the “Peace” and “Black Power” Movements in the United States.’ The project was to involve the recruitment of agents who would penetrate some of the prominent dissident groups in the United States…” (page 137, Rockefeller Commission Report). While the Commission served to cover-up – slavishly accepting the CIA’s blanket denials of wrongdoing – the intent of such Black activist infiltration was clearly spelled out in the FBI’s Operation Cointelpro (the only unedited, unfiltered look at domestic spy operations in America, because the documents were stolen and published before the government could redact or destroy them like the CIA did in response to Congressional inquiries into CHAOS, MKUltra and MKSearch, and most recently Jeffrey Epstein). In the FBI director’s own written words, the aim of infiltration was to “Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement.” – March 4, 1968 memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Other Cointelpro documents demonstrate US spy agencies’ informants set up Black activists for assassinations.
Phoenix Program intersects with Chaos and COINTELPRO
At the same time DeFreeze was having his behavior modified and his mind controlled, he was subjected to another program run by a CIA subcontractor named Colston Westbrook. Westbrook had previously worked on a CIA operation setting up interrogation and torture centers for South Vietnamese citizens suspected of harboring sympathies for the North Vietnamese. It was a sub project of the infamous Phoenix Program. It is estimated that more than thirty thousand civilians were massacred as a result of torture-forced confessions under Phoenix. Colston’s work with DeFreeze had all the earmarks of a CIA Operation Chaos and FBI Cointelpro production. Colston’s new cover was as a prisoner enhancement service coordinator run out of University of California at Berkeley. Colston created the Black Cultural Association (BCA) at Vacaville and sister California prison at Soledad. The BCA connected white radical leftist students from Berkeley to Black prisoners for ‘cultural exchange.’ In practice, Colston and his program did nothing but turn Black activists more leftist and radical and do the same for white students who felt empowered with street cred for bonding with persecuted black ‘freedom fighters.’ Regardless of one’s politics, the program had zero socially redeemable purpose, even arguably, for either the students or the prisoners.
In fact, most Black prisoners were wary of the program. Westbook acknowledged that he resorted to offering extraordinary benefits to lure prisoners. That included arranging for meetings of the BCA where “conjugal” spaces were made available so that prisoners could have sex with female students. Still, most Black prisoners smelled a law-enforcement rat in Westbrook’s operation and did not want to be associated, despite the offered benefits, because to do so would be to be suspected of informant status (a virtual death warrant in prison). Later, prisoner-observers would surmise that Donald DeFreeze took Westbrook’s offered leadership role because he was and always had been an informant (the latter being documented fact). Indeed, with mind tenderized by MKSearch Subproject 3 ‘treatments’, all the conjugal visits he could handle, and perhaps the threat of his informant status being confirmed and leaked, Donald DeFreeze jumped to the lead of Westbrook’s program with enthusiasm. He established regular sexual relations with at least two of the Berkeley participants. While Schreiber repeats accusations that Patty Hearst herself came to conjugate with DeFreeze on several occasions under a false name and phony identification, I personally found the evidence flimsy and the likelihood slim. At the same time, there is no denying that at that time the politics of Patricia Hearst – then a student at Berkeley – were lurching further and further to the left.
Cult Formation
DeFreeze was indoctrinated by Westbrook and the students in leftist, radical politics. Even though DeFreeze appeared dull intellectually and slow to express his mainly shallow thoughts, under Westbrook’s guidance the students developed starry-eyed allegiance to DeFreeze. In their eyes he was a persecuted, minority freedom fighter. DeFreeze’s acceptance of them bolstered their radical, revolutionary fantasies. And their acceptance of DeFreeze caused his damaged mind to swell. DeFreeze adopted the mantle “Cinque”, the name of the African slave/prisoner who famously overthrew and killed the guards, overseer and captain of the ship Amistad that was transporting him to the New World in the 19th Century. His group, himself and his student followers, adopted the moniker Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Symbionese was a coined term signifying symbiosis of races in fighting establishment oppression.
Finally, after Cinque was created and DeFreeze was fully playing the part, and had established a veritable cult of the Berkeley clan, he was virtually shoved out the door. DeFreeze was given a prison detail that put him in a position where only a six-foot bare chain-link fence separated him from freedom. To top it off, he was left there alone by prison authorities late at night – a obvious invitation to leave. On March 5, 1973 DeFreeze accepted and within hours joined his white ‘comrades’ in Berkeley. No search party followed up. Nobody – including Colston Westbrook – bothered to check the residences of the Berkeley crew who spent months regularly visiting DeFreeze. And it was in those very residences over the next several months that their radical cult was organized and formalized.
SLA’s First Offensive
Cinque’s first endeavor at revolution was to offer up the SLA as an assassination for hire operation to the Bay Area black activist groups, including the Black Panthers and the United Slaves. All offers were recoiled from, with virtually everyone approached smelling a federal agent provocateur. Undaunted, the group continued to train with arms and explosives, DeFreeze’s specialty as a Los Angeles informant and a lifelong obsession. Rejected by the Black activist community, by autumn 1973 the SLA were planning their first major offensive against their capitalist masters.
Recalling an important target suggested by erstwhile CIA operative and mentor Westbrook, DeFreeze decided to assassinate the School Superintendent of Oakland, one Marcus Foster who allegedly served the aims of the national security state. His followers argued against it, noting Foster was seen as a hero in the black community, the very people SLA was formed to protect and serve. They argued, “why kill a black man when our first purpose is to combat racism?” But, DeFreeze, once the vacillating, bumbling criminal was steadfast on the idea apparently implanted by Westbrook.
The assassination was performed. The SLA took credit for it. The backlash – as predicted by most SLA members – was catastrophic. The leftist and activist communities, especially the black elements, roundly condemned the killing and sought to distance themselves from the SLA. They clearly saw Cinque/SLA’s act as something so anathema to the sensibilities of all communities that only the most avowed enemies (the CIA and FBI) could dream it up for a “black activist” group to execute. To them, it was something straight out of the CIA’s operation Chaos or the FBI’s COINTELPRO.
It was somewhere during this dark post-assassination period – alone and despised by all segments of society – where Schreiber reckons DeFreeze might have realized he had been set up by Westbrook aided by the ‘doctors’ of Vacaville and the prison system encouraging his ‘escape.’ In a world where SLA was universally vilified – right and left, establishment and radical – Cinque became a free agent who was forced to come up with a spectacular encore that would restore his followers confidence, his reason for being and his very survival.
Enter Patricia Hearst and…Scientology?
On the night of February 4, 1974 the SLA burst into Patricia Hearst’s Berkeley apartment, knocked her boyfriend to the ground with a rifle butt, and physically seized the heiress at gunpoint. They threw her into the trunk of a getaway car and fled into the night.
The Berkeley police initially investigated. When they discovered that the victim was the daughter of one of the most influential and wealthiest men in America, the Alameda County Sheriff’s department and FBI swooped in. After a day of getting nowhere, and apparently overwhelmed with the red tape and arrogance of its county and federal overseers, a Berkeley detective decided to try something unconventional. He had heard about a group of psychics working at the Stanford Research Institute, attached to the famous University at the south end of the Bay area. The detective phoned a director of the project, Russell Targ.
Targ had two psychics to choose from. Both were long-term Scientologists, as was the founder and co-director of the entire psychic research project. Targ chose the top performing psychic at that time, a former Burbank, California police commissioner named Pat Price. According to Targ, Price was able to identify two of the kidnappers and the location of Hearst, even accurately describing her immediate circumstance of being blindfolded in a closet. (Third Eye Spies documentary) Establishment corroboration of Targ comes from the most unlikely of places. That is the Central Intelligence Agency. Two years earlier when the CIA saw the level of accuracy in the Scientologists’ abilities to transcend space and time to view things and events thousands of miles away, they became the largest funder of the program. The CIA assigned two full-time agents to oversee their investment. One was Ken Kress. His report corroborating Targ’s account is attached (CIA Report on Pat Price/Hearst).
Targ quipped that had the Feds not so summarily dismissed the Berkeley police’s SRI psychic data, the saga of Patty Hearst would have ended right there and then. But, the police were prevented from acting by the Feds, and so this story is to be continued.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 