Part One
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 energetic and curious investigative reporter named Brad Shreiber published the result of his extensive probe into 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. Hence, another book recommendation, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA.
It is remarkable that forty years passed before someone would gather 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 Schreiber’s sources: “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 