Reference: The Second CIA Cult – Symbionese Liberation Army
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.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 