“I died in that fire on Fifty-fourth Street, but out of the ashes, I was reborn. Our comrades did not die in vain. They did not die in vain. I turned my back on the pig I was when Cin and Cujo gave me the name Tania. I have no death wish, but I do not fear death either. I would rather die than spend my life surrounded by pigs like the uber-Pig Galtons.
“Patria o muerte, venceremos! Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!”
INTERLUDE 2
Lionel Congreaves Explains the Current Situation
“HELLO, THIS IS Lionel Congreaves speaking. I am not dead yet, but I still remain high on the SLA hit list. If the caller is a terrorist, please include your affiliation, so the credit for my demise can be properly awarded.”
This recorded message greeted all callers to the home telephone of Lionel Congreaves, a man of carefully cultivated negritude, an East Bay resident of several years’ duration, the erstwhile outside coordinator of the Afro-American Cultural Exchange at Vacaville Prison, and a more vilified and calumniated individual than you could ever hope to find.
As a matter of strictly personal interest, Lionel Congreaves maintained a collection of rumors, coincidences, and other allegations, baseless or otherwise, concerning the Symbionese Liberation Army and those murky areas in which its activities and his own gave the appearance of intersection.
And what was it that would constitute an allegation that had some basis? An excellent and thought-provoking question, indeed.
Now, Lionel Congreaves was prepared to admit to some embellishment of his personal resume. Everyone fudged a little, here and there, and he was no exception to this general rule, which went straight to the heart of human nature (a consistently interesting area). But in his own case, he found that the problem was not with the actual claims he had made but with the implications that sprang, unbidden, from them. He meant, you put a bunch of guys in a cage and their imaginations ran wild. Because it was from prison, you see, that the “snitch jacket,” so called, for which he had so carefully been fitted, was coming. All of the porcine, so to speak, activities that had been attributed to him derived from the febrile brains of a bunch of jailbirds he’d only been trying his best to help. So much for gratitude.
All right, he had made different claims to different people at different times. But the bare facts were the same, immutable: He spoke several languages, including French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. He had served seven years in two different branches of the armed forces and later had spent time in Indochina, in Vietnam and Cambodia, working for an American construction firm. And then he had obtained a post as a language instructor at UCB and become the outside coordinator of the Afro-American Cultural Exchange, a prisoners’ group formed to provide education and foster selfesteem. A little change of pace, for Lionel Congreaves. He had been attracted to the groves of academe, to the steep green hills rising above the bay, and he’d wanted to give something back to the community. Nothing strange about that at all.
Here was a baker’s dozen, some of the rumors that Lionel Congreaves took a certain bleak pleasure in cataloging:
Rumor No. 1 was that his employer while in Indochina, West Coast Construction and Engineering, Inc. of Los Angeles, was in fact a subsidiary of the Pacific Corporation, an alleged CIA front headquartered in Delaware—a “stone’s throw,” as the news media would have it, from Langley. A very long toss, Lionel Congreaves had oftentimes remarked.
Rumor No. 2 was that West Coast Construction and Engineering, Inc. had provided “tactical support” to the Phoenix Program, the CIA’s scheme to eliminate Vietcong sympathizers in South Vietnam via infiltration by covert agents. Specifically, it was alleged that West Coast Construction and Engineering constructed state-of-the-art torture chambers, interrogation centers, and other places of detainment.
Rumor No. 3 was that the Afro-American Cultural Exchange had been a “behavioral modification program,” an element of a new CIA program, CHAOS, whose purported aim was to recruit individuals “without existing dissident affiliation” to infiltrate leftist groups. In other words, a domestication of the alleged Phoenix agenda. These unaffiliated individuals would be those like, say, Donald David DeFreeze.
Rumor No. 4 was that the AACE encouraged prisoner participation by allowing itself to become known as a place where you could obtain “white snatch.”
Rumor No. 5 was that Drew and Diane Shepard as well as Angela Atwood had been CIA, working with Lionel Congreaves to indoctrinate candidates within the AACE, the latter two individuals providing enticement as described in Rumor No. 4, above.
Rumor No. 6 was that Lionel Congreaves had been DeFreeze’s control officer; that DeFreeze had come to the AACE when, after having enjoyed a string of surprisingly light punishments for repeated felony offenses and violations of probation (to say the least; Lionel Congreaves was in fact shocked by the leniency afforded the man in his chronic encounters with the law), he had finally run out of luck and been incarcerated at Vacaville; that DeFreeze had been highly recommended as a potential agent because of his many years’ experience as an informant for the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Unit.
Rumor No. 7 was that the SLA had been devised—by Lionel Congreaves, personally, himself (to the extent that it was claimed that he’d designed the seven-headed Naga figure)—to operate like a cancer within the Left.
Rumor No. 8 was that the future Tania had visited Vacaville under the auspices of the AACE, using the ID of one Mary Alice Siem, a lumber heiress, and that in the course of doing so she had become romantically involved with DeFreeze.
Rumor No. 9 was that after DeFreeze had himself been sufficiently programmed (according to some, via electrodes implanted directly in his brain—probably by none other than Lionel Congreaves, who could now look forward to listing neurosurgery among his many skills) and the central SLA cadre identified and primed, DeFreeze had been allowed to spin off a separate group from the AACE, Unisight, in which the members of the nascent SLA could finalize their plans. This accomplished, DeFreeze was shipped to Soledad, where arrangements were made for him to effect an “escape,” after which he returned to the Bay Area and awaited the green light to begin SLA operations.
Rumor No. 10 was that with respect to the plans mentioned in Rumor No. 9, above, Lionel Congreaves had himself identified Marcus Foster as the SLA’s first target, both because of Foster’s capitulation to Black Panther and community demands vis-à-vis the whole student ID thing (oy vey, was Lionel Congreaves’s personal opinion of that particular brouhaha), and because his murder would cost the Left dearly in terms of credibility if attributed to a putative leftist group, such as the SLA.
Rumor No. 11 was that Tania had participated in the plotting of her own abduction, in part to avoid marrying Eric Stump. Alternatively, that Tania had plotted to kidnap one of her sisters, Vivian or Helene, and been double-crossed. The victim’s conspiring in her own abduction was supposedly proved by the fact that later the SLA was able to submit documents from the girl’s wallet as proof of its possession of her, despite the well-reported, perhaps obsessively reported, fact that she had been removed from the house “half naked.” The reasoning went, Where did the girl carry her wallet?
Rumor No. 12 was that DeFreeze in effect became Cinque Mtume, the name Lionel Congreaves was supposed to have chosen for him, and, having effectively evaded the control of his CIA handler (again, Lionel Congreaves) and set the SLA on a renegade course, was marked for termination “with extreme prejudice.”
Rumor No. 13 was that because of the concatenation of all the alleged circumstances enumerated above, and spurred by a well-attended (by The New York Times, among others) press conference called by investigator Lake Headley just days before the L.A. “barbecue” (as it was being called) in which Headley had divulged DeFreeze’s past as a police informer and his present intelligence connections, CIA operatives Teko and Yolanda had been instructed by their Los Angeles control agent, operating under the code name Prophet Jones, to r
emove Tania from the safe house at 833 West Eighty-fourth Street on May 16, 1974. The incident at Mel’s soldier, a “prisoner of war” in a “fascist concentration camp,” with a noble African heritage that had been hijacked from him. This was easier than admitting that he was an illiterate rapist or a pimp or the strong-arm thug for some pusher. But half these guys couldn’t get through The Cat in the Hat, and here comes Willie Wolfe with “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” It was frankly humorous.
But the other big contradiction was: If Lionel Congreaves was such a key figure in the CIA, in the notoriously anti-Communist Phoenix program, why would he be teaching incarcerated felons about Karl Marx? Puffing up their self-righteousness for the next time they felt like aiming a pistol at a liquor store clerk?
Lionel Congreaves brewed a pot of tea, for himself and his visitor: orange pekoe with its excellent blend of choice Ceylon teas. A plate of English biscuits, just on the sweet side of savory. The afternoon sun was fading, slipping mellow through the big windows.
Another thing was, Lionel Congreaves wanted to be shown a single slip of paper that demonstrated that his years with West Coast Construction had ever been anything other than a matter of administering personnel. It was pretty humorous when you looked at it. The company had been incorporated in Delaware for tax purposes, as were many legal American enterprises. Otherwise, he knew little about its structure. Could he state with categorical certainty that it was not a CIA front? No, but that was precisely the point. He was a personnel administrator and stuck to his particular field of expertise. Was there a tape of him interrogating a prisoner? Was there a photograph of him standing outside one of these famous torture chambers that to hear people tell it, he practically had built himself, brick by brick? Oh, yes, and he had been in two branches of the armed forces as well, the marines for three years and the air force for four. That was supposed to prove something too. Very shady business. Right. One thing Lionel Congreaves could state with Cartesian certainty was that he didn’t know the first thing about the Phoenix program. He certainly couldn’t speak to allegations that it had led to the indiscriminate killing of thousands of South Vietnamese. Was there eyewitness testimony to the extent that “Lionel Congreaves worked for the CIA”? He was not that kind of “spook.”
Sporting Goods was staged to alert the authorities to begin the termination op.
Lionel Congreaves had put that message on his answering machine to demonstrate a sense of humor. A sense of humor was sometimes the only thing you had left. Also, he thought it broke the tension. Because the fact of the matter was there were a lot of people calling up just to see if he’d been offed yet—most of them pro—Lionel Congreaves, incidentally—and he thought the message was considerate in a humorous sort of way, while also being a bit of a thumb in the eye of those who were less than well-wishers.
There were some other totally baseless reports too, plenty of them. But after having put them side by side in their endless permutations and studied them for a while, Lionel Congreaves had decided that this particular arrangement formed a nice, coherent chronology of innuendo. And he generally liked to take a break right about here to review some of the contradictory aspects of the above-mentioned insinuations, after which all the rest could be presented as the humorous miscellany of ridiculousness that it so plainly was. The fact of the matter was that he had done his best to help Don DeFreeze, as he had with all the worthless losers in the AACE, not to mention their exceedingly immature white friends on the outside, such as Willie Wolfe. What Lionel Congreaves had tried to do was develop a selection of courses in art, black history, literature, math, and political science (though basically his whole thrust was necessarily remediation). And in the spirit of free inquiry Lionel Congreaves was happy to admit Marx and Lenin into the curriculum; they were dandy as far as they went, which was pretty damn far in prison with its compulsory work rules and poor conditions and the natural solidarities that tended to form among the various constituencies thereat. But to urge a bunch of convicts to think of themselves as “soldiers” was just asking for trouble. The fact of the matter was that as soon as Chairman Mao entered the room where the AACE participants met, channeled by skinny uppermiddle-class white kids like Willie Wolfe, Lionel Congreaves had scooted out double quick.
Now, Lionel Congreaves could certainly understand why, for example, a loser who had never managed to get a single thing right in his life might become transfixed by a vision of himself as a righteous
Speaking of which. Just some more happenstance that Lionel Congreaves had collected for his own edification and for that of those who were willing to look with their eyes, there was a novel by Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door. The book deals with a spook, that was to say a black person, who works as a double agent, that was to say a spook, for the CIA. But he evades his control officer to recruit a multiracial, coed guerrilla army—which he characterizes using the neologism symbiology—the idea being to incite a race war. In the end, the brother and his group are cornered in a small tract house in South Central L.A., surrounded by overwhelming police fire power. Published when? 1968. Funny, huh? Coincidence was always funny. Wouldn’t be coincidence if it wasn’t funny.
You wanted to hear funny, now here was something so funny it might curl your hair. Book called Black Abductor. By a man named Harrison James, who nobody ever heard of. Published by Regency Press, which never before or again published another book so far as anyone knows. A PO Box address. Deals with the heiress of a famous California conservative family. She is kidnapped from the off-campus apartment she shares with her boyfriend by a multiracial band of revolutionaries. After indoctrination and many freewheeling sexual experiences with her captors, she is converted to their revolutionary cause and opts to join them. And oh, the name of the heiress is Alice. Year published: 1972.
But anyway. Lionel Congreaves was getting a little ahead of himself. Now, how—if the Shepards were the ones coordinating the assault on the SLA from inside—did the rumormongers get Don DeFreeze and company all the way from the house on West Eighty-fourth Street over to the house on East Fifty-fourth where they got cremated? The Shepards and the rest of the SLA were incommunicado after the machine-gunning at Mel’s, so how did the Shepards “coordinate” DeFreeze all the way to a specific house in a totally different part of town? ESP? It’s humorous; it’s laughable in the extreme.
And DeFreeze. Supposedly he was the agent provocateur nonpareil, yet his single distinguishing qualification was that he had been a police informer? So a man who obviously couldn’t keep secrets was expected to keep the lid on something like this? Assuming, for the sake of argument, the truth of the allegations regarding Lionel Congreaves’s intelligence affiliations, his immanent pigginess, would he have selected or acceded to the selection of an individual whose instability was so luminously apparent?
Lionel Congreaves found the accusations concerning that poor kidnapped girl to be revolting. Personally, and only on the basis of what he’d read in the papers plus his own schoolmarmish knowledge of the inner lives of his AACE charges, he believed the girl had been snatched for real. Mary Alice Siem he remembered very well; she was what in an earlier time might have been called an “adventuress.” She certainly was not the missing girl whose smiling face he’d been looking at in the papers for months. And it hardly seemed likely, at least to Lionel Congreaves, that the girl would dream up her own kidnapping to get out from under an unhappy engagement. He meant, first you wanted to try less drastic measures. A series of long and candid talks, therapy, a weekend in Sonoma, even a trial separation. He knew the drill.
Lionel Congreaves was always very happy to be asked what he thought instead of being forced to react to a bunch of Mickey Mouse charges with him at their center.
Now, and who hired Lake Headley to conduct this so-called investigation? Lionel Congreaves would surely like to know the basis for Headley’s assertions that he, Lionel Congreaves, had himself worked with the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Sect
ion, particularly since this alleged partnership allegedly occurred during the period for which he was already being shellacked for allegedly building alleged CIA torture chambers in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. He meant, Which was it? He wasn’t prepared to offer up any confessions in either event, but it didn’t quite strike him as cricket to be forced into a position where he had to play one baseless allegation off against another.
The fact of the matter was that anyone’s life had a series of unknowable holes in it that, if you were resourceful and persistent and could get The New York Times to show up at your press conferences, you could pack with allegations and lies. See, the truly funny thing was, people were so eager to believe this stuff that they couldn’t see the real consequences that stemmed from asserting the pseudoconfluence of all these pseudoevents. He meant, Where was the documentation? Everybody left a trail, the Pentagon Papers were a famous trail, and now the president of the United States of America couldn’t erase the trail he’d made, and so how was Lionel Congreaves supposed to?
Trance Page 21
