As for the shoot-out, Harris said, “People witnessed on live television the burning to death of six of the most beautiful and courageous freedom fighters by cowardly, fascist insects. In most cases when an urban guerrilla unit is encircled by the enemy, it can expect to take great losses, especially if the enemy has time to mobilize a massive force.” To conclude, Bill adopted DeFreeze’s deranged sense of self-importance: “The pigs boast that they have broken the back of the Symbionese Liberation Army. But to do this, the pigs would have to break the back of the people”—as if “the people” had ever rallied to the SLA cause.
The tape had another purpose, which was to bid a more personal farewell to the six martyred comrades. Patricia—Tania—wanted to deliver this message. Emily insisted on drafting part of it, and the final version was a collaboration by the three survivors. Much later, Patricia would repudiate the “eulogy tape,” as it became known, but it does seem to have been, at least in part, her own handiwork. Her early taped messages cannot be taken as expressions of her own views. Now Nancy Ling and Angela, who wrote and collaborated with Patricia on her earlier communiqués, were dead. Bill and Emily had never told her what to say. And by June, Patricia was a far more independent actor—free to express herself as she wanted to be heard. And this is what she said, as it was later transcribed by the FBI:
Greetings to the people. This is Tania. I want to talk about the way I knew our six murdered comrades because the fascist pig media has, of course, been painting a typical distorted picture of these beautiful sisters and brothers.
Cujo [Willy Wolfe] was the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known. He taught me the truth as he learned it from the beautiful brothers in California’s concentration camps. We loved each other so much, and his love for the people was so deep that he was willing to give his life for them. The name Cujo means “unconquerable.” It was the perfect name for him. Cujo conquered life as well as death by facing and fighting them.
Neither Cujo or I ever loved an individual the way we loved each other, probably because our relationship wasn’t based on bourgeois, fucked up values, attitudes and goals. Our relationship’s foundation was our commitment to the struggle and our love for the people. It’s because of this that I still feel strong and determined to fight.
I was ripped off by the pigs when they murdered Cujo, ripped off in the same way that thousands of sisters and brothers in this fascist country have been ripped off of the people they love. We mourn together, and the sound of gunfire becomes sweeter.
Gelina [Angela Atwood] was beautiful. Fire and joy. She exploded with the desire to kill the pigs. She wrote poetry—some of it on the walls of Golden Gate, all of it in the LA pig files now—that expresses how she felt. She loved the people more than her love for any one person or material comfort….We laughed and cried and struggled together….
Gabi [Camilla Hall] crouched low with her ass to the ground. She practiced until her shotgun was an extension of her right and left arms, an impulse, a tool of survival. [This was a bit of an inside joke among Bill, Emily, and Patricia. Camilla was inept with firearms.] She loved to touch people with a strong—not delicate—embrace.
Zoya [Mizmoon] wanted to give meaning to her name, and on her birthday [May 17], she did. Zoya, female guerrilla, perfect love and perfect hate reflected in stone-cold eyes. She moved viciously and with caution, understanding the peril of the smallest mistake. She taught me, “Keep your ass down and be bad.”
Fahizah [Nancy Ling] was a beautiful sister who didn’t talk much but who was the teacher of many by her righteous example. She, more than any other, had come to understand and conquer the putrid disease of bourgeois mentality. She proved often that she was unwilling to compromise with the enemy because of her intense love for freedom….She was wise, and bad, and I’ll always love her.
Cinque [DeFreeze] loved the people with tenderness and respect….He longed to be with his black sisters and brothers, but at the same time he wanted to prove to black people that white freedom fighters are comrades-in-arms….He taught me virtually everything imaginable, but wasn’t liberal with us. He’d kick our asses if we didn’t hop over a fence fast enough or keep our asses down while practicing….He helped me see that it’s not how long you live that’s important, it’s how we live: what we decide to do with our lives. On February 4 [the day of the kidnapping], Cinque Mtume saved my life….
It’s hard to explain what it was like watching our comrades die, murdered by pig incendiary grenades. A battalion of pigs facing a fire team of guerrillas, and the only way they could defeat them was to burn them alive….It made me mad to see the pigs looking at our comrades’ weapons—to see them holding Cujo’s .45 and his watch, which was still ticking. He would have laughed at that….The pigs probably have the little Old McMonkey that Cujo wore around his neck. He gave me the little stone face one night….
I renounced my class privilege when Cin and Cujo gave me the name Tania. While I have no death wish, I have never been afraid of death. For this reason, the brainwash/duress theory of the Pig Hearsts has always amused me. Life is very precious to me, but I have no delusions that going to prison will keep me alive. I would never choose to live the rest of my life surrounded by pigs like the Hearsts….
Patria o muerte, venceremos! Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.
Once the tape was complete, the Harrises arranged a meeting with Kathy Soliah by Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Kathy gave the recording to her brother (who had been clued in that his sister was sheltering the trio), and Steve ferried the tape south to Santa Barbara, where he gave the tape to still another person, who stashed it beneath a mattress in an alley behind KPFK, the Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles. Tipped off by a call from a phone booth, the station retrieved the tape and played it on the air on June 7.
Notwithstanding the brave talk on the tape, Bill understood that the best chance for the survival of the remaining SLA comrades was to disappear for a while. Even the Bay Area, with its network of like-minded friends, represented a life of constant threat of arrest or, like their comrades’ fate, death. Kathy had admitted her brother Steve into the circle of Bill, Emily, and Patricia, and the trio began to spend time with the easygoing ex-athlete. As it happened, someone had contacted Steve Soliah offering the surviving SLA members a route out of town and, perhaps, into a new life.
16
JACK SCOTT MAKES AN OFFER
Jack Scott sat in his cramped apartment on West Ninetieth Street and stewed. The biggest story in years was unfolding in his old home turf, but he was thousands of miles away, on the other side of the country, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was pushing paper around his desk, supposedly working on a book about drugs and sports, but he couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the subject. But the SLA—now there was a story!
Scott was a curious hybrid, very much a product of the era. He was a journalist and an activist, an idealist and a hustler, an athlete and a hedonist. He wanted to do good and do well. His mixed motives, and mixed role, played a crucial part in the fate of Patricia Hearst.
Scott regarded the shoot-out in Los Angeles as both horrifying and fascinating. He didn’t know any of the SLA comrades personally, but he had dwelled in their milieu in Berkeley. In the previous decade, he had lived both sides of the divide in the American Left. He had been a good liberal and worked in an orderly way for gradual reform of the sports world. But he also knew and admired people on the militant left. The radicals were also “America’s children,” he told his wife, Micki, and he wanted to tell their story.
So, bored and restless, he decided to get on a plane and head west. He didn’t even know at that point whether anyone in the SLA was still alive. (Patricia’s eulogy tape had been recorded but not yet released to the public.) Scott checked into a Holiday Inn near Berkeley and started making calls to reach people who might know the SLA comrades. On his first night in the Bay Area, he arranged to have dinner at an Italian restaurant in North Beac
h with Wendy Yoshimura, who brought along Michael Bortin, an active member of the Revolutionary Army bombing cell in Berkeley. Bortin had dropped acid before the dinner, and so was less than coherent, but Scott succeeded in persuading him to put the word out that he wanted to meet people who were close to the SLA.
After Bortin, Scott checked in with his old friend Kathy Soliah. He wanted to tell the SLA story, Scott told her. Did she know anyone who knew people in the SLA? Kathy said she’d think about it, and before too long she called him back. As it happened, she did know some people. “I can introduce you tonight to people who are close to the people killed in Los Angeles,” she told him. She said she would come to the hotel and pick him up with Jim Kilgore, who was also an old friend of Scott’s.
At around seven, Soliah and Kilgore fetched Scott at the hotel. “These people you want to meet are nervous,” she said. “They don’t want you to know where they are.” So Kathy Soliah placed a blindfold over Jack Scott’s head for the trip to meet her friends. Scott rolled his eyes at the absurdity of the gesture, but he figured it was just typical Berkeley craziness. Plus, he knew that Kathy had been an actress, so he also chalked it up to her flair for self-dramatization. He was willing to play along. He accepted the blindfold as Kilgore began driving a circuitous route through Berkeley.
They went to an apartment in North Berkeley, and Kilgore and Soliah steered Scott to a chair in front of a table. “Are you ready?” Kathy asked him. Scott said he was.
Then, with a flourish, Kathy Soliah removed Scott’s blindfold.
—
Jack Scott was born in 1942 and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father ran a prosperous family tobacco business until his alcoholism drove the operation into ruin and his family into near destitution. Jack found a refuge from his chaotic home on the playing fields of his high school, where he captained the football team and set records as a sprinter. He was offered athletic scholarships to Villanova and Stanford. He spent a year at each school before a foot injury ended his athletic career and cost him his scholarship. The stark reality of college sports, where an injury could cost a student his education, left him with a sour impression. Scott spent a year in Greenland, graduated from Syracuse, then went west to Berkeley to study for a Ph.D.
Even before he received his doctorate, Scott made a national name for himself. He founded the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society, which aimed to capture and focus national attention on the exploitation of athletes in the college and pro ranks. Scott’s group challenged the authority of coaches, denounced racism in sports, and questioned the medical treatment of athletes. Scott helped write Dave Meggyesy’s 1970 best-selling insider’s account of playing in the NFL, which described rampant drug use and violence against women. As sports editor for Ramparts, a counterculture magazine based in San Francisco, Scott made exactly the enemies he wanted. Spiro Agnew, the vice president of the United States and a great sports fan, denounced Scott by name for questioning the verities of the national pastimes. The most famous visitor to Scott’s institute in Berkeley was Bill Walton, the UCLA center who was at the time the best college basketball player in the country; later, Walton and Scott would become close friends.
On a personal level, Scott’s institute also attracted the attention of sports-minded radicals, notably Jim Kilgore (the former track star) and his girlfriend, Kathy Soliah (the daughter of a coach). Kilgore painted the Scotts’ Berkeley apartment for free. Scott’s circle in Berkeley also included Willie Brandt, who was one of the first members of the Revolutionary Army bombing cell to be charged, and whose girlfriend, Wendy Yoshimura, designed the sign for Scott’s ISSS. Jack was never an actual member of the outlaw cell that drew these people together, but he inched close to the line on several occasions. When Brandt was arrested, Scott helped Yoshimura flee from the authorities.
In 1972, the Berkeley idyll of Jack and Micki Scott ended abruptly when Oberlin College hired a left-leaning president who wanted to shake up his athletic program. The president hired Jack as athletic director, even though he was only thirty years old. In keeping with the spirit of his appointment, Scott hired Tommie Smith, who had given the famous black-gloved salute during the 1968 Olympics, as the school’s track coach. Oberlin’s president was forced out after only two years, and Jack was cashiered as well, albeit with a severance package worth about $40,000. Jack and Micki decided to reopen their institute in New York, rather than Berkeley, and the couple moved there just around the time that the SLA kidnapped Patricia.
Balding, bearded, lean, and still athletic, despite his Dionysian appetites, Scott loved the attention that came with his prominence as an activist in Berkeley. The job in Oberlin, though prestigious, had been a sleepy detour. The Scotts hadn’t yet put down roots in New York either, and the book on drugs and sports scarcely held Jack’s attention. The SLA, in contrast, looked to be Jack’s route to the big time—to fame and a book deal as well as a chance to put a human face on what were at the time despised figures. But first Scott had to make connections to the people who knew them.
Kathy Soliah had led him, in a blindfold, to where he wanted to go.
—
After the blindfold was removed, Scott beheld an unforgettable tableau.
Before him were the three most notorious fugitives in the United States—Bill and Emily Harris and Patricia Hearst. Scott thought he was only meeting friends or associates of the SLA. But these people, to his astonishment, were the real deal.
And what a sight they were. All three were in full battle dress—military-style jackets, watch caps, scarves, gun belts with ammunition bags, and holstered sidearms. Patricia had a bandolier draped across her chest and a .30-caliber rifle slung along her back. Bill had a submachine gun in his lap. Emily also had a bandolier and a shotgun across her knees. Guns were scattered around the rooms, like throw rugs, as decorative statements of revolutionary intent.
Bill spoke first. “This is Tania,” he said, “and I am General Teko. Sitting beside Tania is Yolanda.” Kilgore and Kathy Soliah hovered in the background.
Scott was mesmerized by the spectacle—amused by the costumes and petrified for his life. He knew what happened the last time the SLA comrades were gathered together: they were immolated. He imagined that he would soon hear a police bullhorn, like the one outside the house in Los Angeles, demanding that they surrender. Then, gathering his wits, he responded to the scene as a journalist.
“Tell me your story,” he said. “I’ll tell the world.”
Bullshit, said Bill. No thanks. “We need a journalist like we need a hole in the head. What we need is your help getting out of here. The heat is too much. We’ve been told that you’re the kind of guy who would help people in this kind of situation.” Kilgore and Soliah had told the Harrises how Scott helped Wendy Yoshimura skip town when Willie Brandt was arrested. Bill, Emily, and Patricia wanted the same kind of assistance, in an unimaginably more high-profile situation.
Scott thought fast. His wife, Micki, had rented a farm for the summer in the countryside of Pennsylvania, near Jack’s hometown of Scranton. He planned to use it to write in peace and quiet, away from their apartment in New York. Maybe he could install the trio there instead and interview them at leisure. In that way, Bill, Emily, and Patricia could put some space between themselves and their pursuers, and Jack might get a blockbuster article or book out of it. Harboring fugitives was illegal, but it was a risk he was willing to take.
“Look at yourselves,” Scott said to the trio, “holed up in this little room, hugging your weapons. You all look so tired and pale and worried. You need fresh air and open country, an atmosphere where you won’t have to be so paranoid.”
Scott then added a condition that he regarded as nonnegotiable.
“You have to disarm,” he said. “I can’t have you bringing weapons to the farm.”
Patricia, who had largely been silent up to that point, rejected this idea out of hand. “We will not surrender and we will not give up our guns,” she
said. Like most Americans, Scott only knew Patricia’s voice from her tapes. He had no other sense of her as a person. But what he saw was a fanatic, clearly the most passionate and even unhinged of the three SLA members before him. She was fixated on revenge.
“The last time,” Patricia said, referring to Fifty-Fourth Street, “shots were only coming into the house.” (This was wrong, of course, because the SLA fired thousands of rounds at the police.) “The next time they’ll be going both ways,” she said. “We’ll kill pigs this time.”
In fact, Patricia had a plan to share with Scott. “We’ll tell Master Bates that I’ll surrender, and when they come for me, we’ll kill him and the others, to avenge our comrades’ deaths.”
The conversation did not go well. At around 11:00 p.m., Kilgore and Soliah served what they called “Dagwoods” to the group. They consumed the thick, multilayered sandwiches eagerly, but they came no closer to consensus. (In the brief break, Scott learned from Kilgore and Soliah that the Harrises were worried about security. The two were just house-sitting in this apartment for the next couple of days. In other words, the fate of the SLA trio had to be settled fast.)
Scott tried to paint an idyllic picture of life on the farm, even though he had not yet been there himself. They could relax, take stock, and look ahead. Scott even told them about his severance from Oberlin, which he was willing to share to help support the group for a while. But Scott was firm about the weapons. He was not going to lead them into another firefight and massacre.
Tightly wound and desperate, the three would not budge. They told Scott he didn’t understand the nature of revolutionary action. They were soldiers, and soldiers did not give up their weapons. Patricia escalated matters by suggesting that Scott might be leading them into a trap. “How do we know you’re not a police agent?” she asked.
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst Page 23
