Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  “Are you saying the government was behind all this?” I asked.

  “Not exactly, but it gave them an excuse to act,” Lorraine said. “By the early seventies, the FBI had infiltrated the radical underground. And the CIA started a program for prisoners in California called the Black Cultural Association, which they wanted people to believe was about black convicts venting their anger so they could begin to heal.” She said this in a way that was skeptical but serious. “They hired a professor who lectured about black history and literature and held meetings where the participants chanted African songs. But the real purpose of the BCA was for undercover agents and informants to see and hear what the militant radicals were planning.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, more than a bit skeptical.

  Lorraine put her hand on mine and smiled. “I know you’re going to research this, Winnie, and I welcome that. I absolutely do. A lot of this is in the public record. Some stuff you can get under Freedom of Information. Some of it, you’ll have to dig for.” She leaned toward the tape recorder. “Look up Vacaville Psychiatric Prison. By all means. It’s where they had meetings. And the guy who ran the Black Cultural Association was named Westbrook, Colston Westbrook. To make sure the prisoners kept coming, Westbrook invited young, middle-class whites, girls mostly—students and hippies with long hair and large breasts.” She laughed.

  “It sounds like a farm team for revolutionaries,” I said.

  “It was like throwing a lit match on a pile of dry kindling.” Lorraine got up and walked to the fireplace, where she stretched her calves. “Enter Donald DeFreeze,” she said. “Thirty years old, grew up in Cleveland, the oldest of eight, fatherless, with a fourth-grade education. By the time he was sixteen, DeFreeze had been arrested twenty times. Shoplifting, vandalism, dealing drugs, and fighting. In the mid-sixties, he turned up in L.A., where he was arrested again.”

  Lorraine sat down. “It was 1967 and the cops made him an informant. For the next two years, DeFreeze led police to guys who were dealing weapons and to gang leaders. But when he got arrested again, this time for bank robbery, the police cut him loose. The judge sent him to Vacaville Psychiatric Hospital near San Francisco for evaluation, which is where he came in contact with the Black Cultural Association.” At this point, you can hear me clearing my throat on the tape. “None of this in and of itself might sound suspicious, but bear with me,” Lorraine continued. “After less than a year in prison, DeFreeze up and walked out of prison and disappeared in Berkeley. It turned out he went to live with a couple of white women from the BCA. He changed his name to Cinque M’Tume, after the slave who led the Amistad mutiny, and over the next eight months, he convinced eight college-educated, middle-class whites, all of whom attended those same meetings, to start killing, kidnapping, robbing banks, and bombing buildings in the name of this ideological trash heap called the Symbionese Liberation Army.”

  Symbionese. A made-up word based on that condition in nature where people or things exist dependent on one another—dissimilar organisms thrust together—moss on oak trees, lichens on rocks. Liberation armies were a dime a dozen back then. Part Maoism, part Marxism, and part Monty Python with a heavy dose of racial guilt.

  I was confused, and I told her so. “How did the FBI get some guy with a fourth-grade education to discredit the black and youth movements of the sixties?”

  “Mind control,” she said, without skipping a beat. “Techniques perfected during the Korean War and practiced on American soldiers under the supervision of American psychiatrists in the fifties.” Lorraine was dead serious. “This is all documented, Winnie,” she said, sensing my cynicism. “Colston Westbrook was in covert operations in Korea.” She touched the papers she’d taken out of her bag. At the time, I was thinking how many times I’d made friends with someone who seemed perfectly intelligent and friendly and then something—it could be anything—came out of left field and ruined it.

  “You’re saying these middle-class white kids followed DeFreeze because the FBI used mind control on them?”

  “No,” Lorraine said patiently. “DeFreeze was converted by the CIA, and then he brainwashed the others.”

  “Why DeFreeze?” It sounded like one of those theories that gets customized to fit an otherwise inscrutable set of facts.

  “I’m not really sure,” Lorraine confessed. “But I have two hypotheses. First, since he’d been an informant, he’d already crossed the line. Ideology is interchangeable. After the first betrayal, the snitch loses his sense of self. Whoever feeds him, owns him. If there are any two organisms in society that are symbiotic, it’s police and informants.” On this subject, she seemed very confident. “Second, convicts—especially tough black guys with nothing to lose—were celebrities back then. By activating DeFreeze, the Feds were creating the very problem they wanted permission to solve.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the fall of 1973, the SLA completed their first mission—the murder of Marcus Foster, superintendent of schools in Oakland, California. A black man.”

  “Why?”

  “No one’s really sure. The official story was he wanted to introduce ID cards for students to keep the riffraff out, which reminded DeFreeze too much of prison. But think about it, Winnie,” Lorraine said. “The SLA commits a murder so heinous that everybody—even black Americans—is horrified. This only makes sense if the SLA was created to discredit itself.”

  “What happened?”

  “When Cinque heard that the police had stopped a van with two SLA members in it, he and his followers torched the apartment they were living in and went underground, where they could do their real work.” Lorraine stopped talking while she turned the cassette tape over. “What the SLA lacked in ideology, they more than made up for in literary output. The FBI recovered several cartons of half-burned papers with notes—long drafts attempting to outline a political ideology, revolutionary logos, shopping lists, obscene doodles, and a spiral notebook with a list of future kidnap victims—including your old friend Patty Hearst.”

  “Are you saying Patty was in on her own kidnapping?”

  Lorraine laughed. “You knew Patty back then. Do you think she’d have signed up for that? Besides, the FBI never showed the list to anybody.”

  “How come?”

  Lorraine made a face that indicated she didn’t expect me to understand things yet. “Because they hadn’t accomplished their mission.”

  What happened to Patty has been talked about, written about, recorded in legal files and transcripts, described to television audiences, and made into TV movies and documentaries. On Friday, February 4, 1974, three weeks before her twentieth birthday, while she was making dinner for her fiancé, Patty heard the doorbell ring. It was a weeknight. They’d been watching TV. She was wearing panties and a robe. Slippers. From the kitchen, she heard a woman say she was having car trouble and then ask if she could use their phone. A few seconds later, two men waving automatic weapons broke down the front door. They beat up her fiancé and rushed into the kitchen. Patty was thinking, If this is a robbery, how come I’m being blindfolded, bound, gagged, and dragged outside. She felt the cool night air on her legs and around her waist. She remembered a neighbor calling out and then bursts of automatic gunfire. Somebody threw a blanket over her head and pushed her into the trunk of a car that sped away.

  Lorraine told me things about the abduction I hadn’t heard, or, if I had heard, I didn’t remember. How Patty was held in a tiny closet that reeked of mildew and body odor for fifty-seven days. How she was raped and threatened with automatic weapons, woken in the middle of the night, harangued by her captors, deprived of food and privacy, and ridiculed in front of the others for her naïveté about people’s suffering. Sitting in my mother’s cottage, hearing about Patty’s kidnapping, I was ashamed by how little I knew, how I’d viewed Patty’s experience as a cultural phenomenon rather than a personal tragedy that a friend had suffered.

  “Over the course of a year, the SLA
delivered seven audiotapes to Bay Area radio stations.” Lorraine reached into her handbag and pulled out a ninety-minute cassette that was marked “FOIA: Freedom of Information Act, January 1983.” “I believe this is the fourth, or maybe fifth.” She stopped the recorder and put the tape in. An unexpectedly steady voice came through the tinny speaker.

  “Greetings to the People! All sisters and brothers behind the walls and in the streets! Greetings to the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, and the Black Guerrilla Family, and all combat forces of the community! This is General Field Marshall Cinque M’Tume speaking.” Between phrases, I could hear the sounds of lips moistening, static crackling, and the microphone being handled. “Combat Operation: April 15, 1974, the Year of the Children. Action: appropriation. Supplies liberated: one .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, condition good…five rounds of 158-grain, .38-caliber ammo. Cash: $10,660.02…Casualties: People’s Forces—none. Enemy Forces—none. Civilians—two.” He spoke in monotone. “Reasons,” the voice continued, “subject one, male—ordered to lay on the floor, facedown. Subject refused order and jumped out the front door of the bank. Therefore, subject was shot.” The words and syntax were of another time, too self-conscious and serious to be a bluff or a toss-off, too far-fetched to be real. Field Marshall M’Tume continued. “We again warn the public: Any attempt to aid, to inform, or assist the enemy…will be shot without hesitation. There is no middle ground in war…. I am the bringer of the children of the oppressed and the children of the oppressor together…. I am bringing the truth to the children and opening their eyes to the real enemy of mankind….”

  There was a fumbling sound, the microphone changing hands, and then a different voice, also a man’s. “Bill Harris,” Lorraine said. “Cinque’s second in command.” Harris spoke in the manner of a white man trying to sound black, a prissy, educated guy trying to be streetwise. “If white people in fascist America don’t think they are enslaved, they only prove their own foolishness…the thing the pigs have feared the most is happening…a People’s Army of irate niggers of all races, including whites—not talkers anymore, but fighters. The enemy recognizes that the People are on the brink of revolution…. Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!”

  Lorraine turned off the tape. “You have to understand. These were the days of law and order. Richard Nixon was president. The sixties had flamed out. It was the beginning of everyone being afraid. Before the SLA could even state their demands for Patty’s release, Governor Reagan announced there’d be no deals. Patty’s father donated two million dollars in food to California supermarkets, while Ronald Reagan told reporters he hoped the poor people eating it would get botulism and learn their lesson about handouts.”

  I asked what was happening to Patty all that time.

  Lorraine was calm and relaxed as she spoke. “Patty stayed in the closet, except to bathe or relieve herself. After a while, she lost muscle mass in her legs. She couldn’t walk. She stopped menstruating. When she balked at sharing the group’s toothbrush, she was teased for her bourgeois tendencies. When she tried to be sympathetic, she was called a rich bitch who would never understand. They broke her down.”

  I would learn later that the formal name for this is the Stockholm syndrome, after a bank robbery in Sweden, where a female hostage was so thankful that her life had been spared that she fell in love with one of the robbers, had sex with him on the floor of the vault, even pleaded with police to spare him when he surrendered. Any person held prisoner or hostage, traumatized long enough, will go from defiant to dependent to sympathetic.

  Lorraine put the blank tape back in and pressed RECORD. “Of course, what the SLA became most famous for was convincing your friend Patty to renounce her parents and her privileged upbringing and become Tania, the gun-toting urban guerrilla who participated in a string of SLA robberies until the spring of 1975, when six of the nine SLA members, including Cinque, were incinerated in a small house in Los Angeles.” Lorraine produced another thick folder and handed me a photograph of cops surrounding a small house in Los Angeles that was billowing smoke. The caption read: “9,000 bullets, 125 tear-gas canisters, 320 police cars, 400 siege officers, 2 helicopters, and an array of media, and SLA is history. Media heiress Patty Hearst feared dead.”

  I shook my head, trying to imagine my little friend from Camp Tidewater at the center of such a strange drama. “It was the first live cremation—right up there in television history with Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Patty watched her comrades go up in flames on TV from a motel in Disneyland. By the time the inferno was over, she and the Harrises were in a car heading back up to San Francisco, listening to their own eulogies on the radio.”

  “You think letting Patty escape was part of the government’s plan?”

  “In the world of double agents and brainwashing, once a handler turns his back on an operative, they’re finished. Keeping somebody you’ve tried to kill around is generally a bad thing.” I was surprised how knowledgeable Lorraine seemed about all this. “To stay sane,” she said, utterly convincingly, “operatives imprint to their handlers. After Cinque broke her down, Patty thought of him as a father figure. When the FBI killed him, Patty probably felt like she’d been orphaned. Despite the fact that she’d be unpredictable, the government would have needed her to denounce the SLA, which, after she was captured, is exactly what she did.”

  “The three of them—Bill and Emily Harris and Patty—scrambled, avoiding the Feds, evading police, and dodging roadblocks for another year. They traveled across the country and back—staying briefly in Manhattan, upstate New York, and near the Pocono Mountains in a house in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, which is where I hooked up with them.” Lorraine paused to look at her watch. “I’m exhausted. I need to get some rest. We can get together once more…before I leave. Can you give me a lift home?”

  Although the government conspiracy theories and the details of Patty’s brainwashing fascinated me, I was much more interested in hearing about Lorraine’s and Patty’s meeting in the mid-seventies. I had the feeling that something really important had happened, not just for the two of them, but for me as well. “I’ll leave the bag with you,” she said, standing.

  Outside, it was very cold. The sun had set and the moon was a tiny sliver along the horizon. Most of the lights in nearby houses were off. A little over an hour later, when I got home, I ate some leftovers and cleared a space on what had been my mother’s dining room table. I took a stack of sixties memorabilia and SLA clippings from Lorraine’s tote bag and began reading. It was an astonishing archive of this particular era within an era. There were articles about race riots, break-ins at Selective Service offices, pictures of nuns in soup kitchens and priests in field hospitals, eyewitness accounts of bombs that went off in basements and behind statues. There were pamphlets and position papers by all kinds of revolutionary groups, photographs of long-haired men and women blurred by time or an unsteady camera, group shots and individuals, hippies and flower children collapsing with laughter, standing with signs against the war, flashing the peace sign and smiling. In several of them, I recognized Lorraine: young, beautiful, full of life. One showed her sitting with a man against a tree, their eyes closed, sunlight from directly above settling around their hair like a halo. In another, the same young man with long, tangled reddish brown hair, a turned-up nose, and freckles was looking earnestly into the lens. Underneath, it said: “Frederick Keane: Wanted, Armed and Dangerous.”

  In a box marked “SLA,” I found an eight-by-eleven print. Eight young people held automatic weapons in front of a seven-headed snake. Someone had drawn an arrow pointing to Patty, who was wearing a kerchief, crouching, and smiling timidly, just as she had in the Camp Tidewater play a few summers earlier. She was dressed in brown fatigues, her shirt open midway down her chest, her small hands supporting a machine gun, staring blankly ahead. A newspaper account speculated that an army of revolutionaries had descended upon the Bay Area as in a science-fiction mov
ie.

  Before falling asleep, I found individual pages torn from a child’s coloring book. On the back of each page, in crayon, was what looked like the Hearst family history, written in cursive handwriting as though it was a fairy tale.

  Summer 1968

  After finals, Chuck Puckman found a cheap room on the Boston side, about a mile down the road from Lorraine, between Boston College and Boston University. By walking up and down Harvard Avenue, nodding at the freaks and holding a cigarette ambiguously, he attracted new customers for weed, hashish, and hash oil, which he began buying in larger quantities from the road manager of the band in Connecticut. For the summer, Lorraine got a job selling life insurance door to door. Everyone teased her about it, but she had a way with regular people, especially when it came to talking about what matters. She was successful from the start, earning sometimes as much as $1,000 in commissions, to be paid out over the life of the policies.

  Consistent with the belief that after the revolution, professional sports would replace war, satisfying man’s craving for aggression, Frederick applied for a job with the Red Sox organization. By mid-May, he’d joined the ground crew at Fenway Park, tamping, sweeping, digging, piling, and preparing the field for play. When the Red Sox were at home, he worked from early in the morning until midday, and then sat in the bleachers for free. When the Sox went on the road, Frederick did, too, traveling to Providence, New York, and New Haven to meet other radicals planning demonstrations against the war.