"Life as 'Tania' Seems so Far Away"

The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)

Newspaper article

By: Maureen Orth

Date: July 31, 1988

Source: Toronto Star.

About the Author: Maureen Orth began writing for Vanity Fair in 1988. She advanced to contributing editor in 1989 and to special correspondent in 1993. Among her investigative articles was a story on the funding of terrorism activities through Afghanistan's illegal opium trade. Orth has also written for the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Toronto Star.

INTRODUCTION

The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was a small, but violent group of radicals in the 1970s opposed to what they perceived as powerful influences of wealthy corporate interests over the United States government. Two activists, Russell Little and Robyn Sue Steiner, originally created the loosely based group in Berkeley, California to recognize the issues involved with poverty, prison reform, and race. Shortly after its inception, the group was taken over by Donald DeFreeze, an escaped prisoner, and Patricia Soltysik, a radical activist. The name Symbionese was adopted from the word symbiosis, which DeFreeze applied within his manifesto to refer to different types of people living together in peace and harmony.

DeFreeze and Soltysik gathered together the original members of the SLA: Nancy Ling Perry, Russell Little, William Wolfe, Bill and Emily Harris, Joe Remiro, Camilla Hall, and Angela Atwood. DeFreeze soon convinced the members to burglarize and kidnap wealthy capitalists and rob banks in order to raise money for a self-described revolution of the under-privileged. Their plan involved high-profile crimes in order to receive regional, if not national, media coverage of their rebellion.

Their first deadly action was the November 6, 1973 killing of Marcus Foster, the superintendent of Oakland, California's public school system. A statement delivered to a radio station communicated that the SLA was responsible for the assassination because Foster allegedly agreed to use compulsory photograph identification cards for high school students, which the group believed was a covert plan by the federal government to place surveillance cameras inside schools.

The SLA's next target became its most notorious crime. DeFreeze, Atwood, and Bill Harris kidnapped Patricia (Patty) Hearst on February 4, 1974, from her apartment while she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. The kidnapping became a national media event as Patty was the daughter of newspaper magnate Randolph Apperson Hearst, son of William Randolph Hearst. According to a statement given to a radio station, the SLA kidnapped Hearst to exchange her for SLA members (Little and Remiro) held in jail. However, when the exchange did not succeed, its second demand was for the Hearst family to give free food to the poor.

In response, Hearst's father, chairman of the Hearst Corporation, formed the People In Need program in the San Francisco Bay area, to which he donated almost $2 million. However, Hearst went from SLA hostage to SLA member when she announced that after the SLA released her, she decided to stay and fight for its cause. Her family and the police asserted that she had been brainwashed.

Then, on April 15, 1974, Hearst was photographed holding an assault rifle while robbing the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Later, it was learned she had adopted her SLA name, Tania. At this time, Hearst was considered a criminal and, at one time, was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted list.

In May 1974, six members of the SLA died in a confrontation with police officers and FBIagents. However, Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris, the last remaining SLA members, were not involved. They vowed to keep the SLA alive and continued robbing banks.

In August 1975, with weapons and explosive materials purchased with stolen money, they began a series of bombings against law enforcement and other government agencies. Hearst was eventually arrested in San Francisco in September 1975, along with Bill and Emily Harris and several other associates. At that time, the police declared the SLA to be no longer functioning.

Hearst's trial began on January 15, 1976 when her defense attorney, F. Lee Bailey, claimed she had been blindfolded, locked in a closet, brainwashed, physically and sexually abused, forced to join the SLA cause, and coerced into committing crimes. However, the jury did not believe Patty Hearst's testimony. Hearst was convicted on March 20, 1976. She served nearly two years of a seven-year prison sentence, and was released on February 1, 1979, after having her sentence commuted by President Jimmy Carter. Later, on January 20, 2001, Patty Hearst (now Patty Hearst Shaw) was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

PRIMARY SOURCE

On Feb. 4, 1974, the SLA broke into the house Patricia Hearst, 19, shared with her boyfriend and kidnapped her at gunpoint. A month later she embraced her captors, renounced her family as "fascist pigs" and took the name "Tania," a female guerrilla who died in Bolivia fighting with Che Guevara. That seminal media event of the '70s is about to bob up in the national consciousness again, this time in the movie Patty Hearst, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Natasha Richardson as Patty. The film, scheduled for release in August, is based on Hearst's 1982 book, EverySecret Thing. But rather than being the final word on this extraordinary tale, the film is bound to unleash a whole new debate because at crucial moments it begs the key questions: Was Patty Hearst's conversion for real or did she feign allegiance to the SLA to ensure her survival? And why didn't she ever try to escape? The film has already provoked anger and controversy from major players in the real-life drama, people who have remained silent for a decade. "She could have gone home; she could have killed us in our sleep if she wanted to," says one of her former SLA captors. "She wasn't imprisoned for the 19 or 20 months she was with us. The point is, she started out a victim and then a process took place. You can't say it was psychological coercion and you can't say it was 100 per cent free will. We ourselves were fooled by a lot of the dynamics of the conversion."

Was it, in fact, a conversion experience? How else to explain a kidnapping victim who, within two months, emerged with a gun and a new identity to rob a bank with the SLA and then shoot up a Los Angeles store with a sub-machine gun in a second SLA holdup? Hearst watched on TV as the Los Angeles police fired 9,000 rounds of ammunition into the SLA hideout, killing everyone inside including her lover "Cujo" (William Wolfe). Hearst herself would have been in the house that day, but she was hiding out in a Disneyland motel with Bill and Emily Harris, the two surviving members of the SLA, who each served five years for her kidnapping.

One of the country's most-wanted women, Hearst used a dozen disguises as she crisscrossed the country on the lam and took part in another bank robbery during which a mother of four was killed—all before the FBI finally caught up with her 19 months after her kidnapping. When Hearst was arrested she gave her profession as "urban guerrilla."The star of a sensational trial, she took the Fifth 42 times. Her lawyers offered brainwashing (referred to as "duress") as her defense; the jury did not buy it and the heiress was convicted on bank robbery charges and sentenced to seven years in jail. During her two years of incarceration, Hearst and her family launched a major media campaign to influence public opinion in her favor. President Carter finally commuted her sentence on Jan. 29, 1979, nearly five years to the day after her kidnapping.

The film, told strictly from Patty Hearst's point of view, tries to convince the audience of what director Schrader calls the horrendous "psychological reality" with which she had to cope and the living hell she writes of in her book: a numbing isolation; the belief that her parents had abandoned her ("There was no one out there who could help me," she writes), her firm conviction that the SLA was "suicidal," and that the FBI would shoot her on sight.

Schrader shot much of the first half hour of Patty Hearst in near darkness, a stylistic simulation of the terror of being kidnapped, blindfolded, locked in a closet for much of the time and subjected to regular propaganda sessions for more than a month before Hearst told Cinque, the ex-convict leading the SLA, that she chose to join them.

For a good part of the film Natasha Richardson plays the forceful Patty like a scared doe; The film doesn't take into account the rage that may have fueled Hearst's decision. After all, although her parents Randolph and Catherine Hearst paid $2 million for the abortive food giveaway program the SLA had demanded, they turned down a second set of ransom demands, claiming, according to a source close to the family, it was "throwing good money after bad." Then, at a delicate moment in the negotiations, Catherine Hearst not only defied the SLA when they demanded that she resign as a regent of the University of California, but renewed her term for another 10 years—without telling even her husband. "My father was furious and insisted she shouldn't do it. And she just insisted it was the right thing to do," says Shaw today.

The effect on Patty then, says someone who knew her, was that "she started to see her mother as the enemy."

When she finally was able to get out of the closet—off "death row," as she puts it—and convince the SLA that she was sincere in wanting to join them, she felt tremendous relief and something else as well. Hearst writes in her book: "In trying to convince them, I convinced myself. I felt that I had truly joined them; my past life seemed to have slipped away . . . Somewhere in the jumble of my reasoning was the hope, reborn, that the essential thing was that I would survive. I would stay with this horrible group for a while and the day would come when I would be rescued or perhaps be able to escape."

But the day never came. Instead, Hearst participated in escalating acts of violence and never once tried to escape. Why?

Her SLA captors were convinced that Hearst was a genuine convert when she joined them in robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. "She never would have been taken to do such a thing if she was not felt to be 100 percent with us," says one of them. "You do not give a person who's a captive a loaded weapon, an automatic weapon." Shaw protests; she says that the bolt on the weapon was turned. But could she have turned the bolt? Today she is evasive. "I don't know," she says. One of her kidnappers contends that due to Hearst's inexperience she jammed the gun and could not get it unjammed while she was in the bank. "She wasn't coerced. She was freely involved in it—I don't know how else to put it."

Shaw argues that she was controlled by other people the whole time and in her mind was unable to distinguish right from wrong. "At Mel's Sporting Goods Store I really began to notice I was no longer in control when, without a thought, I just did what I had been trained to do—fire the machine gun and the other guns in sequence." Given her overall fear—and her fear of SLA members Bill and Emily Harris in particular (she calls them "evil")—Shaw says she never believed she could escape.

Not even months later when she and a radical boyfriend, a house painter named Steven Soliah, were mistakenly thought to be stranded on some rocks near San Francisco Bay and some friendly sheriff's deputies rescued them. She didn't give herself up, she says, because she genuinely believed she was without options—still in terror of the police because of the way they had decimated the SLA hideout in Los Angeles. "Everybody asked me why didn't I go to the police?" says Shaw. "Why would I? A police station! That's about the last place I would have thought would be safe to walk into."

But according to some of the country's leading terrorism experts, brainwashing—deliberate coercive persuasion—cannot account for the depth of Hearst's conversion. Not even the Stockholm or "survivor" syndrome can explain 19 months of sustained rage at the system. A conversion process like hers is complex, they claim, and had a great deal to do with her age, sex, and personality development at the time of the kidnapping.

In prep school Hearst's IQ was measured at 130. Among Randolph and Catherine Hearst's five daughters, "She was the iconoclast, the individualist," says lawyer Coblentz. "Patty was known to be rebellious." Her first cousin William Randolph Hearst III, publisher of The San Francisco Examiner, agrees: "She was certainly someone capable of expressing her own mind. She tended to challenge people and ideas." At the time of her kidnapping Patty Hearst was 19, living with and engaged to be married to someone her family didn't like, Steven Weed, her former math tutor and a graduate philosophy student at the University of California at Berkeley where she was a student. (In her book, Hearst contends she had doubts about going through with the wedding.)

One of her SLA captors says that, ironically, it was Hearst's large engagement picture in the San Francisco Chronicle that triggered the kidnapping plan; "You rarely see that much information about someone in the ruling class." At first, the captor says, the SLA viewed her merely as a "rich bitch," but as time and the propaganda sessions wore on they began to view her as "exceptional, a diamond in the rough. She had spunk."The SLA seemed almost flattered when she decided to join.

Other ties began to develop as well. At her trial, Hearst testified that she was forced to have sex in the closet with both Cinque, the ex-convict leading the SLA, and William Wolfe ("Cujo"), the son of a doctor, a National Merit Scholar finalist and a prep-school graduate like Hearst.

One of her captors vehemently disputes this, saying the women in the group, radical feminists, would never have condoned rape. Although it was considered "comradely" to have sex with everyone within the group, Hearst spurned the four female SLA members in favor of Wolfe. After he died in the SLA shootout in Los Angeles, Hearst issued an emotional communique (she later said she was forced to write it) that eulogized him as "the gentlest, most beautiful man I've ever known . . . Neither Cujo or I had ever loved an individual the way we loved each other."

Today Shaw compares Cinque to Charles Manson and the SLA to a cult. "You can hardly have a hold on reality when you're all living in one room and staying up all night having self-criticism sessions. It was mass hypnosis. By the end they were all chanting, 'We won't live to see the end of the revolution.'"

SIGNIFICANCE

The Symbionese Liberation Army was a collection of radicals who had links to the California prison movement and who hoped to parallel the activities of the Black Panthers, a black revolutionary nationalist group that formed in the late 1960s.

For the most part, the SLA was efficient in publicizing their goals and philosophies to the media. The group distributed photographs, press releases, and taped interviews with the intention of explaining their activities to all who would listen. When the SLA staged violent actions, its members made sure those actions were recorded. Their ultimate goal was to gain support for their cause with the general public and other radical groups. Despite their concerted media campaign, the SLA never had more than thirteen members at any one time.

During the period from 1972–1974, the media showcased the SLA as some of its top newsworthy stories. The name, the Symbionese Liberation Army, became a household word, as did the members' names and nicknames, especially Patty Hearst and her alias Tania. The general public was interested in the escapades of the SLA when the group was vividly described on television and radio and in the newspaper, but otherwise, did not support the SLA philosophy and ideas by swelling its ranks.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Boulton, David. The Making of Tania Hearst. London: New English Library, 1975.

Hearst, Patricia. Every Secret Thing. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982.

Payne, Leslie. The Life and Death of the SLA. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

Web sites

Court TV's Crime Library. "The Claiming of Patty Hearst." <http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/terrorists/hearst/1.html?sect=22> (accessed June 19, 2005).

Court TV's Crime Library. "The Symbionese Liberation Army." <http://www.courttv.com/trials/soliah/slahistory_ctv.html> (accessed June 19, 2005).

PaperlessArchives.com. "The Symbionese Liberation Army, Patty Hearst Kidnapping, FBI Files." <http://www.paperlessarchives.com/sla.html> (accessed June 19, 2005).