Backward-Facing Man (20 page)

“We're still supporting a system that exploits people,” Rahim said.

Chuck thought about this for a while. The last time he felt good about what he did for money was when he was dealing weed in college. “This may not be the purest logic,” he started, “but everybody needs cash to stay afloat in this system—a living wage for food and shelter and health care. We'd be expanding the market so poor people can get more money for their unwanted possessions. We'd make enough money to keep the lights on in here, to pay for health insurance, and maybe to hire back a few of our guys. A rising tide floats all boats.” Sure it was a con, but he was tired of being broke.

I held the door open for Lorraine, who carried her handbag against her chest like it contained treasure. It was a cold night, so I started the fireplace, one of those gas-fired rigs my mother put in the cottage in Merion before she got sick. Lorraine set the bag on the edge of the table, reached in and extracted a sheaf of papers bound with a rubber strap, a cassette recorder, and a blank tape whose seal she scored with her fingernail. I went to get cheese and crackers. When I returned, Lorraine was standing under one of the spider plants touching her toes. She was wearing black tights, and she was really buff. “I'll be honest with you, Winnie,” she said. “I'm not really interested in Patty or in William Randolph Hearst. I read your book—well, I skimmed it, actually—just to see how your mind works. I realize I don't know you other than what you said on the
Today Show,
but I feel like I can trust you. I want you to listen to what I say with an open heart, and if it moves you, tell it in your own words.”

She said this as if she'd been planning it for a long time, using certain gestures that I wish I had on videotape. When Lorraine knew something sounded unlikely, she arched her eyebrows as though beseeching me to be rigorous in my research, but to accept it if it turned out to be true. And when she asserted something really strange, she let the end of
her sentence trail up, as though by sounding skeptical, she would be more credible. The more controversial or unlikely things were that she told me, the more placid her expression and measured her delivery.

Lorraine talked almost the entire time we were together. It was important, she told me, to create a record of everything she said, hence the tape recorder; she looked me in the eye the whole time and periodically touched my forearm or leaned toward me for emphasis. I didn't interrupt much, except when I couldn't hear her or I didn't understand something she'd said. And for reasons that will become evident, I have written much of what she told me exactly as she described it.

“In the early seventies,” she said, pressing
RECORD
, “even though the war in Vietnam was winding down, the people in power in this country felt threatened. They believed that draft resistance and the civil rights movement with all the media coverage had stirred the pot so much that, unless steps were taken, revolution was possible, even likely.” She stopped the tape to make sure it was recording and then resumed. “At the time, San Francisco was home to dozens of radical groups—United Farm Workers, the Chino Defense Fund, Venceremos, the Nuestra Familia, the SDS, the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Yippies, Diggers, Motherfuckers. It was also a haven for runaways and radicals and the place where the black liberation movement began.” As she talked, she moved her hand gently across the upholstery of the couch. It was soothing to listen to her voice, and several times, I had to force myself to concentrate on what she was saying.

“In early 1972, the CIA came up with a plan they called Operation Chaos. Sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, doesn't it? The goal was to portray counterculture radicals as violent and dangerous people who most Americans wouldn't mind being wiped out.” She asked me how much I knew about the black militant movement.

“Not much,” I said.

“In the late fifties, an eighteen-year-old black man named George Jackson got busted in L.A. for robbing a gas station. He was sentenced to life in prison.” She paused to let the significance of that sink in. “He wrote a book speculating that the reason blacks break the law is that white America is an oppressive and racist place for them to be.” Lorraine arched her eyebrows and put a cracker in her mouth. “The
book became very popular.” She took a minute to chew. “Jackson was a very good-looking man. Charismatic, too. An inspiration to people, especially blacks. So when he was killed by guards, his message spread like wildfire. A month later, the largest prison riot in U.S. history happened in Attica, New York. It was exactly what President Nixon feared and what the CIA had been waiting for.” Lorraine raised her eyebrows.

“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….”