Brad Schreiber - Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA

Advance Praise for Revolutions End

Revolutions End is a stunning and chilling expose of one of the most bizarre political chapters in my lifetimethe rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army and the kidnapping of bad-girl heiress Patty Hearst. Brad Schreiber presents a compelling new case that the SLA was a creation of the police state to infiltrate, subvert, and destroy the growing radical movements of the period.

David Talbot, bestselling author of Season of the Witch and The Devils Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of Americas Secret Government

Revolutions End is a gripping reada persuasive, well-researched and detailed interpretation of what is known about the SLA kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

Peter Dale Scott, author of The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy

This book careens to its bloody ending with all of the inevitability of a train wreck. Schreiber wont let us take our eyes off it. He ignites the past in chilling detail and at the same time shines an uncanny and unsettling light on who we are today.

T. Jefferson Parker, three-time winner of the Mystery Writers of Americas Edgar Award

The Symbionese Liberation Army was a counter-revolutionary front, carefully created to infiltrate and discredit the authen tic leftist movements then alive and well in California. Such is the unhappy, fascinating truth Brad Schreiber tells in Revolutions End a careful book, and one as necessary as it is disturbing, not just for all it teaches us about what really happened with the SLA in California, over forty years ago, but alsoand especiallyfor what it teaches us about America today, and all the world, post-9/11.

Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies, New York University and author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 20002008

Copyright 2016 by Brad Schreiber

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover photos from the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1425-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1427-4

Printed in the United States of America

C ONTENTS

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I THANK THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE for their aid in research and support of my writing Revolutions End . The list is alphabetical, but you are all equally appreciated. Carrie Adamowski, Philadelphia field office, FBI; Angela Bell, FBI, Washington, DC; Linda Chester and Laurie Fox, Linda Chester Literary Agency; Judge Elliot Daum, Sonoma County Superior Court; Ken Deifik; Vanessa Dunstan, The Nation ; Terence Hallinan; Rachael Hanel; John Hayes; Bonnie Kouneva; Tony Lyons and Joseph Craig at Skyhorse Publishing; Stephen Maitland-Lewis; Justin Manask; Jonathan Menchin; David Newman; Anna Nicholas; Jim Parish; Dr. Colin Ross, Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma; Laurie Scheer; Brian Schindele; John Spencer; Roger Steffens; Douglas Valentine; Vesla Weaver, Center for the Study of Inequality, Yale University; Amy Wong, UCLA Library Dept of Special Collections.

In memory of the brilliant Robert Litz, the nicest writer who ever lived.

This book is dedicated to Dick Russell, who provided me the Rosetta Stone of research on the Symbionese Liberation Army and its prison origins, a forty-year-old file I thank God he still had, of unredacted, rare interviews, letters, notes, press releases, articles, affidavits, and court papers that shed so much light on one of the enduring mysteries of US history.

I NTRODUCTION

W E FIND OURSELVES IN AN increasingly, even sickeningly undemocratic country. In 2014, tanks and military-grade weapons appeared in Ferguson, Missouri, when demonstrations erupted after a white police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth. Law-abiding citizens and the press were attacked when they protested the callous response from local law enforcement to this deadly incident.

The militarization of our police, so clearly displayed on the streets of Ferguson, is due in major part to the Department of Defenses 1033 Program, which has transferred more than $5 billion in Army military hardware to local law enforcement since 1997.

At the same time, despite its clear and present danger to our freedom, our government spies on us, more frequently and more effectively than ever before in history. Whistleblower and National Security Agency infrastructure expert Edward Snowden, who left the United States, perhaps never to return, released staggering classified documents in 2013 to the media. He proved that Internet service providers and phone companies are allowing the NSA to illegally monitor all Americans, regardless of any connection to national security issues.

Police militarization and the diminishment of our rights of privacy and public protest have become the norm in an era of highly sophisticated electronic social control. The Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements recall the burst of undiluted fury at this government that arose out of 1970s political unrest. Its epicenter in California, driven by the black prisoner reform movement and antiVietnam War activists, was the San Francisco Bay Area.

Without a doubt, the case that is still shrouded in the greatest mystery, despite its long-standing hold on the publics imagination, is the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst by a previously unknown political group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). This story outstrips the historic Lindbergh baby kidnapping in sensationalism. It was Americas first political kidnapping. The SLA saga was the only US case of a kidnap victim who participated in a bank robbery. And it resulted in six SLA members dying, after hundreds of police and SWAT team members surrounded the revolutionaries and fired a fusillade of more than five thousand bullets at them.

The yellow stucco bungalow in South Central Los Angeles, the last refuge of those six SLA members, caught fire due to the intentional use of riot control grenades thrown into the structure. The shoot-out and incineration were shockingly carried live, for two hours, on national television. It was the TV networks first use of minicam technology to broadcast news live across the country, and those horrific images seared into American consciousness the ultimate power of the state.

The full story of Patricia Hearst, the supposed revolutionary group that kidnapped her, and its black leader, who was secretly a government informant, is a complex, bizarre, salacious, surreal, terrifying, immoral, and tragic tale. It illustrates how early 1970s Bay Area political activism led to one of the most audacious cases of government duplicity in American history.