On January 17, 1969, a shootout erupted on the campus of UCLA between members of the far-left Black Panther Party and Ron Cororinga's Black Nationalist US organization. UCLA's Black Student Union had just held an election to choose its leader for that year, and Coringa's preferred candidate lost, causing tensions with the Black Panthers to boil over. It isn't known for sure what events immediately precipitated the shootout or who fired first. But the aftermath left Panthers John Huggin and Bunchie Carter dead, while those on the US organization side either disappeared permanently or served substantial prison terms. The shootout was the culmination of months of tension between US and the Panthers, which was followed by a period of heightened violence during which a pipe bomb would destroy the San Diego office of USR and four more Black Panthers were assassinated. But what no one involved in the shootout realized at the time was that much of those rising tensions between the groups over the preceding months had been a direct result of an FBI cointelpro campaign intended to pit black activist groups against one another. Leading up to the shootout, the bureau had created political cartoons mocking the Panthers and distributed them under the US organization name and sent a letter to USORG containing fake plans for an assassination attempt on their leader Ron Cororinga by the Panthers. FBI memos written shortly after the UCLA shooting show the bureau happily taking credit for the violence and planning to provoke more: ''shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counter intelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program. The Los Angeles division is aware of the mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of Black Panther activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.''
Donald DeFreeze (Informant) - The first pieces of the SLA puzzle came together well before the establishment of the group itself, when Donald DeFreeze was just a petty criminal operating on both coasts of the United States. Despite a long rap sheet, Defreeze had an incredible ability to avoid prison time, even on serious charges. In the course of just 5 years, from 1964 to 1969, Defreeze acred no less than seven separate arrests for possessing guns or explosives, almost all of them stolen, plus an attempted bank robbery, a motorcycle theft, and a failed gun store burglary, receiving probation each time. Although it's not known for sure when his informant work began, it couldn't have been any later than 1967. Because in December of that year, Defreeze would be arrested after a violent incident with a prostitute in Los Angeles when he was found to be in possession of 12 handguns that had been stolen in a military surplus store robbery that netted over 200 firearms. Defreeze would lead police to the man who had supplied him with the guns. In return, Defreeze walked with a sentence of 5 years probation, and the LAPD even let him keep some of the pistols from the robbery. But the freeze didn't get away unscathed as this plea deal seems to have been the precipitating event that kicked off his career as a prolific informant for the LAPD's version of CONITLPro run out of their infamous criminal conspiracy section and the criminal investigation and identification unit where DFreeze had handlers who weren't exactly subtle about the kinds of missions they'd send him on. Perhaps the most transparent setup of Defreeze's informant career took place in 1969 when he was temporarily back on the East Coast in Newark, New Jersey. As recounted in the book Revolution's End by Brad Shriber on May 9, 1969, Defreeze was involved in the most convoluted of his crimes up to that point. Because Defreeze had lived in New Jersey, whether by California Attorney General Evil Younger directly or by a member of the California Criminal Investigation and Identification Unit in Sacramento, he was assigned to attempt to set up for arrest Ralph Cobb, an influential Black Panther in the Jersey City chapter. In New York, Alfred Whiters, 32, custodian of the temple Beni Abraham, told local police that two black men, later identified as Defreeze and Cobb, 20 of Jersey City, abducted him on a rainy morning and drove Whiters around in his own car for an hour with a shotgun held to his head. Whiters said they demanded the phone number of Wim Prince, the temple's nationally renowned rabbi, in order to extort from him $5,000 to then be used to free a Black Panther brother in jail, referred to only as the enforcer. Whiters gave to Freeze and Cobb the number to the temple's answering service, and they left him. No one could explain why his abductors didn't directly confront the rabbi, who was listed in the area phone book and lived in Orange, New Jersey. A week after Cobb was arrested, the temple was seriously damaged by fire. Rabbi Prince publicly stated that he assumed the Black Panthers were responsible, although no one ever claimed credit for the arson. On May 28, Whiters was again questioned by the police, and under pressure, Whiters identified Cobb's accomplice via mugsh shot as Donald Dreeze. Both Cobb and Defreeze were investigated for assault, extortion, and the kidnapping of Whiters, but Cobb was released without an indictment. According to a story in New York Magazine, Essex County prosecutor Hugh Francis told New York attorney Milton Friedman, who defended Cobb and the New Jersey Black Panther Party that the case should never have come to the court. There was a plethora of inconsistencies and unanswered questions that Francis noted to New York Magazine. To begin with, White's grand jury testimony was confusing. He also contradicted his own statements at times and suspiciously refused to take a lie detector test. Francis and Freriedman recognized that kidnapping a caretaker to demand the phone number of a wealthy rabbi listed in the phone book in order to make a ransom demand made little sense. And the charge of kidnapping carried a sentence of 30 years to life or to free a black panther they refused to cite by name. While Defreeze was in jail, Temple Benai Abraham was still receiving threatening phone calls about the incident. One anonymous caller chillingly stated, "Your caretaker, Whiters, identified the wrong man in court, and we want $10,000 or we'll blow up the temple." No bombing took place. "It appeared to be a clumsy attempt to implicate the Jersey City Black Panthers and create the context for a reprisal by law enforcement." "It occurred to me," County prosecutor Hugh Francis told New York Magazine, that the FBI had engineered the whole thing. Putting aside for a moment the question of exactly which law enforcement organization Defreeze was working for at the time, it is remarkable to have the county prosecutor openly telling the media that he suspects a case he's prosecuting is an FBI setup. Ralph ''Buddha'' Cobb was a respected officer of the Jersey City chapter of the Black Panther Party considered important enough to the movement that coverage of his criminal case appeared in the Panthers national newspaper. And the plot he was accused of enacting, kidnapping a rabbi's assistant to attain the phone number of a different rabbi. Even though this rabbi's phone number was listed in the phone book in a scheme to extort this other rabbi for money, all on behalf of some unnamed Black Panther called the enforcer, who Defreeze made sure to mention repeatedly sounds like it was specifically engineered to make the Black Panthers look bad without much thought put into its believability. All kidnapping related charges against Defreeze would be dropped, but Ralph Cobb took the case to trial and won acquittles on all counts. But in November of 1969, Donald Def would bungle a crime so badly that he risked exposing the LAPD's role in his crime spree. Defreeze would rob a young tourist of her purse, battering her with a butt of a gun in the process. He may have escaped punishment for this initial robbery. But 2 days later, Defreeze entered an LA bank attempting to cash a check made out in his victim's name. When the teller became suspicious, Defreeze ran, getting into a shootout with the bank security guard and police who had shown up in the meantime. Defreeze was arrested on the scene, charged with two counts of assault to murder, plus first-degree robbery and possession of a fraudulent completed check. But the LAPD wouldn't be intervening to save him this time. According to Brad Shriber in Revolution's End, the criminal conspiracy section of the LAPD after the failed armed robbery at the Bank of America was done arranging probation for DeFreeze. One of the main reasons was the 32 Beretta he used in that incident. Defreeze fired upon the security guard and police with one of the stolen guns acquired among the 200 in the prior firearms case. For his cooperation, DeFreeze was allowed to keep some of them for resale and likely to set up Panthers in future police agent activity. But now with a gun potentially traceable to the LAPD recovered after a bust, DeFreeze was jeopardizing the department. In late 1970, Donald Defze was found guilty and sentenced to a then legal indeterminate sentence of 5 years to life in the California Department of Corrections. It was California law at the time that all newly incarcerated prisoners should spend a short observation period, typically between 6 weeks and 90 days at the California Medical Facility at Vakavville to determine what level of security the inmate should be housed in and whether or not he required medical or mental health treatment. But DFreeze would end up spending three years at Vakavville despite having no known serious medical or mental health diagnosis. Starting well before Defriez's arrival, the facility at Vakavville had been a site for CIA funded psychological research, specifically subject 3 of a program known as MK SEARCH, the successor program of MK Ultra. This fact was confirmed by the congressman and CIA critic Leo Ryan, who incidentally would die just a few years later in the infamous Jonestown cult massacre. In a 1978 letter he received from the deputy director of the CIA, Frank Carluchi, as described in Revolution's End, quote, "Carluchi's letter to Leo Ryan acknowledged voluntary testing on prisoners at Vakavville with a drug called magnesium peel and claimed it had concluded in 1968. The letter, however, did not address other drugs or techniques that had been or were still used at the facility. Carluchi's carefully worded reply to Ryan merely stated that DeFreeze hadn't been involved in the Pemlin experiments. In so far as our reports reflect the names of the participants, there is nothing to indicate that DeFreeze was in any way involved in the project. While the precise experiments DeFreeze was subjected to remain unknown, the superintendent of Vakavville later admitted that DeFreeze quote volunteered for medical research at the prison, which in the context of Vakavville often just meant that the prisoner was coerced into signing a consent form as a means of escaping punishment for some infraction. Common treatments at Vakavl from the period included electroshock therapy, labbotoies, paralytic drugs like anine, and so-called zombie drugs like prolixen, which later investigators discovered had been administered to DeFreeze. But it seems clear that the most consequential part of DeFree's stay at Vakavville was the relationship he developed with an employee there who happened to be a CIA operative freshly back from helping run the Phoenix program in Vietnam. As detailed in Revolution's End, ''Colston Richard Westbrook became Donald Dreez's early vakil confidant, sponsor, and supporter.''
After Patty Hearst was kidnapped, Colston Westbrook (DeFreeze' Handler) gave frequent media interviews about the SLA. And in one he was asked if the behavior modification programs at Vagavville may have influenced the SLA's actions. Responding at least the top leadership of the SLA has been trained in this process. The top leadership of the SLA was Donald Defreeze. Notably, Westbrook didn't say he was subjected to behavior modification, but that he was trained in it.
Colston Westbrook (DeFreeze' Handler) - Westbrook was an asserbic character who could only have existed in that time and place. He was black, pot-bellied, and wore dashiki and other African garb. And while he spoke seven languages, including Swahili, he preferred to use black street language whenever possible. Westbrook served at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, just miles from the town of Vakavville, and his facility with languages enabled him to travel all over the world in his military career. Westbrook was an adviser to the KCIA, the South Korean equivalent of the CIA. He also claimed to have had a direct line of communication in a past assignment to Cambodian Prime Minister Law Null, who replaced Prince Noram Sahan, in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. Between 1967 and 69, Westbrook was an adviser to the South Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers. Westbrook was in South Vietnam during the CIA's Phoenix Program, during which 20,000 to 40,000 citizens, alleged Vietkong sympathizers were murdered over a 2-year period. Professor Peter Dale Scott wrote in the essay the assassinations of the 1960s as deep events that Westbrook after the destruction of the SLA applied for a teaching job in Scott's English department at UC Berkeley. The chairman asked me to peruse Westbrook's curriculum fet and I immediately noticed that while in Vietnam Westbrook had worked as a civilian employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers P& was a well-known cover for the CIA in Saigon and ISO notified the chairman. Westbrook did not get the job. Among others who confirmed P&E was a proprietary of the CIA was Bart Osborne of the Fifth Estate, a Washington DC research group made up of former intelligence community members who changed their minds about the validity of the Vietnam War. Osborne himself was in charge of teams of men involved in the notorious Phoenix program. Pacific architects and engineers contracted the building of the interrogation torture centers known as province interrogation centers in every one of South Vietnam's 44 provinces. These compounds were surrounded by high walls and gun towers and could communicate instantly with CIA headquarters in Saigon. The interrogation centers were staffed by South Vietnam's plane closed secret police, the special branch, working in conjunction with South Vietnamese military intelligence officers and advised by undercover CIA liaison officers like Colston Westbrook who used the cover of P&E. The CIA's Phoenix program targeted only civilians known as Vietkong infrastructure presumed to be sympathetic to the Vietkong. VCI prisoners, like their American and South Vietnamese counterparts, experienced torture and deprivation. But these non-combatants had no form of redress and were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. Once accused, they were swept up and imprisoned without confirmation or any form of due process. Bart Osborne testified before Congress that all of the VCI suspects he dealt with in Vietnam died due to their mistreatment. When a VCI gave what was deemed actionable intelligence, a provincial reconnaissance unit was assigned to hunt down and kill the target. PRUs were a mixture of South Vietnamese and American military, mostly Navy Seal teams, under the command of the CIA. Four years after the Phoenix program was initiated, the New York Times on July 15, 1971 revealed that 26,843 non-military Vietkong insurgents and sympathizers had been neutralized in the previous 14-month period. The exact total of civilian injuries and deaths due to Phoenix will never be known. After Westbrook returned to the United States from Vietnam, William Herman, advising Governor Ronald Reagan on counter intelligence measures to combat leftist militancy, enlisted Westbrook to create and run the Black Cultural Association at Vakavville Medical Facility. The BCA was ostensively an education program designed to instill black pride in Vakavville inmates. In reality, it became a cover for an experimental project to explore the extent to which unstable or susceptible prisoners could be controlled for the purpose of infiltration of Bay Area radical groups. Westbrook was euphemistically named an outside guest coordinator while in control of the BCA. His cover was as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley's Afroamerican Studies Department. His encouragement of black prisoners to talk about their experiences and identities, coupled with his outsized personality, helped him initially gain the trust of many inmates at Vakavville. Westbrook chose to befriend Donald Dreeze, the former LAPD informant, in a prison where coercive treatment of prisoners was the norm. As Dr. And Colin Ross noted in the CIA doctors, there was a process by which DeFreeze later treated Patricia Hurst as a kidnap victim. It utilized isolation, psychological threats, physical abuse, and alleged dosing of Hurst with hallucinogenic drugs. All in all, it was a methodology that DeFreeze learned from his experience in Vakavville. Where did a street hood and unsuccessful robber like Donald Defze learn such sophisticated programming techniques? My conclusion is that DeFreeze was a controlled controller created in part by Phoenix program veteran Coloulston Westbrook. Shriber identifies Westbrook's teaching assistant role at UC Berkeley as a CIA cover position. And although this can't be proven for obvious reasons, it was amusing to read Westbrook's quotes in newspaper stories about the SLA. Westbrook loved talking to the media, in which he gave the journalists a different job title in every interview he did. Sometimes he claimed to be an urban affairs instructor. At others, he was a linguist or an instructor in black lexicon. Apparently, Westbrook had trouble keeping his cover story straight. Westbrook's role as an outside guest coordinator at first revolved around his handling of the prison's black cultural association, an advocacy group for black prisoners at Vakavville, where inmates were encouraged to immerse themselves in the radical politics common in California prisons. There was a belief popular among students and radical left-wingers at the time that since African-American convicts, who the students naively referred to as political prisoners, were the primary victims of America's carceral state, they would be the ones most likely to lead the revolution against it. It was this strain of thought that elevated people like George Jackson, Bobby Seal, Huey Newton, and Geronimo Pratt to positions of influence within the left-wing counterculture of the 60s and 70s. Westbrook would use his position on the UC Berkeley campus to recruit young white radicals to volunteer for the Black Cultural Association, inviting the true believers to interact with the supposed vanguard of their coming revolution. By all accounts, Donald Dere was totally uninterested and uninformed when it came to politics. But in those BCA meetings, Westbrook would rapidly elevate DeFreeze to a position of authority that no other prisoner enjoyed. The DeFreeze faction in the BCA counted many future Symbionese Liberation Army militants as its members. People like Willie Wolf, Russ Little, and Joe Romero. And Westbrook seemed to be positioning to freeze to have as much influence over these outsiders as possible. Westbrook was even the one who gave to freeze his name, Cinque, which was a misprononunciation of the surname of Joseph Cinqué the African chief who had led the slave revolt on the ship Amistad. The word symbion was also a Westbrook invention a neologism he had coined that was supposed to refer to the biological concept of symbiosis. The BCA charter required that its leader be chosen by election every 6 months. And since most of the inmates were transferred out in less than 3 months the pool of eligible candidates was small. When DeFreeze put his name in the running and lost, Westbrook allowed him to create his own group separate from the Black Cultural Association called Unicite. Unicight had a vague mission statement that seemed to serve little purpose besides giving DeFreeze more free time with the outside radicals. In exchange for his cooperation, DeFreeze enjoyed privileges at Vakavville far beyond what any other inmate could expect. Fellow inmates told later investigators that the Vakavville guards chose DeFreeze as their designated marijuana dealer on the inside, smuggling in packages of weed for him to sell and split the profits 7030. The guards also secretly gave DeFreeze unfettered access to the prison's conjugal visit trailers, usually reserved for married prisoners, so DeFreeze could enjoy occasional asignations with the radical women of the BCA and Unic. Two of those women, Nancy Lang Perry and Patricia Sultic would later become core members of the SLA. In fact, there was a third woman who occasionally accompanied the freeze to the conjugal trailers whose presence during this period completely destroys the conventional narrative of the Symbionese Liberation Army. According to Revolution's End, ''when Patty Hurst met future SLA member Patricia Sultzik in Berkeley and was invited to attend a women's rights meeting, her path toward meeting Donald at Vakavville was set.''
DeFreeze ''Escape'' - Several Unicite members proceeded to freeze to Solidad. And once there, Defreeze quickly began making plans for their escape. One UNICE member and former crime partner of Defreeze named Fred Brazwell claimed that Defreeze's escape was planned with the California Department of Corrections ahead of time. The most specific testimony about Defreeze being allowed to escape Solidad came from Fred Brazwell. He made the discovery by accident. I caught Defreeze and Lieutenant James Nelson talking in the custody room one day. Brazwell wrote, "And that's when I was sure the CDC knew of our plans. They were discussing the SLA when Nelson saw me and ordered me into the recreation yard." The Freeze told Nelson, "No, let him stay. He knows everything. He's the second man. So then Nelson looked at me and told me I was going to escape. I didn't trust Nelson. I quietly started warning some of my people that the Department of Corrections knew our plans. Brazwell, unlike to freeze, feared the expendability of a prisoner who worked clandestinely with the prison. He refused to cooperate, assuming that once they had done their duty, black SLA soldiers on the outside would be hunted down and killed rather than rearrested and allowed the chance to publicize their incriminating knowledge. Private investigator Lake Headley spoke to a Solidad inmate who recounted he made an offer to help DeFreeze get a better work assignment. The Freeze's reply was that in a few days he was going to work in the boiler room of the South facility. This was peculiar. Those inmates employed in that section of the prison tended to be trusted by the administration because there were no guards or gun towers there. Prisoners did their work in South Facility and then were escorted back to the mainline. Defreeze was at Solidad less than three months, and his contentious history with the Black Cultural Association at Vakavville did not make him an ideal candidate for an unsupervised job. Defreeze was asked by the same Soladad prisoner how he managed to get such an assignment when other convicts who had been at Soladad much longer had been turned down for it. He answered by merely giving a wide enigmatic smile. True to his prediction, Donald Dreeze was given the midnight to 8:00 a.m. shift at the boiler room in South Facility on March 5, 1973. Headedley reported that a number of prisoners claimed that the south facility was used at the time as a holding area for informers. After prison guard Jim Tucker accompanied the Freeze, driving him in a pickup truck to South Facility, he left, returning the prisoner who had served the 400 p.m. to midnight shift. By the time Tucker returned less than an hour later, Defreeze was nowhere to be seen and could not be found. After Don split, Brazwell remembered, "I got my queue in June when I was ordered to minimum security at South facility. I refused this offer because I knew we would all die." Several weeks later, I was in the recreation yard and a guard motioned for me to walk towards him. He was standing next to the gate and I started walking towards him. The guard opened the gate and walked away. I then turned around and walked back to the recreation yard. Because Brazwell refused to be involved in the undercover counter-revolutionary black prisoner SLA, the California Department of Corrections moved to the next candidate, Damian Tomita. A year later, James Nelson called Toita into his office, well aware of the money Tomita owed for the marijuana he smoked. He forced Tomita to agree to sell marijuana in the prison with the usual split. 30% to the convict and 70% to the prison. During this year, I was called into his office several more times, Tomita wrote. And Nelson tried to pressure me to sell harder drugs. However, since I had been in prison 8 years, and additionally, because my brother had become a narcotics addict at a young age, I continually refused these requests. Incurring the wrath of Nelson led to Tomita's name being put on an execution list, as he termed it. I lived under perpetual fear of danger until late August 1973 when I was approached by Nelson in my cell. To my astonishment, instead of threats or further pressure, he told me, "Well, I have information that you're supposed to be leaving here soon." While I was still reacting to this first statement, he continued, "Yes, Defreeze tells me that you're supposed to be leaving soon." Defreeze had already escaped. These statements stunned me for a moment, and I asked him, "What the hell is going on here?" But the lieutenant only replied, "You'll be notified when you're supposed to leave. You're supposed to be a new recruit of Defreezes. Either accept this or suffer the consequences here. Toward the end of the month, Tomita was approached by two guards who informed him they were working with Defreeze. Soon thereafter, one of the guards brought a dummy which was placed as a decoy in Toita's bunk. He was told to hide in a plumbing fixture in the prison yard, wait until dark, climb over the fence, and walk to the highway where a car with two white men waited for him. They drove me to Berkeley, California, Tomita wrote, where a room was waiting for me. I was told that I would be contacted soon, and they left. The location of the room was a few blocks southwest of the university. On the outside, Defreeze quickly moved in with one of his girlfriends from the Black Cultural Association, Patricia Sultisic, also known as Msiz Moon. Using the social network he'd built in the BCA in Unicite, Defreeze began approaching other Bay Area radical groups with proposals for violent direct action that were as obvious of setups as the earlier rabbi kidnapping plot. According to Revolution's End, quote, Tim Finley, who wrote often on the SLA for the San Francisco Chronicle, filed a story that quoted many Berkeley community activists who met Defreeze after he had escaped from Solidad. Finley noted that a number of these radical organizers had their suspicions about Defreeze and included a quote from one person who said to Freeze came on so heavy that he might be a provocator. The public television station in San Francisco, KQED, ran a news report after the kidnapping of Patty Hurst, stating that a few leftist groups in the Bay Area were approached by Defreeze shortly after he escaped from Solidad. Defreeze startled them by offering his services as a hitman or contract killer. While late night bombings of presumably unoccupied buildings, which represented oppression had occurred with regularity years before via the Weather Underground and others, the idea of a radical hitman seemed incomprehensible to the groups that were approached. The KQED report said these activists suspected Defreeze of being a police agent. The San Francisco Chronicle had even more detail about Defreeze's outrageous offers to the radical left. It cited the fact that Defreeze had reversed the process with some Bay Area activists. Instead of offering his services as a killer, he asked if any of the groups would agree to be paid for a contract killing. Now, it's at least possible to imagine that a newly escaped convict who spent years stewing in the violent rhetoric of prison radicalism and is desperate for money but unable to work because he just escaped prison might actually dream up a scheme to make money by committing crimes for his newfound friends in the movement. But why would DFreeze offer to become a hitman and then turn around days or weeks later and try to hire a hitman from among the middle-ass college radicals of the Bay Area? And where would he get the money to do so? It's so patently absurd, so logically inconsistent, and so obviously intended to ent trap the groups he approached. It sounds like something an outofouch right-wing cop or FBI agent would think up to entrap radical groups he didn't quite understand.
The SLA's tactic of targeting non-violent individuals for arcane, ideologically vague reasons, on the other hand, seemed almost perfectly tailored to enrage average Americans. Even some of his closest associates in the SLA sometimes suspected that Defreeze wasn't really the one in charge. Theo Wheeler, a high-up member of the SLA, later told the San Francisco Chronicle, "I think he was being used by a lot of other people that felt certain things should be done, but they didn't have the nerve to do. And because he was an escaped convict and was mad, you know, at the world and what was happening to him that they used him." The original core of the SLA after Defreeze got out of prison, however, were two of his girlfriends who had no such doubts. Nancy Ling Perry, described as the chief theoretician of the SLA, whose ideology would become the basis of the communicates the group would later send, and Patricia Sautisic, the woman who opened her home to Defreeze after his escape. Willie Wolf, Russ Little, and Joe Romero were other early joiners from the BCA days. The crime that would announce the Symbionese Liberation Army to the world was just as incomprehensible and ideologically backwards as the hitman proposals.
Marcus Foster assassination - On November 6th, 1973, the first black superintendent of the Oakland school district, 50-year-old Marcus Foster, was walking out of his school district's headquarters with his superintendent, 38-year-old Robert Blackburn, when they were accosted by two people who opened fire with a shotgun and two pistols. Blackburn was rushed to the hospital and survived. Foster wasn't so lucky. The next day, November 7, the SLA's first communique was found among mail delivered to the Berkeley radio station, KPFA. The communicate was read aloud on the radio and would soon be published by both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. According to Revolution's End, quote, "The charges against Marcus Foster were three-fold, including the use in Oakland schools of a political police force, compiling of bio dossier through the forced youth identification program, and building of files for the internal warfare identification computer system. In fact, by using initial capitalization, the SLA suggested there was a specific computer system for identifying students. Nothing of the kind existed. And anyone who actually followed Oakland Unified School District activities and politics knew that Foster had taken bold steps to improve the status of non-white children, not deprive them of their privacy or other rights. Foster's discussion of security in the Oakland school district did not include weapons or police. In response to previous violent incidents on school grounds, Foster had created a $1 million plan for the integration of police, the juvenile court system, county probation, and parole departments, including peace officers and safety coordinators in selected schools, a truency coordinator and student ID card program. No one objected to it, either in the administration or in the community. It simply couldn't get sufficient funding. In October 1973 though, the California Council on Criminal Justice about to provide $275,000 to the district changed their previous agreement with Foster, saying in a revised draft of the new program that school security had to have a police background. Foster staff checked the revised draft and missed the change. Just before the October 9th schoolboard meeting, Foster caught the oversight, very upset. "He called me over and pointed it out," Blackburn remembered. He said, "Have you seen this?" The most incredible thing. The community objected strongly at the schoolboard meeting, having seen public mention of the change in the agenda. Foster explained what had happened and assured a concerned audience at the meeting that he did not and would not endorse the CCCJ provision on security with police backgrounds in schools. He even agreed to back away from an ID card proposal. Robert Blackburn said that the October 9 meeting was not any more rockous or emotional than most. Interestingly, Willie Wolf was sent to the meeting to report back to the SLA. If Wolf privately told Defreeze of Fosters's firm resolve at the meeting, no mention of it was ever made among the other SLA members. Many in the SLA later spoke as if Foster was about to create a school system not unlike apartheid South Africa. The assassination of Marcus Foster was somehow even more inconsistent with any kind of rational left-wing objectives than the rabbi kidnapping and the hitman discussions, if that's even possible. Foster was black, first of all, and a rather milkto-ast mid-level bureaucrat, unobjectionable and generally popular among the largely black constituency of parents he served. But more importantly, the SLA's main charge against Foster that he was instituting mandatory ID cards for students wasn't even true. And moreover, they knew it wasn't true because an SLA member had attended the very schoolboard meeting where the issue of ID cards was decided. And the reasoning the SLA offered for the assassination in their first commun was similarly objectively false. After the shooting, the Pacific News Service reported, "According to Bay Area journalists with connections on the left, and according to a group of activists who split from the SLA last fall, Foster had been marked for assassination by the SLA last summer, meaning the ID card allegations were likely a misdirection, as the SLA had settled on Foster as a target months before he raised the issue of security or ID cards in Oakland schools." The wider radical left reacted to the assassination of Marcus Foster with open suspicion and hostility towards the SLA. The editors in the respected journal of the 1970s new left, Ramparts magazine, put into print what many radicals were privately saying to each other about the assassination. Namely, the act itself was so brutal, so morally unjustifiable, and so politically incomprehensible that most Bay Area radicals assumed the SLA to be a cover for some right-wing or police group.
Even those who had previously considered themselves allies with or members of the SLA denounced them. A letter appeared in Berkeley's biggest underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb titled, "Exsymbian send letter to the people," saying: "We are ex-members of the Symbian Federation. We resigned collectively from the federation immediately after the assassination of Dr. Marcus Foster by resorting to abstract violence. The SLA not only separated itself from the rest of the revolutionary movement, but became the example to avoid the stereotype of the mad terrorist so indispensable to our oppressors to put us down even more with new laws and restrictions. We began to suspect that the war council, meaning in reality, Defreeze, was manipulated either by some local right-wing organization or the CIA itself. The secret decision to kill Marcus Foster and its execution, confirmed our suspicions.'' Even those in DeFreeze's inner circle, didn't seem to understand the rationale for attacking Foster. SLA member Russ Little would later say, quote, I remember saying to DFreeze, "Why? Why would you kill a black guy? Jesus Christ, man. It's like there's black people being killed all over the place, man. You know, if you're going to kill somebody, why in the world would it be him?'' It's a good question. Why would Defreeze, who knew very little about politics, much less obscure local schoolboard politics, choose Marcus Foster of all people, as a target? What could possibly have been his motivation? Shriber offers one explanation.
Colston Westbrook had condemned Marcus Foster back when Defreeze was attending the BCA in Vakavville. Westbrook even called him a fascist, a completely nonsensical charge, ignoring the white racism Foster diplomatically battled within the school district. A member of the BCA who was interviewed after the shooting said Westbrook was quote always murdermouthing about stopping Foster, screaming about his putting cops on campuses and giving identity cards to students. He should have known better. He knew how easy it was to get consled. Of course, maybe he wanted that. So Westbrook hadn't just chosen the names for DeFreeze and his new group, but he'd even picked their first victim. Westbrook had filled the bumbling apolitical convict to freeze his head with outrageous slanders against a bureaucrat in the local education system of all people and then set him loose with predictable results.
So, if the SLA had been an OP, then who was in control if it wasn't to Freeze? While Lake Headedley and the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee uncovered documentary evidence proving that Defreeze had been an informant for the LAPD under the Criminal Investigation and Identification Unit and the Criminal Conspiracy Section, which the department chief and Defreeze's handler, both admitted in media statements. This could at the very least explain Defrieza's early informant work and the New Jersey Black Panther entrapment plot. But there are other possibilities. In 1971, just a few years before the formation of the SLA, an informant for the criminal conspiracy and special investigation sections of the LAPD named Louis Tackwood went public with allegations that the LAPD had coordinated with the FBI to create a special political intelligence unit called Squad 19 that specialized in false flag, agent provocator, and other subversion operations targeting the political left. Tackwood maintained that in his role as an informant, he'd been induced to call in fake anonymous tips to the LAPD, one of which resulted in a police raid of a black Muslim mosque in LA. According to Tackwood, the LAPD had funneled money and guns to Ron Cororinga's US or with the understanding that they would be used in violent confrontations with the Black Panthers, identical to the FBI plots, which would later be revealed with the release of classified COINTEL profiles. Tackwood said he'd been sent undercover in a joint CI FBI operation to infiltrate black militant groups and spy on Berkeley city council candidates. He further claimed to have been involved in an abortive squad 19 plot to provoke violence and possibly even plant explosives at the 1972 Republican National Convention in San Diego as a false flag operation to provide the pretense for a national crackdown on radical groups. Tackwood had convinced members of the underground press of his credibility by allowing them to record his phone calls with his LAPD handlers in which they discussed their prior operations together, but the mainstream media never picked up the story. Could Defreeze have been intended as an agent provocator to entrap Berkeley radicals? An arrangement like this could explain to's bizarre hitman plots where he both offered his services for and tried to solicit contract killings.
As for Defrieza's time in Vakavville, the deputy director of the CIA, Frank Carluchi, admitted that Vakavville had been the location of MK search research prior to Defrieza's arrival there. However, the prison had continued its medical experimentation, behavior modification, forced medication, and thought control techniques well into Defrieza's incarceration there. Obviously, this is pure speculation, but it's entirely plausible that the CIA had continued conducting MK Ultra-like research in Vakavville under some other program name. The existence of MK Ultra wasn't revealed to the public until the summer of 1975 with the release of Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission reports. So any behavior modification experiments during Defrieza's Vakavville stay wouldn't have faced the kinds of suspicion and scrutiny that existed after 1975. The presence of Colston Westbrook, a known CIA operative and admitted FBI informant at this prison, which had ostensibly just ended its MK Ultra experiments a couple years earlier, is suspicious to say the least. The entire pretense of Westbrook's role at the prison was that he was a UC Berkeley professor, altruistically facilitating interactions between college students and black convicts. But when asked what subject he actually taught at Berkeley, Westbrook seemed to name a different discipline every time, suggesting his university placement may have been a cover story. And Westbrook was just backstates side from having helped run the Phoenix program in Vietnam, which was a counter intelligence and interrogation operation aimed at extracting intelligence from suspected Vietkong collaborators. It's not hard to imagine why the CIA or the FBI would want to implant someone with interrogation and infiltration experience into the Bay Area prisons where political radicalism seemed to be taking over. Westbrook admitted that the leadership of the SLA, meaning to freeze, was trained in the process of behavior modification, which casts his later treatment of Patty Hurst, the blindfold, the sleep deprivation, the druggings, and forced propaganda recitations in a much different light.
Another possible vector of federal involvement was the FBI's pris or prison activist surveillance program, a branch in the co-intelpro family of operations specifically targeted at prison-based radical activism. Although it officially launched in 1974, the program that became prisac existed at least as early as 1970 under different names. Prisac created a liazison program through which the FBI would establish ongoing contacts with key people in prisons throughout the country. They organized a symposium at FBI headquarters called the National Symposium on Prisons as a revolutionary target where the FBI would teach the tactics of counterrevolutionary warfare to prison bureaucrats from across the US while theyworked with administrators from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the CIA. At the 1973 symposium specifically, the prison administrators were taught to think about their work as a domestic war and then trained by people who had engaged in counterinsurgency warfare throughout the world. Counterinsurgency warfare like the Phoenix program. The operation that became prisac started as a classification in FBI files called black extremist activity in penal institutions. An appellation that showed up on the FBI files of the Black Liberation Army, the Black Guerilla Family, Geronom Pratt, George Jackson, and eventually the SLA. As for the intelligence motive in creating a group like the SLA, it's worth noting that the Black Panther Party was notoriously difficult to infiltrate because membership relied on a personal word of mouth and vouching system where admission was limited to black people who had demonstrable social ties to a specific neighborhood or to someone already in the Panthers. Hence why the LAPD was resorting to having people like Louis Tackwood call in fake tips against them. The few informants the government was able to cultivate were mostly long-standing members who were induced to provide information to get out of criminal charges. But the Panthers were generally extremely paranoid about informants and dealt with more than one snitch with extreme violence up to and including murder. Perhaps the government thought it would be easier to entrap black radicals in more serious charges if they were approached by peers like Defreeze with the credibility of having served time or committed violent acts for the cause. Louis Tackwood, the informant who revealed the existence of Squad 19, said that in exchange for his CI and FBI informant work, he was given a license to steal. In other words, the police gave him leeway to commit crimes below a certain threshold so long as he remained on informant. Maybe Defreeze started out with a similar arrangement. Hence, the numerous firearm arrests for which he walked away with probation. But then at some point, he started to believe his own hype as the general field marshall Cinque and burned the handlers who were protecting him. It is notable that the only arrest to actually earn DeFreeze prison time was the one in which he used an illegal gun the police had already confiscated from him once, suggesting Defreeze had a similar license to commit crime until it jeopardized the LAPD's plausible deniability regarding his informant work. By all accounts, Donald Def was politically ignorant and apathetic upon his arrival at Vagavville. And during his time leading the SLA, he left the actual political theorizing to Nancy Ling Perry and Bill Harris. Even after becoming the ostensible head of his own political terrorist group, Defreeze still occasionally called it the Lebanese liberation army and his strategizing seemed to flow backwards compared to a typical guerilla faction leader. Rather than becoming so outraged over Marcus Foster's policies that he felt violence was the only answer, the freeze appears to have decided on violence first and then Coloulston Westbrook just sort of aimed to freeze in the direction of Foster. And what's more, their whole justification for targeting Foster in the first place appears to have been a cover story since they already knew that Fosters's alleged crimes against the people, the ID card and school police policies had been cancelled well before his assassination. The mainstream media seemed to accept Patty Hurst's kidnapping at face value when the whole ordeal was fraught with contradictions. How did the SLA find Hurst's apartment in the first place if they were strangers? Why did it take weeks for the SLA to release their ransom demands even though that was ostensibly the whole point of the kidnapping? Why kidnap Randph Hurst's daughter instead of Randolph himself? The underground press and the citizens research and investigation committee recognized the absurdity of the situation immediately, but predictably the mainstream media coordinated to portray the wealthy Patricia Hurst as favorably as possible. The true history of the SLA has been obscured in a maze of classified programs, prison snitches, intelligence operatives, and agents provocator. So, parsing reality from rumor and misdirection is a difficult task. The SLA latched onto the nent radical movement of the 1970s and cartoonishly embodied its most irrational and destructive aspects, mimicking their lingo and aesthetics while pushing a political program that sounded incoherent and vague to outsiders. If DeFreeze's handler's objective was to make the radical left seemed deranged and violent to normal Americans, they couldn't have done a much better job. [Music] >> For those people who still believe that I'm brainwashed or dead, I see no reason to further defend my position. I am a soldier in the people's army. Patria Benzeros. Death is a fascist insect that plays upon the life of the people.
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