How the Patty Hearst Kidnapping Led to U.S. Police Militarization

by Brad Schreiber

Brad Schreiber has written or co-written seven books, including Becoming Jimi Hendrix, selected for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library. His latest book is Revolution's End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA Hardcover (Skyhorse Publishing, 20

Forty years ago, one of the most psychologically complex trials in US history concluded in San Francisco. Publishing empire heiress Patricia Hearst, kidnapped by an alleged left wing radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, locked in a closet and threatened, eventually joined the SLA, was involved with a bank robbery and other crimes and was sentenced to seven years in jail.

As a young man living in the Bay Area at the time, I knew there was a fuller story hidden from view. Alternative newspapers the Berkeley Barb and Los Angeles Free Press revealed SLA leader Donald DeFreeze had been an informant for the Criminal Conspiracy Section of the Los Angeles Police Department and a victim of behavior modification at the California Medical Facility, Vacaville. Most significantly, it was proven that Colston Westbrook, the black “outside coordinator” of a Vacaville prison group, who introduced eventual white SLA followers to DeFreeze, came to his job directly from Vietnam, where he worked for Pacific Architects and Engineers, in fact a proprietary company of the Central Intelligence Agency.

On May 17, 1974, DeFreeze and five white SLA members were found in a hideout in South Central Los Angeles, on the Watts border. About 500 law enforcement officers surrounded the small, yellow stucco bungalow and, making no attempt to negotiate a surrender, poured about 5000 rounds into the house, which eventually caught fire and killed all inside. DeFreeze, who condemned Westbrook in a communiqué and went rogue, was identified as a former informant by his handler, LAPD Sergeant Ronald Farwell who, a week before the shootout, told investigator Lake Headley that DeFreeze would be killed.

In a cruel irony, that very morning, John Kifner, writing in the New York Times, confirmed DeFreeze’s work as an LAPD snitch, quoting DeFreeze’s one-time attorney Morgan Morten who said it was “indicated he was cooperating with the police.” Kifner also corroborated Westbrook’s connection to the CIA. For years, I did research on this case, wondering when a book, documentary or feature film would detail the intelligence connections to the creation of the SLA. No one ever did.

And that is why I wrote the recently published Revolution’s End, subtitled The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA. It is an exhaustively researched book, one I knew would be challenged, despite my scholarship, as “conspiracy theory.” I could not have written it without the groundbreaking research of two men; The late, private investigator Lake Headley (Vegas P.I.)—who Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi called “the best P.I. on Earth”—dug deep into this internecine case. And author-journalist Dick Russell, who wrote a definitive expose in Argosy magazine, provided me a file of forty-year old, unredacted court records, letters, affidavits and other crucial documents that likely do not exist anywhere else on this planet.

In the mid-70s, Headley and Russell made clear that the reason Westbrook, with the logistical aid of select California Department of Corrections officers at Vacaville and Soledad prisons, enabled DeFreeze to create the SLA, was in order to delegitimize the New Left in California and most especially, the Black Panthers, founded in nearby Oakland. The SLA’s first major action, despite the incredulous protests of DeFreeze’s followers, was the murder of Dr. Marcus Foster, the uniformly respected, first black superintendent of Oakland schools, who not coincidently had been allowing input from members of the Panthers regarding East Bay schools.

Patty Hearst is the reason the surface story initially caught the attention of the media and public. No one understood that she was a closet radical who secretly visited DeFreeze in prison and whose kidnapping was retribution for breaking off an affair. But Hearst is really tangential to the importance of the events.

Aftermath of the shootout and fire May 1974

The shootout and fire in May 1974, broadcast live for two hours on the major networks with then-new mini-cam technology, showed the country for the first time the use of LAPD’s Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. Almost immediately, police departments around the nation began to hire the LAPD to train them in SWAT techniques. Thus, an intelligence operation that successfully undermined the nexus of leftist activity in the San Francisco Bay Area also became the beginning of the militarization of America’s police. And that exponential weaponization has had lasting repercussions in racially charged policing, in Ferguson, Missouri and beyond.

Revolution’s End not only draws a connection between the destruction of the false front SLA and police militarization but also examines the little known horrors of Vacaville prison in the 70s and the particular debasement of black prisoners there. Those even marginally familiar with the history of the CIA’s MKULTRA and similar behavior modification projects, which ran for two decades, will not be surprised that Vacaville received funding from the Agency. Before there was a so-called prison-industrial complex, Vacaville was a prison-medico-intelligence complex.

Vacaville Superintendent T. Lawrence Clanon admitted to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson that petty criminal DeFreeze agreed to “medical experimentation.” But in the context of the time, it made sense to ask black prisoners to become police agents, because Governor Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Evelle Younger feared the vitriolic, revolutionary fervor of the Black Panthers, Venceremos, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and other radical groups in the Bay Area. And the politicization of black prisoners in Northern California made it ground zero for a major undercover operation like the SLA, whose methods were suspected only by those in the radical left, underground.

While one can debate the trajectory of the tragic life of Donald DeFreeze, it is a shock to contemplate that the five followers who burned to death alongside him never knew he had been a police agent. However, the 70s use of drugs and other forms of coercion by the CIA and prisons were tools of the state, just as automatic weapons and armored personnel carriers are today, in our most economically ravaged neighborhoods.