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Mom, Dad, I'm okay. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they've washed them up and they're getting okay. And I've caught a cold, but they're giving me pills for it, and so I'm not being starved or beaten or unnecessarily frightened. I've heard some press reports, and so I know that Steve and all the neighbors are okay, that no one was really hurt. I'm with a combat unit that's armed with automatic weapons, and.
And I'm ah, there's also a medical.
Team here, and I'm there's no way that I will be released and let until they let me go. So it wouldn't do any good for somebody to come in here and try to get me out by force. These people aren't just a bunch of nuts, and they've been really honest with me, but they're perfectly willing to die for what they're doing. And I wanna get out of here, but I the only way I'm going to is if we do it their way. And I just hope that you'll do what they say, Dad, and just do it quickly.
I mean, I feel pretty sure that that I'm gonna get out of here if everything goes the way they wanted to. And I think you should feel that way too, and and try not to worry so much. I mean, I know it's hard, but I heard that Mom was really upset and and that all everybody was at home, and and I mean, I hope that this puts you a little bit at ease, so that and that you know that I that I really but I really am all right. I just hope I can get back to everybody really soon.
And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
Meetings. To the people and fellow comrade, brothers and sisters, my name is sin Q, and to my comrades, I am known as.
Sin Episode six, Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people. At just after nine pm on February fourth, nineteen seventy four, a woman and two men, all armed, burst into an apartment in the building near the University of California campus in Berkeley. The intruders beat and tied up a man named Stephen weed and a neighbor, Steve Suanaga, who had come to see what was causing the disturbance. The intruders then grabbed the
young woman who lived in the apartment. She was nineteen years old and a sophomore at Berkeley. They dragged her down the stairs and bundled her into the trunk of a car. A witness described what he saw in the street.
We heard a scream, two or three shots. So three of us that were in the house ran downstairs, and one of the guys the street said the guns are loaded and to get the hell off the street. So we got off the street, and we saw a second carpool up, and I ran out again, and the other fellow try to look at the license, and they started shooting, So I just fell on the ground.
Did you have a feeling they were shooting at you or just shooting in any direction?
They could seem to me they were just shooting, So everybody would get off the street and not look at the plates or give any positive identification.
Were there a lot of people on the street at that.
Time, Yeah, I'd say about twenty people were probably roused out of their house just by the shots and screams.
This abduction and the fate of the victim would soon preoccupy the nation.
There's been a big kidnapping on the West Coast. The victim is Patricia Hurst, the daughter of newspaper executive Randolph Hurst and a granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hurst.
Before February nineteen seventy four, most of America probably hadn't heard of Patricia Hurst or even her father, Randolph, but people would have known the Hurst name, and certainly William Randolph Hurst.
William Randolph Hurst, who invented the Hearst Publishing Empire, own the largest private residence in the United States, the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, which is now open to the public. I'm Jeffrey Tubin. I'm the chief legal analyst on CNN, and I'm the author of American Heiress, The kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hurst. His life was the basis of perhaps the greatest American movie ever made, Citizen Kane by Arson Wells.
He's that clearly your idea how to run a new paper.
I don't know how to run a newspaper, mister Betcher.
I just try everything I can think of.
His family was among the richest in the United States, if not the world at that time. So the Hurst name, while still famous today, was really magical in the seventies. So if you wanted to get attention, you would try to do something with regard to the Hearsts, and that's what the SLA decided to do.
This was, of course, well before the advent of twenty four hour news and the ending news cycle, but in the context of the news media at the time, Patty hurst kidnapping was a huge story. This was a product of both the Hearst fame and the novelty of a high profile kidnapping a rare occurrence in the US.
There was a tremendous amount of attention, and there's no doubt it was a real kidnapping. She didn't know the SLA, she didn't have any connection to those people.
Three days later, a plain, white envelope was delivered to KPFA radio in Berkeley. Inside was a communicate from something called the Symbionese Liberation Army West Regional Adult Unit. It claimed responsibility for kidnapping Patty. Here, Patty's father, Randolph Hurst, reads from the letter at a press conference.
The United Federated Forces of the Cydianese Liberation Army armed with cyanide loaded weapons, served in a restward upon Patricia Campbell Herds. All communications in this court must be published in full in all newspapers and all other forms of the media. Figured to do so and danger the safety of the prisoner. See any attempt be made by authorities to rescue the prisoner or to arrest or harm any
SLA elements. The prisoner is to be executed, and in capital letters under that is death to the fastest insect that praise upon the life of the people.
The SLA promised further communications to follow. The country wanted to know what exactly was the Symbionese Liberation Army.
The area south of San Francisco what is now known as Silicon Valley, but also over to Oakland and San Jose. That whole region was home to a tremendous number of really dangerous radical groups in the nineteen seventies. The Hell's Angels were there, the Black Panthers were but were started there, and the Symbionese Liberation Army was a very small offshoot of that radical world. It was started by an ex con named Donald de Friese, who thought of himself as the leader of a revolutionary group.
Defriese had been imprisoned at the California Medical Facility at Vaccaville, a medium security prison. He'd been given a six to fourteen year sentence for stealing a one thousand dollars bankers check. While he became radicalized in prison, Defrize was not a leader in the prison radical scene. In fact, his attempts to acquire some semblance of power were opposed by George Jackson, perhaps the most important prison radical in California, if not
the country. But things changed for Defreese after he escaped from Solidad State Penitentiary on March fifth, nineteen seventy three.
I'm Brian Burrow.
I'm an author of I think seven books, including Days of Ray, which I think came out in twenty fourteen, which was a look at violent radical groups that went underground and started bombing things in the nineteen seventies.
He managed to escape from Solidad in seventy three, thinking that the texts that he'd read, whether Cleaver or Fan or George Jackson, thinking that that's the way the world was outside the prison wall, not realizing that it wasn't anymore. That the America that he escaped out into in nineteen seventy three and made his way to Berkeley was not primed for bloody revolution as perhaps it had been in nineteen sixty eight.
He recruited a very small handful of adherents, and they called themselves Symbionese because he thought of the word symbiosis as a bringing together, and so he made up the word Symbionese and liberation Army was in keeping with the sort of radical.
Of that time.
Some of Defries's recruits had either been a part of or associated with Vinceerramos, a radical organization that advocated armed struggle. It was run and mostly comprised of white radicals, but a central belief of the group was that former black prisoners, because of their alienation and training and violence, would play
a leading role in this struggle. These former black prisoners were idealized for having survived in the prison system, which was perceived as the most extreme and violent example of society's racism and exploitation. This experience was the preparation that would allow them to be leaders in revolutionary groups. This is Britney Friedman, Assistant professor of sociology at the University
of southern California. Talking about these former prisoners, she mentions political prisoners, which in this case doesn't mean people who are incarcerated because of their politics, but inmates who became political and social activists in prison and were often seen by the authorities for their activism.
To survive is considered a badge when someone gets out because you have survived what it would be considered to be the worst of the worst, because you've survived what people know happens in society. Right, so we know that in society for over a century, we've had connections between law enforcement and the ku Klux Klan, often one and the same across the country, and that being a joint alliance to eradicate freedom movements and people you know, have
survived that. I think with political prisoners, when they come out, people are thinking that someone was able to survive that in generate knowledge from that while being behind the.
Cage, and when these prisoners were released or escaped, they held an authenticity, a certain authority that attracted young white radicals, people who.
Might be coming from a white middle class or white upper middle class background, who might have an affinity for certain political ideals, but they've never put them in practice. They've never survived them in practice. They just read them in a book. They're not embodied. And I think having a close connection with someone where it is embodied, the where they live, the way they've survived, the way they talk, there is a charisma to that that draws people in.
This dynamic between black ex convicts and young, middle and upper class white radicals would play out in the story of the SLA.
Donald the Friese was black, but everyone else in the SLA was white, and they were all young, so they hadn't been involved in many things for very long. But they were an eclectic group from around the country who had sort of drifted west, like a lot of young people in that period, and they all got together and started planning to do what they thought of as revolutionary acts.
As a symbol, the SLA adopted the image of a seven headed cobra. Each head represented an SLA value, self determination, unity, cooperative production, and so on. They introduced themselves to the public in November of nineteen seventy three with a crime that showed both their willingness to use horrific violence and the incoherence of their political philosophy. After the break.
The kidnapping of Patty Hurst brought the SLA national attention for the first time, but people in the Bay Area had to look back only a few months to recall their initial act of violence.
The bizarre and awful beginning of the SLA was the assassination of Marcus Foster, who was the Oakland School superintendent, an African American himself, who was really trying to improve Oakland school system, which was known as one of the worst, not just in California, but in the whole country.
Foster, along with his deputy Robert Blackburn, were recruited from the Philadelphia public school system and we're a reason for optimism in the Oakland community. Here Foster appears on the Oakland radio show The Open Pulpit with Reverend Charles H. Belcher.
I think that in everything we need to build the eagle strength of our young people, especially our damaged youngsters, where society shouts at them that this is too good for you. That's the second class. Citizenship is your natural lot. And you see that reflected in symbols of racism in terms of housing patterns and the quality of homes in
certain sections of the city. This kind of symbolism tends to be degrading and debilitating and denigrating, and whatever you can do to offset that by giving a person a sense of his power, by helping him shape a positive image of himself, to help him develop a sense of belonging to a church or to a school, or to some institution that is pro social, and really building that so that he feels that when he opens his mouth
to talk, someone is going to hear him. You're on your way to making that child a fine individual and pulling out of him the potential that's there.
Jared Kobec, author of Motor Spirit and Where to Find Zodiac.
If I'm not mistaken, I believe he was the first African American superintendent in Oakland. He was there specifically to just get poor kids, particularly poor black kids, a better education.
But Defreese developed conspiratorial beliefs about some of Foster's new policies and decided that the SLA needed to assassinate Foster.
This is the extent of their political thinking, right, that this person is somehow the fascist insect preying on the people, when clearly, by any possible measure, he's not.
On November sixth, nineteen seventy three, After an uneventful school board meeting, Marcus Foster, along with the deputy superintendent Robert Blackburn, was ambushed in the parking lot at the Oakland School Administration Building. Three SLA soldiers Defriese. Nancy Ling and mis Moon Soltiesek opened fire as Foster and Blackburn approached Blackburn's Chevy Vega. Ling fired two shots with a Walther PP three eighty, missing once then hitting Foster in the leg.
Defree shot Blackburn twice with a shotgun, seriously wounding him but not killing him. Soltiesik then advanced the wounded Foster, firing at him with the thirty eight the fatal shots. The police would later find that the bullets that killed Foster were tipped with cyanide. They fled two blocks to where two other SLA members, Joe Ramiro and Russell Little
waited with a getaway car. They escaped late on the night of November seventh, barely twenty four hours after the attack, Radio station KPFA received a letter from the SLA detailing the reasons for the Foster assassination. Two newspapers also received copies of the letter. The letter was immediately recognized as authentic because it referenced the use of cyanide laced bullets,
a detail that had not been made public. The contents of the letter revolved around the proposed placement of armed guards in Oakland schools and the implementation of a student I D system, which they believed would allow information to be entered into a clearly fictitious federal initiative called the Internal Warfare Identification Computer System. If they thought this was going to win them supporters, they were wrong.
It gives you a sense of what Patty Hurst was brought into, which is just a group that is senselessly violent, and she gives over.
To it again. Author Brian Burrow.
I mean, they.
Literally thought that they could overthrow the government and change the world. Twelve of these nobodies in Berkeley, and you know, for every person that they recruited in Berkeley, I'm sure
there were fifteen that laughed at them. I mean, nobody took this group seriously until a faithful night when they managed to kidnap Pettyhurst, and that changed everything, that made them into a joke that it actually done something noteworthy, that it had actually done something that no radical group up until that point had done, had executed an action in this case of kidnapping of a very wealthy person
that resurrected the entire underground radical movement. The SLA erupts out of nowhere to give a second and entirely unexpected birth to the underground movement.
And it all happened right there in Berkeley. The SLA had pulled off an action that drew intense national attention. The question was, now that they had their hostage, what would be their demands. The demands arrived on February twelfth, in the form of a letter and an audio tape. All the SLA members took on new revolutionary names. We don't need to go through them, ma, all but Defreese's SLA name was sinqter to the leader of a revolt on the Spanish slaveship Amistad in eighteen thirty nine.
Greetings to the people and fellow comrade, brothers and sisters. My name is sin Q, and to my comrades, I am known as Sin. I am a black man and a representative of black people. I hold the rank of General Phield Marshall in the United Federated Forces of the
Symbonese Liberation Army. Today I have received in order from the Symbonese war counsul the Court of the People, to the effect that I am ordered to convey the following message in behalf of the SLA, and to insert a tape word of comfort and verification that Patricia Campbell Hurst
is alive and safe. That an action of good faith be shown the part of the Hurst family to allow the Court and the oppressed people of this world and this nation to ascertain as to the real interests and cooperative attitude of the Hearst family, and in so doing show some form of repentance for the murder and suffering
they have aided and profited from. And this good faith gesture is to be in the form of a token gesture to the oppressed people that they aid the corporate state in robbing and removing their rights to freedom and liberty. This gesture is to be in the form of food to the needy and the unemployed, and to which the following instructions are directed to be followed to the letter.
It ended in the way that all of the essla's communicates ended with this phrase, death.
Of the fascist insect that praised upon the life of the people.
This audiotape included Patty Hurst explaining that she was as yet unharmed in her understanding of the situation. You heard a part of this at the beginning of this episode. The tape also included the piece you just heard with Donald de Frees. Using his nom de guerre Sinq, he demanded that Patty's father, Randolph Hurst, feed the poor in
the Bay area. The specifics were daunting. The token gesture that Sinq mentions, in fact, is to provide seventy dollars worth of food to everyone in the state on welfare or Social Security or several other programs. Experts believe that the costs would run to about three hundred million dollars. This was far beyond Randolph Hurst's means. Again, author Jeffrey Tubin.
The Hurst family decided to try to meet the demand, at least somewhat, and they set up an organization very much on the spur of the moment called People in Need, which was a shoe string operation to try to spend really a great deal of money of feeding the poor of the San Francisco area.
Hurst contributed five hundred thousand dollars to the effort, and the Hurst Foundation added another one point five million. This is what they had to work with. The initiative was called People in Need or PEN.
In fairness to the Hurst family, no, it was difficult to set up something like this on the fly since it had literally never been done before, especially under the pressure of this kidnapping. But even by that standards, it was kind.
Of nuts to run this spur of the moment program. Hirst brought a man named Ludlow Kramer down from Washington State, where he had served as Secretary of State. Kramer had previously run a successful private program called Neighbors in Need, providing food and basic staples to unemployed aerospace workers in his state. His work in Washington, though, was dealing mostly with middle class families who had suffered a sudden employment emergency.
This would be an entirely different challenge here. At a press conference outside the Hearst residence, Creamer asked for donations to augment the food purchased through the PIN funds.
We are asking today that any producer of any commodities that wants to donate to the People in Need program to contact us. We have been given thirty two trucks to date, and we'll be able to pick that food up tomorrow. We have sixteen phones in operation as of now, and.
We believe we'll be able to.
Take care of the calls that take place.
The only thing that we have to pay for under the laws of this country is the telephone system. If anyone want to donate what that cost, we would gladly accept that.
They did set up an operation in a very short period of time in a warehouse down by the water, very close to where the San Francisco Giants Ballpark is today, and they did start these food distributions.
That's up.
How are you give me a one shot.
Of the black guy when you can't.
Here's Loudlow Kreamer at the Pin warehouse addressing the press about plans for the first food distribution.
We hope to open those sites at approximately ten AM and we hope to within those eleven sites have between twenty and twenty four thousand bags of groceries to distribute. We believe that the type of food meets the demands of the SLA. We have meat, poultry, fresh vegetables, fruit.
The first PIN food distribution was a disaster. Veteran San Francisco community organizer Calvin Welch.
The successful food distribution happened as a result of the activities of a community coalition, the People in Need Program created a mess, and these people had no idea how to distribute food. They actually threw it off the back of a truck. It was a joke and it was humiliating to our people. There were community based organizations in Bayview that could have very effectively distributed that food that the People in Need Program didn't even know exist.
Four distribution sites had been designated around the Bay area. At one of the sites in Oakland, the Shabbaz Bakery, which was run by the Nation of Islam, a food riot broke out. People climbed into the trucks and threw food into the surrounding crowd. Chaos ensued, people were injured.
Hey, man, I was fucked up.
What they did.
Man doing the food out the talk they should have done that.
That was found.
I was upsetting.
It was really found.
When the trucks were empty, a crowd moved on Shabba's Bakery. There was no more food to distribute, but they were demanding their share, and the bakery workers apparently felt as though they had to distribute food from their own supplies. The Black Muslims who owned the bakery sent Pinnabill for one hundred and fifty four thousand dollars to compensate them for supposedly giving away seventy five tons of fish and
eight hundred and twenty cartons of eggs. Pinn eventually wrote a check for ninety nine thousand and twenty six dollars, though it wasn't clear that this food had actually been given out. These are difficult days, Louvelo Kramer commented. The
PIN operation itself verged on spinning out of control. Different groups tried to take command of the food distribution, including the Black Panthers and the People's Temple, led by the Reverend Jim Jones, who in nineteen seventy eight would lead more than nine hundred of his followers to commit mass suicide in Jonestown. Guyana. Volunteers also came from other radical organizations and from the ranks of idealists who wanted to
help feed the poor. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times described visiting the PIN headquarters.
The dominant impression is of a paranoid security consciousness, a vast concern for favorable public relations image, and the confusion of a dozen petty officers and aging radicals who wander about with plastic cups of coffee in one hand and clipboards in the other, issuing mutually disregarded orders and declarations of policy emanating apparently from some unknown source.
And into this arrived a suburban divorcee in her mid forties who would twenty months later take a shot at the President. Her name was Sarah Jane Moore. She was, according to Patty Hirst fiance Stephen Weed, shrill, abrasive, and totally unpredictable. She had arrived at Penn to volunteer her services as a bookkeeper. She said, God sent me next time on Rip Current.
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