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Four in the morning. On May seventeenth, nineteen seventy four, three and a half months after Patty Hurst's kidnapping, Donald de Fries, better known as sin QW, the leader of the Simbionese Liberation Army, knocked on the door of fourteen sixty six East fifty fourth Street in Los Angeles. He probably picked us home because there were lights on in the windows. Inside, four adults listened to the radio, played cards, and drank wine. Two children were asleep in their bedrooms.
Minnie Lewis, who lived in the house, answered the door. Sinq said that he and some friends needed a place to lay low for a few hours. Mini was sure, but Sinq offered her one hundred dollars and she agreed. Sinq asked the man playing cards if he could help them empty their vans. They brought in boxes of documents, sleeping bags, suitcases, and a foot locker. They also brought in weapons, a lot of weapons, nineteen shotguns, rifles and pistols,
and over four thousand rounds of ammunition. When the vans were empty, they stashed them a block and a half away. Later in the day, the Los Angeles police spotted the two SLA vans where they'd been hidden behind a burned out apartment building at fourteen fifty one East fifty third Street. It was a spot they stopped by frequently where criminals would drop stolen and stripped cars. The stash vans indicated to the police that the SLA was almost certainly in
the area. They checked several addresses before receiving information that Sinq and his companion were at the house at fourteen sixty six East fifty fourth. According to neighbors, people had been coming and going from that address all day. At five point forty that evening, the police surrounded the house. At five point forty four, an officer using a bullhorn called for the people inside the house to surrender. An eight year old named Tony emerged crying. Minutes later, a
man named Clarence Ross came out. In all, the police made eighteen surrender announcements. At five point fifty three, the shooting began.
The Los Angeles Police used a record amount of ammunition in that shootout.
Today, the air shook.
With gunfire and police realized what they were up against. Gunfire was so massive it was absolutely impossible to tell if you were safe or not. Then police went to tear gas bombs.
Fire was squires coming from the house.
I to have spread to the adjacent how it does go.
On, and it's possible at this point find that the flames themselves were setting off the tremendous amounts of ammunition that the SLA had stockpiled inside the house.
Several companies of the Los Angeles Fire Department were poised, but police would not allow them near the blaze because in spite of the inferno firing from the house continue. Is the body of Patty Hurst among the five found early tonight in a shot up, burned out home on fifty fourth in Compton Avenues. The experience of watching the holocaust and progress was more shocking, more terrifying than anything
I have ever experienced. A family spokesman said tonight that the feeling inside the Hearst Hold is that it's all over for Patty.
I'm to be bald and I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
That could betray the network. The underground network. But again I told him to I told him take take Eye.
Episode nine contradictions.
All six of the SLA members at fourteen sixty six East fifty fourth were killed in the shootout and the fire that followed. This included since mis Moon, Soltizik, Camilla Hall, Angela Atwood, Willie Wolf, and Nancy Ling Perry, but not Patty Hurst. Author Jeffrey Tubin.
As it happened, Patty Hurst and the married couple that was sort of minding her, Bill and Emily Harris, were not in the house, although that was not known for some time, and the three of them then went on the lamb. But at that point the Cyndiinese Liberation Army really just amounted to those three people. That's all that was left.
They were forced to retreat even further underground, eventually making their way across the country to a farm in Pennsylvania. They went dormant, but their influence was still felt. Two weeks after the shootout in Los Angeles, a memorial was held for Angela Atwood, one of the SLA members killed.
The setting was Willard Park in Berkeley, also known as Ho Chi Min Park after the North Vietnamese leader among the speakers at the rally was Popeye Jackson, one of the few members of the left willing to publicly align themselves with the SLA at this point.
And not only did they see too that this food was distributed, but I think a more important part that they did for everyone is proved that while we were always too many of us that are in community groups that have day in and day out conversations with the
establishment or the reuning class or whatever. You know, your particular political persuasion makes you call those, but not only do when we have our day in and day out of contact with them, we're always told the question of time, that you're right, we realize that people need.
These things, but it takes time.
But what a program is in the interest of the people of that class, it only takes a matter of days. It only takes a matter of days to move to get things organized and moved, to put cert goods in the hands of the people. But it's not until they feel pressured for whatever reason, is that thing done. What we want to stress is that, contrary to what said in the press, is that what happened with the SLA is not an end, but we hope it's beginning.
A future, frankly a beginning in terms of the fact that we hope certain things will be illustrated to people in this country.
Popeye went on to say that he was quote tired of armchair revolutionaries who theorize but don't act. At an event commemorating the death of a member of a wildly violent group, this was a provocative statement of intent. Popeye was signaling what he felt was the need for violent action. Why did Popeye say this? The SOLA had previously been regarded with caution. Now people on the left were trying to distance themselves from what seemed like unnecessary, unrevolutionary violence.
Was his support a tactic to maintain his viability as a contact between what remained of the SLA and Randolph Hurst or did he sincerely believe in the need for SLA style violence regardless. During this time, he was also acting as Sarah Jane's patron among the radical left. Jerry Spieler, author of Sarah Jane Moore's biography.
They wanted her to go to these various rallies and meetings of these radical organizations and try to get the names of people who are there and find out what they're plans. Are and then get that back to the FBI. So they wanted her to infiltrate these different groups, and she got Popeye to quote introduce her or take her to these things and say, this is Sarah Jane, and she wants to help out. She's taking notes and getting information back to the FBI. This was very cool on
her part. She was, you know, a spy basically, Sarah Jane felt very important about that, working with the FBI and being able to give them information.
The SLA shootout in Los Angeles happened in May. Two months later. July nineteen seventy four marked a turning point for Sarah Jane and her informant work with the FBI and, to a lesser extent, her work with Randolph Hurst in the San Francisco Police Department. That month, she took two big steps. The first was to distance herself from Popeye Jackson. Until this time, she'd been closely associated with him. In San Francisco. She'd volunteered to answer phones at the United
Prisoners Union, the organization that Popeye led. Popeye's wife, Pat Singer, said that Sarah Jane quote followed him around like a puppy dog. But something caused her to decide to make the split. Maybe it was that she felt used by Popeye. He had borrowed money from her, which he had not repaid. He'd also borrowed her car at one point and returned it with some damage that went unrepaired. The clash of
two strong personalities was probably also a factor. For all his talk of representing the people, Popeye was a chauvinist photographer and friend of Popeye Jackson Jacob Holt.
Popeye was a terrible sexist, so I don't know how he was able to get so many female white supporters.
As he did.
Later, explaining the split, Sarah Jane told the Berkeley Barb he treated people like shit. He wanted money in middle class life. He did not give people the same respect he expected from them. The second and more consequential decision was to disclose to a prominent member of the underground Left that she was an FBI informant. From the beginning of her work with the FBI, they had told her that their top target was this man, whom Sarah Jane
referred to as Tom. She has never revealed Tom's identity. In a retrospective nineteen seventy six, interview with journalist Andrew Hill for Playboy magazine, she talked about her growing sympathy with the people that the FBI was asking her to report on. I began to see that the leftist people I was working with were not enemies of this country. They were dedicated people working for qualitative change. They were
not evil. Yes, they recognized revolution. They were dedicated to the armed overthrow of the government because they did not think there was any other way to do it. I became aware of how dangerous what I was doing was in terms of those people. I was looking at people getting arrested on the basis of information like that which I was telling the FBI. I was looking at people getting killed. I couldn't do what I was doing any more.
The reality was that Tom was radicalizing her, bringing her in to the Maoist ideology that underpinned so many groups in the Bay Area. Maoism in the US took the form of a number of Marxist groups that roughly aligned themselves with Chinese style communism or selectively picked from that ideology. Its philosophy held some special attraction at the time. It drew a parallel between what radicals called the Imperial war
in Vietnam and racial oppression in the US. It connected domestic civil rights efforts with decolonization movements around the world, seeing it as an international struggle, and there was an expectation that a mass worker's revolt would take place and that the current MAOIs would serve as the leadership, and because of this needed to be educated in the correct political philosophy. Maoism was often about studying an education or re education. This is how Patty Hurst became a gorilla
and Sarah Jane Moore became a radical. As she tells the story of her disclosure, she informed Tom that she was, in her words, a pig, someone who worked with the cops. Tom didn't believe it. She understood his doubts. She didn't fit the profile of an agent, but Tom asked her a series of questions and satisfied himself that she was telling the truth. Tom told her that the FBI would never allow her to genuinely work with a radical left.
He said he needed to talk with his group to make a decision about what to do with this information. The decision of Tom's group was that I was a security risk to them and therefore they had to break off all contact with me. However, they believed in my sincerity and therefore they were making what to them was a dangerous decision. They would not tell anyone else I was a pig. In September, she told her FBI handler
about her confession to Tom. They initially dropped her as informant, but picked her up again a month later when they realized that she had maintained her relationship in the LEFT. She had less information to offer after her July disclosure to Tom. Sarah Jane also realized that her disclosure to Tom might have put her in danger. She talked about this fear in the Playboy interview. I began to wonder
if Tom's group might be setting me up. What he had done was contrary to all I had learned about the way PIG agents were treated when they were discovered. And you have to remember that violence and death were very real in the Bay Area. Then, Marcus Foster had been killed, Patti Hurst kidnapped, The People in Need program operated in a sea of threats and violence. Then there was the SLA's fiery shootout in LA. Three months after being reinstated, technically, at least to the FBI payroll, she
made another rash decision. In the same interview with Playboy magazine, Sarah Jane said that in January nineteen seventy five, she told a left wing lawyer named Charles Garry about her work for the FBI. He convinced her that her activities had done more harm than she realized, and that she had a duty to the people she reported on to come clean, especially if she wanted to continue to work
with organizations on the left. On this advice, she contacted people within the radical scene and told them about her informant work. In a Berkeley barb article, she claimed that she told around twenty five people, and Playboy Sarah Jane claimed she had contacted the heads of three groups as she had infiltrated. Of the three she contacted, one small violent organization called Tribal Thumb would become a major part
of her story to these groups. Sarah Jane both confessed to her work for the FBI up until July of nineteen seventy four, and provided what she felt was damning information about Popeye Jackson. Specifically, she disclosed his agreement with Randolph Hurst Hearst's intervention in his parole revocation case. In what she he claimed was Popeye's use of United Prisoner
Union funds for his own purposes. Sarah Jane claimed that two of the groups handled this news at the leadership level, but that the third spread her admission throughout the Bay Area Left. That third group was most likely the Vietnam Veterans against the War. While she had made this disclosure with the aim of continuing her relationships within the leftist organizations, their negative reaction angered her and recommitted her to her
work for the FBI. Paradoxically, the disclosure of her identity as an FBI informant to the left at large actually helped Sarah Jane's information collecting. She told Playboy, the faster word about me spread through the movement, the more new people came to me to ask me questions, and the more information I was able to give about them to the FBI. The interviewer followed up, asking if informing on
her friends bothered her. She replied, sure it did, and I don't know how how I handled it, and then rambled about how stupid those people were to talk to.
Her as an informant. Sarah Jane was part of a concerted FBI effort to infiltrate and disrupt political extremist groups on both the left and the right, but mostly on the left. This initiative began in nineteen fifty six as the infamous co intel Pro program that was technically shuttered in nineteen seventy one, but continued on in practice through the mid seventies.
Co intel Pro is a bad acronym for counterintelligence program. When we talk about counterintelligence, the idea is this goes beyond the more passive monitoring or surveillance of particular groups in order to uncover what they might do, and it moves to the more active disruption of these groups, like seeking to proactively defuse these groups' ability to organize, ability to act. I'm David Cunningham. I am a professor of
sociology at Washington University in Saint Louis. Co intel Pro was predominantly targeting left wing groups, and so almost all of the co intel Pro programs focused on left wing quote unquote threats, ranging from the communist part of USA to the Socialist Workers Party, to the New Left and anti war movement, to civil rights and black power organizations that the FBI deemed black nationalists and hate groups.
And it was the very existence of these left wing groups, rather than their actual capacity to undertake meaningful action that caught the eye of the FBI. Say what you will about the rhetoric of some of these groups, they were tiny and their goal of fomenting a national revolution was comically unattainable.
Because when the FBI targeted the whole spectrum of groups on the left wing, their aim almost across the board,
unilatterally was to eliminate these groups. They really wanted these groups to be gone, and so even when these groups seemed weak and ineffectual, the FBI would kind of relentlessly go after undermining them and continuing to undermine them because FBI Director Jagrew Hoover always saw them as having the potential in the right climate, of having a revolutionary potential, of being able to lead or further a revolutionary threat.
The goal of the FBI when they went after right wing groups was significantly different.
When the FBI targeted the right wing groups. So the ku Kluxplan in particular, the issue was not whether they existed or not. It turned out the FBI didn't have any problem with the KKK being active and being organized. What they really wanted to do was control those groups.
So the aim of cointelpro against the Klan to be more towards placing informants in these groups, which they were very good at, and trying to get these informants placed highly within the KKK so they could in effect run the clan in a way that the FBI could see as predictable and could see as controlling unpredictable violence against civil rights workers and others.
Over time, changes in the size and tactics of the revolutionary groups provided the FBI with new challenges.
As we move into the later nineteen sixties and into the nineteen seventies, when a lot of these targets were maybe seen as more explicitly revolutionary or radical in their orientation and oftentimes took an underground approach to organizing, so it was less about building, you know, mass events with marches and things like that, and more about cell based action or something that would look more insular and underground.
The FBI was less and less effective trying to burrow into those groups with informants, which does not mean that they stopped trying, and if anything, they tried harder in that environment, but with much more mixed success in terms of their ability to do this effectively.
You can see this in Sarah Jane's recruitment. She was an outsider to the movement and someone who didn't really fit in with the radical scenery. Not only was she outside the normal demographic of black ex convicts and young white radicals, but her personality guaranteed that she would stand out as well. Recruiting members from small, intense groups, though, was difficult. This is Rick Riley, who will hear more from next episode. He was a member of Tribal Thumb,
one of the groups Sarah Jane confessed to. Here, he talks about a recruitment approach by the FBI to become an informant. He had been sentenced to a one hundred and twenty day prison stint and the FBI let him sit a month before an agent came to talk with him.
Their plan was to send me to prison for a little bit to scare me, you know, scare straight. They came to visit me while I was in prison. After I had been there like thirty something days, they came to see me and again made the offer to me, And this time they wanted me to escape and use utilize travel thumbs escape resources. And then betray that, you know, because like travel Thumb was involved in jail breaks and
prison breaks and stuff like that. So they wanted me to go to a camp facility and get them to help me to escape, and that way I could betray the network, the underground network. I told him to take a y.
I think that sort of tactic is really central to what the FBI would try to do. I mean, they knew that the placing of informants had a direct value to them in the sense that these informants could act directly and provide information directly. But they also knew that the global effort to place informants had an indirect effect, which is that it created a climate that really sowed suspicion and potential dissent around the presence of informants generally.
And part of that indirect effect was trying to use informants and others to accuse non informants of informing. And sometimes they would do things that would signal to others that someone was being treated like an informant by law enforcement, so providing a light sentence releasing them from jail when
their co conspirators remained in jail. Things like this oftentimes they would try to do for folks who were not informants, precisely because that would be a signal to other members that they must be an informant, and that's why they were treated in that way. And so the FBI clearly knew that this could be effective in an indirect way, and that they could exploit the climate that they themselves had created.
Even unsuccessful attempts to recruit served to increase the fear in the radical community that there are informants in their midst a paranoia that would play out in the coming months. For Popeye and.
Sarah Jane after the break.
Oh well, yeah, we definitely had privileges. I would call it middle class upbringing, but maybe, you know, maybe a little more so economically. We lived in a really nice home neighborhood in Menlo Park. I'm Lee Darby, author of Stars in Our Eyes.
Stars in Our Eyes is a memoir that focuses in large part on Lee's sister, Sally Void.
When I was a freshman in high school, you know, just right on the cusp of adulthood, we moved over to the town of Alamo, which is near Walnut Creek because my dad got a new job. We just had a kind of a privileged life and intact family and friends would come over and hang out and it was just we really had a good time. There wasn't any real angst other than the usual teenage stuff. She had a real sense of justice. She would confront and tell people off, and she was very popular. She didn't let
transgressions happen. You know, if somebody said something rude or not nice, she would call them on it. She was just that way, just really opinionated, you know, she wanted to be right. Everything kind of changed. We went to different colleges. You know, we've been joined at the hip since early age, being only one year apart in school. I went to University Pacific and she went to U
see Santa Barbara. So both of us joined sororities, and we just loved campus life and she was active in it and she ended up being the president of her sorority her senior year. She then went and did her fifth years what they call it, to become a teacher,
and she went to Berkeley and everything changed there. She saw people that were underprivileged and she wanted to do something to help, and she became interested in plight of black people, especially, And after she got her teaching credential, she started teaching in Vallejo, and there's a large black population over there, and a friend told her about this literacy program at San Quentin, and so she became active in this teaching prisoners to read, and so she was
volunteering over there, and that's how she met Popeye Jackson, because he was an ex con and he was involved in several different programs over there at the prison. Just completely unclear about what she thought she was doing with these people. I think she talked to my brother a little bit about it, but I don't think he even recognized the name Popeye Jackson either. But somehow we knew that she was involved with a group of ex convicts, and we all felt like she was out of her element.
We saw the danger, she just saw the potential to help.
In March of nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane moved into an apartment that had previously been home to her friends Joyce and Paul Halverson. The Hoversons had also been friends with Camilla Hall, a member of the SLA who was killed in the LA shootout. Paul had earlier spent two weeks in jail for refusing to testify in front of
a grand jury investigating Camilla Hall. The apartment that Sarah Jane moved into was just two blocks from Popeye's apartment building, and as had so often been the case in her life, she made an impression on her neighbors. The New York Times interviewed a woman named Evelyn Jebaut, who was described as the local Avon lady. She said that she never called on Sarah Jane, explaining, she seems so strange. She was so quiet and unfriendly, and this is such a
friendly neighborhood. Of course she don't go out much after dark, but it's a friendly neighborhood. Also in March, Popeye had a close call photographer Jacob Holt. Talking about Popeye.
He himself certainly made me paranoid that this that personal towards out for and I think, as far as I remember, he was the one who, Yeah, he warned me about FBI spices in his union and so on, but he ignored it all. He didn't he didn't care that had already been an assassination at himt on him and Pat Singer before that excellent Sally voice card which was full of bullet holes, and so was such a nice suburban teacher.
I couldn't believe that had the guts to go into all this, even after that assassination nets him.
Popeye, his wife Pat Singer, who was six months pregnant at the time, and two others were driving through the Mission District in March of nineteen seventy five. One of those other two people was likely Sally Voy, though this was never reported. As they drove, at least one shot was fired at the car. Reports vary about the number of shots, with some people saying the car had several bullet holes. Lee Darby again talking about her sister Sally Voy.
Somebody took some shots. I'm not sure why Popeye Jackson didn't have a car, but somehow she was taking him, you know. I guess all this happened on weekends because you know, she taught school, but she was taking him somewhere, and there was other people in the car too, I think, And so somehow we've I think she told my brother about that, So somehow we found out about that, and
so we were further concerned about her safety. But she just waved it off and just thought she was John Wayne dodging apache arrows, and it was all kind of fake, and she just never thought that bullets would catch up to her and the bullet the bullet holes got repaired somehow and nobody got killed. But it was definitely a severe warning that none of them heeded.
Three months later, on June fourth, nineteen seventy five, a mysterious group called the New World Liberation Front sent an open letter to KPOO, a community radio station in San Francisco. The letter, which KPOO read over the air, laid out accusations against Popeye Jackson. It claimed that Popeye displayed what it called four contradictions against the revolutionary cause. The first was that he received privileged treatment by the courts and
prison system. This was related largely to a shoplifting offense for which Popeye had received sixty days in jail. The writers felt that sentence was too short. The second contradiction was that Popeye projected a capitalist image. This probably concerned his habit of wearing fancy clothes, though his defender said these were generally homemade. He also at this time drove a Catillac, which was another symbol of this capitalist image.
The third contradiction was urging people to commit premature acts, in other words, being a provocateur, remember, for instance, his advocating violence at Angela Outwood's memorial. The fourth was for quote subjective criticism verbal trashing, which has to do with the way in which disputes were aired. In the letter, the NWLF says, we welcome comradeley criticism of our acts, but we reject trashing. It is divisive and neither further's
dialogue or revolutionary theory. The letter concluded, we feel Popeye got weak and turned undercover pig. It was an accusation that would have been true about Sarah Jane. It was less certain about Popeye. The first two of the letters points, the short sentence and the capitalist image, were certainly part of the documents that Sarah Jane had supplied the underground groups in January. The third may have been as well, or was an inference made from the first two points.
In short, at least some of the charges levied by the New World Liberation Front could be traced back to Sarah Jane's accusations. Again, this letter was received by radio station KPOO on June fourth. On the evening of June seventh, Popeye and Sally Voy attended a benefit party for the radical group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Late that night, as Sally dropped Popeye off at his apartment, they were murdered.
What happened was Popeye Jackson was sitting in a car at forty one Albion Street in San Francisco, and young lady about ten years old was looking out the window after she heard gunshots us and she saw a tall, thin black male shooting a gun into a car. Seated in that car was Popeye Jackson.
This is retired San Francisco Police detective Frank Fausan. He worked many of the big homicide cases in San Francisco.
He was in the driver's seat. Next to him was a young lady. Turned out, the young lady was a school teacher elementary school teacher in the Valeo School District, which is in the East Bay of San Francisco. The sad thing about Sally voy and I never did confirm it. I felt like she was just collateral damage. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time when this assailant stepped up outside the driver's side window and started shooting.
We eventually found five casings on the ground next to the driver's door, so it indicated that he was using an automatic, which turned out to be a nine millimeter automatic. Well, we come to find out later there was another individual, another blackmail, standing on the opposite side with a handgun, a revolver which wasn't ejecting shells, and he fired through that window. Both victims ended up with multiple gunshot wounds and died right in the position that we found them.
We knew right away it was two forty five am Sunday morning when these gunshots rang out. It was a June eighth, nineteen seventy five. This was definitely assassination. It was not a robbery. There were two suspects laying in wait to take down Popeye Jackson. One had the revolver, the other one had the automatic. Witnesses told us again both suspects were black mail.
Identification of two black men turned out to be wrong, but at this point the investigation had barely begun. Two blocks away, Sarah Jane heard the news and realized that Popeye's death changed everything for her. It had been six months since she had provided a number of underground groups with a letter accusing Popeye of being a police informant. Now he was dead, assassinated, as she told Playboy Magazine. When he was killed, all I could think about was
that I had fingered him. When I hung up the phone after hearing the news, my immediate thought was, oh, my god, I've killed Popeye. That same week, I got another call. The voice on the other end said, you're next next time on Rip Current.
Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary Katherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sanoff, Show art by Jeffney as Goda and Charles Rudder. Producers Jesse funk Rema O'Kelly and Noams Griffin. Supervising producer Trelie Young, Executive producers
Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick. Hear episodes of Rip Current early completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and visit our website, ripcurrentpod dot com.