The Ordeal of a Political Prisoner

For all its vicious history, kidnaping in the U.S. has been a crime forcing victimized families to trade suitcases full of cash for at least the hope of recovering a loved one unharmed. Last week one of the nation's most celebrated families, the Hearsts of California, continued trying desperately to deal with an altogether different abduction: perhaps the first political kidnaping in U.S. history. Members of the revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army, who dragged 19-year-old Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment and flung her into the trunk of a getaway car, at first ordered her father Randolph to feed all the needy of California as a condition for her return. It was a demand that not even the Hearst millions could possibly meet.

As Patricia's ordeal dragged through a second week, life at the Hearsts' $300,000 cream-colored stucco mansion in the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough took on a grim order. The 15 rooms, many of them decorated with antiques from the fabled San Simeon mansion of Patricia's grandfather William Randolph Hearst, were filled with agonized friends and family. Among them were Patricia's four sisters and her fiance Stephen Weed, 26, who had been badly beaten by the kidnapers. FBI agents set up a command center in the library, which was crammed with six telephones on the chance that Patty's captors might call. Throughout the week Randolph and Catherine Hearst--putting up a remarkably courageous front despite their fears--stepped before TV cameras to provide bits of news.

The S.L.A.'s first communique, delivered by mail to an FM radio station in Berkeley, also contained a tape cassette on which Patricia had recorded a message to her parents beginning, "Mom, Dad, I'm O.K."

Sounding tired, possibly drugged and scared to death, she went on to describe her captivity. The S.L.A., she said in a quivering monotone, kept her blindfolded most of the time, often with her hands tied, but "I'm not being starved or beaten." She noted that her captors had automatic weapons and warned against any rescue attempts by police. "These people aren't just a bunch of nuts," said Patricia. "They're perfectly willing to die for what they are doing. And I just hope that you'll do what they say, Daddy, and do it quickly."

She was followed on the recording by a man calling himself General Field Marshal Cinque (which he pronounced sin-cue). He said that Hearst, editor of the San Francisco Examiner and executive-committee chairman of the news-paper-and-magazine chain founded by his father, was "the corporate chairman of a fascist media empire." Furthermore, Mrs. Hearst, a regent of the University of California, had helped invest university funds, he said, "in corporations that have interest and do gain profit from robbery, oppression and genocide." As usual, the S.L.A. statement was filled with far-left jargon and was accompanied by the group's standard demand that its propaganda be printed and broadcast in full by Bay Area newspapers and stations. News executives had little choice except to accede to the demand in view of the S.L.A.'s final, chilling admonition concerning its "prisoner of war." Cinque* declared himself "quite willing to carry out the execution of your daughter to save the life of starving men, women and children of every race."

The first solid break in the case came with the probable identification of Cinque as Donald D. DeFreeze, 30, an escaped prisoner who had been serving a five-year-to-life term at California's Soledad prison for assault and robbery.

Inmates who knew DeFreeze reportedly said that they recognized his voice from the tape, and at least three witnesses to the kidnaping were said to have identified him by photo as one of the two black men who, accompanied by a young white woman, burst into the Hearst apartment. Authorities were also looking for another prison escapee, The-ro M. Wheeler, 29, a jail acquaintance of DeFreeze's, who at one time was active in a California revolutionary Maoist group known as Venceremos. At week's end an intensified search for the two escapees, both of whom have been at large for months, had turned up nothing.

Ransom Demands. The S.L.A. communique early in the week demanded that Hearst provide $70 worth of "top" meats, vegetables and dairy products to everyone in California holding one of several certificates attesting to neediness: welfare cards, Social Security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled-veteran cards, Medi-Cal (the state's version of Medicare) cards, parole or probation papers and jailor bail-release slips. The food was to be distributed through supermarkets for three days during each of the next four weeks, and the S.L.A. suggested that the program be supervised by several groups, including the Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Black Teachers Caucus.

The plan was modeled on ransom demands made in recent years by the Argentine E.R.P. (Revolutionary Army of the People), which has demanded food, clothing and medical equipment for poor areas from corporations in return for freeing kidnaped executives. The S.L.A., however, had wildly raised the stakes. The largest amount known to have been demanded by the E.R.P. was $10 million from Exxon last year. California officials estimated that the bill for the state's 1.9 million welfare recipients alone would come to $133 million and that other people deemed eligible by the S.L.A. might make it as high as $400 million. Even if the logistics of finding and distributing so much food could be worked out--a doubtful proposition--that kind of money was certainly beyond even Hearst's means.

The family's strategy was to attempt to find a compromise. Urging Patricia over television to "hang in there, honey," Hearst promised to make "some kind of counteroffer that is acceptable."

He said that he was hoping to find a way "to give the food to people who really do need it, and not assume that anyone with a card can go in."

Evidently, that general idea met the S.L.A.'s approval. At week's end, the Hearsts received a second tape recording from Patricia relaying a conciliatory message: her captors would not insist, she said, that Hearst comply to the letter with their original instructions. Quite aside from relieving Patricia's family from an impossible task, the communique was encouraging evidence that the S.L.A. was bargaining seriously and might eventually set terms within reason for her release. "I think I can get out of here as long as they [the FBI] don't come busting in," said Patricia. She also urged her mother to stop wearing black clothes on TV. "It's really depressing to hear people talk about me like I'm dead."

A major reason for the S.L.A.'s backdown on the food issue, however tentative, may well have been the scorn heaped on the original demand by a vast majority of those designated as beneficiaries. Many welfare recipients said that they would refuse to take any food paid for with "blood money." Chavez sent a message to the Hearsts that "my prayers are with you." Leftists from Black Panther Leader Huey Newton to Actress Jane Fonda condemned the S.L.A.'s use of violence as damaging to the radical cause. Some too conveniently forgot the New Left's more-than-occasional condoning of violence a few years ago. Yet most seemed to agree that the S.L.A.'s demand was as illogical as it was cruel. Said Communist Angela Davis: "If you want to build a mass movement against racism, poverty and imperialism, you don't do things that alienate people."

Despite the optimism generated by the week's second S.L.A. message, there lurked the possibility that the kidnapers would yet demand other fantastic "signs of good faith" before releasing their captive--if it ever does. Patricia hinted in her first message that there is "an analogy" between her abduction and the police capture of two suspected S.L.A. members now charged with the murder last November of Dr. Marcus Foster, the black superintendent of schools in Oakland. Authorities expect that Patricia's kidnapers may well ultimately demand their release. Beyond that, some law-enforcement officials despair that, following the skyjacking syndrome, the S.L.A.'s sudden notoriety may already have loosed the seed of example for future senseless terrorism--even if, like kidnapers in the great majority of cases handled by the FBI, this group is caught.

*A nickname used by more than one radicalized black. The original Cinque was an African who in 1839 led a revolt aboard the slave ship transporting him to the U.S. The New York Post noted last week that the plot of Black Abductor, a novel of politics and pornography published in 1972, closely resembles the Hearst kidnaping. In the book, an heiress-coed named Patricia is held for ransom by a racially mixed group of radicals in America's "first political kidnaping."

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