The rally for the SLA in a pie-shaped corner of Ho Chi Minh Park on June 2 had a rather odd sense of nostalgia. Some of the best-known Berkeley radicals were there, but they skirted the edges of the disappointing crowd, looking for a familiar face from anti-Vietnam War days. Some of them carried infants in their arms. They still had that Berkeley style of rough-hewn casual clothes, heavy boots. From a nearby building, the FBI filmed the gathering.

Someone lined up bottles of Acadama Plum Wine along the front of the stage, a memorial gesture to Field Marshal Cinque’s penchant. The speakers, mosly in their early twenties, eulogized the SLA dead. Rudy Henderson was there and spoke lovingly of Ling Perry. But no one who spoke said he had Cin, or even Patricia Hearst. The only person who knew one of the SLA was the blond, jut-jawed organizer, twenty-seven-year-old Kathy Soliah.

Soliah had worked with Angela Atwood at Great Electric Underground restaurant, a businessman’s luncheon retreat in the basement of the world headquarters of the Bank of America in San Francisco. They both had acting ambitions and both quit their jobs at the restaurant in 1973 because their boss insisted they wear brief, ruffled skirts with V tops to titillate the bored afternoon clientele of bankers and brokers. Angela went from that job to her first encounters with DeFreeze in those days when the SLA was writing its Declaration of Revolutionary War. Kathy waited until the first series of SLA communiqués began appearing after Hearst’s kidnapping before joining with a few others in the formation of the Bay Area Research Collective. At first, BARC devoted to exposing by memoranda the corrupt dealings of large corporations and government. But gradually, BARC also came to be a conduit for new underground groups like the New World Liberation Front, who

needed a safe means of "cleaning" and disseminating their communiqués so they could not be traced.

Wearing sunglasses, her hands clasped around the

front shoulder strip of her purse, Soliah eulogized the courage

of her dead friend. And then she announced simply, "I am a soldier of the SLA." Some in the crowd cheered. One or two reporters raised their eyebrows, but nearly everyone took it as a symbolic gesture. Months later, newspapers would sift through their files for the picture of Soliah standing on the platform that day and publish it with more resounding speculation. It was weeks. after the picture had appeared over and over again that someone noticed the middle-aged woman with her arms crossed standing in the crowd behind Soliah, cheering her speech; it was Sara Jane Moore.

The FBI had already invested enormous resources in their search for Patricia Hearst and the SLA. Special Agent in Charge Charles Bates had been involved in some major cases, including the assassination of President John Kennedy and the Watergate cover-up, but be had never marshaled so elaborate an investigative army. But, like almost everyone else in the crowd that day, bureau agents paid no special attention to Kathy Soliah’s declaration.

Mizmoon Soltysik had brought in Camilla Hall, Angela Atwood was recruited by the Harrises; Russ Little attracted Nancy Ling Perry, and on and on The links were stronger personally than politically. Thus it was important that day in Ho Chi Minh Park that Kathy Soliah declared herself a close friend of Angela Atwood. For Angela had had a close relationship with the Harrises ever since the days they were all students at the University of Indiana.

Soliah eventually would involve her sister Josephine and her brother Steven with the couple associated with her friend Angela. And they all would link up with Patty Hearst. The rally that day also brought the trio together with sports activist Jack Scott and a circle of his trusted friends, Including Wendy Yoshimura.

Kathy Soliah’s background was similar to those of SLA members. The second oldest of five children born to Palmdale, California, high school teacher—coach Martin Soliah and his wife Elsie, she was popular in high school. An honor student, president of the Pep Club, Kathy earned a degree in education at the University of California at Santa Barbara and while there met and fell in love with James Kilgore, gangly, free-spirited son of a well-off San Rafael, California, businessman. Kilgore would change Soliah’s life. She

with him first to live at what her parents complained was a commune in Southern California. In 1972 Kilgore and Soliah, both twenty-four, moved on

to Berkeley. Despite her degree and her ambition to be an actress, like so many others of her generation in Berkeley, she never found a job that could be said to match her education.

Had FBI agents checked the background of Kathy Soliah they would have found that in 1973 she frequently visited Willy Brandt, an inmate at Soledad

Prison. Kilgore had been a character witness at Braunt’s trial. Brandt and two companions—Michael Bortin and Paul Rubenstein had been arrested in

1972 and charged with illegal possession of explosives.

They had been arrested when Berkeley police, acting on a tip from neighbors, raided a garage and found the cache. They also seized Brandt’s girlfriend’s Volkswagen and in the glove compartment found an unsent

-communiqué claiming credit for the allegedly planned bombing of the Naval ROTC building at UC Berkeley. The communiqué, a stylistic forerunner of those later sent by the SLA, was signed by the "Red Army." The owner of the Volkswagen, an indicted coconspirator in the plot, was not apprehended. She was Wendy Yoshimura.

Brandt was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. Rubenstein and Bortin served brief jail terms and were released on probation. Yoshimura slipped into the underground.

Among the people Brandt had known and admired while at Berkeley was former track star Jack Scott,who had a Ph.D. in philosophy. An unconventional

athletics coach, the balding Scott was something of an anti-establishment sports celebrity by the tune he was assigned the directorship of the sports program at Oberlin College in 1973. There he confounded the sports establishment by hiring black coaches, including Tommie Smith, who, along with John Carlos, had been censured for wearing black socks and raising their fists, in the black-power salute on the winner’s stand during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Scott attempted to de-emphasize winning even in the school’s competitive sports. His reputation as a sports activist was most solidly rooted on three controversial books he authored decrying the dehumanization of athletes in professional sports. And be and his close friend Mikki McGee founded and ran a clearing house for their radical views of American athletics. They called it the Institute for the Study of Sports and Society(1SSS).

Brandt corresponded with Scott when the latter was at Oberlin. The athletics director also persuaded a mailroom attendant to write to Brandt at Soledad. That young attendant was Jay Weiner, also an admirer and protégé of Scott’s.

Back in the Bay Area, the SLA trio was having difficulty acquiring money and shelter. They had never been able to penetrate such established groups as the Weather Underground Though the dead SLA soldiers were eulogized, those yet alive were viewed as adventurist bandits and worse. Because they were traveling with Hearst they were considered fugitives to be avoided. In their revolutionary document "Prairie Fire," the Weather Underground mentioned Joseph Remiro and Russell Little, but took no direct notice of the SLA. They appeared to condemn the army’s activity as mere provocative terrorism.

Contrary to one magazine’s "exclusive" account, the Harrises did not attend the rally that day in Ho Chi Minh Park. It would have been a singular act of derring-do. For the park blossomed with federal agents, undercover police, and FBI informants. And there were squads of news reporters with microphones picking their way through the crowd.

Jack Scott was in Berkeley that day. Though he had associated with members of Venceremós, Scott did not fancy himself a revolutionary. Brandt was his only

associate whose zeal for the Movement had landed him in prison. Brandt’s girlfriend, along with Michael Bortin and Paul Rubenstein, was indicted with him in 1972 for allegedly plotting to bomb the ROTC building at Berkeley. Bortin and Rubenstein drew jail sentences and parole. The female co-conspirator escaped arrest. Through Brandt she met Scott, who, according to some, provided transportation I shelter for her in early 1973. Brandt’s fugitive girlfriend was Wendy Yoshimura.

In June 1974, Scott put the word out through the Berkeley underground that he was interested in meeting the SLA trio. The word also drifted out that Scott could be trusted and that he had a large sum of money available.

Scott received word from the underground that a small group of people needed his help. He had little doubt that it was the SLA. He made sure that the contact knew that he was interested in writing a book about the SLA.

Scott received a call to meet the "friends" at an apartment in Berkeley.

Bill and Emily Harris had found it relatively easy to move about in public. With make-up skills learned at the hands of Angela Atwood, they posed as stooped and wrinkled elders or hip blacks moving with ball-bearing strides. Bill sometimes walked around undisguised, for his wanted poster pictures were more than two years old, and he was much shorter than people imagined him. In public his stature, so long considered a plague, now gave him conscious advantage.

Like Remiro and Little, and even Cinque, Harris tried to compensate for his height. Shouting orders, he strutted around Patricia Hearst and Emily with lamppost bearing, head tilted back, shoulders as squared as his drill sergeant’s had been in boot camp. His parents recalled that all the time he was growing up, their son had always wanted to be taller. "It seemed that he

wanted to be six foot eight," his father said. And Harris remembers that his father was "insensitive" about his height complex. "Yes, I had an inferiority complex about my height," Harris said. "My father was a crud. I hated that dude. I was a runt all of my life and he just made me feel more like a runt."

When Scott met the trio that June day, he too was ~ surprised at Harris’s shortness. Tania was easily recognizable, a fact that had kept her mainly indoors. Viewed together, there was no mistaking the SLA trio, although they had changed their names: Tania was "Pearl"; Emily was introduced as "Edna"; Bill was "Frank."

The SLA apartment was a virtual arsenal. Uneasily at first, in the midst of the pistols and shells, sandbags, shotguns and rifles, Scott and his hosts discussed his offer for a book, their predicament, and what he could do for the three fugitives. The conversation periodically strayed back to the shootout in Los Angeles and "Cin," whom they now seemed to revere as a "messiah." They seemed completely lost without him.

Tania over and over again declared her love for "Kojo." (Willie Wolfe) She spoke of the shootout with bitterness and pledged to kill "pigs" to avenge Kojo’s death. She was the most outspokenly militant, impatient, and threatening with Scott. Tania opposed any notion that the group disarm and enter a dormant period of reorganization. Scott suggested that they consider putting away their guns and resting at some distant sanctuary. The trio picked up "liberal" vibrations from Scott; Tania spit out the label with particular venom.

Scott offered to help, providing they traveled unarmed. The Harrises wanted the guns to be kept in the car trunk for use only in serious encounters with the law. The argument went far into the night.

When Scott expressed a desire to leave, the trio, convinced that he might attract attention; demanded that he wait till morning.

The following day Scott made the arrangements. They would go to the East Coast in two cars, the Harrises in one, Scott, Tania, and Scott’s parents in

the other. The Harrises made no demands that Tania a be especially watched.

On the drive east the newspaper heiress described her mother to the Scotts as a pill-popping hypocrite who struggled into bed on Saturdays and rose for

Mass on Sundays. Her father, she said, had avbandoned her by refusing to meet the SLA food ranson. Mrs. Scott grew more and more sympathetic with the embittered Tania. She offered grandmotherly advice, tried to cheer her up. Daily she helped her with the dark wig and the make-up.

Occasionally, the Scotts would hint that maybe Tania would like to give herself up and return home; she steadfastly rejected all such suggestions and implied that her main reason for staying with the SLA was to one day avenge Kojo’s murder. She spoke often of that inevitable attack on the police.

The elder Scott insisted on driving the entire trip.

Tania, the fugitive guest, was allowed veto power over hotels too suspicious, gas stations too well lighted. Tania also wanted veto power over what routes to take and all stops to be made. Irritated at the way she was wearing on the nerves of his parents, Scott attempted to discipline the heiress.

But she reminded him that while Bill and Emily were absent, she was in command. At motel stops, the women would wait in the car while Scott and his father reserved two rooms. On the first night that Tania and Jack checked into their room he explained to her that though the arrangement was necessary, he saw no requirement for them to become sexually involved. "That’s all right," Tania said. "I couldn’t get up for it anyway after what happened to Kojo." Tania played commander throughout the four-day trip. She insisted on knowing where everyone else was at all times.

Upon reaching New York, Scott complained bitterly about Tania’s domineering attitude. As they walked along a Manhattan street Emily informed Scott that Tania was indeed "third in command." At top volume Scott protested his enlisted man’s rank. Emily scolded him for his "liberalness" and lack of dicipline.

Throughout the relationship, the trio reminded their benefactor that it had been they who had endured trial by revolutionary fire. They spoke often of I dead comrades, the shootout and escape in Los Angeles, the troops awaiting their leadership back on the West Coast. But when they soared too high in revolutionary flight, Scott pulled them back to car with the reminder that he had "saved their asses."

The trio and their benefactor lived in two separate apartments in Manhattan, one of which had t rented by Scott’s common-law wife, Mikki McGee. Scott wanted to get started on his SLA book, but the trio, accustomed to the West Coast and the sprawl of the Midwest, grew increasingly testy in Manhattan. Scott decided to rent a farmhouse for the summer in eastern Pennsylvania. The Scotts paid a New York fireman $2,000 for the summer use of the farmhouse situated on a ninety-acre spread. There was a windmill and a small, shallow pond too muddy for swimming.

Bill had his army together and he took command. He affected more and more the speaking style of Cinque. He continued shouting orders to Emily and Tania, even when he was standing a foot away from them. They exercised daily and held foot races, most of which Tania won. And, in the style of the old days, they practiced target shooting with BB pistols. The SLA troopers also studied the revolutionary books and history texts they had brought along, and pored over their extensive newspaper- and magazine-clipping files.

Scott resisted taking up with the SLA and their revolutionary discipline. However, he did suggest that they shift their base of operations to the East Coast. Tania and the Harrises refused. They were selecting targets for their return home. They stayed in touch with Bay Area "revolutionaries" probably Kathy Soliah, her boyfriend, James Kilgore, and her sister Josephine and brother Steven. Soliah’s New Dawn Collective was setting up a network with the New World Liberation Front and the SLA return was being arranged.

Throughout the Summer, Tania remained the most explosive and self-righteous member of the trio. Revenge stayed on her mind and she grew increasingly restless. Bmily was the most sensitive and a regularly broke down and cried when gripped by despair.

Scott occasionally invited friends to the farmhouse. Former Olympic athlete Philip Schinnick stopped by, as did Paul Hoch, an athlete friend who was living in Canada. Jay Weiner, who had corresponded with Brant, was also introduced to Tania and the Harrises. But Scott's young protégé panicked, wanting nothing to do with the Hearst affair. The Harrises and Tania scorned and sometimes insulted Scott’s "jock friends." But another friend of Scott’s who came to the farm house was immediately accepted by the trio. The new guest was Wendy Yoshimura.

During her long years in the underground, Wendy had evolved into a tempered and committed feminist. Bill Harris emitted a bit too much male chauvinism

for her liking, and she pointed this out to the intelligent, impressionable Tania. It was the beginning of a split between Tania and her former kidnappers.

One of Scott's friends taped an interview with Tania. But the Harrises seized the cassette, partly for security reasons but mainly because the heiress had spoken in inflamed rhetoric about her yearning to murderously attack "pigs". She delighted in her militant identity. As the summer wore on, Scott and Mikki began to regret each additional day with their SLA guests.

The contacts on the West Coast postponed several SLA departures. Things, they said, were not ready. The group left the farmhouse and returned to New York City, where the trio was supposed to have been picked up and transported across the country. By now Scott was considering another book, having despaired of doing one on the SLA. He flew to Portland to visit basketball superstar Bill Walton, relieved that he was finally rid of the SLA.

But a call was waiting for him when he deplaned. He explained to a puzzled Walton that an emergency required him to return to New York. The Harrises and Yóshimura had transportation, but the West Coast connection wanted no part of Tania. Scott agreed to transport the heiress once again. She wanted to travel disguised as a pregnant wife. Scott rejected the idea, feeling that Tania, never having been pregnant, could at some point along the way inadvertently reveal her cover. But the chain of command once again outvoted the benefactor. So Scott and his "pregnant wife," wigged and in make-up, journeyed to the Las Vegas rendezvous.

They arrived on schedule at 10:00 P.M. The rendezvous was scheduled for 11:00 P.M. It passed without contact. Midnight. At 12:30 there was a call from the Bay Area: the contact had been unable to make the trip.

Scott took Tania to a nearby hotel, where she called the Bay Area associates. She was picked up by the Berkeley team the next day.

On the same day Tania was picked up, Scott’s older brother Walter, who had often bragged of having been an assassin for the CIA and overseas corporate interests, visited his parents’ home in Las Vegas. He had been drinking. He detected something suspicious about their attitude and, in a rage over their reluctance to explain it, he began beating his mother and shoving his father around. They blurted out the name Patty Hearst. But before his questioning got advanced, a neighbor burst into the house with a pistol.

Months later, when Jack refused Walter a loan, the older brother went to the FBI with vague knowledge of the Pennsylvania farmhouse and his parents’ cross country trip with Patty Hearst.

By fall, police and the FBI had their nets spread all over the country. Randolph Hearst scarcely passed up an opportunity to get his Patricia home. He sent out secret offers to finance his daughter’s escape to a haven friendly to a U.S. fugitive, say Cuba or Algeria. Another scheme had him conferring with former mobster Mickey Cohen, who had once lived in Cleveland, in an effort to pin down his daughter’s exact location there. "I think she was pretty well situated in the black community there," said Cohen.

No one came close to the Pennsylvania farmhouse. Sacramento was an unlikely place for the Harrises to be in November 1974. Remiro and Little were soon to stand trial there for the SLA murder of black school superintendent Marcus Foster.

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Nevertheless, later that month Bill and Emily Harris, as Mr. and Mrs. Carol Simmons, rented half of a shabby bungalow near the student quarters of the city. They, and possibly Patty, had laid the groundwork for what some say was an attempt at rescuing their Comrades. Records at Sacramento City College show that in September three students applied for ID cards for the 1974—75 school year. They used the names Gary Lanphear, Ellen Broudy, and Sue Hendricks. The ID’s would later be found on Harris (Lanphear), Emily (Broudy), and Patty (Hendricks). It is not clear whether the trio themselves obtained their false ID’s. At the same time, James Kilgore was acquiring a student ID card under the name Robin Stewart at Contra Costa College northwest of San Francisco, and by coincidence, Colston Westbrook, who had once been placed on the SLA’s death list, was teaching his version of "Black English" at the college.

A February 25 holdup of the Guild Savings and Loan Company in Sacramento drew little public attention. In a fairly routine robbery, two armed men, aided by a third man who waited in the car outside, sped away with $3,700. By April the Little-Remiro trial had started in Sacramento. Security precautions were unusually heavy; The two SLA soldiers expressed "contempt for this court" and were granted their request to watch the early stages of their trial on a television set in their cells. They probably had no idea that their SLA comrades were in town, expropriating funds for the revolution and planning a way to get the defendants liberated.

The Crocker Bank in Carmichael, a nearby suburb, was robbed of $15,000. Three men armed with shotguns and carbines were led by a rough, foul-talking

woman. Wearing ski masks, they entered the bank shortly after 9:00 A.M. Witnesses remember that the woman’s mask was blue around the eyes and red

around the mouth and that she had a green scarf wound around her neck. One of the men barked orders for customers to, "get your noses in the rug." Myrna Opsahl was just a little slower than the rest. A shotgun blast struck her in the stomach. She died. hours later.

From the beginning, police suspected ‘that the military precision of the robbers indicated that it was the work of a politically motivated gang. The killing of Mrs. Opsahl might even have been an accidental hair-

trigger reaction. But police theory leaned in the direction of Tribal Thumb as the group behind the robberies. Tribal Thumb, a secret cadre of young revolutionaries, had first emerged in 1972, even before the SLA was formed. Although none of their known members had been convicted, it was widely suspected that Tribal Thumb had pulled a number of military style bank robberies. The suspected leader of the group was Earl Satcher, ex-convict and former friend of George Jackson. He was arrested immediately after one such bank robbery in Berkeley but was later released for lack of evidence.

The three surviving SLA members, generally thought to be in another part of the country, were not among the police first suspects.

A short time after the robbery, and only blocks away, police captured two getaway cars used by the bandits. One was a 1965 Mustang stolen April 7 in Sacramento. The other was a 1967 Pontiac Firebird that was to be a major source of embarrassment to the police. Less than ten days before, on April 12, an apartment-house manager became curious about the young woman who rented one of his garages in an alley near the freeway. The woman said she wanted to store her mother’s car there, but made a special point of being sure the garage contained an electrical outlet. Ever since he had rented it to her, the manager said, lights were frequently on in the garage well into the night. Police quietly checked out the vehicle—a 1967 Pontiac Firebird. stolen that same week in Oakland. They staked out the garage thinking they had come upon a stolen car ring. But the police were not there very early on the morning of April 21 when the car was driven to the bank robbery. The apartment-house manager described the woman he rented it to as five feet two, in her late twenties with light-brown hair. The subsequent police composite drawn up was a remarkable likeness of Patricia Hearst.

Still, police were doubtful this had been the SLA. No communiqué had followed the robbery; no effort had been made by the robbers to claim it as another victory for the people’s army. And anyway, the female bandit was too tall to have been Patricia Hearst.

By January Walter Scott had told ‘what he knew to the FBI and agents searched every millimeter of the Pennsylvania farmhouse, dusting every, conceivable spot for fingerprints. They found a set that matched Bill Harris’s. A dog supposedly sniffed out the scent of Patricia Hearst in a bed where she had slept months earlier. A set of fingerprints belonging to Wendy Yoshimura, the almost forgotten fugitive, brought new hope for the agents’ pursuit. Wendy would prove to be the key to locating Patty and the Harrises in San Francisco.

But for the moment, the FBI went after Jack Scott, Mikki McGee, and all of their known associates who possibly had journeyed to the farmhouse. Weiner was picked up in March near Oberlin College and threatened, he said, by armed FBI agents. Within days he was telling the Harrisburg grand jury all he knew about Hearst and the Harrises at the farmhouse. He emerged from., the courthouse and warned his companions of what he had told the grand jury. He expressed "solidarity" with his "comrades Tania, Teko and Yolanda. . . Jack and Mikki." After two hours before the grand jury, Weiner said, "I told the truth because the FBI already knew it."

It was the FBI’s first big break in the Hearst case. Scott and McGee proved much harder to crack. They dropped from sight for a time, emerging April 9, with Bill Walton and their attorney, to complain that they and their parents and friends had been harassed by the FBI. Scott’s father refused to testify before a San Francisco grand jury. Phil Schinnick also refused. "I have committed no crime," he said. "I know nothing of the whereabouts of Patricia Hearst or any other SLA member."

John Cottone, the U.S. Attorney in Scranton, Pennsylvania, threatened Scott and his friends with fugitive harboring indictments. But the pace of the Pennsylvania threat slowed when Scott and his parents and friends refused to testify.

Sacramento police meanwhile pressed their investigation of the Carmichael bank robbery. None of the eyewitnesses got a clear look at the robbers; there were even conflicting versions of who fired the fatal shot. The best evidence that emerged was a set of fingerprints found on the license plate rim of the Pontiac getaway car. The prints belonged to James Kilgore of Berkeley, Kathy Soliah’s boyfriend.

On May 4, 1975, a- pleasant young couple calling themselves David Ian and Mary Holcomb rented an apartment in Daly City, the town where Patty was first taken after her abduction. They said they planned to attend San Francisco University after spending the last year in ‘Oregon. This time, Bill and Emily Harris didn’t even bother to acquire student ID cards.

While the path of Bill and Emily from Pennsylvania .to Sacramento to Daly City is relatively clear the trail of Patricia Hearst is not. Certainly, she had left Pennsylvania with. Scott and without the Harrises.

One account has her driving southwest with Jack Scott and being picked up by the "new team" and sheltered

the Bay Area. The likeliest members of the "new team" seem to have been Kathy and Josephine Soliah, Wendy Yoshimura, Kathy’s easygoing brother, Steve, and James Kilgore.

By the time the Harrises had set up housekeeping Daly City, the Bay Area SLA, with its new soldiers---Steven Soliah, Wendy Yoshimura, James Kilgore, and Kathy and Josephine Soliah—was operating as a unit of the New World Liberation Front. Following the shootout in Los Angeles, Bill Harris said in the June 7 taped communiqué that the remaining trio would "proudly take up the banner of the New World Liberation Front." A short time after that, four women from the NWLF’s "aboveground contingent" began making contact with a Bay Area radical who had been friendly with the six slain members of the SLA. Potential recruits were told that the NWLF would operate with bombs, more in the style of the sophisticated Weather Underground. However, there was no great rush for membership. On September 3, 1974, the front claimed responsibility for bombing the San Francisco offices of Dean Witter & Co., the stock brokers. And since that beginning, the front had planted some two dozen bombs in California, including a December 20, 1974, explosion at the Union Bank building in San Francisco.

The structure of the NWLF remained vague to police authorities, and its membership was often exaggerated by its claims. Underground sources, however, revealed that the front basically served as an organizational title under which "combat units acted." These "combat units," as in the SLA, consisted mainly of ex-convicts and young white, dissidents. About half of

their members were white women, with an occasional black, Asian, or Chicana (Chicano?). Names of individual i some not even known to each other, were dten L changeable, employed to confuse police agencies entice the media. "We have taken up many c names, but we are not hung up on names," Bill Harris. said.

The front units, each with less than half a dozen members, shared an impatient thirst for action, not mere political discussion and theorizing. They sought to forge revolutionary change here and now, using the bomb, the knife, and the carbine against such targets as government and finance buildings and utility companies. It was this impulse more than any other that separated these heirs of the SLA from the older, more established Leftist groups, seeking "scientifically" build a Marxist party organized against the capitalist system.

"The SLA and what’s left of them have always made up of the worst practitioners of jailhouse politics coupled with the most impatient leftist on the outside said one Marxist scholar in Berkeley.

The title New World Liberation Front was first us by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver in 1969 in describing a political organization of Third World people radical whites. After Cleaver broke. with the Panthers and inspired the formation of the Black Liberal Army, that group’s West Coast leader, Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt, came, to symbolize the fighting spirit of the NWLF. "G" had commanded the Los Angeles ~ Panthers in a five-hour shootout with the city’s SWAT squad in 1969.

In 1974 SLA soldiers .Little and Remiro, held at the adjustment center in San Quentin while awaiting trial for the murder of Marcus Foster, became close friends and political allies of a convict there. The trio, was known to have close contact and influence with at least one unit of the NWLF.

During the spring and summer of 1975, the front took credit for several major bombings in the Bay Area. One involved a police car hit with a pipebomb loaded with black powder. Use of NWLF communiqués did not remind police and reporters that Harris, back in June of 1974, had declared th SLA a unit of the front.

.In the spring of 1975, at least one unit of the NWLF dared to have returned to the SLA’s policy of spilled blood instead of bricks and mortar.

Wilbert "Popeye" Jackson, a president of the United Prison Union, had played a key role in the Hearst food giveaway. He had been a close friend of Sara Jane Moore, the FBI informant who had been assigned to spy on Jackson and other radicals working with the program. Jackson drew criticism from leftists

• it was rumored that he was trying to bargain with Hearst to locate Patty, provided that the newspaper

publisher use his influence to keep Jackson’s parole from being revoked for a drug violation. His parole was not revoked and some radicals theorized that Jackson’s good fortunes were tied to his co-operation with Hearst and, worse, the FBI.

Jackson was also becoming more openly critical of bombing tactics of groups like the NWLF. At a May 18, 1975, rally in Ho Chi Minh Park, Jackson told a crowd: "I wonder why when we drop bombs in buildings,particularly [California Attorney General Eville Younger], we don’t bomb him. Until we begin to adhere to these things the SLA taught us we can’t say that. we are revolutionaries."

A week later a NWLF communiqué charged Jackson with living like ‘ a capitalist and sounding like a provocateur, and questioned his being allowed to remain free after being charged with a drug violation.

In the early morning of June 2, while Jackson and a girlfriend sat in his car outside his apartment, a young gunman came up from behind and emptied the clip of a 9mm automatic pistol into their bodies. Both Jackson and his schoolteacher friend Sally Voye were killed.

Police would later say that they found an unsent NWLF communiqué claiming credit for the Jackson execution in an apartment shared by Wendy Yoshimura and Patty Hearst. They also ‘claimed to have

discovered an undelivered "NWLF Death Warrant issued against another black prison reformer in the East Bay area named Maalik el Maalik. Still anothet!~ communiqué allegedly took responsibility for the Carmichael bank robbery.

Shortly after Jackson was killed, a NWLF letter, delivered by the Soliahs’ Bay Area Research Center, charged that the police had probably killed Jackson. The communiqué, which demanded proof that. Jackson was an FBI informant, was signed by the "SLA Strategic Command." It was from the Harrises.

Bill Harris said that his group had indeed sent. the communiqué questioning whether Jackson was "snitch." But he denied having produced a letter claiming responsibility for the execution and signed the "SLA Strategic Command Post."

"A lot of people use New World Liberation Front and SLA to add excitement and legitimacy to what they’re doing," Harris said. "We don’t know who a lot of these people are. For example on the Popeye Jack son killing, there’s supposed to have been some communiqué from us claiming credit. That’s bulishit. The murder of Popeye Jackson was fucked up. We had nothing to do with it and denounced it in really strong terms in a righteous communiqué that came out after the phony one. We signed ours ‘SLA Strategic Command.’ The one that got the pig publicity was attributed to the New World Liberation Front [and] was signed. ‘SLA Strategic Command Post,’ We never put ‘post’ on the end of ‘command.’ .

"On the ‘Maalik’ communiqué, we don’t even know’ who he is."

In the last week of August the Harrises’ landlord ~ in Daly City received a call from the studious young ~ man he knew as David Holcomb. Holcomb said they would be moving out to return to Oregon, but that since the rent was paid through September, they wanted a friend to live in the flat for that month, The landlord agreed, provided that the friend would be willing to show the place to potential new tenants.

The Harrises had already rented a second floor apartment on Precita Street, at the edge of San Franciso’s Mission District, this time using the name Carswell. As always, the couple was remembered as friendly and quiet by their neighbors around the wood-frame building. The woman downstairs in particular remembered chatting with Mrs. Carswell over coffee. Ironically, this neighborhood probably had of a "radical" reputation than any they had In since Berkeley. Precita Park, just a block away, mown as a hippie and dope-dealing enclave. In me neighborhood, police had years before staked out suspected cells of radical terrorist groups, but made no major arrests. The Harrises blended in well.

The Harrises still seemed to abhor idleness and theorizing. They kept up their jogging, a legacy from Jack Scott and the summer at the farmhouse. Occasionally did their push-ups, sometimes for punishment, sometimes for fun. And they continued to build up their arsenal. Police would attempt to link a number of bombings, two of police cars, to the SLA.

Shortly after the Harrises moved, Steve Soliah helped Wendy and Patty move into an apartment on Morse Street. Wendy, in her own persuasive way, was weaning Patty from the aggressiveness of the SLA unit under Bill Harris.

.Thanks primarily to Walter Scott, the FBI had been supplied with enough pieces to make a puzzle. He had led them to Pennsylvania and the farmhouse. The farmhouse led to Jack Scott and the SLA. Jack Scott ledto Wendy Yoshimura and Willy Brandt. But Jay Weiner had convinced the FBI that the trail out of

Pennsylvania was as cold as the winter during which FBI had discovered it. If nothing else, the long

months of SLA-chasing had served to weary the minds of those on the hunt. After so many tedious communiqués, so many false starts. and opportunist schemes, every break in the fog seemed just another mirage. When the FBI routinely asked Kathy Soliah’s father to try and get his daughter to, talk to them, he, as any. parent .would, told them he was certain that she had no reason to see the FBI. But he did meet with her in front of the San Francisco Federal Building and asked that she go up to the sixth floor and tell them just that. Kathy said it would be a waste of time and, worse, an excuse for them to harass her.

Near the end, it was a rookie FBI agent routinely looking over the dog-eared file who at last made the connection—Yoshimura, Brandt, Soliah. The agents who began trailing Kathy and Josephine Soliah in early September picked up the trail between the Visitacion Valley apartment rented by "Charles Adams" and the outer Mission place rented by the "Carswells."

Kathy Soliah’s mission, however, is even today still something of a mystery. The best indications are that. Patricia and Wendy were making a break from the increasingly military posture of Bill Harris. Wendy and Patricia wrote a critique of the Harrises’ chauvinism and trigger-finger approach to revolution and took It to them soon after settling on Morse Street. According to one account, there was a bitter confrontation over Wendy’s influence on Patricia that at last separated her from the Harrises. Kathy and Josephine Soliah became the messengers and mediators between the two apartments, and, unwittingly, the guides of the plodding federal agents.

On September 17, a Wednesday, a pair of agents sat lazily in their aging sedan almost a block from the Precita Street apartment of the Carswells. The street was narrow and wound down from Precita Park through a mixture of clumsy Victorian and awkward frame houses ranged around a "T" intersection. Backed by a hill on one side and Army Street a block away on the other, it was a remarkably easy block to seal off, but the agents were uncertain, so they were waiting nearly a block away to make a positive identification.

Early in the afternoon, a short, dark-bearded man in polo shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes bounded lightly down the stairs of the apartment, a pillowcase of laundry tossed over his shoulder. One agent got out and walked diagonally across the street and three doors up to the laundromat. When the short bearded man came in, the agent nodded diffidently to him and squeezed by the doorway. The agent had nodded in an effort to Harris to smile so that he could identify him by his mall, unusual teeth." Harris didn’t smile, but the identification was remarkably easy: Bill Harris, Teko.

"I was at the laundromat doing laundry when I see these two guys," Harris said. "One, a guy in a suit, really looked out of place. Anybody could see that he didn’t belong in the neighborhood. When I looked at him he acted like he wanted to make himself invisible. He made a beeline for the phone booth.

"He never nodded to me. He just seemed to want to get fuck out of there when I saw him."

Harris, growing less cautious after eighteen months evading FBI agents, had still maintained an eye for spotting a government man.

"Emily and I talked about it that night and decided it didn’t have to be the FBI, and if it was they

may not have recognized me, but were looking for someone else. We thought it could have been the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] or anybody. We thought that maybe we were being paranoid. We decided not to move on it."

It was a mistake.

As the Harrises discussed the agent that night, the bureau watched their house. FBI agent Bates mapped out a clean, simple trap. A Los Angeles style shootout was to be avoided. Although the FBI had seen a woman come and go from the Precita apartment, they were still not positive that Emily Harris was in the bouse, or Patricia Hearst. Still, everything they knew up to that point about the SLA would lead them to believe that all three of their most wanted fugitives were inside. For the sake of the bureau, and the sake of the case, the object now was to capture them all alive and without shooting. They waited into the morning of September 18.

Shortly after noon, the Harrises bounded down the wooden outside stairway together, peppy and dressed in jogging clothes. Across the street, the agents in their Ford sedan tensed. Only two. Where was Patty? Bates was in another car more than a block away. let them go, he reasoned, but watch and wait. Bill and Emily set off on their jog. Past the park, around it, up through the neighborhood and back again. They ran at a measured pace, three-quarter speed. The agents waited in agony. Nearer the house, others watched for someone else to emerge. Nothing. It had been almost an hour when the Harrises turned the corner and headed back to the apartment. It had to be then. Bates said go. Two agents came out of the back of a van, two more from the other direction. The Harrises were cut off.

Guns drawn, the agents shouted, "FBI!"

Bill Harris stopped and threw up his hands in surprise. Emily backed off a few steps and almost began to run before she saw the agents blocking her way. "You sons of bitches," she said.

Other agents rushed up the stairs and burst into the apartment, but it was empty.

"The car was obvious," Emily Harris said later. "It parked right in front of the house. There were about four of them at first. I just got a feeling about who they were when I saw them; their hair was too short; their shoes were regulation. We knew they had us.

"We had gotten to know the area where we were jogging very well. We knew that it would be hard for someone who didn’t know that area as well as we did to try and follow us. There were all.kinds of hidden stairways and passageways between some of those buildings. We used to run back and forth through them, seeing how many we could find.

"It was crazy for them to-have broken into the house like that. They had to know that nobody was there. When they broke that front window anybody in there could have heated their asses up good.

• - "We knew the end had come. .. ."
•  

The word had spread even before Charles Bates got back to his office. So concerned was the FBI abôu& the rumors that they leaked a false report that the Harrises had been caught in the Cathedral Hill District of San Francisco, almost two miles away from Precita Street. Even so, at least one cameraman had already managed to get a photograph of them being brought into custody in the federal building basement, and every reporter in town was demanding details. Bates had everything but Patricia Hearst when he scheduled his 3:00 P.M. news conference.

All the pieces had been assembled, but they did not quite fit yet. The FBI surveillance man knew that the Soliahs had made stops at the 625 Morse Street house but, overanxious about the definite identification made on Precita Street, let that slip to a second. priority. There might be, it was reasoned, a chance of nailing SLA supporters such as Soliah or maybe even Yoshimura on Morse Street, but the big game was the Harrises.

- So, some two hours after the Harrises began their jog on Precita Street, and nearly an hour after they were arrested, an FBI agent accompanied San Francisco Police Intelligence Inspector Tim Casey up the back steps of the red-fronted Morse Street house. Casey tapped on the glass-windowed door and when Wendy Yosbimura looked down the hallway in surprise, he broke out the glass with his gun and charged in.

Standing in the living room, frozen to the spot, the fugitive heiress was as surprised as Casey.

"Why . . . Patty," he said. "What are you doing here?" - -

Patricia Hearst wet her pants.

Patricia Hearst and the Harrises were sketched differently by the media beginning with the afternoon their arrests. It began with Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. A picture of Hearst in the back seat of police car with her right hand raised and clenched into a fist carried the caption: "Patricia Hearst Smiles Displays her Handcuffs."

A similar pose by Bill Harris on the back page carried the caption: "Bill Harris Raises His Arms Some Kind of a Salute."

Miss Hearst signed into the jail as an "urban guerrilla." Her bail was set at $1,500,000. That of the Harrises was $550,000 each. For those first few hours and days the trio was giving every sign of solidarity. In truth, Patty was, when arrested, more in the embrace of Wendy and Steve Soliah than of the Harrises, Now they were all in jail. But Patty was getting all of the attention in custody she had on the fugitive trail.

Already Catherine Hearst was priming her daughter’s defense. "She knows what it means to look down the barrel of a gun at the age of nineteen— thrown in the trunk of a car and locked in a closet for a week or so. [Details for this defense had already been supplied by Scott and later verified by Wendy

Yoshimura.] She may have done some unfortunate things. There was certainly plenty of stress on her. I don’t think you make very free decisions after you look down the barrel of a gun. Idon’t believe Patty’s legal problems are that serious. After all, she’s primarily a is victim."

Catherine’s position, uttered on the day of her daughter’s "rescue," was already being written into an affidavit, which, after some changes were made, Patty signed. The affidavit was flied in court and read tearfully at a press conference by one of her lawyers, Terrence Hallinan, whose vacationing father, Vincent, had been retained months earlier by the Hearsts. The statement said that Miss Hearst had been driven to the brink of insanity by her SLA captors until she was "unable to distinguish between what was real and what imaginary." The statement—never very convincing, given Patty’s taped communiqués—was later denounced even by the heiress herself.

Hallinan later withdrew from the case and the Hearsts hired famed criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey to head the defense team.

The affidavit confirmed Patty’s final break with her own SLA comrades.

"Towards the end we had had our difference," said Emily Harris. "We all had problems of adjustment. Sure, Patty would go off into flights of individualism, but I guess at times; we all did. Things didn’t blow

r the. arrest, really after the affidavit. That one of Hallinan’s prizes. He had it prepared so ly it was probably already written. All Patty had to do was sign it.

I was really wiped out,. pissed that she would do that. We had talked. At first she said well, I just won’t remember anything. That way I won’t have to give up my friends. After the affidavit all of that seemed to change. I was so mad at her I couldn’t even talk."

Jailers said that the two women, locked up in adjoining cells at the Redwood City Jail, engaged in a shouting match; some say they came to blows. Emily denied this. But guards left the door between the two cells open.

"Patty had decided to save her own skin at the expense of everybody else," Emily said. "When Bill and I got to Los Angeles we weren’t ready to tell the world about the split. We said that she was a strong sister and we tried to act as though there had been no break. We thought that she would come around. For after the bust when Patty talked about Randolph Catherine I mean it was cold city."

Kilgore, his girlfriend Kathy Soliah, and her sister Josephine all vanished into the underground. The FBI said that the trio was wanted only for "questioning." Steve Soliah was arrested for harboring the live Tania and suspicion of having robbed Carmichael bank. Wendy Yoshimura was released December on $25,000 bail. (Steve) Soliah was also released, his bail was $50,000. Patty, too, could have been released but, according to sources close to the defense, her parents wanted her to remain in jail until her trial. They no doubt figured that a prolonged stay in jail would convince Patty that a prison sentence was no alternative to turning state’s evidence a her former comrades.

Judge Oliver Carter, a longtime friend of Hearst’s, revoked Patty’s bail. But under the 1974 bail reform act, most attorneys agreed that bail was mandatory in all but capital cases. An appeal of the judge’s bail ruling would have freed Patty. Her parents, according to members of the defense team, vetoed her release. (Carter died in June 1976 after presiding over Patty’s bank robbery trial in which she was found guilty.)

The SLA’s public crimes tend toward the bizarre, given their political position. Led by a black convict, they killed a black educator whom only they believed worthy of assassination. The feminist-dominated group ~ kidnapped a nineteen-year-old coed, who, even they admitted, had committed no known "crimes against the people." In the robbery of the Hibernia Bank, the group wounded two elderly bystanders. In their escape from capture at Mel’s Sporting Goods store, the SLA trio commandeered four vehicles, terrorizing six people, including an elderly black man and his son and a pregnant black woman and her brother. "We really hated having to do this," said one member of the trio, but it was a life-and-death situation. These people, poor and black, were the ones we wanted to help and we were in a position of having taken from them.

The SLA seems lastingly proud only of their kidnap of Patricia Hearst. And the Harrises and a not known publicly now consider and other SLA members now consider the heiress’s acceptance into the group as a mistake. "Her lawyer has her saying that she was brainwashed and coherced all along the way," said Bill Harris.

"She was free to do whatever she wanted and means to make phone calls, too. She could have discussed giving herself up with Randolph, but she didn’t want to go home. She had really deep comradely feelings for Wendy and Steve. She would have blown their whole thing by giving herself up.

Note: The "brainwashing" depends on the timeline. Hearst was told she was just a common criminal after Hybernia, the LA shootout where she thought she would have died probably was the full snapping point. Hearst had what Dr. Robert Lifton called a "psuedo conversion" meaning you have to keep priming the pump. By ten days after the arrest when the Harris’s lost their constant company influence, the pseudo-conversion effect began to wear off. The same thing happened with Westerners finally able to leave Communist China, who Lifton studied. In layman’s terms Pseudo Conversion is like "A nice kid hanging out with the wrong crowd"

"The Patricia Hearst we knew was strong and assertive, making her own independent decisions. Her present reversion does not negate the processes of voluntary change, as her family so desperately hopes. Instead it shows that a person does not become a revolutionary overnight. The possibilities of back-sliding are ever present. She has wilted like a flower of the sunlight.

How can she forget our murdered sisters and brothers, the warmth she shared with them, feelings that she

so eloquently spoke of following their deaths? How can she. forget that in order to ‘free’ herself they want her to sell out two of her friends. When we’re not enraged, we really feel pity for her."

The Harrises admit ix’ retrospect that the selection of Foster as a target for execution was wrong. The couple had nothing to do with the selection or execution It’s not that they view Foster as having been a "ni~ce guy," but, rather, that killing him was not dealing with the "enemy. Foster was not clearly definable as a pig in the same sense that Rockefeller or a real member of the ruling class-would be."

Wendy Yoshimura has not spoken to Patty Hearst since they were arrested. Angry and hurt that throughout the ordeal Patty has not inquired about her former close associate or offered any assistance, Wendy refuses to discuss Patty, who has co-operated with authorities by providing information about Yoshimura and some two dozen other radicals she met during encounter with the underground left.

Russell Little and Joseph Remiro will probably serve a number of years in prison before being released. Bill and Emily Harris may be on trial for as long as three years. Patricia Hearst may join them ~ a defendant in some of the cases. The Carmicheal bank robbery and the attending murder may prove I be the most serious charges facing them all.

And almost no one speaks about Cinque, Gabi,  Kojo, Geliiia, FahiZah and Zoya.

Note: Remiro is still in prison, Little got out on a technicality due to an error in reading the jury instructions. Tony Serra was Little’s lawyer on appeal. After release Little was impressed enough with the anarchist newspaper "Fifth Estate" that he went to Detroit to meet the staff. He is now a tour boat pilot in Hawaii. Each of the Harris’s served, I believe seven years. They have since divorce.