Patty's parents were there on view when the jury was selected, although the press was excluded. But how could the judge be sure that Randolph Hearst wouldn't leak the story to his own paper? And so they sat in the front row of the courtroom each day, that protective image of media royalty continuing to lurk behind Princess Patty in the subconscious memory of the jurors.

What was really on trial was the royal nuclear family--floor sample of a consumer unit that also serves as the original source of authority. If Patty had not "belonged" to her parents, why would anybody want to kidnap her? And if the princess had lived her pre-kidnap life inside the safety of the castle, then how could any nasty old SLA get her?

The message of this trial was clear: Destroy the seeds of rebellion in your children or we shall have it done for you. In the courtroom, spectators with binoculars focused on Patty and her parents, who were busy pretending that they weren't being watched for reactions. They had become a captive audience by being forced to listen in public to a tape-recorded communiqué from their princess, abdicating her right to the throne:

Mom, Dad, I would like to comment on your efforts to supposedly secure my safety. The [food] giveaway was a sham . . . You were playing games--stalling for time--which the FBI was using in their attempts to assassinate me and the SLA elements which guarded me . . .

I have been given the choice of, one, being released in a safe area or, two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army . . . I have chosen to stay and fight . . .

I want you to tell the people the truth. Tell them how the law-and-order programs are just a means to remove so-called violent--meaning aware--individuals from the community in order to facilitate the controlled removal of unneeded labor forces in this country, in the same way that Hitler controlled the removal of the Jews from Germany.

I should have known that if you and the rest of the corporate state were willing to do this to millions of people to maintain power and to serve your needs, you would also kill me if necessary to serve those same needs. How long will it take before white people in this country understand that whatever happens to a black child happens sooner or later to a white child? How long will it be before we all understand that we must fight for our freedom?

At the end of the tape, Donald "Cinque" DeFreeze came on with a triple death threat, especially to one Colston Westbrook, whom he accused of being "a government agent now working for military intelligence while giving assistance to the FBI." This communiqué was originally sent to San Francisco radio station KSAN. News director David McQueen checked with a Justice Department source, who confirmed Westbrook's employment by the CIA.

Conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell traced his activities from 1962, when he was CIA advisor to the South Korean CIA, through 1969, when he provided logistical support in Vietnam for the CIA's Phoenix program. His job was the indoctrination of assassination and terrorist cadres. After seven years in Asia, he was brought home in 1970, along with the war, and assigned to run the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville Prison, where he became the control officer for DeFreeze, who had worked as a police informer from 1967 to 1969 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.

If DeFreeze was a double agent, then the SLA was a Frankenstein monster, turning against its creator by becoming in reality what had been orchestrated only as a media image. When he finked on his keepers, he signed the death warrant of the SLA. They were burned alive in a Los Angeles safe-house during a shootout with police. When Cinque's charred remains were sent to his family in Cleveland, they couldn't help but notice that he had been decapitated. It was as if the CIA had said, literally, "Bring me the head of Donald DeFreeze!"

Consider the revelations of Wayne Lewis in August 1975. He claimed to have been an undercover agent for the FBI, a fact verified by FBI director Clarence Kelley. Surfacing at a press conference in Los Angeles, Lewis spewed forth a veritable conveyor belt of conspiratorial charges: that DeFreeze was an FBI informer; that he was killed not by the SWAT team but by an FBI agent because he had become "uncontrollable;" that the FBI then wanted Lewis to infiltrate the SLA; that the FBI had undercover agents in other underground guerrilla groups; that the FBI knew where Patty Hearst was but let her remain free so it could build up its files of potential subversives.

At one point, the FBI declared itself to have made 27,000 checks into the whereabouts of Patty Hearst. It was simultaneously proclaimed by the FDA that there were 25,000 brands of laxative on the market. That meant one catharsis for each FBI investigation, with a couple of thousand potential loose shits remaining to smear across "No Left Turn" signs. Patty had become a vehicle for repressive action on the right and for wishful thinking on the left.

A three-month-old baby, whose mother wanted to expose her to the process of justice, was being breast-fed in the back of the courtroom while Patty Hearst testified that she had been raped in a closet by the lover she had once described as "the gentlest, most beautiful man I've ever known."

Now, prosecutor James Browning was cross-examining her.

"Did you, in fact, have a strong feeling for Willie Wolfe?"

"In a way, yes.""As a matter of fact, were you in love with him?"

"No."

A little later, he asked if it had been "forcible rape."

"Excuse me?"

"Did you struggle or submit?"

"I didn't resist. I was afraid."

Browning walked into the trap: "I thought you said you had strong feelings for him?"