But was it possible, as Tribal Thumb pointed out, that Patty Hearst had participated in the planning of her own kidnapping while ostensibly buying bagels? An SLA manuscript stated that they had expected more trouble from their intended victim, "since we were planning on carrying her away, but she turned out to be real cooperative. She just lay down on the floor while one of the comrades tied her hands and blindfolded her."

When Patty was being interviewed in jail by prosecution psychiatrist Harry Kozol, she pulled a Raskolnikov (the character in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment who cannot repress the force of his own guilt) by darting from the room and complaining that Kozol had accused her of arranging her own kidnapping. Bailey asked him on the witness stand:

"Did you suggest that she got herself kidnapped?" He answered, "No."

In their first session, Kozol questioned Patty about Willie Wolfe. "I told her," he testified, "that I'd heard her speak tenderly of him [on the final taped communique] and I asked her this question: 'Is that the way you felt about him?' She seemed to get upset and deeply moved. I felt she was almost sobbing inside . . . but no tears ran down her face . . . She said, 'I don't know how I feel about him.' I said, 'I'm not asking you how you feel. Is that how you felt?' She became very much upset, began to shake and quiver, obviously suffering. And she answered, 'I don't know why I got into this goddamn thing--shit!' And then got up and left the room, terribly upset."

Got into what goddamn thing? Patty could have been referring to her agreement to talk with psychiatrists, or to her decision to join the SLA, or to the kidnapping itself. In their second session, when she described the kidnapping scene, Kozol asked if there was anything else. He testified:

There was some delay. She was sort of thinking. She began to look very uncomfortable and I told her, "Never mind." And she said, "I don't want to tell you." And I said, "That's okay, if it makes you uncomfortable," and then she blurted out that she was going to tell me anyway. She told me that four days before the kidnapping, while she was sitting in class, she was suddenly struck with a terrible fear that she was going to be kidnapped. This was an overwhelming sensation. It stayed with her. I said, "What's so surprising about a girl from a well-to-do family worrying about kidnapping?" She brushed it aside and said, "It wasn't anything of the sort. It was different." For four solid days, she couldn't shake the fear. She finally thought in terror of running home to her parents, where she would be safe. She somehow fought that. Then the thing she dreaded occurred.

The family of slain SLA member Willie Wolfe hired Lake Headley--an ex-police intelligence officer who was chief investigator at Wounded Knee--to find out what had really happened. What he discovered, with fellow researchers Donald Freed and Rusty Rhodes, was that the SLA was part of the CIA's CHAOS program. In that context, they were planning to kill Black Panther leader Huey Newton and succeeded in killing black school superintendent Marcus Foster after he agreed to meet Panther demands for educational reforms.

At Vacaville Prison, DeFreeze was permitted to set up Unisight, a program by which convicts could get laid by visiting females. According to investigator Headley, DeFreeze's visitors included kidnappers-to-be Nancy Ling Perry and Patricia Soltysik--and Patty Hearst, then 18, not going under her own name but using the ID of Mary Alice Siems, a student at Berkeley.

Headley's affidavit stated: "That Patricia Campbell Hearst and her parents disagreed bitterly over Patricia's political and personal relations. That a love affair between a black man and Patricia Hearst did take place prior to her relationship with her fiancé Steven Weed. That Mrs. Randolph A. Hearst subjected her daughter to extreme pressure to change her personal and political relationships."

Patty began living with Weed in Berkeley later that year, in the fall of 1972. DeFreeze was transferred to Soledad in December 1972, where he was given the special privilege of using the trailers ordinarily reserved for married trustees. DeFreeze became a leader of the SLA and, according to Headley, renewed his affair with Patty for a brief time. The affidavit continued: "Discussions were held between Patricia Campbell Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army concerning a kidnapping--not her own."

Whose, then? Her sisters, Anne and Vicki. The idea of kidnapping Patty, too, was brought up--this was a year before it actually took place--but she didn't think it was such a great notion. But, if true, this would explain Patty's outburst at the moment of kidnapping: "Oh, no! Not me! Oh, God! Please let me go!"

The investigators presented their findings to the Los Angeles City Council, charging that the intelligence unit of the police department--the Criminal Conspiracy Section--knew of the SLA's presence but wanted the shootout for test purposes. Headley acquired official film footage of the massacre, showing that the FBI used a pair of German Shepherds to sniff out Patty's presence so she wouldn't be inside the safe-house. Steven Weed was told by a cop at the shootout, "Don't worry, Patty's not in there."

On the tape of April 3, 1974, Patty said, "I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia for the people." And on the tape of June 6, she said, "I renounced my class privilege when Cin [DeFreeze] and Cujo [Wolfe] gave me the name Tania." But in a New Times interview, Bill Harris said, "She chose the name Tania herself." According to Weed, her reading matter had ranged from the Marquis de Sade to Do It by Jerry Rubin. And, according to my Berkeley source, Patty and a former roommate had both read the book Tania, the Unforgettable Guerrilla a year prior to the kidnapping.

Further, I was told, the roommate had been subpoenaed to testify for the prosecution in Patty's trial, but the subpoena was withdrawn. I wrote about that in the Berkeley Barb. The FBI's liaison to the US Attorney's office, Parks Stearns, Jr., denied this vehemently, shouting at me in the press room, "You're wrong!"

It could've been just a coincidence, but after that incident, the head marshal began hassling me for identification, even though I had been coming to the trial every day. One time he asked for my driver's license. I told him I didn't drive a car. Another time he asked for my Social Security card. I told him I never carried that around. I would present only my press credentials, which he accepted because there were too many media people around, and he didn't want the attention that a scene would automatically create.