Interesting read, though I don’t know what to think about it.
In my adolescent male mind, Patti Hearst wanted dark meat and when caught, copped a kidnap plea.
THAT was my assessment back then and I've had nothing to alter it.
I’d like to know if Toobin got into the SLA support network that crisscrossed the US. Hearst’s fingerprints were found in a barn outside of Philadelphia (Bucks or Montgomery County) along with those of athlete radical Bill Walton (who, as I recalled, refused to testify about it before a Grand Jury - don’t recall if he got jail time or not).
This farmhouse was one of several underground railroad resting/hiding places for Marxist terrorists/radicals on the run from the law.
I wrote about this in 1979 in a special section for the old “Pink Sheet on the Left”, No. 279 and this report provided one of the first public maps of terrorist hideouts in the US (Beat the FBI by about 6 months when they issued a similar report).
The reds in the US used a combination (by their own admissions) of old active and former members of the Communist Party USA to move them and hide them, esp. in New York City (where Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohr hide/taught in plain sight for about 10 years, by their own admission).
They also used radical communes to move across the country, esp. re Hearst from California to the East Coast.
The same thing apparently happened with the members of the May 19th Communist Organization (M19CO), participants in the deadly Nyack, NY armored car robbery that killed to local police officers and the Brink’s truck driver.
Other non white participants came from the remnants of the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and affiliated black Marxist/terrorist groups.
Many operated out of front groups/buildings in Brooklyn during the early 80’s before scramming after the Brink’s job. An unheralded NYPD officer tried to warn his superiors about these groups but was largely ignored until after the Brink’s job.
Other underground support groups and safehouses existed for the FALN Puerto Rican Marxists of Morales, the Black Liberation Army of Joan Chesimard (now safely in Cuba), the Massachusetts terrorists/killers (Lammands? brothers, et al).
I bumped into an FBI agent in Baltimore years ago at our local bank (he was an old schoolmate of my) and we got around to talking about bank robbers. He mentioned that he was on the tailing detail for Marilyn Buck and others from the maoist terrorist group closely affiliated with the M19CO
and that they had a safehouse in Baltimore.
I told him that I was the FBI operative whose testimony warned the nation about the “Days of Rage” riots planned by the Ayers/Dohrn/Jones/Machtinger wing of SDS known later as the Weather Underground Organization/Weathermen.
We had some good laughs about all this.
Sam did forget that I had to beat him up in a fight because he was a little nasty bastard back in elementary school. It lasted about three seconds and he was on his back on the floor. After that, we called a truce and became friends in Junior High.
See, we turned out to be the “good guys” after all. Ah, those were the good old days.
However, the communists became college professors (Ayers and Dohrn, Wilkinson, etc) so while we were the good guys, the bad guys became academic successes. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? OBAMA, FOR ONE. THE CLINTONS FOR ANOTHER.
Hopefully when the last chapter to this story is written, we, the good guys will have won. If not, adios America.