America's Al-Qaeda: The SLA-Venceremos Connection
Even Sara Jane Moore, serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, puts on a Charlie Manson crazy act when questioned about the SLA.
[SNIP]
One of the murkier episodes in the SLA/Venceremos history was the murder of Wilbert "Popeye" Jackson, a low-rent crook and police informant who was publicly denounced by Sara Jane Moore. Moore later became famous for the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
Before the botched hit on Ford, Moore had been an FBI informant until she told Venceremos members that what she had been up to and they rejected her. The FBI rejected her too, because she had grown too close to the radicals.
"Popeye" Jackson had been enlisted by Randolph Hearst to seek contacts with the SLA underground after the horrific LAPD/SLA shoot-out that killed about half of the SLA. Hearst rightly judged at that point the FBI did not care if they killed his daughter. Jackson was connected with the United Prisoners Union (UPU) and was a police informant.
Much fuss has been made of identifying police informants; in the seventies, being identified as such could easily lead to assassination, as Popeye Jackson would discover, to his shock. But too much can be made of the label "snitch" - any convict is a potential informant if the possibility of parole is offered by prosecutors. As Max Crawford's The Bad Communist makes clear, being a police informant, as long as you were honest about it, did not necessarily mean that Venceremos would stop talking to you. They got a lot of good information from "snitches". So the "snitches" and the "revolutionaries" were one force.
According to what I've read, Sara Jane Moore was 1) in attendance at the SLA rally in Berkeley where Kathleen Soliah spoke in favor of the SLA, and so was Popeye Jackson and Emily Harris; 2) Moore befriended Popeye Jackson and they both worked for Hearst's "People In Need" Foundation food giveaway; 3) Kathleen Soliah took the name Sara Jane Olson shortly after Sara Jane Moore's attempt on the life of President Ford; 4) Moore was the bookkeeper for People in Need; 5) Moore had a falling out with Popeye Jackson, denounced him in a letter to various movement people, and several days later, Jackson was shot dead along with his police control agent while they sat in a car in the Mission District of San Francisco.
One interesting thing about my typo is that in looking up links to post this correction, I've learned one investigator has argued there were links between the two Sara Janes:
Four days after the September 1975 San Francisco bust effectively crushed the Symbionese Liberation Army, Sara Jane Moore, a middle-aged doctor’s wife, who vacillated between being an FBI informant and a radical groupie, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford on the steps of the St. Francis Hotel. For those who had flirted with political violence and assassination, the President represented the ultimate target.
Since June 21, 1999 – five days after the FBI surrounded Ms. Soliah-Olson’s minivan, ending over 23 years on the lam – I’ve argued that Kathleen, desperate for a new name, took "Sara Jane" because of it’s radical significance. As Bill "Teko" Harris noted in the first SLA communique following the catastrophic May 17, 1974, shootout in L.A. that left six comrades dead, "We have taken many different meaningful names." Patricia Hearst's given nom de guerre, Tania, was that of a German-Argentine communist who had died with Che Guevera in Bolivia in 1967. In the week that Soliah-Olson fled, the most famous "propagandist of the deed" was Sara Jane Moore -- without the "h."
The link between Soliah-Olson and Moore is far more substantive than this one-time temporal and spatial coincidence. Their paths crisscrossed repeatedly in the wake of the Hearst kidnapping. Their's were paths of violence. And intertwined into their two stories is the story of the New World Liberation Front which gives us a different, and perhaps better, paradigm for understanding Kathleen Soliah than does the SLA/Patty Hearst angle.
I hope to put to rest, once and for all, the myth that Ms. Soliah was just some marginal activist in the early '70s who happened to show a little compassion to three surviving members of the SLA. Whether the material's sufficent to convict her, I'll leave to the jury. But that it demonstrates that she was at the center of Bay Area radical violence and at least proximate to would-be presidential assassin, Sara Jane Moore, is beyond dispute. A good journalist would have mined that history and used it when questioning Soliah.