-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Every Secret Thing Patricia Hearst©1982 w/ Alvin MoscowDoubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, N.Y. ----- I hated the idea of having to reveal myself to these unknown doctors, who would probe my mind impersonally, stripping me of the last shreds of privacy. Cinque had done that to me in the SLA interrogations, and now I had to submit to basically the same thing at the hands of psychiatrists. My fear, no doubt, was based upon my family's disdain of psychiatry to resolve personal problems. My sisters and I had been brought up to believe that we were responsible for what we did and could not blame our transgressions on something being wrong inside our heads. I had joined the SLA because if I didn't they would have killed me. And I remained with them because I truly believed that the FBI would kill me if they could, and if not, the SLA would. In my mind now, I was a "bad girl" for doing all that and now would have to be punished. When the first of the psychiatrists came to see me on September 30, just eleven days after my arrest, I simply crumpled under his scrutiny. I cried, murmuring and mumbling out replies that were not answers to his questions. He thought I was refusing to cooperate with him. This was Dr. Louis Joloyn West, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute, Psychiatrist-in-Chief of UCLA Hospitals, a licensed MD., Chairman of the Council on Research and Development of the American Psychiatric Association, psychiatric consultant to the Air Force, author of books and studies on prisoners of war, an internationally recognized expert in his field. I thought he had a creepy hypnotic voice. A tall, heavy-set man who appeared to be kindly, I suspected "Jolly" of being too smooth, too soothing to be trusted. After trying to deal with me for about an hour and a half, Dr. West left the consulting room, where we were meeting, and complained to Al Johnson about my refusing to cooperate fully with him. Al came in and spoke to me and after lunch Dr. West and I went at it for another two hours. He tried to be gentle and kind, I suppose, but his questions became more intimate and personal. It was one thing to explain things to the lawyers: their questions were for the most part factual and relatively superficial. I could answer them with a word, a short sentence, a nod of my head. But with Dr. West, and the other psychiatrists who followed him, the questions probed areas which brought me back to that closet and the abuse my comrades had meted out to me. It was astonishing how much had receded from my memory and how much of my ordeal had been altered by my acceptance of the SLA version of my status as a prisoner of war. But when Dr. West probed, I was forced to relive those moments again as they had happened. He would not allow me to gloss over events and repress my emotions any further. And each time, I would break down in tears. I wept in these sessions almost as much as I had wept in the SLA closet It was the first time since the closet that I had wept like that, the first time since then that I allowed myself to truly feel. Dr. West, I thought, was inordinately interested in the sex that went on within the SLA, particularly in the lesbian relationships. He seemed to think free sex was an integral part of the cell and I could sense that he simply did not believe me when I told him the comrades were more devoted to combat drills and training for the revolution than to sex. But then, even eminent psychiatrists have been conditioned to certain stereotypes which they take for granted. Despite all this and despite my own depression, Dr. West did get through to me in time and I tried to tell him of Cinque's interrogations, the threats, the metallic clicking of the rifles when I thought they were going to kill me, the sex forced upon me in the closet, the offer to join them or to die, the bank robbery, the criticism/self-criticism meetings, the weapons, the combat drills, the political indoctrination, my fears, my desire not to anger them, and my subsequent inability to escape or even to telephone anyone for help. All of this, or most of it, was extracted from me by the doctor very slowly and painfully. I was amazed at how much I had repressed of those early days of torture and torment. Ile mind, it seems, obliterates the memory of pain. But I also suffered losses of memory of some periods of time before my kidnapping. I could not recall, for instance, a single course I had been taking at Berkeley at the time I was kid-napped, or where my sisters had gone to school, or where I had spent my last Christmas before the kidnapping. Dr. West, as he would later tell the court, spent some thirty hours drawing out from me the infor-mation he needed for his psychiatric report. Dr. West also ordered a complete physical checkup for me at Stanford University Hospital. I was physically, as well as mentally, in pretty sad shape. For the trip outside the jail, I had to submit to a "patdown!' by a young novice U.S. marshal named Janey Jimenez. She told me right off that there were certain prescribed routines that had to be followed, such as the pat-down, and that she had her job to do. I could make things easy or difficult depending on my cooperation, but I had to be moved at all times under maximum security. So I was waist chained and handcuffed and transported as a dangerous criminal to Stanford Hospital. In a small examining room, I was kept anxiously waiting for well over an hour for the examining doctors. I was refused permission to go to the bathroom and handed a bedpan. Janey, not allowed to leave me alone in the room, was obliged to use the same bedpan. It was the start of a rather special friendship between prisoner and guard. When the examinations did begin, the doctors poked and probed and X-rayed with no concern for my personal feelings or any explanation of what they were doing. The gynecological examination was positively brutal and by the end of it I was in hysterics, sobbing, as I writhed in pain. When they led me to another room and attempted to sedate me in order to shove some electrodes up my nose for an electroencephalogram, fear overwhelmed me. I did not know what they were trying to do. I feared electric-shock treatment. I feared everything and everyone; I was helpless. But as if I were fighting for my life, I absolutely refused this test, screaming for my lawyers. It was put off and I was hustled back to jail. Dr. West also called for a complete battery of psychological testing for me and brought in Dr. Margaret Singer, a renowned and respected clinical psychologist from UC-Berkeley, and she spent, according to her own calculations, some twenty hours with me, talking and testing. I was so apathetic it was difficult for her to get information out of me. But she was dauntless in giving me eight different psychological tests and several of them were a complex series of questionnaires within one test.* My ability to concentrate was so impaired that some of the tests had to be administered by flash cards. [*The tests were: the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale for my IQ, the Rhode Sentence Completion Test, the Draw-a-Person Test, the Gough Adjeotive Checklist, the Murray Thematic Apperception Test (administered twice), the Sargent Insight Test, the Rorschach Procedure, and the lengthy Minnesota Multiphasic Personality inventory (administered twice).] I was quizzed and questioned by two other court-appointed psychiatrists, Dr. Donald T. Lunde and Dr. Seymour Pollack, and out of all this came the consensus that I was not insane or psychotic, that I was mentally capable, in the legal sense of knowing right from wrong, of standing trial, but that I was indeed "emotionally and mentally impaired to a significant degree." Dr. Singer's testing showed that my cumulative 10 score had fallen from 130 at Santa Catalina School to 109, with the worst of the tests showing an IQ of 90. A variance of plus or minus 10 points on an IQ test is an acceptable result. However, a 20- to 40-point variance indicates that serious change has taken place. The other tests revealed me as "sad, hopeless . . . withdrawn, emotionally distressed and expressing a silent cry for help." Dr. West, as the senior member of the team, diagnosed my condition as a "traumatic neurosis with dissociative features," which meant simply that I had been frightened out of my wits by the SLA, "subjected to powerfully effective coercive manipulation by her captors," and that I would need three or four months of psychiatric treatment before I would be "able with full competence to aid and assist counsel in her own defense." He recommended private, individual psychotherapy, preferably in a hospital setting and out of prison, to restore my mental health. My trial was rescheduled to begin three months hence, on January 26, 1976, and I was allowed my own private therapist, but, because of government objections, my therapy would have to be conducted in jail, not in a hospital. Dr. West and Dr. Singer, who agreed to testify on my behalf at the trial, continued to work with me, but less intensively than before. One day Dr. Singer said she wanted me to see another doctor. Since I had little choice in the matter, I was visited by a rather heavyset man who spoke in a thick Viennese accent straight out of Freud. This was Dr. Martin Orne, who was a psychiatrist and a psychologist, from the University of Pennsylvania. For hours over two separate visits I went over my whole story again for him, except that Dr. Orne frequently seemed to misunderstand me. He would leap to conclusions or suggest events that had not happened, and I would have to correct him. I thought him very strange. Some of his questions were most extraordinary. He acted or commented as though he was not believing a word I was saying, and at the same time he seemed unable to comprehend what I was trying to tell him in response to his questions. Only at the end of the last session with him did the, doctor reveal his thoughts. The doctor smiled at me in avuncular fashion, patted my hand, and said, "Miss Hearst, you really shouldn't feel embarrassed. Stronger men than you have cracked and cooperated with the enemy under less torturous conditions. The only thing surprising about all this is that you are here with us today. You suffered severe sensory deprivation being tied up and blindfolded in that closet for so long. Other people subjected to such sensory deprivation would have given up the will to live. They just curl up and die, deprived of their senses for so long. You survived and that is remarkable in itself. You are a survivor." Dr. Orne's strange, off-center questioning was explained to me several days later. His particular field of expertise was lie detection and deception and he had been called in for his expert opinion on whether or not I was faking all or any part of my story. His questions had been designed to lead me into lying or into making my story more plausible than it actually was. Dr. Singer and Dr. West were happy to tell me that I had passed Dr. Orne's scrutiny with flying colors. In court, Dr. Orne would testify as to how he tested my truthfulness and reached his conclusion: "It was really quite remarkable. Miss Hearst simply did not lie." The prosecution objected vehemently to that! Judge Carter was obliged to instruct the jury that they and only they had to decide upon my credibility. As the days in jail crept by, I grew more accustomed to this new environment which was a hundred times better for me than my days with the SLA. After a month, my solitary confinement ended and I was allowed to take my meals in the dining room with the other women inmates. I grew accustomed to the screams from the "drunk tank" and the steady banging on the door of the "padded cell" opposite my cell. Saturday nights were wild, with screaming, intoxicated women, some dressed in evening gowns, thrown into the drunk tank. Nights of the full moon were the wildest. Unfailingly, the crazies came out in force and the two drunk tanks were filled to overflowing. I took up crocheting, puttered around the little cell, living in limbo, waiting. But the deputies and jail guards did not come to beat or torture me in the dead of night. As time went on they became more and more friendly. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking my condition: I was a prisoner again, helpless, undergoing repeated interrogations. I saw my family only during regular visiting hours, a half hour on Thursday and on Saturday, and then only through the bulletproof glass partition which separated us. We couldn't touch each other, and we could hardly communicate beyond superficialities, for we now knew the authorities were tape-recording everything We said over the telephones on either side of the glass partition. My mother anxiously wanted to know what she could do for me, what she could bring me, but she was not allowed to bring anything; my father tried to cheer me up with his wry jokes and funny stories, but I found it difficult to laugh. From the very start, they both firmly reassured me. "Hell, we knew those weren't your words or your thinking," my father said. "If you really wanted to give it to us, you would have been much more sarcastic. Don't forget, we know you, Pat. We knew you were being, forced to say those things. Only the dumb public believed that garbage. People seemed to always forget that you'd been kidnapped. We were always happy to get those tapes and hear your voice. That's the only way we knew you were still alive. Believe me, we were relieved every time a new tape showed up." The love and special knowledge we had of each other were still there. I felt that. But we were separated and kept apart by a wall of glass. And worse, despite their reassurances that they had not believed a word of the tapes, I was still not convinced that I had not hurt them terribly and that there was not some awful weakness in my character causing me to break under the strain of the SLA's people's prison. My best moments in that jail, perhaps the only times I enjoyed a sense of normalcy in those surroundings, came with the regular pastoral visits of Ted Dumke. Ted was an old friend, albeit a casual one, from my pre-kidnap days at Berkeley, where he had been studying at a theological seminary. Now, as an Episcopal priest, he could make unlimited visits to me under prison regulations, which he did almost every day. He did no preaching, advising, or questioning of my motives and yet he was my greatest comfort at the time. We would sit for an hour or so in the attorneys' conference room, making small talk, playing cards, and just being with one another as friends. Dr. West assured me that with some psychotherapeutic help I would make a complete recovery, finding my way back to the life I had known before. I had suffered a trauma, starting with my kidnapping, he told me, but I was not in any way chronically ill. To speed my recovery along, I agreed to see a therapist recommended by him and by Dr. Singer. Through their efforts, Dr. Elizabeth Richards, a psychiatrist in private practice in Palo Alto, came to see me for an hour, two times a week, on a regular basis. Through her, I came to understand my feelings of guilt and inadequacy over having been brainwashed and manipulated by the SLA, and we worked hard together on some of my newly developed phobias, such as my fear and inability to use the telephone for anything other than legal calls. Not being psychologically oriented, I resisted for quite a while the explanations of brainwashing made by Dr. West and others. But in time, I came to understand brainwashing as an inexact, popular term for what psychologists have long known as coercive persuasion. In other words, anyone could be coerced to say or do anything by torture, beatings, abuse, and threats of death. In modem times, however, the Communists discovered that you did not have to put a man on a rack, twist his thumbs, or lash him to make him confess. The more sophisticated method was to weaken your prisoner gradually by depriving him of proper food, sleep, exercise, and then browbeating him through continual, unrelenting questioning until he agreed to what you wanted him to say or do and had, in fact, come to believe it himself. In the 1930's the Western world was astonished when several of the top dissident leaders in the Soviet Union stood up in open court, without a mark of physical abuse on them, and confessed (apparently voluntarily) to crimes against the state and, in effect, condemned themselves to execution or exile in Siberia. In these famous purge trials, the condemned even accepted and agreed to their punishments as just. In the cold war of the 1950's, Cardinal Mindzenty of Hungary, after only thirty-five days of imprisonment by the Communist regime, signed a written confession and admitted in open court, with impartial observers in attendance, to spying for the West and to various criminal acts against the state. People in the West were perplexed and confounded by such admissions from a cardinal of the Church. During the Korean War, not one of our servicemen who had been taken prisoner of war had tried to escape from the Communist Chinese prison camps; hundreds of our officers and enlisted men had appeared on Chinese television confessing to war crimes, condemning the United States, and some even embracing Communism. When the war ended, several of our men refused to return home, preferring to remain for years with the Chinese Communists. It had been a scandal of major proportions at the time, an embarrassment to American patriotism, and only after that had our Defense Department engaged psychologists to study the phenomenon of brainwashing. During the Vietnam War, the same thing happened again: more televised false confessions by servicemen taken prisoner of war. This time, the Army hired Dr. West, Dr. Orne, and others to set up a program to train our pilots and soldiers in resisting the coercive persuasion of the Communist North Vietnamese. Dr. Orne organized an experiment in the Arizona desert in which one team of Air Force pilots acted as prisoners of war, with instructions on how to resist revealing the game's military secrets; the other team was instructed on how to coerce those simulated secrets out of their prisoners. The experiment was to last two weeks and it was expected that perhaps 6 or 8 percent of the simulated prisoners would break down, confess, and reveal secrets. These were officers, trained combat pilots, and all the instructions and training given to them beforehand did not help. Held prisoner in caged traps, yelled at in a phony gibberish language, and interrogated unceasingly, more than 25 percent of the prisoners broke down in three days. They not only confessed their simulated secrets, they spilled out every bit of confidential information they possessed. The other prisoners were in such bad shape the whole experiment was called off after three days. The results and the percentage of breakdowns were classified Top Secret. In explaining all this, Dr. West repeatedly tried to reassure me that I had no reason to feel guilty or humiliated. No one, including himself, Dr. West said, could know beforehand whether they could withstand coercive persuasion. It depended upon how effective and adept the captors were and how resistant the prisoner might be. Cinque and the others had used a rather coarse, haphazard method, but then I had been an easy subject for them. Because I was so young and apolitical, I had no background experience or training with which to resist their persuasion. Nevertheless, whether or not they knew really what they were doing, they did employ the classic Maoist formula for thought reform on me, which Dr. West called the three D's—Debility, Dependency, and Dread. I had been effectively weakened by my confinement in that closet, deprived of sight, decent food, regular sleep and exercise, with a radio blaring at me most of the time. I had grown fully dependent upon them for the necessities of life as well as all the information I would receive about the outside world. I could communicate with no one beyond their own little group. And, finally, I certainly had learned to dread them because of their own threats to kill me and their warnings that the FBI would kill me if the agents could find me. All this was reinforced on a daily basis by our criticism/self-criticism meetings, in which I was obliged to renounce my former bourgeois life, my family and friends, and all the values with which I had grown up. All of this, Dr. West said, was based on the psychological theories underlying Chinese thought reform. Drawn from Pavlov's early experiments in behavior modification, but much more sophisticated, Chinese thought reform holds that if a person is forced to recite certain ideas, even without believing them at first, he or she will come to in time. Psychologically, no one can long believe one thing and say or do another. In time, such a conflict would either make a person crack up or force him to adjust his actions to his thoughts, or his thoughts to his actions. Thus did Mao Tse-tung reform the thinking of hundreds of millions of Chinese who had lived their lives according to Confucius until the revolution. Then Mao set up schools to teach the children, meetings to instruct the adults, and in time when a whole nation's people recited over and over the quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the people came to believe what they had been reciting. Thus did Cinque "reform" me into believing that a revolution was under way which in time would overthrow the government. At first, I remembered, I thought I was humoring Cin by telling him what he wanted to hear. But Cin had really been humoring me. I thought at first that they all were stark raving mad, crazy, out of their minds, but in time I came to accept what they believed because of the repetition of those daily criticism/self-criticism meetings. It is a difficult process to understand. We are raised to believe we enjoy freedom of thought. Cinque and the others told me that the people in America were all brainwashed in believing in bourgeois principles, ranging from family and monogamy to capitalism and two big cars in the garage. Cinque and the others were not alone in their beliefs. Many other radical groups of various persuasions throughout the United States still believe that the revolution is going on, a revolution which will in time topple bourgeois America and give the power to the people. It was all a question of who was brainwashing whom. But the single difference in my own case: I had been persuaded coercively-by force; no one had forced the Harrises or the others to adopt the SLA principles and Codes of War. As the date of my trial approached, word came from F. Lee Bailey that I was to see one more psychiatrist, who was the expert's expert on Chinese thought reform and coercive persuasion used on prisoners of war in Korea, Communist China, and North Vietnam. So, over a fourday period in the second week of January, I spent fifteen hours going over my SLA experiences with Dr. Robert Jay Lifton of Yale University. Dr. Lifton, author of several books on coercive persuasion and thought reform, and a consultant on the subjectsto the Air Force, after taking what he called "a peek" at me, pronounced me a "classic case" which met all the psychological criteria of a coerced prisoner of war. He bemoaned the fact that he had not been able to see me during the first two weeks of my arrest, for then he could have observed the all-important transition from my coerced state of mind to my present state, when I had already shucked off a good deal of the "gunk!' that had filled my mind. The way I had acted immediately after my arrest-the clenched-fist salutes, giving my occupation as "urban guerrilla," the sentiments I expressed to Trish Tobin two days after my arrest-bolstered and confirmed his diagnosis of coercive persuasion. One does not revert back with the snap of the fingers upon being released. Dr. Lifton explained that many of the released POW's in Korea "spouted Commu-nist gunk" for a full two weeks after being freed, until it finally dawned on them that the coercive pressure was off. If I had reacted differently, that would have been suspect, he said. In fact, he added, I was a rare phenomenon for psychiatrists studying coercive persuasion because I was the first and as far as he knew the only victim of a political kidnapping in the United States. In his judgment, I had been "compliant" in going along with the SLA demands, but I had not been "converted" to their cause. Once freed from their power and control, I was realizing that I no longer had to comply with their thought reform and was, in fact, reverting to my former life and values. Dr. Lifton said he would be happy to testify on MY behalf at the upcoming trial. That was good news. However, if the defense used expert psychiatric testimony, the government was entitled to put its own experts on the stand in rebuttal. That meant that I would have to see two more doctors—for the government's side. The first was Dr. Harry Kozol, an elderly, stout man with a high, squeaky voice and a strange accent. He was the Director of the Bridgewater, Massachusetts, Center for Criminally Dangerous Sex Offenders. I had five sessions with this man. At first, his questions were merely strange and sexually oriented: Was Cinque black? Black black or light black? What was the color of his eyes? The texture of his hair? How did he caress you? Tell me about the seduction. Did you kiss him? Was he circumcised? What did your friends do? Tell me about your lover, William Wolfe . . . The questions came at me like a full-scale cross-examination and I kept having to deny that anyone was my "friend" or my "lover" or that I had initiated any of the things that had been done to me. Then he began to ask me about the Harrises and what part they had played in various crimes. I refused point-blank to talk about the Harrises or anyone else still alive or say anything that could be used against them by the government. I told him I was still. in fear of them. But he kept insisting. His provocative questions were beginning to make me ill, and within fifteen or twenty minutes he had me in hysterics. I ran out of the room, crying, looking for Al Johnson, whom I found standing by in another room. Then I came back and told Dr. Kozol that my lawyer said I did not have to answer such questions. He kept on. I ran out again. Came back. And on and on went those questions. In the end, Dr. Kozol and Al Johnson got into a furious argument and Al ended up taking him back to court for a hearing in an attempt to straighten out what the doctor could and could not ask me under the court order. I was frankly surprised when I met the government's second expert. He turned out to be an M.D. and not a licensed psychiatrist at all. He was a bohemian type with a shaven head, wearing a turtleneck shirt with strands of beads around his neck. It seemed his specialty was treating runaway teenagers with drug and behavior problems and he had testified at more than two hundred trials in twenty-two states. This was Dr. Joel Fort, a "expert witness," who, according to Al Johnson, had volunteered to testify for the defense and then had gone over to the government's side when he was told that we could not use him. Dr. Fort was easier on me than Dr. Kozol had been, but it was obvious that he had already made up his mind. He kept asking questions trying to pin down the notion that I had been a very unhappy girl before my kidnapping, that I was ashamed of my family's wealth and position, and that I wanted to break away from the family and be a rebel. None of that was true, which I tried to tell. this doctor. My family life and upbringing had been a happy one and, in fact, I had always been thankful about the benefits and privileges of being a Hearst. But Dr. Fort clearly had his own stereotyped image of children of wealth. In four separate sessions, I went over the same story, the same facts of my childhood, the kidnapping, the closet, the SLA, and the bank robbery. Again I refused to talk about the Harrises or the others. The facts were the same but the interpretations of those facts were different. Dr. Fort seemed to have made up his mind that I had enjoyed being Tania, running around robbing banks and shooting up the streets of Los Angeles. He thought I adored being "Queen of the SLA!' (his phrase) and I could not persuade him that he had it all wrong. Nor did I try very hard. I wanted to get it over with, once and for all, and never talk of it again. When F. Lee Bailey returned to the jail, shortly before the trial was to begin, I pleaded with him to keep me off the witness stand. I did not think I could bear to go over all of this one more time. I felt shattered by the ceaseless questioning. He again promised to keep me off the stand. MY defense would be two-pronged, Bailey told me. First of all, I had gone into the Hibernia Bank under clear duress. That part should be easy. But the government, in order to convict me, would have to show intent-that I had joined in the robbery voluntarily because I had joined the SLA voluntarily. To prove that, the government would bring in the shooting at Mel's and any and all events after the Hibernia Bank robbery to try to prove that I had joined the SLA and cooperated with them voluntarily. So our second line of defense would be diminished capacity resulting from coercive persuasion-that I had been abused, threatened, and scared out of my wits for so long that I was no longer strong enough to resist. Legally, the defense would have to prove, he said, that I had been reduced by the SLA to a state of diminished capacity and had not been mentally capable of resisting the SLA or of escaping. That was why the psychiatric testimony would be so important -to link what had happened to me to what had happened to our POW's in the Korean and Vietnam wars. "If you were being tried in a military court, Patty," he told me, "I could get you acquitted in one day." Pps. 393-406 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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