The Dilemma of Sara Jane Olson

On June 29, several dozen people gathered in a windowless room in San Francisco's Mission District to hear ex-federal fugitive Sara Jane Olson talk about why she is on trial for the attempted murder of two Los Angeles police officers 26 years ago. The literature table at the event was festooned with information about the horrible conditions in America's prisons and copies of Olson's cookbook, Serving Time: America's Most Wanted Recipes. Olson was in town to raise money for her legal defense fund.

Flanking Olson was a large photograph of Warren Wells, a former member of the Black Panther Party who had passed away that morning while serving a life sentence in prison. Behind the podium was a large maroon banner: "Defend and Support Sara Jane Olson -- Free All Political Prisoners."

Olson was indicted in 1976, in Los Angeles, for conspiring to plant bombs, which did not explode, under two police cars. She said that she is not guilty and that her trial, scheduled to begin Oct. 15 in Los Angeles, is a show proceeding, produced by law enforcement officials with a grudge against her and the generation she represents.

Stuart Hanlon, a member of Olson's defense team, took the microphone to say that Olson was not anywhere near Los Angeles when the bombs were planted and that "the prosecution is political to its core." According to Hanlon, Los Angeles' law enforcers have fabricated evidence. They are, he claimed, trying to frame Olson because she was -- and is -- a political dissident. The System, said Hanlon, wants to make an example of Olson in order to show young people that "if you attack the foundations of government, you will be pursued to the ends of the Earth."

Or at least to St. Paul, Minn., which is where Kathleen Ann Soliah, a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army who went underground in 1975, was captured two years ago. During the intervening years, Soliah had mutated into Olson, an upper-middle-class mother of three who has been variously portrayed in the national press as a soccer mom and as an unrepentant radical leftover from the 1960s. In many ways, say her defenders, it is really the '60s that are on trial. The real problem, they assert, is not political activism; it's persecution by paranoid law enforcers.

Curiously, the values and beliefs of Olson's criminal defense lawyers will be on trial, too. All but the youngest of them have a deep, abiding affection for their youth, when they defended many political radicals, including members of the SLA. The defense team intends to portray Olson's past behavior as the actions of a humanitarian, left-wing idealist, hoping to distract a jury from boxes and boxes and boxes of evidence demonstrating, at least in her prosecutors' minds, that she actively supported multiple acts of terrorism.

To help prove that Olson was a terrorist, the prosecution is calling as its star witness the heiress to a vast media fortune, a B-movie actress who was once an international symbol for what went wrong with the 1960s: Patricia Hearst, aka "Tania." To show Olson was an idealist, the defense will attempt to bring the spirit of the '60s into the courtroom, to re-create it as a positive era in U.S. history, a time when a tide of civil rights movements and anti-war demonstrations changed society for the better.

But last week history intervened in this carefully choreographed legal battle. In the wake of the terror bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it now seems very likely that Olson -- who is, after all, an alleged conspirator in terror bombings -- will seek to have the start of her trial delayed. Prosecutors are adamant that the trial, already long put off, start as scheduled. And whether the televised trial starts next month or next year, a question will hang over the courtroom: After Sept. 11, 2001, can anyone who ate with, lived with, and financially supported known terrorists be seen as well-intentioned or, in any sense, innocent?

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Much has been written about Patty Hearst and her association with the SLA, a good deal of it coming in the form of self-serving, conflicting accounts by SLA members.

But certain facts stand out as historical benchmarks. In March 1973, Donald DeFreeze escaped from Soledad Prison in Monterey. DeFreeze, 31, found refuge with prison reform activists in Berkeley. Renaming himself Cinque Mtume (Fifth Prophet), DeFreeze, an African-American, organized a half-dozen or so white, middle-class radicals into the Symbionese Liberation Army, a "focoist" organization. (Focoists, such as Che Guevara, argued that the violent actions of a small band of revolutionaries can inspire the masses to rise up and overthrow a capitalist state.)

On Nov. 6, 1973, the SLA slew Marcus Foster, the school superintendent of Oakland, in a fusillade of cyanide-tipped bullets. Cinque then issued the first of a series of SLA communiqués, explaining that Foster had to be killed because he wanted to issue identification cards to high school students and unveiling the SLA's slogan: "Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys Upon the Life of the People."

On Feb. 4, 1974, DeFreeze and his band kidnapped Patricia Campbell Hearst at gunpoint from her Berkeley apartment after repeatedly bashing the face of Stephen Weed, her boyfriend, with a wine bottle.

On the morning of April 15 -- to the astonishment of the world -- Hearst and eight members of the SLA robbed the Hibernia Bank in the Sunset District of San Francisco, shooting and injuring two bystanders and escaping with $10,660. Nine days later, the SLA released a now-famous tape recording: "Greeting to the people, this is Tania," Hearst began. The newly minted revolutionary blamed the bystanders for getting in the way of an "expropriation."

"[T]he difference between a criminal act and a revolutionary act is shown by what the money is used for," Hearst said, claiming that she had not been brainwashed, that she was "a soldier in the people's army."

The first phase of the SLA's existence ended when, on May 17, 1974, Cinque and five SLA members were cornered by 400 police officers in a house in South Central Los Angeles. The house sprang into flames during an ensuing firefight, and all of the SLA members perished as millions watched on national television. By a quirk of fate, Hearst and two of her comrades, Bill and Emily Harris, were not at home when Los Angeles police came knocking. They fled to the Bay Area.

Enter Kathleen Soliah, a University of California at Santa Barbara theater graduate who was working as a waitress in Berkeley. Soliah, then 27, had been friends with Angela Atwood, an SLA member who was killed in Los Angeles. Soliah organized a rally in Berkeley to commemorate the SLA dead.

She then helped the Harrises and Hearst escape to the East Coast. When the fugitive SLA members returned to the Bay Area a few months later, Soliah and two of her siblings, Steven and Josephine, set up housekeeping with them. Other people joined the group. According to contemporaneous accounts and the Los Angeles district attorney's trial brief, the revivified SLA embarked on a bombing and bank-robbing campaign under the rubric "New World Liberation Front."

According to Hearst, on the morning of April 21, 1975, Soliah, Emily Harris, James Kilgore, and Michael Bortin entered the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento. Hearst has accused Harris of shotgunning Myrna Opsahl, a matronly Seventh-day Adventist who was depositing church proceeds. The ski-masked robbers made off with $15,000. Opsahl died on the spot.

According to historical accounts and the Olson prosecutors, the urban terrorists spent the rest of the summer blowing up police cars all over the Bay Area. On Aug. 21, unexploded pipe bombs, laced with nails, were found under two police cars in Los Angeles. Hearst has claimed that Soliah and Kilgore returned from Los Angeles on Aug. 22 depressed about their failed bombing run. (Perhaps the most reliable history of the SLA, Voices of Guns, written by investigative journalists Vin McLellan and Paul Avery and published in 1977, puts Soliah and Kilgore in Mendocino County between Aug. 15 and Aug. 22.)

Most of the gang was captured on Sept. 18, 1975, when federal agents raided their safe houses in San Francisco. The Soliah sisters heard the news on the radio and fled through the back window of an FBI-watched house.