Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (63 page)

“Does anyone recall that famous photo of Patty Hearst in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s seven-headed cobra symbol?” Lloyd asks them. “You know the one I’m talking about: she’s wearing a black knit beret and she has an M-1 carbine slung across her chest.”

“Oh, man!” Skip groans. “I had the biggest crush on Patty Hearst back then.”

“Skip, weren’t you about six?” Twinker asks him, laughing.

“More like seven or eight,” says Skip, “but I was–what’s the word?”

“Precocious?” Lloyd suggests.

“Warped?” says Twinker.

“Infatuated,” D.H. says, speaking from personal experience.

“Right! I was infatuated with her,” says Skip. “I wanted to go fight the SLA and kidnap Patty back. I used to daydream that once she saw how much I loved her, she’d hide out with me in my bedroom and just kiss and hug me for months. Then–after she turned back into a nice, normal rich girl again–I’d help her surrender to the police at a big press conference. Her mom and dad would be bawling their eyes out, saying, ‘Thank you, Skip, for saving our baby!’ while everyone else on TV, like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, talked about how big a hero I was.”

“You might’ve had your chance,” says Lloyd, grinning. “It’s a known fact that Patty Hearst passed right through Kingsburg on Highway 99 when the SLA was making its migration from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles.”

“All you needed was a machine gun, Skippy,” Jimmy says. “You could’ve taken ‘em on.”

“Patty used a rather photogenic little M1 carbine to rob the Hibernia Bank,” says Lloyd, free-associating. “Later, she fired it at security guards in a sporting goods store to help her comrades escape after they shoplifted a pair of tube socks. Bland, spoiled, self-regarding Patty–nineteen-year-old heiress to the Hearst family fortune–transformed into the revolutionary guerrilla girl, Tania. Curious, isn’t it? How did that happen? Does anyone have a clue?”

“They brainwashed her,” Jimmy says, parroting the standard newscaster’s theory.

“Yes, but where did the SLA learn their brainwashing techniques?” Lloyd asks. “Did you ever stop to think about that? Those techniques were rather sophisticated for the time. Brutal… but sophisticated. For forty days, the SLA kept Patty in a tiny closet, which functioned as a sensory deprivation chamber. She was also deprived of food and sleep–and she was frequently raped. She thought she might be killed at any time.”

“Poor Patty!” Twinker says.

“Yes, poor Patty…” says Lloyd. “Is it any wonder she started to moon after her captors? It’s well known among the intelligence community that a deranged sort of unconscious complicity is found in victims of kidnapping and ritual abuse–a passive cooperation in one’s own degradation.
Stockholm syndrome
, they call it now. But how did the SLA know that? Any guesses?”

A collective shrug. “Maybe they read about in a book somewhere,” Gordon says. If he had to brainwash someone, that’s how he’d go about it.

“Donald DeFreeze was just a poor, black, functionally illiterate street criminal before his transformation into ‘Cinque’–the founder and leader of the SLA. I doubt he had a library card,” Lloyd says. “And I seriously doubt he came up with the SLA’s communiqués on his own. One of my favorites–the one that gave the game away for me–was their revolutionary slogan, ‘Death to the Fascist Insect that preys upon the Life of the People!’ When I saw that, I just knew… the SLA was a creation meant to serve that Fascist Insect, and when their usefulness was at its end that same Fascist Insect would be biting off the SLA’s head.”

“Like a praying mantis after it has sex.
Nice
…” says Jimmy.

“I always thought it was kind of extreme,” Skip says, “the way the LAPD ganged up on the SLA in that crappy little house in Compton and burned it to the ground while they fired about nine thousand bullets into it. I mean, they weren’t even sure if Patty was in there or not. It seemed pretty ruthless.”

“It was meant to appear ruthless,” Lloyd says. “The SLA represented everything Middle America has been taught to fear: free love, black militancy, women’s liberation, and rebellion against an unjust system. Stir all that up with some Communist-sounding rhetoric and kick things off with the assassination of a popular school superintendent and you’ve got an organization that seems to be just begging to go down in flames. Their termination was used as an example. But what most people don’t realize is that the SLA had been designed to serve as that example right from the beginning. It was only one in a series of covert operations intended to disrupt and discredit the New Left and to bring closure to the Woodstock era.”

“So who’s the Fascist Insect?” Gordon wants to know.

“Well…” Lloyd huffs, “the CIA, of course… and those shadowy figures behind the CIA–and all the other alphabet agencies–who run the show.” Lloyd gives a wink and a nudge to Gordon and mummers: “The Anunnaki. Remember them?”

The Anunnaki…
Gordon thinks.
Where have I heard that before?
He gets a brief mental image of a corporate boardroom full of pissed-off lizardpeople. Human meat and gore spatters blue velvet curtains and mahogany-paneled walls.

“The Anu-
what?”
D.H. asks from the backseat.

“Never mind…” Lloyd says. “Here’s how it worked: Donald DeFreeze was an informant for the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Unit from 1967 until 1969, when he was charged with armed robbery and sent up to Vacaville State Prison. For the next two years during his confinement, DeFreeze met twice a week with a CIA psychological warfare expert named Colston Westbrook, who’d served as an advisor to both the Korean CIA and the South Vietnamese Special Police Branch. Westbrook happened to be black, and at Vacaville he used the Black Cultural Association as a cover to gain the trust of the inmates. But what he was really doing there was conducting mind control experiments for the CIA’s MKSEARCH program, under the direction of Doctor James Hamilton.”

“No way!” says Skip. “How would you even know that?”

“I have my sources…” Lloyd smirks, “but if you want documentation, you’ll find it in the public record. Frank Carlucci, Deputy Director of the CIA, sent a letter dated October 18th, 1978 to Congressman Leo Ryan, admitting that MKSEARCH experiments were being conducted at Vacaville just prior to DeFreeze’s stay there. Oh… and it just so happened that Congressman Ryan was assassinated exactly one month later on an airport runway in British Guyana during another CIA operation run amok.”

“You’re talking about the Jonestown Massacre…” Gordon infers. “Jim Jones, cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid, nine hundred dead–that whole thing?”

“None other,” Lloyd says. “It all ties together in a tricksterish, convoluted way. Leo Ryan headed the Free Patty Hearst Movement, which was very active in persuading President Carter to commute Patty’s jail sentence early in 1979. Ryan was also co-author of the pending Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have subjected all covert CIA operations to Congressional approval for funding. It’s extremely fortunate for the CIA that the Hughes-Ryan Amendment died shortly after Leo Ryan did, don’t you think?”

“You think the CIA offed him on purpose?” Jimmy asks.

“I do,” Lloyd says. “Before the Peoples Temple settled in Jonestown, that same area of Guyana had been the site of a CIA training camp called the Shalom Project. Black mercenary guerillas had been trained there for operations in Angola. And Jim Jones was almost certainly a longtime CIA asset, helping them test-drive new mechanisms of social control. The people of Jonestown didn’t commit suicide. They were murdered. What you have to understand is that MKULTRA and other CIA mind control programs didn’t stop in 1973, as Richard Helms would have had Congress believe. They just went deeper underground, into prisons, mental institutions, and–most significantly–religious cults like the Peoples Temple. Of course the CIA doesn’t care to advertise facts like that.”

“Just like they don’t go around bragging about that Westbrook guy being Donald DeFreeze’s handler,” says Gordon. “Can you prove any of this?”

“I can’t,” Lloyd admits. “But it’s exactly how things work, believe me…. It was Colston Westbrook who gave DeFreeze his new guerilla name–General Field Marshal Cinque Mtume. Westbrook also designed the Naga symbol that would come to represent DeFreeze’s future guerilla army. When DeFreeze was transferred to a less-secure prison at Soledad, the CIA fixed things so he was able to walk right out of there. As an escaped convict that no one was really looking for, he shacked up with a politically radical lesbian librarian self-dubbed ‘Mizmoon’ and they wrote the SLA’s Codes of War together.”

“Waitta second… what’s a Naga?” Skip asks, a little slow on the uptake. “That cobra-headed thingie?”

“Yes, it’s that cobra-headed thingie…” Lloyd says with surprisingly little scorn. “In southern parts of Asia, the Naga are reputed to be an ancient race of reptilian beings, or serpent-gods, who live in kingdoms beneath the sea, or in vast, cavernous palaces underground. Colston Westbrook would have run across their stone likenesses on his excursions into Korea and South Vietnam.”

Everything from Gordon’s previous conversation with Lloyd suddenly comes flooding back to him:
Nordic aliens, Aryans, Quetzalcoatl, kundalini, neural DNA….
Gordon says, “Then aren’t the Nagas the same thing as the Anu –”

“Yes,” Lloyd says, cutting him short. “The Naga symbol had many pleasing connotations for the CIA. The Symbionese Liberation Army, after all, was a shadow aspect of that organization, a momentary nightmare transformation that revealed–for those who have eyes to see–the tragic, hydra-headed monster the CIA has become. It must have amused them to make such a pointed reference to their own controllers.”

“Their controllers?” Twinker asks.

“In a very real sense, we’re all victims of mind control on this planet. And it’s our sacred duty, as potentially free spiritual beings, to identify and subvert our would-be controllers,” Lloyd says. “That goes for everyone, from the lowliest bum on the street all the way up to the President of the United States. Donald DeFreeze did his part, in a crude but fearless way. A few days before his death, he publicly identified Colston Westbrook as a covert agent working for military intelligence and called for his execution. Of course, it was DeFreeze who was executed first.”

“Bummer,” says Skip.

“How’d they get Patty?” Twinker wants to know.

“As I understand it,” Lloyd says, “the CIA or the FBI could have picked up Patty Hearst at any time, but they chose to let her remain free so they could build up their files on potential subversives. When they finally brought her in, she was forced to stand trial for armed robbery, even though she was a victim of kidnapping and obviously wouldn’t have been robbing banks otherwise.”

“That really bit the Big One,” Skip says, still outraged over the callous judicial treatment suffered by his first great love.

“It struck me as payback for Patty’s rebellion against her obscenely rich parents,” says Lloyd. “How it must have galled them to hear their little media princess denouncing them as capitalist pigs enthralled to a corporate police state willing to imprison, torture, and murder millions of innocent people–including herself–in order to maintain power and further their blind agenda of greed and hatred.”

“Way to go, Patty…” Gordon says.

“Well, it was fun while it lasted, but poor Patty had to endure a second round of brainwashing once they had her in prison.” Lloyd glumly shakes his head. “The so-called mind control experts who testified at her trial were themselves all connected in one way or another with the CIA’s MKULTRA and MKSEARCH programs: Margaret Singer, Martin Orne, Robert Lifton, Joly West–all of them. ‘Doctor Jolly’ West, for instance, started off his career in Air Force Intelligence, interviewing American pilots who’d come back from Korea after being captured and brainwashed by the Communist Chinese. He had Top Secret clearance and funding under MKULTRA to study the psychobiology of dissociation. He was a friend of Aldous Huxley, who gave him the bright idea of using LSD combined with hypnosis in his experiments. It also so happens that our ‘Doctor Jolly’ once spent eight hours straight in one of John Lilly’s sensory deprivation tanks. And he has the rare distinction of being the only person to have ever killed an elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with a bad acid trip.”

Jimmy laughs. “The guy sounds like a maniac!”

“Indeed, he’s right up there with Columbia University’s Doctor Paul H. Hoch, who coined the term ‘borderline personality disorder’ and killed a tennis pro named Harold Blauer with an overdose of Army mescaline.”

“Hey, all that reminds me…” says D.H., “I read somewhere that John Lilly used to give hits of acid to dolphins and now the Stanford Research Institute is training them to wear bombs and work as underwater assassins.”

“Dolphin assassins?” says Jimmy. “Would Flipper really do that?”

“It’s a documented fact,” Lloyd states. “Dolphins strapped with explosives have been swimming out to enemy ships and blowing them up ever since the Vietnam War.”

“Dolphins?” Twinker says, appalled. “They do that to dolphins?” Apparently she shares the popular New Age belief that dolphins are super-intelligent, spiritually powerful sea creatures with the potential to enlighten mankind.

“No area is considered off-limits when it comes to U.S. military-funded medical research,” Lloyd explains to them. “They’ve been responsible for a fantastic farrago of evil. Boys and girls as young as four were given massive doses of LSD and kept on full-blown acid trips for days, weeks, and even months at a time. Look into the case histories of Doctor Lauretta Bender, past-President of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, if you don’t believe me. Over at Yale, Jose Delgado implanted electrodes into an eleven-year-old boy’s brain that made him think he was a girl. The gender-confused young man prattled on endlessly about marrying a doctor–specifically, Doctor Delgado. Radiation experiments were conducted on pregnant mothers, with forged consent forms, resulting in children who died of leukemia before they could start kindergarten. And don’t even get me started on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment….”