Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

This recorded message greeted all callers to the home telephone of Lionel Congreaves, a man of carefully cultivated negritude, an East Bay resident of several years’ duration, the erstwhile outside coordinator of the Afro-American Cultural Exchange at Vacaville Prison, and a more vilified and calumniated individual than you could ever hope to find.

As a matter of strictly personal interest, Lionel Congreaves maintained a collection of rumors, coincidences, and other allegations, baseless or otherwise, concerning the Symbionese Liberation Army and those murky areas in which its activities and his own gave the appearance of intersection.

And what was it that would constitute an allegation that had some basis? An excellent and thought-provoking question, indeed.

Now, Lionel Congreaves was prepared to admit to some embellishment of his personal resume. Everyone fudged a little, here and there, and he was no exception to this general rule, which went straight to the heart of human nature (a consistently interesting area). But in his own case, he found that the problem was not with the actual claims he had made but with the implications that sprang, unbidden, from them. He meant, you put a bunch of guys in a cage and their imaginations ran wild. Because it was from prison, you see, that the “snitch jacket,” so called, for which he had so carefully been fitted, was coming. All of the porcine, so to speak, activities that had been attributed to him derived from the febrile brains of a bunch of jailbirds he’d only been trying his best to help. So much for gratitude.

All right, he had made different claims to different people at different times. But the bare facts were the same, immutable: He spoke several languages, including French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. He had served seven years in two different branches of the armed forces and later had spent time in Indochina, in Vietnam and Cambodia, working for an American construction firm. And then he had obtained a post as a language instructor at UCB and become the outside coordinator of the Afro-American Cultural Exchange, a prisoners’ group formed to provide education and foster selfesteem. A little change of pace, for Lionel Congreaves. He had been attracted to the groves of academe, to the steep green hills rising above the bay, and he’d wanted to give something back to the community. Nothing strange about that at all.

Here was a baker’s dozen, some of the rumors that Lionel Congreaves took a certain bleak pleasure in cataloging:

Rumor No. 1 was that his employer while in Indochina, West Coast Construction and Engineering, Inc. of Los Angeles, was in fact a subsidiary of the Pacific Corporation, an alleged CIA front headquartered in Delaware — a “stone’s throw,” as the news media would have it, from Langley. A very long toss, Lionel Congreaves had oftentimes remarked.

Rumor No. 2 was that West Coast Construction and Engineering, Inc. had provided “tactical support” to the Phoenix Program, the CIA’s scheme to eliminate Vietcong sympathizers in South Vietnam via infiltration by covert agents. Specifically, it was alleged that West Coast Construction and Engineering constructed state-of-the-art torture chambers, interrogation centers, and other places of detainment.

Rumor No. 3 was that the Afro-American Cultural Exchange had been a “behavioral modification program,” an element of a new CIA program, CHAOS, whose purported aim was to recruit individuals “without existing dissident affiliation” to infiltrate leftist groups. In other words, a domestication of the alleged Phoenix agenda. These unaffiliated individuals would be those like, say, Donald David DeFreeze.

Rumor No. 4 was that the AACE encouraged prisoner participation by allowing itself to become known as a place where you could obtain “white snatch.”

Rumor No. 5 was that Drew and Diane Shepard as well as Angela Atwood had been CIA, working with Lionel Congreaves to indoctrinate candidates within the AACE, the latter two individuals providing enticement as described in Rumor No. 4, above.

Rumor No. 6 was that Lionel Congreaves had been DeFreeze’s control officer; that DeFreeze had come to the AACE when, after having enjoyed a string of surprisingly light punishments for repeated felony offenses and violations of probation (to say the least; Lionel Congreaves was in fact shocked by the leniency afforded the man in his chronic encounters with the law), he had finally run out of luck and been incarcerated at Vacaville; that DeFreeze had been highly recommended as a potential agent because of his many years’ experience as an informant for the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Unit.

Rumor No. 7 was that the SLA had been devised — by Lionel Congreaves, personally, himself (to the extent that it was claimed that he’d designed the seven-headed Naga figure) — to operate like a cancer within the Left.

Rumor No. 8 was that the future Tania had visited Vacaville under the auspices of the AACE, using the ID of one Mary Alice Siem, a lumber heiress, and that in the course of doing so she had become romantically involved with DeFreeze.

Rumor No. 9 was that after DeFreeze had himself been sufficiently programmed (according to some, via electrodes implanted directly in his brain — probably by none other than Lionel Congreaves, who could now look forward to listing neurosurgery among his many skills) and the central SLA cadre identified and primed, DeFreeze had been allowed to spin off a separate group from the AACE, Unisight, in which the members of the nascent SLA could finalize their plans. This accomplished, DeFreeze was shipped to Soledad, where arrangements were made for him to effect an “escape,” after which he returned to the Bay Area and awaited the green light to begin SLA operations.

Rumor No. 10 was that with respect to the plans mentioned in Rumor No. 9, above, Lionel Congreaves had himself identified Marcus Foster as the SLA’s first target, both because of Foster’s capitulation to Black Panther and community demands vis-à-vis the whole student ID thing ( oy vey, was Lionel Congreaves’s personal opinion of that particular brouhaha), and because his murder would cost the Left dearly in terms of credibility if attributed to a putative leftist group, such as the SLA.

Rumor No. 11 was that Tania had participated in the plotting of her own abduction, in part to avoid marrying Eric Stump. Alternatively, that Tania had plotted to kidnap one of her sisters, Vivian or Helene, and been double-crossed. The victim’s conspiring in her own abduction was supposedly proved by the fact that later the SLA was able to submit documents from the girl’s wallet as proof of its possession of her, despite the well-reported, perhaps obsessively reported, fact that she had been removed from the house “half naked.” The reasoning went, Where did the girl carry her wallet?

Rumor No. 12 was that DeFreeze in effect became Cinque Mtume, the name Lionel Congreaves was supposed to have chosen for him, and, having effectively evaded the control of his CIA handler (again, Lionel Congreaves) and set the SLA on a renegade course, was marked for termination “with extreme prejudice.”

Rumor No. 13 was that because of the concatenation of all the alleged circumstances enumerated above, and spurred by a well-attended (by The New York Times , among others) press conference called by investigator Lake Headley just days before the L.A. “barbecue” (as it was being called) in which Headley had divulged DeFreeze’s past as a police informer and his present intelligence connections, CIA operatives Teko and Yolanda had been instructed by their Los Angeles control agent, operating under the code name Prophet Jones, to remove Tania from the safe house at 833 West Eighty-fourth Street on May 16, 1974. The incident at Mel’s soldier, a “prisoner of war” in a “fascist concentration camp,” with a noble African heritage that had been hijacked from him. This was easier than admitting that he was an illiterate rapist or a pimp or the strong-arm thug for some pusher. But half these guys couldn’t get through The Cat in the Hat, and here comes Willie Wolfe with “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” It was frankly humorous.