Sara Jane Moore was a snitch for the FBI?

Sara Jane Moore, who came close to assassinating President Jerry Ford in September of 1975, was just paroled from federal prison at age 77: Sara Jane Moore, who tried to kill Ford in '75, freed on parole by Michael Taylor, SFGate.com 12/31/07.

Taylor's article gives a good historical sketch of Moore, with some mention of an unrelated attempt by a member of the Charles Manson cult to kill Ford just a couple of weeks before. One thing jumped out at me, though:

On Feb. 4, 1974, a group of revolutionaries called the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, who morphed into a machine-gun-wielding terrorist and joined her captors for more than 19 months on the run. (The Hearst Corp. now owns The [San Francisco] Chronicle.)

When the SLA demanded that Hearst's father, Randolph Hearst, feed poor people, a $2 million food giveaway program called "People In Need" was created.

Moore, an accountant who was already steeped in the Bay Area's radical politics, volunteered to be the group's bookkeeper. At the time, she was also an FBI informant, but apparently never rose far in the bureau's arsenal of snitches. That was in early 1974. (my emphasis)

The SLA was a quixotically murderous group of bank robbers and adventurers with a ditsy ideology. Their most famous slogan was creatively strange, though: "Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People". I'm surprised neocon bigwig Richard Perle doesn't close with something like that when he gives a speech, though obviously he would say "Islamofascist".

There's no reason to think that the FBI would have put out a hit on Jerry Ford. It's just that the fact that Moore's was an informant was news to me. It is at least a reminder that the people who are recruited as snitches are often unstable people of questionable reliability.

It made me curious enough to go look at the account of the Hearst food distribution program in Patty/Tania (1975) by Jerry Belcher and Don West, which evidently was written before Moore's attempt of Ford's life. Belcher and West interviewed Moore in their research and write about her role in the program.

[Wonk Alert! From here on, I'm not trying to make a particular point about anything. I'm just talking about aspects of the story that struck me as interesting.]

The program financed by Randy Hearst and the Hearst Foundation was called People in Need (PIN) and was a one-time food distribution. It had to be organized quickly, which is no easy task, especially if people are trying to do it right. To set up and run the program, Hearst brought in two official from Washington State, A. Ludlow Kramer, Washington's Secretary of State, and Peggy Maze, who headed a Washington state program called Neighbors in Need (NIN). Hearst's PIN program was modeled after NIN.

Patty Hearst (r) on a bank heist with the SLA, 1974

Belcher and West write:

Unlike most of the volunteers, Sara Jane Moore was a professional woman - white, upper-middle-class, an accountant and business consultant. She showed up at the Hearst Building on February 22, the day of the first free food distribution, and volunteered her services, gratis, for a week. She was separated from her husband, had a young son to support, and could not afford to work without income indefinitely.

Kramer quickly determined that Ms. Moore's accounting and managerial skills were sorely needed. Kramer and his staffers, Mrs. Maze and Pat Colton, took her out to dinner the following night. They asked her to stay on throughout the program.

"I think Lud said to me, 'We mean paid staff.' I said I would like to be paid because if I were going to do it for the entire program - at that time we were talking about a two- or three-month program - it would mean I would have to be paid enough to reimburse my expenses. We settled the amount at that tune."

Ms. Moore, however, refused to take any salary until after the program was completed.

During the next few weeks she would be privy to much behind-the-scenes maneuvering and feuding.

Almost before she knew where the pencil sharpener was located, she began hearing bitter gripes about Kramer. At first she discounted the complaints. But then, soon, she decided the complaints were often valid.

"The majority in PIN, volunteers who helped bag food, businessmen who sold us things, the majority were really doing it from their hearts," she said. "A lot of them disagreed with what we were doing, but as long as we had decided to do it 'Well, hell. Let's do it.' We had tremendous talent, really willing people. Unfortunately, the management - meaning the people from Washington State - ranged from the inept to the incompetent. ... There was a lack of communication from them, a lack of any real feeling that PIN could succeed or that it should succeed."

She assessed Kramer as the image maker, the front man, perhaps sincere in his own way - but not above using PIN to promote his political ambitions. But in her view, he knew little about administration, almost nothing about food and food distribution. "The man," she said, "didn't know how to butter bread."

Having worked with and for social service agencies, it's not at all unusual to find a great deal of bickering and belittling of other officials. Radical movements are also notoriously sectarian. Even when people are not competing so much for money, there is still a lot of competition for position, recognition and what power there is to be had in that environment. In this case, it's easy to imagine that a state official from Washington would not only be viewed by Bay Area radicals as an Establishment figure but also someone who was taking a high-visibility position for which there were undoubtedly local aspirants.

With the information that Moore was at the time acting as a snitch for the FBI, it strikes me that the way she insinuated herself into the PIN organization probably indicated that she was working out ways to make a lot of contacts in the Bay Area radical scene. Although it's not surprising that the FBI would be working snitches to get information on the SLA - that is the FBI's job in a case like the SLA's - but it's worth noting that a "snitch" is not the same as an undercover agent or an agent provocateur, although snitches trying to impress their importance on those who pay them for information have certainly been known to stir up stuff. They've also been known to just make stuff up.

Kramer and Maze probably weren't thinking of screening for police agents in their hiring. But if they had been, her story as related by Belcher and West sounds funny. She was a single mother with a child to support and she needed a job right away. But she was willing to work for free for a week and then for expenses only until the end of the project - in a high-profile operation that, given its association with the SLA, probably would not be ideal resume reference for a lot of employers.

This from Belcher and West is also something that would be an easy accusation for someone like Moore who was trying to impress people who may have been suspicious of characters like Kramer and Maze to make:

They [Kramer, Maze and Pat Colton] commuted between San Francisco and Washington at least 17 times. Air fares were paid by PIN and NIN. Kramer and his staffers stayed in free rooms at the posh St. Francis Hotel, but there were expenses and PIN paid them.

"One day," Ms. Moore recalled, "they handed me a bill for $1268. This was simply meals, laundry and drinks."

Belcher and West do not indicate that they verified this particular point independently. In itself, it's relatively small in the scheme of things. She makes it sounds like Kramer and Maze were partying off the food-distribution money. But if that represented meals for several staffers over several weeks, it doesn't seem that unusual on the face of it.

Belcher and West also quote a friend of the Hearst family, who asked to be identified by the pseudonym John Walker, who worked in the food-distribution warehouse and who mentions an informant, but an informant providing information to the SLA:

Walker was convinced, like a number of others, that certain elements of the ghetto underworld had infiltrated the operation to rip off food, to demand protection money to insure delivery of food to distribution points. He shared with others, including Sara Jane Moore (of whom he was no admirer) the conviction that the SLA had planted an informer-observer within the PIN organization or within the [Community Food] Coalition itself. (The SLA's condemnation of PIN rations as "hog food," made on a March tape recording, came within 24 hours after the phrase was used by a PIN warehouse worker in reference to a shipment of beans. Only 3 or 4 others were present when he made the remark in a closed Coalition-PIN meeting.)

But, by Walker's lights, PIN'S problems were not principally in the warehouse but in the front office.

"Between Sara Jane Moore being a white savior of the world and Ludlow Kramer being a future president of the United States, and his trusty assistants (who I don't dislike, in fact I really like Peggy Maze) these people could not make a decision," Walker charged. "Everyone was on a [Cheney]ing hero trip." (my emphasis)

For a program like this that had to be organized and executed so quickly, essentially from scratch, it would have been a substantial miracle if there had not been a tangle of administrative problems. Of course, if you wanted to minimize such problems, you probably wouldn't knowingly select an FBI snitch as a key administrator.

Belcher and West also make this reference to Moore:

Sara Jane Moore, one of Randy Hearst's stoutest defenders, commented that the Coalition, the SLA, and Patricia Hearst thought the editor was all-powerful — and he was not. She thought the impact of this reality on Patty must have been stunning.

"You have to remember that Patty was only 20 years old," she said quietly. "When I was 20, I thought my father was omnipotent. And Patty, I'm sure, feels that about her father with a great deal more reason than I would. Her father is wealthy, powerful, influential. She had gone through life seeing him getting his own way, and she thought he was omnipotent. And be simply is not. So I'm sure there is this tremendous letdown for Patty, and combined with the education she was getting from the people in the revolutionary movement - she must have felt deserted."

This is an inconsistency in the image of Moore. If you were seeking to insinuate yourself with leftwing revolutionary groups at that time, being "one of Randy Hearst's stoutest defenders" was an odd position to take.

There is a recent documentary about Patty Hearst and the SLA, Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army (2004) also known as "The American Experience: Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004). The PBS Website for the film has a lot of information about the SLA and Patty Hearst, including a transcript of the film. The film itself is available from Netflix under the title Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst.

Tags: don west, jerry belcher, patty hearst, randolph hearst, sara jane moore, symbionese liberation army