CRIME: The Ordeal of a Political Prisoner

For all its vicious history, kidnaping in the U.S. has been a crime forcing victimized families to trade suitcases full of cash for at least the hope of recovering a loved one unharmed. Last week one of the nation's most celebrated families, the Hearsts of California, continued trying desperately to deal with an altogether different abduction: perhaps the first political kidnaping in U.S. history. Members of the revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army, who dragged 19-year-old Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment and flung her into the trunk of a getaway car, at first ordered her father Randolph to feed all the needy of California as a condition for her return. It was a demand that not even the Hearst millions could possibly meet.

As Patricia's ordeal dragged through a second week, life at the Hearsts' $300,000 cream-colored stucco mansion in the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough took on a grim order. The 15 rooms, many of them decorated with antiques from the fabled San Simeon mansion of Patricia's grandfather William Randolph Hearst, were filled with agonized friends and family. Among them were Patricia's four sisters and her fiance Stephen Weed, 26, who had been badly beaten by the kidnapers. FBI agents set up a command center in the library, which was crammed with six telephones on the chance that Patty's captors might call. Throughout the week Randolph and Catherine Hearst—putting up a remarkably courageous front despite their fears—stepped before TV cameras to provide bits of news.

The S.L.A.'s first communique, delivered by mail to an FM radio station in Berkeley, also contained a tape cassette on which Patricia had recorded a message to her parents beginning, "Mom, Dad, I'm O.K."

Sounding tired, possibly drugged and scared to death, she went on to describe her captivity. The S.L.A., she said in a quivering monotone, kept her blindfolded most of the time, often with her hands tied, but "I'm not being starved or beaten." She noted that her captors had automatic weapons and warned against any rescue attempts by police. "These people aren't just a bunch of nuts," said Patricia. "They're perfectly willing to die for what they are doing. And I just hope that you'll do what they say, Daddy, and do it quickly."

She was followed on the recording by a man calling himself General Field Marshal Cinque (which he pronounced sin-cue). He said that Hearst, editor of the San Francisco Examiner and executive-committee chairman of the news-paper-and-magazine chain founded by his father, was "the corporate chairman of a fascist media empire." Furthermore, Mrs. Hearst, a regent of the University of California, had helped invest university funds, he said, "in corporations that have interest and do gain profit from robbery, oppression and genocide." As usual, the S.L.A. statement was filled with far-left jargon and was accompanied by the group's standard demand that its propaganda be printed and broadcast in full by Bay Area newspapers and stations. News executives had little choice except to accede to the demand in view of the S.L.A.'s final, chilling admonition concerning its "prisoner of war." Cinque* declared himself "quite willing to carry out the execution of your daughter to save the life of starving men, women and children of every race."