Screed 29: CINQUE ON COBRA AND ZEBRA
After the message of April's Fool's Day, the SLA was silent for two weeks. Exhausted by their ordeal and dismayed by Patricia's metamorphosis into Tania, the Hearsts slipped off to Mexico. From a vacation villa in that warm nation, Randolph Hearst complained that the SLA had not played fair with him, and that he was disillusioned about their "good intentions". Similarly inadequate comments came from Weed, Kramer, the Berkeley revolutionaries, and others. The free-food program was terminated in Fresno just as it had begun in Oakland, namely with a riot, injuries, and arrests. Media stardoms shifted a little, moving from Black actionists, who now drew back, to professors and psychologists who eagerly replaced them.
While the police and FBI maintained a grim silence, a few enterprising reporters turned up the basic data on the SLA membership. As it now appeared, all but two, or possibly one, of the SLA people were college-educated Telegraph Avenue whites. All were ordinary Berkeley revolutionists, trite veterans of movements to "green" the nation and to "liberate" women, homosexuals, poets, South Vietnamese, Angolans, Catholic Irish, and children, as well as prisoners. Except for Cinque, their captive Black leader, they were all in their twenties. They had prepared their programs with great care, and done a great deal of practice shooting in basements and rifle ranges. To most of the other revolutionary spirits of Berkeley and Oakland they had seemed dangerous and counter-productive, especially after the murder of Marcus Foster. But from motives of loyalty, existential non-involvement, and sheer trembling cowardice, these other revolutionists had maintained silence about them and their plans.
Even as the names and histories of the SLA soldiers came out the newer set of "Zebra" crimes began to occupy the headlines. This was a new program of so-called "senseless slayings" or "random murders" of whites by Blacks on the streets of San Francisco and other cities. Shootings in this racially specialized series now totalled eighteen, and twelve of the San Francisco victims had been killed outright. The San Francisco Police Department, which had already mounted a massive program to stop these killings, now adopted the technique of accosting and questioning young Blacks who answered descriptions of the killers. There was an immediate protest from Black politicians and other race leaders. Court injunctions, "emergency meetings", riotous protests staged for the camera, and all the rest of the race-politics paraphernalia now filled the media. Quite by accident, the series of Black-white murders had acquired its poetic code-name Zebra. While the SLA lay quiet, their animal, the Cobra, slipped to the back pages, while the Zebra of the bloodier new episode dominated the emotions of the Bay Area peoples.
The next move of the SLA, namely the robbery of a San Francisco bank, took place after this shift of racial attention from Cobra to Zebra. Selected for attack was the Sunset branch of the Hibernia Bank, a quiet establishment in a quiet neighborhood. Into the bank at 10:30 AM on April 15, stormed Field Marshal Cinque and a little army of heavily armed white women. These included Patricia "Mizmoon" Soltysic, Soltysic's lesbian lover Camilla Hall, the lyric screedsperson Fahizah, and Patricia or Tania Hearst. Outside, the four or five other members of the Liberation Army manipulated four rented cars in an escape system. Security cameras in the bank photographed the whole scene. The opera. tion went off flawlessly, or would have, except that at the very end Cinque gratuitously shot down two elderly bystanders.
Screed 28, with the two which followed it, was read onto tape, packaged in tinfoil, and addressed to the still-favored WAPAC. By some slip or change in the plans, it went to an anonymous Black citizen, from him to another, and from the other to a Black police inspector, and so to the media and the FBi. In this screed, Cinque misrepresented the wanton shooting of the bystanders, pedantically enumerated weaponry used and weaponry "liberated" (from the bank guard), and introduced a new Symbionese calender system through which 1974 became "the year of the soldier". Of much more significance, Cinque attempted to regain the attention of the Bay Area Black communities by wedding his Cobra to the maturing Zebra. According to him, the casual butchery of the Zebra slayings must be thought of as a police gambit, the immediate purpose of which was "to entrap the SLA forces and more precisely to assassinate myself", and the general purpose of which was "to commit a race war" and "to remove young blacks from the community".
Other comments of Cinque in this screed reflect other events with which the SLA wished to connect itself. In particular, his plaint about the "disarming" of "the people" refers to another Berkeley-Oakland incident Following an assault complaint East Bay policemen had entered a Black Muslim barracks and confiscated an enormous arsenal of firearms, plus some narcotics and stolen property. Black counter-action, which took the usual form of civil-rights lawsuits and televised screams about harassment and genocide, had represented another threat to the SLA domination of the media.
[I]
To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express their wills of freedom.
Greetings to the people and all sisters and brothers behind the, walls and in the streets. To elements of the Black Liberation Army,) the Weather Underground and the Black Guerrilla Family, and all combat forces of the community.
I am General Field Marshall Cm speakmg
[III
Combat operations: April 1 5, the year of the soldier.
Action. Appropriation.
Supplies liberated: One .38 Smith and Wesson revolver, condition good. Five rounds of 158 grain .30 caliber ammo.
Cash:
$lO,660,02.
Number of rounds fired by combat forces: Seven rounds.
Number of rounds lost: Five.
Casualities: People's forces, none. Enemy forces, none. Civilian, two.
Reasons: Subject One, Male. Subject was ordered to lay [sic] on the floor face down. Subject refused order and jumped out the front door of the bank. Therefore the subject was shot. Subject Two, Male. Subject failed or did not hear warning to clear the street. Subject was running down the street toward the bank, and combat forces accordingly assumed subject was an armed enemy force element. Therefore the subject was shot.
We again warn the public. Any citizen attempting to aid, to inform, or to assist the enemy of the people in any manner will be shot without hesitation. There is no middle ground in war. Either you are the people of the enemy. You must make the choice.
[III]
As a Black man and a father and as a representative of Black people, I would like to say that 1, as well as many other Black people, have been watching the actions taken against Black people within the city of San Francisco, and also in Berkeley and Oakland, by the racist agents of the ruling class.
Like most of my people, I never trust anything the enemy says or does. I must at all times be suspicious or distrust any acts on his part as not being what they first seem to be. Following this principle, I must look at the so-called Zebra operation with more attention, since it is an action against the freedom of the people.
For the love that I hold for the people drives myself and all the SLA to understand that we must fight and defend the people.
I at first had thought that Operation Zebra was really nothing more than a normal counter-insurgency operation to attempt to entrap the SLA forces, and more precisely to assassinate myself. I say assassinate because the enemy knows by now who I am, and [tape blurred: that I will not fail the people? J that I represent as long as I am alive.
He understands that if he can terrorize and disarm the Black community with some action adjoining me, then he will be able to isolate me specifically and to kill me, thereby not allowing me the time to educate [tape blurred: the people and children?] of the community to become leaders of our people.
He also understands that I have been bringing the children of the oppressed and the children of the oppressor together. He understands that I am bringing the truth to the children and opening their eyes to the real enemy of humanity by simply allowing them to see the enemy as he truly is, and allowing them to find out really who the people are; and that the [we?] people love them and will welcome them with open arms if they will just come.
In short, he knows that the SLA is building an army of the people. That is the army which by its very composition can truly destroy the enemy and free the people.
[IV]
At this time I am more inclined to feel, however, that Operation Zebra is a lot more than just entrapping the SLA. In fact I feel the enemy knows that he or she can never totally entrap all the SLA forces regardless of the size of the city in which counterinsurgency operations may take place. The [tape blurred: enemy's false pretenses? ] that the SLA are under surveillance by the FBI is designed to demoralize the people and attempt to make them believe in the prestige of the enemy.
In any event, once understanding these points we come back again to the same question: What is Operation Zebra? If Operation Zebra is not merely a counter-insurgency operation, then what is it9 And if we look closely we begin to see the truth that Operation Zebra is a planned enemy offensive against the people to commit a race war. This could possibly be the only way the enemy can stop the SLA from bringing all oppressed people together against the common enemy.
Operation Zebra is even more than that. The so-called Zebra killer will never be found, because it is the only justification, notwithstanding [sic] martial law being declared, whereby the enemy can stop and arrest any Black male. In fact we can expect in the next few months, under the guise of searching for the so-called Zebra killer, block by block and house by house searches. And of course all weapons found in the people's homes will be confiscated under the guise of stolen property or that [sic] they have to be verified as not being the murder weapon. In short, the people will be disarmed.
Operation Zebra shows up even another purpose of the enemy. It is a means to remove as many Black males from the community as possible, at the same time pressing all Black males to submit to FBI classification and identification, which is being applied in the form of so-called police passes, by using each person's driver's license or Social Security card numbers, which are, I may mention, pre-codes for the FBI computer systems.
[VI
Now people, I warn you again: The only way, I repeat, the only way you will regain your life and freedom is to fight.
The only way you can keep your guns is to use them.
Your time is running short. Open your eyes.
Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.
