Black Cultural Association
Prison outreach program at Vacaville run by CIA operative Colston Westbrook that connected white radical students from Berkeley with Black inmates, serving as a recruitment mechanism for the SLA and a conduit for behavioral modification experimentation.
The Black Cultural Association (BCA) was a program operated at Vacaville Medical Facility in California that ostensibly provided educational and cultural programming for Black inmates. The program was run by Colston Westbrook, a CIA psychological warfare specialist and employee of CIA proprietary Pacific Architects and Engineers. Westbrook served as the "outside visitors coordinator" for the BCA, connecting white radical leftist students from Berkeley with Black prisoners in a program that researchers have identified as a recruitment mechanism for intelligence-connected operations.1
Recruitment of Donald DeFreeze
Through the BCA, Colston Westbrook recruited and mentored Donald DeFreeze, the future leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army, who was serving time at Vacaville as a career criminal and LAPD informant. DeFreeze obtained early release from Vacaville by performing a "favor" for prison authorities, a reference to submitting to psychiatric experiments during the same period when MKULTRA experiments were being conducted on inmates at the facility. After his release and subsequent escape from Soledad Prison, DeFreeze formed the SLA, which conducted a campaign of political violence that served to discredit left-wing movements.1
The Pipeline from Counterinsurgency
Westbrook's trajectory from Pacific Architects and Engineers in Vietnam, where he participated in the CIA's Phoenix Program counterinsurgency operations, to running the BCA at Vacaville represented a direct transfer of methods from foreign counterinsurgency to domestic intelligence operations. The BCA's structure, which brought together radical students and prison inmates under the guidance of an intelligence operative, paralleled the CIA's documented practice of infiltrating and manipulating political organizations for counterintelligence purposes. The BCA operated at Vacaville during the same period when MKULTRA experiments were being conducted on inmates, creating an intersection of behavioral modification research and intelligence recruitment.1
Aftermath
In April 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army placed Colston Westbrook on its death list, calling him a CIA agent and "torturer." Westbrook went into hiding following the SLA's denunciation. He died of cancer on August 3, 1989, in Oakland, California, at age 51.1
Sources
- Curt Rowlett, "Project Mind Kontrol: Did the U.S. Government Actually Create Programmed Assassins?," Steamshovel Press #16, 1998; Russell, Dick. "Who Ran the SLA?" New Times, 1974, archived at libcom.org. https://libcom.org/article/who-ran-sla-dick-russell; Schreiber, Brad. "How the Patty Hearst Kidnapping Led to U.S. Police Militarization," BradSchreiber.com. https://www.bradschreiber.com/selected-writing/how-the-patty-hearst-kidnapping-led-to-us-police-militarization ↩
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