Forbidden Science Dispatches #4A

H. Bruce Franklin, the Venceremos Organization at Stanford, and the Symbionese Liberation Army

Read Dispatch #1 here.

While I did not expect to return with another dispatch from Jacques Vallee’s Forbidden Science journals so soon, I nevertheless came across some interesting material relating to revolutionary movements of the late 60s and early 70s. Most of this information leads down parapolitical paths but, as we shall see, is not completely disconnected from the UFO issue that remained Vallee’s obsession throughout the decades. Working in Stanford’s computing department in the early 1970s, he witnessed a turbulent and politically active campus as well as a flourishing anti-establishment underground. H. Bruce Franklin was a professor in the English Department at Stanford at the time. After a he and a cadre of followers were expelled from the Revolutionary Union organization, they joined the Maoist group Venceremos (“we shall prevail”) which was founded by activist Aaron Manganiello. Vallee notes how Franklin’s antiwar activism was effecting his computer work on campus directly:

Stanford students have published a pamphlet denouncing the computation center for illegally running a program called Gamut-11. It implements strategic simulations designed for the war by the Stanford Research Institute. SRI, largely supported by classified research, is supposed to be separate from the University, yet the students claim that our machine was used to plot troop landing techniques in Cambodia. Several professors, notably Dr. Bruce Franklin, support the mutiny. The fact is that SRI doesn't have a computer as powerful as our IBM 360/67. It would make sense for them to run simulations secretly. When Elizabeth Michaels checked among our operators, they told her some military programs had actually run on the Campus mainframe.¹

This admission of SRI using campus computers to run secret military simulations is disquieting, but with Stanford’s tight connection to ARPA, somewhat unsurprising. Vallee himself would later become an ARPA contractor. Yasha Levine writes in Surveillance Valley that SRI was “involved in everything from chemical weapons research to counterinsurgency work and development of the ARPANET,” a system specifically designed as “a military research network” for Department of Defense usage.² The computation center where Vallee worked in 1971 was soon directly attacked by activists but damage was minimal.

Later on, Vallee periodically recounts different stages of Prof. Franklin’s academic trial, writing that “the University wants to draw him out to blunt his message and provide the rope that will be used to hang him.”³ Curiously, the militant professor had a young Alan Dershowitz giving him legal advice, although Stanford still wound up firing him for his militancy.⁴ Franklin would later face criminal charges in the murder trial of Robert Seabok, a Venceremos member who shot and killed a prison guard when he and others facilitated the escape of inmate Ronald Wayne Beaty. Author Brad Schreiber writes that “when Beaty was caught, he cooperated so fully with the FBI that he gave them names of people who both were and were not in Venceremos.”⁵ Even more bizarrely, in what seems like a state of ultra-informant mania, Beaty also “offered the FBI the right to surgically insert a tiny radio transmitter under his skin, so that he might serve as a human ‘bug,’ able to record conversations with other radicals and set them up for arrest.”⁶ While this “human bug” scenario never came to fruition, Beaty’s testimony was key to more than a dozen arrests.

The charges against Franklin were eventually dropped but the now-blacklisted professor would proceed to create “distance between himself and his persona as a revolutionary leader,” rarely discussing his time in the Revolutionary Union or Venceremos.⁷ The founder of the group, Aaron Manganiello, would also snitch on the group, “breaking a basic rule of radicals” by talking to the FBI while in jail for an assault charge.⁸ He would later be interviewed by the Bureau for information on a former Venceremos member who had joined up with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the far-left group famous for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. The SLA was also likely an intelligence operation intended to monitor leftist groups in the Bay Area, but author Brad Schreiber’s Revolution’s End—a book destined for a later Getting Spooked reading list—explains it better than I could.

Regardless, Franklin’s Venceremos would later be noted for a series of connections to the infamous group. The brass tacks: Two prominent SLA members, the aforementioned Joseph Remiro and Willie Wolfe, were former members of the Venceremos organization. Further, Colston Westbrook, a former Phoenix Program contractor and “suspected” CIA employee would later utilize Wolfe in particular for a sinister purpose. In his role as teacher at Berkeley, Westbrook organized cultural exchanges between students and Vacaville Prison’s Black Cultural Association. Using likely prison informant Donald DeFreeze and the student Wolfe, Westbrook set about “assembl(ing) a group of white radical Maoists, connected to Venceremos, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and other groups.” Schreiber notes of this new collective: “It was the foundation of a unit that could, with DeFreeze’s cooperation, provide the state of California with crucial intelligence on underground activities.”⁹ Even “the ghost of Venceremos was once again dredged up” when the 1974 California Senate Subcommittee on Civil Disorder declared that the two revolutionary groups were working together.¹⁰ This pronouncement, made amidst furor over the SLA’s Hearst kidnapping, ignored the fact that the Venceremos organization was dissolved in 1972.

Vallee himself does not touch on the SLA much in his second volume of journals, but I noted an ominous passage I have not yet reached in my readthrough. While visiting a real estate agent in 1974, Vallee recounts how the agent’s spouse reported “psychic experiences in bilocation and clairvoyance.” More specifically: “He's had visions of a place where he believes Patty Hearst is sequestered. They also told us of their growing admiration for the People's Temple, located further up their road. Every Sunday dozens of buses bring its members up from the Bay Area.”¹¹ At the moment, inundated with the other topics within the journals, I do not want to touch this bit with a 10-foot pole. Perhaps we will return to Jonestown when I get to this later section of the book.

This meditation on Jacques Vallee’s interactions with radicalism in the early 70s was meant to be nearly twice as long, but alas, the contents would not fit in one email. Getting Spooked will return tomorrow with a continuation of this train of thought, seeing covert action against American revolutionary movements possibly teetering into the unexpected realm of UFOs. See you tomorrow.

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1. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 69.

2. Levine, Yasha. Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. New York: Icon Books, 2018. Page 69.

3. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 99.

4. Leonard, Aaron J. and Conor A. Gallagher. Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists – The Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014. Page 100.

5. Schreiber, Brad. Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016. Page 67.

6. Ibid., page 68.

7. Leonard, Aaron J. and Conor A. Gallagher. Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists – The Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014. Page 102.

8. Ibid., page 103.

9. Schreiber, Brad. Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016. Page 65.

10. Ibid., page 125.

11. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 269.