The Last Revolutionary: Sara Jane Olson Speaks

By Greg Goldin, LA Weekly. Posted January 18, 2002.

The trial of Sara Jane Olson, one of the last associates of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was supposed to be the trial of the century -- the last century. But in a new twist, it now threatens to stretch well into 2002 and perhaps beyond.

After decades of hiding from the law, Olson was arrested in June, 1999 for attempting to blow up two Los Angeles Police Department cruisers back in 1975. Patricia Hearst herself, the SLA's most famous victim and member, was to have taken the stand as the star witness against Olson to retell the sordid tales of the nine-member band of homegrown terrorists that kidnapped her in 1974. She would tell of gunslinging, bank robbery, bomb making, love, rape, Sapphism, recorded communiques left in trash cans near community radio stations, turgid manifestoes, graffiti, and cockroach-infested hideouts, settling once and for all whether the Nixon-era "revolutionaries" were archcriminals or youthful idealists gone psycho.

Hearst never got the chance. After a series of ping-pong pleas (first "guilty," then "not guilty," then "guilty" again) the first chapter of Olson's case was finally closed on Friday, when Judge Larry Paul Fidler sentenced her to two consecutive terms of 10 years to life imprisonment. Due to discrepencies between old and new sentencing laws, Olson's lawyers believe she'll only receive 5 years and 4 months -- and might serve little over two years with good behavior.

Among those who spoke on Olson's behalf before the judge pronounced sentence were her husband, Fred Peterson, her St. Paul, MN., pastor, and the youngest of her three daughters, Leila, 15. Olson broke into tears as her daughter told the packed courtroom that her mother is "one of the best mothers anyone would want. I want to tell you," she said, "that no matter what happens, I love you." Hugging her mother, Leila keened, "Mommy!"

Olson then said, "I did not have anything to do with those bombs. If I did harm, I did not mean to, and I want to apologize. I am truly grateful for all that I've had in my life. For all the mistakes I've made, I accept responsibility, and I am truly sorry."

But immediately after the sentencing, Judge Fidler opened another chapter in Olson's saga. He arraigned Olson on a new charge of first degree murder, stemming from the April 21, 1975 murder of Myrna Opsahl. Opsahl was gunned down during a $15,000 SLA bank heist in Carmichael, CA, outside Sacramento. Olson entered a plea of not-guilty.

It appears Hearst will testify after all. The prosecution certainly hopes so. From the moment Olson was first arrested in 1999, Los Angeles DAs were ready to take on the entire 682-day career of the SLA -- from the autumn of 1973, when the commandos assassinated Marcus Foster, the popular black superintendent of Oakland's public schools, through 1974, the "Year of the Soldier," in which six of the urban guerrillas shot it out with the LAPD's newly minted SWAT unit and died, in the premiere episode of live, nationally televised domestic terrorism. Their chances seemed dashed with Olson's guilty plea and the non-trial trial. But with the murder trial on the horizon, prosecutors may get a second chance to conjour the SLA spectacle out of the grim, largely obscure past.

In person, Sara Jane Olson is deeply inscrutable. Is she, as Judge Fidler declared after her numerous flip-flops, "guilty because she is guilty" and deserving of her current prison term? Or is she, as she asserts, little more than an innocent bystander?

When discussing her guilt or innocence, Olson is by turns risible and phlegmatic. At 55, she is thin, with a runner's body. Sitting in her attorney's office, she is relaxed, almost too relaxed, as she flings one leg over the arm of her chair, tucks the other against her chest and turns her torso akimbo to make eye contact. It is the pose you expect of a teenage girl, fearful and coquettish all at once -- the ingenue.

In Olson's version of events, the SLA came to her, not the other way around. A few years before Foster was murdered and Hearst was nabbed, Kathleen Ann Soliah (Olson's name before going underground), was attending UC Santa Barbara, where she witnessed the incendiary anti-war demonstrations in Isla Vista. She shed her high school yearbook resume of Girl Scout counselor, churchgoer, honors graduate and "pep chairman" for the Palmdale High Falcons and, after graduating, drifted to Berkeley, still, in the early '70s, the lodestar for radical wannabes. In September 1972, she met Angela Atwood, and the two became best friends and roommates, taking night courses in radical politics at UC Berkeley and waitressing together at the Great Electric Underground, in the Bank of America headquarters. They quit after complaining about their scanty outfits, meanwhile denouncing their bosses, in a five-page letter sent to all employees and a local radio station, as "agents of the ruling class."

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »