Colston Richard Westbrook (September 14, 1937 – August 3, 1989) was an American teacher and linguist who worked in the fields of minority education and literacy.
At the University of California, Berkeley, he established a program of prison outreach and approved students from the Bay Area to serve as volunteers.
His father was Edward Cody Westbrook, who died in Germany while serving as a sergeant in the Army in World War II.
[2] While in Tokyo he was recruited for a civilian position in South Vietnam with Pacific Architects and Engineers, a US government contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program.
He worked with PAE for five years there, as the United States became increasingly embroiled in warfare, in an effort to prevent South Vietnam from being overtaken by communists.
[4] PAE's services as a contractor included civilian cover for CIA operatives and constructing 44 Province Detention Centers.
According to writer Ward Churchill, circumstantial evidence suggests that Westbrook could have begun a working relationship at the time with Donald DeFreeze, an alleged informant for LAPD.
By then working as a teaching assistant and later professor at University of California, Berkeley, Westbrook had set up a program of prisoner outreach for student volunteers.
In 1975, he completed his master's thesis on the dual linguistic heritage of African Americans,[2] which he called "Black English dialectology.
Willie Wolfe, Russell Little and Mary Alice Siem, white students who attended Westbrook's African-American Linguistics class, were among those from Berkeley who joined the BCA outreach program.
DeFreeze had received favorable treatment while at Vacaville and Soledad prisons, which followed court approval of lenient probation and lack of prosecution earlier on weapons charges while in Los Angeles.
have suggested that DeFreeze's escape was arranged by law enforcement in an effort to launch intelligence-gathering and sting operations against Bay Area radicals.
"[4] BCA founder David Inua described DeFreeze as unintelligent, lacking leadership ability, and incapable of formulating the SLA communiques that he purportedly wrote.
Inua said he thought Patricia "Mizmoon" Soltysik and Nancy Ling Perry, two gung-ho white upper middle-class radicals enthralled with violent revolution, were the driving force behind forming the SLA and the major theorizers.
Not long after the SLA's denunciation of Westbrook, Willie Wolfe's father and another member's family contracted with private investigator Lake Headley to research the group.
They presented 400 pages of documentation, and detailed the following findings: On May 17, 1974, The New York Times ran an article about the relationship of DeFreeze and the Los Angeles Police Department and suggestions that he was an informant.
[9] But, this account was overshadowed by reports of the shootout with the LAPD in Los Angeles and burning of the house where DeFreeze and five other members of the SLA had holed up.
: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Detective, co-written with William Hoffman,[14] Headley presented evidence that DeFreeze had been a police informant and agent provocateur.
Dick Russell suggested that inmates in California prisons were recruited with a combination of coercion and promises of favored treatment, and later withdrew their consent and faced consequences.
[10] Reportedly, DeFreeze was recruited and anointed as Field Marshall Cinque while in Soledad Prison, and was allowed to escape to do the government's bidding.
Joe Remiro and Russell Little were thought to compromise security after the assassination of Foster; they were the only two SLA members charged with the crimes and were sentenced to prison.
Lastly, he said that the Los Angeles shootout in 1974, in which six SLA members died, was a planned elimination of the hit squad to silence them after their security had been too compromised.