Colston Westbrook

In Lake Headley's 1993 book Vegas P.I.: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Detective, co-written e with William Hoffman, Headley presented evidence that DeFreeze had been a police informant and agent provocateur. Further, he said that the Black Cultural Association was used by law enforcement to monitor radicals among students and prison inmates.

Westbrook died of cancer at Kaiser Oakland Medical Center on August 3, 1989. He was 51.

Westbrook was involved in student politics on campus. He was President of the Pan African Student Union at UC Berkeley for two consecutive terms. In 1979 he hosted a question-answer session with noted author James Baldwin on campus. His views on equity and justice often created controversy.

He served as dean of students at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, California from 1978 until 1989.

He worked in the fields of minority education and literacy. While a student, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1975, he completed his master's thesis on the dual linguistic heritage of African Americans, which he called "Black English dialectology." He focused on how many African-American students customarily code-switched between the General American dialect and their own dialect of English, which has some roots in West African languages. He told a journalist, "It's a brand new field, my own field. I made it up". As a teaching assistant, he taught African-American Linguistics in Berkeley's Department of Afro-American Studies. He continued to teach the class after completing his doctoral degree.

When a journalist asked Westbrook in 1974 why he had gone to Vietnam, he answered, "Money, why else? I was told by the American Embassy in Tokyo I could make $10,000 working in Vietnam. They said it pays to be black in Nam". PAE's services as a contractor included civilian cover for CIA operatives and constructing 44 Province Detention Centers. Westbrook later denied working for the CIA.

After kidnapping Patty Hearst in February 1974, the SLA placed Westbrook on their death list by April. They claimed he was a CIA agent, and had worked as a "torturer" for the CIA in Vietnam. They classified him as "an enemy to be shot on sight". They also claimed he was an FBI informer.

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. On May 4, 1974, Headley, along with writer Donald Freed, held a press conference in San Francisco to announce their 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. 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.

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. 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. Russell said that the main target of the SLA hit squad was the Black Panther Party, and that Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster was selected as a target by government forces because of he was considered too friendly with the Black Panthers in Oakland. 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. Russell suggests they were to be executed by SLA recruits in prison. (Remiro is still in prison.) Further, he described the kidnapping of Patty Hearst as a decoy action to provide cover for the SLA hit squad before planned actions against the Black Panthers. 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.

These individuals were among the founding members in 1973 of the Symbionese Liberation Army following DeFreeze's escape from Soledad prison, where he had been transferred. Wheeler later escaped from Vacaville and joined his associates in Berkeley.

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. In 1972, DeFreeze invited these three to join his separate study group, Unisight. Another inmate, Thero Wheeler, a former Black Panther, was also in this group.

Westbrook had previously served with a contractor in Vietnam for the US Army that provided services to the CIA. After returning to the United States, he worked for the Los Angeles Police Department in its Criminal Conspiracy Section and the State of California's Criminal Identification and Investigation Unit. In 1970 he started graduate work at University of California, Berkeley and taught at the university after completing it.

Westbrook enrolled in the Linguistics department at the University of California, Berkeley in September 1970. By this time, he had mastered several foreign languages — Korean, Japanese, Italian, German, and French. He also studied Swahili at Berkeley with Bwana Kaaya, from Tanzania. He understood and had a working knowledge of Bakweri.

In 1968 Westbrook returned to the United States, where he began working with the Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Section and the State of California's Criminal Identification and Investigation Unit. During that time radical black militant organizations were a top target of those units. 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.

The Black Cultural Association was formed in 1968 at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville and became officially recognized by the prison system in 1971. At that time Westbrook was a graduate student at Berkeley and became the group's "outside visitors coordinator" for educational outreach from students at Bay Area colleges and universities. He reportedly was asked to work with this group (but it is unclear who asked). There were cultural meetings at the prison on Friday nights, which several hundred outsiders also attended. They opened with a pan African flag and black power salutes. Meeting programs included speeches, poetry readings, plays and debates. The program attracted radical students who saw militant black nationalism as a force that could launch a revolution. Westbrook's purported prior relationship with inmate Donald DeFreeze in Los Angeles has driven the contention that DeFreeze was recruited by Westbrook as an informant to keep tabs on black inmates with radical political sympathies, and on interactions with radical students in the outreach program.

In an unusual path, Westbrook served in the Army, followed by the Air Force. After an assignment in South Korea, he was assigned in 1960 to Travis Air Force Base in California. Upon completion of military service in 1967, he taught English at the International Christian University in Tokyo. During that period he became friends with Steven Mbandi and later visited him in his home country of Cameroon.

Westbrook attended Chambersburg primary and high schools, graduating with honors in 1955. After graduation he and his elder brother, Cody, traveled from Pennsylvania to Richmond, California to live with their maternal grandmother. Colston attended Contra Costa College, in San Pablo where he excelled, particularly at languages. He was an honors student. He was selected to travel to Rome, Italy to represent Contra Costa College under President Dwight D. Eisenhower's People to People Student Ambassador Program.

Colston Richard Westbrook (1937–1989) 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. Some of the participants from Berkeley and two former prisoners at Vacaville Prison were among the founding members in 1973 of the radical leftist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Westbrook was born on September 14, 1937, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where he was raised. He also grew up in this area. His father was Edward Cody Westbrook, who died in Germany while serving as a sergeant in the Army in World War II. His mother, Virginia Ruth (Colston) Westbrook, was first a housewife and then held various jobs while raising their five children. She stressed their education. His siblings were Cody, Naomi (married name Martinez), and Diane and Tanya Hill.