How P.O.W.s Judge 'Tania'

"Anyone can be terrified if it is done the right way," said a retired Navy officer. The man should know. He is former Commander Lloyd ("Pete") Bucher, skipper of the U.S.S. Pueblo, the intelligence ship taken by North Koreans in 1968. Said Bucher, who had confessed to espionage activities but recanted after he was freed, "I signed things in North Korean captivity that I would not have signed unless I had been terrified for myself or for the people who were with me."

Like many other Americans, Bucher has been wondering whether Patty Hearst could convincingly plead that she was psychologically coerced into bank robbery. Bucher does not presume to know what her state of mind was, he told TIME Correspondent David Lee, but he argues that "no one is immune. A person can be made to do damned near anything under threat if he is determined to remain alive."

The armed services have advised ex-P.O.W.s still in the service not to comment on the Hearst trial. But some other experts on American prisoners of war see similarities between the prisoners' experiences and Patty's.

Virginia Pasley, a former newspaper correspondent and author of 21 Stayed, a book about brainwashed American prisoners in Korea, believes that Patty Hearst's experiences as a captive--if her account is true--coincide with those of the P.O.W.s. They were humiliated, stripped naked, confined in narrow spaces, forced to write life histories that often revealed disastrous childhoods. Most of the P.O.W.s who broke down were very young, Pasley says, and poorly educated--a characteristic, she believes, that Patty shares with them despite her finishing-school background. One P.O.W., Pasley recalls, was convinced by his captors that he had been condemned to death in absentia by the U.S. Supreme Court. Similarly, Attorney General William Saxbe's description of Patty Hearst as "a common criminal" might well have convinced her that she would be shot on sight.

In the courtroom last week, U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Dr. Louis J. West argued that making a captive feel "debility, dependency and dread" is the key to controlling his behavior. And, added West, Patty was a victim of "persuasive coercion"--another description for gradually breaking down a P.O.W.

Boston Attorney Lawrence O'Donnell, who has represented mentally abused P.O.W.s, further suggests that "brainwashing" is not the most apt description of what Patty experienced. "This appears to me to be a classic case of indoctrination," he says. "We sent people to the Air Force Academy and to West Point, and yet they capitulated and signed the Stockholm peace petition and all the rest. I just don't know how a 19-year-old kid could have been expected to handle it any better."

A number of ex-P.O.W.s took a less sympathetic view of a coercion defense. Retired Air Force Colonel Quincy Collins, who was held prisoner in North Viet Nam for 7 1/2 years, faced a North Vietnamese indoctrination program that seems far more concentrated and relentless than the ordeal Patty apparently underwent. But, he says, "if you were weak and really screwed up beforehand, you might go over." If she was in fact brainwashed, he says, it was due more to her indulgent parents than to her captors. "Her big problem," he suggests, "is her mommy and daddy," by which he means that her somewhat pampered upbringing kept her from developing a secure self-image. Had she done so, reasons Collins, the likelihood of her adopting S.L.A. values "would be rather remote. It would appear to me next to impossible unless she had wanted to rebel before."

Former Air Force Staff Sergeant Steve Kiba, held by the Chinese for 32 months during the Korean War, is even tougher on Patty, though some of his own experiences seem to echo hers. To disorient American flyers, their captors kept moving them from cell to cell, from prison to prison--a pattern that suggests the S.L.A., perpetually on the move. For nine months the P.O.W.s were not allowed to bathe. In one session, Kiba was asked the same question for 18 hours straight. What Patty Hearst went through, he says disdainfully, was only "a miniature, a sample." And any physical abuse she may have suffered at the hands of the S.L.A. might well have toughened her resistance rather than weakened it, says Kiba. "If you're mistreated," he contends, "you aren't going to lick their boots." Besides, he argues, the excuse that she was young and sheltered rings false. "It's hard to believe that, when she was out living with some man. Who's she trying to kid?"

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