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PARTISAN REVIEW
trayal of her identity looks as if it were being directed by someone
else, and her actions are based upon a script composed for her: she is
merely an actress.
Before her trial, she had a psychiatric evaluation and was
described as having suffered a "traumatic neurosis with dissociative
features" caused by powerful "coercive manipulation by her captors."
The well-known psychoanalyst, Dr. Robert
J.
Lifton, pronounced
her "a classic case" of mental coercion, resembling that of prisoners
of war. As the trial showed, Hearst was not the only one caught up
in fictions, however,
"It
was the media image of me on trial," she
remarked. Perhaps she
was,
at last, only a media image. Certainly
the media helped to keep her a fiction.
During the last decade the FBI has increasingly used under–
cover agents against drug dealers, terrorist groups, racketeers, and
others. These agents begin by constructing identities, learning roles,
playing at perspectives upon reality different from their own. Phys–
ical danger is present, of course; but by the early 1980s a greater
danger was showing up with sufficient regularity that FBI officials
were moved to commission a study of the problem: many agents,
once having assumed a false identity, found it difficult, if not impos–
sible, to shed the fictions after the undercover assignment was com–
pleted. The false role became the true self. In 1983, FBI Director
William H. Webster sent a memo to field supervisors warning them
to be on the lookout for personality changes in undercover agents.
The very same elements of personality that make an agent able to
playa part are the ones that make it difficult for him or her to shed
the role.
A few examples are sufficient to show the problem in a clear
light. Between 1982 and 1983, FBI agent Dan A. Mitrone began an
undercover investigation of narcotics smuggling at the Fort Lauder–
dale, Florida, airport. Set up as an expert on debugging under the
name of Don Micelli, Mitrone made numerous contacts with airline
pilots who were concerned about eavesdropping on their smuggling
activities. Eventually, however, Mitrone conspired with an informer
to close a big cocaine deal, from which he himself netted $850,000.
So, finally, Mitrone himself, the undercover agent, was the only
criminal caught in the covert operation. He had gotten trapped in
his fictions and then acted them out. Convicted of drug dealing and
bribery, Mitrone, his wife says, "doesn't know why he acted the way
he did. The only thing he said was ...
'It
wasn't me ... I had to
try so hard to be this guy [Micelli] that it wasn't me.'"
