Sara Jane Olson's supporters sigh when they hear her described as a soccer mom.

"It's much more complicated than that," said Peter Rachleff, a history professor and a friend of Olson and her husband, physician Gerald Peterson. "He makes a nice salary. They have a nice house. But it's way too simple to say they are a conventional middle class family where he's a professional guy, and she's a stay-at-home-mom, and she has a minivan and she carts her daughters around ... like a figure in a movie with Jim Carey or something."

Soccer mom has been media shorthand for Olson since June 1999 when the FBI arrested her on bombing charges from 1976, when she was a radical named Kathleen Soliah. She is, after all, an upper middle class housewife with a minivan and three school-age daughters, the youngest of whom plays soccer. The phrase, suggesting suburban respectability and centrist politics, juxtaposed nicely with charges of counterculture terrorism. The implication was that Olson, the soccer mom, went with Soliah, the '70s revolutionary, like Jekyll with Hyde.

Those who know her well, however, say Olson may have shed her given name and home in California, but never abandoned her own brand of radicalism. In two decades in suburban Minneapolis, she protested apartheid, rallied against American policy in Central America and helped organized a progressive bookstore. She campaigned for leftist candidates and women's rights.

"Really the person she is today is the person she has always been and that is a very intelligent sort of socially conscious and committed person," said defense lawyer Shawn Snider Chapman.

And it's not just supporters who find her unchanged.

"There's no redemption on her part," said Jay Bryan, a former Los Angeles police officer who believes Olson tried to bomb his cruiser in 1975. Bryan, who is suing her in civil court for emotional distress, said he was sickened to see her align her cause with those of convicted murderers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. "All these people are charged with killing police officers. This is what this woman embraces."

Kathleen Ann Soliah was born in Fargo, N.D., in 1947, the eldest of five children. Her parents, Martin and Elsie, moved the family to Palmdale, Calif., a desert town an hour northeast of Los Angeles, when Kathy, as she was known, was young. Martin, a World War II veteran, taught high school English and coached track and football and Elsie stayed home with the children.

Kathy Soliah in 1975

"[T]he Soliahs were quiet American middle-class stock, a conservative family," according to Voices of Guns, a 1977 history of the Symbionese Liberation Army by Paul Avery and Vin McLellan. "Kathy's vita was resplendent with teenage honors: Girl Scout counselor, junior high yearbook editor, churchgoer, 'pep chairman' for Palmdale High, from which she would graduate with honors."

At the University of California at Santa Barbara, she studied theater and began dating James Kilgore, an economics graduate student. UCSB students, like those at other campuses, protested the Vietnam War, and Soliah and Kilgore were drawn to the Left. In 1971, the couple moved to Berkeley and became more involved in the counterculture movement. Soliah, who had always loved cooking, joined the Food Conspiracy, a group of commune dwellers who pooled their money to buy organic produce from local farmers.

She also acted in local theater. And in a production of Hedda Gabler, met a young woman named Angela Atwood. They became friends and together took jobs as cocktail waitresses in San Francisco. Atwood was becoming increasingly involved in a radical prison reform movement and in 1973, unbeknownst to Soliah, she became a founding member of the SLA and took the name General Gelina. Soliah, who had been on a Mexican vacation when Atwood went underground, did not know what had become of her friend until May 1974 when Atwood and five other SLA soldiers died in a police shootout and subsequent house fire in Los Angeles.

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