So, Peter Levenda, probably best known on this site for his hand in the publishing (and perhaps creation? he denies, but many still suspect) the
Simon Necronomicon.
However, any truly dedicated follower of High Weirdness should probably be aware of his "Sinister Forces" trilogy, what Levenda refers to as "grimoires of American political witchcraft". In these books, he attempts to undertake this project:
To what degree does mysticism (including occultism, religious organizations, and secret societies) influence politics? Can it be demonstrated that there is no real separation of church and state, despite most Americans’ belief? Can we show that the world’s political leaders are motivated by (at times bizarre and outrageous) religious or spiritual convictions, thus threatening at the least the very nature of the American way of life… and at the most American lives in general? Is politics a science? Is it an art? Or is it religion?
And for a man with Levenda's research skills and own...interesting history, which includes run-ins with intelligence officers, wandering bishops, longstanding involvement in the New York occult scene and an unwise quest for
Colonia Dignidad, this project of research takes on a very unsettling and, indeed, worryingly sinister tone.
Below, I've included a number of notes from the first book of the trilogy, The Nine, with annotations by myself where I've considered necessary. I am currently working my way through the second and third books, and will post the notes from those in due course.
I visited the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and the Library of Congress and fell upon a treasure trove of documentation showing Nazi fascination with occult themes… to the extent of financing research in Tibet and hunting down the Grail. This became the central subject matter of my last book, Unholy Alliance. Here was a perfect example of a nation being ruled by what were called—in any other age—occult leaders and “spiritual” visionaries. From the swastika to the SS, the Nazis were little more than the 20th century’s best organized (and best dressed) cult. A political party? Please.
This is the real background to this project. Unholly Alliance made the argument that the Nazis were religious fanatics and a religious cult, not a mere political movement. Of course, any movement of sufficiently messianic qualities will eventually become a religious cause, but Levenda traces the particular occult influences on the Nazi Party and associated bodies, such as the Thule Society. Sinister Forces is essentially an attempt to extend this project to American history, with disturbingly successful results.
During the Watergate era a somewhat unsettling revelation was made: that for twenty-five years (or more) the CIA had conducted psychological experimentation upon both volunteers and unwitting subjects—both at home and abroad—to find the key to the unconscious mind, to memory, and to volition. Their goal was to create the perfect assassin and to protect America from the programmed assassins of other countries. This project was known by the name MK-ULTRA, but it had its origins in earlier forms of the same “brainwashing” agenda: Operations BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. To me, this was astounding. A US government agency was conducting what—to a medievalist—could only be characterized as a search for the Philosopher’s Stone, for occult power, for magical spells and talismans. Indeed, some of the CIA’s subprojects included research among the psychics, the mediums, the magicians and the witches of America and beyond. And the Army was not far behind in its mind control testing, as we shall see. What was even more disturbing was the revelation that nearly all records of this incredible and superhumanly ambitious project were destroyed in 1973 on orders of CIA director Richard Helms himself. In his testimony, he claimed that MK-ULTRA did not come up with anything worthwhile, and that the project had been terminated. Then why were the documents shredded? We do not know who the test subjects were. We don’t know what was done to them. We don’t know how they have been programmed, if at all. We don’t know what they might do. Or what they have already done.
MK-ULTRA, and its associated projects, will of course form a large part of this story. Not the whole story, but a significant aspect of it.
University of Chicago Professor Ioan Culianu was able to show that the technique of secret links and correspondences between objects and events discovered by a Renaissance magician—Giordano Bruno—are applicable to mind control and psychological warfare today. Charles Manson declared himself to be a reincarnation of Bruno, an oddly sophisticated choice for the nearly-illiterate convicted murderer. Professor Culianu himself was murdered in 1991, another crime that has never been solved.
And the second major obsession of this series is Charles Manson. Manson is almost a stand-in, a symbol for the logical reproduction of the state's actions on an individual level...though he's important for other reasons, as well.
The victim was a nobody. An ex-con, once convicted of writing bad checks. A man down on his luck, working for a trucking company. He had been stabbed in a fury of nineteen slashing, slivering strokes—in a wood frame house in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning on a side street in a small country town—and no one heard a thing. The perpetrator left no clues, no identifiable fingerprints, nothing. The body might have lain there for days, except that the victim’s co-worker stopped by to see why he hadn’t shown up for work that morning. The body was found. The police were called. The officer who responded to that call and who was the first policeman at the scene is today the Chief of Police of Ashland, Kentucky. The murder took place in 1969. He told me it remains unsolved—and the murder open on the books—to this day. The victim’s name was Darwin Scott. He was the brother of one Colonel Scott. Colonel Scott had been sued—successfully—for paternity of a boy, one “No Name Maddox,” by a girlfriend and sometime prostitute, Kathleen Maddox. No Name Maddox would soon be known by another name. Charles Manson.
It is a mystery. What happened to Manson in Chillicothe, that he suddenly became studious (he was still illiterate when he was transferred there), learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic, mellowed out, and became a star “prisoner”? His psychiatric reports were all negative up to that point; even during the first month at Chillicothe the doctors were despairing of him, believing that he needed a closed environment and not the relatively “open” ambience of Chillicothe. Then, suddenly, Manson became a different person and maintained that identity for over a year and a half, until his release. That degree of conscious control—especially in a disturbed, uneducated, illiterate, violent, criminal, sodomitic bastard child of an unmarried, alcoholic mother—is suspicious, if not alarming. Was Charlie “helped” by someone at Chillicothe?
During this time, US government agencies were conducting medical tests among various inmate populations in America. Their most prized subjects were violent criminals—sociopaths like Charles Manson—whom they dosed with massive amounts of drugs to gauge personality changes, emotional response, and other parameters that have never been revealed.
Taking stolen goods across state lines is, of course, a federal offense and Charlie was caught, as usual. Only this time, he had a pregnant seventeen-year-old wife. He drove a stolen car to Los Angeles, was apprehended, pled guilty, and asked the court for psychiatric help, for some reason referring back to his time in Chillicothe. The judge so ordered, and he was examined by Dr. Edwin Ewart McNiel in October 1955.
The implication here is fairly obvious: was Charles Manson experimented on during his time in Chillicothe? We can never really know, thanks to the destruction of MK-ULTRA files by Richard Helms. He also gets curiously sympathetic treatment from the legal system.
At Terminal Island, Charles is tested again by prison psychiatrists. This time, his IQ has climbed to 121, a substantial improvement over his score at Chillicothe. His verbal skills have noticeably increased, and he enrolls in a Dale Carnegie course, only to quit after a few weeks out of either pique or boredom. When he is seen as trustworthy, he is transferred to a Coast Guard station which is minimal security, but he is found hot-wiring a car in the parking lot and is slammed back inside to serve the remainder of his term.
During this time, Manson became involved with Scientology and it’s this interest that has fueled a lot of the speculation concerning other influences at work in Manson’s life. The creation of a small-time science fiction writer and would-be occultist, Scientology has been described as either a cult or a scam, or both, depending on which journalist, investigator or “survivor” you read. It has attracted celebrity membership, including John Travolta and Tom Cruise, as part of a concerted effort to win followers among Hollywood stars; it has also conspired against US Government agencies and been conspired against in turn. Its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was a former Navy officer with a history of mental problems. He was a colleague of Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist and follower of Aleister Crowley. All of this will be discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow, as it bears heavily on our thesis, but suffice it to say that Scientology in the early 1960s was just coming into its own, recruiting heavily on street corners, and had obviously penetrated the prison system as well. An offshoot of Scientology is the Process Church of the Final Judgment, and Manson was believed to have been involved with the Process as well.
Manson was involved enough with Scientology at one point to have picked up the jargon and to pass himself off as a “clear”: someone who had passed through all of Scientology’s “deprogramming” levels and reached the stage where previous social, environmental, perhaps even genetic influences no longer had any effect on decision-making, emotional stability, etc. He had a Scientology “auditor” in prison, another Scientologist called Lanier Ramer, who—Manson claimed—brought him to the level of “clear” or, more accurately, “theta clear.”
Levenda doubts Manson actually made it to clear, given the usual amount of time this requires. But this is worth noting.
And there is this particular case, which was almost certainly a Manson-related murder, which deserves more scrutiny:
There was Darwin Orell Scott in Ashland, Kentucky: Manson’s uncle and victim of an unsolved crime, carved with knives. And there was Marina Habe, a seventeen-year-old girl who was abducted on New Year’s Eve, 1968 and whose body was found—carved with knives—a few days later. Although attributed to the Manson “family,” the murder is still officially unsolved. But it was Marina Habe’s case that led me to a whole other dimension of the thesis I was working on. It was Marina Habe who led me back to World War II, to Operation Paperclip, to Hollywood, escaped Nazis, psychological warfare and the enigmatic team of Clay Shaw and Fred Crisman.
On New Year’s Day, 1969, the petite body of Marina Elizabeth Habe was found nude at the bottom of a ravine off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, about four miles from home. The seventeen-year-old student at the University of Hawaii and aspiring actress was the victim of multiple stab wounds in the neck and chest, had been raped, burned, and had contusions in her eyes. It was a savage attack reminiscent of the later attack on Darwin Scott in Ashland, Kentucky. She had been returning from a date with friend John Hornburg in Brentwood the early morning of December 30, 1968 and was kidnapped from in front of the home she shared with her mother in the Hollywood hills after returning from a night out on Santa Monica Boulevard. The case remains unsolved, but there was a lot of speculation at the time that her killer was a Manson “family” member, since she was known to have befriended various members of the group. Manson himself has no alibi for the day and time of her death, and is known to have been in Los Angeles on the day she was kidnapped and killed, attending a New Year’s Eve party at the home of musician John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Phillips himself is known to have been friendly with elements of the Process Church of the Final Judgment.
Levenda then goes on to describe the background of Habe's father, who as it turns out, had a very illustrious history.
As hostilities began with the accession of Hitler and the Nazi Party to a position of control within Germany, Habe found himself becoming a dedicated (some would say “rabid”) anti-Nazi. (It is to Hans Habe, in fact, that we credit the discovery of Hitler’s “Schicklegrueber” family background.) As war broke out, Habe found himself on Hitler’s enemies list: his books were burned, and he was shot at in Vienna (because of his publication of Hitler’s Schicklegrueber ancestry; Habe actually sent copies of his report to Germany at the time of Hitler’s campaign against Hindenburg in an effort to ridicule Hitler and cause him to lose the election, a tactic which was in vain as we all know). Habe enlisted with a group of foreign volunteers in the French Army, and took part in the Battle of France. He was captured on June 22, 1940, armed only with an 1891 Remington rifle. Habe—in his book about the experience, A Thousand Shall Fall—rails against the French complicity in the defeat, accusing the Vichy hierarchy of actually wanting to surrender rather than fight Germany. (This book eventually became the 1943 MGM propaganda film The Cross of Lorraine, starring Jean-Pierre Aumont, Gene Kelly, Cedric Hardwicke, Peter Lorre and Hume Cronyn.) Held at a prison camp in Occupied France, Habe managed to survive for a few weeks under an assumed name before escaping, dressed in a German uniform and fleeing in an ambulance. He eventually made his way to Spain and Portugal, joining his wife—Erika Levy—in neutral Lisbon. President Roosevelt gave Habe a special emergency visa, and the couple arrived in New York harbor on December 3, 1940.
Further research suggests Habe made a significant contribution to the war effort:
Psychological warfare officer? Italian front? The newsclipping gave the author a further dimension for his research, and also suggested a new line of inquiry. Let’s see where it leads us. Habe began giving talks at various clubs and societies in America during 1941, even staying for a while at West Point where, it is said, he continued to work at his writing. In 1942 he began a series of lectures at Army bases under the aegis of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations on “How To Lose a War”: an ironic title which took as its text the fall of France, and served as motivation for the American troops in their struggle against Nazism.
Shortly thereafter, in January 1943, Habe enlisted in the US Army. This was not mere expedience, since he had dependents and would probably not have been called up, but he asked to enlist anyway. By July of that year, he was in North Africa (and the new father of a son) as a second lieutenant. He was then loaned to British General Montgomery for a while, and September found him in Italy and this time with the US forces. After that, the record becomes a little confused. Some reports have him landing with Allied forces at D-Day, yet he seems to have entered Europe via Italy nine months earlier than that. Regardless of the order of events, by that time Habe was working for C.D. Jackson—more famous in his Time-Life incarnation—and was actively involved in psychological warfare operations, operations which lasted long after the war’s end and which found Habe in charge of no fewer than eighteen German newspapers throughout the Allied territories.
Habe was no mere grunt, in other words. He was a strategic asset, trusted with running major psychological warfare programs. He also trained other soldiers in these techniques:
His memoir, A Proud Hungarian, mentions a psychological warfare school in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where Scitovsky and others were being trained in propaganda. He characterizes Habe as the “US Army’s propaganda expert” in his memoir of the war years, and describes how Habe trained him in spotting important information in the New York Times, and how to use that information for propaganda purposes. They practiced making radio broadcasts, writing articles and filler, designing propaganda posters, and all of it in both French and German. According to Scitovsky, Habe also had been a student of the Bauhaus and thus had a good eye for artistic composition as well as literature and journalism.
And of course, this work had various intelligence applications, leading to Habe working with the OSS, the wartime forerunner of the CIA:
Another friend of Habe at this time is psy-war officer Alfred de Grazia— now a professor at Princeton University and, even more intriguingly, a friend of the late Immanuel Velikovsky—who was with Habe in North Africa in 1943. His book on the war years makes for very interesting reading, as it reveals that the “Mobile Broadcasting Company” was a cover for OSS (Office of Strategic Services) activities in Europe, and that they were joint OSS-US Army units.