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Sinister Forces

Started by Cain, June 15, 2013, 01:17:30 PM

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EK WAFFLR

This is awesome, Cain.
I need to order the Sinister Forces books, I guess. I have Unholy Alliance, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.
"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]

Cain

Unholy Alliance is definitely worth reading, and perhaps better in some ways than Sinister Forces.  It's more tightly focused, and with a concrete thesis (the Nazis were a cult, informed by the German occult scene) and with a smaller cast of characters than the latter series.

It's also probably worth reading first because the chronology of Sinister Forces mostly concentrates on the post-WWII period, and does involve Nazis in places.

And even if you don't buy his thesis, it is worth reading for his account of when he travelled to the notorious Colonia Dignidad.

EK WAFFLR

How does Unholy Alliance compare to Nicholas Goodrick Clarke's books?

And I'll definitely invest in the Sinister Forces.
"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]

Cain

Better, IMO.  Goodrick-Clarke doesn't have the in-depth knowledge of ceremonial magick and the occult that Levenda has.  And since Levenda isn't an academic, he can more freely follow tangents and engage in interesting speculations.

EK WAFFLR

Heh. That's what I felt was missing from Goodrick-Clarke all along. Definitely putting it on (near) the top of my reading list.
"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]

Nephew Twiddleton

Ah, dammit, I wish I didn't have to get ready for work
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

Cain

OK, datamined Book Two (A Warm Gun) and Book Three (The Manson Secret).

I won't post them all at the same time, however.  I'll stick to what I consider the interesting anecdotes, and the quotes which are central to Levenda's thesis regarding religion and politics.

QuoteSecrecy is a way of life for both the spy and the sorcerer; they both use codes and code names; they both pretend to have access to mysteries not available to the general public; they both claim to be able to influence events at a distance with their special abilities and powers. They both specialize in the manipulation of reality; both are aware that things are not always what they seem to be; and they are both ruthless and often amoral or immoral in the pursuit of their goals, embracing illicit sex, illegal drug use, and even murder as the means to their enigmatic ends. And when one can so easily manipulate the perception of reality, one eventually comes to the realization that Truth, itself, is a malleable thing. So it was only natural that the cultist and the spy would gravitate towards each other and would try to learn from each other.

QuoteAnd when this occurred, when state religions were established and associated with city-cults such as those of ancient Sumeria, Babylon and Egypt, then there grew up around them secret cults that worshipped older gods, the gods and goddesses that had been usurped by the newer, royally-linked deities. Even ancient Sumeria—arguably the oldest western civilization that has left any written record of itself—had its cult of witches, and various texts (such as the Maqlu or "Burning" Text) contain chants and prayers against the practice of witchcraft, some three thousand years before the birth of Christ. These witches were independent practitioners of ritual; in other words, they did not belong to the state cult, were not approved by the ruler (who was both secular and sacred ruler), and they worshipped beings that were not approved by the state cult. Thus, the Biblical phrase cited above, that witchcraft and rebellion were synonymous. Rebellion is a revolt against secular authority; the implication is therefore that witchcraft is a revolt against sacred authority. It puts access to God in the hands of the Great Unwashed. It creates an anti-church, just as rebellion creates an anti-government.

QuoteTo worship the "old gods" was to commit heresy and, in the old days, treason. The political leadership and the religious leadership were one and the same. To go outside the system was to be cast into the outer darkness, to lose one's soul; to become a worshipper of devils, a word that comes from deva, the Sanskrit word for "god."

QuoteThis speaks to Robert Anton Wilson's concept of "consensus reality," mentioned in the previous volume. Reality is a shape-shifter, dependent as much on political decisions as it is on scientific observations. And these decisions and observations are usually not the prerogative of the individual citizen. An essential part—a fundamental part—of the social contract, and imposed from the top down, is a general agreement as to what constitutes reality. To deviate from that agreement is to deviate from society—the kingdom, the real estate, the state religion—itself. It is to become, in a sense, a Satanist, a worshipper of an adversary; or a witch, a worshipper of an unapproved God.

QuoteProfessor Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty—in her important study The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology—describes how the ancient Sanskrit texts relate the history of demons. The belief is often expressed that the demons were not only the equals of the gods but their superiors—the older brothers, the original gods from whom the gods stole the throne of heaven. This, of course, is exactly how the Sumerian creation epic describes it, showing how Marduk and his Company of Heaven rebelled against the older gods, their parents, and destroyed them. It is also related in this text that humanity was created from the blood of the slain older gods and the breath of the victorious younger gods. In fact, the Sumerian myth goes even further and describes the creation of human beings a bit as if Marduk was building automata, destroying the first set as defective. This parallels a Qabalistic legend that all of creation as we know it is really only the second draft; the first draft was defective and broke, and the shells of that first draft became the demons—the qlippoth—of the second. The idea that demons represent a moral quantum—evil, which is supposed to be the opposite of good—does not develop until much later and, in some cultures, not at all.

QuoteAlthough there have been many examples of theocracies in ancient history (and a few in modern history, such as Tibet), there are perhaps even fewer "cultocracies" in the world, but when they do occur they offer evidence of the way cults operate even when they do not control an entire nation. In my previous work, Unholy Alliance, I attempted to show how the Third Reich was just such a cultocracy. Here, in North America, we have had another: the Republic of Haiti, under the dictatorships of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier. Haiti is perhaps a unique example of a nation that was created out of the houngans and hounforts of the Voudon religion, normally spelled "voodoo."

Cain

QuoteWhat most audiences never realize, however, is that the relationship between magic and politics in Haiti is very strong, virtually inextricable. Papa Doc Duvalier was a powerful voudon practitioner, and bragged that it was his magic that resulted in the assassination of his enemy, President John F. Ken- nedy. This is not as much of an anomaly as it may appear, since the Haitian republic itself was born out of both political revolt and voudon, rebellion and witchcraft. On the night of August 14, 1791 at Bois Caiman in Haiti, near the town of Morne-Rouge, a secret voudon ceremony was held in the midst of a storm of thunder and lightning. Amid that theatrical setting the god of war, Ogun, was invoked in the presence of legendary leader Boukman Dutty. Slaves from plantations all over the northern plain of Haiti were present, and swore allegiance to Boukman and to his lieutenants, Biassou, Celestin, and Jean-Francois. A black pig was decapitated in the midst of the ritual, and the Revolt of the Slaves was baptized in its blood. From that moment on, Haiti was in the midst of terrible turmoil. Plantations were burned to the ground, and thousands of white settlers and plantation owners were slaughtered. Towns fell to the rebels, known as Maroons to the French, and with the advance of a Spanish force from the neighboring Dominican Republic and its alliance with the Maroon armies, the days of French colonial supremacy on the island were numbered. France made several treaties with the slave leaders, some of whom betrayed their leadership and became almost as bad as the white slavers themselves, but in the end France (and Napoleon) could not prevail against Haiti, losing some thirty-to sixty-thousand troops in a futile effort to retain control over the colony and use it as a base to attack the southern part of the United States. Boukman became a national hero, a Haitian slave who, with the energy and passion of the voudon cult, organized a slave revolt against the French and won, dying in the process. Voudon priestesses danced in the streets of the towns they would capture, and the sound of the conch shell horns and the pounding of the drums drove terror into the hearts of the slave owners. These children of the Slave Coast had vanquished the strongest European force in the world at that time, using a mixture of politics, military strategy, and African faith that had never before been seen.

QuotePapa Doc was born Francois Duvalier, one of the sons of the elite, intellectual class of Haitian society, but with strong feelings of identity with the Haitian people as opposed to the French society to which the elite normally swore cultural allegiance. At a time when an American occupation of Haiti was a festering sore of humiliation and shame, Dr. Duvalier—who had by this time become a medical doctor as well as an ethnologist specializing in Haitian culture—decided to do something about it. He gathered around himself a clique of like-minded souls who saw in Haitian identity—as opposed to the imported French variety—a source of national pride, and this included the popular folk religion of voudon.

QuoteIn the 1950s, as voudon was still being actively suppressed by the government and the sacred drums and flags of the religion were still being burned, Duvalier and his group represented a political, intellectual and cultural alternative, and Duvalier—seen as a "black" candidate as opposed to a supporter of the mulatto elite—won the presidential election in 1957. For the first time in over a hundred years, voudon priests, or houngans, were invited to the presidential palace and given government positions. On one particularly historic occasion, Duvalier invited all of the houngans in Haiti to a special meeting in Port-au-Prince, the capitol of the country. His allegiance to voudon was no secret, and the allegiance of voudon to Duvalier was cemented. The rumors in Haiti (and abroad) were that Duvalier was, himself, a houngan or perhaps even a black magician, a bokor. Things were not easy for Duvalier, however. The first few years of his administration there were numerous attempts at military coups and assassinations, and in reaction he formed his own personal bodyguard, the dread Tontons Macoutes. With their sinister sunglasses and small arms, they were everywhere in Haiti for about thirty years. They wore no uniforms, but their presence was pervasive in every town, on every street corner. It was a huge organization, and the secret behind it was peculiarly Haitian: an occult society known as Bizango.

QuoteWhatever the origin of Bizango, it has developed into a secret society that exists in every part of Haiti, and with whom its followers claim the Haitian government must cooperate if it wishes to stay in power. The Bizango cult has murdered its enemies, and has worked its voudon magic against them as well using a mixture of herbal poisons and drugs as well as incantations and spells. It is believed that Duvalier's Tontons Macoutes were soldiers of the Bizango society, or that, at least, their memberships overlapped considerably (as implied in the Wes Craven film very loosely based on Wade Davis' research in Haiti, The Serpent and the Rainbow).

Cain

Back to the Manson narrative for a bit:

QuoteIn the months that followed in that first year of Richard Nixon's first term as President, the Manson Family gathered guns, vehicles, drugs and additional members and headed out to the Mojave Desert and Death Valley in preparation for a long-term siege. Manson's dream of becoming a rock star was not materializing, but his nightmare of race war and armageddon was taking shape. There had been race riots in Los Angeles a few years earlier, and Freedom Riders in the South.

QuoteManson was a creature of the Right: raised by the State, formed by the State, brutalized by the State since he was a child, Manson was the Right Wing in America, taken to its logical conclusion, in an environment in which Nazis were protected and coddled, in which the Church itself collaborated in some of the worst crimes that century had ever seen, and in which the American State Department, the CIA, the military, and other institutions fought among each other for the spoils. The cynicism of Manson was conceived as he watched this duplicity unfold in his own life. In "brainwashing" his followers he was only doing to perfection what the men of MK-ULTRA were trying to do with a larger budget and a lot of paperwork. The fact that he was convicted of the Tate/La Bianca murders and is still in prison to this day is testament to his success, since it is acknowledged that he did not pick up a knife or pull a trigger or in any way actually participate at the Sharon Tate crime scene. He was, as he said, "convicted of witchcraft in the twentieth century."

And then to Nixon, who forms a central interest to A Warm Gun:

QuoteWhile at Whittier, he [Nixon] was involved in setting up a fraternity to rival the existing—more prestigious—one. The initiation rituals devised by Nixon and his colleagues for this "anti-frat" involved going at night, naked, and digging up a dead animal and feasting on its decaying flesh. It is said that Nixon, as the one who created the fraternity, did not have to go through this repulsive, Jeffrey-Dahmer-like, hazing ceremonial.  Nixon would go on to create spurious orders throughout his career, such as the Order of the Hound's Tooth (after the "Checkers speech" that saved his political career amid allegations of financial wrong-doing). Interest in secret societies, espionage capers, and all the other hallmarks of a paranoid personality (or, simply, a suspicious one) would characterize Nixon as both a man and as a politician in the eyes of an increasingly nervous electorate.

QuoteWhen war broke out in December 1941, Nixon took a job working in Washington, D.C. for the Office of Emergency Management. Tiring of that, he enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and—after a short posting to Quonset, Rhode Island—was sent to the Pacific theater, where he served the remainder of the war, becoming a Lieutenant Commander in the process. This is where it gets interesting. In 1937, he had gone job-hunting in New York City at two firms that had strong intelligence connections: Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Lombard, of which General William "Wild Bill" Donovan was the founding partner, and Sullivan and Cromwell, which had John Foster Dulles as a senior partner. Donovan, of course, was the genius behind the OSS; John Foster Dulles was a statesman of world renown and brother, of course, to Allen Dulles, who would one day become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At this time, Nixon also applied to the FBI but was turned down. The reasons are a little vague. In 1945, at the war's end, Nixon—still in uniform—was back on the East Coast, and this time we know even less of what he was doing and for whom. There is one tantalizing reference to the "Bureau of Aeronautics," which is suggestive of a Jack Parsons link, but alas there is nothing else there to work with. What we do have, however, is evidence that Nixon had been involved—however briefly, however peripherally—with Operation Paperclip.

QuoteMark Aarons and John Loftus, in The Secret War Against the Jews, refer to interviews with former Counter Intelligence Corps personnel as well as the Central Intelligence Group (the forerunner of the CIA), who claim that Nixon had seen documentation that Allen Dulles wanted kept secret, and that Dulles in return offered to help finance Nixon's run against incumbent California Congressman Jerry Voorhis in 1946. (This claim is repeated in their Unholy Trinity.) As Dulles had contacts and business associations with Nazis going back long before the start of the war, it is possible that the documentation Nixon saw implicated Dulles in some ugly relationships.

QuoteFurther investigation also revealed another twist to the mystery of Nixon's anonymous backers, this from longtime mobster and associate of Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen. As early as the 1946 election, Nixon had been in the pocket of organized crime. Cohen confessed during his incarceration at Alcatraz to what had already come to the attention of US government officials as well as Democratic party leaders, that he—on Mafia orders—had supplied funds for Nixon's first campaign against Voorhis,

QuoteMickey Cohen was Los Angeles' answer to Bugsy Siegel in Las Vegas, and indeed the two had worked together to consolidate the West Coast rackets for the Lansky operation, while Lansky busied himself with his casinos in Cuba.

QuoteWhat is even more worrisome, however, is Mickey Cohen's relationship to another character who would figure prominently in American history: Jack Ruby.

Cain

And Nixon's links to Nazism, which I'll admit, even I was not entirely familiar with:

QuoteWhile much of the story behind the Dulles-Nixon partnership has been sanitized, and sensitive material remains classified to this day, there is enough in the public record concerning Nixon's support of Nazi war criminals to afford us an honest gaze at this aspect of American history.

QuoteStill others would be confused by the plethora of Eastern Orthodox churches, idiosyncratic priests, spies and double agents, former SS officers, Republican Party flacks, South American political movements, captains of industry, Middle Eastern intelligence operations, multinational corporations and unorthodox banking practices that form the real structure of a network of resurgent fascism, a kind of Nazism nouveau, equal in everything but swastika armbands and Furtwaengler conducting The Ring.

QuoteTo understand the degree to which resurgent fascism and refugee Nazism have influenced the political direction of the United States (including its foreign policy), it is necessary to examine the role that Eastern European ethnic groups have played in the postwar years, forming voting blocs on the one hand, and making themselves essential to Western intelligence operations on the other. It is also necessary to examine the political allegiances and philosophies of these groups before they came to the United States. In many cases, these were nationalist organizations that had actively resisted Soviet Communism and, in the process, turned to fascist, extreme right-wing support, adopting anti-Semitism and other racial ideologies from the Nazis.

QuoteThe groups most openly hostile to Communism and most open to Nazi support were Ukrainian, Croatian, Romanian, and Hungarian nationalists. The Hungarians and Croatians were, by and large, Roman Catholic and received tremendous support from the Catholic Church both in their actions against Soviet Communism as well as in intelligence operations and political action in support of Intermarium and other pan-Slavic cabals, support that would eventually earn these Nazi and pro-Nazi criminals safe haven in North and South America.

QuoteMany fleeing Ukrainian Catholics had switched allegiance to the more fiercely nationalistic Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and it was this same church that consecrated renegade Romanian Iron Guard commandant and instigator of the 1941 pogrom of Bucharest, Valerian Trifa, as a Bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America in 1952—even though he had no qualifications whatsoever as a bishop, had never been a priest or even an altar boy, and had no theological training at all. Trifa went on to create cells of Romanian Nazi "priests" under church cover throughout North America and in other countries, right up to his eventual deportation from the US in 1984

QuoteWhen the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign of 1952 was successful in depicting the Democrats as "soft on Communism," it attracted the political and financial support of these émigré groups all across the country. A special "Ethnic Division" was created at campaign headquarters to ensure that the Ukrainian, Romanian, Slovak, Croatian, etc. vote was turned out in support of the former World War II Commander-in-Chief of Allied forces in Europe and his Red-baiting, anti-Semitic vice-presidential candidate.

And if we believe that Allen Dulles was his principal backer and political godfather...well, Dulles' own interest in Nazism wasn't strictly academic:

QuoteThus, Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, and their uncle Robert Lansing had already formulated a geopolitical strategy that they would implement not only at the end of World War I, but consistently through the postwar years, through World War II and beyond. It involved strengthening Germany as a guardian against the spread of European Bolshevism and Communism, and the creation of a cordon sanitaire composed of Eastern European countries to hold back Russian expansionism. The Dulles brothers actively courted Nazi officials in the 1930s—as did such American concerns as the Ford Motor Company and IBM—with no scruples about the type of institutionalized anti-Semitism that Hitler and his colleagues were planning for Germany and the Occupied Territories.

QuoteIn 1945, Dulles—along with his OSS agent Hans Bernd Gisevius, a former Gestapo officer—was accused by the US Treasury Department of laundering Nazi funds from Hungary into Switzerland (where Dulles was based). The investigation was dropped when the US State Department claimed jurisdiction.

QuoteGisevius himself was working for the massive intelligence operation being run by a White Russian, General Turkul, and known as the Black Orchestra, a Vatican-linked Nazi intelligence network that was in reality a miracle of Soviet penetration into the Western intelligence services, something that Dulles would not have known at the time.

Oops.  Also a great story, sadly mostly unknown in the western world.

QuoteRichard Nixon was brought in on the money laundering secret by Allen Dulles in 1945 or early 1946, of which the Treasury Department investigation had only revealed a small portion. Nixon, in examining captured German documents as a Navy officer after the war, is presumed to have come across evidence of this money laundering effort, and of other links between German industrial and banking firms, OSS officers, and Dulles in particular. This was at the same time as the US Treasury Department investigation, so it is reasonable to assume that Nixon uncovered elements of a paper trail that would implicate such firms as Chase Bank, Morgan Bank, ITT and other companies that have since been revealed to have operated freely in Nazi territory, and often with Nazis on the local board of directors (such as Nazi Intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg, who kept his board position with ITT throughout the war). Dulles, in return, promised to assist Nixon in his California congressional campaign if he buried the data. A life-long partnership was born.

QuoteDulles met with Hohenlohe in Geneva in January 1943 and is recorded—by the SS, remember, in their documents—as stating that in Europe "there must be no toleration of a return of the Jewish power positions" (Higham's paraphrasing) and that "the Americans were only continuing the war to get rid of the Jews and that there were people in America who were intending to send the Jews to Africa."

Cain

QuoteItem: 1950. July 19. Viorel Trifa arrives in New York. Trifa had been commandant of the Romanian Iron Guard student movement and responsible for the January 1941 attempted coup and resulting pogrom in the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, in which one thousand Jews were killed, including more than two hundred who were taken to a slaughterhouse and butchered in a grim parody of koshering. During the pogrom, Trifa himself visited the cells where Jews were being held and murdered them personally. He was a member of the Iron Guard General Staff, along with only two others. He was tried and sentenced in absentia by the Romanian government, but was living in protection at the German Embassy in Bucharest. At war's end, Trifa sought asylum in Italy and obtained a position as a history teacher in a Catholic college. In 1950, he manages to emigrate to the United States by disguising his Nazi past. He will take over the Romanian Orthodox Church in the United States by force, become an Archbishop, and in 1955 open a session of the US Congress by invitation of Vice President Richard Nixon.

QuoteItem: 1951. Nixon introduces a private bill to allow Nikolae Malaxa to stay in the United States. Malaxa is a Romanian émigré and financier of the Iron Guard, and hence of Trifa's pogroms against the Jews in which thousands had been tortured and murdered. Malaxa had been a business partner of Hermann Goering, the Nazi Reichsmarschall, and his factories "integrated" with Germany's during the war.

QuoteItem: 1954. Nikolae Malaxa meets with Otto Skorzeny and Juan Peron in Buenos Aires, Argentina, according to CIA documents. Skorzeny—the famed Nazi commando—has eluded a Nuremberg indictment and, as an international arms dealer, is now running an informal worldwide SS underground operation. Juan Peron, of course, is the President of Argentina and a supporter of Italian and German fascism. Most escaping Nazis wind up in Argentina at some point during their exile, and Peron profits financially as well as politically from the arrangement.

QuoteAt the same time as Nixon was jockeying for position against Johnson on Vietnam, he was also cutting a deal with the Greek military junta, and illegally accepting huge cash contributions from the generals.

QuoteOne of the strangest episodes of the Nixon campaign was the selection of Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate; George Bush had been put forth as a logical vice president, but Nixon stunned the convention by choosing the Greek-American Agnew instead (much, one imagines, to Mr. Bush's great relief years later!). This is now believed to be directly linked with events in Greece and Nixon's friendship with the enigmatic Thomas Pappas, who is mentioned in the Oval Office tapes as "good old Tom Pappas," a guy who was raising hush money for the Watergate burglars. Pappas was a self-made millionaire who started in the grocery business and later wound up with a small empire of his own in oil and chemicals. He funneled large cash contributions into the Nixon war chest, and when Agnew was selected as candidate for vice president it appeared to be due to Pappas' influence.

QuoteAccording to Summers, the sum of $549,000 had been transferred to Nixon's campaign in three separate payments between July and October of 1968, an amount equivalent to millions of dollars today. The money originated not with rank-and-file Greek citizens—illegal as that would be in any case—but from the Greek Central Intelligence Service, KYP. The cash would go to Thomas Pappas in Greece, who would then carry the funds himself to the United States.

Cain

QuoteAs information has come to light in recent years, we now know that the Soviets were well aware of anti-Communist agitation among the White Russians, as well as among the various disenfranchised ethnic groups living in the West. They began penetration of these groups shortly after the Revolution, and never abandoned their intelligence networks in the West. By the time that Dulles and his British counterparts began using Ukrainian, Hungarian, and White Russian émigré groups to go up against the Soviet Union, they had been so compromised by Russian intelligence as to be virtually useless. Worse, they acted as agents against the West and did untold damage to the Western intelligence services. Dulles and his men, in their hubris, did not suspect that the White Russians on their team were agents for the KGB and Soviet military intelligence. By the time they did, the damage had been done.

QuoteE. Howard Hunt was the inspiration for the Cigarette Man on Chris Carter's television series, The X-Files. According to Carter's mythology, the CGM was responsible for everything from the Bay of Pigs invasion, to the Kennedy assassination, and just about every dirty trick and dirty deed in American history of the past fifty years. He was also a failed novelist, and the bitterness of a frustrated career behind the typewriter led the CGM to a hard-bitten, cynical approach to life. This very nearly parallels Hunt's own career.

QuoteG. Gordon Liddy is also an obvious member of the Watergate Coven. A lifelong admirer of German culture, who was smitten by hearing Hitler's speeches over a radio when he was a child, he is known to start singing the Horst Wessel song at the drop of a microphone. While known to the media as the Plumbers, Liddy had named his team for stopping leaks and disrupting the Democratic presidential campaign "ODESSA," after the fabled organization of former SS officers: "It appealed to me because when I organize, I am inclined to think in German terms and the acronym was also used by a World War II German veterans organization belonged to by some friends of mine, Organisation Der Emerlingen Schutz Staffel Angehoerigen: ODESSA."

QuoteJeane Dixon was familiar to many in the 1960s as a psychic who was said to have predicted the assassination of President Kennedy. The American-born daughter of German immigrants, she also made some startling predictions about a world war that was supposed to take place in the final decades of the twentieth century, as well as the birth of a Savior somewhere in the Middle East in the early 1960s. Most of this was included in the book about her, A Gift of Prophecy: a blue and white bound paperback that was ubiquitous in bookstores and magazine racks throughout the United States for years. What most people did not know, however, and which would have horrified them if they did know, was that Jeane Dixon was actively working on behalf of the FBI, tailoring her predictions to emphasize the danger of the Soviet Union!

Cain

QuoteAccording to Ehrlichman, Nixon was getting premonitions from both Billy Graham and Jeane Dixon that his life was in danger in late 1972. Recently declassified FBI files—released after the psychic's death in 1997—show a comfortable relationship between Ms. Dixon and the FBI, to the extent that the Bureau supplied her with information on groups they considered subversive so that she had ammunition for her speeches around the country. She volunteered to help the FBI erode popular support for the Left, by making speeches with material that could not be traced to the Bureau.

QuoteIn 1969, she accused the Soviet leadership of instigating and controlling race riots and student revolt in the United States; in 1971 she went so far as to say that there was a high-level spy in the US government who was reporting back to the Soviets. Her fear of the Left in general and of the Soviet Union in particular was consistent, and was exploited by the FBI for its own purposes. One angry correspondent wrote to Hoover demanding an investigation of the psychic, accusing her of trying to create an environment in which Democratic Party leaders would be assassinated, in particular Teddy Kennedy, about whom Dixon had always had dire things to predict. The accusation was that Dixon was consciously using her prestige as a diviner to suggest that Ted Kennedy ought to be killed.

Cain

QuoteInitially, Operation OFTEN was a joint CIA/Army Chemical Corps drug project, based out of Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and using inmates of the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia as test subjects. It came under the aegis of the CIA's Office of Research and Development (ORD), which was concerned with parapsychology and the application of supernatural powers for military purposes. 6Later, OFTEN would become a kind of grab bag of CIA investigations into the paranormal, and would include everything from séances and witchcraft to remote viewing and exotic drugs. Agents of Operation OFTEN would consult with such occult luminaries as Sybil Leek, the famous English witch who was interviewed constantly in the late 1960s on radio and television talk shows, and who had published a few books on the occult, astrology and associated themes. Although the CIA had been investigating ESP and the paranormal, and infiltrating occult groups, since 1952, when Andrija Puharich began contact with The Nine, someone at the CIA evidently felt that the occult underground in 1969 might have access to special techniques for the manipulation of consciousness and memory, and they took to their study with renewed vigor.

You may remember Sybil Leek from the "Final Events" book - according to which, she allegedly channeled a demon for US intelligence personnel, to answer questions on the UFO phenomenon (note: Final Events was published after a Warm Gun, but Leek's work for Operation OFTEN was well established before now).

And back to Manson:

QuoteIn April of 1969, Bruce Davis had just returned to California and the sticky embrace of the Manson Family after having spent more than five months with either the Scientologists, the Process, or both. His lengthy mission in England is still a mystery, as is the funding for this junket. Documents seized by the US Government after a raid on Scientology headquarters in 1977 show considerable anxiety over the alleged connection between the Manson Family and Scientology; the Scientologists sent emissaries to try to find Steve Grogan (who was later convicted of the murder of Donny Shea), a Family member who had information concerning Manson's Scientology background (they were unsuccessful). Then, an informant came to them with information on Manson's 150 hours of Scientology auditing sessions in prison. The picture painted is frightening, for it shows a Manson at turns extremely enthusiastic about his training... and terrified to the point of demanding to be put into solitary confinement so he could escape his auditor.

QuoteManson consciously used the drug as a tool in his arsenal, along with sex. In one instance, he told an interviewer that he would make a woman exhausted with physical work before he would have sex with her, so that she was in no mood to have sex at all. Then he would approach her and gradually work on her until the point where she began to respond to his sexual ministrations; at that point, Manson believed he had control of her mind and could convince her to do anything. That combination of sex and drugs and a kind of perverse operant conditioning are the basic working parts of what Ed Sanders calls "The Manson Secret." It was what CIA psychiatrist Ewen Cameron was working on until virtually the day he died, except that Manson was much more successful. As documented in The Nine, Cameron created zombies; Manson created assassins

QuoteA few nights before the Tate slaughter there was a strange event at the house on Cielo Drive. A dope dealer from Canada was punished for selling Jay Sebring bad dope. According to actor Dennis Hopper, twenty-five people were invited to watch the dealer get whipped and to participate in the whipping. They videotaped the event, as they had other events involving—again, according to Hopper—"sadism, masochism and bestiality."  Hopper claims that LA police informed him about some of this information. The tapes have never surfaced, but rumors in the Hollywood underground have always insisted that they exist. Some say that the LAPD has them in a safe place, much like J. Edgar Hoover's famous "secret files," to be used when necessary to coerce or persuade a celebrity to cooperate. This event cannot be considered in isolation from the Tate killings. According to Hopper, the public humiliation of the dealer took place three days before the murders at Cielo Drive, which would make it on or about August 5th. Manson had complained to Gary Hinman about a bad batch of mescaline on July 26th. The burn was worth two thousand dollars. Hinman was killed. Hairstylist to the stars (and former lover of Sharon Tate) Jay Sebring had complained about getting burned to the tune of the same two thousand dollars. He would die in the Tate house. Only the type of drug is in question: was Sebring talking about cocaine or mescaline? According to Ed Sanders, Sebring's burn—and the subsequent whipping of the drug dealer—involved cocaine. That there were two dope burns for the same amount of money in each case, less than two weeks apart, is probably coincidence; but it got Gary Hinman murdered, got a dope dealer whipped on Cielo Drive in front of twenty-five eyewitnesses including many celebrities, and led up to the horrific murders in the same house only three days later.

QuoteMaury Terry raises an important point in his observation of the killings, one which cannot be easily ignored: if Helter Skelter was the true motive, then why did the killings stop after La Bianca? There was no evidence linking the Manson clan to any of the killings; they were still in the clear on Tate and La Bianca, although Bobby Beausoleil had been picked up for the Hinman murder. They could have continued their Helter Skelter murder spree much longer before being stopped. Why only that one weekend in August? Why only the five victims at the Tate house (six, if you count Sharon Tate's unborn son) and two at La Bianca? The only reason that makes sense is that both murders were contract hits, and that Manson dressed it up in Helter Skelter for the benefit of his young female assassins. (It is presumed that Tex Watson knew of the real motive, or had a suspicion anyway, as it was he who drove the car to the Tate residence specifically; it was not a random selection.) Helter Skelter was Manson's "program" for the brainwashed murderers; it provided a context, and it also influenced their choice of bloody graffiti at each scene, thus laying the crimes off on the Black Panthers. For Manson, it was two birds with one stone, so to speak. He could spread the evil message of Helter Skelter while meanwhile getting paid—in some form, since money seemed to be in short supply in the days immediately preceding and succeeding the murders—by the drug dealing establishment to rid them of some problems.

QuoteThen there was a substantial rumor pointing to what Ed Sanders calls a "voodoo cult" operating from Jamaica. Polanski went down to Jamaica to check it out, and again came up empty. The Jamaican angle is interesting because Canadian drug dealer Billy Doyle, who was beaten at the Tate house only days before the killings, was known to have flown drugs into the United States from Jamaica specifi- cally. The idea was that Doyle had arranged the killings as retribution for the treatment he received on Cielo Drive, and contracted a cult of killers from Jamaica to do the deed. This only fits what we know of the crime if we maintain that the Jamaican cult then sub-contracted the hit to a known local cult, the Manson Family. There is no evidence to support this, of course, and one suspects it would have been easier for Doyle to go direct to Manson with the contract.

QuoteManson himself has said that the real motive behind the Tate killings would never be revealed (by him), but that it was so explosive it would rock the establishment.

QuoteThese were either contract hits, taken on by Manson for reasons undisclosed to this time, or we have to believe that they were the opening salvos in Manson's dream of igniting a race war. If the latter, then why did the high-profile murders suddenly stop? While many more murders were committed in the days and weeks to follow, they were low-profile attacks on members of the Family who knew too much... or on Scientologists for some strange reason also yet to be divulged.

Doktor Howl

This is kind of amazing, in a very strange way.
Molon Lube