Principia Discordia

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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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:

QuoteTo 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Baviera), 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.

QuoteI 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.

QuoteDuring 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.

QuoteUniversity 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.

QuoteThe 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.

QuoteIt 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?

QuoteDuring 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.

QuoteTaking 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.

QuoteAt 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.

QuoteDuring 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.

QuoteManson 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:

QuoteThere 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.

QuoteOn 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.

QuoteAs 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:

QuotePsychological 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.

QuoteShortly 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:

QuoteHis 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:

QuoteAnother 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.

Levenda also finds an interesting link between this and his earlier project on the Nazis:

QuoteViereck was a propaganda officer and spy for the Kaiser during World War I and a colleague of infamous British occultist and sometime spy Aleister Crowley. Viereck went on to conduct espionage and propaganda activities during World War II as well, and wound up arrested for his efforts, spending about a year in prison. At the same time, his son—Peter Viereck—was working for the OSS and the 1st Mobile Broadcasting Company in North Africa, along with Hans Habe and other notables, including Martin Herz, a future US Ambassador!  And we should not forget yet another OSS officer in Italy at this time, Peter Tompkins, a broadcast journalist who became an intelligence officer during the war, but whose fame rests more on his researches in two fields: Egyptian archaeology on the one hand, and the use of lie detectors in the investigation of the "secret life of plants" on the other. Also involved in intelligence during the war in Europe—and specifically in the interrogation of Nazi prisoners, like his counterparts in OSS and USSBS—was J. D. Salinger, the famed and reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye, that favorite tome of American assassins. He was a CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) officer from 1943, and took part in the D-Day invasion of June 1944.13 His duties were essentially the same as those of his OSS counterparts: to round up Nazis and interrogate them, and to search for collaborators and German Army deserters among the "civilians." It also appears that two other gentlemen who will figure in our story—Clay Shaw and Fred Crisman—were involved in similar intelligence activities, specifically with the Paperclip operations.

So, rather illustrious, and unusual, company.  Especially unusual, in the case of Shaw and Crisman:

QuoteShaw, as many readers are aware, figured prominently in the Kennedy Assassination theories of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and others; Crisman, supposedly a friend of Shaw from the war years, was subpoenaed by Jim Garrison to testify concerning that relationship. It has been suggested that Shaw was an OSS officer during the war; Crisman certainly was, as his CIA files demonstrate. Crisman, however, was also involved in the seminal UFO contact of the twentieth century. This was the Maury Island affair of 1947, which ushered in the whole UFO spectrum, from "flying saucers," to "men in black," to government coverups and exploding

QuoteAs if that weren't enough, another Army Intelligence officer in Rome at this time, charged with hunting down Nazi agents like his OSS counterparts, was Philip J. Corso, who would eventually find a position on President Eisenhower's National Security Staff. It was Corso who, a bit before his death, published The Day After Roswell, a book claiming that he was privy to reverse-engineered scientific achievements based on captured flying saucers, and had actually seen the corpse of an extraterrestrial from Roswell in a shipping crate on its way to Wright Air Force Base in Ohio, a claim that is hotly debated on both sides of the UFO issue, even though Corso's bona fides in all other respects seem unimpeachable.

UFOs and military intelligence/OSS.  Interesting, how those seem to end up being connected so often, but that's for later discussion.

QuoteSomeone as high-profile and as rabidly anti-Nazi as Habe was a jewel in the psy-war crown. After all, they made a movie about his life in a Nazi POW camp (The Cross of Lorraine); he was married to the adopted daughter of the former US Ambassador to Russia; he was running propaganda and psy-war operations against the Nazis and then, after the war, against both the Nazi sympathizers and the Communists. If the Allied postwar intelligence community was like a corporation, then Habe had a seat on the Board.

QuoteWas Habe involved with Operation Paperclip, the US effort to bring Nazi scientists—especially rocket scientists, but also medical men and other experts—to America after the war?

QuoteThere is an intriguing—and startling—photograph in Tom Bower's Blind Eye to Murder, an account of the Allied failure to completely de-Nazify Germany after the war. 15It is labeled Photograph 13, "The Paperclip Scientists," and describes "the men who put America on the moon, enjoying a Bavarian evening in Chicago, 1950." Among the scientists—the notorious "physician" Dr. Hubertus Strughold, Wernher von Braun, and General Walter Dornberger—there is another figure, identified as "Hans Habe." Hans Habe does not appear in the text of Bower's book, nor in the index or anywhere else. The photo certainly looks like Habe, when compared to the De Grazia photo and the one in Current Biography of 1943. But how could that be? What would Hans Habe be doing hanging out in apparent conviviality with Paperclip scientists?

Project Paperclip, of course, was one of the blackest black ops in all of intelligence history.  Unrepetant Nazis, responsible for war crimes and atrocities beyond count, rescued and hidden from the prying eyes of the Nuremberg prosecutors, then spirited away to America or other "safe locations" in South America, to form an integral part of the military-industrial complex to combat the Soviets.

UFOs and intelligence officers appear again:

QuoteThere is another famous photograph to consider, this one notorious among UFO enthusiasts and debunkers alike. It is of an "alien," a short creature in a strange suit, a weird mask with elongated forehead and breathing apparatus, holding hands with an Army officer as another person walks behind carrying his... oxygen tank? It first appeared in a German newspaper on April Fool's Day, 1950, and made the tabloid circuit in the States shortly thereafter, in which form the author first saw it as a child years later. This photo would have appeared in one of Habe's newspapers (it appeared in 1950, and Habe was in charge of West German propaganda until 1951) and certainly would not have been shown without his prior involvement and approval as the US Army psychological warfare and propaganda expert. The photo was obviously a hoax and was published that way, in a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous Roswell sighting of 1947, perhaps.

Habe retired in the 1950s to Switzerland.

QuoteIn the meantime, Habe began writing books critical of the United States. One of his more famous efforts, Der Tod in Texas: Eine amerikanische Tragoedie, ("Death in Texas: An American Tragedy") was an attack on the Warren Commission published in 1964. Habe had been traveling through the United States at the time of the assassination and did not believe the conclusions of the Warren Report. He was very fond of Kennedy, but very critical of America in the wake of the assassination and what he perceived as the obvious coverup efforts by the government and the willingness of the American people to accept the government's findings. Habe. OSS operations. Psychological warfare. UFO hoax. Paperclip scientists. Even the JFK assassination. More—or less—than meets the eye?

Levenda goes on to explain that psychological warfare is not simply propaganda:

QuoteSimpson's study, however, goes even further and cites clandestine operations such as sabotage and assassination as functions of the psychological warfare effort from the very beginning, for what the establishment considers "psychological warfare" the enemy often considers "terrorism"; these are two sides of the same coin. These operations are not, strictly speaking, military in nature, but have as their goal the psychological disorientation of an enemy population. The Nazis had already been working a psy-war system of their own since the 1930s when they came into power. Mystic and Theosophist Otto Ohlendorff, who would later become a famous SS Einsatzgruppe D commando, cut his milk teeth on psychological warfare programs with his own creation, the Deutsche Lebensgebiete, in 1939, before going hunting in the Caucasus, looking for Jews and Freemasons, and killing ninety thousand innocent people in the process. Probably the most famous propaganda chief of the war itself was the odd-looking, in-your-face Nazi fanatic Josef Goebbels; most Americans and other Allies could not name his opposite number in their own countries. Propaganda was something the other side did. Our side does not use propaganda, the story goes; it merely disseminates factual, i.e., truthful, information. Meanwhile, "propaganda" and "psychological warfare" became synonymous within the United States intelligence agencies, and psychological warfare was the province of agencies like the famous OSS or the Army's G-2 and therefore operated in a cloak-and-dagger world of secrecy.

QuoteAccording to Simpson, British and Nazi German strategies and tactics in this field have historically been termed "political warfare" and Weltanschauungskrieg ("worldview warfare"), respectively. Each of these conceptualizations of psychological warfare explicitly links mass communication with selective application of violence (murder, sabotage, assassinations, insurrection, counterinsurrection, etc.) as a means of achieving ideological, political, or military goals.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Like the resume of certain intelligence agencies post-WWII?  Levenda goes on to discuss how psychological operations require an intimate understanding of the psychology, history and culture of the people one is trying to influence, and how this leads to a disturbing conclusion:

Quote...And eventually, the temptation will arise to test some of these principles on the domestic population. After all, with whose mindset are we the most familiar but our own? What better place to test new theories of psychological warfare than among our native populace? And how better to control our population politically than through the judicious use of propaganda, using the robust media of the most turned-on, tuned-in, mentally-massaged nation on earth: the United States of America?

Chief among these postwar practictioners of psychological warfare is Colonel Lansdale, an infamous and notorious figure in certain circles:

QuoteUnited States Air Force Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale was the CIA's chief operative in the Philippines during the Huk rebellion in the 1950s. As such, he was under the oversight of C. D. Jackson and Nelson Rockefeller, who were responsible for psychological warfare operations at that time in the Philippines and other hot spots. It was Lansdale who came up with the idea of using the Huk belief in vampires—the asuang—against them. The psy-war squad would snatch a Huk in ambush and then kill him; they would pierce his neck with two holes, like a vampire bite, and then hang the body up and drain the blood. They would leave the body where the Huk would be sure to find it, neck punctured, drained of blood.  After his successes in the Philippines, Lansdale was transferred to Vietnam. This was in 1954. At this time, Lansdale followed a psy-war technique that was used during World War Two: the use of astrologers to predict fatal outcomes for enemy leaders.  Lansdale was so successful at his work that he was put in charge of organizing Operation Mongoose, the anti-Castro CIA operation designed to destabilize the Cuban regime. In one of these operations, Lansdale suggested simulating the Second Coming. He proposed telling the Cuban people that Fidel Castro was the Anti-Christ, and then staging the return of Jesus, complete with phosphorous shells fired over Havana. His partners in Operation Mongoose called the plan "elimination by illumination." That was in 1962.  By 1964, the use of occult themes and rituals became an accepted part of psychological warfare planning. The Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at the American University prepared a paper at the request of the US Army on "Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic and Other Psychological Phenomena and Their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo." The paper was authored by James R. Price and Paul Jureidini. American University was no stranger to psychological warfare research, having seen the establishment there of the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) in 1950. The BSSR was the scene of numerous studies of psychological warfare on Eastern European countries, and its African psy-war studies were underwritten by the Human Ecology Fund, an organization well-known to researchers of government-sponsored mind control programs as a front for the CIA's MK-ULTRA program.

Lansdale was as crazy as the operation he is most famous for, Mongoose, but it was a methodical sort of crazy, with a twisted logic to it.  The CIA, as part of its focus on covert action, found the idea of using religious and occult themes to undermine foreign governments to be a very tantalising one.

But, for the moment, back to Marina Habe's murder:

QuoteMarina was believed to be an associate of the Manson "family," and it is alleged that Charles Manson himself stabbed her to death. Was she selected for a particular reason, or was it just an evil coincidence? There is some evidence to show that the Manson "family" murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the day after the Tate murders was a contract killing. Indeed, much of the violence perpetrated by Manson and his followers had a basis in other criminal activity. They were purposeful. Manson does not fit the profile of a serial killer, and indeed his crimes do not fit that pattern at all. A serial killer would not have missed the slaughter at the Tate household, for instance, which Manson had done, sending his followers inside to commit the hideous knife attacks on the five unfortunate victims.

QuoteWhy, then, was Marina killed? A lust killing, pure and simple? Manson getting off on savagely murdering a college coed? His schedule for the day of the kidnap of Marina Habe and her subsequent murder argues against this; he left Death Valley for one day and returned the next. That implies he went to Los Angeles with a specific purpose in mind, a task to accomplish, and returned when the deed was done.

QuoteFor Manson's most famous victim, he chose Sharon Tate, the daughter of an Army intelligence officer serving in Vietnam. Was there a connection? Two victims, both female, both daughters of intelligence officers, both living in Los Angeles; murdered within eight months of each other.

Remember, Habe was described as a fanatical anti-Nazi.  And he was sufficiently important to American intelligence to likely have knowledge of how the Nazis had morphed from strategic threat to strategic asset in the eyes of American intelligence:

QuoteThe most famous intelligence coup of the post-war period was the recruitment of General Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi spymaster whose specialty was Russia and Eastern Europe. His story is told, albeit thinly disguised, in Hans Habe's Agent of the Devil, where he is identified as "General von Greehahn." Habe treats his subject cynically, and it is easy to see that he has become frustrated with Allied duplicity where the de-Nazification process was concerned. The book was published in 1958, by which time Habe had retreated to the aloof neutrality of the Swiss Alps.

QuoteHabe was in a position to watch the OSS morph into the CIA, and to observe how many of his sworn enemies became CIA operatives while he sat in Munich or Berlin, writing articles and editing newspapers for the Allies.

It's nothing conclusive, of course.  But we should also recall Manson's own ideology had strong mystical fascist elements to it...as did the Process Church's, which Manson was linked to.

And anyone with even mildly strong ethical leanings would take umbrage at a man like this being protected:

QuotePerhaps the most intriguing locale for former Nazi scientists was Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. Unlike Fort Bliss, near El Paso, where by February 1946 more than 100 Nazi scientists were in residence, working on the rocket program, Randolph AFB near San Antonio was used for more arcane research. It was at Randolph that we come across the name of Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Strughold managed to escape the fate of his Nazi colleagues by clever maneuvering and outright lying about his work and his responsibility—aided and abetted by American intelligence agencies—but in the end as more and more files were found and declassified, it became apparent that Dr. Strughold was right in the middle of some of the more heinous medical experimentation this planet has ever known.

QuoteAs director of an aviation medicine research institute for the Luftwaffe, holding the rank of Colonel, Strughold was in a position to know of the horrific medical experiments being carried out on living human beings at Dachau in the name of aviation medicine, some of which were being conducted by his friends and co-workers. Prior to the war years, aviation doctors had risked their own lives in these experiments. Now, with such a wealth of potential guinea pigs at their disposal, there was no need to endanger the lives of scientists. Experiments in high altitude pressure, extremes of heat and cold, etc. were carried out on living Jewish and political prisoners at Dachau, and these results shared among the members of the Nazi aviation medicine community.

QuoteThe experiments involved plunging prisoners into ice-cold water, with thermometers stuck in their various orifices, to measure how long it took for a live human being to freeze to death. Prisoners were also subjected to oxygen deprivation, to high pressure experiments, etc., and much of this was captured on still and motion pictures, some of which have survived to this day. It is not known how many prisoners in total died as a result of these "experiments," but eyewitness testimony indicates that eighty prisoners alone died as a result of the high pressure tests conducted by Rascher.

And given the Nazi prediliction for medical experiments, and the subsequent activities of the CIA, the question has to be asked: did the Nazis undertake research in any way similiar to MK-ULTRA?

QuoteThe first indication we have that anything like a mind control program existed within the Third Reich is the memoir of Himmler's astrologer, Wulff, who talks about the Nazi desire to create a program within the Reich to duplicate the mental state of the Japanese soldier, a human being willing and eager to risk his life without question for his country, stuffing his own body into pillboxes to blow them up, and the Chinese Communist "human wave" trooper, who would rush unthinkingly into certain slaughter. This "Asian" mentality was something the Nazis would have dearly loved to inculcate into their own troops, and Wulff—seen as an expert on Asian mysticism—was hired to come up with ways that could be used to condition the German soldier the same way.  Buried in the voluminous files of the Ahnenerbe-SS are also references to the use of mescaline and cannabis as "truth serums," programs that—according to John Marks in his ground-breaking study of CIA mind control projects—have been kept classified by US intelligence since 1945. Here and there we come across the names of Paperclip scientists involved with military and CIA mind control programs, such as Friedrich Hoffmann, a Nazi chemist who advised the CIA on matters relating to psychotropic substances for use in interrogation and "brainwashing." Hoffmann has been linked to Edgewood Arsenal, where CIA maintained TSS (Technical Service Staff) personnel involved in various aspects of chemical and biological warfare, including—according to John Marks—the implantation of new memories in amnesiac patients. One finds an article by Hoffmann, and co-authors William A. Mosher and Richard Hively, on the subject of "Isolation of Trans-*6-Tetrahydrocannibinol from Marijuana" in the April 20, 1966 issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society, an issue published—ironically enough—on Hitler's birthday. Hoffmann was working at the time under the cover of the University of Delaware, along with his co-author Mosher. Another colleague at the University was Dr. James Moore, a chemist originally with Parke, Davis in Detroit, and a person well-known among aficionados as deeply implicated in the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, who experimented on mind-altering substances such as mescaline, psilocybin and the highly controversial drug BZ (quinuclidinyl benzilate).

QuoteAt the same time, in the United States, OSS agents were using the same or similar drugs on unsuspecting targets—such as Mafia "made men"—to see if the same objectives could be attained. Gradually, in the US, hypnosis was also used, sometimes in combination with drugs. And if false information, or "suggestions," could be implanted in the subject, then we have an instance where the goals of psychological warfare and regular intelligence work overlap.

And if we're discussing rocket programs and the occult, then the subject must, inevitably, move towards that of Jack Parsons:

QuoteNaturally, the Nazis were not the only ones with a rocket program during World War II. The United States was involved in various research projects involving rocketry, including a search for the perfect solid-fuel propellant. At this time, much of the work was being done in California, at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) under the famous team of Theodore von Karman and Frank J. Malina at Pasadena. One of their more illustrious—if eventually notorious— team members was Jack Parsons, a tall, darkly handsome and frighteningly intelligent man who would eventually lose his security clearance after the War due to his relationship with occultists and magicians. It was Parsons, a devotee of English magician Aleister Crowley, who would later declare himself the Antichrist... after a stormy relationship with the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons was accused of giving secret technology to the Israelis, among other felonies, and at one time worked for the Howard Hughes empire. He died quite prematurely from an explosion at his home, either an accident, or suicide, or murder; none of the sources seem to agree.

QuoteOn June 13, 1941, an Army officer is initiated into the OTO at the Agape Lodge temple. His name is Grady McMurtry, and he will be stationed for a time in England where he meets Aleister Crowley and develops an odd sort of relationship with the Prophet of Thelema. At this same time, Crowley has been involved in some potential intelligence work with such figures as Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming, both officers with British intelligence and friends of Crowley. They would later become famous novelists, of course, but at the time they were seeking Crowley's assistance to exploit his knowledge of the European occult underground in the war effort. (This is all covered in detail in my Unholy Alliance.) McMurtry will return to the United States safely after the war, and engineer a coup to take over leadership of the OTO after the deaths of Crowley and Crowley's designated successor. More about McMurtry in later chapters, but his movements between the Agape Lodge—which is, after all, infamous among the rocket scientists who are working on highly classified work—and London, where Crowley, their leader, is staying are suggestive of a larger purpose.

QuoteAccording to FBI file 65-1753, originating with the Los Angeles Field Office but made at Cincinnati, Ohio on November 22, 1950, Parsons was being investigated by the Army's CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) in May 1948. A Major Sam Bruno, Chief of Security at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, reported the CIC investigation to the FBI. His report stated that "a religious cult, believed to advocate sexual perversion, was organized at subject's home at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California, which had been reported subversive.... The report further reflects that subject reportedly associated with one [name deleted] an alleged Communist Party member."

QuoteA word to the nervous: Wright-Patterson AFB in 1948 is a very suggestive place to have been involved in an investigation of Jack Parsons, to be sure. UFO enthusiasts know Wright-Patterson as the scene where the elements of the crashed Roswell "flying saucer" were taken in 1947. It is also, of course, where Nazi General Walter Dornberger and his merry men were first taken as part of Operation Paperclip, curiously at the very same time as the Roswell crash in July 1947, leading many to suggest that the UFOs were really Nazi experimental aircraft. The author believes that the security personnel at the air base would have been involved in the Parsons investigation due to the occultist's deep involvement in the rocket program, and not due to anything more sinister; however, interested readers are advised to keep an open mind, because the people who eventually become involved in the Parsons investigation turn up in some odd (and worrisome) places.

Like the Kennedy assassination.

QuoteOn February 7, 1952 Hoover sent James McInerney a memo regarding Parsons, informing him that Parsons' appeal to the Industrial Employment Review Board of the Department of Defense was turned down. According to an attached letter from the Board, Parsons "might voluntarily or involuntarily act against the security interests of the United States and constitute a danger to the national security." 68 Five months later he was dead. James McInerney is an interesting person to associate with Parsons. We discover, for instance, in Robert Maheu's autobiography Next to Hughes, that it was James McInerney who provided the initial funding for Maheu's security firm, Robert A. Maheu Associates. According to Maheu, "Almost immediately, I began working for the CIA." This was in 1954, and McInerney was still Assistant AG. He and Maheu, and some other ex-FBI agents, were gambling illegally, and Maheu won handily the princely sum (in 1954) of $2,800, all from McInerney. When Maheu attempted to refuse the winnings, McInerney would have none of it. It was to this fund that Maheu attributes the initial financial investment for his agency. Maheu, of course, would go on to greater glory, including his infamous relationship with Howard Hughes (Parsons' former employer) and his involvement with the CIA/Mafia plots against Castro. McInerney himself would go on to represent the Kennedys at one point, according to Victor Lasky, even though Maheu was told to sever his relationship with the Kennedy family or else he could not become involved with the CIA.

And for those wondering if the Communist reference above was merely McCarthyite paranoia, or there was something to it...well...

Quoteone of Parsons' earliest partners at GALCIT was Dr. Tsien Hsue Shen, a scientist who specialized in long-range missile development; in fact, his first prototype was built under Parsons' watchful eye at Aerojet. During the McCarthy Era, however, Dr. Tsien was accused of being a Communist. Although he denied any such affiliation, his security clearance was also removed; he protested this straight up to the Undersecretary of the Navy, saying he would go back to China if he wasn't reinstated. Instead, the Undersecretary made a call to Immigration and had Dr. Tsien arrested!  Tsien eventually left the United States, disgusted at his treatment and the suspicion that was aroused by a man born in pre-Communist China. He returned to China as threatened... and jump-started the Chinese missile program. Were the McCarthy investigators wrong in their assumption that Tsien was a Communist? A review of the FBI files shows that Parsons was suspected of knowing someone believed to be a Communist, and he was interrogated on this point several times by the FBI over the course of several years. Further recourse to some hand-written notes in those same files shows an intriguing reference to a suspect in the US Consulate, Shanghai and a list of friends of this suspect; all of the names in the Parsons file are deleted, except for Parsons himself. Was Tsien a Communist, working for Mao's China? And if so, was Parsons aware of this at the time? With his avowed hatred of Christianity—he called himself the Antichrist, after all—and the suspicions of the American government that he was a walking security risk, is it possible that Parsons was only one element of a larger network of political intrigue, involving Chinese Communists, occultists, and rocket scientists? Was the much-rumored job in Israel a cover for something more ominous? And was his murder the final solution to the nagging problem of what to do with a brilliant young scientist who would not bow to "all authority that is not based on courage and manhood"?

1947 was a really, really weird year, for anyone paying attention:

Quote1947 is also in the running as the pivotal year of the postwar period. Many of the issues that define our generation owe their conception to the events of that year. 1947 was the year the CIA was created, and the penetrating of secrets; it was the year of the famous UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico and the subsequent concealing of secrets; the year the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and their exposure of secrets. It was the year Winston Churchill made his famous "Iron Curtain" speech, thus declaring the beginning of the Cold War. It's the year that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) begins its full-scale investigation of Hollywood. It is the year that inventor Arthur Young leaves Bell Helicopter for a full-time study of paranormal phenomena. It is the year that the US Navy begins Project CHATTER, the search for a viable truth serum, a magic potion to unlock the secrets of the mind. In May of that year, the Corporal is launched: America's answer to the V-2 rocket, compliments of Jack Parsons and the rest of the JPL rocketeers. It is also the year of the famous "Black Dahlia" murder in Los Angeles, and of Admiral Byrd's "Hollow Earth" expedition. It is the year that Aleister Crowley dies. It is the year that Holly Maddux is born: a future murder victim whose death will expose the seamy underworld of the New Age movement.

And so, at long last, the topic comes around to the UFO mystery of 1947, the spate of sightings that took place in that year, and the unacknowledged involvement of at least one American intelligence official:

QuoteIn June 21, 1947—the summer solstice—six unidentified flying objects were seen over Maury Island in Puget Sound in the State of Washington. The observers were Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman who was avoiding bad weather by anchoring in Maury Island Bay, his two crewmen, his teenaged son and a dog. The objects were doughnut-shaped and were hovering at about two thousand feet over the boat, according to Dahl. One of the six seemed to be in trouble, as it was losing altitude and was being circled by the other five. The objects seemed to be metallic, with a hole in the center (hence the idea they were "doughnut-shaped") and with portholes around the outer circumference. Each of the objects seemed to be about one hundred feet in diameter. There was a small explosion, and one of the objects rained hot metal all over the boat, killing the dog, damaging the boat and injuring the teenaged son. Dahl quickly beached his craft and began taking pictures of the objects, which soon took off and headed towards Canada. Dahl tried to radio for help or to make a report, but his radio was jammed. Instead, bewildered, he headed back to Tacoma. He got some treatment for his son's injured arm, and then took his evidence—the camera, the film and some samples of the metallic slag—to his boss, a man known as Fred Lee Crisman.

QuoteNo matter on what side of the Kennedy assassination one finds oneself—a believer in the Warren Report, or a believer in a conspiracy—the Fred Crisman element strains credulity. More than twenty years after this event, Crisman will be subpoenaed by District Attorney Jim Garrison as a suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Crisman, a former OSS officer, a man with a CIA file, a man friendly with Clay Shaw... in at the birth of the twentieth century's UFO experience? Of course, this is not the full story. Who would believe the full story?

QuoteRegardless, the next day—on June 23, 1947—Crisman went out to Maury Island and found what appeared to be molten glass or metal and foil, but not before another UFO passed overhead. Crisman returned to Tacoma, not knowing what to do at the moment with the information and evidence he had acquired, or so it seemed. So far, the UFO sighting was a localized event, a small town anomaly. The next day, June 24, 1947, the world changed. This was the day of the famous sighting of nine UFOs north of Mount Rainier by Kenneth Arnold.

Crisman had an interesting relationship with Raymond Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, who went on to publicize Kenneth Arnold's encounter:

QuoteHis relationship to Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, is full of unanswered questions. Why this former OSS officer and harbor patrolman would be involved with a man who published fantasy tales of underground civilizations, weird military experiments (such as the Philadelphia Experiment, in which it was claimed the military had developed a device that could dematerialize a ship and then re-materialize it somewhere else on earth, a story that was later believed to be true by an astonishing number of persons), and mischievous aliens from other worlds, is not clear. Like fellow OSS officer Peter Tompkins after him, Crisman may simply have been fascinated by the paranormal and by speculative history. Or his interest may reveal a slightly more sinister agenda. Speculation is rampant that Crisman's role was that of a disinformation specialist, and that his ultimate purpose was to devalue the UFO reports or, failing that, to erase all traces of the evidence. Crisman contacted Palmer in writing concerning the Maury Island incident; Palmer himself had contacted Arnold about the Mount Rainier sighting, offering a two hundred dollar advance for his story. These were only two of a large number of UFO sightings that were taking place that month and into July.

QuoteDahl finally breaks, and tells Arnold the same story he told Crisman. Dahl's photographs are gone, of course: he has given his camera and his film to Crisman. He did, however, manage to keep back a few pieces of the "slag" that fell from the damaged UFO. He showed Arnold a piece of what seemed to be volcanic rock, not a very suspicious-looking fragment. Dahl also told Arnold about a letter he had received, which stated the UFOs were piloted by aliens who had become visible due to US atomic explosions, and that they were visiting the earth to help protect it from unspecified enemies. The letter writer was anonymous, and one can't help wondering if Crisman was behind this, as well. At this point, Arnold felt he was being had. The whole story sounded very suspicious, very artificial. He asked a friend, another pilot—United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith—for his take on the affair. They came to the conclusion that either the story was a simple hoax, or it was part of an intelligence operation. They distrusted Crisman completely, and felt that he was trying to control the investigation. Either Crisman was a hoaxer, or a spy. Either way, Arnold and Smith felt that he had nothing to contribute.

QuoteThen, as if in confirmation of their suspicions, it was reported that United Press International had received verbatim transcripts of their interviews and discussions, the ones held at Arnold's mysteriously-booked hotel room! Suddenly, it was all becoming clear. Arnold's presence in Tacoma had been part of a larger plot; his room was selected in advance and bugged; the information he extracted from Dahl, and his conversations with Smith, were sent to the news agency (for what purpose can only be imagined). It seemed as if there was an operation underway to discredit the Maury Island UFO report and to do that with Kenneth Arnold, a much more credible witness than either Dahl or Crisman. Two birds with one stone?

Crisman was also present at a meeting between Kenneth Arnold and military intelligence, where this odd sequence of events occured:

QuoteAt the airport, an odd thing happened, one which has plagued UFO researchers for years. Crisman, the man the intelligence officers seemed to think was nothing more than an oddball hoaxer, turned up at the last minute and gave the men a heavy box which he claimed was filled with the debris from the damaged UFO. To Arnold, who was there, the contents looked like a bunch of rocks. The men stowed the box in the trunk of their car and left for the airport, catching their flight. They never made it back to base. Both Davidson and Brown were killed. The enlisted men on board parachuted to safety after the left engine caught fire—according to the report of one of the survivors—and the two officers remained with the aircraft for a full ten minutes before the B-52 bomber crashed to earth. No one has any idea why the two intelligence officers would have remained with the plane and not parachuted themselves; or why they did not radio a distress call. The emergency fire-fighting equipment was inoperable, so there was no chance to save the plane. According to Major George Sander of the US Army Air Corps, the plane was carrying classified material. Was that a reference to the box of rocks carried on board by Davidson and Brown?

And another Kennedy reference makes its way in:

QuoteOne of the men involved in the investigation of UFO reports in the American Northwest that year was none other than FBI Special Agent Guy Banister. Guy Banister's name is well-known among conspiracy aficionados as another one of the men implicated by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the Kennedy assassination. It was Guy Banister—by this time a former FBI agent—who rented office space at the same location stamped on Lee Harvey Oswald's "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" flyers. Banister was running an anti-Castro Cuban operation from his investigator's office, an operation that attracted the likes of former Eastern Airlines pilot and assassination suspect David Ferrie. Oswald was running a pro-Castro Cuban operation from the same address, an anomaly that could only be explained if one understood that Banister and Oswald were working together, and that the pro-Castro operation was a front for some other, even more nefarious, purpose. Further, while Banister was FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Chicago field office during World War II, one of his FBI subordinates was James McCord of Watergate "plumbers" fame, 3and another was Robert A. Maheu: the man who would later become head of his own investigative agency and an employee of Howard Hughes, the man whose agency was started by money won from James Mc-Inerney, the assistant Attorney General who was involved in the Jack Parsons investigation. Maheu would go on to become the man in the middle between the CIA and organized crime in the assassination plots against Castro.

X Files!

QuoteA look at recently declassified FBI files for that period in 1947 show a number of telexes from Banister, some with his initials "WGB," all pertaining to UFO phenomena, as well as other FBI documents with the designation "Security Matter—X" or simply "SM-X," the origin—the author supposes—of the "X Files," which, at least in 1947, did exist at the FBI and was concerned with UFOs (as well as with the federal investigation of Wilhelm Reich, the pioneer psychoanalyst whose "orgone therapy" had run afoul of the medical establishment and who himself was a firm believer in the existence of UFOs).

And there are Nazis too.  Of course.

QuoteWhile the Army then changed its story to describe the Roswell debris as that of a weather balloon, events were proceeding apace. General Walter Dornberger, the chief of the Nazi space program at Peenemuende and, later, at the Mittelwerke at Nordhausen, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of concentration camp inmates as slave laborers, is sent to Wright AFB as the Roswell debris is being shipped there. Dornberger and Wernher von Braun—both of whom initial CIC reports describe as ardent Nazis—have been forgiven their past sins by the Army and are brought to the United States under Operation Overcast—renamed Paperclip—much to the irritation of Nuremberg prosecutors. They are now in a position to review the Roswell wreckage.

QuoteThus, the 1947 UFO sightings attracted two men—Crisman and Banister—who both would come under suspicion twenty years later for their supporting roles in the Kennedy assassination.

And this is hardly the start of the weird coincidences, or the apparent intersectionality between different kinds of high weirdness.

Levenda then goes on to discuss Roswell in a bit more detail:

QuoteOnce again, most people who claim to have seen UFOs are dismissed as scientifically unsophisticated or somehow misinformed. In the case of Roswell, however, the sheer number of military witnesses alone argues against this. These witnesses include Corporal E.L. Pyles, Sergeant Thomas C. Gonzales, Sergeant Melvin E. Brown, CIC agent Master Sergeant Bill Rickett, Major Edwin Easley, Lieutenant Colonel Albert L. Duran, Colonel William Blanchard, and up to Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, not forgetting Major Marcel himself, among others. In some cases, these men saw the crash and concluded that the craft was not of this world; in other cases, they saw bodies that did not seem to be human; in still other cases, they examined the crash debris and were amazed by the strange properties of the metal, such that it resisted extreme heat and could not be dented by hammers. This list includes both officers and enlisted men, from a Corporal to a Brigadier General. Either they are all lying, or some of them are lying, or they are all telling the truth. It strains credulity to believe that they were all simply mistaken, or the victims themselves of some kind of hoax.

And we get some more info on the aforementioned Philip Corso:

QuoteCorso's credentials are impeccable; he had given testimony before Congress on the fate of POWs being held in North Korea, he had appeared on Prime Time Live as an expert on U-2 overflights, had worked for both Senator Strom Thurmond and Senator James Eastland as "a staff member specializing in national security," and had a remarkable twenty-one year career in the armed services. He had been part of Operation Paperclip in Italy. He had been a staff member for Senator Richard Russell on the Warren Commission (yet another Paperclip/UFO/assassination tie). The eighty-year-old retired military man with no need for the money the book would bring (and, indeed, due to some legal problems his royalties would be held up until after he died), and with a mantelpiece filled with medals and awards and photos with the famous and powerful in Washington, had no discernible reason—no ulterior motive that we can find—for participating in a hoax, if that is what Roswell is. His claim that his job at the Pentagon involved coordinating the reverse engineering of alien technology was greeted by either sneers of derision or cries of "I told you so!" The question that has not been answered is why Corso, at the end of his long and successful career, would have bothered writing all of this if it wasn't true, and thereby besmirch a previously blameless reputation.

QuoteUnfortunately, the Roswell Air Base files on the crash were all destroyed, as US Representative Steven Schiff (R.-New Mexico) discovered to his disbelief in 1995.

Another Kennedy-UFO link is also made:

QuoteFebruary 12, 1948. Brigadier General Charles P. Cabell of the US Air Force Directorate of Intelligence—and later to become Deputy Director of the CIA, implicated in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and possibly in the Kennedy assassination—issued a memo requesting all Air Force bases in the United States be provided with at least one camera-equipped fighter plane to record data from UFOs. The request was considered too expensive, and was turned down.

But now the book turns to the creation of MK-ULTRA, and it's many attendant programs.

According to most intelligence officials:

Quotecode names like BLUEBIRD and the later ARTICHOKE "have no known significance." This is echoed in John Marks' classic study of CIA mind control projects, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979). Yet it is true that, in the early days of the CIA, project names were at the whim of their creators, and not the results of a computer-generated random search among a classified dictionary as they are now. Thus, project names usually had some meaning attached to them. (For instance, when Allen Dulles was put in charge of the CIA's mind control project he changed the name BLUEBIRD to ARTICHOKE, since (according to Gordon Thomas) he was fond of the vegetable. It was, according to John Marks, CIA security chief Sheffield Edwards who decided to call the project—a program for exploring the uses of hypnosis and other means to protect Agency personnel from enemy psychic penetration—BLUEBIRD. Why, then, did he choose the name BLUEBIRD for the first-ever CIA mind control project, the forerunner of the more infamous MK-ULTRA? At the time, the US Navy had its own truth serum operation, called Project CHATTER, begun in 1947. CHATTER seems a more appropriate project name, since its goal was to make prisoners talk. Thus, we are still faced with what appears to be a minor mystery: why BLUEBIRD? There is a phrase which is perhaps not used so much these days as it was in the tender years of the twentieth century: "the blue bird of happiness." What many people do not realize—and did not realize even then—was that this term had its origins in a play and a novel by the Belgian Nobel Prize-winning author and dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949). Maeterlinck was surrounded by the Symbolist movement (forerunners of the Surrealists) in fin-de-siécle France, and was a friend of Sar Peladan, a noted Rosicrucian of the day. Indeed, Maeterlinck was something of a mystic himself and a firm believer in occult phenomena, as his other writings such as The Other World (1942) amply demonstrate. He was also a keen observer of nature and natural phenomena, in The Life of the Bee (1901), in which the concept of the "meme" is introduced to a wider audience (after its creation by a relatively-unknown German psychologist—Richard Sauder—years before, the same psychologist who created the "engram," made famous by L. Ron Hubbard).

QuoteHis writings were very popular in Europe, being a mixture of the profound with the childlike, such as his most famous work The Blue Bird (1909). In this play, first performed in the Russian language in Moscow on September 30, 1908 and later in English in London and New York, two children set off on a search for the Blue Bird of Happiness. This search leads them on many adventures—a kind of initiatic quest for the Grail—and the author was startled to realize that many of the motifs of Maeterlinck's play are repeated in the CIA's search for a Manchurian Candidate, a search that began with Project BLUEBIRD.

And this leads onto the tragic fate of Dr. Olson:

QuoteWhat is not well-known, and what has only come to light recently, is that Dr. Olson was working on chemical and biological warfare weapons at his laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, work that involved the search for drugs that would unlock the human memory bank and help to create the perfect assassin, the "Manchurian Candidate"; that he doubted the morality of his work when confronted with some "test subjects" at a secret base in the United Kingdom (according to Gordon Thomas, German prisoners of war); that he was a colleague of such esteemed psychological warfare experts as William Sargant, who was worried that Olson would blow the whistle on the programs.

QuoteIn 1948, Dr. Baldwin issues "Special CBW Operations" for the War Department, in which he advises a new approach for chemical and biological weapons strategy, the use of CBW weapons as sabotage.

QuoteBetween 1949 and 1969, citizens of the United States were the unwitting subjects in 239 separate cases of open-air biological attack simulations; most used chemicals that were inert and harmless, but in some cases live bacteria were used, such as in San Francisco in September 1950

Olson struggled with the ethical issues of the programs he worked on, and so was eventually referred to a psychiatrist for treatment.

QuoteThe psychiatric treatment planned for Olson is unusual, to say the least. In the first place, the "therapist" was Dr. Abramson, a Mount Sinai-connected CIA doctor whose specialty was immunology, and who had no training or credentials at all in psychotherapy, psychology or psychiatry. It seems his only qualification was that he was CIA, with a background in LSD research. Why Olson had to be taken to New York for "therapy" is also unrevealed. There had to be CIA-approved psychiatrists closer to home, in Washington or Baltimore; but Abramson had been one of those involved with the CIA's Technical Services Staff and thus could be expected to know what was at stake and to stonewall the local authorities; also, according to the CIA's internal memo on the events, he was the only one who had experience with LSD experimentation.

QuoteGottlieb and Olson also visited London and Porton Down, which is Britain's version of Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal. Later on, Olson went to England several times himself, and met with Sargant on many occasions. In the summer of 1953—the period discussed above—Olson told Sargant he was in Europe to meet with Gottlieb and a "CIA team." Thomas at this point tantalizes us with the statement, "Sargant was satisfied that the CIA team was doing similar work that MI6 were conducting in Europe—executing without trial known Nazis, especially SS men." (If so, this makes for an interesting additional chapter to the history of that war, but there is no independent corroboration of this assertion.) Whatever the facts of the case, when Olson returned from his trip to Europe (which included Norway and West Berlin, according to a photocopy of his passport) he had changed. According to Sargant (via Thomas), Olson had seen the results of his work firsthand, on actual human "subjects" who were being killed by the very weapons Olson himself was developing at Detrick. The horror and ensuing guilt led Olson to question his faith in the United States government and his faith in himself as a human being.

And back to Manson, again

QuoteCharles, Lynette Fromme and Mary Brunner were living in the woods of Mendocino County when Charlie, hitchhiking one day, was picked up by a Congregationalist minister named Dean Moorehouse. The Reverend Moorehouse is a strange twist to this already strangely twisted tale, because Moorehouse came to California from Minot, North Dakota. As we will see later, Minot—a small town of about thirty thousand people and an Air Force base—was the scene of serious and sometimes violent occult activity that was linked to the Son of Sam murder cases in New York a decade later.

QuoteAt this time it is not known whether there is any more substance to the Moorehouse/Minot link than that. However investigative journalist Maury Terry would later find elements of a drug and prostitution network shaded with a veneer of ritual Satanism based in Minot, and would connect it to a convicted murderer known as "Manson II," to the Son of Sam killings in New York, and to the murder of producer Roy Radin in California.

QuoteMotive was the most ephemeral aspect of the prosecution's case against Manson; once they had the satanic and racist elements, the prosecutors looked no further. They believed that the victims in the Tate and LaBianca killings were selected randomly, as part of "Helter Skelter": an attempt to force a race war between whites and blacks. Although this dubious motive satisfied the media's lust for sensationalism and served to paint Charlie and his Dark Angels as the latest incarnation of Satan and Hitler combined, a look at Charlie's criminal history would tell a different story. As prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi himself admits in his book on the case, Helter Skelter, he was surprised by the lack of violent crime in Manson's rap sheet. Manson came across more as a con man and petty thief than as a lust killer.

QuoteWhatever Charles Manson may be—and he may be many things—a serial killer he is not, if we look objectively at the available evidence. The murders he did commit himself were not motiveless crimes, but were each for a specific purpose.

QuotePeople with only a passing knowledge of the Manson case usually don't realize that the Beach Boys recorded one of Manson's songs and released it as the "B" side of their cover of the old Ersel Hickey 1958 hit "Bluebirds Over The Mountain," a song about lost love. Manson's song was originally entitled "Cease to Exist"—a Scientology reference and not necessarily a homicidal one—but the Boys retitled it "Never Learn Not To Love," which comes from the song's lyrics, and changed the line "Cease to Exist" to the more seductive "Cease to Resist." This song later made it onto the group's album 20/20 (1969), but by this time the reference to Charles Manson was deleted. What drew the author's attention to this nugget of information was the song on the "A" side of Manson's single. The title "Bluebirds Over The Mountain" was suggestive of the CIA mind control operation—even though it had been written by a rockabilly composer from Brighton, New York one night in the mid-1950s—and seemed too synchronistic to ignore.

QuoteOne of the more unusual Family members, though, if only for a short time, was Deirdre (or "DiDi") Lansbury, the troubled teenaged daughter of actress Angela Lansbury. Angela Lansbury even went so far as to give DiDi a note that said it was all right for her to stay with the Manson Family, in case she got hassled by the police! The author felt the reverberations of this odd piece of trivia, since Angela Lansbury played the role of the evil mind controller in the 1962 John Frankenheimer film The Manchurian Candidate, a film starring Frank Sinatra, Lansbury, Laurence Harvey and Khigh Deigh that was pulled from distribution after the assassination of President Kennedy (even though Kennedy himself had given the green light to Frankenheimer to proceed with making the film, since Kennedy at the time was in delicate negotiations with the Soviets).

And The Manchurian Candidate will turn up later on in this story.

QuoteWas it possible that Hollywood was being used as a tool of secret, special interests, and that the selection of themes, scripts, actors, studios, producers, directors was—at times, and during certain periods of international or domestic tensions—politically motivated or the result of an intelligence agenda: psychological warfare? Of course, we have the ultimate example of Ronald Reagan, the actor who became a President, but is there more to this story than that? Something more profound, and evidence of another "player" altogether?

Speaking of dead Presidents:

QuoteAnother striking reference to "Bluebirds" was in direct connection to the Kennedy assassination itself, the spoor of a minor event that may have had deeper implications, because it involved Lee Harvey Oswald and his time spent at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, one of only two locations outside the United States (along with Manila, in the Philippines) where the CIA maintained a store of LSD, and the base for U-2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union. And what was the scene of a fistfight between Oswald and Tech Sgt. Miguel Rodriguez on June 20, 1958, the same year "Bluebirds Over The Mountain" was first released? The Bluebird Café in Yamato, Japan.

QuoteThis incident merits further attention is for two reasons. In the first place, episodes of Oswald getting physical and looking for fights are few and far between. (About the only other event in which Oswald is known to have used his fists is in slapping his Russian wife, Marina, around.) Oswald was known to have been physically cowardly, and even effeminate in the way delicate young men can appear to the "jocks."

QuoteIn any event, Lee Oswald's deliberate attempt to provoke Rodriguez to a fistfight is wholly out of character.

QuoteIn the second place, according to some witnesses, Oswald's actual time spent in the brig seems to have been slight, and moreover spent in civilian clothes according to the only eyewitness who actually saw him there. Some researchers feel that Oswald was receiving intelligence training at this time, and that the fight and ensuing sentence in the brig was a cover, to allow him time to complete this training unnoticed.

Now why would Oswald be chosen for intelligence training?  Well...

QuoteOswald is known to have been approached earlier by what was probably a Communist spy in Japan—a beautiful Japanese woman who asked a lot of questions about his job at Atsugi—and he reported this contact to his superiors.

QuoteFormer CIA finance officer James Wilcott testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Oswald was, indeed, a CIA asset in Japan, according to conversations he had with his co-workers at the Agency after the assassination.

QuoteIt is impossible to tell with any certainty at this time what Oswald was really doing in the Marines at Atsugi; his military records do show some discrepancies and, in one case, a medical notation shows that he contracted gonorrhea "in the line of duty"; certainly a bizarre set of circumstances for a lowly Marine radar operator.

But of course, Oswald was a crazy lone gunman.  What could that possibly have to do with the CIA?

QuoteAs discussed by Harvey M. Weinstein, himself a physician and the son of one of Cameron's patients, Cameron had been fascinated by memory, believing memory to be stored in the brain and accessible through chemicals or other biological means. Cameron realized that the Land of Memory guarded access to the mysteries of the mind itself, and if a way could be found to call up any memory—and reinterpret those memories or eradicate them completely—then one effectively erased mental illness. He called his technique of causing selective memory loss "differential amnesia"; it was a critical aspect of what MK-ULTRA was all about. As mentioned before, if the CIA could cause certain specific memories to be erased in a targeted individual—and perhaps replaced by false memories—then they could create the perfect spy, the perfect double agent, or even the perfect assassin: a person who would commit murder and not know (not remember) why he had done so, or who had ordered the hit. Imagine an assassin, standing up in a crowd, pulling out a gun—regardless of danger to his own safety, his own life—and killing an important political figure. He is captured, of course, and then cannot say why he did what he did, cannot even remember that he did it. Such an assassin is a cypher: a crazed, lone gunman.

Oh.

The Cameron referenced above is Dr Ewen Cameron, perhaps the practitioner of one of the most infamous MK-ULTRA linked programs:

QuoteCameron believed that schizophrenia and other psychotic states were caused by physical conditions in the brain; like his friend and colleague of many years, Dr. William Sargant, he had a mechanistic view of consciousness and felt that with the right drug and the right procedure all could be made right as rain. This was an approach very attractive to the Technical Services Staff at the CIA; it was what they were looking for: a switch to turn memories on and off, something reliable, something quick. The CIA wanted to hear that there were easy techniques—whether drugs, or hypnosis, or some other mechanisms—to give agents in the field additional weapons in their arsenal. Cameron obliged. To that end, and to both test and prove his theories, he developed procedures known as "psychic driving" and "depatterning." The procedures were radical and extreme, designed to totally disorient a human being, to strip away layers of consciousness and memory until one came to bedrock, and then to rebuild the personality step by step. Unfortunately, his patients—some of whom had come to him for mild disorders, such as anxiety—had no foreknowledge of the treatments and had not volunteered for the experimentation. Like other CIA guinea pigs under the MK-ULTRA program, they were unwitting and expendable test subjects.

QuoteIn the case of Cameron's psychic driving technique, a patient would be kept isolated in a room—the "sleep room"—and would be administered some combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (what is popularly known as "electroshock"). Sometimes the shocks given were staggeringly high, and repeated more often than is usual in a therapeutic setting. The normal voltage is usually 110 volts; Cameron used 150 volts. The normal dosage was a single shock lasting a fraction of a second; Cameron's shocks lasted longer, up to one second (and thus an average of 30 times more powerful than normal) and were done 2-3 times a day as opposed to the more usual once a day, or once every two days. Electroshock causes a major convulsion, which is then followed by several minor convulsions. Cameron's was a variation of the already intense Page-Russell method, but taken up quite a few notches to the point where his patients became disoriented and confused. This was Cameron's aim, which was the opposite of what was intended by the already controversial electroconvulsive therapy method. The drug regimen was equally severe: a "sleep cocktail" was administered to the subjects—one can hardly call them "patients" anymore—consisting of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal and Phenergan. The subject would be awakened several times a day for the electroshock treatment and for the drug concoction. The combination kept the subject asleep day and night except for the electroshock, during which time his screams could be heard all over Ward 2. This treatment typically would last from two weeks to a month, with some subjects being "treated" in this manner for over two months. In some cases, they would lose control of their bowels, be unable to feed themselves or to tend to normal bodily functions. Many tried to escape, but were always captured and brought back to their ward by the doctors and orderlies, since they were in such feeble condition that escape was impossible, groping along the walls and pathetically urinating on the floor of the corridor. The effect of this treatment was to cause the subjects to lose their memory, usually in three stages. In the first stage, much memory was lost, but not the facts of the subject being at the clinic, knowing he is at the clinic and why, and who the doctors and nurses are. The second stage involved the loss of what Cameron called "space-time image"; the subject would not know where he was or why he was there. Understandably, this disorientation was extremely frightening. Imagine waking up in a hospital bed and not knowing what had happened, or why, and with no one in a position to tell you since keeping you in that degree of confusion was necessary to the "treatment." This nightmarish and Kafkaesque state of affairs was designed, remember, by a man who had once tested Rudolf Hess for sanity. The third and final stage of memory loss is complete amnesia. There is only knowledge and memory of the present; there is no reference to past events or feelings. Cameron proudly pointed to this stage as the one where any schizophrenia has disappeared (along, of course, with a lot more!). The mind of the subject is a blank slate. He has been depatterned. The CIA, satisfied with this level of progress, then asked Cameron to go to the next level: to implant new behavioral patterns in place of the old, erased ones. To do this, Cameron turned to another technique he had developed, which he called "psychic driving." This method is, if anything, even more hellish than depatterning, and involves blasting the subject with tape recordings of verbal messages—usually specific for each subject—that played in a loop for sixteen hours a day for weeks. Normally, two tapes were used: the first was a "negative conditioning" tape which concentrated on, obviously, the negative facts of the subject's life, continually reinforcing these unhealthy images. This would then be replaced by a "positive conditioning" tape, also in a loop, also for sixteen hours a day for weeks, which would emphasize the desired behavior instead of the unwanted behavior of the first tape. Cameron's assistant in these endeavors—one Leonard Rubinstein, whose salary was paid for entirely by CIA funds—designed an enormous tape device that could play eight different tapes at the same time, thus "psychically driving" eight subjects at once. The speakers for these tapes were placed beneath the subjects' pillows. They were inescapable, unremitting, endless; and, in some cases, augmented with the use of hallucinogens such as LSD.

QuoteIn case the reader is wondering if Dr. Ewen Cameron was a fluke, an accident that was taking place in a backwater of the psychiatric field, it is well to note at this time that Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association (in 1953) and was the first-ever president of the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron was famous, honored, well-respected by his peers, and a consummate politician. This was not a defrocked, dishonored crackpot who had lost his medical license over a botched, back alley abortion. This was the Chairman of the Board.

QuoteMany of Cameron's former colleagues still will not talk; many have since died or left the country. As mentioned before, Gordon Thomas has revealed that several of the latter found employment with Latin American dictators and their secret police.

Interestingly, Cameron's own program may help point to some of the causes of prevalent abuse among the Catholic clergy, in particular a notorious and horrific case in 1950s Montreal:

QuoteDuring the postwar years in Montreal, money was in short supply. Funding for orphanages was virtually non-existent, but funding for hospitals was available from the central government in Ottawa. The Catholic Church decided to take advantage of the disparity in funding by classifying its orphans as "mentally deficient," thus qualifying for the federal largesse. The government in Montreal—specifically the administration of Premier Maurice Duplessis—was the instigating factor, since it offered the Church a subsidy of $2.75 per day per "mental deficient" as opposed to only $1.25 per day per orphan. The Church immediately took advantage of this policy, and reclassified thousands—estimates range as high as 5,000—of orphans and illegitimate children in its care as mental patients (usually without any medical or psychiatric examination whatsoever). If this was strictly an exercise in paperwork, with no one the wiser—a pragmatic attempt to secure funding for the support of children whose only crime in the eyes of society was that they existed—then perhaps one could have turned a blind eye to the whole proceeding. However, the reclassification process prompted acts of horrific brutality against the children by nuns, the "brides of Christ," and in some cases monks and lay helpers.

QuoteOnce the papers had been signed and, in some cases, entire orphanages converted to mental institutions virtually overnight, the horrors began. Children were beaten, in some cases with chains; they were tied to iron bed frames and force-fed; put in straitjackets; subjected to ice baths; and sodomized. Some died from the abuse. Others became severely disabled, to the point that now—over fifty years after the events—they are still taking anti-depressants and are unable to hold regular jobs. One man still suffers from testicular problems due to the beatings. Of course, as they were officially listed as "mentally retarded" or "mentally deficient," they were considered marginal members of society and could not obtain decent education or the other benefits of "normal" children and adults. In fact, once they were officially designated "retarded," it was felt that there was no longer any need to educate them, and in many cases schooling of these children was cancelled completely. Some of these victims—at the time of this writing, in their 50s and 60s—still cannot read or write. In many other cases, the children were labeled retarded when they were quite young, so they had no reason to believe they were not retarded. When some of these bewildered men and women were interviewed for national television in the mid-1990s, their confusion and anger were apparent. Their lives had been destroyed, if not by the physical, mental and sexual abuse, then by the label of "mentally deficient" or "mentally retarded" which followed them all through life.

QuoteThe Allan Memorial Institute was in full flower at the same time that the atrocities were being committed against the Children of Montreal, and in the same city; an institute run by the world-renowned psychiatrist and specialist in mental disorders, Dr. Ewen Cameron.

Proven link between the two?  No.  But recall:

QuoteIt is also well-known that the status of nuns within the Catholic Church is very low: the lowliest priest has more status in the ecclesiastical hierarchy than the most mature Mother Superior. That the abuse of these children could take place without the knowledge or consent (tacit or implicit) of the priesthood is simply not possible. So, how was this long—nearly twenty years or more—institutionalized horror allowed to take place?

The American national security establishment did not just take an interest in crude, mechanistic interpretations of psychology, though.  And this is where the story gets really weird:

QuoteHowever, there was a band of scientists and explorers loyal to the American government who felt the need to bring together the purely mechanistic and behaviorist approach to psychology that was being endorsed by the CIA on the one hand with the deeper, more analytical and Jungian approach on the other. The ideal discipline to cement this union and to demonstrate the utility of occult practices was the relatively new science of parapsychology. Parapsychology was concerned with bringing the psychic abilities and practices of certain powerful individuals into the clinic for measurement and testing. What seemed like a series of tame experiments in ESP turned into something quite different as the years wore on, and some of these government scientists became scalded by their exposure to the heat and light of powers beyond their imagining. One of these was a friend and, in some sense, a colleague of Aldous Huxley: Dr. Andrija Puharich.

QuoteThe story of Puharich is central to any study of the US government's postwar interest in how psychology and parapsychology could benefit the intelligence agencies. It was arguably Puharich who was the first to bring the potential uses of paranormal abilities in military applications to the attention of the United States Navy; it was Puharich who introduced the Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, to American audiences... and to American intelligence. Further, it was Puharich who formed a mysterious cabal that numbered many important and influential Americans among its members, a cabal that would deliberately attempt to make contact with alien beings and—according to some commentators—actually succeed. This cabal included a man with shadowy connections both to Operation Paperclip on the one side... and to the Kennedy assassination on the other.

QuoteIn tandem with his work in New York City with McCulloch, Puharich formed the Round Table Foundation of Electrobiology in Camden in 1948, an organization whose name was usually shortened to the Round Table, or the Round Table Foundation. Thus, the hospital or clinic that had been originally planned became instead a kind of research institute specializing in the more arcane of the behavioral sciences, from cybernetics to ESP, and moved from the barn—which he lost due to some unpleasantness concerning Red baiting in the small New England town—to somewhat grander quarters in a twenty-two room house. One of the earliest members of the Round Table was Aldous Huxley, and one of his earliest experiments was with the psychic Eileen Garrett, who was placed in a Faraday Cage to test her psychic abilities, as were such other famous names in the field as Peter Hurkos and Harry Stone. In order to support his research, Puharich approached a variety of individuals for funding, including Henry Wallace. Wallace had been Secretary of Agriculture in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration and later his Vice President. Under Truman, Wallace had been Secretary of Commerce, and in 1948 ran for President himself on the Progressive Party ticket. Wallace's name is usually associated with a scandal involving a Russian mystic, one Nicholas Roerich. (Wallace himself is usually credited with coming up with the pyramid and all-seeing eye design used on the back of the US dollar bill.) There is not enough space here to go into the whole story of Roerich; suffice it to say he was a painter and a mystic on the order of Gurdjieff, who became friendly with Wallace. He and Wallace had discussed how to Christianize Mao's China, and it is believed that Wallace sent Roerich on special missions to Tibet and Mongolia with this in mind, since he believed that evidence pointing to the Second Coming of Christ would be found in those Asian countries.

QuoteAnother mysterious donor to the Foundation was one Walter Cabot Paine, of Boston, who donated $3,000. When a researcher attempted to interview Walter Paine, he was rebuffed immediately, and Paine did not answer any questions.

QuoteW. C. was directly related to Ruth Forbes Paine Young's previous husband, George Lyman Paine (who is also descended from Colonial American "royalty," the Lyman family). Her son by that previous marriage, Michael Paine, married one Ruth Hyde. The reason for this heredity lesson is simple. In 1963, Michael and Ruth Hyde Paine befriended two poor immigrants from the Soviet Union: one Russian woman, Marina, and her American-born husband, Lee Harvey Oswald. The documents concerning the Paines and their relatives were sealed by the Warren Commission, and even District Attorney Jim Garrison could not get access to them when needed.

QuoteAt one point, Puharich claimed he was researching psychic abilities for the US Navy in 1948, for something called Project Penguin. The Navy has denied that any such program existed, and indeed there does not seem to be any documentation available to prove Puharich's statement. However, what can be proved is that in November 1952 Puharich briefed Pentagon officials on the military uses of parapsychology. His talk was published as "An Evaluation of the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare." That talk was reported in the Washington Post on August 7, 1977, at a time when MK-ULTRA revelations were coming fast and furious.

QuoteHis presentation to the Pentagon was in November of 1952; according to his own account in The Sacred Mushroom, the orders had been cut to redraft him into the Army the following day, thus implying a specific agenda for Puharich. That December he would begin observing the trance state of one Dr. Vinod (whom he had first met in New York in December 1951) and make contact with what he believed were extraterrestrial forces.

QuoteThere is no other way to understand what Puharich was doing at Edgewood Arsenal—of all places—except to admit that he was working for the CIA, the US Army, or some combination of the two, just as Olson was doing. This is exactly what his colleagues insisted was the case, and this would mean that the intelligence community's interest in mind control and in mechanical means of controlling memory and volition was running parallel with its psychic research as long ago as the early 1950s.

QuoteOn February 16, 1952—Puharich is very specific about the date—he had his first "reading" by Dr. D. G. Vinod, a Hindu scholar "and sage" from Poona, India, who channeled spiritual forces. Dr. Vinod held Puharich's right ring finger at the middle joint, and then began reading his past and future. According to Puharich, Vinod went into a trance, from where he was able to recite Puharich's life in detail "as though he were reading out of a book." Vinod then went on to predict a rosy future for Puharich, and they made plans to meet again to probe this ability further.

QuoteAt precisely 9 P.M. on New Year's Eve, then, the Indian gentleman began channeling something that called itself The Nine. "M. calling. We are Nine Principles and Forces," the channeled entity began, and thus was born the saga of The Nine. The reader may be forgiven for wondering what all of these gentlemen were doing alone on New Year's Eve, holding a séance in a house in the Maine woods. (Sadly to say, the author has had worse New Year's Eves.)

QuoteAfter Vinod's—or, should we say, "M's"—initial pronouncement that they were talking with The Nine, there followed a short discourse on the nature of The Nine in the type of language with which philosophy majors are comfortable, replete with terms like ontology and teleology, which then evolved into a form of the Lorentz-Einstein Transformation equation and a tantalizing reference to its application to the "problem" of the "superconscious." The Nine offered to work with Puharich to solve some of the problems he was working on at the time.

QuoteSome months later, on June 27, 1953, the night of the full moon, Puharich gathered around him what was to be a core group of the Round Table Foundation for another session with Vinod. The membership of this group of nine members—á la The Nine—is illuminating. Henry Jackson, Georgia Jackson, Alice Bouverie, Marcella Du Pont, Carl Betz, Vonnie Beck, Arthur Young, Ruth Young, and Andrija Puharich. Dr. Vinod acted as the medium.

And those are some very interesting names indeed:

QuoteAlice Bouverie was born Ava Alice Muriel Astor, and was a descendant of John Jacob Astor, and the daughter of Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, builder of the Astoria Hotel and author of the book A Journey To Other Worlds (1894); her father was also one of the ill-fated passengers aboard the Titanic when it went down in April 1912. She had a reputation for her interest in the occult, as well as an interest in the institution of matrimony, for she married and divorced four times before her death in 1956 at the age of 54. Interestingly, her first husband was an officer in the Czarist Army, Prince Serge Obolensky. Obolensky was an intelligence officer during World War II and "headed the OSS Operational Groups which worked with the French Maquis at the time of the Normandy invasion." 13He also parachuted behind enemy lines in Sardinia to inform the Italian garrison there that Italy had switched sides and abandoned the Nazis. A dashing sophisticate, he was a fanatic anti-Communist and, at the same time, a "darling of the New York social set." It was Obolensky who translated a secret Russian copy of Mao Ze Dong's guerrilla warfare manual. Thus, Ms. Astor's intelligence connections were on a par with those of Puharich and Paine, making The Nine look like a prayer meeting of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

QuoteArthur Young was a famous inventor, one of the men credited with creating the Bell Helicopter. For some reason, Young left Bell Helicopter after the end of the Second World War before the time that Walter Dornberger—Nazi scientist and slave labor czar of Peenemuende fame—took up residence there as a member of the Board. Rather than continue in the field of aviation mechanics and design, Young dropped out of the military-industrial complex and began to devote himself to a spiritual quest which lasted the rest of his life.

QuoteHenry Jackson was Puharich's administrator and was married to Georgia Jackson. Carl Beck was involved in alternate energy research, and had visited the laboratory of one Thomas Henry Molay, a Mormon scientist and ersatz alchemist living in Salt Lake City who claimed to have identified a source of "free energy" which he termed "radiant energy." Developing alternate energy sources (á la Nicola Tesla) would be a preoccupation of Puharich in the years to come. (The only member of the original Nine that the author has been unable to satisfactorily identify is Vonnie Beck, who may have been the same Vonnie Beck who was a pilot for the US Navy during World War II, but at this time there is no further information on Beck.)

So, these rather illustrious personalities were brought together and told....

QuoteWhat Vinod (or, actually "R") was telling the assembled group is that they were to be reborn as spiritual Brahmins, in charge of bringing about a mystical renaissance on earth... under the mentorship of The Nine, of course. "R" then made an allusion to alchemy and transformation, and then a reference to Buddha.

QuoteGradually, over a period of time, The Nine revealed themselves as extraterrestrial beings living on an immense spacecraft hovering invisibly over the planet. The assembled congregation had been selected to promote the agenda of The Nine on earth. As Puharich would later write in his biography of Uri Geller, "We took every known precaution against fraud, and the staff and I became thoroughly convinced that we were dealing with some kind of an extraordinary extraterrestrial intelligence." This belief was reinforced by events that took place over the next twenty years, culminating in the Uri Geller experience, when it seemed there were UFOs following everyone around, from Israel to South America to New York State. Indeed, Puharich became obsessed with The Nine, seeing them behind every psychic encounter, every UFO sighting, every paranormal event.

For example:

QuoteWhile in the town of Acambaro, he and Hurkos ran into an American couple from Arizona who eventually claimed that they had been receiving instructions from The Nine. Neither Puharich nor Hurkos had ever met these people before, but it seems they were working with a medium back in Arizona who was also channeling The Nine. To prove this, they sent letters to Puharich the following month with sealed communications from The Nine that referred to details of the specific séances that Puharich had chaired back in Maine. This was the proof that Puharich was looking for. The details went so far as to include a variation of the Lorentz-Einstein Transformation formula that had formed part of the first séance.

QuoteIf we do not want to give The Nine the benefit of a doubt, we can assume that the medium who was working with the Arizona couple—the Laugheads of Whipple, Arizona (which sounds fishy anyway)—was the same Dr. Vinod, for no one else would have the information. Puharich insists that no one from his laboratory had leaked the details of the séance to anyone; but we never learn what happened to Dr. Vinod. Yet, if this were the case, what was Vinod up to? And for whom? Was this a kind of double-blind experiment on Puharich, conducted by the Army or CIA? Was Dr. Vinod a plant? Unfortunately, there is no way to answer these questions now without more documentation about the Army, the Navy and the CIA's mind control programs, and in most cases this documentation has been destroyed.

Yet more mysteriously destroyed series of files.  YOU'VE PAPER-SHREDDED TOO MUCH AND CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE.

And back to Kennedy, and associated matters:

QuoteGeorge de Mohrenschildt is one of the most enigmatic characters in the entire assassination scenario. A White Russian himself, a petroleum engineer, an entrepreneur, a world traveler, multilingual, suspected of Nazi sentiments, he cooperated with American intelligence on more than one occasion in his life. His motives for introducing the Oswalds to the Paines is unclear. He has told the story several different ways. When finally he was about to be brought before the House Sub-Committee on Assassinations in 1977 to tell the whole story, he committed suicide or, as some theorists insist, was murdered; it is true that the forensic evidence is suspicious, but either way—suicide or murder—the event is sufficiently alarming and suggestive of deeper, darker secrets.

The Paines played quite the role in the whole post-assassination drama.

QuoteWhen he [Oswald] returned to Dallas, he took up residence in a rooming house, once Ruth Paine had managed to network him into the Texas School Book Depository, and Marina remained with Ruth at Irving. When the assassination occurred, it was the Paines who led the police officers to the place (and the blanket) where Lee had supposedly stored his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

QuoteIn fact, Ruth Paine was more than helpful. Much of the evidence that would eventually damn Oswald in the eyes of the Warren Commission (and the public) came from Ruth Paine: some of the famous photographs of Oswald posing with the rifle and copies of a Communist newspaper, the "spy camera," the fake Alex Hidell documents, and much else besides. There is even a growing body of evidence that Michael Paine's father—George Lyman Paine, who was a Trotskyite leader in California—had intelligence connections that led straight back to William Buckley, Jr. and E. Howard Hunt, through one James Burnham, who was George Paine's colleague in the Trotskyite party to which they both belonged, and who was also a consultant to the CIA and a friend of E. Howard Hunt of Watergate "Plumber" fame.

QuoteIt was Michael Paine who took Oswald to his first ACLU meeting. It was also Michael Paine who took Oswald to his first John Birch Society meeting. It was Michael Paine who engaged Oswald in political discussions in front of witnesses.

Ruth Paine also seems to have a guardian angel in the person of Allen Dulles:

QuoteDulles becomes helpful to Ruth Paine's testimony on more than one occasion. Each time her Russian language tutor is mentioned, Dulles heads off the line of questioning by asking something else before Ruth can answer. This happens first on page 467 of Volume II of the Warren Commission Hearings, and then again on page 473.

QuoteWhen the Commission finally did get around to asking Ruth Paine about her Russian language tutor, Dulles was conveniently absent from the hearings that day. Why would Dulles take such a particular interest in Ruth Paine if, in fact, he did? Was he afraid that something said about the Russian language tutor in his presence would reflect badly on him later on? Was he aware of Ruth Paine's august family connections back in Philadelphia? Or did it have something to do with Michael Paine?

And this is what the Russian tutor actually had to say:

QuoteMrs. Gravitis spoke with Marina on the phone twice, and never met her, but they discussed Lee from a perspective that should have been very disturbing to the Commission, but which seems to have been passed over. When asked by the Commission why she decided to distance herself from Marina before the assassination, she said it was because of Marina's remarks concerning Lee Oswald. Marina had used a very specific term in Russian to describe Lee's political beliefs. This word is not easily translatable into English, and her interpreter—Mamantov—had difficulty with it. It is a word that signifies that Lee was in the second phase of becoming a member of the Communist Party, the phase where he had to prove himself to the Party in some material way. In the Soviet Union of Mrs. Gravitis' experience, that usually meant spying.

QuoteAnother possibility, also never followed up, is that Oswald told Marina this story in order to direct her away from his real activities, which also included spying not on the White Russian community but for a faction of the US government. As former CIA officer Victor Marchetti revealed in an interview to assassination researcher Anthony Summers, the US Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had a program in place in the 1960s to place phony defectors in the Soviet Union. These included between thirty and forty young men who were "made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about." 10From every indication, it would appear that the twenty-year-old Oswald fit the profile exactly. Add to that the fact that the period in which he defected was a time of numerous defections of US military and intelligence personnel to the Soviet Union, and the shoe fits.

QuoteHis erstwhile friend, the White Russian George de Mohrenschildt, found Oswald to be intelligent and well-spoken; it was also de Mohrenschildt who, it was later discovered, was reporting on Oswald to American intelligence in the months prior to the assassination; it is also de Mohrenschildt who, from his writings and remarks to various investigators and journalists, gives the impression that he was saddened—perhaps even guilty—about what happened to Oswald.

Arther Young's involvement also links the Kennedy assassination back to "The Nine":

QuoteThe author would like to propose that the connection to Arthur Young through the Paines is a smoking gun, indicative of another level of covert activity that has not been explored by the Warren Commission or by the later House Sub-Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Arthur Young's travels with Andrija Puharich to Mexico and elsewhere, and his long support of Puharich's Round Table Foundation, as well as his inclusion in the first "séance of The Nine," may reveal an intelligence operation—a truly bizarre intelligence operation—that is connected to the Oswald affair.

And here's a bit of weirdness:

QuoteThere is another strange aspect to the question of the Paines that is worth a brief look, even though it is perhaps too bizarre to take seriously. One of the most mysterious of the many Aleister Crowley mysteries is that of a section of his famous Book of the Law, specifically Book Two, Verse 76. This verse reads, 76.4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meanest this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. The verse is commonly referred to—by Thelemites—as "R P Stoval" after the last group of letters. No one knows what it means, although many have claimed to decode the enigmatic phrase. A photograph found in the Paine home—a photograph of a '57 Chevrolet in the driveway of General Walker, the man Oswald is supposed to have fired upon and missed in the weeks leading up to the assassination—was mutilated. The license plate had been removed from the photo so that it would be impossible to identify. The Dallas detective who seized the photo from the Paine home and put it into evidence claimed that it was already mutilated; Marina Oswald denied this and later evidence—a photo of the photo, to be precise—shows that Marina was telling the truth. The photograph when it came into custody of the Dallas police was intact; someone in the department must have chopped the license number out of the picture. The Dallas police detective who confiscated the photo and who subsequently lied by stating that it arrived in his possession in its mutilated state was one R. B. Stovall. In addition, Oswald worked for a photographic firm in Dallas that had Defense Department contracts: Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. The job had been arranged for Oswald by George de Mohrenschildt.  In de Mohrenschildt's entire existence, as with so much else surrounding Oswald, we seem to be looking at a kind of voodoo.

The involvement of White Russians with Oswald also leads to the role of the various Orthodox Churches in the fight against Communism:

QuoteThis use of Orthodox churches in the fight against Communism was more widespread than most Americans realize, simply because to them the Eastern Orthodox church is too ethnic, too mysterious to understand. Eventually, though, such famous names in the Kennedy assassination investigation as David Ferrie would be revealed as players in this strange underworld of archaic ritual, dead languages, and wandering bishops.

QuoteFerrie's name had been dropped as a friend of both Guy Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald by one Jack Martin, who worked for Guy Banister (he of the FBI UFO files) as some sort of ersatz investigator. Martin himself had worked with Ferrie on an investigation involving diploma mills and fraudulent ecclesiastical papers. Well, they claimed it was an investigation. It was obviously more than that. It seems that both Martin and Ferrie were only too happy to acquire these paper dignities themselves. Ferrie and Martin had both come to the attention of the Warren Commission briefly, and then were dropped as suspects. They both came under Jim Garrison's microscope later on, but Ferrie died before he could testify. Garrison claimed that Ferrie was one of the most important people in history, but that might have been hyperbole. He was certainly one of the strangest.

QuoteOne of the intriguing aspects of the Ferrie case to the author—and to very few others—was his membership in a church and his status as a bishop. This rang alarm bells, since the author himself has direct and personal experience of the church to which Ferrie was admitted and in which he was consecrated. This church is referred to in the journalistic accounts of the assassination by all sorts of names, such as the Old Catholic Church or the Holy Apostolic Church, etc., etc., but in testimony obtained by the FBI it is clear that David Ferrie was a bishop in the American Orthodox Catholic Church, and therein lies a tale. The American Orthodox Catholic Church was founded by Walter (Vladimir) Propheta, a priest with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church whose father was also a priest. (In Eastern Orthodox churches, priests are allowed to be married and raise families, provided they are married before they are ordained; married men are not, however, allowed to become bishops.) Walter Propheta was a sincere and dedicated anti-Communist, as were most Ukrainians who lived in the United States during the time of the Soviet Union. Propheta had gone on television in its early days to promote a strong, anti-Communist message. He had arranged for a documentary to be made on the Katyn Forest Massacre, and had appeared with Dave Garroway to discuss the evils being perpetrated against Ukraine and other "Captive Nations" by the Communists. In fact, Propheta once showed the author a letter from Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, promising Propheta that he would be the White House chaplain should Dewey win the election against Truman. According to Propheta, he was packing his suitcase to go to Washington when the news came that Truman had won. As it happens in the churches, celebrity can be the kiss of death when it comes to advancement in the hierarchy. Propheta wanted to be consecrated bishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but for some reason (canonical or otherwise) it didn't happen. Upset, he broke away to form his own church, the American Orthodox Catholic Church, which would be an Orthodox Church conducting its services in English (a rather novel idea at the time). The Church's headquarters were on East 183rd Street in the Bronx, at the Cathedral of the Holy Resurrection, a former Protestant church with an interior covered in crayon-colored ikons, quite close to the Bronx Zoo and also comfortably near Arthur Avenue, a famed Italian neighborhood with great bakeries and restaurants. The church, however, had very few—if any—parishioners. It did have, however, an embarrassingly large number of bishops. At the headquarters alone—in the period 1968-69 when the author was there frequently—there was Propheta himself, Bishop Leonard G. Hill and Bishop John Christian Chiasson as the regular staff. There were no priests, deacons, altar boys, or anyone else for that matter. But there were American intelligence officers. According to Propheta, there was one FBI agent and one CIA agent on the Church's Board of Directors. This may have been simple boasting, but the author was introduced to both during his tenure at the Church. In fact, they were involved at the time in trying to buy a former mental hospital in New Jersey on behalf of the Church (for which purpose the author never knew), and once broached the subject to two young priests, wondering if they could sign the purchase agreement in order to disguise the agents' involvement. When they discovered that the two priests were only eighteen years old at the time, and thus could not sign legal documents in the State of New Jersey, the matter was dropped. The two young priests, however, went on to greater glory—and notoriety—in the years that would follow.

QuoteBack in the 1960s there was a very popular book—in certain circles—entitled How To Become a Bishop Without Being Religious. This book humorously discussed the ease with which one could become a clergyman, particularly a bishop, and all the perks that went with it. It was read avidly by a strange circle of very strange men—of which David Ferrie was a member—known as the Episcopi Vagantes, or "wandering bishops." These were men who had either invented their own Church and named themselves as its bishops or who, more often, joined churches already in existence and (for a fee, or for some service) were consecrated as bishops by other bishops. There is a certain degree of sadness in contemplating the type of individual who would lust so mightily for the bishop's robes but be otherwise incapable or unqualified to be even an altar boy, much less a priest and much, much less a bishop. Some of these men gave themselves outlandish titles, such as Patriarch or Archbishop; some were janitors, convicted criminals, or the borderline insane. Still others were intelligence agents.

Does This Remind You Of Anything?

QuoteThis is what happened with Propheta. He had to secure valid consecration, and he did so at the hands of an occultist, a man who ran one of the oddest of odd churches in Manhattan, an Orthodox Church which was at the same time the local headquarters of the SRIA: the Societas Rosicruciana In America, or "the Rosicrucian Society of America." 13 The SRIA. was an occult lodge founded in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century as an outgrowth of a British lodge, the Societas Rosicruciana In Anglia (also known as SRIA). The British SRIA was the breeding ground of the Golden Dawn, which itself was the breeding ground of Aleister Crowley. Without going into too much detail about the creation and history of these orders, which is certain to bore and confuse the reader, let us summarize by saying that the head of the American SRIA was, for quite some time, one George Winslow Plummer, a devoted occultist and Hermeticist who edited a magazine of things alchemical and Rosicrucian called Mercury. Plummer was also interested in Christian mysticism, and aligned himself with several renegade Christian churches, including something called the Holy Orthodox Church. He was also a member of Aleister Crowley's OTO, and thus fits the mold of occultists everywhere: the inveterate joiner and accumulator of dignities. Plummer died in 1944, and was succeeded in the SRIA by his widow, the ethereal Mother Serena, who played the organ at the Church's headquarters at 321 West 101st Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when the author knew her. Mother Serena later married Theodotus Stanislaus de Witow (1890-1969), who then became the Patriarch of the Holy Orthodox Church, as well as the head of the SRIA until his death in 1969. Propheta was ordained a Ukrainian Orthodox priest by Bishop Bohdan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on May 15, 1933. At this time, and until 1964, Propheta was still within the ecumenical fold. But things became strange after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and Propheta sought other alliances; the details are not too well known. Propheta was consecrated bishop of the American Orthodox Church on October 3,1964 by Archbishop Joachim Souris of the Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of America and by the aforementioned Archbishop De Witow of the Holy Orthodox Church in America; he then incorporated the American Orthodox Church as the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC) in New York, and thus entered the document stream as one of America's foremost bishop mills. Archbishop Joachim Souris was himself made a bishop by Metropolitan Peter Zhurawetzky and two Old Roman Catholic Church bishops who traced their lineage through the inescapable Rene Villate, a famous name in wandering bishop circles, as are Zhurawetzky and Propheta themselves. The Old Roman Catholic Church is the American incarnation of the famous Jansenist heresy, and according to most authorities they have maintained valid apostolic succession through their bishops who were—originally, at the time of the heresy—validly consecrated. It was the Old Roman Catholic Church more than any other group who popularized the idea that one could be a "real" priest and a "real" bishop without belonging to the "real" Catholic Church or any of the legitimate Eastern Orthodox Churches. Once that was accepted, it was only a matter of time before a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon, obtained "real" consecrations and set up their own churches, usually aligning themselves with other "real" bishops in order to consecrate even more bishops... who would found their own churches... and so it goes.

Don't worry too much about the above if it doesn't interest you:

QuoteAnyone trying to make sense out of the foregoing, or to follow the richly entangled web of consecrations, cross-consecrations and affiliations has the author's condolences.

QuoteBefore Propheta was consecrated bishop, another representative of the American Orthodox Church (soon to become the American Orthodox Catholic Church) was making a name for himself and has now become—if you are one of the faithful—a saint. This is Carl J. Stanley, who became Archbishop Christopher Maria (now Saint Christopher Maria, canonized—by someone—on April 22, 1976). It was Carl Stanley who was referenced in the Warren Commission documents as the bishop who consecrated David Ferrie a bishop; a photograph of Stanley in his episcopal regalia will show a dignified looking sort (it's hard not to look dignified in voluminous robes and heavy golden pendants, topped by a veiled hat of the Never On Sunday Greek variety) that one would hesitate to associate with anti-Castro gun runners.

QuoteStanley told the FBI that he consecrated David Ferrie as a bishop in July of 1961, but then removed him from that office the following January when Stanley learned of Ferrie's homosexuality. When the author first read Stanley's statement, he burst out laughing. Homosexuality was never a bar to either ordination or consecration at the American Orthodox Catholic Church

QuoteEven if the Itkin episode never happened, the history of the American Orthodox Catholic Church (indeed, of all the "wandering bishop" dioceses) is replete with instances of every form of sexual expression. (It's not for nothing that Propheta's headquarters—the Cathedral of the Holy Resurrection—was known as "the Cathedral of the Holy Erection" in wandering bishop circles.) Thus, there is no question in the author's mind that Ferrie was never defrocked or deposed or in any way removed from office due to homosexuality, and it is doubted that he was ever removed at all, for any reason. If he was, he would have been the first (and probably only) person ever kicked out of the wandering bishops' club. To be fair, Stanley and Itkin "parted ways" soon after Itkin's consecration: evidently because Stanley found Itkin's activism a little too "up front" for 1960, and Itkin joined yet another church, finally (at the time of this writing) winding up with the "Moorish" diocese above-mentioned, which is actually a sect with heavy cultic overtones, being a survival of something called the Moorish Temple. The Moorish Temple was the progenitor of what would become the Nation of Islam; a West Coast mystic who called himself Hakim Bey revived the Temple and made it a catch-all for occultists, magicians, Christian mystics, Islamic mystics, homosexual mystics, and assorted counter-culture types.

Hmm, Hakim Bey and self-ordained bishops with outlandish titles and strange beliefs.  DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR IN ANY WAY?

Ferrie had some odd religious beliefs of his own:

QuoteRegardie was initiated into a Rosicrucian group in Washington, D.C. in 1926, a group that leads us right to David Ferrie and from him to the assassination itself. Regardie had been in contact with a group of Golden Dawn hopefuls in Dallas in the early 1960s; they had hoped to have Regardie teach them how to pronounce the Hebrew words that are so much a staple of Golden Dawn and other Hermetic literature. Regardie suggested they simply go to a local synagogue and get someone there to help them; but the Dallas group insisted and thus forked over a $500 per diem for two days, plus all expenses to bring Regardie to Dallas. Regardie made friends in Dallas that day, and had stayed in touch with them until the day he died.

QuoteThus, Ferrie and Regardie—while probably not knowing each other—were brothers under the sign of the Rose and the Cross. Ferrie's interest in occultism is hinted at by the people who knew him. It is known that he considered himself something of a hypnotist as well as a psychotherapist... or at least used these dubious qualifications as a lure for potential sexual partners. According to Perry Russo—one of Jim Garrison's witnesses during the Clay Shaw trial, and not necessarily the most reliable or credible of those witnesses in the eyes of many investigators—Ferrie conducted the equivalent of Black Masses in his apartment at the appropriately-numbered 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, New Orleans.

Quoteit is worth quoting his transcript of Perry Russo's description of Ferrie's weekly Black Masses: The chalice featured animal blood, the wafer consisted of some kind of raw flesh, instead of cake or bread. "He wore a little black toga, solid black. He wore nothing underneath. ...he called it the American Eastern Catholic Orthodox Church... after all the ritual, shouted ritual... it ends up and it's a brutal thing, a sadistic quality to it—bloodletting, chicken killing, stuff like that...."

Levenda speculates this might have been Santeria of some sort, rather than an actual Black Mass.  He does note, however:

QuoteTo most people, the association of hard-core occultists and members of secret societies and Masonic groups such as the SRIA, the Golden Dawn and the OTO with the Old Roman Catholic Church, the American Orthodox Catholic Church, and—God help us—the Moorish Orthodox Diocese of Ong's Hat and Montclair, New Jersey would seem to be illogical. Why would occultists and magicians hunger after "apostolic succession," mitres, cassocks, croziers and panagias? The answer is simple, and sinister. The Black Mass which Ferrie was accused of performing is a ritual that mocks those of the Catholic Church; essentially, it is an attempt at organized blasphemy, an attack of rebellion, political as well as theological. It is also designed to attract demonic influences, evil spirits and the souls of the angry dead. Yet, this ritual carries very little weight if performed by a lay-person. It is potentially quite powerful, however, if performed by an ordained priest.

QuoteThis should not be viewed as the sole objective, however. Many occultists value the line of succession as a source of spiritual power whether or not they consider themselves Christian. Power is power, wherever it is found and by whatever means it can be obtained; a validly ordained priest has the power to perform most of the sacraments, and the validly consecrated bishop has the power to perform all of the sacraments including ordaining more priests and consecrating more bishops, thus ensuring a line of power for his cult equal to that of the Catholic Church. The allure is irresistible.

Meanwhile, the intelligence links of the wandering bishops are documented:

QuotePropheta's organization began fronting for intelligence agencies and setting up shop all over the world. The author has personal knowledge of several such instances, such as the improbable H.P. ("Holy Prophet") Aluya, who came to the United States from war-torn Nigeria during the Biafran crisis. The author was on hand to welcome the Prophet at Kennedy Airport in New York in 1968, as were several members of the Nigerian Consulate. Aluya was brought to the Cathedral in the Bronx, consecrated a bishop, and sent back to Nigeria with a handsome document and photographs of the consecration. The author doubts whether the Holy Prophet was even a Christian, much less an Eastern Orthodox priest deserving of consecration as a bishop.

QuoteAnother instance was the synchronization of American intelligence goals with those of the Italian government around the same time. As is well-known, Italy in the 1960s was in the throes of an active and subversive Communist movement, and cover as priests for American agents in Italy was quite valuable, particularly if one did not have to deal with the cranky and bureaucratic Catholic Church itself. The Vatican was likely to exact a pound of flesh for every agent sent over under its cover; indeed, one could not be sure that the Vatican itself was not penetrated by agents of a hostile service. The author— due to his basic ability in the French language—was pressed into service as translator of communications from several suspect religious organizations in Europe and Africa, one of which was run by a bishop in what was then the Belgian Congo. This bishop had connections among another network that runs hand-in-hand with the wandering bishops, and that is the equally bizarre world of knighthoods and royal titles. For an unknown consideration, Propheta was to receive a Papal Knighthood from one Prince Policastro of Sicily. This had been arranged with the Belgian bishop aforementioned. This dignity was delivered to Propheta's church by two gentlemen from the Italian Embassy in a limousine. The reason for this award is not known to the author; indeed, as an award it would not have been particularly necessary since Propheta had his own purveyor of knighthoods, baronetcies, dukedoms and other such endowments in the person of Bishop Pierre Michel Lorenzo de Valitch, a putative Serbo-Croatian Count who had been in the art gallery business years before, but who now ran a flourishing trade in bogus orders of knighthood for the rich and famous.

QuoteAnother suspect organization was the Greek Order of St. Denis of Zante, an organization that numbered the elusive Father Fox among its members. Father Fox had been a priest of various denominations, including the Syrian Orthodox Church, and had studied at Fordham University. He was fluent in several foreign languages, including Arabic and Russian, and had once been caught trying to cross the border into Northern Ireland in a car with a trunk full of weapons. Fox had made trips to Vietnam during the War, and one has the suspicion it was not as a tourist. In at least one episode, it became obvious to the author that Fox was working for American intelligence as an informant, if nothing else.

QuoteYet another personality close to the Propheta organization was the famous wrestler Antonino Rocca. Rocca—retired from wrestling at that time—claimed to be an agent of the CIA working out of Lebanon; he further claimed that he was running Phantom jets into Israel under diplomatic radar by having them shipped to Luxembourg first and then flying them into Israel, thus avoiding Arab spies and saboteurs, who would have been expecting a shipment from the United States or, at least, France or Great Britain. It also was a way of hiding the shipments from the US Congress, since the sales would not register as Israeli but as sales to Luxembourg. All of this would seem like outrageous posturing, except that Rocca made these statements before Rabbi A. Allen Block of the Brotherhood Synagogue in 1969, in a meeting including several of Propheta's clergymen as well as the author.

QuoteAnd what do we make of the strange association of David Ferrie—pilot, investigator, consecrated bishop, acquaintance of Lee Oswald, performer of Black Masses—with Guy Banister, former ONI, former FBI, former hunter of UFOs? And of Fred Crisman, author of the Maury Island Affair, former OSS, former CIA, reputed friend of Clay Shaw? UFOs and satanists, aliens and archbishops. Spies and soothsayers. Magicians... and Manchurian Candidates. Another Ferrie association—and another connection that was examined by Jim Garrison's staff—was with a strange wandering bishop based in Canada: Bishop Earl Anglin Lawrence James. Ferrie had made a number of long-distance phone calls to James in the period 1962-63, and Garrison asked Metropolitan Toronto Police to follow up. The episode made the Toronto newspapers, and a report filed by the Toronto Telegram on November 6, 1967 was headlined "Toronto's Renegade 'Bishop' Mentioned in Garrison Probe." According to the paper, James "operates a bizarre school on Danforth Ave." What newspapermen considered "bizarre" in Toronto in 1967 is anyone's guess; not for nothing was the town known as "Toronto the Good" for many years. James denied any knowledge of Ferrie, and in fact denied he had ever been to New Orleans. That proved to be a dubious statement, since he was in possession of a Key to the City of New Orleans, had membership cards in various Louisiana and New Orleans organizations, including one naming him an "Honorary Attorney General" of the State of Louisiana, another that named him a Colonel on the staff of Earl K. Long, and possessed various other police and investigation agency paper litter, and including a United States Social Security card.

The interests of the Old Catholics and US intelligence agencies also overlapped in one significant area:

QuoteThe only clue we have to what was really going on with Holt, James, Stanley, Ferrie, Propheta, and the rest is the connection between the Old Roman Catholic Church and hypnosis, specifically the interests in hypnosis of not only Ferrie but also William Bryan, Jr., who claimed he was the technical advisor for the film version of The Manchurian Candidate. It was Bryan who worked a score of well-known criminal cases, including the Boston Strangler case, and who claimed he worked for the CIA. He claimed also to have hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan, something that could only have happened before the young Palestinian assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. As we shall see in the next chapter, Bryan was a member—and possibly a bishop—of the Old Roman Catholic Church.

QuoteThe religious, mystical dimension to this study leads in many directions. Suffice it to say that swirling about the feet and hands of the Kennedy assassination was a sticky fog of occultists, wandering bishops, American intelligence... and alien intelligence known as The Nine. Arthur Young, Michael Paine, Ruth Paine, Ruth Forbes Young, Andrija Puharich, Mary Astor, even David Ferrie were all a handshake or two away from Jack Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. They were all talking to ghosts, summoning alien beings, practicing ritual magic, holding hands around the séance table or sacrificing chickens in a New Orleans apartment.

Some more Kennedy:

QuoteThe day after the assassination of President Kennedy, his former mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer phoned LSD guru Timothy Leary to tell him that the President was murdered by a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-1964) had once been married to CIA Chief of Covert Action Operations Cord Meyer, Jr. Cord Meyer, a former Marine lieutenant who was badly wounded on Guam in 1944, joined the CIA in late 1950 and gradually rose through the ranks, being at one time Chief of Station in London and later Deputy Director of Plans.

Mary Meyer also allegedly introduced Kennedy to weed and LSD.

QuoteMary Meyer was murdered less than a year after the Kennedy assassination—on October 12, 1964 (coincidentally Aleister Crowley's birthday, and of course the day Columbus discovered America)—and her diary disappeared. She seemed to have been the victim of a mugging in Georgetown during the lunch hour, shot in the face at close range on a towpath, although the level of violence in the attack made it look suspicious to some, and the accused murderer was acquitted by a jury due to lack of evidence.

Well, that's not suspicious.

QuoteBut evidence later would show that the diary was found by her sister, and surrendered to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's paranoid Chief of Counter Intelligence and one of Cord Meyer's closest friends, who had been in Mary Meyer's apartment with a key long before her other friends arrived, looking for the same diary.

Well, that's not suspicious.

QuoteAngleton did not destroy the diary, however. What he did with it while it was in his possession is open to debate, but he eventually gave it back to Tony Bradlee, who then destroyed it herself. It seems very odd that the Bradlees would have given the diary to Angleton to destroy in the first place; destroying a book is not exactly rocket science. It would have been a simple matter to rip out the pages and burn them, or flush them for that matter. But the diary went to Angleton, who took it to the CIA, who then did not destroy it, who then gave it back to the Bradlees to destroy.

Well, that's not...aw fuckit, this "repeating it until it appears true" shit doesn't work at all.

QuoteAngleton's fast trip to Mary Meyer's home to find the diary suggests that he was worried about far more than a revelation that she had been sleeping with Jack Kennedy. One does not get the impression that Angleton would have been worried about Jack Kennedy's reputation being tarnished; he would have been more worried about the intelligence implications of what would have been contained in the diary. The Warren Commission Report had been published the previous month. This was also during the time of the Nosenko debriefing, in which Angleton was certain KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was a plant, a false defector, sent by Moscow that January to do serious damage to the CIA. Angleton must have worried about the possible use Mary Meyer's diary would be to Soviet intelligence, for the type of intelligence information contained therein (pillow talk with the most powerful man in the world until his assassination less than a year earlier) might well have been damaging to national security.

And now, onto the Process Church.

QuoteIt was perhaps inevitable that Hubbard's philosophy of enlightened self-interest would result in the Process Church of the Final Judgment, usually referred to simply as the Process. Formed sometime in 1963-64 as a splinter group from Scientology, its founder was Robert Moore, a British subject who was born in Shanghai on August 10, 1935 and had been—according to one account—a cavalry officer who had served time in Malaya (that favorite haunt of witchcraft guru Gerald Gardner, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess, and the Heart of Darkness' Joseph Conrad), and who later lived in London at the time of the Process' creation. At the Hubbard Institute of Scientology in London he met Mary Anne MacLean, a woman who is said to have been engaged to prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson in America for a brief period, before returning to England. Mary Anne MacLean was born in Glasgow on November 20, 1931, and was thus four years Robert Moore's senior. Before she met Moore, however, she became involved with several high-ranking British politicians á la Christine Keeler of the Profumo affair.

QuoteThis, then, was the situation at the time Mary Anne MacLean met Robert Moore at Scientology headquarters in London; they then decided to break away, form their own operation, and get married. For someone like Mary Anne, it was probably a wise move: her profile in British society was not entirely low. Engaged to an American prizefighter, running in the same circles as Keeler and her associates, who were all being rounded up to "help the police in their inquiries," it was a smart move to decamp to the Scientologists and marry an intelligent and charismatic architect like Robert Moore, as cover if nothing else. Further, the circumstances of the Profumo Affair and of Stephen Ward's participation in it, suggested a far deeper political agenda that involved Jack Kennedy, the British government, the Soviet government, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as declassified FBI and CIA files suggest. It has also been revealed that Dr. Ward was the go-between for the British intelligence services and the Soviet GRU (military intelligence) via his friendship with Yevgeny Ivanov, and that possibly Ward had manipulated Keeler into sleeping with Ivanov as part of a classic "honey trap," in case they needed to blackmail the Russian agent into defecting at some later date. War Minister Profumo was essentially caught in the middle, having also slept with the evidently irresistible Ms. Keeler.

QuoteThe philosophy of Robert and Mary Anne Moore (now known as Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston, a name of cultic significance to them) was a mixture of reincarnation, existentialism, some concepts adapted from Scientology, an attempt to merge the worships of Jehova and Lucifer, and a bit of neo-Nazi flavor. Their emblem was a stylized swastika, which in all fairness could have meant they were Buddhist; however, the philosophy of the Process and its alleged origins as a front for a German neo-fascist group, coupled with Mary Anne's belief that she was the reincarnation of Josef Goebbels, seems to indicate a Nazi rather than a Buddhist inspiration. Further, the group was known to have kept thirty German shepherds on hand as a kind of totem-cum-guard dog arrangement.

QuoteIt was this very public association of German shepherds with the Process that would later lead some investigators in the United States to link Process members or former members with a series of sacrifices of these particular dogs where cult activity was believed to be taking place.

Yes, skinned and mutiliated German shepherds showed up a number of times in Terry Maury's investigation of the Son of Sam killings, and in the investigation of a Process splinter group in Southern California.  Though as Maury, and others, have pointed out, does the sacrifice of said dogs imply a form of rejection of the original Process teachings?

QuoteIn 1967, the Process set up camp in San Francisco, a few doors down from where Manson was living at the time on Cole Street. By the spring of 1968, they were in Los Angeles, and making a frontal assault on the entertainment industry (something the DeGrimstons had perhaps learned during their sojourn at the Scientology operation). Dressed in black, German shepherds at the leash, and speaking about worshipping Jehova, Lucifer and Satan, they were a pretty common sight in California. In 1966, Anton LaVey had already opened his Church of Satan to much media hoopla in San Francisco, so Californians were getting used to Satan-worshippers and oddly-dressed, blackly-dressed young people working on their satanic stares while everyone else was working on their tans. And then, in the summer of 1968, the Californian operation of the Process suddenly went underground.

And who else apart from Manson and the Process had an interest in the occult and were hanging around in California in that time period?  Well, practically everyone, but one particular infamous individual stands out:

QuoteOn May 28,1966, a young Palestinian immigrant fascinated with the occult had attended his first meeting of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) at the society's Akhnaton Lodge in Pasadena, and was the subject of an experiment in sensory perception, sitting blindfolded while attempting to identify objects by touch.8 AMORC was one of the many splinter groups that broke off from the SRIA in England; they had OTO and Golden Dawn connections, but created a distinctly American style of recruiting: direct mail.

QuoteIn March 1968, the Palestinian was in Pasadena—where he lived with his mother, some blocks north of where Jack Parsons had lived in the 1940s and 1950s—attending a meeting of the Theosophical Society's Adyar Lodge. (That same month, the Process set up shop on South Cochrane Street in Los Angeles.) A few months later, he would be arrested for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The Palestinian, of course, was Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.

QuoteMuch ink has been spilled on the subject of the Process; Ed Sanders in the first edition of The Family links the Process with an amoebic network of death cults in California and from there to Manson; investigative journalist Maury Terry has linked them to Charles Manson as well as to the Son of Sam killings. The problem is that the linkages are there, but not enough to put a smoking gun in the hands of the Process itself. Of course, that is the problem with the entire field of conspiracy theory as well. What we are looking at in this case are mostly philosophical influences—which are certain to become a subject for academic study in another twenty or thirty years—and the "deep politics" connections of which Professor Peter Dale Scott writes so eloquently.

QuoteThe fidgety reader may complain that the American system of jurisprudence is such that one cannot be arrested on suspicion of undue influence over another; but, of course, that is exactly what happened in the case of Charles Manson, who did not actually murder anyone at the Tate or LaBianca households, but who was convicted of the murders anyway and would have been executed had not the State of California abolished the death penalty during his incarceration.

QuoteThe Charles Manson case is germane to the study of the Process, since Manson was known to them and had even written an article for the "Death" issue of their magazine (in all fairness, Marianne Faithfull and Salvador Dali also wrote for the Process magazine; however, what put scroungy little Charles Manson in the same company as Faithfull and Dali?); and, as his prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has written, members of the Process visited Manson in prison after his arrest for the Tate/LaBianca killings.

Quote(One of the murderous cults in California supposedly linked to Manson and to Maury Terry's "Manson II" was something called "Four P." A glance at the Process' logo—the stylized swastika—will show it is basically four P's in a circle.)

And a few years ago, there were rumours of a successor splinter group to Four P doing the rounds, including a password protected website.  It may just have been a fake...I was unable to gain access either way

QuoteIn all of that ink, a lot of nonsense has been promulgated about the Process, as critics such as Robert Hicks have been quick to point out. That strange new breed of law enforcement officer, the "cult cop," has been all over the Process, the OTO, and the Church of Satan, with seminar leaders telling wide-eyed police officers around the country that these cults are dangerous, using mind control methods, and committing murder and mayhem on a global scale. To anyone who has had any direct dealings at all with these groups, the accusations are absurd. The Church of Satan was at best a gimmicky New Age operation; at worst it was a magnet for the type of neurotics that LaVey himself would eventually banish. The OTO couldn't organize a box lunch much less a nationwide program of human sacrifice. And the Process does not exist any longer, and hasn't existed for almost thirty years. On the other hand... It is a fact of life that many people who join or are attracted to organizations like the three mentioned above are much more serious than their leaders. To judge all Church of Satan members by the writings or the actions of its founder, Anton LaVey, would be a mistake. LaVey, for instance, talked a good game, but it was little COS vampire Susan Atkins who plunged the knife into Sharon Tate, killing both the actress and her unborn child. To judge all OTO members by their leaders would be to reduce that organization's reputation considerably. Jack Parsons and British occultist and author Kenneth Grant are good examples of people that the OTO administration did not like, but who have in past years become icons of the Order, and its best representatives. As for the Process, Robert Moore aka Robert DeGrimston has distanced himself completely from his creation. One published account even states that he was "purged" from the Church and that his wife, Mary Ann DeGrimston, took over and further emasculated the group. When critics of the cult cops rightly point to the many logical inconsistencies in the way the police describe the very cults they investigate, they ignore something darker that is taking place. Indeed, the Process was itself a splinter group of Scientology; the Church of Satan was a rebellion against Christianity; the OTO was an attempt to inject new life into dusty old Freemasonry. And these groups have spawned their own splinters, their own renegade branches that have taken the original ideas a step or two further and usually in a dangerous direction.

QuoteTo the outside world, these people are all "Process" or "Church of Satan" or even "OTO," but in fact most of them have severed any formal links with these organizations before they began their criminal activity. What the occult Orders have done, however, deliberately or not, is provide these individuals—often more dedicated, more serious, even more charismatic than their own leaders—with the philosophical basis for their actions; in many cases, providing them with the ritual tools, jargon, and psychological conditioning necessary not only to perpetrate their crimes, but to scare the living daylights out of the rest of the population.

QuoteMany people in the New York City area, including some very serious occultists, were originally drawn to the OTO when it made its resurgence in 1977. It was the time of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The hottest underground novel was Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, all about conspiracy theories, occultism, secret societies and consciousness expansion, with healthy dollops of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. The occult was on the increase, the Church of Satan was actively recruiting, as were the Wicca covens, and the OTO had decided to get back in the game after almost twenty years of lying low.

QuoteBut their membership roles were swollen by some very strange individuals. And these individuals attracted some even stranger hangers-on, who had expected to see in the OTO something more profound, more serious than they actually encountered. The exposure of these individuals to the Order at first stimulated them, but then they discovered that the rituals and the posing of the Order members—their pretension to spiritual powers and profound insights—were shallow, and so they adopted what they learned in the Order's meetings and Gnostic Masses and from discussions with other serious members and fellow-travelers, and began to develop more serious programs of their own. The same was true of the Process. The same was true of the Church of Satan, in which case Michael Aquino broke away in search of something more intellectually stimulating and more powerful, creating the Temple of Set: a much more ambitious occult program than the more popular, showy Satanism of LaVey.

QuoteThus, there were OTO members (current or lapsed) involved with nefarious activities in New York City at the time of the Son of Sam murders. And there were some familiar faces at OTO gatherings who could also be found at producer and theatrical agent Roy Radin's home on Long Island, for instance, including one young woman—a student at one of the Brooklyn schools of higher learning—who took her occultism very seriously, and who introduced the author to Roy Radin one afternoon when the latter was looking into the possibility of filming occult rituals. (Roy Radin figures prominently in Maury Terry's theory of a nationwide network of Satanic killers, of which "Manson II" was a member.) None of this means that the OTO itself was officially involved in anything illegal. How does one separate the acts of the organization from the acts of its members, particularly when what we are speaking of is essentially a secret society?

QuoteThere can be no doubt that individual Process members were involved in some illegal acts; interviews conducted with a Process member a few years ago have categorically linked David Berkowitz and other "Son of Sam" killers to the Process, or to some faction thereof. 12Further, the murders of people linked to Berkowitz are evidence of a group at work and since nothing else seems to have characterized this group except murder and magic, then we are forced to make some unsettling assumptions. Indeed, a published personal account of the Process makes it clear that at least some members had knowledge that the Process was fronting for a German neo-Nazi operation in the 1960s. Founder Robert DeGrimston's wife, Mary Anne, even claimed that she was a reincarnation of Nazi Propaganda Chief Josef Goebbels. The Process' symbol—a stylized swastika—is further evidence of the group's sentiments if not alignments; and their theology included worship of Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer while their magazine was a paean to Death, Fear, etc. To view the Process then as an amalgamation of Scientology with neo-Nazism puts us in a different realm: it raises the stakes. The neo-Nazi movement—both in Europe and in the Americas—has been violent, has been responsible for murder. Scientology members themselves have performed illegal acts in the United States, including breaking into US government offices and spying on government agents, former Scientology members, etc. What occurs is a unique social phenomenon that has been inadequately examined: it is the fact that these groups—which openly incorporate or idolize Lucifer, Satan, ancient Egyptian gods, Death, Fear, Nazi ideology, secret rituals and arcane initiations, and use what is sometimes a sophisticated, sometimes an ill-advised, series of psychological mechanisms such as hypnosis, auto-hypnosis, psychodrama, ritual sex, and potent hallucinogenic drugs to create altered states of awareness—thus may act as channels for sinister forces, forces they cannot control.

QuoteRosemary's Baby was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1967. The events described were supposed to have taken place from August 1965 to June 1966 (i.e., 6/66). The Pope's visit was in October of 1965, and Rosemary's Satanic child was born on June 25, 1966—i.e., nine months after the Pope's visit. (No, the implication was not that the Pope was the father!)

It should have been, though.  That would have been awesome.

QuoteWhat many people do not realize, and what was not generally known at the time, was that there was an actual exorcism taking place in Manhattan on 125th Street, on the same day that the Pope celebrated Mass in Yankee Stadium (and the same day that the fictional Rosemary was being drugged and raped in the Satanic ceremony in Manhattan). The possessed person in this case was "Marianne K.," and the event is recorded in Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil, a book that was not published until 1976, almost ten years after Ira Levin's novel had hit the bookstores.

QuoteDuring the same month, actress Sharon Tate was busy filming The Fearless Vampire Killers in London with director Roman Polanski, the man who would later become her husband. She had already filmed 13, also known as Eye of the Devil, in London the previous year. Although she was perhaps better known to American audiences for her supporting role in Valley of the Dolls, her occult films gained her additional notoriety, especially after the Manson killings. It has been reliably reported that during the filming of 13 she was initiated into a form of witchcraft created by the film's technical consultant, Alex Sanders. Sanders had developed an amalgam of Gardnerian witchcraft and ceremonial magic that was known as "Alexandrian," after its founder's name; Gardnerian witchcraft itself was the creation of Gerald Gardner, a one-time customs official in Malaya and expert on the kriss—the wavy-bladed knife peculiar to Malaya and Indonesia—who returned to Great Britain and became involved with Aleister Crowley. Crowley actually wrote many of Gardner's rituals after the latter became initiated into Crowley's OTO. The flavor of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows—the witch's spellbook—is distinctly Crowleyan, and even has poems by Kipling, presented as if they were ancient pagan chants. Alex Sanders took some of the Gardnerian concept and mixed it with a somewhat more intellectually-demanding collection of ceremonial magic rituals, and it was this into which Sanders claimed to have initiated Sharon Tate. The same source suggests that Sanders had also had contact with members of the Manson "family," either directly or through his wide network of Alexandrian covens in Europe, America and Australia. There is also evidence that Sanders' group had interacted with the Process, and, if so, this is yet another connection to Manson and to the Tate murders.

QuoteWhat is even more suggestive is the fact that Manson Family member, and later convicted killer, Susan Atkins performed the role of a vampire in LaVey's 1967 public production of a Black Mass, in which she rose menacingly from a coffin. LaVey himself performed the role of the Devil in one of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's offerings, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), alongside Bobby Beausoleil, another Manson Family member and convicted murderer. Jack Parsons' widow Marjorie Cameron had once appeared in Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), in a dual role as Kali and the Scarlet Woman. A later Anger film, Lucifer Rising (1970), was an Anita Pallenberg production, which featured Marianne Faithfull in the role of Lilith. The musical score was by Bobby Beausoleil, then already in prison for his participation in the Manson Family murders, and the film was shot in Egypt and in Externsteine, the Teutonic pagan shrine in Germany that was sacred to the Nazis. For this film, Anger enlisted the aid of Gerald Yorke as "Thelemic consultant," i.e., as an advisor on the Crowleyan aspects of the film's mythology. The names of Pallenberg, Faithfull, Beausoleil, LaVey and Atkins all figure prominently in our story, as we shall presently see.

QuoteAnger was not the only one to use Beausoleil as a film actor. The soft-porn production Ramrodder—an "E.S.I. Production" shot in Topanga Canyon—features Bobby Beausoleil as a murderous Indian with Buck knife (the same type he used to kill Gary Hinman?), and Manson Family member Cathy "Gypsy" Share as an Indian "squaw." One of the central acts of the film involves the rape and murder of a blonde woman by a group of rampaging Indians. The film is high on production value but low on virtually everything else, from script to acting. Even the sex acts are chastely mimed, with a strange over-emphasis on close-ups of swinging buttocks. The value of this film, however, lies in the fact that Manson Family members Bobby Beausoleil and Cathy Share are actors, that they portray people living rough who turn murderous, and that there is a scene showing the murder of a blonde woman by a group of these Native American "Hippies" led by Bobby Beausoleil. When the blonde asks, "Why me?" the Beausoleil character responds,You are paying for the sins of your people, just as our people are paying for the crimes of our fathers who sold our land and our honor to the white man for a string of beads.... [The Chief] says we must live by the white man's law. Does not the white man's law say you are to take an eye for an eye?"

QuoteFurther, the castration of a white man by Bobby Beausoleil is also a foreshadowing of the murder he would commit on musician Gary Hinman, using the same type of weapon. The portrayal of the Indian tribe as a group of promiscuous young people wearing headbands and indulging in both straight and lesbian sexual acts could be a rehearsal of the Manson Family experience, or of the Summer of Love generally. It is the degeneration of this "Hippie life-style" into a season of violence and murder—portrayed by Manson Family members as actors—that leads the author to propose that this is yet another manifestation of the influence of sinister forces below the surface of everyday actions.

Quote
A major studio did produce Rosemary's Baby, however. The executive producer on this project was Robert Evans, and it is Evans who will tie us in with a world of occultism, serial murder, secret societies, drug running and Hollywood celebrities that will lead from California to New York... and back to Ashland, Kentucky.

But that particular discussion takes place in the 2nd or 3rd book, I believe.

QuoteThe Richard Condon novel, The Manchurian Candidate, was published in 1959 and became a best-seller. It told of an American GI who was captured by the Communists during the Korean War, brainwashed, and sent back to the United States as a programmed assassin: his target, a candidate for President of the United States. The film version starred Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury, and was directed by John Frankenheimer. Frankenheimer had asked then-President John F. Kennedy if it was okay to make the movie, as it dealt with Communist brainwashing and the assassination of an American political leader. Frankenheimer was afraid that the sensational aspects of the plot would either inflame the American public or otherwise have an effect on Kennedy's ongoing negotiations with the Soviets, which had become exacerbated by the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was also trying to get the Soviets to come to the table to ban nuclear weapons testing, and was embroiled in Vietnam. Frankenheimer did not want to create an atmosphere that would rock any boat the President might be sailing at the time. Kennedy told Frankenheimer to go ahead with the film and not to worry about any political fallout. The film was released in 1962 to much critical acclaim; but in 1963 Kennedy was assassinated, and the film was pulled from distribution almost immediately, and was not seen again for almost thirty years. Five years later, in June of 1968, John Frankenheimer hosted a small dinner party at his home in Malibu. Among the guests were Roman Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate. The guest of honor was Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then running to become Democratic candidate for President. Four of his children were also present at the dinner. The California Primary polls were open, and there was nothing else for the Senator to do until the winner was announced except enjoy the company of film stars and studio executives. It was to be his last supper. Frankenheimer drove the Senator to the Ambassador Hotel after dinner, where he would stay up the night to watch the election results. By midnight, it became obvious that Kennedy had won the California Primary. He went to the Embassy Room downstairs and declared victory to the cheers of his supporters. "On to Chicago!"

QuoteA few moments later, he was shot to death. The accused assassin was Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the Palestinian immigrant and Rosicrucian wannabe. He claimed (and still claims) to have no memory of the assassination (even though it took place in front of witnesses), and notebooks found in his home—seized without a warrant—opened a Pandora's box of conspiracy theories, as they tended to support the view that Sirhan had been the subject of a mind control experiment. Also discovered was a book by occultist Manley Palmer Hall, The Divine Art of Healing. The famous "girl in the polka dot dress" was seen with Sirhan by several witnesses, and then running from the scene shouting, "We killed him!" LAPD, in its infinite wisdom, discounted the testimony of these eye-witnesses almost immediately. Sirhan himself appeared remarkably calm and peaceful when he was jumped by ex-football star Roosevelt Grier among others, yet it took six men to hold him down even though he was a small, thin man.

QuoteOne of the chief elements of the case in Turner's view is the possibility that Sirhan was one of the first programmed assassins. First, there is the consideration of the cult angle. He bases this not only on Sirhan's famous notebook—which contains numerous allusions to the Illuminati, to "Kuthumi" (evidently a phonetic equivalent of Theosophy's disembodied spiritual guide Master Koot Humi), and other occult subjects—but also on several pieces of evidence which put Sirhan in contact with people adorned with occult jewelry only hours before the assassination. Sirhan, after his arrest, also requested copies of Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, as well as Talks on the Path of Occultism, Volume 1: At the Feet of the Master, co-authored by Blavatsky's Theosophical Society successor and political firebrand Annie Besant and wandering "Bishop" and Theosophist Charles W. Leadbetter. Several right-wing theorists in California at the time attempted to put the blame for the assassination on an Illuminati/Rosicrucian/Theosophist conspiracy, another way of saying (to them) the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. However, the evidence—as Turner and Christian demonstrate—goes deeper than a possible cult connection to Sirhan, although we see our old friends, the wandering bishops, turn up again in the figure of one of Turner's top suspects in the case, hypnotist and suspected mind controller Dr. William Joseph Bryan, Jr.

Who was also possibly an Old Catholic Bishop, as mentioned before.

Quoteinvestigative researchers tend to ignore the Wandering Bishop phenomenon because it is just too weird and seemingly irrelevant; certainly, one has to be pretty much of an expert in the subject to see any relevance at all, and it may be doubtful whether the effort is worth the candle.

QuoteTurner is correct in mentioning that it is the same church to which David Ferrie belonged; as we saw in the previous chapter, Ferrie was on close terms with both an Old Roman Catholic bishop, Earl James, and the testimony of Bishop Carl Stanley of the American Orthodox Catholic Church to the FBI gives evidence of his relationship to that organization. Since these churches swapped ordinations and consecrations like baseball cards, it is entirely possible (nay, likely) that Ferrie was a priest or bishop of the Old Roman Catholic Church as well as of the American Orthodox Catholic Church, making Ferrie and Bryan fellow clergymen.

And one just happened to be involved in the JFK assassination, while the other is somehow involved in the RFK assassination.  So many shared interests...

QuoteAs noted earlier, David Ferrie was something of an amateur hypnotist, and he used hypnosis and drugs in some combination in his dubious "therapies," probably as a method of seduction. William Joseph Bryan was a much more successful hypnotist (it was his career), and, as a notorious womanizer, often used hypnosis for pretty much the same purposes as Ferrie; and his resume was if anything even more suggestive. A large, bearded man who taxed the scales at nearly 400 pounds, he was even stranger in his appearance than hairless Ferrie; a fat man who expected his secretaries to sleep with him, and who used hypnosis to sexually exploit still others. He demonstrated his hypnotic powers in public on many occasions, even putting noted defense attorney F. Lee Bailey under, along with two other lawyers, in a seminar organized by Melvin Belli (talk about a "dream team"). He also consulted on many famous criminal cases, and had hypnotized accused serial killer Albert DiSalvo (the "Boston Strangler") in his cell.

William Bryan was also:

Quoteduring the Korean War, worked for the US Air Force in what he termed "the brainwashing section." If this was, in fact, true and not some of Bryan's notorious hyperbole, then he certainly came to the attention of the CIA, which had just geared up Operation BLUEBIRD at this time and had sent agents to Korea to investigate the brainwashing phenomenon and to come up with ways to protect American servicemen against it. In fact, he would have been working for, or with, Dr. James Monroe, the Air Force officer we met in the previous chapter, who also specialized in brainwashing and was adopted by the CIA. As an admittedly powerful hypnotist, Bryan would have been scooped up by the CIA almost at once. Hypnosis—along with drugs—was the CIA's immediate strategy in the development of the "Manchurian Candidate," and they were working with hypnotists in New York and elsewhere in the attempt to develop a workable protocol. If the records of Bryan's successes are anything to go by, then he already had the system down pat. According to Bryan's associates, he admitted to working for the CIA; the only question is, for how long?

QuoteAlthough Bryan would gleefully describe any of the cases he worked on, especially high-profile cases like DiSalvo, he would change the subject when Sirhan's case was brought up, and occasionally turn angry at reporters or investigators who had the temerity to mention it. This was uncharacteristic of Bryan, and points to another level of knowledge about the case. Eerily, Sirhan would also turn angry and upset when the Rosicrucians were mentioned, insisting that they not be brought into the investigation. This has led Turner and Christian to wonder if that was a deliberate hypnotic suggestion, implanted by Bryan or some other programmer, to divert attention away from the real conspirators. The "DiSalvo" reference in Sirhan's notebooks, however, suggests that the name of this alleged serial killer was brought up during Sirhan's programming, perhaps as a trigger word or, more likely, as a reference back to the original programmer. This would have to have been Bryan, since Bryan famously worked on the DiSalvo case. Did Bryan plant the "DiSalvo" reference as a kind of calling card? Or did Sirhan see the name of his programmer linked to DiSalvo in a newspaper or magazine article? There is no other connection between Sirhan and DiSalvo that anyone has been able to discover. It is perhaps the only pure anomaly in Sirhan's notebooks. It has nothing to do with politics, with Robert Kennedy, with the Illuminati or the Theosophists. It is as glaring—in the context of the notebooks—as a black cat on a white rug. The only connection to both Sirhan and DiSalvo is, of course, Bryan himself.

Well, that's not....nope, still not working.

QuoteResearcher, and William Turner's co-author, Jonn Christian interviewed a hypnotherapist who had encountered Sirhan in Pasadena in 1966. The hypnotherapist—Richard St. Charles—also had a stage act, and he would hand out slips for people to fill in their names and addresses for a mailing list. Sirhan's name and address was on one of them. Based on notes he made at the time, St. Charles recalled that Sirhan was a good hypnotic subject and, in his opinion, had been hypnotized before St. Charles ever met him. Thus, Sirhan had been hypnotized by St. Charles in 1966, and possibly by someone else even earlier. In fact, Sirhan was not the only assassin who had prior experience of hypnosis. James Earl Ray had also been hypnotized in Los Angeles two months before the assassination of Dr. King—by one Reverend Xavier von Koss—and a book on hypnotism was found in his safe house in Toronto, one of the stops he made before escaping to Europe.

Levenda then goes on to recount the strange tale of Candy Jones, and how it may shine a light on the CIA interest in hypnotism and assassination:

QuoteWhat we do have is Candy Jones' story, and it is a very strange tale indeed of hypnosis, drugs, mind control experiments, foreign assignments, torture, and a post-hypnotic instruction to commit suicide. It is a story made even more bizarre by the peripheral characters involved, one of whom would become a member of the Warren Commission and later President of the United States, the same man who would be the focus of an alleged assassination attempt by a former Manson Family member.

QuoteModeling agent John Powers invited her to New York City on a spurious offer to appear in a Chesterfield cigarette ad, and when that didn't pan out she found herself visiting the offices of competitor Harry Conover. Harry Conover had formed his modeling agency in partnership with another male model, Gerald Ford. Yes, the same Gerald Ford who would become President of the United States.

QuoteIt was Candy Jones that people of my parents' generation remember as the WAC and WAVE girl, urging young ladies to enlist during the War years. She was also a very popular pin-up girl in the candy-striped bathing suit that was her trademark, as well as in a more demure gown fashioned of parachute nylon. Her picture could be found in GI barracks all over Asia, and her tour was enormously successful until the day she contracted an illness from drinking unpasteurized milk, and had to be hospitalized in the Philippines. This was in April 1945. The illness was compounded by malaria and jungle rot, and eventually Candy found her hair falling out and her complexion turning different shades from the malaria. It was during this time in hospital that she met a medic, who is named Dr. Gilbert Jensen in the Donald Bain book. It was a chance meeting amid the last days of the War, and she did not think of it again for nearly fifteen years.

Quoteshortly after the break-in at his office, Candy Jones is visited by an FBI agent known only as "Ted," who asks her questions about the break-in which then segues into a request for her to assist in an FBI mail-drop operation. In this case, she will receive mail that is addressed to specific people not working at her agency. She is to hold the mail until an FBI agent comes to pick it up. This is all well and good, until "the general" himself phones in the late summer of 1960 and asks her to take a letter to someone in San Francisco, where she will be organizing a fashion show.

Quotethe mail drop was a CIA drop, because when she arrives in San Francisco she is phoned by the pseudonymous Gilbert Jensen, and a meeting is arranged at his office on Cyprus Street in Oakland, where she undergoes her first hypnotic trance.

QuoteSan Francisco was a hotbed of MK-ULTRA activity in the 1960s, incorporating everything from drugs to hypnosis and, later, to paranormal and occult research. In 1955, MK-ULTRA operator George White (who worked for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and not directly for the CIA, and thus had "plausible deniability") had moved to San Francisco from New York City, where he had run a "safehouse" that was used to test the effects of various drugs on prostitutes and their clients via two-way mirrors and the like. He set up an identical operation on Telegraph Hill, and wired it for sound, bringing in hookers, their johns, and eventually a whole assortment of local characters, both underworld and "civilian." George White's operation in San Francisco went on until the summer of 1963, covering the time of Candy Jones' first visit to the hypnotist in the autumn of 1960.

And for those who doubt the usefulness of hypnotism, as "a hypnotised subject cannot be made to do anything against their ethics"...well, remember, most people's ethics are pretty shit, if someone in a uniform gives them an order.

QuoteAs an example, the CIA's own Morse Allen—who led the hypnosis side of the search for the Manchurian Candidate—performed experiments on his own staff in the 1950s which demonstrated how easy it was to get someone to pull the trigger. As described in John Marks' The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Allen hypnotized a secretary on February 19, 1954 sending her into a deep trance. He then hypnotized another secretary and told her she had to wake up the first secretary; if she could not, then she should become enraged, pick up a pistol and kill her. The first secretary was unable to come out of the trance unless Morse Allen gave her the command, and therefore could not be awakened; thus the second secretary became enraged and picked up a pistol—not knowing it was unloaded—and shot the first woman. When she was brought out of the trance, she had no memory of the event and insisted she would never shoot anyone. What more evidence is necessary? A woman was told to commit an outrageous act of which she would not have been capable in a waking state, a morally-reprehensible act, in fact murder, and then had no memory of it upon awakening. As early as 1954, therefore, the CIA had the technology in hand to create programmed assassins. The only difficulty they faced was the "delivery system": how to snatch an unwitting person, a person with no discernible ties to the Agency, put them under, and give them the post-hypnotic suggestion to kill another human being? They needed to experiment on the real world, and several scenarios were developed that would enable CIA operators to implement this technology under "battlefield" conditions.

QuoteIn addition, Allen wanted to know if a person who had been hypnotized to forget certain vital information—a lock on the Land of Memory to which only the hypnotist had the key—could stand up under torture. Allen had suggested they use the services of a friendly foreign intelligence agency or police department, such as "Taiwan or Paraguay," (nations where torture as an interrogation tool was widely practiced) to test the strength of the posthypnotic amnesiac state. This way, they could create a genuine, threatening and dangerous environment equal to that a real agent would experience if captured by an enemy agency; plus the CIA would have distanced itself (legally, if not morally) from the actual torture of the subject. More plausible deniability. The subject would be tortured by these foreign agents in an effort to make him to reveal "classified" information. According to the CIA, there is no knowledge of such vile experimentation actually taking place. According to Candy Jones, it did.

QuoteHer first meeting with Gilbert Jensen in Oakland included a hypnotic session. He first asked her a number of questions about her personal life, including details about her childhood: specifically, about imaginary playmates she had. This is potentially the most explosive area of the investigation because, as we will see and as has been reported by Marks and others, the CIA explored the possibility of creating or developing alternate personalities in their mind control subjects, essentially manipulating what DSM-IV calls "dissociative identity disorder," or what used to be known as "multiple personality disorder." The CIA felt that if access was had to a violent personality hidden within the subject, then that personality could commit violent acts and keep the memory from the conscious recall of the core personality.

QuoteAs Marks writes, The candidate had to be among the one person in five who make a good hypnotic subject, and he needed to have dissociative tendency to separate part of his personality from the main body of his consciousness. The hope was to take an existing ego state—such as an imaginary childhood play-mate—and build it into a separate personality, unknown to the first. The hypnotist would communicate directly with this schizophrenic offshoot and command it to carry out specific deeds about which the main personality would know nothing.

QuoteDuring hypnosis there was a deliberate attempt to focus on one of Ms. Jones' "alters," an imaginary playmate of Candy's childhood, who turned into the aggressive and cynical personality known as Arlene Grant. The "Arlene Grant" persona was discussed during Ms. Jones' first visit with Jensen, even including hair coloring, much to Candy's irritation since the questions seemed rather bizarre for someone who was interviewing her for a possible role in American intelligence. During the course of several visits to Jensen's office during 1960 and 1961, Jensen "conjured" Arlene Grant to appear, using what appears to be a combination of drugs—possibly including sodium amytal—and hypnosis. This relationship with "Arlene" would continue for 12 years.

QuoteCandy Jones was a blonde; Arlene Grant became a brunette. This required Ms. Jones to wear a dark wig when she was on assignment on behalf of the CIA, using a false passport in her "alter" personality. Photographs of Candy Jones and "Arlene Grant" in Bain's book are quite dissimilar; one would have to know that they were the same person to note the physical identity. "Arlene Grant" was also programmed to endure tremendous physical pain, something that is common under hypnosis, as many can attest from public demonstrations. Candy Jones was afraid of Arlene; Arlene despised Candy as a weakling and as a far too trusting individual. Over the course of Candy's sessions with Jensen, Arlene would be the personality who would be constantly "invoked" by the hypnotist; it was Arlene who was given the undercover assignments, acting as a courier all over the United States and eventually in Asia. And it was Arlene who was sent to Taiwan in October of 1966—one of the two countries mentioned by Morse Allen as potential hosts for the "terminal" experiments in hypnosis and mind control—and tortured.

QuoteThe trip to Taiwan was made after the usual visit to Gilbert Jensen's office in Oakland. In this case, she was given the Arlene Grant passport and an airline ticket in Arlene Grant's name. She left the office in the dark wig and in the persona of Arlene Grant, where she would remain until her return from Taiwan. She was met at the airport by a man who had been president of the Taipei Chamber of Commerce and taken to his house outside Taipei. She gave him the envelope she had carried from the States, and much to her surprise was taken to a room in the basement of the house, and then hooked up to electrodes and tortured. She was asked if she knew a Gilbert Jensen, and she said she didn't; she was asked about the contents of the envelope and said she didn't have any idea. And on and on. Eventually, the man made a phone call and when he returned, he unhooked her and told her it was all a misunderstanding and that the electro-shock was only used to "jog her memory." She stayed for lunch, and they drove her back to the airport that night. Due to the method of electrode placement, her hands were severely burned, enough that she wore gloves for days afterwards to hide the evidence, something that friends of hers remarked upon. She also had been gone from her office for a week without any warning or advice to her staff, which was even more unusual.

QuoteHer 1968 trip or trips to Taiwan involved more specific torture sessions, and seemed to include a scorpion and a coral snake, both very poisonous. It also involved being drugged, examined, pinched and interrogated by what appeared to be a Chinese nurse, and all of this done under the observation of an American in what appeared to be a kind of elaborate inn or guesthouse that included an infirmary. The location of this house is not known, except that it was not in Taipei this time, but in the south of Taiwan, probably in Kaohsiung. Ms. Jones was pinched very painfully by the "nurse," so much so that her arms and breasts were black-and-blue from the assaults. On her way out, she fell down a flight of stairs, so weak was she from the drugs and the torture. She apparently passed the test, because she was escorted back to the airport, and then flew back to the States, reporting as usual to Jensen. The exact date of this trip to Taiwan is not known, except that her Taiwan visits ended in 1968. Another trip she made that year is, if anything, even more suggestive, as she was in California during the Democratic Primary on the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot.

QuoteThis time, she was visiting an institute run by another pseudonymous hypnotist, called "Dr. Marshall Burger" in the Bain book, who had a thriving practice in Chicago before moving to northern California and establishing his "institute" on behalf of the CIA.

QuoteThus "Marshall Burger" could have been an employee—official or unofficial—of the Human Ecology Society or one of the various fronts the CIA employed to provide sufficient distance between it and its experimentation. (At this point, after all of the revelations concerning MK-ULTRA, there is probably no longer a need to keep the identities of these individuals—Burger and Jensen—secret, and their exposure would only serve to validate the late Candy Jones' story.) The disturbing fact about Burger and his relationship to Candy Jones was the racist indoctrination she underwent at his seminars at a secret school somewhere in a small town in Texas on the Louisiana border (possibly the town of Orange). This is the strangest, most anomalous part of the story of Candy Jones and does not mesh with what we know of the CIA. According to the Bain book, Jones was taken to this class by Jensen, who introduced Burger to the class. Burger then went into a tirade concerning blacks, Hispanics, Asians, miscegenation, and the whole Bible of race hatred, including a recommendation that mixed-race couples should be sterilized. There is no way that this could have been an official CIA session. As much as we may distrust any secret intelligence agency—or the CIA in particular—there would be no discernible requirement or value for the type of class Candy Jones describes, except in the most feverish imagination of conspiracy theorists. More than that, however, is the lack of a clear motive for instilling racist concepts in hypnosis subjects like Candy, or in any of the other persons who attended the class. Yet, in the transcript of the hypnosis session between Candy Jones and her husband, John Nebel, she insists that Burger "is the CIA. He's important out here in discussions, but I don't know how big he is."

QuoteJensen had expressed racist feelings to Candy Jones years before, when both were in the Philippines during the War. This was before the creation of the CIA in 1947, and obviously was not part of a psychological warfare or mind control scenario. The author suggests that Jensen and Burger were genuine racists, and that they had a hidden agenda. He further suggests that Candy Jones was a deniable asset of the Agency, an informal agent who was being used as an experimental subject and nothing more, but that her training and progress under Jensen's ministrations were being closely observed by the CIA as a case study in the use of hypnosis as a method for creating the Holy Grail: the Manchurian Candidate. If she could be made to express racist feelings—and if her presence at the "training school" in Texas was somehow recorded for posterity—then were she involved in a political assassination, it could be put down to race hatred, as it had been in the case of James Earl Ray and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. earlier that same year.

QuoteThe fact that Candy paints both Jensen and Burger as racists—as committed and even rabid racists—and the parallel fact that both Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray were known without a doubt to have been hypnotized in California prior to their assassinations of known anti-racists... is either a coincidence of muscular proportions, or it points to an intelligence operation in place at the time being run either by the CIA or by a secret, frantic faction thereof.

QuoteYet, since we are on the subject of coincidence—meaningful or not—we can refer to an occult novel first published in 1972 by one David St. John: The Coven. The novel is about a Pennsylvania Senator and his wife who are embroiled in a secret underground cult in Washington, D.C. based on the powers of a young, black African priestess. The Senator's wife—Catherine Vane—is a tall, beautiful blonde who, for some reason that is never explained in the book, wears a black wig. The hero of the tale, a former US Attorney-turneddetective with the appropriately Ayn-Randish name of Jonathan Gault, beds the Senator's wife without too much trouble but does not appear to have done much else in the entire length of the novel except gather intelligence and illegally dispose of a body. The fact that the couple are from Pennsylvania (there is even a scene involving a company in Wilkes-Barre, Candy Jones' home town) and that the woman wears a black wig for no particular reason, Arlene Grant style, and turns out to be a murderer who undergoes a trance in the middle of an occult ceremony in the basement of an abandoned house in Washington... well, it would have been no more than an interesting parallel to the Candy Jones tale except that the real name of the pseudonymous author of The Coven is E. Howard Hunt, former CIA agent, Bay of Pigs action officer, despiser of Kennedys, and convicted Watergate "Plumber."

QuoteCandy Jones was taken to the Farm in November 1971. The Farm—as aficionados of CIA fiction and non-fiction are aware—is the training facility in Virginia where the Agency puts its agents through a kind of espionage boot camp. It was there that Ms. Jones was finally displayed before Jensen's colleagues as an example of his perfect control. According to her recall of the event while under hypnosis by her husband, there were about twenty-four people in attendance watching while Jensen put Candy through her paces, people she assumes were doctors.

QuoteDonald Bain is careful to state at the beginning of his book that some of the material recalled by Ms. Jones under hypnosis—by her husband, in fact, an amateur hypnotist at best—might be tainted by leading questions and other environmental cues and may not be pure memory. Fair enough. But there is a level of credibility in the story of Candy Jones that cannot be denied. Something happened to her during those long years between 1960 and 1972, when she finally managed to escape the clutches of her controllers by marrying John Nebel. She was subject to wild mood swings in public, actually complete personality changes as "Arlene" took over; she would be gone for long periods of time; she did have friends in the government, some of whom she made during her USO stint during the war. All in all, there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that at least part of her story is true. Her details on Taiwan and on her visits to San Francisco are also very much to the point. She names her controllers to her husband, although these names are disguised in Donald Bain's book; thus we are to assume that these are people whose identities are known to a circle of people around the late Candy Jones. The lack of independent confirmation of her story is frustrating, but the internal evidence is compelling. What can be checked against other sources has been checked to the best of the author's ability, and he finds himself supporting the basic elements of her story.

What the everloving fuck

Also, that movie sounds terrible. I still kind of want to see it, though.

I know.  My reaction every three pages in reading these books has been: wat.

There was also a large digression in the first book about the Mound builders in Kentucky, the presence of the Welsh in America, and other stuff I left out.

Will now get to work on finishing book 2.

Quote from: Cain on June 15, 2013, 03:33:02 PM
I know.  My reaction every three pages in reading these books has been: wat.

There was also a large digression in the first book about the Mound builders in Kentucky, the presence of the Welsh in America, and other stuff I left out.

Will now get to work on finishing book 2.

The Mound Builders are interesting as fuck. Especially since they're supposedly my ancestors.

Weirdos.

What's this about Welsh in America? That's just crazytown. Everyone knows the Welsh can't cross water.

Holy shit. The stuff in this thread is insane. There is so much crazy out there.

Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on June 15, 2013, 04:19:08 PM

Quote from: Cain on June 15, 2013, 03:33:02 PM
I know.  My reaction every three pages in reading these books has been: wat.

There was also a large digression in the first book about the Mound builders in Kentucky, the presence of the Welsh in America, and other stuff I left out.

Will now get to work on finishing book 2.

The Mound Builders are interesting as fuck. Especially since they're supposedly my ancestors.

Weirdos.

What's this about Welsh in America? That's just crazytown. Everyone knows the Welsh can't cross water.

Apparently, there was a white-skinned tribe in America who spoke a variation of Welsh.  History suggests it might have been a Welsh Prince who fled the conquest in the 12th century.  They were mostly wiped out by the late 18th century, but fortifications in their former lands matched Welsh ones from the same period, and a Welsh soldier who was once taken prisoner by them said he could easily communicate with them.

Quote from: Cain on June 15, 2013, 04:43:25 PM

Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on June 15, 2013, 04:19:08 PM

Quote from: Cain on June 15, 2013, 03:33:02 PM
I know.  My reaction every three pages in reading these books has been: wat.

There was also a large digression in the first book about the Mound builders in Kentucky, the presence of the Welsh in America, and other stuff I left out.

Will now get to work on finishing book 2.

The Mound Builders are interesting as fuck. Especially since they're supposedly my ancestors.

Weirdos.

What's this about Welsh in America? That's just crazytown. Everyone knows the Welsh can't cross water.

Apparently, there was a white-skinned tribe in America who spoke a variation of Welsh.  History suggests it might have been a Welsh Prince who fled the conquest in the 12th century.  They were mostly wiped out by the late 18th century, but fortifications in their former lands matched Welsh ones from the same period, and a Welsh soldier who was once taken prisoner by them said he could easily communicate with them.

Yeah, I've read those accounts and they're all pretty sketchy.

These books sound like roughly a 10 for entertainment, but maybe a 4- for credibility.

(Only because some of the things he talks about actually exist, like the movie with Marianne Faithfull.)

Levenda must have been on some goooood shit!  :lol:

Yeah, I dunno how I feel about the whole diffusionist/originalist arguments either.  Possibly because I don't really care either way.

But the whole MK-ULTRA stuff is on much stronger ground, even where that ground gets decidedly strange, like with Andrija Puharich stuff.

Quote from: Cain on June 15, 2013, 05:19:22 PM
Yeah, I dunno how I feel about the whole diffusionist/originalist arguments either.  Possibly because I don't really care either way.

But the whole MK-ULTRA stuff is on much stronger ground, even where that ground gets decidedly strange, like with Andrija Puharich stuff.

Yeah, that's both the most intriguing, and also, unfortunately, the hardest to corroborate.

Yeah.  He tries, combining witness testimony with government reports with stuff from investigative journalists, but thanks to Richard Helms, everything comes down to a statement of probability in the end.

And given my knowledge of US programs comes from things like Operation Mongoose and the whole "Earth First Battalion", my threshold of "too crazy for the US government" is very, very high.

Quote from: Cain on June 15, 2013, 05:50:56 PM
Yeah.  He tries, combining witness testimony with government reports with stuff from investigative journalists, but thanks to Richard Helms, everything comes down to a statement of probability in the end.

And given my knowledge of US programs comes from things like Operation Mongoose and the whole "Earth First Battalion", my threshold of "too crazy for the US government" is very, very high.

Oh yeah, the US government has pulled some serious whackadoo, not to mention unbelievable breaches in ethics.

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.

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.

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

And I'll definitely invest in the Sinister Forces.

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.

Heh. That's what I felt was missing from Goodrick-Clarke all along. Definitely putting it on (near) the top of my reading list.

Ah, dammit, I wish I didn't have to get ready for work

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."

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).

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.

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."

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

QuoteMerrick's film, Manson, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973. Merrick had been an acting coach for Sharon Tate, and had easy access to the Family members who were still at large. He was shot to death at his studio in Hollywood in 1977.

QuoteFamily members were still involved in murder and attempted murder. Brenda McCann, aka Nancy Pitman, was arrested on November 11, 1972 in Stockton, California. Brenda had been Bruce Davis' girlfriend, with whom she had been on the lam in the Los Angeles sewers for months before they turned themselves in during December 1970. This time, she was found in a house which contained a body buried in the basement, that of Lauren Willett (19), who had been shot in the head. Along with McCann were two members of the Aryan Brotherhood, as well as another woman named Priscilla Cooper (21). Both women had X's carved into their foreheads, identifying them as Manson Family members. What alerted police to the house was the fact that a car parked outside belonged to a man who had been murdered a few days earlier in Northern California. James T. Willett was a former Marine, and had been found in his Marine uniform: killed with a shotgun and decapitated.

Jim Jones time:

QuoteThey joined the church in 1970 and stayed with it through thick and thin for the next six years. When they left in 1976, they were afraid for their lives. They campaigned vociferously against it, and did what they could to inform government and civic leaders of the threat it posed to society. They spoke of beatings, sexual abuse including the rape of men, women and children, public humiliation, torture, brainwashing, and the mind control of children, including sleep deprivation and being made to witness terrible punishments meted out for the slightest of offences and, sometimes, for no discernible offence at all. The leader considered himself a God, said he was the reincarnation of Jesus and Lenin, and demanded absolute obedience from his followers, who numbered in the thousands. It was Charles Manson and his Family writ large and fine-tuned. In November of 1979 the Mertles published a book about their experiences. In February 1980, they were murdered in their home along with their teenaged daughter, each shot in the head execution-style by person or persons unknown. Their triple homicide has remained unsolved to this day. The Mertles had published their book under a pseudonym: Jeannie Mills. It was entitled Six Years With God and was subtitled Life Inside Rev. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple.

QuoteEven the biography of the man at the center of the holocaust, Jim Jones, was sketchy and open to interpretation. His presumed close association with Dan Mitrione was never investigated by the US government or, if it was, the results were never made public. Mitrione was the man taken hostage and then killed by the leftist guerrilla Tupamaros in Uruguay in 1970, revolutionaries who knew that he was a CIA agent with AID agency cover. Jones and Mitrione had known each other in Indiana, where Mitrione was a cop specializing in juveniles and Jones a fifteen-year-old sidewalk preacher, and they were both in Brazil at the same time in the early 1960s: Mitrione with a police training unit that was under Agency for International Development (AID) cover, and Jones in some murky capacity that involved the US

QuoteMitrione, it is now known, was involved with the training of Latin American police forces in the use of torture and drugs in interrogations, under the auspices of the now-defunct and cynically-entitled Office of Public Safety (OPS), an Orwellian organization that was formed during the Eisenhower administration. Mitrione was an avid practitioner of the methods he taught and, according to one of his trainees in Uruguay in the late 1960s, he would pick up homeless people on the streets to be used as guinea pigs in his training sessions, bloody interrogations which were always conducted in a soundproof room. In Montevideo, this room was in the basement of his home. When the derelicts died during the course of the "training," their bodies would be dumped back in the streets as a warning to Communist insurgents.

QuoteThe drugs and techniques, of course, were the direct and unequivocal legacy of ongoing MK-ULTRA research. According to John Marks, In 1966 CIA staffers, including [John] Gittinger himself, took part in selecting members of an equally controversial police unit in Uruguay—the anti-terrorist section that fought the Tupamaro urban guerrillas.... Agency operators worked to set up this special force together with the Agency for International Development's Public Safety Mission (whose members included Dan Mitrione, later kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros). The CIA-assisted police claimed they were in a life-and-death struggle against the guerrillas, and they used incredibly brutal methods, including torture, to stamp out most of the Uruguayan left along with the guerrillas. John Gittinger was the "MKULTRA program's resident genius."  He developed something called the Personality Assessment System (PAS). An incredibly complex system, it resisted computerization due to all the variables, and at one point Gittinger had something like 29,000 separate test results on computer printout in his office that he mined for data on the personalities of drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, criminals, the easily hypnotizable, etc. His specialty was uncovering the "underlying personality structure—discrepancies that produce tension, conflict, and anxiety."

QuoteDuring the same period, Andrija Puharich (of Arthur Young, MK-ULTRA and "Council of the Nine" fame) was also in Brazil investigating the famous "psychic surgeon," Arigo, while Arthur Hochberg (of Robert Mullen and E. Howard Hunt fame) was also in Brazil working for the CIA station there.

QuoteAt that time, the early 1950s, Jones' politics was by all accounts as virulently anti-Communist as those of his fellow clergymen, and his radio programs and preaching carried a clear anti-Communist message. This was, after all, the McCarthy Era and anti-Communism was fashionable in some circles (just as socialism was in others), and for a Christian minister in the Midwest who traveled the circuit between Cincinatti, Dayton, Richmond, Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, it was to be expected that he would preach against the godless Russians and the atheist Chinese.

Quoteafter his mysterious sojourn in Brazil, Jones gradually abandoned any pretense at standard Biblical terminology or theology. Jones began to speak of revolution, and of Jesus as a socialist. He began to gradually mock and villify the God of the Jews, the "Sky God" as he called him, and to identify Jehovah with satanic forces bent on the destruction of humanity. It was pure neo-Nazism, except it was so convoluted that most of his followers would never have recognized it for what it was. As detailed at some length in my previous work, Unholy Alliance, the Nazi ideologists of the Third Reich had reinterpreted the Bible in such a way that the God of the Israelites was Satan. This has become standard theology in such racist organizations in America as the Christian Identity movement.

QuoteLucifer was the "light-bringer," and intent on delivering humanity from the clutches of the evil Jehovah. This is also a Gnostic belief, as demonstrated in the scriptures uncovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. In this system, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was the true God, who wanted to deliver the human race from the blind Creator God, the Demiurge who wanted Adam and Eve as his personal slaves. This deity is equivalent to the H.P. Lovecraft creature, the "blind idiot god of chaos," for it was he who created material forms with reckless abandon and who—in his blindness—believed he was the Superior Being and demanded that Adam and Eve worship only him. According to Gnostic legend, this being—Samael—was then chastised by the other gods for his vanity in assuming the mantle of Supreme God.

QuoteThis multiplicity of gods with Biblical geneaology is what gave rise to the theology of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, as discussed in Book One. This form of Gnosticism also influenced Charles Manson, and he began to identify himself with Abraxas, a famous Gnostic deity whose numerological equivalent is 365, the same as the number of days in the year and thus representative of time itself.

QuoteThere is evidence to show that Jim Jones and his wife, Marceline, visited Cuba in 1960, for reasons unknown.

QuoteHougan demonstrates that Jones was known to the CIA and the FBI before the massacre, and that the CIA maintained a file on Jones that coincided quite precisely with Dan Mitrione's career as an overseas "trainer" of foreign police forces. That is, the file on Jones was opened when Mitrione began to work for the AID-sponsored OPS program and was closed when Mitrione was killed in Uruguay in 1970

QuoteAccording to a Cuban whom he met in Havana during that trip, Jones was involved in trying to arrange for Cubans to emigrate to the United States. This was part of a larger American policy of encouraging Cubans to defect from Castro, in order to weaken the Cuban economy as well as win some propaganda points. Jones was specifically trying to recruit black Cubans to come to Indianapolis where his Peoples Temple was still located. It seems that nothing much came of this plan, but Jones was evidently working on behalf of American political interests when he was there. He brought back with him photographs of himself in Cuba and most curiously a photo taken of him standing next to a downed aircraft that had been flown by anti-Castro Cubans—not exactly on the main tourist circuit, even in revolutionary Cuba.

QuoteAs pointed out in Hougan's research, Jones had two passports issued to him at two different times. One, issued in Chicago on June 28, 1960 and another issued in Indianapolis on January 30, 1962. The problem is twofold. First, as there is strong evidence (on the basis of an eyewitness account, an affidavit signed by Jones during that period in Cuba, etc.) that Jones was in Cuba in the first few months of 1960, how did he travel there if his passport was not issued until June 28? Secondly, why the two passports, as the first one issued in 1960 certainly would still be valid? It is certain that Jones was in Cuba in February of 1960. It is also certain that he visited Cuba again a year later. And there is further evidence—also incontrovertible, and verified by newspaper accounts printed at the time—that Jones had visited Guyana (when it was still called "British Guiana") years before he ever set up the commune known to the world as Jonestown. In fact, according to an eyewitness—a Cuban he eventually brought to the United States in August 1960 to stay with the Temple in Indianapolis—Jones appeared to have been well-traveled by that time and "knew Latin America well. He had already been to Guyana, and wanted to start a collective there."

QuoteHe was named as the Director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission when he was thirty years old, by most accounts, which would mean sometime in 1961. One wonders what the duties of a Human Rights Commission director would have been in Indianapolis in 1961, but whatever they were, by October he was resigning the post after having spent a week in a hospital due to stress. He had been hearing "extraterrestrial voices"—shades of Aleister Crowley and Aiwaz, or of Barney and Betty Hill, whose celebrated abduction by a UFO had taken place the previous month in New Hampshire—and having seizures.

QuoteAt the end of October, Jones left Indianapolis for a few weeks of rest and recuperation, in Hawaii according to most accounts. Unfortunately, as Jim Hougan points out, this story is patently false, for the Guyanese newspapers have Jones in their country in late October 1961. He could not have been in both Hawaii and Guyana the same week of October. Not in 1961. Further, he is supposed to have stopped in Mexico City during that time as well, which renders the impossibility of being in three different countries spread that far apart in the same week.

QuoteFurther, there is evidence that Jones had been under psychiatric care in San Francisco and—as Hougan points out—some have offered the opinion that Jones went to Hawaii in order to "receive psychiatric care without publicity."

QuoteNonetheless, what is known about Jones beyond any doubt is that he was under psychiatric care at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, a hospital that conducts experiments on behalf of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department, and where "virtually every survivor of the Jonestown massacre was eventually treated."

QuoteWitnesses describe Jones' lifestyle in Brazil as lavish; others as meager at best. Witnesses say that Jones was setting up an orphanage in Brazil, but for whom and with what fund- ing is not described; others say that Jones did no missionary work at all in Brazil, but left the house each morning with a briefcase and returned each evening with few comments on where he had been or what he had done. He would make passing references to Naval Intelligence (à la Ron Hubbard) or to other government work; people who knew him in Brazil thought of him as a spy: no Brazilians who knew Jones during his stay there and can attest to his Christian missionary work have been discovered. Whatever took place in Brazil, by the time he returned to the United States he had undergone a conversion to socialism, a conversion that would eventually lead him to espouse Communism as the only way.

QuoteAccording to Hougan's sources, Jones was there to study the phenomenon of David Miranda, a Pentecostalist minister who started his own congrega- tion—the Church of God is Love—in Brazil in 1960-61, shortly before Jones' arrival. Miranda's mix of Christian fundamentalist Pentecostalism with faith healing and (as accused in 1999) money laundering would have attracted the like-minded Jones. Hougan believes, however, that there might have been another element to Jones' fascination with Miranda, and that would have been the CIA's interest in "mass conversion techniques" as part of its MK-ULTRA program. Certainly, Jones' visit to Brazil coincides with a major effort on behalf of the CIA to study primitive religions worldwide, from the psilocybin-eating Indians of Mexico to the Yoruba faith healers of Nigeria. This was not only a CIA interest, for the military had also actively pursued these studies in the name of psychological warfare.

QuoteBefore Puharich's posting, one Dr. Laurence J. Layton was posted to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, a test center for the Chemical Warfare Division of the US Army; this was in November of 1951. In March of 1952, Layton had been named Chief of the US Army's Chemical Warfare Division, a position he held until 1954. In other words, Dr. Layton was—at least on paper—Dr. Puharich's boss. The relevance of this will become clear shortly. Suffice it to say for now that Dr. Layton—and especially his children, Larry Jr. and Deborah—would play a major role in the events that led up to the Jonestown massacre and that Larry Jr. is still in prison, the only man ever convicted of murder in that hideous event, while it was his sister, Deborah, who had been an important influence on Congressman Leo Ryan's decision to go to Jonestown in the first place.

QuoteDeborah Layton—after a stint in the United Kingdom at a strict Quaker school—was finally drawn into the Peoples Temple experience by her brother Larry. This was when the Temple was located in Ukiah, California. Gradually she became very involved with the group and was entrusted to greater and greater responsibilities by Jim Jones. She found herself becoming part of an inner circle that handled the money, and was involved in moving funds out of the United States and into bank accounts in Latin America and Europe. Just as Rev. David Miranda of Brazil would be accused of doing some twenty years later, Jim Jones moved millions of dollars out of the country using church members as "mules," carrying the cash with them and depositing it in various accounts spread over the globe.

QuoteHis socialist rants from the pulpit of the Peoples Temple church in Ukiah and, later, in San Francisco became increasingly full of dire warnings about the doom facing America and the coming race war that would target groups like the Peoples Temple and its followers. Like any good member of the Disciples of Christ, Jones' view of the late twentieth century was apocalyptic. There would be a conflagration, perhaps a nuclear war, and only those he managed to save would survive the holocaust. Jones' vision of an imminent race war was eerily similar to Manson's. One could say they were on either side of the same argument: Jones (ostensibly) wanted to preserve the black people of America and Manson wanted them destroyed. Both, however, saw race war as inevitable. When the dust cleared, however, Manson had killed only white people (with an attempted murder on one black drug dealer); Jones had killed hundreds of black people in Jonestown.

QuoteIn October 1976, a month before the US presidential election that would put Jimmy Carter in the White House, a man named Bob Houston decided he would leave the Peoples Temple. He wrote a letter of resignation to Jim Jones on October 3rd. On October 5th, he was dead.

QuoteThe pharmacy at Jonestown was heavily weighted in favor of narcotics and psychoactive compounds, and it is not clear to what extent these drugs were used in the everyday life of the commune. As for sex, Jones constantly complained of his continuous need for sex, and would enlist as many women as he could in his sexual stable. He would then ridicule the sexual lives of his male followers, and insist that all men but him were basically homosexual.

QuoteHe would control the sex lives of the members of the Peoples Temple, and arranged marriages between couples who were then not allowed to have sex. He would demand that wives complain publicly about the lack of sexual performance or prowess of their husbands, while demanding as well that they praise Jim Jones in that department. In other words, it was Mansonism writ large and, if possible, even uglier.

QuoteCalifornia Congressman Leo J. Ryan was making a name for himself as a government watchdog. He had co-authored the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which required the CIA to get prior approval from Congress before undertaking any covert activity. In addition, he was asking questions about the CIA's mind-control projects in the State of California, as he won- dered whether or not the notorious members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) had been the willing or unwilling beneficiaries of the MK-ULTRA program while serving time at Vacaville.

QuoteWhen Patty Hearst was finally freed she was put on trial for armed robbery as if she were legally culpable, a subject on which many psychiatrists disagreed passionately. It brought many of the old CIA mind-control experts out of the woodwork, although they were not necessarily advertised as such. Dr. William Sargant, who was a friend of Dr. Frank Olson and who advised the British intelligence agencies on inter- rogation and brainwashing techniques, was one of those who examined Patty Hearst, as was Dr. Martin Orne and Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the latter an expert on Chinese mind-control techniques.

QuoteDonald DeFreeze, the commander of the SLA, had earlier been a prisoner at the Vacaville facility that was used by the CIA as part of their mind-control experimentation program. At Vacaville, an organization was set up to raise black consciousness—the Black Cultural Association, or BCA—which was under the direction of Professor Colston Westbrook. Westbrook has since been identified as a former intelligence officer who served in the Far East during the 1960s and, in fact, worked for AID

QuoteThe police were mobilized in an intensive manhunt to find the SLA and bring them to justice. No one who was in front of a television will ever forget the day in May when SWAT teams destroyed a house in such an intensive storm of gunfire that the building collapsed in flames. Six members of the SLA—including Donald DeFreeze, their leader known as "Cinque"—were killed in the conflagration. Patty Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris were not in the building at the time. The May 17, 1974 attack was criticized by some members of the press, especially when it became obvious that the inhabitants of the house—and of surrounding buildings, some of which were damaged in the fire—were given little opportunity to evacuate or surrender.

QuoteThe existence and actions of the SLA are so strange, and so illogical, and so out of context that the organization has been subject to the full-court press of the conspiracy theorists. The leader of the SLA—Donald DeFreeze, or "Cinque"—was black. Virtually everyone else in the SLA was white. (This is a mirror-image of the Peoples Temple, where the leader was white and the congregation black.) The group was believed to be Maoist, but the evidence for this was flimsy. Further, they claimed responsibility for the murder of Dr. Marcus Foster—Superintendent of the Oakland school system—in 1973 ... by two white men who had used makeup during the commission of the crime, making themselves look black.

QuoteDeFreeze himself was a police informant who spent very little time in prison, even though he had a record of arms-dealing, among other felonies. When he left prison, he simply walked out, leading many to assume that his escape was an inside job.

QuoteCongressman Ryan may have been getting a little too close to the truth when he demanded that the CIA inform him of any relationship between Don- ald DeFreeze and MK-ULTRA. They responded in writing to his office on October of 1978, stating that there had been no connection that they could find (remember, most of the documents had been shredded long before). The wording is a perfect example of a typical CIA response and is worth quoting at length:

Dear Mr. Ryan: Thank you for your letter of 27 September to Admiral Turner requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville. It is true that CIA sponsored testing, using volunteer inmates, was conducted at that facility. The project was completed in 1968.... Your letter referred to Donald DeFreese [sic], known as CINQUE, and Clifford Jefferson, both of whom were inmates at Vacaville. In so far as our records reflect the names of the participants, there is nothing to indicate that either was in any way involved in the project.

The letter was date-stamped "18 Oct 1978," and bore the signature stamp of Frank C. Carlucci. There are several points worth mentioning about this "non-denial denial" (as they used to say at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation). The first is the misspelling of Donald DeFreeze's name, which—as any lawyer knows—is a way to cover one's ass in the event that the denial is proved false. It means that there was no one at the facility being tested who bore the name "Donald DeFreese." The CIA has used this tactic before. Yet, let us allow that it was an honest mistake, a typographical error by a typist. Then there is the question of "our records." In the first place, the key MK-ULTRA records, of which the Vacaville experiments would have been a part, were all destroyed in 1973 (except for four boxes of accounting and bookkeeping records). So, the CIA had no records of it at all. In the second place, the letter is very careful to hedge even further: "In so far as our records reflect the names of the participants," Very clever, considering that in all likelihood no records existed and, anyway, the name of DeFreeze was misspelled. Then there is the statement by future-CIA Director Carlucci that the project which had drawn Congressman Ryan's scrutiny "was completed in 1968." DeFreeze did not become an inmate at Vacaville until 1969. Thus, we are left with the distinct impression that the CIA had nothing to do with DeFreeze. But, from 1970 on, DeFreeze was in twice-weekly contact with Colston Westbrook, former intelligence officer under AID cover, psycho- logical warfare officer, and Vietnam veteran, who created and ran the Black Cultural Association at the facility. By running an operation at the prison at arm's length, the CIA had what is known as "plausible deniability." When DeFreeze was being sought by police during the SLA fiasco, he repeatedly warned that Westbrook was a CIA officer, but his warnings were taken as the ramblings of a deranged Communist and black revolutionary, and few paid his charges any attention.

A month to the day after he received his non-denial denial from the CIA, Congressman Ryan was dead on the ground at Port Kaituma, Guyana.

QuoteIt was in that same year of 1976 that Jones began to expatriate the Temple funds to banks in Panama and Switzerland, using Deborah Layton as one of the administrators of these funds and as a courier. He had simply been amassing too much wealth—he had one hundred thousand dollars in cash in a safe at the Temple to cover "incidental expenses"– and he was getting thousands of dollars of cash donations every week, in addition to members' Social Security checks and real estate that was signed over to the Temple.

QuoteYet another disturbing coincidence lies in the fact that the site chosen by Jones was in the Northwest District of Guyana, the same place where—in 1845—a Reverend Smith called together the local Native American population (including the Arawaks, Tituba's countrymen), and told them the Millennium was at hand. When it did not materialize, Smith's four hundred followers committed mass suicide on the spot, believing they would be resurrected as "white people." The parallels to the Jonestown event are too strong to be ignored.

QuoteThe Temple members lived on rice and beans, and a little water (depending on the rainfall). It was, essentially, concentration-camp living, with the ever-present security forces alert to any deviation from the fixed routine, any complaint, no matter how reasonable or how minor. For infractions, one could be imprisoned in "the box" for extended periods of time, fed on a liquid diet—with vital signs monitored daily to ensure that the inmate was still alive—and subjected to interrogation by the security team until they were satisfied that the inmate was giving the correct answers. Children were subject to even worse treatment, taken to a well at the bottom of which two adults would be hiding in the water, waiting to grab the unfortunate child's legs and drag him or her under the surface of the brackish water. After a long session of that, the child would be allowed to return to the surface, and then would have to walk all the way back to the compound through the jungle, repeating over and over, "I'm sorry, Father."

QuoteThe pharmacy at Jonestown contained Thorazine, as well as "Quaaludes, Demerol, Seconal, Valium, Nembutal, morphine—enough to fill the ordinary needs of a city of sixty-five thousand people."  Another source records that large quantities of Haldol and Mellaril in liquid form were being shipped to Jonestown.

QuoteOne of the members accompanying Ryan to Jonestown was Richard Dwyer. Dwyer's involvement in this—and subsequent discoveries about his back- ground in intelligence—is one of the more suggestive elements of the whole saga. Dwyer was a career intelligence officer, working under State Department cover at the US Embassy in Georgetown. He was, according to several sources, the CIA Chief of Station for Guyana. As such, he could be expected to have very good information on Jonestown; unfortunately, he did not choose to share this information with Ryan or his party. It was well-known in Georgetown that the Peoples Temple had strong influence with the Guyanese govern- ment; Temple women were expected to develop personal relationships with Guyanese officials, and one such woman was the mistress of the Guyanese ambassador to the United States. Dwyer would have had to have known all of this, as Georgetown is small as capitols go, a place where gossip is about the only entertainment there is. Further, as CIA station chief, it would have been his business to know all about the Peoples Temple political involvements, not only with the Guyanese government but also with the Soviet Union and Cuba, as the Temple had approached both of these countries—through their embassies in Georgetown—as possible relocation sites. Yet, Dwyer—and the State Department in general—remained strangely silent on the subject of the Peoples Temple and offered very little assistance to Congressman Ryan before and during his trip.

QuoteJones was quite aware of the effect that the isolation and insularity of the scene would have on the psyches of his flock. He demonstrated this during a session in which a young boy was accused of stealing. Jones lightly drugged the boy, telling him he could strike him dead. By the time the drug began to take effect, the boy was quaking in fear. He was revived briefly, in the darkened church and to the sound of the other members of the congre- gation making terrifying sounds, as if the boy had descended to the very pit of hell. The boy was then "brought back from the dead" by Jones, and the traumatized child promised he would never commit another crime in his life.

QuoteJones several times insists that Dwyer be allowed to leave; in fact, he doesn't want Dwyer in Jonestown at all when the curtain comes down and calls over the loudspeaker to have him taken away. As we have seen, Dwyer was likely the local CIA Chief of Station. Why, suddenly, is Jones worried for his safety? If the whole congregation is going to commit mass suicide (as the cover story would have it), then why would Jones care one way or another about Dwyer?

QuoteMany of the victims bore gunshot wounds, which argues strongly against the suicide-by-Kool-Aid story that was disseminated shortly after the massacre. Those who did survive recall the sounds of gunshots in such abundance it sounded like a war. The security forces had armed themselves with heavy automatic weapons at the start of Jones' plea for suicide and were ensuring that none would escape the compound.

QuoteAerial photographs of the site days later would show the famous scene of bodies all over the compound; millions saw those photographs in the news magazines, but few came to the obvious conclusion: the bodies were all lying facedown and in many cases neatly arranged, indicating that the story of mass suicide might have been in error. It beggars belief that everyone in Jonestown would have fallen forward onto their faces after taking the cyanide-laced grape drink. It is entirely possible that the bodies were arranged that way to make their identification more difficult when photographed from above. It is also entirely possible that the bodies were arranged that way by persons unknown after the massacre. For it was a massacre. Initially, the body count—performed by the first contingent of Guyanese troops that arrived the morning after the massacre—was only about two hun- dred. Later, as the days went on and more investigators (and curiosity-seekers) arrived, the body count was corrected upwards. At first, it was believed that the grand total would come in at three hundred sixty-three, of which eighty-two were identified as children. Yet, as the body count increased, the incredulous wanted to know how it was possible that it could go from 363 to 913; how was such a wide variation possible?

QuotePhotos of some of the bodies show that they were wearing identification bracelets on their wrists, the type commonly used in hospitals to identify patients. No one knows why this was done, and particularly why those bracelets mysteriously disappeared somewhere between Jonestown and the American air base where the bodies were eventually shipped, thus rendering further identification even more difficult.

QuoteThe bodies were left in the open jungle air for days, and had reached a particularly loathsome state of putrescence, rendering hellish the task of coroners and medical examiners. In fact, there were virtually no autopsies performed on the bodies recovered.

QuoteOnly seven autopsies were ever performed on the more than nine hundred bodies found at Jonestown, and only one of those showed any sign of cyanide poisoning.

QuoteDr. Mootoo, Guyana's chief medical examiner, noted that many of the victims had puncture wounds from syringes on their shoulders, where they could not have possibly injected themselves. In addition, cyanide was present in bottles labeled Valium, and Mootoo assumed that the victims had been given the fictitious Valium and discovered the switch too late, as they lay dying. To summarize his findings, he believed that the evidence strongly supported a charge of homicide in at least seven hundred cases. The tissue samples that he collected at the site—representing tests of more than twenty bodies—were handed over to an official of the American embassy for onward transmission to forensic specialists in the United States. They never arrived, and to this day no one knows what happened to them.

QuoteAs if anyone needed additional mysteries to solve, Jim Hougan points out one more incredible anomaly: the CIA knew that there were mass suicides in Jonestown at 4:44 A.m. on Sunday morning, Guyana time. But the site had not been visited until mid-morning that same day by Guyanese troops. How did the CIA know that there had been mass suicides in Jonestown at least six hours before anyone else did? One of the planes involved in the attack at Port Kaituma had managed to leave and make its way to Georgetown the night of the 18th, but the only news they had was of the attack on the Congressman's party at the airstrip and the murder of five people whose bodies still lay on the tarmac. No one knew about the massive death toll at Jonestown until the next day. Yet, somehow, the CIA knew all about it and was already spinning the story as a "mass suicide." Hougan believes the probable source to be Richard Dwyer; in addition, a CIA memorandum concerning Guyana refers to a CIA "field station" in Guyana, giving rise to speculation that there was another CIA operation in Guyana beyond that of Dwyer's embassy posting.

QuoteThe deaths did not end with the massacre at Jonestown. As in the case of the Manson Family murders, people connected with the case continued to die from gunshot wounds for quite some time after the discovery of all those bodies in the jungle.

QuoteOnly nine days after the Jonestown massacre, San Francisco Mayor Moscone—whom Jones had helped to elect in the 1976 campaign—was shot dead, as was Harvey Milk, the famous defender of gay rights in government. There are numerous photos of Moscone and Jones, and even at the height of the Peoples Temple scandals in the press, Moscone stood behind Jones and was vocal in his support of the church. There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest Peoples Temple involvement in these deaths, but nothing substantial enough to warrant a full discussion at this point.

QuoteOn October 21, 1985, White was found dead in his garage, a victim of probable suicide from carbon monoxide poisoning. The motives for the Moscone and Milk murders were never very clear. White had no particular agenda against Moscone. He had resigned his city position for the simple reason that it would not pay enough to support him and his family. He then decided to retract his resignation, but there was no legal precedent for it. All in all, it did not seem enough to warrant his insane plan to murder the Mayor. As a political and moral conservative, he prob- ably despised gay activist Harvey Milk; it's possible that he considered killing Milk at the same time as Moscone on general principle. But we will never know; White had confessed to the crimes, and it only wanted a decision by the courts as to whether the homicides were murder or manslaughter. The question of motive was not explored because, quite simply, White insisted he didn't even remember committing the crimes.

QuoteOn July 31, 1980 the surviving children of Congressman Leo Ryan's family brought a lawsuit against the United States of America in the matter of Ryan's assassination. They charged that the State Department knew in advance of the dangers inherent in a trip to Jonestown, but failed to warn the Congressman in advance. They further charged that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment, and that the community was heavily armed, and was infiltrated by CIA agents

QuoteThere are also persistent rumors that some of the security staff escaped into the jungles with a suitcase full of cash. The Temple owned three sailing vessels in Guyana, which were all at sea at the time of the massacre.

QuoteWho were on these vessels? How many were they? Where were they dropped off? No one seems to care.

QuoteAs for Jim Jones himself, his fate is also open to question. His death was ruled a suicide, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The pistol he is alleged to have used, however, was found far away from his body. At least one researcher—Michael Meier—insists that the body that was identified as Jim Jones at the scene could not have been Jones, because the body does not match some essential physical characteristics, thus giving rise to the "Jim Jones double" theory; that Jones may have had a double is supported by some circumstantial evidence, as shown in the Jim Hougan article. In Meier's view, the real Jim Jones is sipping banana daiquiris on a tropical beach somewhere, enjoying his millions in relative peace. Hard to believe? Sure. But, as so often in this study, we are confronted with more questions than answers. One wonders, for instance, where Dwyer was at the moment Jones was killed? Jones wanted him gone; thus he seemed to have been there at the time of the massacre. Was he Jim Jones' executioner, playing the Marlow to his Kurtz? Or was it a bit more like the Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando characters in Apocalypse Now, with Brando's crazed but successful renegade Colonel—surrounded by his Montagnard Army who revere him "as a god"—who must be assassinated by Sheen's Captain Willard.

QuoteI like to think that Jim Jones was Colonel Kurtz; that he had been recruited by the CIA in his early days, and then become increasingly psychotic as his personal and spiritual isolation grew. I like to think that the CIA used him and his Guyana operation for a variety of experiments in situ because it was outside the United States, in the middle of nowhere, far beyond any possibility of congressional interlopers (until events forced Congressman Ryan's hand), and anyway the victims were poor, black, and socialist; by openly accepting Jones' rabid form of "apostolic socialism" and parroting his fear of an attack by the fascists, the Nazis, the KKK, the CIA, the FBI, etc., they had placed themselves beyond the pale. They could not be repatriated.

Holy shit.

QuoteWhat interests us about the October Surprise and the development of the plan into what eventually became known as Iran-Contra is the involvement of some of the strangest people ever to become associated with American politics—which, as the attentive reader may agree, is quite an accomplishment.

QuoteIn this case, we are talking about the woman who first blew the whistle on October Surprise with a book of the same title, a woman who worked for the Reagan Administration and who resigned her staff position, charging sexual harassment: Barbara Honegger. Incredibly, Barbara Honegger brings us back again full circle to the weird, post-war group that first attracted our attention in Book One: the Round Table of Andrija Puharich, the same Round Table whose members were inexplicably linked to the assassination of President Kennedy. For it was Puharich, Honegger, accused murderer Ira Einhorn, and nuclear physicists Saul Paul Sirag and Jack Sarfatti who formed a nucleus of another sort in the 1970s, and who brought The Nine back to life—and back in operation—in the person of Israeli psychic and sometime intelligence agent Uri Geller.

QuoteAs if this story needed to get any stranger, Honegger then—according to accounts published on the Internet—befriended the wife of one of the Iran- Contra pilots, Gunther Russbacher; and now we are well and truly in over our heads.

QuoteA letter to Robert Hunt from Moshe Ben-Manash, Special Envoy to the Israeli Ambassador to Washington, dated November 11, 1993, confirms the presence of Robert McFarlane, Oliver North, Robert Hunt, George Cave, Howard Teicher, Gunther Russbacher and John R. Segal on a flight that left Israel loaded with one pallet of spare parts for the Hawk missile system. Russbacher and Segal (the latter identified as CIA) are mentioned as the pilots of the aircraft.

QuoteSeveral years later, Gunther Russbacher married a woman who believes herself to be descended from royalty, a woman who also believes that she and her brother were experimented upon by the government when they were children, who believes that her eggs were taken from her when she was eleven years old, etc. Her stories—available on the Internet through various sites—are a bizarre trip through a very disturbed psyche. She recounts events whose participants are all high-ranking US government personalities—engaged in weird, uncharacteristic behavior involving Templar chapels, underground submarine bases, and the like—and an individual introduced to her as the "King of the World."

QuoteYet, here we have the intrepid Rayelan Allan Russbacher feeding information to Barbara Honegger on Iran-Contra... the same Barbara Honegger who was Saul Paul Sirag's main squeeze... who has a master's degree in parapsychology... who was an intimate of the circle around Puharich and Sarfatti and Einhorn... ...and who today is a military affairs journalist for the Naval Postgraduate School, Department of the Navy. A journalist who warned Washington a week after the September 11 attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center that a fifth column within the American military and justice systems—including a judge, military officers, pilots, and even Israeli intelligence—had advance warning of the attacks and did nothing to stop them, and may, indeed, have had a hand in planning and carrying out the horrendous events of that day. It... it... boggles the mind.

QuoteSarfatti had been getting calls from someone speaking in a strange, metallic voice stating that it was the voice of a computer aboard a spacecraft hovering over the earth. These calls went on for a while, and would cause the young Sarfatti to wander around dazed.

QuoteThere is a lot of Sarfatti email correspondence available on the Internet, much of which is concerned with quantum mechanics and nuclear physics in general, but some of which has to do with the events surrounding Spectra and The Nine. There are times when Sarfatti is obviously doubtful about the communications, wondering if they were the product of some bizarre sort of intelligence agency mind-control program.

QuoteThe fact that Puharich would also arrange long-term psychic experiments involving children at his farm in upstate New York in the 1970s gives one pause, considering the long military and intelligence background of Puharich.

QuoteOne of the predictions made in the calls was that in twenty years he would become involved with a group of people whose mission was the acceleration of human evolution through contact with these otherworldly agencies. This is exactly what happened, for in 1973 he began to develop contacts with other, like-minded, scientists through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and eventually with Puharich himself. These contacts would eventually culminate in a business venture in the 1980s with Harold Chipman, a CIA Chief of Station in San Francisco, who was involved with SRI and the paranormal testing that went on there with Puharich and Geller, as well as with Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, Ingo Swann, and the whole murder of crows that formed the most strictly controlled investigation of psychic phenomena that the United States had ever known.

QuoteSarfatti claims to have introduced Geller to Jacques Vallee—the French UFO researcher of Passport to Magonia fame—and both to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg would later produce Close Encounters of the Third Kind, using Vallee as a technical adviser: Vallee the Anton LaVey to Spielberg's Ro- man Polanski. The character played by Francois Truffaut in the film is said to be based on Jacques Vallee himself. This same nexus of Puharich and Sarfatti is said to have influenced Gene Roddenberry in his development of the Star Trek television series.

QuoteMark David Chapman is something of an enigma. The back story to his assassination of Lennon does not really compute: the trip around the world, the work for the YMCA that is missing from their files, the visit to war-torn Beirut, the trips back and forth between New York City and Honolulu, the story about the "Little People" in his head, his abrupt decision to plead guilty and avoid a trial ... all of these things put together make him look uncomfortably like your standard political assassin or serial killer.

QuoteIt's Chapman's interior life that interests us most, however. He described his private childhood fantasies to Jack Jones, who recorded them in his biography of Chapman, Let Me Take You Down. Instead of an imaginary playmate, Chapman had an entire kingdom full of imaginary playmates. He called them the Little People, and he was their king. If they dissatisfied him in any way, he would blow them up "and a lot of them would die," but they would forgive him later and everything would be okay. It's possible he got this concept the "Little People" from his fascination with the film The Wizard of Oz.

QuoteThere is no guidance available as to why this deeply committed Christian would have picked Beirut when Jerusalem was also available. No one seems to be able to give an answer to this perplexing question. Beirut was already in the throes of political upheaval and instability, and was only weeks away from full-blown civil war. Mark was one of only two people sent to Beirut by ICCP/Abroad, and he spent very little time there once the shooting started. He made a tape-recording of the small-arms fire going on outside his hotel room window, which he brought back with him and played for friends. He was obviously very shaken and paradoxically excited by this experience. From Fenton Bresler's point of view, he was sent to Beirut to be "blooded."

QuoteAt that time, Mark had developed another, very odd, relationship with a man whose name is only given as the pseudonym "Gene Scott" in Bresler's book, but was later identified as "Dana Reeves" in the Jack Jones biography of Chapman.  This gentleman was an officer with a Georgia sheriff 's department at the time Bresler's book was being written (1989), and it is not known where he is today, but his influence over Mark was powerful and bizarre. Chapman, who was said to despise guns and violence, became a gun enthusiast around this man and seemed to be under the control of his personality in some way. And as it turns out, it was this same mysterious individual who supplied Mark David Chapman with the hollow-point bullets he used to murder John Lennon.

QuoteSome commentators have written that Chapman's trip to Hawaii was for the purpose of committing suicide. Others have said that Chapman went to Hawaii for further training and indoctrination by any one of several classified military operations that were based on the islands. What we do know is that Chapman did, indeed, attempt suicide in Hawaii by means of a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the closed window of his car, but it was a pathetic and failed attempt and Chapman wound up in a mental hospital. This juxtaposition of Hawaii and mental hospital is one that we encountered already in the case of Jim Jones. In Jones' case, the belief is that he committed himself to a hospital or clinic in Hawaii in order to avoid adverse publicity back on the mainland. Chapman would have had no such qualms. Yet, the nexus of Hawaii and hospitals comes up again in the Son of Sam case, where it was revealed that drugs were making their way onto the mainland from Hawaii by being secreted in bags of plasma. The plasma would arrive in a hospital in New York City and the drugs removed there by hospital workers who were one link in the supply chain. This trafficking in narcotics is said to be one of the main sources of income for the Son of Sam cult. Chapman was in Hawaii at the time of the Son of Sam killings, and it is worthwhile to note that he did have access to unexplained sources of income during that time, income that helped finance his trip around the world and his subsequent flights to New York City leading up to the assassination of Lennon in 1980. In fact, one of the strangest episodes of Chapman's visits to New York was his taking a cab through the city and stopping for a few minutes at various apartment buildings where he seemed to be making pickups or deliveries, which makes no sense since Chapman supposedly knew no one in New York. At one point, he offered the cab driver some cocaine, which is also totally out of character for Chapman at that time (this was long after his "drugged out hippie" days in Columbia High School in Georgia) and has never been explained; but if Chapman was making drug deliveries in Manhattan it all begins to make much more sense: everything from the Hawaiian hospital connection to the multiple air fares to New York to the unexplained source of income to the strange cab ride and the offering of cocaine. As I used to tell people in New York in the 1970s and '80s, if you overheard a conversation between two people and it didn't make any sense, it was probably about drugs.

QuoteBresler has noted that all the documentation possessed by Chapman at the time of his arrest checks out. His Hawaiian driver's license was issued in July of 1977, which is about right. The owner of the apartment where he stayed says that he did, indeed, live at the address on Puwa Place in Kailua where he said he was. Everything seems fine. Except that the owner says that Chapman was living with "a woman and three young children," and that they left owing a month's rent, had no electricity in their final month at the complex, and left the apartment in such a mess that it cost two thousand dollars to clean it up. A search of records at the post office and other agencies in Kailua failed to turn up any identification of the mysterious woman and her three children. The records of the apartment complex do not show Chapman as having lived there, even though it is the precise address on his driver's license.

QuoteChapman was duly arrested, strangely shouting at the arresting officers, "I acted alone!"

QuoteIn mid-August 1981, Chapman suddenly went berserk. He began screaming at other prisoners, tearing up his Bible and attempting to flush it down the toilet in his cell, which caused it to overflow. He splashed the water from the toilet at the guards, tore off his clothes, and started screaming like a monkey. (Shades of the Sirhan Sirhan hypnosis session with Dr. Diamond!) It took six men to subdue him, and bundle him off to Bellevue, New York's famous mental hospital. In the ambulance on the way, he spoke to his guards in two entirely different demonic voices, named Lila and Dobar. They said they had been sent to him by Satan. After he was injected with anti-psychotics, the demonic presences began to fade, but not disappear entirely. He was visited by clergymen and prison chaplains of various denominations; all were convinced that Chapman was possessed by demons, a claim that only made Chapman angry. On August 24, 1981 he was sentenced to twenty-to-life at Attica. In Attica, in 1982, he began to invoke Satan again. His wife visited him and tried to exorcise the demons herself, but to no avail. Eventually, Chapman's demons faded once again, and he became somewhat normal.

QuoteTaxi Driver was based, in part, on the George Wallace assassination attempt committed by Arthur Bremer, and on Bremer's diary. Thus, it was a case of art imitating life. Bremer had used a Charter Arms .38 revolver, the same make and model as that later used by Mark David Chapman. Bremer had attempted his assassination of Wallace on May 15, 1972. His Charter Arms revolver only held five bullets, like that used by Chapman eight years later. Yet, Wallace was struck by a minimum of four bullets, and possibly all five. Taking into consideration the fact that three other people were wounded in the same fusillade, it would appear that at least eight bullets had been fired, which immediately raises the ugly specter of a second shooter, and thus of a conspiracy. Wallace himself always claimed that he was the victim of a conspiracy that day. In addition, Bremer's fingerprints were not found on the gun retrieved at the scene, even though the famous film footage of him shooting Wallace shows he was bare-handed and not wearing gloves. An FBI agent retrieved it, not from Bremer, but from the ground where the assassination attempt had taken place, and held on to it for hours. No one knows why. Like Chapman, Bremer traveled extensively in the days leading up to the murder; this for a man whose jobs were as a busboy in a restaurant and as a janitor. In fact, Bremer had also flown to New York City (from Milwaukee) and stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the same hotel favored by Chapman on his original trip to New York. In the days leading up to the Wallace attempt, Bremer had bought a second- hand car, took a helicopter ride around New York City, rented limousines, bought weapons, etc., all on a busboy's salary. Records of his hotel stays, bills, etc. were seized by the FBI and not made available to the press. Bremer's half-sister—Gail Aiken—was a close associate of Reverend Jerry Owen, the man who befriended Sirhan Sirhan in the days leading up to the Robert Kennedy assassination: yet another minister of religion with mysterious ties to assassination and murder. Reverend Owen was believed to be one of the sources of income for Sirhan Sirhan, and one of the members of the assassination conspiracy, according to researchers Turner and Christian.

QuoteOn March 30, 1981, John Hinckley, Jr.—strongly influenced by Taxi Driver (based in part on Bremer) and by Chapman's murder of John Lennon—attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, armed with a revolver and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. A case of life imitating art imitating life.

QuoteThe Hinckley family knew the Bush family; both were in the oil business. Hinckley's father had an appointment the day of the Reagan assassination attempt with George Bush's brother in West Virginia.

This is all written by one guy? This is some amazing Lo5 stuff right here.

Yeah, it is. 

He does consider coincidence may possibly have some form of significance, based on Jung and Pauli's conversations in regards to synchronicity.  That may explain why he seems to linger on such things, though his main focus is nevertheless the "scarlet thread" of murder running through American religion and politics, which is a pretty broad subject on its own.

QuoteItem: May 1985. Reagan at the Nazi cemetery in Bitberg, Germany. Laying a wreath and memorializing the Waffen SS as "victims." Reagan also proclaimed April 10th as "Croatian Day" in the United States. April 10th, of course, is the anniversary of the day the Nazi Ustashi government under Pavelic took control in Croatia and began its reign of terror in the Balkans, including Catholic Father Kamber's establishment of a concentration camp at Doboj.  The entire Ustashi government, including Pavelic, managed to emigrate safely to Juan Peron's Argentina after the war.

Item: October 1987. The program for the National Republican Heritage Groups Council meeting lists, as co-chairmen, Anna Chennault (the Taiwanese lobbyist we came across during Nixon's 1968 "October Surprise" negotiations with Vietnam), and Laszlo Pasztor (former leader of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Youth Division, the Hungarian Nazi Party organ, during World War II). The Host Committee lists such notables as Romanian Iron Guardist (and supporter of Nazi war criminal Valerian Trifa) "Reverend" Florian Galdau; Italian fascist Phil Guarino, who was an associate of Licio Gelli and Roberto Calvi of Masonic P-2 fame; and even that doyenne of the cosmetics industry, Hungarian émigrée Christine Valmy.

Item: September 1988. A flurry of news reports concerning a heavy concentration of Nazis on presidential candidate George Bush's newly-formed Coalition of American Nationalities, including the usual grouping of Romanian Iron Guardists, Ukrainian SS supporters, Croatian Nazis, and Holocaust-denial activists. This list includes Fred Malek, who, when working for the Nixon White House, compiled an enemies list of "Jewish sounding names." Malek resigned his position as Bush advisor immediately. He would eventually—and quietly—enter the administration after the election of George Bush.

Fred Malek went on to more recent notoriety as a top aide to Sarah Palin, and one of her staunchest defenders in the party in the wake of her resignation.  By the way.

QuoteThe presence of Nazi war criminals in Africa has rarely been addressed, if only because Africa itself is still a "heart of darkness" for most Americans and Europeans, a treacherous land of incomprehensible intrigue. That Nazis such as Siegfried Mueller would have found their way to the Congo comes as no surprise. The opportunities for war and the spoils of war were too numerous. In addition, with the advent of Lumumba, the struggle became characterized as a war between Capitalism and Communism, between the "values" of the West versus those of the East. The renegade Nazis came down squarely on the side of the West and Capitalism, fighting their old enemy the Soviet Communists on the battlegrounds of Katanga province. Enlisted to assist the efforts of the United States, and of the Belgian forces in the region, Nazi mercenaries were only too glad to offer their expertise in torture, interrogation, and military drill. This is the dirty secret of the African wars of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. More attention has been paid to the presence of Nazi war criminals in Latin America, but the activities of Nazis in Africa, Asia and Australia are only now coming to light in the literature.

For instance, under Otto Skorzeny's leadership, the Middle East became a safe haven for Nazis on the run. Moving there in 1953, Skorzeny managed to find posts for a lot of his old friends. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spiritual leader for thousands of Muslims in Palestine, had worked for Schellenberg's counter-intelligence division of the SS. King Farouk of Egypt had collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis during the war years. Skorzeny became the "chief military adviser" to General Mohammed Naguib of the new republic in Egypt, selected and groomed for that position by an "unholy alliance" of former Nazi spymaster and now head of the CIA's anti-Soviet effort in Europe, Reinhard Gehlen, and the CIA's own Allen Dulles. Skorzeny began the happy task of recruiting as many former SS officers as he could find to fill the ranks of what would become Egyptian strongman Nasser's secret police, including some four hundred SS men as a special operations group involved in the training of Palestinian commandos for attacks across the Gaza Strip.  Members of Field Marshall Rommel's Afrika Korps were also located and turned over to Nasser's command and, it is said, that some of these men were involved in the quiet liquidation of Jews in Egypt in the 1950s. 

But, in addition to the rank-and-file SS criminals sponsored by the Skorzeny/Nasser/Dulles triumvirate, there were also the superstars. These men included Adolf Eichmann, who sojourned in Egypt before moving on to Argentina; General Oskar Dirlewanger, the Butcher of Warsaw; Leopold Gleim, in charge of the SS in Poland; and, even more ominously, a gaggle of concentration camp medical men. Dr. Hans Eisele was Buchenwald's medical officer, and he was recruited by Skorzeny together with Heinrich Willerman, his opposite number at Dachau. These men formed a core of specialists in interrogation and torture techniques, seconded to the Egyptian secret service.

QuoteOne does not automatically think of South Africa when one discusses chemical and biological weapons, but during the era of apartheid and before Nelson Mandela was released from prison and became that country's first black president, the Republic of South Africa pursued a "weapons of mass destruction" campaign as serious as any other. In cooperation with foreign firms and agencies, the South African Defence Force (SADF) and its CBW project leader—Dr. Wouter Basson—developed an arsenal of poisons, both chemical and biological, for use against critics of the regime. The cabal in charge of this effort included the chief of staff of the defense force, the chief of staff of intelligence, and the surgeon general, as well as Dr. Basson.

QuoteThe toxins involved included "anthrax in cigarettes, botulinum in milk and paraoxon in whiskey—in the Commission's view clearly murder weapons." Even more bizarre was the baboon fetus. The inclusion of a baboon foetus on the list, dated late July 1989 (just prior to such a foetus being found in the garden of Archbishop Tutu's house), as well as a reference to chemical and biological operatives, indicated that the items may well have found their way, directly or indirectly, into the hands of operatives of the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB). The CCB, of course, was the Orwellian-nomenclatured South African secret police, responsible for assassinations in other African countries as well as within South Africa, and which maintained offices in Europe for monitor- ing anti-apartheid activities and conducting operations against those who opposed white rule in South Africa. The CCB has claimed responsibility for numerous murders in Africa, many of which were committed with toxins developed under Project Coast. Another front company for Project Coast and Dr. Basson was Delta G Scientific, which was involved in the development of street drugs such as ecstasy and methaqualone. This was admittedly used for crowd control, but also for assassinations in which prisoners were injected with muscle relaxants ... and then dropped from planes. In addition, Basson was sent to Croatia in 1991 during a negotiation to buy 500 kg of methaqualone from the Croatians (including "high-ranking government officials"), which was brought back to South Africa. This is the deal that eventually led to Basson's arrest when he was discovered holding $40 million worth of Vatican bearer bonds. His involvement in Project Coast gradually became revealed after his arrest (in Switzerland) and the discovery of the four trunks of documents in his possession. But Croatia was not the only country on Basson's list. He also visited Taiwan to meet with CBW specialists there, as well as the United States, where—ac- cording to the Commission documents—the South African surgeon general met in 1981 with "Americans who were part of the United States CBW programme"; these Commission documents "demonstrate their willingness to assist the South Africans." As a reminder, this would have been during the Reagan administration and during the time of the United States' boycott of trade with South Africa.

QuotePat Robertson is not only a Christian minister with a congregation composed of television viewers who donate heavily to his cause. Robertson is also a businessman. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, and the argument could be made that if more ministers and priests were businesspeople, there would be less corruption in the churches and clergymen would be more understanding of the day-to-day stresses of dealing with jobs, employers, volatile markets, and the like. The concept of the "worker priest" was popular for a while in Europe in the years after World War II, although it gradually took on a Marxist tinge.

Robertson, however, is no "worker priest." His business deals are routinely in the millions of dollars and involve the exploitation of the natural resources of developing nations, what used to be called "the Third World." Investing heavily in Africa, Robertson created the African Development Corporation, or ADC. This was allegedly not connected in any way with his religious broadcasting operations, although it is hard to tell how these companies are financed.

What is known for sure is that, in 1992, the ADC entered into negotiations with the Zairean government of President Mobutu for the development of the diamond trade in the southern mining town of Tshikapa, along with projects including logging in other areas of Zaire. The idea, as touted by the Robertson organization, was that it had secured Mobutu's blessing to use some of the profits from these enterprises to boost humanitarian aid projects in Zaire. The fact that Mobutu had already plundered his country's economy, banking hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars in foreign accounts in Switzerland and Belgium, suggests the cynicism of this self-congratulation. It has been estimated that Mobutu could have single-handedly solved his country's economic and humanitarian problems with the funds he had salted away abroad while his countrymen's per capita annual income was something like $500, belying the necessity of a Robertson–Mobutu partnership.

Robertson initiated Operation Blessing as a tax-exempt humanitarian mission to help those less fortunate in Africa, buying three Caribou aircraft in the process, for the ostensible purpose of flying medical supplies and doctors to those areas of Zaire being flooded by refugees, both internal refugees as well as those from the growing Rwandan crisis across the border. The Caribou are designed for short-take-off and landing (STOL): Vietnam-era aircraft ideal for short runways in the jungle. Robertson went on the air in the United States extolling the virtues of his operation and showing how the poor Zaireans and Rwandans were being helped by the smiling Christian American efficiency of Operation Blessing.

Unfortunately for the poor Zaireans and Rwandans, Operation Blessing was largely a sham. Pilots who had been employed by the organization revealed to newsmen that their job was not hauling medicine to Goma or the other regions where people were starving to death or dying from a host of treatable illnesses; rather, they were involved with moving mining and dredging equipment to Robertson's diamond mines. It got so bad that one of the pilots had "Operation Blessing" removed from the plane's tailfins. Out of forty flights that had been flown in Zaire for Operating Blessing, only one or two had actually had anything to do with humanitarian aid.

QuoteEventually, in 1995, Robertson pulled the plug on the African wing of Operation Blessing (possibly due to all the bad publicity), but continued with his business deals in other parts of Africa, such as in Liberia in support of President Charles Taylor, a man with a human rights abuse record at least as long as Mobutu's. Taylor's use of death squads, his support of mercenary groups who use Liberia as a staging area for attacks in other countries, and his involvement in arms trading made him a '90s equivalent to former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin; he had even been known to conduct torture and interrogation sessions in his own home, the Executive Mansion. Corruption was rife and unapologetic in Liberia, with Taylor and his cronies pocketing at least 20% of Liberia's annual budget, according to a 1998 US Department of State Country Report on Liberia.

In 1998 Robertson created a company called Freedom Gold for investment in Liberia. His focus remained roughly the same: the exploitation of Liberia's raw materials and natural resources—gold, diamonds, oil, lumber—with the expectation that profits would be plowed back into the Liberian economy for humanitarian efforts. Well, Liberia—like Zaire—certainly needs humanitarian aid, of that there can be no question. The problem arises when dictators, consumed with greed and the desire for personal wealth, make deals with Christian ministers-turned-businessmen. There is no earthly way that profits would have been reinvested in the poor of either Liberia or Zaire in any significant amount, when the leaders of those respective governments had control over the profits. It would have been naïve to think so. That Robertson himself would have been remunerated for his assistance to these regimes goes without saying; but that he would have been able to bring this money back to the people of Zaire or Liberia, untouched by the corrupt fingers of Mobutu or Taylor, was impossible.

QuoteAnother "Christian" ruler supported by Robertson on television and in his books is Jorge Serrano, the bizarre President of Guatemala who wanted to create a Pentecostal Christian government in Guatemala. The list goes on and on. Here is Robertson sitting down to dinner with notorious Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson.  Here is Robertson raising two million dollars for Guatemalan military dictator General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores.  Here is Robertson being saluted by the Contras at their base camp in Honduras.  Here is Robertson once again in Guatemala, this time in support of death-squad leader and eventual president Rios Montt, a born-again Christian who suspended his country's constitution and proceeded to murder thousands of his fellow citizens.

QuoteThe fact that the Christian Right raised millions of dollars in aid to the Contras has been "backburnered" in most histories of the affair. Indeed, Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network was only one source of aid and support to the Contras; in addition, we find the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon as well as the Knights of Malta fraternal society involved in fund-raising and other efforts on behalf of the rebels.

The Knights of Malta participation is interesting because, at the time, its head was J. Peter Grace, an old friend of Pat Robertson and the godfather to his children. It was Grace who famously hired a Nazi scientist, Otto Ambrose, to work for the W. R. Grace Corporation even though his past as a chemist and director of I.G. Farben during the war was well-documented. Grace seems to be another of those monied Americans who feel an investment in fascism is always good for business, and who support (sometimes secretly, sometimes openly) all manner of right-wing dictators and death-squad capos in the defense of Christianity, democracy, and white supremacy.

As for Reverend Moon and his Unification Church, this convicted felon (for tax evasion) has supported the extreme right in America for decades. The Unification Church itself fronts for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, and when the author himself was approached by the Church in the 1970s they owned—in addition to a network of churches with a sophisticated marketing campaign aimed at scientists and other intellectuals—a rifle factory in Korea. Reverend Moon himself believes that Jesus will return to earth as a Korean, and he has let it be known that he believes this Second Coming involves his own person. Incredibly, with all of this clearly heretical belief openly promulgated, Christian ministers such as Pat Robertson have no problem at all in sharing a podium with Moon and enjoying the international reach of the Unification Church.

The main organizer of the private funding endeavor was Major General John Singlaub (retired), who came to brief prominence during the Iran-Contra investigation. Singlaub, a decorated Army veteran who had worked closely with the CIA over the years, took control of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in 1984.

QuoteThe WACL is a notorious hotbed of Nazis, pro-Nazis, and neo-Nazis from every continent. The number of groups involved in the WACL is almost embarrassing in its composition of ethnic organizations devoted not only to the destruction of Communism, but to the advancement of a neo-fascist agenda. Singlaub was able to find support from the governments of Taiwan and South Korea, as well as from Saudi Arabia, in his globe-trotting mission: support that went to the Contras in their efforts to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

QuotePresident Reagan's support for both Singlaub and the WACL is also well-documented. For instance, it was Reagan who, in 1983, told Yaroslav Stetsko, former Nazi premier of Ukraine during the War, "Your struggle is our struggle. Your dream is our dream."  At the time, Stetsko was a leader of the secretive Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN-B), which collaborated extensively with the Nazis in their invasion of the Ukraine, and in 1983 was representing the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), part of the bewildering matrix of acronyms and ethnic subgroups that are the legs and arms of the WACL.

QuotePrescott Bush was an active Nazi supporter, whose company—Union Banking, a subsidiary of W. A. Harriman & Company—had its assets seized by the US Government in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. This was done by US Government Vesting Order No. 248, for those who think I am making this up. The gist of the government's case was that, for many years, Prescott Bush and George Walker (his father-in-law) had been actively raising money to support the fledgling Nazi Party, laundering the funds through Harriman and its subsidiary Union Banking. According to Loftus and Aarons in their Secret War Against the Jews, George Herbert Walker was "one of Hitler's most powerful supporters in the United States," and was under Congressional investigation as early as 1934, when it was believed that Walker's Hamburg-Amerika Line "subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States."

QuoteEugenics was the new "science" of population control, which was a code word for genocide and "ethnic cleansing," and the Bush–Walker team provided logistical support for the Third International Congress of Eugenics that was held in New York on August 21-23, 1932, at the American Museum of Natural History, ensuring that Nazi eugenicists were present at the Congress by providing free passage aboard their shipping line, Hamburg-Amerika.

QuoteIt is clear that some of the most important businessmen in America felt they had a vested interest in promoting the Nazi Party, and through their support of ancillary programs such as the Eugenics Congress, we can begin to put together a more complete picture of this interest: America for white people, Europe for the Nazis, forming a broad alliance of power stretching over both sides of the Atlantic and ensuring the enslavement of millions upon millions of people who were not members of the club.

Quote"After the war, certain influential members of the Mellon family maintained close ties with the CIA. The Mellon family foundations have been used repeatedly as conduits for Agency funds. Furthermore, Richard Helms was a frequent weekend guest of the Mellon patriarchs in Pittsburgh during his tenure as CIA director (1966-1973)." In addition to the Mellons, members of the Morgan, Vanderbilt, and DuPont families were very active in the OSS making it essentially a "rich man's club." David Bruce himself was the son of a US Senator and a millionaire even before his marriage to Ailsa Mellon.

QuoteThus, William Mellon Hitchcock's presence at dinner in London in 1962 with Thomas Corbally and Stephen Ward is highly suggestive of an intelligence angle. At the time of the Profumo affair, Hitchcock was flying back and forth between New York and London: in London, to hang out with Ward and Corbally (the latter will become important a bit later on), and in New York to hang out with Timothy Leary, who had just returned from an aborted LSD-commune experiment in Mexico and was looking for another site. He found one at Hitchcock's Dutchess County, New York, estate: Millbrook.

QuoteAs it turns out, Hitchcock had so many ties to the intelligence community—mostly through banking circles and money-laundering operations—that it raises one's paranoia level to a new ... high. As described in The Nine, LSD was introduced to the American public through the CIA, which wanted to test its effectiveness for everything from mind control to crowd control. We then discover Hitchcock's involvement with the CIA and CIA-front organizaions, such as Castle Bank and Resorts International. We also see Hitchcock turning state's evidence against his old LSD chemist, Nicholas Sand, even though Hitchcock himself admitted he had financed Sand's operation for the manufacture and distribution of millions of hits of LSD.

QuoteRichard Mellon Scaife's antecedents were also intelligence-connected in World War II. His father Alan Scaife was a major in the OSS. The Mellon side of the family, of course, included all those OSS Mellons with their cozy relationships extending to the modern incarnation of the OSS, the CIA. While Bill Hitchcock's involvement with twentieth century American history seems divided between the LSD culture on one side and money laundering on the other—including a variety of intelligence and high-level Republican Party cooperative efforts—Richard Scaife's politics are worn on his sleeve for all to see. He has been identified in the mainstream media as the treasure chest for the anti-Clinton campaigns of the 1990s, supporting a wide variety of efforts to destroy the Democrat. We learned of the Paula Jones scandal through Scaife's investigation into Clinton's private life, an investigation undertaken with private detectives and well-placed bribes, as well as with investigative reporters working for his own newspaper. It was Scaife who joined hands with Pat Robertson—he of the "jewels for Jesus" investments in Zaire—to promote a video cassette purporting to tell the truth about Clinton the mass murderer entitled "The Clinton Chronicles," a conspiracy theory wrapped in innuendo and basted with misdirection which, if anything, gives the very idea of "conspiracy theory" a bad name.

QuoteThe plan had been to have George Bush serve for two terms, during which a consolidation of power could take place: the "ideological forces" mentioned by Scaife in 1994. When Clinton threatened that, action was required.

QuoteLucianne Goldberg had worked for Murray Chotiner, Nixon's first and virtually only campaign manager. Chotiner had worked for Nixon since his first run at a political office after the War, orchestrating the red-baiting and Jew-baiting whisper tactics that helped Nixon in his California campaigns. Chotiner's involvement with organized crime is no secret; his delight in dirty tricks was passed on to his student as a virtual religion.

QuoteWord of her state of mind reached Goldberg through another friend, and Goldberg approached Tripp for more information. About all Tripp could come up with on her own were the shenanigans that took place around the time of the Foster suicide, and a lot of gossip about various staff people and the lack of organization within the administration. Goldberg was not satis- fied with that. It just wasn't enough to sell a book ... or destroy a president. She wanted more. Tripp eventually made the acquaintance of another White House staffer, a former intern named Monica Lewinsky. Monica claimed to have been having a love affair with Bill Clinton. This was just what Goldberg was looking for.

QuoteDuring this time, several other events were taking place behind the scenes. In the first case, the anti-Clinton lobby had worked itself into a frenzy with something called "The Clinton Chronicles." Financed by Scaife, this was an "exposé" of the Clinton mafia and its evil machinations—including murder—over the years. As mentioned before, the source material for the Chronicles was rather flimsy, largely based as it was on the "revelations" of a "disgruntled former employee," Larry Nichols. Nichols had been fired from his state government post in Arkansas because he had been using the office facilities to raise funds for ... the Contras.

That concludes book two. 

Now onto book three, "The Manson Secret."

The record of Manson's visit to the Scientology Centre in LA is found:

QuoteIn Los Angeles, he went to the Scientology Celebrity Center. Now this was more like it. Here he could mingle with the elite. I managed to obtain a copy of the original log entry: "7/31/68, new name, Charlie Manson, Devt., No address, In for processing = Ethics = Type III." The receptionist—who, by Type III, meant "psychotic"—sent him to the Ethics office, but he never showed up.

QuoteThe Process struck me as a group of occult provocateurs, using radical Christianity as a front. They were adamantly interested in Yippie politics. They boasted to me of various rallies which their vibrations alone had transformed into riots. They implied that there was some kind of connection between the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and their own mere presence on the scene.

QuoteBernard Fensterwald, head of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, told me that Sirhan Sirhan had some involvement with the Process. Peter Chang, the district attorney of Santa Cruz, showed me a letter from a Los Angeles police official to the chief of police in San Jose, warning him that the Process had infiltrated biker gangs and hippie communes.

And Ed Sanders wrote in Win (Workshop in Nonviolence) magazine, "[W]ord came out of Los Angeles of a current FBI investigation of the RFK murder, the investigation growing, as the source put it, out of 'the Manson case.' Word came from another source, this one in the halls of Government itself, that several police and investigatory jurisdictions have information regarding other murders that may have been connected to the Robert Kennedy shooting: murders that occurred after RFK's. A disturbing fact in this regard is that one agency in the Federal Bureaucracy (not the FBI) has stopped a multi-county investigation by its own officers that would have probed into such matters as the social and religious activities of Sirhan Sirhan in early '68, and into the allegations regarding RFK-connected murders."

QuoteConspiracy researcher Mae Brussell put me in contact with Preston Guillory, a former deputy sheriff, who told me, "We had been briefed for a few weeks prior to the actual raiding of Spahn Ranch. We had a sheaf of memos on Manson, that they had automatic weapons at the ranch, that citizens had complained about hearing machine-guns fired at night, that firemen from the local fire station had been accosted by armed members of Manson's band and told to get out of the area, all sorts of complaints like this. We had been advised to put anything relating to Manson on a memo submitted to the station, because they were supposedly gathering information for the raid we were going to make. Deputies at the station of course started asking, 'Why aren't we going to make the raid sooner?' I mean, Manson's a parole violator, machine-guns have been heard, we know there's narcotics and we know there's booze. He's living at the Spahn Ranch with a bunch of minor girls in complete violation of his parole. Deputies at the station quite frankly became very annoyed that no action was being taken about Manson.

My contention is this—the reason Manson was left on the street was because our department thought that he was going to attack the Black Panthers. We were getting intelligence briefings that Manson was anti-black and he had supposedly killed a Black Panther, the body of which could not be found, and the department thought that he was going to launch an attack on the Black Panthers...."

QuoteModern writers like Thomas Harris (who created the unforgettable Hannibal Lecter) have taken this idea one step further: if the serial killer is indeed outside the normal realm of human behavior, then—on an existential level—what does he represent? By comparing the bizarre actions and beliefs of a serial killer to those of cannibals, primitive shamans, etc., we are drawn to the conclusion that these extreme cases of human behavior—eating human flesh, becoming possessed by spiritual forces—point the way to a different view of society, and of reality itself. Thomas Harris' killers are seeking transformation: either spiritual or psychological transformation or actual physical change. They use murder, torture, and pain as means to this end. In this they are no different from organized killing societies such as the SS, for Hitler himself believed he was using the Nazi Party to create a "new man."

QuotePerhaps the most striking feature of the war from the medical point of view has been the enormous scale upon which its conditions have produced functional nervous disorders, a scale far surpassing any previous war, although the Russo-Japanese campaign gave indications of the mental and nervous havoc which the conditions of modern warfare are able to produce. —W. H. R. Rivers to the John Rylands Library, April 9, 1919

QuoteRivers would devote a great deal of his time towards an understanding of the relationship between "Medicine, Magic and Religion" (as a collection of his essays is entitled), looking for a solution to the problem of the mind-body dichotomy. This, of course, is the bedrock of what would become the mind- control programs of the Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese and others, although Rivers—a humanitarian and idealist—would presumably have been horrified to see his insights result in such experimentation.

QuoteEach personality may remember what has happened to the other personalities, or more usually may not. This type of amnesia is common in cases of DID, and was of intense interest to the CIA scientists of MK-ULTRA. Yet, involved with the already heady experience of dealing with a serial killer who may be suffering from DID, we also have—in the fictional case of Psycho but also in the actual case of Ed Gein—the concept of transformation.

QuoteHis goal—after being turned down by several sex-change clinics—was to become a woman, and to do this he would don a woman's actual skin, or a skin suit composed of pieces of various women. That this smacks of pure lycanthropy, as practiced by shamanistic cults the world over, albeit with animal skins, usually goes unnoticed. Yet, to further drive home his message, Harris has his serial killer insert the larva of a specific type of moth into the mouths of his victims when he dumps their bodies. The moth, of course, is a symbol of transformation.

QuoteA more pressing case before us, however, is that of convicted serial killer Arthur Shawcross. In Shawcross we have all the elements of a paranoid fantasy that even Hollywood would find a hard time digesting. A Vietnam veteran, child molester, rapist, and murderer who is set free only to kill again. A man who claimed a history of violent encounters in Vietnam ... but whose official Army records deny any substance to the stories. A man whose brain shows evidence of surgical intervention, but whose Army medical records were classified and not permitted to be reviewed by his own defense team. A man who claimed he heard voices, haunted by ghosts no one else could see.

QuoteIn the United States, we marginalize political assassins. They are either crazed loners—like Oswald, Hinckley, Chapman—or they are marginal people, such as the Palestinian Sirhan B. Sirhan. The established ruling class of a country cannot accept a sane, reasonable assassin any more than they can accept the points of view of their political or military enemies. Assassins are, by definition, insane or somehow racially or ethnically "other," if not actually inferior. They do not come from the body politic. They are outsiders, and their outsider status is what causes them to commit these crimes. We cannot afford to give these assassins a soap box from which to convince us of the rightness of their actions, because we may be swayed by a person who is so consumed by political conviction that he picks up a gun and rids the country of someone we may be tempted to realize was a tyrant, and by extension therefore to question the present government altogether. So, we eventually accept a subliminal message every time an assassin is murdered or otherwise silenced before he or she can stand trial: to attack the king is insanity.

QuoteThe central concept behind the shamanistic initiation is the controlled derangement (reorganization?) of the human mind in such a way that it follows a predictable and useful pattern. I use the term "shamanistic" in the sense that Mircea Eliade and others have done

QuoteThe goal was to create the perfect spy and the perfect assassin. The CIA claims they did not succeed at either, at least not through their mind-control projects which fit under the umbrella of MK-ULTRA. However, when we examine the claims and counterclaims of those involved in debunking or supporting the "repressed memory syndrome" concept, we will see that someone, somewhere must be lying.

QuoteAs Eliade writes, "The strange behavior of future shamans has not failed to attract the attention of scholars, and from the middle of the past century several attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon of shamanism as a mental disorder. But the problem was wrongly put. For, on the one hand, it is not true that shamans always are or always have to be neuropathics; on the other hand, those among them who had been ill became shamans precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cured.... But if shamanism cannot simply be identified with a psychopathological phenomenon, it is nevertheless true that the shamanic vocation often implies a crisis so deep that it sometimes borders on madness.... But I should like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane; it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology."

QuoteDemonic possession became a household phrase in the 1970s with the publication of the novel The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty, a Hollywood screenwriter. As is well-known by now, the novel was based on an actual case of possession that took place in a small town in Maryland while Blatty was a student at Georgetown University. What is not so well-known is that Blatty himself had been an intelligence officer, specializing in psychological warfare, in the years before writing his famous novel. It was Blatty who also wrote the screenplay for a film that came to be known as The Ninth Configuration (1980) after his original novel Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane, a book and film that come as close to describing the arcane world of military psychiatry as any (imagine Catch-22 meets The Manchurian Candidate).

QuoteThis condition would have been of utmost interest to the mind-control researchers for all that was implied in terms of memory and control. If the scientists could create an alter personality in a given subject, for instance, they could create a robot. This would be true only if the scientists were able to control the alter themselves. This would probably be difficult to do, since the evidence at the moment suggests that the alter is a defense mechanism of the original personality, to protect it against a traumatic episode (child abuse, for instance, being the most common and most documented cause). Also, there is a danger that the alter—possessed of a perfect memory—would not be the ideal mechanism for creating spies and assassins. Yet, the basic functions of multiple personality disorder would have attracted the scientists and they would have sought ways in which they could create and/or manipulate multiples. Fortunately for them, there is a large literature on voluntary possession. As documented by Oesterreich and in other places, this experience is worldwide, and the author has been privileged to witness this phenomenon firsthand in various countries, notably in Haiti, in the United States, and in parts of Asia.

QuoteTherefore, it would be only a matter of time before the mind-control researchers began to scour the records of occultists, magicians, witches, voodoo priests and Siberian shamans to isolate the techniques that were used since time immemorial to supplant a person's normal, comfortable, everyday consciousness and replace it with a powerful, all-knowing (and sometime violent, and always deceptive) alter personality; and to use those alters to uncover the action of deep memory, for MK-ULTRA was, at its core, an assault on the Land of Memory: the creation of new, false memories and the eradication of old, dangerous ones.

The Finders case, documented below, is a very, very strange one.  It's worth looking into on your own, as even these extracts don't do justice to just how crazy the whole thing is.

I normally don't go in for this sort of thing, but if you suffer from PTSD or similar related to child abuse or ritualistic killing of animals, you may want to skip this entire post.  Yes, that's a trigger warning.

QuoteAlthough there are many documented cases of children being trained as fanatic soldiers and killers—especially in Asia, in some celebrated cases in the Golden Triangle, and in Africa—we choose to believe that this is a bizarre aberration. Yet, as we investigate the evidence in the following pages, we will walk into the center of a nightmare of unbelievable proportions because this single, documented, American case contains within itself all the elements that we—as serious researchers, journalists and historians—have been taught to treat with skepticism and condescension. We will uncover an organization that was trolling for child subjects (victims) all over the globe; that used these children in strange rituals involving animal sacrifice; that sent these children to secret schools abroad; and that—when on the verge of discovery and exposure—was finally protected by the CIA.

QuoteOn February 5, 1987 the US Customs Service received a phone call from Sergeant JoAnn VanMeter of the Juvenile Division of the Tallahassee Police Department in Florida. Six very young children—aged 2 to 7 years— had been found in the apparent custody of two well-dressed men. The children were scampering in a park in Tallahassee, but they appeared to be ill-fed, ill-clothed—some not wearing underwear—and filthy. An anonymous tip to the Tallahassee PD was enough for the police to undertake a routine investigation, questioning the adults and the children.

QuoteOne of the two men now in custody gave the police a business card with a statement on one side saying that the "bearer knew his constitutional rights to remain silent and that he intended to do so." The children could not name the two men either. In fact, they didn't know the "function and purpose of telephones, televisions and toilets" and further stated that "they were not allowed to live indoors and were only given food as a reward."

QuoteThey further said that they were on their way to Mexico to go to a school for smart kids.

Remember this, because this...claim...will reappear elsewhere.

QuoteCustoms said they would investigate the links of the men to an address in the D.C. area, discovered through a check of the license plate on the van. And this is where it all came together ... and then exploded apart.

QuoteA search warrant was obtained, and a Detective Bradley of the Washington MPD informed the Customs agents that an informer reported that a cult known as the Finders was operating out of those addresses, and that the Finders were involved in blood sacrifice, sex orgies involving children, etc.

QuoteBy the time the warrant was served, there were no children at the cult headquarters at 3918/20 W. Street, NW, but a large quantity of children's clothing was found, including diapers and other clothing, though nothing for children past pre-school age. The worse was yet to come, however.

QuoteIn another part of the building, filled with computers and files, the detectives found detailed instructions for "obtaining children for unspecified purposes." I will let Special Agent, US Customs Service, Ramon J. Martinez continue in his own words:

"The instructions included the impregnation of female members of the community known as the Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping. There were telex messages using MCI account numbers between a computer terminal believed to be located in the same room, and others located across the country and in foreign locations. One such telex specifically ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through a contact in the Chinese Embassy there.... Other documents identified interests in high-tech transfers to the United Kingdom, numerous properties under the control of the Finders, a keen interest in terrorism, explosives, and the evasion of law enforcement."

The next day, Friday February 6, 1987, Martinez and Bradley then proceeded to the Finders' warehouse at 1307 4th Street, NE. If anything, the take in the warehouse was more horrifying than what was discovered at cult headquarters. Again, to quote Special Agent Martinez:

"I was able to observe numerous documents which described explicit sexual conduct between the members of the community known as Finders. I also saw a large collection of photographs of unidentified persons. Some of the photographs were nudes, believed to be of members of the Finders. There were numerous photos of children, some nude, at least one of which was a photo of a child "on display" and appearing to accent the child's genitals. I was only able to examine a very small amount of the photos at this time. However, one of the officers presented me with a photo album for my review. The album contained a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a "blood ritual." The ritual centered around the execution of at least two goats. The photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goat's "womb" and the "baby goats" inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat's head to one of the children."

QuoteThe graphic nature of the photographs emphasizes still further that no mere ritual sacrifice of the goats was intended, but a complete disembowelment and dismembering, including a concentration on the sexual organs of the animals.

Quote"Further inspection of the premises disclosed numerous files relating to activities of the organization in different parts of the world. Locations I observed are as follows: London, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Africa, Costa Rica, and "Europe"...There was one file entitled "Pentagon Break-In," and others referring to members operating in foreign countries."

QuoteWhat the agents faced was a mountain of evidence pointing to an international trade in children and the use of children in horrible rituals which were photographed for posterity. They found passports and other travel documents, details for trafficking in foreign currency and in high technology transfer to foreign countries.

QuoteAll passport data had been turned over to the State Department, who told MPD that the passports and the travel represented by the passports was within the law, "even though this involved "travel to Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam from the late 1950s to mid 1970s." Further, Martinez was told that "the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review."

QuoteWhat did the Finders do with the children after they"found" them? Where did they go? Where was the school in Mexico? What did they do there? How many more were there? And ... where are they now and what are they doing? And to whom?

QuoteWhen Lee Harvey Oswald made his famous trip by bus to Mexico City in 1963, ostensibly to obtain a visa for Cuba, he sat next to an Englishman by the name of John Howard Bowen, alias Albert Osborne. Bowen was an "itinerant preacher" of the Baptist persuasion, an elderly gentleman who traveled frequently to Mexico, according to Warren Commission exhibits (mostly FBI interrogation reports). When confronted by the FBI, Bowen claimed he had borrowed the identity of Albert Osborne, an Englishman who was also an itinerant Baptist preacher, when investigated by the Mexican authorities at a time when he couldn't find his own identification. He claimed that Osborne was an Englishman but that he, Bowen, was born in the United States. Unfortunately, the other passengers on that fabled bus trip to Mexico City identified Bowen as an Englishman, and eventually the FBI concluded that Bowen and Osborne were one and the same. 

What is interesting is the fact that Bowen-Osborne was a devoted Nazi both before and during World War II, opposing America's entry into the war, and ran a fascist camp for boys in rural Tennessee until it was closed down in 1942.  At the time of the Kennedy Assassination in 1963, there were persistent rumors that Bowen-Osborne was running a school for assassins in Mexico, somewhere in Pueblo, under the guise of a "missionary effort."

QuoteGradually, stories of Bowen's connections to American paramilitary organizations began to circulate, including his involvement with the Minutemen.

QuoteItem: Los Angeles, May 13, 1964. Less than six months after the Kennedy assassination. The 19th Annual Convention and Scientific Program of the Society of Biological Psychiatry takes place. During the convention, it is reported that 450 children, aged 4 to 15, at Creedmore State Hospital have been subjected to a massive program of hallucinogen experimentation, incorporating everything from LSD to psilocybin to various other drugs. Doses are 150 mcg of LSD or 20 mg of psilocybin, daily, "for periods up to several months." The children ranged from autistic to "slightly schizophrenic" (whatever that means).

QuoteThe horrifying visions of the shaman-in-training are nearly identical, if not exactly identical, to those that obsess the serial killer: the dismemberments, the excruciating pain, the visions, the voices in the head, the blood lust. It is, as Eliade points out, tantamount to psychopathology. In the case of the shaman, he is eventually cured of this disorder even though it may last for a long time. His society understands what is going on, and they have mechanisms for dealing with it; the shaman will be a valuable addition to their society after the cure, because then he will be able to communicate with the spirit world, to intercede for his neighbors and to foretell the future. The crucial difference between a shaman and a serial killer may be that the latter has externalized the psychological process. What for a shaman—as well as for the artist, the poet, the musician—is an internal nightmare of hallucinogenic proportions becomes, in the hands of the serial killer, a dreadful reality.

QuoteIn 1998, the following was reported in the Indonesian press as well as by the Agence France Presse: An Indonesian practitioner of black magic—a type of sorcerer called a dukun—one Ahmad Suraji, was sentenced to death for the murder of forty-two women. He claimed that his father came to him in a dream and told him if he killed seventy women and drank their saliva, his magic powers would be increased and he would—paradoxically—become a better healer.

QuoteThe prom took place in May 1978. A month later, Jeffrey invited her to a party at his house. It was not much of a party, according to Ms. Geiger, but just a half dozen people sitting around with no food, no music, not much of anything. At one point during the evening, Dahmer decided he wanted to have a séance to contact the spirit of someone who had died in the house. According to Dahmer, an evil spirit had contacted him and spoken to him, asking him to do things that scared him. As the candles were lit and started to flare up and sputter, Bridget Geiger realized that Dahmer was not joking, and she fled the house, never to see or speak to Dahmer again. That same month, Dahmer claimed his first victim, the young hitchhiker Steven Hicks.

QuoteAccording to Dahmer, he never killed an animal himself. What argues against this, however, is the scene close to his house of a kind of ritual setting in the woods in which it seems dogs were killed as part of an occult rite. This had taken place the previous year, in 1977, amid reports of missing dogs in the Bath, Ohio neighborhood where he lived. The scene was described by Jim Klippel to the Akron Beacon-Journal: "Somebody must have had a lot of fun with that dog...if that's what you want to call it. It was skinned and gutted. And about a hundred yards away there had been a large fire and thirteen little fires around it. It looked so much like cult worship that it scared us to death." The dog that Klippel referred to had been found nailed to a tree.

QuoteIt is worthwhile to note here that missing dogs—especially German shepherds—are a recurring theme around cult murders and cult activity, and that the slaughter of dogs was an element of the cult surrounding the Son of Sam killings that we will investigate shortly.

Quotewhen he was finally apprehended the body count came to seventeen, including his first victim, Steven Hicks. Their bodies had been dismembered, dissolved in vats of acid in his apartment, stored in a large freezer. Their skulls had been retained, cleaned and defleshed and in some cases painted, and were adorning his altar, his "power altar."  The number of skulls on the altar has been given variously as six (Ressler) or ten (Norris), along with a planned hanging skeleton on either side, a central hanging lamp, and two griffins. The altar was not complete at the time of his arrest, but some of the skulls and the two griffins were in place, as well as candles, incense, and other vaguely occult paraphernalia.

QuoteAs we read famed FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler's interview with Dahmer, the reason Dahmer was fascinated by Exorcist III was the power the possessed had over reality, over the minds and bodies of the rest of the world. The element of "creating illusions" was only a tool, a means to an end. There are many films concerned with the creation of illusions, but only Exorcist III marries this theme with that of demonic possession and serial murder.

What follows is from the testimony of one of Dahmer's intended victims, Tracey Edwards, who managed to escape.

QuoteWhile waiting for the drug to take effect, and with knife in hand, Dahmer demanded that Edwards watch a videotape with him. It was Exorcist III. Dahmer watched the film intently, at times rocking back and forth, chanting in a humming sound, and seeming to go into a trance (as described in Book II, the same process was used by Mark David Chapman when invoking Satan or talking to his Little People). Then a personality change would take place during the parts of the film that depicted possession sequences. At this time, Dahmer himself would become aggressive and demand that Edwards place the other handcuff on his wrist. Then, as the filmed possession sequence would change to something more mundane, Dahmer's mood also shifted and he began to complain about his life and his loneliness.

QuoteIn a macabre example of art imitating life imitating art, we have The Exorcist, which was a favorite film of the man eventually identified as the Zodiac Killer, and then Exorcist III, in which the demon-possessed serial murderer, the Gemini Killer, is based on the same Zodiac Killer (who, unknown to the film's writer, director and producer, was a fan of the first Exorcist movie). This real-life connection then leaps into Jeffrey Dahmer, who is mesmerized by the character and who probably does not realize that the fictional Gemini Killer is based on a real person, a genuine serial murderer such as he himself is becoming, a famous murderer with a taste for the occult and for Satanism, as Robert Graysmith's sequel to his definitive work on the Zodiac killer, Zodiac Unmasked, amply illustrates.

QuoteJeffrey Dahmer was beaten to death in prison in November 1994 by a black inmate, Christopher J. Scarver, who was serving a life sentence for murder. Scarver said that voices in his head told him that he, Scarver, was the Son of God.

QuoteItem: Lt. Commander Dr. Thomas Narut—a US Navy psychologist—claimed before a NATO conference of psychologists in Oslo that ONI (the Office of Naval Intelligence) had been using convicted murderers in a bizarre scheme to create the perfect commando. These were men from military prisons who were sent to various US embassies abroad after having been "treated" with behavior modification techniques and turned into assassins "who could kill on command." Narut was later reprimanded by the Navy and forced to retract his

QuoteItem: It is revealed that Ted Kaczynski, the famed "Unabomber," had been a test subject in a CIA mind-control project during his university days.

QuoteKaczynski was one of only twenty-two Harvard undergrads who were part of this secret project from the fall of 1959 to the spring of 1962, a program based loosely on OSS interrogation methods and designed to break down the student's personality.

QuoteCameron claimed to be able to create selective amnesia. A combination of drugs, sensory deprivation, monotonous tape recordings of command phrases ... but were the side effects too cumbersome? What about surgery? What if we did a little nip-and-tuck in the cerebral cortex? What then?

The example of Arthur Shawcross may be a case in point. A convicted serial killer and rapist, Shawcross had spent time in Vietnam. He claimed to have seen bloody combat in the jungles, and to have first cannibalized his victims there. The Army denied that Shawcross was anywhere near combat, and instead insisted that throughout his tour he had remained "in the rear with the gear."

When he was finally apprehended for a string of ghastly homicides in and around Rochester, New York, his defense team were not allowed copies of his military medical files. Pictures of his brain, however, showed evidence of medical intervention: symmetrical scarring that his team believed had to have been the result of surgery and not from natural causes. It was Shawcross who claimed to hear voices in his head, ghostly spirits urging him to kill.

Full disclosure: I have read Maury Terry's book The Ultimate Evil, where he claims that David Berkowitz did not work alone, and that the Son of Sam killings were the work of a network or cult of some kind.  Terry has taken some flack for the book, both deserving and undeserving. 

Deserving, because Terry has a very simplistic view of what he considers "Satanic", which a more nuanced or religiously aware person will find suspect.  He also puts far too much weight on coincidences involving certain dates, and sometimes works backwards from already known answers (such as the address of Berkowitz) and unconvincingly shoe-horns them into clues from the Son of Sam letters.

However, despite these flaws, Terry is very good at seperating his personal views and analysis from what he found, what he saw and what people told him.  Taking the "raw data" from his book, there is a very persuasive case that Berkowitz was not the only gunman, and that there was a network with possibly some cult overtones or link behind the murders.

QuoteTry as they might, psychologists working on the Son of Sam case could not squeeze the round peg that is David Berkowitz into the square hole that is the "lust" or serial killer. While Berkowitz admits to several of the killings, he insists that he did not commit all of them and that the murders were, in fact, carried out under the orders of a cult to which he belonged. As he is in prison for life with no possibility of parole, he has no ulterior motive for making this claim. Nothing that he says at this point will reduce his sentence and he has, as mentioned, freely admitted to committing some of the murders anyway. By pleading guilty immediately after his apprehension, he denied the rest of us an examination of the available evidence which would have pointed to the existence of the murderous cult to which he belonged. In fact, the evidence collected in the twenty-five years since the time of the killings is now leaning heavily to support this allegation of a cult of murderers operating in the New York metropolitan area as well as in other parts of the country, including North Dakota and California.

QuoteThus if we include Manson and Berkowitz in any study of serial murder, the statistics will become skewed and much valuable data will be lost. Whatever the psychic disorders suffered by Manson and Berkowitz—and they may be legion—the label of serial killer cannot, in all honesty, be used in their cases.

QuoteIn fact, Terry's evidence goes far to suggest that the Manson and Berkowitz cases may actually be related; that the cult to which Berkowitz belonged in New York City was a branch of the one to which Manson had allegiance.

QuoteIn the case of Manson and Berkowitz, we can point to the dim outlines of a cult of killers using occult jargon and ritual to buttress what may have been simply a drug-related criminal operation, much the same way the Matamoros killers used palo mayombe as a front for what were essentially normal, criminal operations.

QuoteIn the grimoires, we find the same reliance upon set and setting that we will come across again, hundreds of years later in a different context. (Set and setting will also be recognized as a crucial element in psychological warfare and interrogation techniques. The process is all of a piece, and we may be able to understand the entire gestalt better if we look at how each of these practices describes and reinforces the others.)

QuoteCulianu's most fascinating contribution was Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, a work that is based in part on the writings of the philosopher-magician Giordano Bruno and particularly on his De vinculis, a work that surpasses Machiavelli's The Prince in its sheer audacity. De vinculis—or "Of the link"—is a virtual operating manual for consensus reality. While it appears on its face to be an introduction to a method of conjuring demons, it is also a guide to psychological warfare, probably the earliest ever

Since there is no English language full translation of De vinculis, I have purchased a copy of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.  Sadly, I've not yet had a chance to read it in depth.

QuoteBruno's hatred of the Catholic Church ran very deep. He had been a Catholic priest himself, one who abandoned the Holy Orders and "defrocked" himself, becoming in the process excommunicate and forbidden by the Church to even attend Mass, much less celebrate it. His hatred of what he saw as Papal idiocy and criminality led him to support various Protestant groups and operations at every opportunity, although he did not consider himself a Christian at all much less a Protestant, and could be more correctly identified as a kind of pagan, a New Age philosopher quite ahead of his time; certainly, he was a magician, and the bulk of his writings after the "Embassy affair" of 1584—in which his espionage activities against French Ambassador to England Michel de Castelnau resulted in the arrest and execution of various individuals who were conspiring with the Church against the Queen—were about occultism.

QuoteBruno is described as using or contemplating four "arms" or methods of toppling the Papacy: armed force, fraud (or, as Bruno called it, the "art of dissimulation" which, in Bruno's case, included espionage), ridicule, and magic.

QuoteIn Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, John Bossy records several instances in which Bruno and Dr. Dee met each other, either at Dee's home in Mortlake or in Prague. Dee was reputed to have the best library in England, and they shared a common interest in the occult as well as in espionage.

QuoteBruno would eventually be captured by the Inquisition and put to death by being burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome on February 17, 1600, on orders of the same Pope Clement VIII he had attempted to destroy through magic.

QuoteAlthough Bruno had written a number of famous and influential works, Culianu concentrates on De vinculis en genere, sometimes referred to simply as De vinculis or "Of Links." These links, according to Bruno, are those between human beings, but they could just as easily be those that link God to humans; the links to which he refers are any connections that could be made between any created objects at all. Magic is the art of manipulating these links, links which have been activated through the desire of the magician; thus magic is, in other words, eros.

QuoteWhat is important for us to consider is whether or not the knowledge of this technology was disseminated more widely than the narrow and shadowy corridors of the secret societies. For Bruno took this hermetic concept one step further, to the realm of politics. And so did Culianu.

QuoteThat the manipulation of a human being's memory is tantamount to control over his consciousness is something that was clearly understood by the magicians of the Renaissance and rediscovered by the intelligence officers of the twentieth century; but while the latter threw the entire weight of hypnosis, drugs, electroshock and other heavy-handed machinery at their subjects, Bruno cautioned a lighter touch.   It was necessary that his subjects be unaware of his intentions, that they be charmed into performing those actions he required. You couldn't accomplish this with drugs and psychotherapy unless you wiped the memory and consciousness of the subject clean, as Ewen Cameron tried to do, and that took a lot of time and energy and resources, and the results were never very reliable or consistent.

Bruno's approach might today be called "subliminal," that is, below the threshold of conscious awareness. While the operator may train himself in these techniques while in a heightened state of awareness brought about by meditation, ritual, drugs, "Tantric" sex and other devices, it was necessary that the target be free to go about his life un- interrupted and oblivious. Just as one is not aware of the process of falling in love—of all the thousand impressions and subconscious signals that are sent and received in the course of a relationship—just so the target of Bruno's magic would not be aware that he was being "bewitched," i.e., psychologically manipulated, until it was too late. The process, according to Bruno and those before him, was virtually identical. Hence, eros is magic because eros charges or activates the link.

QuoteFor Bruno, love is the occult force that binds the universe together, and if one can understand love and understand how others love and what they love, then one can control them through their passions and their appetites. If reality is what our conscious minds make of it—a deliberate ordering of sensations in categories of priority, translated by our brain as images of light and dark, color, sound, dimension, etc.—then the way into the mind of another is through the images he or she manufactures. Rather than create a whole, complex reality that will be translated and identified by the subject's brain, one simply creates the images of the desired reality, working backwards from the image to the result desired.

QuoteBruno's strategy employed a technique of going directly to the brain through the use of images, creating an alternate reality over which he was the master. In order for this system to work, it was necessary that the target be "seduced" by the images, i.e., "fall in love" in a sense with the image presented by the magician and thereby allow it to work in his consciousness. For this to happen, the magician himself must expend great amounts of energy—of passion, really—through that image in order to create the "link," in order to "enchain" the other person or persons and make them instruments of his will. As a corollary, Bruno insists that the magician not allow himself to fall in love with his own images, lest he become enslaved by them and ultimately destroyed. Thus, the magician places himself above love—above all the human passions and desires—so that he is not enchained in turn.

QuoteHe must believe he is in love with his subject at the time he works his magic, and not at any other time. This is our introduction, not only to the Manson Secret, but also to the television preacher, the popular politician, the salesman, the advertising executive. Culianu understood all of this, and was perhaps the first person to clarify and enlarge upon this idea. At least, until he was murdered on May 21, 1991 at the age of 41. Culianu's political involvements were largely unknown or misunderstood by his colleagues. One would have had to have a good working knowledge of the Byzantine conspiracies and intrigues of Romanian politics to get an inkling of Culianu's dangerous activities. He could not resist writing against the dictatorial Ceaucescu regime, although at times his writings were more in the way of a ludus serius, a kind of game involving symbolic figures, than they were out-and-out broadsides against the Communist leader and his secret police, the Securitate. But Culianu was a living symbol of the rewards that freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the free and open exchange of intellectual ideas could bring. Further, he was a problem for both sides of the Romanian problem: right and left. Although there is no doubt that he was a sincere anti-Communist—living and suffering under a Soviet-style Eastern European dictatorship is enough to convert anyone to democracy and the free-market system, without even knowing what those concepts really represent—he was also anti-Nazi. This, in the context of Eastern European politics, was a difficult position to maintain, for it meant that he attracted enemies from both the Securitate and from various underground movements that had their origins in the ideas, if not in the actual membership roles, of the Romanian Nazi Iron Guard.

QuoteThe surrealists sought to tap the powers of the mind using psychiatry and occultism (whatever would work, whatever would help them break through the barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness), and in this they are not very different from shamans, not very different from the men of MK- ULTRA. Art—painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, and even (with Bunuel and Dali) cinema—happened to be the medium in which they worked, but surrealism was born on the battlefields of World War I, as the confrontation between life and death, between existence and non-existence, forced a gen- eration of artists to chose between the dangerous ignorance of a cultivated sanity and the seemingly crystal clarity of madness. The hideousness of that conflict, the first "high-technology" war using tanks, airplanes, mass communications, and chemical weapons, traumatized a generation. Breton began life as a medical student, and worked with shell-shocked soldiers at the front. Andre Masson, another important surrealist, fought in the War and spent agonizing hours wounded, lying in a ditch face-to-face with a dead German soldier, literally "facing death." Using automatic writing, hypnosis, and later various occult techniques and occult studies such as alchemy and ceremonial magic, the surrealists tried to penetrate the secrets of the mind; this endeavor would be repeated by the CIA a few years after World War II, continuing for decades until fear of discovery made them either cancel their projects or disguise them in some way. The preliminary goals of the surrealists and the spies were the same: unlock the secrets of the unconscious mind, understand amnesia, hypnotic trance, hysteria, dissociation, multiple personalities and "the self," and the human will. Yet, the ultimate goals were quite different. For the surrealists, the liberation of humanity—the perfect freedom of men and women—was their target, their raison d'etre. For the CIA and the military, the aim was the enslavement of those minds and the harnessing of consciousness to political and military purposes. The surrealists used the garret, the artist's studio, the writer's desk; the CIA used the laboratory, the interrogation room, the torture chamber.

QuoteIt is of great interest to this study that the artistic movement most singled out by the Nazis for destruction was surrealism, for the surrealists may have been polar opposites of the Nazis when it came to political ideas, but they were just as fascinated by the occult and by the possibilities of human consciousness. The Nazis, however, were a cult, and cults can admit of no competing cults.

QuoteComing from a wealthy background as a right-wing American, Field's political faith wavered, and then finally fell on the side of the left. Around him in Mexico City was a gaggle of left-wingers who professed everything from diehard Communism of the Soviet Communist International or "Comintern" model to revolutionary Castroism—liberal dilettantes who were excited to be this close to real socialists and Communists and who, anyway, professed humanitarian principles ranging from racial integration to a change in American foreign policy in Latin America. In the midst of this cocktail circuit could be discerned such influences as artist (and Communist) Diego Rivera—the aforementioned comrade of Trotsky and Andre Breton—as well as filmmaker Luis Bunuel. As always, surrealism found itself in support of radical political solutions, even as it decried "Soviet realism" in art. It was an eclectic group of people from various backgrounds, and it is in this mélange that we find Marilyn Monroe in February of 1962. Introduced to Field via her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, and his homunculus, Eunice Murray, Monroe and Field became fast friends.

QuoteThis preponderance of closet Communists around Marilyn Monroe is a fact that deserves much more scrutiny than it has been given so far—except by Summers and Wolfe, aforementioned. Even her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was a Communist, and was approved by the Party as a politically- reliable shrink, a functionary of an organization infiltrated to an extent by European émigrés who owed their allegiance to both Freud and Marx. This organization, known as the Psychoanalytic Institutes, with offices in most major American cities, and which contained within its ranks members of various political affiliations, served as a secure means for Communist Party members to meet and exchange information. Psychiatry, in general, was a wonderful mechanism for running "cells" in a foreign country. No one would question why a person had to meet secretly with a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist; in fact, many psychiatrists' offices are designed to permit only one person at a time in the waiting area, and each patient leaves by a separate exit so that no patient need be seen by another.

QuoteJust as the CIA was in full throttle on MK-ULTRA, the Soviets were using traditional psychiatric and psychoanalytic settings in the United States to serve as Comintern fronts and, perhaps, to condition and control certain select patients. When we see the degree to which Monroe depended upon Greenson, and when we learn of Greenson's bizarre "anti-analytic" approach with Monroe in direct violation of his own, published therapeutic principles, we can easily understand how a charge could be made that Monroe was being deliberately manipulated by the Comintern. And when we learn that E. Howard Hunt—former CIA agent, formerly stationed in Mexico City, one of the Watergate Plumbers himself, and present during the break-in at Fielding's office—was a good friend of the last man to call himself Marilyn Monroe's lover, Jose Bolanos, we are forced to take a completely different look at the events of 1962 and 1963.

QuoteIn 1962, Operation Mongoose was in full swing, as the US government ramped up to destabilize Cuba and assassinate Castro. The missiles were starting to arrive in Cuba, smaller tactical missiles at first and then the ICBMs. By late 1961, incoming CIA Station Chief in Mexico, David Atlee Phillips, already knew the first of the missiles were there. By July 1962 everyone at Langley knew. Hunt was still the CIA liaison with the Cuban exiles, trying to keep up their spirits after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. And here was Marilyn Monroe, drinking mezcal with the Reds and—who knows?—maybe eating the worm. She was already friendly with Robert Kennedy, and had been asking him a great many leading political questions, questions provided to her by a suspiciously helpful Dr. Greenson. She would then report on these meetings, in all innocence, in the Zona Rosa to Comintern member Frederick Field, to E. Howard Hunt intimate Jose Bolanos, and from there to ...?

QuoteIn addition, Robert Kennedy would be informed sometime in 1962 that the CIA under General Lansdale (whom we encountered in Book I in his incarnation as a psychological warfare expert) was subcontracting the Castro assassination to the Mafia, using the ever-helpful Robert Maheu as cutout. Ms. Monroe's friendship with Mafiosi Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana—themselves deeply involved in these same clandestine arrangements and directly involved with both Richard Nixon and E. Howard Hunt—went back a ways as well, dating from the beginning of her Sinatra period, and this just wove the noose around her neck a little tighter. All around her were some of the seminal figures in the history of modern American covert operations and the Cold War. And, it was suspected, she was writing it all down in her ever-present red-bound diary.

QuoteMs. Monroe's interest in the Kennedy brothers, and particularly in Bobby Kennedy, was purely romantic. As far as we can discern from witness interviews at the time, Marilyn Monroe was despondent over her relationship with the Attorney General, whom she believed would leave his wife and children in order to marry her. They had argued about a number of political issues, however, including nuclear testing and Cuba as it turns out, with Bobby Kennedy eventually accusing her of turning Communist on the basis of her leftist views.

So, who wanted Marilyn dead? As in the case of the John F. Kennedy assassination a year later, the list of suspects is a long one. At one time, her home was being bugged and her phones tapped by the FBI as well as by an "independent investigator," whose employer might have been either the Mob or the CIA. She was under surveillance by them all. Her association with both the Kennedys and with the Comintern made her a dangerous woman; had the CIA succeeded in assassinating Castro, it is entirely possible that Ms. Monroe would have gone public with what she knew. She was already feeding information to the Mexico City Communists, as well as to Jose Bolanos who, we suspect, was working for E. Howard Hunt. She was a liability to the Kennedys, to the FBI, and to the CIA—specifically, to Operation Mongoose; and, to the extent that she could jeopardize Operation Mongoose, she was a liability to the Mafia.

The only people who did not want Marilyn Monroe dead would have been the Communists themselves, since she was so close to the President, the Attorney General, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, "Operation Mongoose," etc., etc. It would have been insane to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs.

However, by July of 1962 and only weeks before her death, she had realized that something wasn't right with Greenson and Murray. She told her ex-husband Robert Slatzer that she was going to fire them all. Was a decision made to silence her before she could reveal the existence of this clandestine Communist cell in Hollywood and Mexico City?

QuoteThe weekend of July 28-29 probably holds a key to what transpired only days later. Ms. Monroe spent the weekend at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, and the mystery that surrounds this weekend is impenetrable. That something loathsome did take place, and that it involved Marilyn Monroe who was only now making an important comeback, is certain, if only because of the reticence of eyewitnesses to discuss it.

QuoteHer ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio—icon of American baseball and one of the men who truly loved Marilyn—arrived unexpectedly at the scene. No one knows how he knew his ex-wife would be there, but he showed up and was not allowed inside the complex of bungalows that had been reserved for Monroe, Sinatra, and Giancana, on orders from Sinatra.

QuoteWhen DiMaggio returned from Lake Tahoe, he told his friend Harry Hall that he was furious with what had happened, that Sinatra had kept Monroe on drugs, and that they had "sex parties." To clarify what was meant by that, photographer Billy Woodfield was quoted as saying that Sinatra gave him a roll of film from that weekend. When Woodfield developed the roll, he evidently found photos of Marilyn being sexually abused by, or at least in the presence of, Sam Giancana and Frank Sinatra. In other words, Marilyn Monroe was likely drugged, raped, and photographed; the photos would be used as blackmail against her if she decided to come forward with what she knew about the Kennedys, the Mafia, and Castro.

QuoteA drugged Monroe was returned to Los Angeles late the night of July 29-30, in the company of Peter Lawford. Monroe was returned to her home in a limo, but Lawford rode with the flight crew to his beach home. Before arriving home, he asked the crew to stop for a moment so he could make a call from a pay phone (knowing his own home was bugged and his phones tapped). He made a mysterious phone call that lasted about twenty minutes before finally going home in the early hours of that morning. That phone call was logged into the White House, a call that went directly to the President. Marilyn's last days were a turmoil of political intrigue. It seems the blackmail effort was not panning out the way everyone thought it would.

QuoteOn August 4, 1962—at the age of only thirty-six—she died. The crime scene was a mess; forensics were a joke. It was the proverbial "locked room" mystery, in which the victim was murdered in a room that was locked from the inside. She was said to have overdosed on sleeping pills ... but none were found in her digestive tract. There was no glass of water in that locked room to enable her to swallow what were estimated to be nearly 50 capsules. And no hypodermic syringe.

QuoteWhile the Catholic Church has been officially silent on the matter of Malachi Martin, his books have been popular among a certain segment of the Catholic population, who believe that there is an evil, Satanic element within the Vatican that has hijacked the Church for its own purposes. Martin was writing about this years before revelations exploded about the Vatican banking scandals, the Masonic P-2 society infiltration of the Vatican as high as cardinal level, and the alleged murder of Pope John Paul I after only thirty days as Pontiff.

QuoteMartin also alleged that there existed within the Church something he called the "Superforce," which was the name he gave to the cabal of evildoers within the Vatican that perpetrated not only political and financial crimes, but which was also involved in pedophilia and other sexual scandals, some under the guise of a satanic cult of sex abusers.

Quote[Martin's] ...most vocal opponent and the source of the scurrilous rumors about him is Robert Blair Kaiser, in his autobiography Clerical Error. Kaiser's book has been both praised and attacked by Catholics, largely depending upon where they stand where the subject of Father Martin is concerned. Having begun his career as a candidate for the priesthood, spending eight years at a Jesuit seminary, Kaiser abandoned Holy Orders and eventually won a posting with Time magazine in Rome, covering the controversial Second Vatican Council ("Vatican II") of Pope John XXIII and winning awards for his reporting in the process, reporting that was assisted in no small part by Malachi Martin. In Clerical Error, Kaiser accuses Martin of abusing their relationship by sleeping with his wife while he was a houseguest of the Kaisers.

QuoteYet, defenders of Father Martin point to a paucity of documentation supporting Kaiser's contentions and insist that his period spent in a mental institution—where he was diagnosed as suffering from acute paranoia and schizophrenia—has contributed to a wild tale without foundation,

QuoteHow strange, then, that we find Mr. Kaiser three years after the close of Vatican II back in Los Angeles working as a stringer when the Robert F. Kennedy assassination occurred, jumping at the chance to become involved in Sirhan's defense team and gaining unprecedented access to Sirhan for the ostensible purpose of writing a book and some articles as a means of raising money for the defense lawyers.

QuoteKaiser shifted gears numerous times during the investigation and subsequent trial, going from conviction that there was a conspiracy involved and that Sirhan was a hypnotically-programmed assassin, to his final verdict that Sirhan acted alone and fired all the shots that killed the Senator.

QuoteAccording to interviews with Malachi Martin and other sources—some available on religious Web sites on the Internet, some via Art Bell's syndicated radio talk shows—self-confessed serial killer David Berkowitz of the Son of Sam killings asked to speak to Fr. Martin while in jail before his sentencing. Martin obliged, and subsequently refused all offers of a book deal or other financial gain from the fruits of that meeting,

QuoteMaury Terry has insisted that there is a connection between Charles Manson and David Berkowitz, and he has based this conclusion largely on jailhouse confessions and some controversial interviews with convicted felons.

QuoteKelly argues, and quite rightly, that Terry goes overboard in his analysis of the Son of Sam letters and other details about the Son of Sam killings and related matters including—and most importantly—Terry's understanding of the nature of cults. To Terry, virtually everything that is not a socially accepted organized religion in America is a cult. This is a trap into which many have fallen at one time or another, including Attorney General Janet Reno in her doomed opposition to the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.

QuoteKelly's problem with Terry's book is probably less with Terry's leaps of logic than with the possible reaction to Terry's thesis by people who would "use books like Maury Terry's to evoke a new form of the Inquisition."  Kelly, as a self-described "serious student of the so-called 'occult' now for at least two decades" can "definitely say that there is nothing whatsoever in the Borrelli letter to indicate any great knowledge of any esoteric or occult subject,"  Yet, the unusual references to "Chubby Behemouth" and the "wemon of Queens" and a subsequent attack at the Elephas Disco in Queens weeks later, implies someone with a somewhat deeper understanding of occultism than the somewhat airy phrases of the Borrelli letter initially suggest, regardless of Kelly's demurral.

QuoteG.M. Kelly firmly defines his identity as a Thelemite and a serious student of the occult for decades; normally, this implies a certain tradition that can be traced through the OTO and the Golden Dawn, back to Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians and the Knights Templar. It is a specific train of esoteric thought and practice, and the various branches share a common language, even as they may be at loggerheads with each other over minutiae of ritual or interpretation.

But there are other organizations that have only the most tenuous of affiliation with the standard occult secret societies, and which determine their own "tradition" without regard to the standard texts. There is certainly nothing in the available literature on the hermetic secret societies of the West to show that human sacrifice was an acceptable part of the ritual, yet to deny that ritual murder ever has taken place in the past is to deny a healthy part of human history.

Recently, in fact, we have the Matamoros cult that was responsible for a number of ritual murders in Mexico and Texas: a group that was supposedly practicing a form of Latin shamanism known as palo mayombe, even as "legitimate" practitioners insisted that the Matamoros group had no legal standing within their religion. The Matamoros cult—which involved trafficking in illegal drugs across the Mexican-Texas border—was only revealed in 1989, two years after the publication of Terry's book insisting there was an occult "culture" surrounding certain elements of the international drug trade.

QuoteIt is for this reason that we are compelled to look closely at a series of murders that took place between 1977 and 1983, and also beyond. These killings involved some of the most powerful, most famous names in the movie business ... and some of the least known, least respected as well. The culture of drugs, cults, and death overtook the culture of the screen, and for a brief moment the veil of the dark temple was lifted by a corner, and a whiff of sulphur and satanism escaped into the disbelieving world. Appropriately enough, the central character in this episode was the producer of Roman Polanski's film, Rosemary's Baby : Robert Evans. Evans would go on to marry Ali MacGraw—the actress whose father was the mystic of Bedford Village—and Phyllis George, a former Miss America who later married a governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a governor involved in the drugs and money scandal surrounding an organization known only as "the Company."

QuoteMaury Terry, the investigative journalist whose The Ultimate Evil started a landslide of satanic cult hysteria in the United States in the late 1980s, as he delved deeply into the Son of Sam murder mystery, discovered that he had actually gone to high school with John Carr, one of the suspects in the re-opened case who was killed by a shotgun blast to the head at an Air Force base in North Dakota.

QuoteI am a graduate of Christopher Columbus High School, in the Bronx. This institution boasts at least two well-known alumni. One is pioneer transsexual Christine Jorgensen. The other is confessed Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz. I cannot claim to have known Berkowitz in high school, since I graduated in 1968 and he started at Columbus in 1969, but he would have read my article on alchemy and the transmutation of metals in the school's "literary-arts magazine," Horizon, which was published that year. In fact, Berkowitz lived for a while on Barnes Avenue in the Bronx, a few blocks from where I lived on Revere Avenue. And he worked as a security guard at Co-Op City, very close by. And we had friends in common.

QuoteIn those years, 1967-1969, there was a lot of mysticism going on in the United States, and the Bronx was no exception. These individuals were very involved in ritual practices, as they understood them. (Some were even teachers at the high school.) We held séances together in Pelham Bay, near where Co-Op City now stands; some of us even tried summoning demons.

QuoteMany of the people mentioned in Maury Terry's book were either known to us, or known to friends of ours. This web of relationships would increase once Herman Slater opened his famous store on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights in 1972, like a crazy little magnet that attracted only those on the very fringe of society. From that year until 1984 I found myself in the center of many of the incidents recounted in Terry's book, at least those that involved the Warlock Shop, Brooklyn Heights, the OTO, and the various other secret societies and cults with their tenuous connections to the Scientologists, the Process Church of the Final Judgement, the Church of Satan, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Renaissance Party, and all the various witchcraft covens and personalities, from the Gardnerians to the Alexandrians and Welsh Traditionalists, from Raymond Buckland to Leo Martello and Margot Adler, from covens gay and straight and mixed, to covens clothed and "sky clad." What was going on was much more blatant, much more vigorous, than even Terry suspected. There was a lot going on in those days, and much of it was open and covered by a skeptical but eager press, while the rest could be discovered with a little patience and good humor.

QuoteTerry goes further, however, by insisting that the murderous assault on Arlis Perry in a church at Stanford University—a truly hideous killing that incorporated many ritualistic elements—was a killing by the same cult as that responsible for the Son of Sam killings three years later in New York City.

"Many ritualistic elements" is putting it mildly.  All that was missing was a tape recording of "Sympathy for the Devil" and a signed copy of the Satanic Bible.  In my entirely unprofessional opinion, it was so blatantly made to look like a Satanic ritual killing, that I find myself distrusting that conclusion.

QuoteThen we have the attack on Christine Freund on January 30, 1977, a Sunday. This is identified by Terry—for completely different reasons—as a deliberate Son of Sam target rather than a random shooting. This is also a date comfortably close to Candlemas and the pagan festival of Oimelc. Thus, the dates match in this case as well as they do for Arlis Perry and for Donna Lauria. Christine Freund died on her way to a Masonic dance with her boyfriend, John Diel, who was unhurt in the attack. It would be the Freund case that would lead some investigators towards a possible motive for some of the killings that did not fit a "crazed, lone gunman" scenario. According to Berkowitz, an "out of town" shooter was brought in for this one, although there were a total of five cult members present for this attack. The shooter in this case was identified by Berkowitz as "Manson II," who also claimed responsibility for the Arlis Perry attack.

QuoteBut the final confirmed Son of Sam murder was that of Stacy Moskowitz (and the blinding of her date, Robert Violante) in Brooklyn on July 31, 1977—virtually the first anniversary of the Sam killings as well as Lammas in the pagan calendar and a Sunday. And a full moon. This attack had a plethora of eyewitnesses who saw more than one participant in the killing and at least two vehicles: one, a Ford Galaxie, was Berkowitz' car, the one identified by a parking ticket that night. The other was a Volkswagen Beetle.  Although Berkowitz was present at this killing, evidence shows he could not have committed it and, indeed, once he knew his car had just received a parking ticket, tried to call it off, knowing where that clue would lead. However, the killing went ahead as planned, committed—according to Berkowitz—by a friend of John Carr's from North Dakota.

QuoteAs you can see, not all of the killings were timed to the official pagan calendar. In fact, most of them could not be successfully placed near enough to a cult date to be significant. Yet, is there a pattern we could be missing? Or is the lack of a pattern in some killings an indication that they were committed merely to confuse the issue, or conversely that they are evidence of a second killer or killers?

QuoteArlis Perry was killed on or about midnight of October 12-13, 1974. An astrological chart drawn up for that place and time would reveal that there was a conjunction of the Sun and Mars in Libra at the Lower Heaven (the point in space opposite the Midheaven where the Sun is highest at noon). This conjunction is squared by Saturn in Cancer, and "semi-sextiled" (an angle of thirty degrees) by the waning Moon in Virgo. To reinforce the imagery, there were also significant angles between Pluto, Neptune and Jupiter that night. In fact, virtually all the "angles" that night were squares, conjunctions or oppositions: all considered "hard" aspects in astrological circles. In other words, it was a potent night for a ritual murder and may have been selected with that point of view in addition to the fact that all of these aspects were taking place on Crowley's birthday.

Quotecharts drawn up for all the murders indicate that only one—that of Virginia Voskerichian on March 8, 1977—did not take place during a waxing moon. (In fact, the Voskerichian attack was very anomalous in other regards, taking place much earlier in the evening than the others.) The other shootings took place either on New or Full Moons or when the Moon was somewhere between New and Full.

QuoteIf one believes in astrology, then one can say that the murders happened on those dates and times because the "stars were aright." And if one does not believe in astrology, then one can still say that someone else, someone who did believe in astrology, chose those dates and times deliberately. It is not a conclusive piece of evidence, but the astrological character of the murder calendar is suggestive. Berkowitz told Terry that he was not aware of the reasons for the murders, or why some victims were chosen for death; he was simply told what to do and he did it.

QuoteThen, however, we have the collateral damage, the deaths of people who were close to the suspects or the investigation. These include:

September 20, 1977: Andrew Dupay—a mailman who worked the Yonkers route where Berkowitz and the Carrs lived—goes downstairs to the basement of his home while his wife is bathing their two daughters, writes a hasty suicide note, and kills himself with a shotgun. It is the autumnal equinox. No one knows the motive for the suicide, except that in the days immediately before and after Berkowitz' arrest, co-workers say Dupay began acting fearful, gradually becoming consumed with panic through the month of August and into September. One informant wrote Terry that Dupay had met someone in Pelham Bay Park the day before his suicide. Pelham Bay Park, of course, is the same area of the Bronx where Berkowitz had lived a few years earlier. The man he met was not identified.

9 October 31, 1981: the murders of Ronald Sisman and Elizabeth Plotzman on Halloween. Sisman was a photographer who claimed to have possession of videotapes made by the Son of Sam killer(s), notably of the murder of Stacy Moskowitz. Sisman was planning on giving this evidence to the authorities, but he and his girlfriend were executed. It was Sisman who introduced actress (Welcome Back, Kotter) and model (Playboy) Melonie Haller to producer Roy Radin, who was himself murdered by the Son of Sam cult according to Terry. Melonie Haller was savagely beaten at Radin's Long Island estate and claimed that the beatings and possible rape were videotaped by Radin and/or his accomplices.

Craig Glassman, on October 31, 1991: again, Halloween. Glassman, an important witness to the goings-on in and around the Yonkers apartment of David Berkowitz, who had received threatening letters and was the target of an arson attack by Berkowitz, died on the Taconic State Parkway in a bizarre auto accident.

QuoteWhat is important for our investigation, however, is the fact that the Zodiac killings stopped from October 16, 1975 until starting up again on February 24, 1979, a quiescent period of about three and half years. This period of Zodiac inactivity dovetails with the Son of Sam murders, which took place from July 1976 to August 1977, and the murders of alleged Sam accomplices John Carr in February 1978 and Michael Carr in October 1978.

QuoteThere are many similarities between the Zodiac case and the Son of Sam case. The definitive study of the Zodiac killings—Zodiac by Robert Graysmith—tells us that the killings took place "on weekends when the moon was new or full."  In addition, Graysmith has linked the killings to the Quarter Days: the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoces.  Further, Zodiac sent taunting letters to the press, as did the Son of Sam killer(s) as well as probably the most famous serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper. Like the Ripper, the Zodiac's identity is unknown. There was a Zodiac murder in 1974, only a few weeks before Arlis Perry's. This took place "six days after the Autumnal Equinox in 1974," when a fourteen-year-old girl was killed. The Zodiac used a wide variety of murder weapons, making his identification and apprehension even more difficult. Then, after October 1975 there seems to be little or no more activity from the Zodiac until February 1979: virtually the same time frame in which the Son of Sam murders took place, including the violent deaths of John and Michael Carr.

QuoteAlthough Berkowitz is Jewish—his adoptive parents are Jewish, his natural parents are Jewish—David suddenly becomes a Christian upon his return from Korea. While stationed at Fort Knox—the site of the nation's heavily-guarded gold repository—he begins attending the Beth Haven Baptist Church in Louisville and becomes a fanatic Christian. He tries to convert both civilian and military personnel, even preaching (à la Jim Jones in Indiana) on street corners. Again, there is insufficient data to make any kind of assumption here about what motivated Berkowitz to become religious, much less Christian. Did it have something to do with his discovery that he was adopted? Did the LSD he took in Korea have anything to do with this sudden spiritual awakening?

QuoteIn February of 1976, Berkowitz moves to New Rochelle from the Bronx, to an apartment that is much farther away from both his college and his job and which is more expensive. No one knows why he does this. It makes no sense. The apartment was only advertised in a local Westchester newspaper, not something Berkowitz would have normally seen in the course of his days in the Bronx and Manhattan. It is in a private home owned by one Jack Cassara. At that time, Cassara is working at the Neptune Moving Company in New Rochelle. One of his co-workers is Fred Cowan, a neo-Nazi who would go amok and, during a siege at the moving company, kill six people before killing himself on Valentine's Day 1977. Later, clippings would be found in Berkowitz' Yonkers apartment covering the Cowan case in detail. Berkowitz would refer to Cowan as "one of the Sons."

QuoteThen, the following month, he applies for an apartment in Yonkers, on the other side of New York from New Rochelle, at 35 Pine Street, even though he has a one-year lease with the Cassaras that is only a month old. Again, why?

QuoteIn April 1976, he moves to 35 Pine Street. Again, this move makes no sense for someone working and studying in the Bronx. Not only is the time it takes to commute a factor, but also the additional cost of commuting; plus, the rent is one hundred dollars more a month than the original place he had in the Bronx. One hundred "1976" dollars.

QuoteA key element in Terry's thesis is that the Process Church of the Final Judgement is alive and well, and involved in nefarious activity stretching from drug-running to child prostitution to murder. This was also asserted in Ed Sanders' study of the Manson Family, The Family.

QuoteWhat initially bothered Terry about the Process was the appearance in one of their issues (the "Death" issue) of an article written by Charles Manson. Critics of the Terry thesis have scoffed at this, saying that such persons as Marianne Faithfull and Salvador Dali also appeared in the Process magazine; my reaction is simply this, however: what was Charles Manson doing in such august company? Further, Marianne Faithfull (as we have seen) had a long association with occultists of the Crowley dispensation through her relationship with Kenneth Anger. Dali himself was very involved in occultism, was well-known in several occult milieus, and his paintings—true to his reputation as a surrealist—reveal many occult and alchemical themes. There is a certain cultural or spiritual consistency to those who graced the pages of the Process magazine, and to dismiss Manson's appearance there as of little import is to be quite naïve. Further, as we have already learned, Manson told prosecutor Bugliosi that he and Robert Moore (the founder of the Process) were "the same." In addition, members of the Process on a mysterious mission visited Manson in prison after his arrest for the Tate/La Bianca killings, after which he no longer referred to the Process in any way.

QuoteIn addition, we also have the visits by Manson Family member Bruce Davis to England on at least two occasions; as discussed in Book I, the British police agencies identified Davis as visiting the Scientologists and/or the Process on each visit. In fact, we also have the murders of former Scientologists in England at this time, members connected with the Manson Family and, as we will see, yet another Scientologist was killed, this time in connection with the Son of Sam case.

QuoteThe next step is to find any relation at all between David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam murders, and the Process. If this can be done, then we have left the realm of pure speculation and have entered the world of logical possibility. Let's begin with the dogs. For some reason, there have been reports of sacrifices of large numbers of dogs, mostly German shepherds, throughout the United States in the past thirty-odd years, but notably in areas where we discover confirmed cult activity. This was as true in Berkowitz' Yonkers neighborhood as it was in Walden, New York, where a "total of eighty-five skinned German shepherds and Dobermans were found" in a single year "between October 1976 and October 1977."  The day after Berkowitz' arrest in Yonkers, the bodies of three slain German shepherds were found in an aqueduct behind his apartment. Two had been strangled with chains; the third had been shot in the head.

QuoteTwo days before his arrest, someone phoned an animal shelter using his name and address, inquiring about adopting a German shepherd that had been advertised in a local paper. A few hours later, someone else called from the same street in Yonkers, also inquiring about the dog.

Quotearound the time of the Sam killings, the author heard convincing rumors of the abuse and slaughter of dogs in a warehouse near Brooklyn Heights, within walking distance of the Warlock Shop, before Berkowitz was arrested and the connection with dogs was made.

QuoteIt doesn't automatically follow, however, that the Process would sacrifice the animals. Another symbolic association that should be mentioned is the fact that Hitler favored German shepherds above all other animals. That there might be a Nazi or neo-Nazi element to the Son of Sam cult should not be ignored, especially as mass murderer Fred Cowan—one of the "Sons" according to Berkowitz—was a neo-Nazi. Further, the Process symbol was a stylized swastika: what some members referred to as "four P's"; these "four P's" later contributed to the name of a Process splinter group called "Four P" after the same symbol. It was this group that remained behind in California after most of the regular Process decamped and went to New York City following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Four P—and its reputed leader, the Grand Chingon—has been implicated in a number of vile acts, including animal and human sacrifice, in northern and southern California. Convicted serial killer and cannibal Stanley Baker claimed to belong to this cult, and Manson Family members were known to refer to Charles Manson as the Grand Chingon, even though the organization was supposedly so secret that its very existence was unknown to all but a few.

QuoteThe most important from an investigative point of view was the name of "John Wheaties," identified in the letter to Jimmy Breslin as a "Rapist and Suffocater of Young Girls."  It was the investigative work of Terry and his associate (and former police detective) Jim Mitteager that uncovered the identity of this person as John Wheat Carr, a son of Sam Carr of the infamous demonic dog. John Carr led to his brother Michael Carr, a high-level Scientologist, and to Wheat Carr, their sister who worked for the Yonkers Police Department and who was married to a police officer.

QuoteJohn Wheat Carr, a career member of the Air Force who was discharged for drug related offences, died violently on February 16, 1978 at the airbase in Minot, North Dakota, the victim of a shotgun wound to the head. OSI—the Air Force's internal police agency—initially determined that the death was a probable homicide, changing that determination to suicide when the investigation took on national proportions with inquiries from Westchester County and New York City police departments and prosecutors' offices. He had been in Yonkers, at Sam Carr's home, only a few days before and unexpectedly flew back to Minot on Valentine's Day, after phoning his girlfriend at the base and telling her that the police were after him and things were too hot in New York.

QuoteCarr had been the subject of a manhunt by police all over New York City and Westchester once it had been realized that he was the "John Wheaties" of the Son of Sam letters. If someone killed John Carr—while David Berkowitz was sitting in prison—then the implication is that there was at least one more conspirator out there: the one doing the mopping up. To make matters more interesting, John Carr's description fit perfectly with eyewitness reports of the Son of Sam killer seen at more than one crime scene, down to the color of his hair, his build, and his left-handedness. Evidence gathered since then shows that Carr was in New York City for at least four of the shootings, even though he lived in Minot, North Dakota at the time. He was also present in Houston, Texas on June 12, 1976: the day Billy Dan Parker bought the .44 Charter Arms Bulldog for Berkowitz in that city.

QuoteWhile John Carr's familiarity with the occult is documented in Terry's book (everything from keeping a list of demons with him to burying dog excrement in the yards of people he was trying to curse), it receives further confirmation from Berkowitz himself, who characterized him as a "devil worshipper" during his interrogation

QuoteLater, police in the Minot, North Dakota area acknowledged that John Carr was a member of a satanic cult that operated there, that John Carr himself was not only using drugs but dealing (not an uncommon combination), and that he told police detectives that members of the cult had to drink their leader's urine from a chalice, among other unsavory details.

QuoteEven more importantly, the Minot police agencies knew that Carr and Berkowitz were acquainted and that both belonged to the same cult, based on voluminous testimony from friends, including a fellow airman and roommate, Jeffrey Sloat, who eventually had John Carr committed to a mental institution for a while due to the latter's strange behavior, which included chanting in an unknown tongue and talking to a picture of Abraham Lincoln.

QuoteIn the months leading up to his capture, Berkowitz was engaged in a campaign of terrorism in his neighborhood designed to get him arrested on lesser charges before he was apprehended for the Son of Sam murders, and before he would be expected to commit more. He was firebombing houses, shooting dogs, and sending hate mail to all and sundry ... with return addresses that would only point back to him. The inability of the Westchester Sheriff 's Department and the Yonkers police to put all of this together—even when Sam Carr himself walked into a police station with the evidence long before the last two Son of Sam attacks—drove Berkowitz crazy.

QuoteAfter his arrest, he would eventually be interviewed by Dr. David Abrahamson, to determine if he was mentally fit to stand trial. Abrahamson wrote a book about the experience, entitled Confessions of Son of Sam and published in 1985. In this book, we learn that Berkowitz recognized Abrahamson when they were first introduced, as he had read Abrahamson's The Murdering Mind prior to his arrest! He also read a number of books about murderers such as Richard Speck and Nathan Leopold that he took out of the Yonkers Public Library, telling the doctor, "Murder is a recent interest of mine."

QuoteOn July 10, 1979, David Berkowitz was attacked by a fellow inmate, his throat slashed, but he survived. A few weeks later, a friend of his was shot to death in his apartment in Flushing, Queens. Howard Weiss was a fellow member of the police auxiliary unit in Co-Op City to which Berkowitz and another colleague, a former Yonkers police officer who is not identified in Terry's book except for a pseudonym, belonged. These three men had attended a wedding of a friend in Maryland in 1976, before the Son of Sam killings began: a wedding that was captured on videotape, showing all three men present. Another link between them was the fact that the Yonkers police officer knew the Carrs, and that all three men were known to have owned .44 Charter Arms Bulldog revolvers.

QuoteWhen they spoke by phone to Minot, North Dakota law enforcement they were shocked to learn that Minot knew all along about John Carr's occult involvements as well as the existence of a cult in Minot that, among other things, sacrificed German shepherds.

QuoteRumors of a cult calling itself the Four P surfaced in California shortly after the Process disappeared from that state. "Four P" was a name taken from the Process symbol, which resembles four "P's" in a circle forming a kind of swastika figure. Then there was the Grand Chingon, said to be the leader of the Four P. Manson Family members used to claim that Charlie was the Grand Chingon, but that was empty boasting. No one seems to know who the Grand Chingon was, or even what "Chingon" means, except that it may not be a real title but a kind of epithet. In Mexican Spanish, the verb chingar means "to fuck" and is used as an expletive, such as in the word chingada for "fucking" or chinga su madre, a common curse. Thus, the word chingon could mean "the fucker." As the Luciferian element of the Process was the one involved most directly in the lascivious aspects of the cult—the purely sexual component, rather than the more intense power component of the Satan element—it is possible that the Grand Chingon was leading a group of dissident Luciferians, except for the fact that the Four P group and the Grand Chingon were implicated in several vicious murders in the California area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the one involving Stanley Baker, the aforementioned cannibal.

QuoteOverweight, with a pudgy face framed by a short beard, and always well- dressed in public (while preferring a bathrobe at home in his huge Southampton mansion, Ocean Castle), Radin was a show business entrepreneur who managed talent that others wouldn't touch or know what to do with.

QuoteMagicians, ventriloquists, dancing poodles and has-been actors and comedians from the 1950s were his stock-in-trade and, incredibly, Middle America loved it and made him a wealthy man. And with the wealth came the drugs, lots of drugs.

QuoteIn the Roy Radin case, sex and drugs combined in the usual ways, but with the addition of cult practices on the one hand, and videotape technology on the other.

QuoteThe tabloid press was gleeful, of course, and Haller rewarded their joy by insisting to the police that she had been drugged, raped and beaten by Radin and his associates and that everything had been captured on videotape. No such tape was found, but then Radin had ample advance warning from the local cops and would have been able to erase any incriminating evidence.

QuoteWhether Radin blamed his predicament on photographer Ron Sisman is not known; what is known is that Sisman was murdered shortly thereafter. The talk on the street, however, was that Sisman was killed for another, even more sinister, reason: he claimed to have possession of a videotape showing the murder of Stacey Moskowitz, the last Son of Sam victim.

QuoteKaren DeLayne Jacobs [...] A brittle-looking brunette and at times peroxide blonde with a tight smile and a ferret's features, she was nonetheless as popular around the Cuban and Colombian narcotraficante circuit as she was in her Georgia high school Pep Club. Known as La Rubia ("the Blonde"), she began cutting deals behind the backs of her drug-dealing boyfriends and was soon running coke in quantity from Miami to Los Angeles.

Quoteher most recent liaison was with a powerful trafficker, one Milan Bellechasses. Bellechasses, a native of Santiago de Cuba, worked for the Medellin drug cartel and specifically for Carlos Lehder Rivas, one of the most colorful of the three men who made up the cartel. Lehder was not only a drug trafficker (who had spent time in the Bronx as a teenager, dealing marijuana and boosting cars), but he also considered himself a political activist dedicated to the overthrow of North American hegemony in Colombia and the rest of Latin America through the exportation of illegal drugs to the States: weapons of mass addiction, perhaps. He was also a worshipper (there is no other word) of former Beatle John Lennon, and erected a statue of him outside a hotel he owned in Colombia. The statue shows Lennon completely nude, except for a Nazi helmet, a guitar, and a hole where his heart would be.

QuoteWhat they did not know was that his godfather—his literal godfather—was Johnny Stoppelli, a soldier in the Genovese crime family who maintained an upscale lifestyle in Manhattan's Murray Hill section. Radin referred to Stoppelli as his "muscle,"

QuoteOn May 5, 1983, and in the midst of the accusations and recriminations that were flying around the New York City townhouse of Robert Evans that week, Radin managed to bring his "godfather," Johnny Stoppelli, to one of the meetings, hoping that they could work something out between Radin and Evans. However, they had just begun to talk when Laney walked in with her Miami attorney, Frank Diaz, and the fighting began again. Radin was adamant about not letting Jacobs have any percentage of the deal. He did not want to have to deal with her at all. Even more compelling, however, was Johnny Stoppelli's reaction: he recognized Jacobs for what she was, and told Radin that he would not do business with drug dealers and warned Radin to forget the whole thing.

QuoteWhen he was out one afternoon, he received a call at his Los Angeles hotel on his private line. It was a New York mobster, warning him to keep his mouth shut and to get out of town. The call was taken by Radin's assistant, Jonathan Lawson, who was appropriately alarmed and urged Radin to heed the advice. It had been a warning—the last one.

QuoteWilson wound up driving directly to La Scala to wait for Radin and Jacobs to appear. The plan was that Wilson would take another table and watch the proceedings from a safe distance. They never showed up. After a few hours, Lawson called La Scala to see what was going on and was informed that Radin and Jacobs never arrived.

QuoteThe full story would not come out until much later, after several years of investigation, but on June 10, 1983—less than a month after Radin's disappearance—a bee-keeper by the name of Glen Fischer wandering in the rough country near Gorman, California came across a body that was partially buried in a ravine, the fingers of one hand clawing upward from the ground, its skull almost completely destroyed, its jawbone several feet away from its head, pumped with twenty-eight shots at point blank range, and dressed in an expensive three-piece suit and a Pierre Cardin tie. Glen Fischer had found Roy Radin.

QuoteMaury Terry, acting on the basis of information obtained from an informer—"Vinny"—who had known David Berkowitz in prison, was looking at Roy Radin as the possible East Coast connection for the Son of Sam cult. Why? There was more to Ocean Castle than the Melonie Haller incident. It seems that police had been called out to the Castle several times in the past, acting on complaints of sexual assault. There was a strong rumor that many of the parties and other activities there had been videotaped; and that photographer Ronald Sisman was more deeply involved with Radin and with cult activity than others had suspected. Vinny had actually named Radin—knowing him only as "Rodan" and "Rodan the Flying Monster"—as well as Sisman and others involved in the case. Radin was said to be involved with "Dale Evans," another code name, and in this case Roy Radin was referred to as "Roy Rogers."

QuoteTo be sure, "Roy Rogers" could also have been a reference to Tally Rogers who, as Laney Jacobs' drug courier, was driving between Miami and Los Angeles twice a month and could conceivably have been more than simply a drug courier, and used to transport information between the Los Angeles branch of the Sam Cult and the East Coast.

QuoteVinny insisted that Radin had close connections to Los Angeles and the Son of Sam cult supposed to be headquartered there. Terry's information included reports of satanic activity at Ocean Castle along with all the drugs and polymorphous sexuality. David Berkowitz himself was known to have visited Ocean Castle at least once, which was explosive information as it was ... but then Berkowitz also had been seen in Minot, North Dakota, the other Sam cult site.

QuoteOnce Radin's body had been found, Terry was notified and prepared to fly to Los Angeles to examine the crime scene himself, certain he was that Radin had been part of the Sam cult he was investigating. That is when he received another note from "Vinny," who told him to look at the scene carefully, for the killers would have left a cultic clue behind.

QuoteAnd that is when he found the Bible, buried underneath a bush next to where Radin's body had been found, opened to the twenty-second chapter of Isaiah.

For those not up on their Bible knowledge http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+22&version=NIV

QuoteWick also mentions that the name "Rodan" was given to Roy Radin by his neo-Nazi killer, Alex Marti, who also called Radin "a big, fat Jew." Terry's informant on the East Coast knew the nickname Rodan before Radin was killed. Since Radin was known as "Rodan" to the Son of Sam cult (via Vinny's information), the only possible conclusion to draw is that Marti and his partner Mentzer were either members of that same cabal or had been hired guns of the cabal.

QuoteBill Mentzer—Terry's pick as "Manson II," a much-rumored hitman with cult credentials—has the necessary pedigree. According to Terry's in- formants within the Los Angeles police, federal agencies, and the criminal subculture (very few of whom are named, making independent corroboration or confirmation difficult if not at times impossible), Mentzer had been a friend of both Charles Manson and, most importantly, Abigail Folger in the late 1960s.

QuoteWhile Mentzer had a criminal record and had been involved in questionable and illegal activity for a while, what does not ring true about Mentzer being the much-vaunted "Manson II" is that, for a hitman, he evidently has a rather weak stomach. On each occasion where we know Mentzer was present at or committed a murder he had to drink himself into the role. That is, he had to be pretty drunk before he could carry out the killings, whereas his associates—men like Argentine assassin Alex Marti—carried out these missions with glee, and needed no "Dutch courage" to get them in the mood.

QuoteIf we understand that the Son of Sam killings also included some specific hits, possibly ordered by an organized crime lord (as intimated by David Berkowitz himself, who has never avoided responsibility for his participation in these murders), and if we understand that Manson, Mentzer and Berkowitz are linked quite specifically via their respective cults, we have to come to the inescapable conclusion that a cult exists whose members are available for contract killings, and that this cult has existed since at least the late 1960s through the late 1970s, and likely beyond. We have also to understand that some of the Son of Sam killings were cult sacrifices, chosen to take place on days selected in advance according to an occult calendar or to some other, more esoteric, method. These killings were probably arranged to "blood" the new recruits: to acquaint them with the act of murder and to win their loyalty through fear of exposure to the authorities. This implies a well-organized and disciplined operation with, indeed, national coverage, as murders connected to this cult have taken place all over the United States. As we mentioned, however, murder is only one aspect of this cult's activities. Drug-running is another, and probably provides much of the operating income for the group. Prostitution—both male and female, adult and child—is also a function of the group, as well as pornography and particularly child pornography.

Shit. Not even halfway through your new posts yet, but shit. Thanks, Cain!

QuoteWhile we have looked at both the Manson-Mentzer-Berkowitz connections and the Robert Evans-Laney Jacobs-Mentzer connections, what the reader may find startling are connections to still yet another group of organized killers and drug runners, the infamous "Company." When Laney Jacobs was asked about her sources of income, she would usually tell people that she had made investments in the Suzy Creamcheese line of women's fashions and was a part-owner of the franchise which was famous in Las Vegas and among Hollywood celebrities.

We don't know if Jacobs did indeed own a piece of the Suzy Creamcheese action, but she is known to have taken friends to visit Las Vegas and stay at Suzy Creamcheese owner Leslie DeKeyser's house, and to buy them clothes at the boutique. Jacobs spent a lot of time traveling to Vegas from both Florida and California, and we remember that Bob Evans was trying to raise money from casino owners there, the Doumani brothers. Suzy Creamcheese had another illustrious client, and this will lead us back to Ashland, Kentucky and—strangely enough—back to Bob Evans, drugs, and murder.

This time the main character is a bizarre figure who was part-commando, part-mystic, and total criminal, a man who leaped to his death on September 11, 1985, when his parachute didn't open because the $75-million worth of cocaine he had strapped to his body proved too heavy: Andrew Carter "Drew" Thornton II.

QuoteAlthough he boasted such ... luminaries as Charo and Cher among his satisfied customers, his most devoted client was one Anita Madden, nee Myers, a woman who was raised in Ashland, Kentucky on the wrong side of the tracks, but who clawed her way to the top by marrying the heir to the Madden horse-raising fortune. Sharing a great deal in common with Laney Jacobs, another poor white Southern girl who made it a habit to marry wealthy men, Anita Madden's parties became scandalous affairs in the late 1960s (and through to 1998, the year of the last Madden Kentucky Derby-Eve bash), with Ms. Madden decked out in the latest Suzy Creamcheese outrage, all leathers and feathers, and surrounding herself with show business and sports personalities, in a determined effort to invade and hold hostage the society columns of the Kentucky newspapers,

QuoteThe complex mystery begins with a bizarre paramilitary operation known as the "Company" a nickname not to be confused with that of the CIA ... maybe. As it turns out, the Company was involved in more than what was originally suspected by Kentucky law enforcement, which was drug-running, pure and simple.

QuoteThe police investigation of the Company revealed a state whose politics— from the Governor's Mansion on down through the various local and state police departments—was corrupt to the extent that its reputation is only surpassed by that of Louisiana and Rhode Island. There were so many former and current law enforcement officers as part of the Company that for a while many investigators were under the assumption that it was a covert federal operation, perhaps something linked to arms deals with the Contras. Indeed, Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi makes an appearance in this story, too, as a frequent visitor to Kentucky whose own company's name—the Triad Corporation—was echoed in the name of the farm that served as the Company's headquarters: Triad.

QuoteThe logo of the Triad Farm was a pitchfork, and locals insisted to police and federal investigators that it was used not only for paramilitary training but was also the headquarters of a satanic cult.

QuoteIn the 1970s, Kentucky became infamous for activity of the Company, a network of illegal trade in drugs, arms and prostitution. The Company was largely composed of former law enforcement officers, and had intelligence resources high up in several federal agencies, notably the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA. It was widely rumored that the Company had CIA connections, and that they were part of the infrastructure that eventually began supplying the Contras in the 1980s. With planeloads of weapons and high-technology gear such as night-vision scopes and other James Bond paraphernalia (either stolen from US military bases such as China Lake, or actually supplied by the government, the truth is a little hard to find), the materiel wound up supporting Latin American military regimes, and the planes would fly back into the United States with shipments of marijuana and, later, cocaine. Shipments worth millions of dollars a flight.

QuoteWe have David Berkowitz in Kentucky preaching on street corners at the same time Drew Thornton is busting radicals and dope dealers there, in an eerie replay of the Jim Jones and Dan Mitrione "relationship" in Indiana; we have Laney Jacobs staying with Suzy Creamcheese founder Leslie DeKeyser at the latter's home in Las Vegas, at the same time that she is plotting the Roy Radin murder and is involved with Robert Evans; Leslie DeKeyser is also an intimate of Anita Madden and a regular at her parties; Laney will later marry Larry Greenberger, a famous South Florida cocaine dealer and lieutenant of Medellin cartel narcotraficante Carlos Lehder Rivas; Greenberger himself is later murdered either by his wife, Laney, or by one of her lovers, before she herself is arrested and convicted for her role in the Radin homicide. We have Larry Flynt, the man who employed Radin assassins Bill Mentzer and Alex Marti, attending Anita Madden's pre-Derby parties at Hamburg Place ... and we have the assassination of federal judge John Wood at the orders of drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, an assassination carried out by hitman Charles Harrelson, father of actor Woody Harrelson ("Woody" on the television sit-com Cheers, who later portrayed a serial killer in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and ... Larry Flynt, in The People vs. Larry Flynt). When arrested, Charles Harrelson will confess to having been the man on the grassy knoll in Dallas on November 22, 1963; he will confess to having assassinated President John F. Kennedy. He will quickly retract that confession on the advice of his attorney, and he has never spoken about it again.

QuoteAs Denton and Morris reveal, among Eugene Hasenfus' personal effects when his plane crashed in the Nicaraguan jungle, thus initiating the Iran- Contra investigation, was documentation showing his involvement with the controversial and top-secret Area 51 in Nevada ...

QuoteWhy a member of the Contra supply network would have connections of any kind to Area 51 is a question that has not yet been answered. Hasenfus was a pilot and a mercenary; he was not an aerospace scientist with a top-secret classification. We are in the uncomfortable position of having two mysteries wrapped around each other, and neither giving us much room for deduction

QuoteWhile Strieber's story in Communion refers to events that took place while he was an adult and spending holidays at his cabin in the woods of upstate New York with his family and friends, it becomes clear through his writings that he links that experience with older, more unsettling ones from his childhood. Whitley Strieber has never insisted that he was abducted by what the popular imagination terms "space aliens." He is not convinced that the UFO phenomenon is, strictly speaking, the visitation of the earth by beings from another planet, or that he (and others like him) have been periodically kid- napped by these beings and used in gruesome medical experiments. He keeps an open mind, and as far as I can discern is sincerely seeking to understand what his experience really was, what it represents.

QuoteHarvard professor and psychiatrist John E. Mack, M.D. concludes that those who have experienced "alien abduction" are genuinely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  That is, they have had an experience which has caused all the psychological and organic reactions typical of soldiers who have been in battle, or people who have witnessed a particularly upsetting event, such as violent death

QuoteAt this point, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say for the record that Mr. Strieber contacted me via email a few years ago, after reading my first book, Unholy Alliance. His question to me was quite specific: an inquiry concerning Operation Paperclip and the identity of some German officers who had been stationed at Randolph AFB in the 1950s. Since I had spent years researching Nazi Germany and particularly those who escaped justice and wound up in the Americas, it was natural enough that he would contact me for this information. But as we communicated further, and at length, concerning this period of American history, it became clear that Strieber believed that he may have been a victim of some sort of medical treatment or experiment at the hands of these men. He further believed that some sort of connection existed between the Randolph AFB group and a school in Mexico, and this is where the story came unnervingly close to actual events which are only now coming to light.

Did you remember to remember about schools for gifted children in Mexico?

QuoteWhile the hideous example of Dr. Cameron's psychic driving and other programs in Canada is by now well-known to those who study this field, there is virtually no information about similar programs undertaken south of the border, in Mexico. But there is the Finders case.

QuoteAs Maury Terry continued his investigation of the Son of Sam cult, an investigation that became more linked with the Process or one of its offshoots— through statements made by former Process members—he kept hearing the cult called by a peculiar name, "The Children." David Berkowitz knew the cult by this name, and it was stated by Terry that a wealthy émigré from Postwar Germany who lived in the Yonkers area was an important leader. This man has since died. Terry, who knows the man's name, did not divulge it in his book, but he did attend the wake and saw the proliferation of black flowers around the man's coffin.

QuoteA noted psychotherapist and expert on hypnosis, D. Corydon Hammond, has also insisted that a satanic cult exists in America that was begun by Nazi émigrés after the war, and that this cult abuses and even sacrifices children as part of its ritual.  If we put this together with Terry's discovery, we begin to see a pattern emerging ... particularly as the Nazis could not have come to America and begun developing their network without at least preliminary support by American intelligence officials. It is possible that the tales of a nationwide Nazi–Satanic cult that sacrifices children is only the smoke from a much smaller, but potentially more dangerous, fire.

QuoteKnowing all of this, is it so far-fetched an idea that some of these Nazis were allowed—or encouraged—to continue their medical and psychological programs in America? Or, where it was considerably safer, in Canada or Mexico under CIA or military intelligence auspices?

Going by Aaron and Loftus, the Nazi position in America was tenuous because they were, in effect, allowed in by a faction within the CIA - a core of OSS officers who served in a secretive State Department unit in the interim between WWII's end and the creation of the CIA, which was later rolled into the CIA operations department.  Said unit was closely linked to the "aristocratic families" which had close links to the Nazis before and during the war, and likely had a hand in the destruction of CIA files relating to Nazi-era war criminals (a fact discovered by Loftus during his own time as a "Nazi hunter" in the State Department) and the feeding of subsequent disinformation to the broader CIA about the identities of the people they were working with.  Many of these covers were as anti-Nazi, anti-Communist partisans, whereas in fact most had been enthusiastic Nazi collaborators.

History!

QuoteThe memories recorded by Whitley Strieber of his childhood encounters with the "visitors" at the secret school hidden within San Antonio's Olmos Basin may be, he admits, screen memories of actual psychological testing that was done on behalf of American intelligence and conducted by the Nazi doctors of Randolph AFB, tests that could have included hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin. We know that such testing was done on children, for instance at Creedmore in the 1960s.

QuoteNuclear physicist Jack Sarfatti (intimate of Saul Paul Sirag, Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller, Ira Einhorn, Philip K. Dick, Carlos Castaneda, Barbara Honegger, and many others) has written about a similar experience he had as a primary school student around the same time, in 1952, an experience in which he places a lot of stock and which was obviously a seminal event in his life. He had been identified as boy with a genius IQ, and preparations would soon be made to send him to Cornell University on a full scholarship at the age of 17. In the meantime, however, he received a strange phone call at his home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

According to Sarfatti's own account in The Destiny Matrix (1995), and also available on the Internet, "The telephone rings. I pick it up. I hear curious clanking mechanical sounds like relays clicking. A distant cold metallic voice speaking numbers gets louder. "Who are you?" I ask. "I am a conscious computer on board a spacecraft ... We have identified you as one of four hundred young bright receptive minds ... You must give us your decision now. If you say yes, you will begin to link up with the others in twenty years." After a few seconds, young Sarfatti agrees, and the voice replies,"Good, go to your firescape [sic]. We will send a ship to pick you up in ten minutes. Nothing happened."

Sarfatti then goes on to explain how he later became a member of a group of gifted children, an after-school coterie led by one Walter Breen (1928-1993), "a graduate student at Columbia and well known Numismatist associated with psychologist William Shelden."

QuoteBreen is a fascinating person in his own right. His Complete Encyclopedia of US and Colonial Coins is the definitive volume on this subject, and retails today for $135. But he was also very familiar to the science fiction circles of the 1960s, and was a co-founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). He also wrote, under the pseudonym J.Z. Eglinton, Greek Love, a text that has been referenced by the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) as supportive of their philosophy concerning sexual relationships between men and boys. Breen had been arrested before for child molestation, and would be again at the end of his life.

QuoteBut the gifted children group to which Sarfatti belonged was somehow linked with the Sandia Corporation, now part of Lockheed Martin, a charter member of the Defense–Energy establishment.

In an email posted on a Web site (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ItalianPhysicsCenter/message/79) and dated July 16, 2001, Sarfatti writes, "Breen was talking about extra dimensions, telepathy, remote viewing, UFOs, mutant humans, contact with aliens ... Sandia was trying to develop us as super-kids to have paranormal powers and to deal with extra-dimensional intelligence."

Sandia is still involved with gifted children to this day, in cooperation with a "super kids" program that selects very bright students to work with its supercomputer.

QuoteSarfatti mentions in another email exchange, from June 2002, that he had been "studied" by the US Army in the late 1940s, and goes on to describe the after-school group led by Walter Breen as the "McDermott-Sheldon-Breen 'Columbia-Sandia eugenics' connection of 1953-56."

Again, this is a very suggestive timeframe in which to be placing events so similar as those related by Sarfatti and Strieber. In yet another place Sarfatti goes into more detail about this observation by the Army.  He claims it occurred at "US Army Quarter Masters in Lower Manhattan in the late 1940s soon after the alleged Roswell incident," and mentions that his mentor Walter Breen told him that he (i.e., Breen) had been in a plane crash in 1947 and had complete amnesia of the event, only coming to later in an Army hospital.

1947, of course, was the year of the Roswell incident. Sarfatti wonders if there was a connection between Breen and Roswell. (Breen would later go on to become a charter member of the American MENSA organization.) It is not only Sarfatti who has a single degree of separation between himself and the UFOs, however.

One of Whitley Strieber's neighbors was the Colonel in charge of the air base from which Captain Mantell went on his fateful chase of a UFO, and became the first ever military casualty of a UFO in American history. (More about this in a bit.) Young Whitley used to play in the Colonel's swimming pool with the Colonel's own son.

QuoteWhitley Strieber, who for a long time inexplicably believed (erroneously) that he had been at the University of Texas on the day that Charles Whitman began shooting people at random, was in London when James Earl Ray was there after the Martin Luther King assassination; he was in London, visiting the Process, the same year that Manson Family member Bruce Davis was in London visiting the Process; he was in London when Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski were married there.

We would not consider all of this as evidence of anything at all, except that Whitley's behavior during 1968 was bizarre by his own admission, and that he had also visited the Process—for whatever reason—that same year. The author believes that Whitley's odyssey probably had nothing at all to do with the Process per se; that his visiting their headquarters in London might have been motivated more by simple curiosity than anything else.

Yet, placing the young—by now, twenty-three-year-old—Whitley Strieber at the Process headquarters in London at the same time that they were forging some kind of link with the Manson Family is suggestive of some deeper influence, for the Process would later leave California for New York City, which is where Whitley wound up after leaving London and at the same time. They also had operations in Texas, principally Houston, where Maury Terry opines they were working with the Son of Sam cult—if, indeed, the two groups could safely be considered separate by that time, the 1970s.

Quote from: Waffleman on August 11, 2013, 09:03:09 PM
Shit. Not even halfway through your new posts yet, but shit. Thanks, Cain!

No problem.  I may dump all the quotes from the book tonight, depending on exactly how long it takes, and whether or not my exhaustion catches up with me before then.

I never could entirely dismiss the Chapman thing, due to Lennon being on Nixon's enemies list - which was LOLZ until he came up dead and there was all this weird shit around Chapman.

QuoteThen, in the summer of 1955, a copy of Morris Jessup's book, The Case for the UFO, was sent to the Navy's Office of Naval Research. It was heavily annotated by the anonymous correspondent, and the nature of the remarks startled the naval officers who received it; so much so, that they contacted Jessup and asked to see him.

When Jessup arrived in Washington, he was shown the copy of his book with the plentiful notations and remarks, and the experience seems to have been unsettling. He recognized the handwriting as that of his crazed correspondent, Allende, and told the officers that he had two letters from the same man in his files. The officers insisted that they needed to see them as soon as possible. In return, they would give Jessup a copy of the annotated book in order to get his input.

What were the annotations like? They discussed everything from the UFOs, their propulsion systems, "magnetic fields, gravity fields, sheets of diamond, cosmic rays, force cutters, inlay work ..." etc., etc. The annotator knew of a great many details that were known only to Jessup or to a handful of specialists in the field of UFOs, and "many other matters usually of concern mainly to psychics, cultists and mystics. That these were true or not was not the point. The fact that they should be so precisely known to an unknown was." This bothered the scientist more than anything else, this and the fact that the Navy was actually taking the ravings of this mysterious individual seriously. And, of course, the Philadelphia Experiment was also mentioned in the notes.

Demonstrating the extent to which the Navy took this matter to heart is the method by which they made copies of the book. There was no photocopy machine in 1955, so the book had to be retyped by hand on mimeograph stencils! This edition is referred to as the Varo edition, because the work of typing and mimeographing the entire work (in two colors, black for the original text and red for the annotations) was evidently undertaken by a temporary secretary hired by that company for that purpose.

QuoteOne of the strangest—and, at the same time, most documented and revealing of military and government appreciation of the paranormal—was the series of "remote viewing" experiments that were variously part of the Pentagon's own programs as well as sub-contracted by the military and the intelligence community to private contractors. As mentioned briefly in Book I, this program was known under a variety of rubrics, but the most dramatic and best known of these was STAR GATE, but it also included GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE and SUN STREAK. Oddly enough, the most celebrated participants of the remote viewing endeavor were Scientologists.

QuoteThe discussion of the modern technique of "remote viewing"—which was a scientific-sounding name invented by the SRI team to distance their practices from those of spiritualist mediums and Gypsy fortune-tellers—begins, according to Schnabel, in February of 1960 with the publication (in a French periodical, Science et Vie) of an article claiming that the US Navy had been able to communicate with the nuclear submarine Nautilus while it was submerged under the Arctic ice, using only telepathy. The article named names, but a volcano of controversy erupted, and everyone mentioned by name in the article condemned it as nonsense. But the damage had been done. The Soviets were worried that the US had found a way to harness psychic powers for military purposes, and the US was convinced that the Soviets were doing the same.

Quoteon the French side, the consulting editor of Science et Vie who had planted the Nautilus story with a hapless staff writer was none other than Jacques Bergier, one of the co-authors of Morning of the Magicians, and a former intelligence officer himself with strong connections in the French intelligence community.

QuoteOn June 6, 1972, the artist and sometime astrologer Ingo Swann used his mental powers to disturb the operation of a magnetometer buried in a concrete well at the Stanford Research Institute. Four months later, the CIA would fund SRI to the tune of fifty thousand dollars to continue that research, after intermediate testing had demonstrated the uncanny abilities of Swann and other psychics to penetrate top-secret military installations using only their minds.

QuoteThis method was successful beyond expectations, and in worrisome ways. The CIA began to collaborate on the testing, giving the geographic coordinates of various locations to SRI, and Swann—and eventually a newcomer to the project, Pat Price—would mentally "go" to those coordinates and write down what they saw. This testing was done mostly through the CIA's Technical Services division, and involved CIA officers Ken Kress and the pseudonymous "Richard Kennett" and many others. In one case, in June of 1973, a CIA officer with a skeptical attitude towards the project gave a set of coordinates to his mountain cabin in West Virginia. Both Swann and Price came back with detailed information concerning what appeared to be a military base, replete with file drawers marked with operational code names. The CIA official scoffed, telling his associates that there was nothing to this SRI program after all. A while later, one of the other CIA officials involved with the SRI program decided to take a look himself. After all, how could both of the psychics be wrong in exactly the same way, with the same details? Driving around near the mountain cabin, he stumbled upon a top-secret Pentagon installation.

QuoteAs more and more testing took place, Puthoff and Targ used different methods to shield their targets so thoroughly that even they did not know in advance what they would be. For instance, they used random number generators to come up with geographic coordinates to ensure that they were not somehow inadvertently and unconsciously signaling the coordinates to the psychics. They would try an "outbound" scanning experiment, in which a subject would drive to a location and sit there at a specific time while the psychic would try to "see" where the subject was located, essentially looking at the surroundings through the subject's eyes.

QuotePrice had been a heavy drinker and smoker, and was fond of food as well. Therefore it came as no surprise when he developed symptoms of angina. Although his friends did what they could to try to convince him to cut down, he generally ignored this advice and continued his energetic lifestyle. Then, one evening in Washington in mid-July of 1975, he had dinner with friends. The next day in Las Vegas, not feeling very well at dinner, Price men- tioned to his friends that someone had slipped something into his coffee the night before. This did not sound like paranoia on his part; he seemed certain of it. Later that night he went to his room. His friends found him afterward in a state of cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead in the hospital. Perhaps no one would have thought much of Price's insistence that he had been poisoned or drugged the previous evening, but when CIA official "Richard Kennett" tried to find out more, he was told that no autopsy had been performed. This was indeed unusual, as the death had occurred to a non-resident outside the hospital and would have ordinarily required an autopsy. Further, the hospital staff reported that a man had arrived at the hospital within hours of his death with a briefcase full of Price's medical records and managed to convince the staff not to perform an autopsy based on this evidence of Price's poor physical condition. This gentleman has never been identified, not even by the CIA.

QuoteAt the time that SRI was experimenting with psychic abilities in a relatively benign fashion, the Soviet Union was engaged in its own psychic research. There were theoretical problems with psychic research in the Communist state, however; as long as ESP and other paranormal abilities were linked with superstition, magic and religion, no one in the Communist Party could become involved. Marx and Engels were quite clear about the position of religion in a Communist society. Religion, after all, was "the opiate of the people," and psychic phenomena were relegated to the fringe of religion.

QuoteAccording to Schnabel, who bases his information on intelligence documents and sources, the Soviets "scoured the mystical eastern vastnesses of the Soviet Union in order to find the toughest Siberian shamans, the best-trained Tibetan priests, the most powerful Mongolian chi gong masters." This effort yielded some fruit, for "a group of Tibetans succeeded in breaking a human skull a few yards away, just by concentrating on it." All of this was undertaken by the Institute for the Problems of Information Transmission (known by its Russian acronym IPPI) in Moscow. This same Institute was responsible for a state-sponsored experiment in the blackest of black arts: the cursing of souvenirs by shamans so that the (foreign) recipients of these gifts would "suffer neuralgia, depression, and even nervous breakdown."

QuoteUri Geller had been invited to SRI for some informal tests of his abilities in 1972. By 1974, word of his prowess had leaked out around the world, and the nuclear weapons specialists at Lawrence Livermore were concerned that someone with psychic abilities—particularly psychokinesis, an ability Geller demonstrated by bending metal spoons, rings, and other objects with his mind—could detonate a nuclear weapon using only mental energy or could scramble the nation's military computer systems, thus disabling the country's missile defences. Therefore, in late 1974 and 1975 a select group of scientists and security officers began testing Geller at an off-site location. The tests showed that Geller could only affect metal objects, computer systems, and computer disks if he was in physical contact with them. There- fore, it was a reasonable assumption that PK was not a threat to the nation's missile systems. However, other developments took place that caused not only concern but hysteria among the Lawrence Livermore staff While technicians were listening to the audiotapes routinely made during the Geller PK sessions, they noticed a voice on the tape that had not been there during the tests. It was a "metallic voice" and was largely unintelligible, although the few words that were understood turned out to be top-secret codenames for intelligence operations, names that were unknown to the scientists at Lawrence Livermore. In addition, an infrared camera that had been used during the sessions showed patches of radiation on the laboratory walls where no such radiation should have been present. These were more than merely scientific anomalies. They were captured on tape and film under controlled circumstances. However, this would have been worth a few paragraphs in a report and not much more, were it not for the fact that personnel involved in the Geller experiments began to experi- ence exceedingly strange phenomena. One of the recurring motifs was the appearance of a flying saucer in the laboratory: a hovering, hologram-like image that would float around and then disappear. And this "saucer" appear- ance was not restricted to the laboratory. Some of the scientists witnessed the phenomenon when they were at home with their families. There was no conceivable explanation for this, no way such a hologram could have been projected inside the secure laboratory environment without a lot of equip- ment and expensive electronics that could have easily been discovered. Since Geller was known to put out the story that he was in communication with extraterrestrial agencies aboard a spacecraft that hovered over the earth, the connection was obvious, but the reason or motivation behind the appari- tions was not. In addition to the saucer, there were reports of appearances of strange and fantastic animals to the Lawrence Livermore personnel and their families, including very large black birds, ravens, that would appear from nowhere and wander across their lawns ... or suddenly appear in the morning standing over their beds. This association of birds with Geller was something that the laboratory staff may have not recognized, for Geller's supernatural experiences included that of a bird of prey, usually a hawk (symbol for the Egyptian god, Horus). The appearance of fantastic animals is common in the literature of shamanism, and their purpose is usually totemic in nature; but what was happening to the scientists? As the personnel began to break down and exhibit signs of intense mental distress, the security officer in charge of the group broke down and contacted "Richard Kennett" of the CIA. As Kennett not only had security clearances but was also aware of the psychic research programs and had a doctorate in neurophysiology, he was the logical choice. Kennett listened to the men—some of whom broke down and wept in his presence—describe their symptoms. He was not convinced that this was simply a textbook case of hysteria. These men were scientists with no occult leanings; furthermore, they had all been psychologically vetted, as they were involved with classified government and military projects. It didn't make sense. And then he listened to the audiotapes, and heard the secret codewords mentioned that none of the Lawrence Livermore staff could have known. This was not the end of the story, however. One of the scientists received a phone call and heard the "metallic voice" that so often pursues researchers in this field, man and boy, and this time the voice told him to drop the Geller experimentation completely. The team was only too happy to do so, and the "hauntings" gradually stopped.

QuoteAlthough Gates and Carlucci did their best to destroy the remote viewing program, the psychics had champions in the persons of Senator Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia, Senator Daniel Inouye (D) of Hawaii, Senator and former astronaut John Glenn (D) of Ohio, and two Republican senators, William Cohen of Maine and Ted Stevens of Alaska.

QuoteMany of the remote viewers and support personnel became UFO "believers"—if that is the correct term—including Ingo Swann, who eventually returned to New York City after dealing with numerous internal political squabbles himself, most notably with Russell Targ.

This is probably one of the key points of the series:

QuoteThe historical model I am proposing in these volumes should be obvious by now. By tracing the darker elements of the American experience from the earliest days of the Adena and Hopewell cultures through the discovery by Columbus, the English settlers in Massachusetts and the Salem witchcraft episode, the rise of Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Mormons via ceremonial magic and Freemasonry, up to the twentieth century and the support of Nazism by American financiers and politicians before, during, and after World War II, and the UFO phenomenon coming on the heels of that war, we can see the outlines of a kind of political ectoplasm taking shape in this historical séance: politics as a continuation of religion by other means.

The ancillary events of the Charles Manson murders, the serial killer phenomenon, Jonestown, and the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Marilyn Monroe are all the result of the demonic possession of the American psyche, like the obscenities spat out by little Regan, tied to her bed and shrieking at the exorcists. It is said that demonic possession is both a way of testing us, and of making us aware of the real conflict taking place within us every day.

The fact that so many American men and women in positions of power and authority have been specifically involved with occult practices is something that not even I had anticipated before I began the research for this work. Initially, I treated the one or two politicians who "dabbled" as a kind of anomaly; my original focus had been the unhealthy, almost incestuous relationship between Church and State, in America specifically and in the world in general: religious beliefs as the motivation for dangerous policy decisions and strategic maneuvers (such as Ronald Reagan's apocalyptic Christianity, and Nancy Reagan's devotion to agenda by astrology, and George W. Bush's devotion to evangelical Christianity). The more I looked, however, the more I found men with bizarre beliefs and involved in questionable, occult practices at the highest levels of the American government, and buried deep within government agencies.

I also discovered that occultism was embraced by the American military and intelligence establishments as a weapon to be used in the Cold War; and as they did so, they unleashed forces upon the American populace that cannot be called back. Those that were not involved in occultism per se were involved with Nazism in one form or another, and thus were aiding and abetting not only an enemy of America and an enemy of humanity in general, but what was most certainly and by any definition a cult: the most powerful and most dangerous cult the modern world has seen so far. The moral imbecility of those engaging these men as scientists, spies, and agents of American foreign policy—and then defending them against those who begged for justice, hiding them on American soil—is beyond comprehension. The guilty include the Dulles brothers, Walkers and Bushes, Henry Ford, Richard Nixon, and so many other household names in American politics. We can try to make excuses for them, try to rationalize away their actions in the light of realpolitik, but then we become as bad as the Germans who claimed they were only following orders.

Watergate revealed the existence of "sinister forces" to me in many ways. The scandal opened the floodgates of conspiracy theories going back to the Kennedy assassination and beyond. It tied together so many loose ends, yet posited more questions than it offered answers, revealing a secret political struggle that had been going on for decades, ripping apart the very fabric of America with a populace oblivious to it all. One inevitably was forced back to the CIA and the mind-control experiments that began in the late 1940s and extended nearly to the present day.

Coincidence piled on coincidence, indicating the existence of a powerful, subliminal force working at the level of chaos—at the quantum level—and struggling to manifest itself in our reality, our consciousness, our political agenda. This dynamic was uncovered by a Swiss psychologist and an Austrian physicist, but it capably describes a force working within the context of American history and American politics that is suppurating below the consciousness of the people but able to erupt without notice. A sinister force. Fascism.

QuoteThe shaman in primitive cultures is a person who has managed to integrate the irrational into his own personality and, by extension, into the life of his society. His act of personal self-transcendence—to use Koestler's terminology—is an act of social integration which also successfully integrates the irrational into the life of society through his social role as healer, therapist, and seer. The serial killer is a shaman who has not managed to integrate the irrational with the life of his society, as society no longer has a place for it or a context within which to understand what is happening to him. The irrational in modern society is consigned to the dustheap of psychoanalysis, if not of history itself.

The same is true of the fascist. The fascist embraces the irrational because it is transcendental, and the fascist yearns to transcend his natural state, to become more than human, to become—as Hitler said—a "new man." Since the fascist becomes the only political person who tolerates the irrational, he becomes the figurehead of the people who have encountered the irrational in their own lives. The fascist is a shaman who has not managed to integrate the irrational in his own life, but who still needs the approval and support—and, if possible, the adulation—of society in order to act out his fantasies. The serial killer differs only in that he has no need of society's approval: he gave that up a long time ago, and regards society with hatred and suspicion. The fascist and the serial killer share this in common: they both feel a tremendous need for self-transcendence but fail to integrate the irrational needs and experiences of their psyches with either themselves (the fascist) or with society (the serial killer).

The successful shaman has done both: he has interiorized the essential conflicts of the irrational experience in the "rational" world, and has also integrated both the elements of his own personality as well as his own personality (with all of its irrational experiences) with society in general. However, had society in general not welcomed his achievements, there is every possibility that he would have become a social pariah and, from there, a dangerous individual, fueled by the dangerous component of shamanism: sexuality.

QuoteWendy Doniger O'Flaherty—a colleague of the slain Ioan Culianu at the University of Chicago—has studied the problem of evil as it appears in Hinduism, one of humanity's oldest religions, based on one of its oldest languages: Sanskrit, a language so ancient and so complex that even today it is extremely difficult to give satisfactory translations of Sanskrit texts (as the ongoing and still uncompleted project to create a comprehensive Sanskrit dictionary has shown). What she has to say about Hindu concepts of evil is universal in application, and has resonance with early Christian and gnostic belief systems, as well as with mythologies as remote from each other as the Aztec and the Daoist. She writes,

"The belief that the gods create evil for man in order that man should depend on the gods—and the priests—recurs in Sanskrit texts. The gods find evil necessary for their very existence; they allow the demons to thrive in order that they themselves may thrive as gods, to force men to worship them."

This is, of course, an exceedingly cynical appraisal of the problem, but one that is familiar to students of Hinduism. It depicts the gods as venal entities who desire worship and sacrifice, and use men—and their fear of demons—the way governments use their populations. If it is true that "the organizing principle of nations is war" then it is equally true of the cosmos, according to this view. The one invariable characteristic of the gods is that they are the enemies of the demons, and the one invariable characteristic of the demons is that they are opposed to the gods. For this reason, when the later myths began to apply new moral codes to the characters of individual gods and demons in myths, a number of inconsistencies arise, for the two groups, as groups, are not fundamentally morally opposed. (emphasis in original). 

This important point speaks to the problem we face in dealing with spiritual evil. Although gods and demons are at war with each other and—as Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty says elsewhere—"mankind is caught in the crossfire," there is no moral difference between the two. Each is equally good or equally bad, depending on whose propaganda you believe. It also posits an ongoing struggle for supremacy between the two groups, something that would be familiar to anyone who has studied Manichaeism and Gnostic dualism, which considers humanity the battleground between the opposing forces of light and darkness. Yet, even this concept is "reductionist": ... in most Hindu texts, even when life is clearly desired and death feared, death is not the key to the struggle between gods and demons. For although they fight for the elixir of immortality, and the gods are said to win it ultimately, gods and demons are equally mortal and equally murderous to mankind. Finally, though the gods and demons are sometimes identified with light and darkness, these are merely symbolic expressions of contrast rather than true opposition.

"Equally murderous to mankind." A sobering thought, and one which the monotheists reject, even as their texts are replete with instances of an angry God destroying entire cities in his wrath. The monotheists struggle to explain why God would take vengeance on living beings in one instant, but threaten eternal punishment for evildoers in hell after death in the next. Which is it? Punishment here and now, or punishment later? Or both? If we understand the existence of evil in the context of a war between opposing "gods" then evil becomes, in a sense, more palatable. The innocent always suffer in a war; civilian targets and "collateral damage" are inevitable.

QuoteBut if the gods and demons—merely opponents in a cosmic war, after all—are in combat with each other, and if humanity has become a kind of spiritual battlefield, then where did the gods and demons come from in the first place, and why is humanity "caught in the crossfire"? 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 pure Lovecraft. It is also purely Sumerian, which is probably the most ancient of all recorded religious cultures. The idea that there once existed an ancient race of gods that was overthrown by another group of deities goes back to the Sumerian creation epics. It is even reflected in the Talmudic idea of the nephilim. It is resurgent in the gothic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, and it makes an appearance in some of the theories of alien abduction and the Erich von Danniken "chariots of the gods" books. It is such a common and universal theme, that it is amazing the monotheistic religions have not managed to incorporate it into their theologies in such a way that this is no longer a controversial issue; instead it is a persistent "rumor" in literary circles as well as in alternative spiritual beliefs. The identity of a class of Hindu gods known as the asuras has been the subject of a great deal of controversy in this regard. They are among the oldest of spiritual forces recognized in the Sanskrit literature, and even the name asura is quite controversial itself.

QuoteThis idea of the asuras as ocean-dwellers as well as dwellers in a city, and their association with sea monsters is, of course, pure Lovecraft.

QuoteAfter leaving his position at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Gof took up a post at the Esalen Institute—stomping ground of Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Alan Watts, John Lilly, Timothy Leary, and so many others who figure in our story, including a side-trip by Charles Manson—where he stayed for many years.

The Esalen Institute was founded in 1962 by Richard Price and Michael Murphy, and takes its name from a Native American tribe who once lived in the region. It was the first of the "human potential movement" centers, and attracted a diverse group of spiritual leaders, psychotherapists, physicists, philosophers, martial-arts experts, painters, writers, filmmakers, etc. For many Americans, the Esalen Institute would probably typify everything they hate about California, but the influence of Esalen on the fields of medicine, psychotherapy, and international relations cannot be denied. Their establishment of a group designed to reduce conflict through peaceful resolution brought them to the attention of American political and intelligence careerists, as well as the Soviets. (It was the Esalen Institute that brought Boris Yeltsin to the United States for the first time, to visit President George H.W. Bush as well as former President Ronald Reagan.)

QuoteBefore Grof arrived at Esalen, however, Esalen members would play a pivotal role in the founding of Arica, the mystical school established in Chile by Oscar Ichazo. (One of the Esalen members who traveled to Chile to work with Ichazo included John Lilly, he of the dolphin studies.) Ichazo, the son of a Bolivian military officer, joined a mysterious occult group in Buenos Aires in the 1950s when he was a young man. Based largely on this experience, he wound up in Chile training people in his system of mysticism and psychotherapy formed around the Enneagram, a nine-pointed symbol that is familiar to students of Gurdjieff. In the arid, northern Chilean city of Arica he attracted the attention of a Chilean psychiatrist, Claudio Naranjo, who then spoke about him and his technique to the Esalen crowd back in California. A group of about fifty Esalen participants flew to Arica in 1970 to undergo a rigorous training program under Ichazo, including one Jan Brewer. Brewer would tell Jack Sarfatti that Arica had "been started in Chile by high-ranking fugitives from the Third Reich who were masters of the occult." This may seem an outlandish claim at first, except that it was made by one of the first Esalen trainees to study in Arica, and my own direct experience in Chile with occultists who had Third Reich connections tends to make me less incredulous than I otherwise would be.42 Ichazo's background as the son of a Bolivian army officer—at a time when Bolivia was riddled with Nazi fugitives, one of whom (Klaus Barbie) would become head of Bolivian Intelligence—is also suggestive of a deeper military and fascist connection to the Arica movement in Chile.

QuoteThe Nine actually lectured at Esalen! Twenty years after the first appearance of The Nine to the circle around Andrija Puharich, they again manifested in the person of one Jenny O'Connor. Ms. O'Connor was "channeling" The Nine and came to the attention of Werner Erhard, the neo-fascist creator of a school of self-development known as "est," for "Erhard Seminar Training," and always printed in lower-case letters. (Erhard had famously changed his name from Jack Rosenberg to "give up Jewish weakness for German strength.") Sarfatti himself had been a visitor to Arthur Young in the company of Puharich and Ira Einhorn, and had worked sporadically with Arthur Young's Institute in Berkeley, California. Oddly enough, he seems not to have been aware of Young's involvement with The Nine in its earliest incarnation. In the late 1970s, Jenny O'Connor was referred to Sarfatti by one of the est people, and Sarfatti was not impressed. Nonetheless, O'Connor became ensconced at Esalen, channeling messages from The Nine and having influence over some management decisions and organizational structuring at the Institute, at the same time that Esalen was being visited by Soviet officials as well as by Einhorn, various physicists, Stanislav Grof (who was "Scholar-in-Residence" from 1973 to 1987), and many, many others.

QuoteBut the combination of Manson's Scientology and occult training in prison (including his contact with the Process and possibly the OTO), his horrific childhood experiences, his compulsive sexuality, and the use of LSD and other hallucinogens in specifically ritual circumstances suggests another agenda entirely. He was conscious of the uses to which hallucinogens could be put, and he himself underwent an LSD-assisted "crucifixion" in the California desert, as we have seen. The breakdown of the psyches of his followers through indoctrination, sex, and drugs, coupled with the creation of alternate personalities, the removal of his followers to isolated encampments far from city centers, his insistence that they commit criminal acts like stealing, fraud, etc. to further isolate them psychologically from society, and the manipulation of their memories so that they began to view their childhoods as something evil and "programmed," all contributed to their creation as murderous robots who would do anything to please "Charlie."

QuoteMansonism is a peculiarly American form of Nazism, of fascism.

QuoteThe secret, as employed by Manson, seems simple: First, the removal of subjects to a "sacred space" in the desert, with attending isolation from society; breakdown of personality through drugs and sex and "mind games"; bestowal of alternate personality or personalities (new names like "Squeaky," "Sadie," etc.) operative only in relation to Manson, thus becoming Manson's "alternates," like multiple personalities of Manson himself; identification of an external evil—the police, the blacks, etc.—as a threat to the group. And fear is the key element of the Manson Secret that makes it different from other initiatory or shamanistic practices.

"Get the fear," Manson is known to have encouraged more than once. There is life only within the Family; outside is death and loss of identity. Identity is race, and gender, and devotion to the leader, the Führerprinzip. Family is reinforced through crimes committed together, through mutual sex, and through paranormal experiences. Leadership is tantamount to divinity: Manson is a son of God. The paranoia of the occultist becomes the paranoia of the social outcast, the prisoner, the criminal, the junkie, the murderer. Murder is a form of human sacrifice in Manson's gestalt, and commission of the murder makes a Family member "made," as in the Mafia, as in the Son of Sam cult.

Manson has thus brought together elements of Scientology and the Process, along with the Crowleyan "Do what thou wilt," and crystallized them in the persona of an outlaw. The development of "heightened states" among his followers caused them to experience the world and reality so differently that the cohesiveness of the original Family members still exists: those that have abandoned the Family have become born-again Christians or some type of mystic, i.e., they have not really abandoned the path that Manson set them on.

While serial killers are shamans who have not made it back, Manson Family members are a programmed shaman: i.e., people chosen from society at random and forced to go through the shamanistic experience even though they were not ready and their guru was not prepared for the responsibility; thus, the CIA's mind-control experiments were mirror images of what Manson was doing to his followers in the desert. They were both forcing individuals to go through an initiatory experience, the difference being that with Manson there was at least the context of a religious or mystical nature—however eclectic or wrong-headed and undeveloped—which the CIA experiments lacked.

QuoteWith the Manson Family you had a tribe of shamans who were willing participants, and that made them stronger. With the CIA, you had unwitting guinea pigs who were only useful to the extent that the programming was effective and focused on a single target or targets, such as assassination.

QuoteThis is the Manson Secret: the use and abuse of hermetic and initiatic (shamanic) processes as a means of manipulation of individuals and groups; the recognition that within the initiatic process is a wealth of psychological knowledge and technique that can be used for evil as well as for good; the incorporation of Fear as a substitute for Faith. The Manson Secret is black magic, and it was black magic that informed the CIA's mind-control programs as well. These same processes are being used— virtually without change—among terrorist organizations and revolutionary cells throughout the world, who have realized that the most effective tool for violent action is the properly initiated cult member. Ecstasy is just another face of fanaticism; eros is another face of magic. Fascism is the natural environment for both, for it speaks directly to the passions and the unconscious mind, through the use of symbols, repetitive slogans, and group ritual; i.e., magic. Socialism, being more cerebral, lacks the erotic element so necessary for mass appeal. Mao changed that for a while by ignoring Marx's dictum against creating a "cult of personality" and turned himself into an image, a magical link to the eternal. Transmute the ecstasy or the eros to a high pitch of passionate dedication to a cause, and use the theory of the magical link competently, and you have created an assassin, or a priest, a lover, an actor; or a politician who cannot be stopped except by a bullet.

And so ends the notes.

I can't possibly read all of this (sorry), but I've scanned a few of your notes/extracts here and there.

How the fuck did Uri Geller pull off that trick??

The only thing I can think of is that working every day at classified occult experiments must make some people's minds more easily influenced and suggestible?

Quote from: Carlos Danger on August 12, 2013, 08:28:54 AM
This is probably one of the key points of the series:

QuoteThe historical model I am proposing in these volumes should be obvious by now. By tracing the darker elements of the American experience from the earliest days of the Adena and Hopewell cultures through the discovery by Columbus, the English settlers in Massachusetts and the Salem witchcraft episode, the rise of Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Mormons via ceremonial magic and Freemasonry, up to the twentieth century and the support of Nazism by American financiers and politicians before, during, and after World War II, and the UFO phenomenon coming on the heels of that war, we can see the outlines of a kind of political ectoplasm taking shape in this historical séance: politics as a continuation of religion by other means.

The ancillary events of the Charles Manson murders, the serial killer phenomenon, Jonestown, and the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Marilyn Monroe are all the result of the demonic possession of the American psyche, like the obscenities spat out by little Regan, tied to her bed and shrieking at the exorcists. It is said that demonic possession is both a way of testing us, and of making us aware of the real conflict taking place within us every day.

The fact that so many American men and women in positions of power and authority have been specifically involved with occult practices is something that not even I had anticipated before I began the research for this work. Initially, I treated the one or two politicians who "dabbled" as a kind of anomaly; my original focus had been the unhealthy, almost incestuous relationship between Church and State, in America specifically and in the world in general: religious beliefs as the motivation for dangerous policy decisions and strategic maneuvers (such as Ronald Reagan's apocalyptic Christianity, and Nancy Reagan's devotion to agenda by astrology, and George W. Bush's devotion to evangelical Christianity). The more I looked, however, the more I found men with bizarre beliefs and involved in questionable, occult practices at the highest levels of the American government, and buried deep within government agencies.

I also discovered that occultism was embraced by the American military and intelligence establishments as a weapon to be used in the Cold War; and as they did so, they unleashed forces upon the American populace that cannot be called back. Those that were not involved in occultism per se were involved with Nazism in one form or another, and thus were aiding and abetting not only an enemy of America and an enemy of humanity in general, but what was most certainly and by any definition a cult: the most powerful and most dangerous cult the modern world has seen so far. The moral imbecility of those engaging these men as scientists, spies, and agents of American foreign policy—and then defending them against those who begged for justice, hiding them on American soil—is beyond comprehension. The guilty include the Dulles brothers, Walkers and Bushes, Henry Ford, Richard Nixon, and so many other household names in American politics. We can try to make excuses for them, try to rationalize away their actions in the light of realpolitik, but then we become as bad as the Germans who claimed they were only following orders.

Watergate revealed the existence of "sinister forces" to me in many ways. The scandal opened the floodgates of conspiracy theories going back to the Kennedy assassination and beyond. It tied together so many loose ends, yet posited more questions than it offered answers, revealing a secret political struggle that had been going on for decades, ripping apart the very fabric of America with a populace oblivious to it all. One inevitably was forced back to the CIA and the mind-control experiments that began in the late 1940s and extended nearly to the present day.

Coincidence piled on coincidence, indicating the existence of a powerful, subliminal force working at the level of chaos—at the quantum level—and struggling to manifest itself in our reality, our consciousness, our political agenda. This dynamic was uncovered by a Swiss psychologist and an Austrian physicist, but it capably describes a force working within the context of American history and American politics that is suppurating below the consciousness of the people but able to erupt without notice. A sinister force. Fascism.

I've been keeping an eye on this thread for a while, these are definitely on the reading list.

It's difficult to even start to try and comment on this. So much fuckery and so many more things to read into. What kind of time frame does it go up to?

Quote from: Triple Zero on August 12, 2013, 07:01:34 PM
How the fuck did Uri Geller pull off that trick??

The only thing I can think of is that working every day at classified occult experiments must make some people's minds more easily influenced and suggestible?

No need to apologize.

In regards to Uri...not a clue.  It seems the CIA ruled out hysteria, which doesn't really leave a whole lot of options to explain the thing.  It would be nice to see the actual scientific recordings of what was happening at the time, but STATE SECURITY SECRETS LAWL means no-one probably ever will.

Quote from: Junkenstein on August 12, 2013, 08:17:32 PM
What kind of time frame does it go up to?

It goes from Prehistoric America to the 2000s.  However, it mostly covers the 1945-1990 period, with a particular focus on the late 40s, the 1960s and the 70s.

Thanks for posting this. I'm not quite caught up yet but should be by tonight. I have no clue what to think of all this, but it's certainly entertaining reading. Really gets the imagination working.

Finally caught up. This is definitely moving up in my reading list. I'm surprised at just how plausible I'm finding much of this, especially the serial killer connection stuff. I haven't read much on most of these subjects so I don't have anything to compare them to, but I do like that Levanda seems for the most part to just point out the links between events and persons. Too many conspiracy writings goes the route of 'OMGDUDE THIS IS CONCLUSIVE PROOF YOU CAN"T DENY!!!!!' and then fails to deliver. I much prefer Levanda's approach.

That was one hell of a read. I lost the narrative a couple of times, but I could follow along well enough to be thoroughly freaked.

Quote from: McGrupp on August 12, 2013, 09:19:40 PM
Really gets the imagination working.

Yes, I've considered incorporating some elements of this into fiction...and then I've wondered exactly how wise doing that would be.

QuoteI do like that Levanda seems for the most part to just point out the links between events and persons. Too many conspiracy writings goes the route of 'OMGDUDE THIS IS CONCLUSIVE PROOF YOU CAN"T DENY!!!!!' and then fails to deliver. I much prefer Levanda's approach.

You would probably like Jeff Wells as well, then.  The linkages are definitely interesting...maybe not indicative of anything in particular, though once you pile coincidence upon coincidence it becomes hard to ignore, but in just setting the scene as to how unbelievably weird the CIA and US military, among others, can get, it's very useful.

QuoteI lost the narrative a couple of times, but I could follow along well enough to be thoroughly freaked.

Yes, I could have easily copied twice as much information, but then we're moving out from the realms of "fair use" and into copyright violations, alas.  It's also, to a degree, how the books are set out.  A chapter will deal with the early life and career of Richard Nixon, for example, until a tangent sends Levenda off on the subject of Manson or Wandering Bishops for a few chapters, which will then somehow whirl back around into the original point.

Caught up. Wowza.

BAMP!

So, this one time, mid-late 90's, Corso had a drink with us at the Vatican. Apart from the not entirely indubitable story of IC development, he also gave me a very pretty UFO picture. That is all I know.