Guide to the Disinfo Matrix

I was on facebook the other day when one of my unknown friends posted a link to a book titled Big Oil by Dean Henderson. It didn’t have a single review on Amazon so I thought it was something new. In the promo material, some person from South America said it deserved the Pulitzer Prize. It was super expensive at $25, but often the most reliable books on deep politics cost money, so I thought I was ordering a real book and bought it without really looking into the author at all.

Unfortunately, when the book arrived yesterday, I quickly discovered it was filled with misinformation and quoted people like David Icke and William Cooper as if they were serious journalists, which they are not. I opened it at random and came to a quote saying Allen Dulles was a member of Skull & Bones, a secret society at Yale, when, in fact, Dulles had gone to Princeton. Soon, I realized Dean Henderson is either a knowing agent of disinfo or a brainwashed stooge of the disinfo matrix (more on that later).

Paul Krassner, the dean of underground journalism, began printing conspiracy research in the 1960s in his national magazine, The Realist, forging a trail few in journalism would ever follow. Pretty soon, researchers were crawling out of the woodwork and sending Paul stories. Even today, when he no longer publishes conspiracy research, these characters are still peppering him with their nutty theories. I know because Paul forwards the wackiest stuff to me, as if to say, “see how crazy your compatriots are?” Many of these people are undoubtedly plants. Of course, the most famous of these characters was Mae Brussell, whose research seemed authentic at first, but pretty soon Paul realized Mae was leading him down a rabbit hole and connecting dots that didn’t really connect, leading him on a wild goose chase to nowhere. That’s when Paul stopped trusting conspiracy researchers [Paul adds: I felt it necessary not to have predisposed perception, to distinguish coincidence from conspiracy, and not let what might be perceived as evidence be tainted by ego or agenda]. After most people get burned after falling in a rabbit hole, it becomes really difficult to get past the noise to the real info that noise is designed to conceal. The game is to sheep-deep all deep political research as crackpot nonsense by flooding the field with crack-pot nonsense. Unfortunately, this game has worked very well for over 50 years now.

I’m too old and too wise to fall for this crapola, although I can’t say the same for a lot of people I meet, who seem to gobble up the latest pronouncements by Icke, Rense, Jones and the rest of the captains of disinfo. Henderson’s book wasn’t just sourced through these dubious characters, though. He also quoted a number of more reliable conspiracy researchers, some of whom have suspicious axes to grind. In this list, I’d include anyone from the Lyndon LaRouche organization, Alex Constantine, and Mike Ruppert. These are probably disinfo agents, but at least they’re journalists who deal with verifiable facts and not baseless rumor and innuendo. The rabbit holes they lead you into (like Ruppert’s “Peak Oil” scam), are more credible than the shapeshifting aliens in Icke’s manifestos, although ultimately, I don’t think these sources can be trusted any more than their obviously crackpot counterparts.

After I got Henderson’s book, I learned he’s a regular on the Icke/Rense/Jones disinfo circuit. He also seems to be an activist in the Green movement. The environmental movement is heavily seeded with agents because the oil companies have to keep in eye on environmentalists to make sure they don’t do anything damaging to their bottom line, which is why they’ve installed an oligarchy insider like Al Gore as their chief lightening rod. It’s a dialectical game, just like almost everything else that goes on inside deep politics.

Once you get past those two levels of disinfo, you get to real journalists with no visible axes to grind, a list that includes Antony Sutton, Gary Webb, Steve Kangas, Daniel Hopsicker, Dick Russell, Alfred McCoy, Danny Casolaro, and Peter Dale Scott. These are the authors you have to read and if I find their names and books in a bibliography, then I know I’m dealing with a serious researcher. The more serious a researcher is, however, the more ignored they will become over time. Deep political research is a great way to “break your rice bowl,” which is how they put it to Antony Sutton when he veered off the designated rails. You can put me in this category too, as I once had a flourishing journalism career, but after I began publishing deep political research in High Times, I soon realized I no longer had a journalism career. My book, The Octopus Conspiracy, got exactly one review when it came out—in a local publication in Woodstock, New York.

Shortly after 9/11, Retired General Mirza Aslam Beg, former chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, said 9/11 was an operation of the American intelligence agencies. Beg also claimed Wikileaks is a tool of psy-war, and not a real whistle-blowing operation, and that Osama bin Laden died in 2009, and that the Seal Team killed a lookalike stand-in. Of course, researchers like me know Beg is probably telling the truth.

Oh, and by the way, I left my review of Big Oil on Amazon. It wasn’t very favorable.

Hip Hop to Soul Assassins

While I was researching my hip hop book and film project, I got inspired to get involved in music again. I’d left that scene behind in 1967 after being kicked out of my Illinois garage band for taking LSD. In all fairness, the Knight Riders did offer me to rejoin a few days later, but the chemistry was already ruined.

It wasn’t until I began interviewing all the kids in the South Bronx who created hip hop, that I got the urge to get back on stage. And at first, I edged into hip hop as a deejay, enlisting my two best friends, at the time, David Bither and Jeff Peisch, to join as my emcee group. Jeff rapped his own lyrics, while David blew wild sax solos, and I scratched up some break beat records Bambaataa had clued me onto. We held a performance at the cavernous apartment on the Upper West Side Jeff and I were living in. All three of us were rising freelance writers at the time, working for Horizon magazine, and other publications. Jeff and David got a cushy gig that summer with Lincoln Center. “High-level executive meeting” was Jeff’s code-phrase for smoking a joint during work. Our initial performance was attended by many critics and music-industry insiders, all of whom positively raved about how great we were. If nothing else, we certainly had attitude. Dave’s sax playing is what took it over the top since Jeff’s rapping style was more of a white-boy parody of real rap, talking about his Sony color TV set and Klipsch speakers, and other toys he coveted. We probably could have become something, but I had also been moving in circles around the East Village, writing for the Soho News and East Village Eye,  and soon discovered garage bands were very much in fashion downtown. Laurie Lennard was going out with Jeff at the time, and was one of the top goddesses on our scene, a real go-getter who eventually landed a job booking talent for David Letterman. Laurie would later become famous for marrying Larry David and producing “An Inconvenient Truth” with Al Gore. According to Jeff, her body was an exact replica of Marilyn Monroe’s. That’s her in the red sweater with her arm around me in the above photo. Jeff would soon become news director of the newly-created MTV, and then an award-winning producer for Time/Life, while David eventually landed his dream job co-running Nonesuch Records.

I’ve always been a rocker at heart. So I switched gears and told my friends to come to a rehearsal for a garage band I was going to start. I had two cardboard boxes set-up in my bedroom and a pair of drumsticks. That was going to be my instrument to get started. I tried to enlist Dave to play organ, as he knew music theory, could write songs, and sang like a bird. But Dave would only come to the rehearsal if he could play lead guitar. He’d already been in a few bands as a keyboardist and wanted to make the switch. Flick Ford, my favorite art director at the Eye, was a natural choice as a lead singer. He had a dynamic energy that could bowl you over when he was on. But I didn’t know if Flick could sing, so I also invited Rick Dehaan to show up because he had a great rock’n’roll look and had recently tried to commit suicide. I thought this project might pick up his spirits. Rick’s psychiatrist asked him what concrete steps he was taking to make improvements in his life, and Rick replied: “I’m playing the lottery.” “But that’s not very concrete, is it?” replied the psychiatrist. The next day Rick won a million dollars. At that point I was probably thinking we could use Rick to buy equipment. Brian Spaeth helped me conceive the whole project. Brian had been through a similar experience as me, having been unceremoniously booted out of the Fleshtones, the reigning gods of garage rock in New York. The only band that could touch the Fleshtones at the time was probably the Lyres out of Boston. I met Brian when I began working at High Times as Executive Editor. It was a relief to finally land a weekly paycheck after being a freelancer for months. Anyway, I told Dave I’d already promised lead guitar to Bob Brandel, one of the best guitar players from the garage scene in Illinois, who was now working for NBC news as an art director. So that became the core of the band, which I soon named “The Soul Assassins:” Brian on bass, me on cardboard boxes, Bob on guitar and Flick singing. We knew right away we were onto something. Brian didn’t like the idea of two lead singers at first, but I told him the lead singer’s ego was always the biggest issue in any band and that if we had two, it would help keep their egos in check. Rick never had an ego, but Flick soon developed a whopper. But then so did I, I suppose. (I guess the funniest confrontation was the night Flick got drunk and said, “I am the head dick in the band.” To which I replied: “That’s right, Flick.” We were both pissing on the roof at Dino’s on Sixth Street.) I soon pulled in Brian Morse, who had drummed briefly for the Finchley Boys back in Illinois, which allowed me to switch to rhythm guitar. Our first gig was a High Times Christmas party, and the film director John McNaughton (a grade-school friend of Bob’s) flew in for the party and played organ on a couple of songs. You can listen free to the band, and download songs for 99 cents by clicking the Soul Assassin link in the middle of the links at the top-right of this page.

Ira Einhorn and the Origins of Earth Day

Maybe you’ve read some of the disinfo stories about how the counterculture was supposedly a government plot to divide and destroy the country? How government agents secretly encouraged rampant drug use in the 1960s to poison the minds of a new generation, allowing them to be brought under the influence of “new age” ideas?

I don’t believe most of these stories, especially the ones that paint Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as being involved in such activities. Yes, Kesey did get his first taste of acid through a CIA-program, like a lot of people at the time, but anyone who studies his life immediately realizes Kesey was not on anyone’s leash. The same can be said for Abbie Hoffman, Stephen Gaskin and many other important leaders of the counterculture movement. Which is not to say intel wasn’t trying to exploit the counterculture, turn it violent and lead it off a cliff. Obviously, any social movement of any size will be quickly penetrated by intel. That’s what they do. And there are a number of suspicious characters, like Ron Stark, who obviously had secret agendas. Another such character is Ira Einhorn, who sometimes gets credited as one of the founders of the environmental movement.

Einhorn’s early claim to fame was his role as “master of ceremonies” at the first Earth Day celebration, but you won’t find that mentioned on the wikipedia page covering that event today, probably because he recently died on April 3, 2020 while serving a life sentence for murdering his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, who was found stuffed in a trunk on his porch in 1979. Although portrayed as a “hippie guru,” Einhorn’s associations and connections seem much more related to CIA activities than anything to do with the hippie counterculture.

He was mentored in paranormal research by Andrija Puharich, a former army officer who has interesting connections not only to the intelligence agencies but also to the oligarchy that really rules North America. Puharich is best known today for bringing Uri Geller to fame, but he was also involved with MK/Ultra research at Fort Dietrick, as well as organizing black magic seances in upstate New York with members of the Bronfman and DuPont families, among others. You can find background material on Puharich in both Peter Levenda’s Sinister Forces (now out-of-print and very expensive), and Hank Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake (both published by Trine Day).

There’s probably enough in those two books to convince you that anyone mentored by Puharich should be looked at with suspicion.

After Einhorn’s arrest, Arlen Specter, the Warren Commission lawyer who invented the “single bullet” theory, came to his rescue along with Barbara Bronfman, heiress to the Seagram fortune. At the time, Einhorn claimed he was being framed by the CIA because of his left-wing political activities.

Specter managed to get him a very low bail, which Bronfman posted, and Einhorn fled the country, probably with funds provided by Bronfman. In 1997, long after he was convicted in absentia, Einhorn was located living in France under a new name with a Swedish girlfriend. After a long and protracted extradition struggle, Einhorn was finally brought back to Pennsylvania on July 20, 2001, and put in jail to serve his life sentence.

The lesson to be taken from all of this is the potential realization that all popular mass movements eventually become penetrated by intelligence operations. The environmental movement of today, spearheaded by Al Gore, is undoubtedly also a carefully-constructed operation. The rightwing has their apocalypse, centered on the Middle East and ideas about “rapture,” while the leftwing has their apocalypse, centered on the imminent collapse of our environment. Apocalyptic thinking is crucial to maintaining mass mind control because fear is the foundation. The most apocalyptic of all the sixties cults was the Process Church of Final Judgment.