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Tangled up in Spooks: The Bob Dylan Story

It would be difficult to describe the impact the cinema-verite masterpiece “Don’t Look Back,” made on my teenage psyche when first viewed in the summer of 1968 at the Illini Student Union. Bob Dylan had already transformed my generation with some inspiring folk-rock anthems when this glimpse behind the curtain appeared and made clear our hero was flawed, as heroes should be according to Aristotle. Dylan had plugged into the folk revival and rearranged some classics with contemporary lyrics, and since some of these concerned subjugation of the masses, the civil rights movement fit right into the paradigm, igniting the imaginations of kids everywhere, transforming Dylan into a lighting rod for social evolution. Almost overnight, he went from unknown to most famous songwriter in America. And when avatars like that appear, they draw spooks, because spooks seek influence over centers of psychic gravity. Creative energy and spirituality go hand-in-hand, as any student of improvisational theater can attest.

But Dylan soon disappeared and everything written about him became speculation, and rumors ran wild. I can’t pretend to have penetrated this world, but I do have some thoughts formulated over the decades.

No one attached themselves more firmly to Dylan than A.J. Weberman, who famously revealed the contents of the songwriter’s garbage, which is when the world discovered he was dabbling in hard drugs. Not only did Weberman hound Dylan physically and emotionally, he compiled a convoluted analysis of Dylan’s lyrics claiming to have broken a secret code that revealed Dylan was a Manchurian Candidate puppet who required liberation from his controllers. “Dylan’s brain belongs to the people, not to the pigs!!” shrieked Weberman, ignoring the obvious fact Dylan’s brain belongs to Dylan and nobody else. Weberman would soon write a book about the JFK assassination that correctly fingered the CIA for fomenting the heinous act, but built the thesis around E. Howard Hunt as mastermind, and never once mentioned James Angleton or Allen Dulles.

Weberman’s crowning evidence was unleashing pictures of the so-called three tramps, falsely claiming one was Hunt. In truth, Hunt was sent to Dallas that day, but did not participate, if you believe his death bed confession, which claimed Ted Shackley did it. Years later, during the Congressional investigation, the Spotlight would claim Angleton sent a memo to Helms wondering how they were going to explain Hunt being in Dallas. Or maybe not, since only two people claimed to have seen this memo, and one was Weberman, while the other was CIA. Fingering Hunt as instigator was a blind alley, but ignited Weberman’s book sales. When the Oliver Stone movie came around Ed Rosenthal’s Quick Trading republished the book and continued the hoodwink Hunt was grandmaster of the deed.

Mark Mordechai Levy, a close associate of Weberman’s, ran the militant JDO spin-off from Irv Rubin’s JDL. Levy tried to murder Rubin following the split when Rubin attempted to serve a subpoena on him. The bullets missed and wounded an innocent bystander. Levy served 18 months on a 4 1/2 year sentence for attempted murder. Obviously, Weberman and Levy have spook links and no doubt enjoy access to insider information. If you ask Weberman about 9/11, he’ll tell you Osama did it just like the Pentagon. Going through a target’s garbage is spook ops 101 and always has been.

To visit a completely different social strata, I was fascinated by Dylan’s 2004 autobiography (Chronicles, Volume One), especially by Dylan’s encounters with Archibald McLeish, prominent member of Yale’s powerful and highly secretive Order of Skull & Bones and former OSS operative. Broadway producer Stuart Ostrow had a massive hit with “1776” and wanted to follow-up with a musical remake of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benet, with McLeish penning the script and Dylan providing the music and lyrics. Ostrow’s version of events differs significantly from Dylan’s, and the reason is obvious: At least three songs on Dylan’s comeback album “New Morning” were written for this production, but after a few meetings and some disagreements, Dylan dropped out of the project. Without Dylan’s music, it flopped, closing after three performances. Perhaps Dylan saw the flop coming as he writes: “MacLeish tells me about J.P. Morgan, the financier, that he was one of the six or eight persons at the beginning of the century who owned all of America…the play was dark, painted a world of paranoia, guilt and fear—it was all blacked out and met the atomic age head on, reeked of foul play….this play was up to something and I didn’t think I wanted to know….”

Undoubtedly, there were many more attempts from many angles to get a piece of Bob Dylan, and these but two examples. Dylan removing himself far from political and social spheres of influence was likely the only way to end the predatory intrusions into his life.

In 1966, Bob Dylan disappeared from public life, a response to being branded “the voice of his generation.” In fact, he’d been surrounded by spooks and predators of all stripes after seizing the center of gravity on a coming social revolution. Dylan sensed truth tellers were not going to be treated nicely by the masters of war, and sought protection in obscurity. The songs were no longer about making social change in our time, but about long-gone American history, as in John Wesley Hardin.

In 1971, when he resurfaced, he was asked about his obsession with the Kennedy assassination, and claimed he wasn’t obsessed, and the proof was, he never wrote a song about the event. Well, we know now that may have not been exactly true. Dylan may have been working on Murder Most Foul for a long time. But he wasn’t ready to make it public until we reached a national crisis of significant proportion to Kennedy’s killing. Born in 1941, Dylan is not technically a boomer, but like many boomers, was transformed into Hamlet. And like Hamlet, wavered with indecision.

In 1991, I wrote the first national magazine article on how the CIA assassinated the president. Little did I know this article, which I considered so groundbreaking, would sound the death knell on my journalism career. That’s another story, but rest assured, truth telling against the CIA is not permitted in the mainstream.

Dylan will be 80 soon, and could be feeling his mortality, and this song may be his attempt to wash his hands of the event that stole the soul of the nation. Hopefully, a new generation will take the song seriously enough to look into the real forces that have shaped our wars of invasion over the decades since Kennedy died while trying to end a planned war in Vietnam, which was largely fought over oil and opium, and not to end the spread of communism. The spread of communism in America was always run by James Angleton since being founded by intelligence agent John Reed.

There’s no doubt Dylan has been a student of the assassination but he’s not interested in identifying the perps, who are now long dead, but charting the impact on our collective unconscious, our media, and the trajectory of our social identity. It was a dark day in Dallas, November ’63.

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Who’s Obama’s Daddy?

I don’t watch much TV anymore since I much prefer Netflix and Amazon Prime so I can program my own entertainment, and when I checked into Amazon last night, I noticed the number two watched movie right now is about President Obama’s alleged real father, a communist party organizer named Frank Marshall Davis. The film also goes into great detail regarding Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, and his long association with the CIA. Although the mainstream media is ignoring this feature-length documentary, it’s quickly becoming one of the most-watched films on the internet.

The film was made by a mysterious figure named Joel Gilbert, who, far as I know, is no relation to Josh Gilbert, who made AKA Tommy Chong. Until now, Gilbert was mostly known for making low-budget documentaries about Bob Dylan. In this regard he reminds me of A.J. Weberman, who was obsessed with decoding Dylan’s work as well as inspecting his garbage. Since Dylan once captured the center of energy on the counterculture revolution, he remains an important icon in the minds of some baby boomers like me. Weberman would later accuse Howard Hunt of being one of the three tramps in Dallas when JFK was assassinated and wrote a book that unveiled the CIA’s involvement in the assassination for the first time, although Hunt was just a rabbit hole. Hunt was in Dallas that day, but as an observer, and it was James Angleton’s idea to dangle him as the “paymaster” and brains behind the assassination. That was a deflection away from Ted Shackley, who worked under Angleton and really served in that role.

Which brings me to this current film. I strongly suspect some very powerful organization, maybe even the CIA, is behind this current documentary. It’s an exercise in fear-mongering and is being hyped by Alex Jones, who we all know is a disinfo plant, right?

However, there’s obviously a lot of truth being revealed in the film. After watching it, I suspect Obama’s real father may have even been an undercover secret agent himself, as communism was a scam from day one, fomented from within Freemasonry and supported by some of the world’s richest bankers. Just as Hitler had to be brought in to disrupt the Weimar Republic’s dangerous emerging democracy, Lenin was brought in to shift the direction of the Russian Revolution away from democracy and into a dictatorship that could easily be controlled.

Also, I’ve always suspected the Weather Underground was an op to turn the non-violent counterculture revolution toward violence. In situations like this, the bombs are usually provided by an FBI informant, similar to the way the FBI disrupted the Earth First! movement in the 1980s.

Obviously, the film was engineered to hide the truth in plain site. And someone paid for millions of copies of the DVD to be distributed free to the battleground states as Obama was running for his second term. The film plays on old fears that a communist conspiracy is secretly taking power in this country, when, in fact, the real conspiracy is that communism itself is a complete scam, a managed dialectic devised to capture the center of energy on any emerging democratic movements around the world.

The Communist Party of the USA was created by John Reed, who came from a very rich family high up in the oligarchy. When Reed went to Mexico, he wrote a book about Pancho Villa and his army, and managed to never once mention marijuana, even though it was probably Pancho’s favorite substance since he disapproved of alcohol but could almost always be found with a stogie in his mouth. Reed knew this stogie was not tobacco, but failed to mention the importance of cannabis to that revolution, even though Villa’s marching song (La Cucaracha) was about marijuana.

If you look closely into the Communist movement in the US, you’ll find a lot of rich people and bankers behind the scenes. Setting up dialectical forces is what it’s all about because if you don’t set up these forces, you run the risk of a real opposition being set up against you.

By the way, the Obama story actually started four years ago, watch this:

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10 Non-fiction Masterpieces

Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neighardt

You have to give props to Native culture, which has always had a tremendous influence on the history of the counterculture, starting with the Tuscarora at Congo Square in New Orleans, birthplace of the improvisational culture we know today as the counterculture. Even though the Natives were much more advanced spiritually, European culture certainly did its best to destroy their vibrant and vibratory ceremonies. Black Elk was one of the most enlightened holy men to ever come down the pike in any culture and this book is a good place to start if you want some idea of how their ceremonies actually work.

The Yankee and Cowboy War by Carl Oglesby

Oglesby was the most articulate and intelligent leader to emerge from the SDS movement, and this book blew conspiracy theory wide open when it traced the links between the Kennedy assassination and Watergate very early in the game. Oglesby tried to penetrate the conflicts inside the Oligarachy that controls America. Especially groundbreaking was Olgesby’s analysis of the war between the Rockefellers and Howard Hughes that probably resulted in Hughes being neutralized. Whether they killed him and put a puppet in his place, or whether they just kidnapped and drugged him into submission is a question that may never get answered.

America’s Secret Establishment by Antony Sutton

This book got completely ignored by the mainstream, and for good reasons. Sutton was a leading economist at the Hoover Institute when he stumbled onto one of the greatest secrets in the world: The Oligarchy controlling America was involved in setting up Hitler and Communism in order to milk war for profit. Sutton detailed how a secret society at Yale University played a key role in transforming our country into a highly-centralized and heavily-controlled state. But then societies like Skull & Bones exist at every major university where the Oligarchy sends its kids to prepare them on how to run the world.

Terror or Love? by Bommi Baumann

Was the 1960s counterculture revolution intentionally led into violence in order to neutralize the hippie movement? Germany’s leading revolutionary certainly thinks so. It’s a toss-up which book will be harder to find, this one or Carl Oglesby’s. Bommi became a successful capitalist and landowner in Germany. Unfortunately, he passed away before we could meet. I would certainly have loved to meet this guy, since he remains one of the greatest unsung heroes of our time, someone who turned away from terror to embrace the core values of the spiritual revolution of the 1960s.

Wilderness of Mirrors by David C. Martin

Just how crazy are the people who run the CIA? They don’t get any crazier than James Jesus Angleton, the super paranoid king of spooks. Martin is a true insider: Yale grad, Navy vet, and Newsweek correspondent, and I spoke to him after reading this stunning book. I wanted to know if Angleton conspired with William Harvey to assassinate JFK. Martin was strenuous in denying any such connection, but now I know better: Angleton, Harvey and Johnny Rosselli were undoubtedly among the key players in that crime.

Gold Warriors by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave

For decades the hidden gold from WWII has been the CIA’s most closely guarded secret. Rather than return all the gold stolen by the Nazi’s and Japanese, certain highly-placed individuals inside the Oligarchy decided to secretly move the gold into secret funds that could be used to manipulate world events. Nixon probably ran afoul of the CIA when he returned one of these multi-billion dollar accounts back to the Japanese, which may be why the CIA decided to take him out of power through Watergate. You need to read this book to discover how the world really works.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe was a Yale grad sent straight from the heart of the establishment to report on the emergence of the second counterculture messiah, Ken Kesey (who was already in jail by the time the book came out). Wolfe never connected with the cosmic side of the movement, and, in fact, made fun of its spirituality, but he was a good enough journalist to get the basic story right. Today, I view Kesey as our Odysseus and the magic bus ride as a prophetic message. Perhaps we need to band into tribes and become more migratory as the earth changes set in (just like the original Sakka’s who spread cannabis across the globe). This book remains the best portrait of Kesey and his merry band, and I love the fact my copy is signed by many Pranksters, including the Great Kenmaster Kesey himself.

Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins

Calvin Tomkins was one of my biggest early influences as a writer. I just love his approach to art, which concentrates on personalities instead of theories. Gerald and Sara Murphy led enlightened lives and you can learn a lot by reading about them. This book begins as a fun read but ultimately turns tragic. And at under 150 pages, it will go very, very fast.

Chronicles by Bob Dylan

As if becoming the leading poet of his generation and then leading the folk movement into rock and becoming the first counterculture messiah (and then turning that job down emphatically and going into hiding) wasn’t enough, Bob Dylan had to unveil an entire new dimension of his artistic abilities with the release of this masterpiece of counterculture literature in 2004. I especially like the encounters he had with Skull & Bones member Archibald MacLeish, who positively drips with evil vibrations as he tries (unsuccessfully) to pull Dylan into a Broadway production he’s developing. This book has a unique perspective on the sixties from the very tip of the lightning rod.

The Man Who Knew Too Much by Dick Russell

One of the most insightful books every written about the Kennedy assassination, Russell figured out there were plenty of people willing to talk about the case who had important info to share, especially the sons and daughters of CIA agents who felt their parents were somehow involved. Even more important, Russell made contact with the one undercover agent who tried very hard to blow the whistle and prevent the assassination, Richard Case Nagell. Russell is now a co-author with Jesse Ventura.

Additional shout-outs to: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Treason in America by Anton Chaikin, The Franklin Scandal by Nick Bryant, A Terrible Mistake by H.P. Albarelli and Octopus Conspiracy by Steven Hager (that’s me!)