Intel manufactures “influencers” on both sides of any wedge issue simply because people are easily influenced. Wedge issues are the fulcrums deployed to divide and conquer. The influencer makes sure his side of the wedge flows into a managed dialectic. These games are always presented as a choice between two alternatives. If you’re looking for proof of intel penetration into the emerging sixties counterculture, and the manufacture of influencers, look no further than Kerry Thornley.
Thornley became a major New Age influencer despite a strict Mormon upbringing. In 1963, he invented Discordianism, which became the primary influence on the Church of the SubGenius and other counterculture alternative religions.
In 1959, however, Thornley was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan along with Lee Harvey Oswald. The base was a notorious site for MK/Ultra experiments deemed too controversial for US soil and it seems Oswald and Thornley could have gone through some behavior modifications as their lives became forever entwined. When Oswald departed to Russia posing as a defector offering up the U-2 secret, Thornley moved to New Orleans and began writing a novel based on Oswald titled The Idle Warriors.
Thornley was subpoenaed by the Warren Commission and a copy of his unpublished manuscript entered into the National Archives. He gave a highly detailed deposition establishing what a devoted Marxist Oswald was. It included the following exchange:
THORNLEY: [Oswald] had gotten me to read 1984 and this was one of his favorites.
JENNER. Tell me what 1984 was.
THORNLEY. This was a book about…it is a projection into the future, supposed to take place in 1984 in England under a complete police state. It is, I would say, an anti-utopian novel, by George Orwell, a criticism of English socialism and what it might lead to, based upon Orwell’s experiences with Communism and Nazism, his observations about a society .in which a mythical leader called Big Brother dominates everybody’s life. Where there are television cameras on every individual at all times watching his every act, where sex is practically outlawed, where the world is perpetually at war, three big police states constantly at war with one another, and where thought police keep every, all of the citizens in line. Oswald would often compare the Marine Corps with the system of government outlined in 1984.
JENNER. By way of protest against the Marine Corps?
THORNLEY. Yes; humorously, satirically. One day we were unloading, moving a radarscope off the truck and it slipped, and he said, “Be careful with Big Brother’s equipment.”
Because of Thornley’s appearance in front of the Warren Commission, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison made Thornley a target of his investigation. From Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins:
Thornley had told me that he returned from his summer in California by way of Mexico City. This happened to be very close to the time that the Warren Commission said Oswald was in Mexico. By November 1963, according to his own account, Thornley was living in a New Orleans apartment he rented from John Spencer. We located Spencer, who turned out to be a friend of Clay Shaw’s. As he described it, sometimes Spencer visited Shaw, the director of the International Trade Mart, and sometimes it was vice versa.
Several days after the assassination. Spencer told us, he came to his house and found Thornley gone. In Spencer’s mailbox was a note from Thornley saying, “I must leave. I am going to the Washington, D.C. area, probably Alexandria, Virginia. I will send you my address so that you can forward my mail.” Spencer said it was quite unexpected because Thornley had at least a week left in the month before his rent was due. He went to Thornley’s apartment, number “C”, and found that paper had been left over the entire floor, torn up into small pieces like confetti. Before being torn up, the paper had been watered down so that the ink was blurred, making it unreadable. After the assassination Thornley told Spencer he was going to be a rich man because of the coincidence of Oswald having been the subject of his book.
Thornley had wound up at Arlington, a Washington suburb, and had moved into Shirlington House, a first-class apartment building where he worked as doorman. Thornley stayed at Shirlington House for six months, until he testified before the Warren Commission. Oddly enough, his salary was less than the rent of his Shirlington House apartment.
In the mid-1970s when I was in the private practice of law, Thornley sent a lengthy, almost biographical, 50-page affidavit to me describing, among other things, evidence he had encountered in New Orleans of “Nazi activity” in connection with President Kennedy’s murder. It was apparent that even though I no longer was D.A. Thornley wanted to assure me that he had not been involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Although it did not accord with reality, as I recalled it, the affidavit had, in retrospect, one interesting feature. Purely gratuitously, it mentioned how Thornley had left Washington following his Warren Commission testimony and ultimately returned to California, where he and John Roselli happened to become friends.
Actually, the first place Thornley visited after departing Washington was Robert LeFevre’s John-Birch-connected Freedom School in Colorado, where he joined soon-to-be very powerful Charles Koch. Eventually Thornley came clean on the JFK assassination and confessed he’d been drawn into the plot by E. Howard Hunt.
But we know now that Hunt was not the instigator or anything close. After David Morales offered him a role in the assassination, which Hunt turned down (according to his deathbed confession), James Angleton seems to have selected Hunt as the official agency rabbit-hole-backstop. First, Weberman falsely ID’s Hunt as one of the three tramps. Then Angleton leaks a memo implicating Hunt as being in Dallas that day. Meanwhile, a handwritten note from Oswald to a Mr. Hunt is sent anonymously to Penn Jones, a leading researcher in the field before Lane shoves him off the national stage. Soon, Lane will focus all his attention on Hunt, culminating in a widely-covered libel trial. But all this million dollar trial proved was that Hunt could have been in Dallas that day. And by shepherding all eyes on Hunt, the real culprits at JM/Wave (Shackley, Harvey, Morales) were able to waltz free.
But the Thornley saga didn’t end there, not even close. In 1975, Antony Sutton published National Suicide detailing massive covert assistance from Wall Street to Russia. He was kicked out of the prestigious Hoover Institute and cast academically adrift. The John Birch Society seized on Sutton’s work to prove a thesis that Rockefeller and Rothschild were secret Communists working to integrate Russia and the US into one entity to rule the world. Interestingly, the leading polemicist for the Birchers, Revilo P. Oliver, was also called upon by the Warren Commission for a lengthy deposition, as was Mark Lane. It appears significant depositions might have been staged by CIA-connected spooks seeding rabbit holes and backstops.
While working as letters editor of Playboy, conspiracy researcher Robert Anton Wilson was inundated by Birch propaganda and decided to counter it by writing a satirical story about the Illuminati as if the society was an honest attempt to overthrow royalty and religion (and not some covert Jesuit plot to infect Freemasonry from within). Thornley immediately began corresponding with Wilson and worked his way into the pages of Playboy and eventually Discordianism became the foundation for Wilson’s trilogy, which began with a counterculture reporter’s investigation into the JFK assassination. Wilson’s fantasy, however well intended, served to make any Illuminati conspiracy less believable. Worse, it elevated Thornley to icon status instead of unmasking him as either a spook or MK/Ultra robot. Wilson’s book became launching pad for decades of nutty Illuminati conspiracies.
Meanwhile, despite the loss of academic credentials, Sutton soon published America’s Secret Establishment, revealing Yale University’s Order of Skull & Bones was deploying remarkably similar rituals as the original Illuminati. He never claimed a continuous order, only that the Boner playbook had lifted significant concepts from Adam Weishaupt. Meanwhile, the Birchers kept pumping disinfo memes alleging the Rothschilds and Rockefellers were secret Communist agents plotting the integration of the US and Russia into one massive socialist state, the beginnings of the one-world government conspiracy rabbit hole.