Nomenclature of an Octopus Cabal

What is history but a fable agreed upon? —Napoleon Bonaparte

Major historical events, such as revolution, assassination, and war, are usually presented as random events created through chaos and chance. Should any suggest these seminal events are more likely the result of plots hatched in secret, they are quickly dismissed as conspiracy-theory crackpots. Yet anyone who studies the methods for absorbing and maintaining power understands it’s far more likely war and political assassination are the result of hidden conspiracies than random accidents involving isolated loners.

The true study of history is largely a study of secret societies. Not surprisingly, one finds little mention of these societies in history books, at least not in any school textbooks. However, a few hours on the Internet may be enough to convince one of their importance.

IN THE BEGINNING

By far the oldest and largest secret society is Freemasonry, which claims over four million members worldwide, most of whom are in the United States. Today Masonry is a fraternal group that supports many charities. Overwhelmingly, its members are decent, honest people who enjoy the theater and symbolic trappings of the organization.

The average Freemason is not an evil Satanist, as some church groups would have you believe. However, Masonry has been manipulated as an intelligence asset for centuries. The organization has a remarkable ability to create spin-off societies that claim no connection to Masonry but could be examples of freestanding, off-the-shelf operations possibly under control of high-ranking Masonic councils. Some of these spin-off organizations have undoubtedly become among the most dangerous in the world. Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King was made into a brilliant film by John Huston. It tells the story of two former members of the British Army, stranded in India, who decide to invade Afghanistan for the purpose of crowning themselves kings of a land not conquered since Alexander the Great. They are fully prepared to foment bribery, murder, pillage, and plunder. But they are also devout Freemasons.

The first historical record of a Masons’ guild comes from Germany. In 1080, the Steinmetzen, or stone masons, organized a craft guild with rules, ceremonies, and titles. In the Middle Ages, most craftsmen were organized into such guilds and jealously guarded the secrets of their professions.

Fifteen years later, the first (and only successful) Crusade to seize Jerusalem was launched. At the conclusion, the world’s most influential secret society was born: the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, otherwise known as the Templars. Only men 21 years or older could receive the highly secret initiations. Although sworn to poverty and celibacy, they organized an international banking system and became among the richest men in the world, building and maintaining an elaborate network of castles and cathedrals throughout Europe. The Holy Roman Empire had forbidden loans at more than minimal interest, but the Templars created loopholes in these rules and employed them to become the bankers of Europe, with the power to create war and fund Crusades. For 194 years they dominated trade between East and West.

John J. Robinson, author of Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, Knights Templar “were known to maintain intelligence agents in the principal cities of the Mediterranean coast, and they necessarily have employed covert communication.”

Eventually, after the King of France became deeply indebted to the Templars, and feared they were planning to create their own kingdom in Southern France, he managed to move the Vatican to France after installing his puppet as Pope. In 1306, Pope Clement V requested a conference with Grand Master Jacques de Molay as a means of luring him into a trap. On October 13, 1307, when de Molay appeared in France, all known Templars were ordered arrested and subjected to torture, whereupon many confessed to the crimes of homosexuality and devil worship. Five years later the Pope outlawed the Templars and seized their assets. After nearly seven years of torture and imprisonment, de Molay was burned at the stake on March 18, 1314. As legend goes, an armada of Templar boats filled with gold managed to escape to Scotland, where they found refuge with the enemies of the King of France. They allegedly were instrumental in helping Scotland win its independence from Britain in 1327, through their financial support of Robert the Bruce. According to Masonic lore it was during this period that the Templars created Freemasonry as a secret society, with special handshakes and codes of identification—a society that would remain completely underground for nearly 400 years, until its public emergence in 1717.

Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was a dangerous place for progressive ideas. The continent festered with secret police, spies, and informants, and inquisitions and pogroms could be convened at any moment to deal with rabble-rousers who threatened the status quo. Secret societies developed as a result of this persecution. “Liberty, equality, and fraternity” were the principles of revolutions that swept through Holland, North America, France, and the Masonic secret societies.

Masonic lodges became the primary incubators of revolutionary thought because most carried no dogmas, allowing lodges to create and interpret ritual through their own consensus. They also allowed people of different religions and backgrounds to mingle freely as equals. Consequently, Freemasonry was able to morph as it spread through Europe and North America. But it always maintained a pyramidal structure that allowed a small upper cell to conduct intrigues not revealed to the general membership.

“Because of the increasing effectiveness of the political police, secret societies tended to move even further underground,” writes James H. Billington in Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. “Historians have never been able to unravel the tangled threads of this tapestry—and in recent times have largely given up trying. The most important recent study confines itself to tracing the history of what people thought about secret societies rather than what the societies in fact were….The story of secret societies can never be fully reconstructed, but it has been badly neglected—even avoided, one suspects—because the evidence that is available repeatedly leads us into territory equally uncongenial to modern historians in the East and the West.”

HELL FIRE

The oldest still-existing Masonic lodge was established in Edinburgh on July 3, 1600, a year that also saw the creation of the East India Company, a firm that would become infamous for opium running and slave trading. For centuries the East India Company would be closely linked to British intelligence and Freemasonry. In 1664, Edinburgh Lodge No. 1 admitted Lord Alexander and two other nobles. English royalty would eventually dominate the upper councils of British Freemasonry.

In 1694, the Bank of England was created. Four years later, the first public leaflets warning the populace about the dangers of Freemasonry appeared in London. In 1719, two years after Freemasonry went public (and all lodges organized around a central Grand Lodge), the Hell Fire Club was created by two prominent Freemasons, the Duke of Wharton and the Earl of Litchfield. Devoted to debauchery and sinful activities, Hell Fire clubs spread throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, exclusive secret societies for those of noble birth. The Dublin chapter was organized by the Earl of Rosse, who would later be named Grand Master of Ireland’s Freemasons. The clubs became notorious for drug use, black masses, and orgies.

Although the Hell Fire clubs were officially condemned by the Grand Lodge (as well as the English churches), the fact that the Duke of Wharton was named Grand Master of the English Grand Lodge in 1722 reveals there may have been a hidden connection. The duke would also introduce Freemasonry to Spain and later become Grand Master of French Freemasonry. Did the public emergence of Freemasonry demand the creation of new secret societies submerged from public view?

Anti-Masonic sentiments first erupted when the Society of Gormogons appeared in London. Outspoken critics of Freemasonry, the Gormogons claimed the emperor of China as their founder and the czar of Russia as their most powerful initiate. Disaffected Freemasons were encouraged to burn their aprons and gloves and become Gormogons. Strangely, the Duke of Wharton was a prominent member. And thus begins the saga of anti-Masonic groups, some of which seem to have been secretly controlled by Freemasons. (One must always keep in mind that the creation and manipulation of two sides of a conflict would  become standard operating procedure for secret societies.)

According  to books released recently, the most prominent of which is Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh, the highest initiates of British Freemasonry are taught that Jesus was king of Britain and that he was stoned to death at the location of St. Paul’s Cathedral. While Jesus’ evil twin brother, Judas Thomas, was killed by the Romans, the true Jesus sought refuge in England where he learned the secrets of the Druids, married four women, and produced many children. The current Prince of Wales is a direct descendant, as are much of Europe’s royalty. While this fanciful story may seem ridiculous, no doubt it was taken seriously by some royal Freemasons, since it firmly established their divine right to rule. And no doubt a few believe this tale even today.

REVOLUTION AND ROTHSCHILDS

In 1790, Mayer Amschel Bauer was an anonymous merchant specializing in rare coins and antiques who lived in the crowded Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, the banking hub of Germany. Ten years later, he was one of the richest men in Germany and would go on to create the Rothschild dynasty, one of the most powerful multigenerational banking families in the world.

Whenever one finds such a meteoric rise to wealth, the potential influence of secret societies needs to be examined. Bauer had a powerful patron in Wilhelm IV, reportedly one of the leading royal Masons of his day. In fact, Jewish culture became an inseparable part of Masonic tradition from the beginning. Because Jews were exempt from the Vatican ban on usury, they could be helpful in waging war or establishing monopolies in commerce. Some Masonic rituals seem influenced by the Kabala, a school of Jewish mysticism some scholars trace back to 1 A.D. Some historians believe Pythagoras [c. 530 B.C.] received his training from the Zoroastrians, and Pythagorean numerology played a major role in the occult rituals of secret societies during the Revolutionary period. Mysticism in Judaism was strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism, just as Christianity was strongly influenced by Buddhism. According to Jacob Katz’s Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939, the Rothschilds began appearing on Masonic membership lists in 1811. “Special Jewish lodges were created,” writes Katz, “such as the ‘Melchizedek’ lodges, named in honor of the Old Testament priest-king.”

Some have suspected the Rothschild dynasty of being a major supporter of Grand Orient Freemasonry, the primary incubator of the French Revolution, which ultimately brought Napoleon into power. Napoleon’s membership in the Grand Orient was never proven, but his brothers and sons all became initiates. Napoleon’s island home, Corsica, has a long history of conspiratorial activity, as does Sicily (more on that later).

Grand Orient, or French, Masonry had similar codes, secret handshakes and rituals as English masonry. In fact, members of either organization were always welcome at each other’s ceremonies, which made Freemason lodges the ideal setting for spy activities. French masonry was the more rational, since it permitted atheists to join. In Germany, however, the Masonic movement went in the opposite direction, becoming more magical and occult-based. German Masonry was also mixed with elements of the secret Rosicrucian Brotherhood, which claimed access to secrets of the East and an unbroken chain of Grand Masters almost as long as the Templars’.

As the story of secret societies unfolds, a pattern becomes clear. Whenever a new lodge or branch of Masonry was created, there was often an attempt to create a fictional history linking the new society to the Crusades or biblical times. Napoleon went further. After conquering Egypt, he became initiated into an Egyptian secret society supposedly older than the Templars. Or was this just another Masonic spin-off trick?

The Rothschilds have also been suspected of funding the Illuminati, perhaps the most notorious Masonic-style organization, founded in Germany by Adam Weishaupt, a Jesuit-trained lawyer and expert in Catholic law who had also been initiated into the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and Freemasonry. After Martin Luther’s Reformation shook the foundations of Catholicism, seven Spanish knights responded by creating the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), whose primary job was to roll back the Reformation. This operation was realized largely through the creation of universities throughout Europe, schools that undoubtedly became breeding grounds for Jesuit attempts to undermine Masonry from within. No one can be certain whether Weishaupt was a Jesuit secret agent or a real revolutionary, but it seems far more likely the former was true. In fact, many Masons of the time often wondered if their lodges had fallen prey to Jesuit conspiratorial control. The Jesuits grew fantastically rich and powerful by dominating trade with the New World, so much so that a movement circulated in Europe to petition the Pope to dissolve the order.

Aside from the Jesuits, the Vatican had a military order under its command, known as the Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem. Naturally, this order traced its origins to an earlier date than the Templars. They became known as the Knights of Rhodes in 1309 and have been called the Knights of Malta since 1530, according to their Website smom.org. However, the Malta Knights split into many Masonic-style organizations over the years, most of which were never recognized by the Vatican. The most infamous lodge was created after Napoleon invaded Malta. This order sought refuge in Russia and later, after the Russian Revolution, in Pennsylvania. Although branded as a “false order” by the Pope, the Shickshinny Knights of Malta of Pennsylvania are legendary for their far-right political activities, as well as for having British and Russian nobility in their membership.

Weishaupt was one of the only secret society leaders convicted of plotting world domination, in a trial that created reverberations in Masonic lodges around the world. A Bavarian court outlawed the Illuminati (and all other secret societies) several times, but historians believe the highly publicized cases only drove the organization deeper underground. Today, many researchers understand the importance of Freemasonry in the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party was organized out of St. Andrew’s Lodge, of which John Hancock and Paul Revere were prominent members. Hancock was a smuggler who rose to become the richest man in the Colonies. He was a primary instigator of the Revolution and author of the Declaration of Independence, something reflected in the size of his signature on the document. Revere became Grand Master of Massachusetts. George Washington was Grand Master of Virginia, and 33 of his generals were members of the secret society, as were the two most prominent nobles arriving from Europe to support the Revolution, Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben. Technically, any rebel lodges separated from the Grand Lodge during the war but were reinstated to British Freemasonry after the conflict was settled. Many lodges remained loyal and sheltered Tories. In New York City, the richest Tories moved their assets into Trinity Church to protect them from confiscation.

MASONS AND MORMONS

One of the more interesting episodes in Masonic history concerns the simultaneous creation of the Anti-Masonic Party and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon church. After Ret. Captain William Morgan signed a contract with the publisher of the Advocate of Batavia, New York to write an exposé on Freemasonry, he was arrested, kidnapped from his jail cell on September 19, 1826, and taken to Canada, where he disappeared. His exposé, Illustrations of Masonry, was published in his absence, with all proceeds going to his wife, since it was presumed Morgan had been murdered by Masons.

With all the publicity surrounding Morgan’s disappearance, Illustrations of Masonry led to the creation of the Anti-Masonic Party, the first third party in the United States. The new party grew rapidly, electing members to national and local offices, mostly in the Northeast, and campaigning on the belief that Masonry was controlled by European aristocrats working with old Tory families in a royalist plot to take back America. Today the Anti-Masonic Party is remembered primarily for creating the first political convention featuring open voting on candidates. The party also created the first national party platform, and required candidates to support it.

On September 22, 1827, Freemason Joseph Smith claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni, who directed him to uncover some golden tablets buried near Palmyra, NY. These tablets became the basis for the Mormon religion. Due to hostility to both Masonry and Mormonism, Smith was forced to move his lodges west, first to Ohio, then to Nauvoo, IL. The story took an even stranger twist when William Morgan’s widow Lucinda, married Freemason George W. Harris on November 23, 1830, which just happened to be the same year Smith founded the Mormon Church in a nearby New York town. The couple moved to Nauvoo and converted to Mormonism, leaving some to wonder if the entire Morgan affair had not been stage-managed for some hidden purpose.

Antagonism toward the Mormon/Mason lodges in Illinois was so intense that a neighboring town decided to invade Nauvoo, with the intention of killing Smith and his followers. At the time, Smith was being held in protective custody in jail. A mob descended upon the jail and murdered Smith as he displayed the secret Masonic sign of distress in a failed bid for rescue.

The Mormons moved on to found Council Bluffs, Iowa, a key strategic point for crossing the Missouri River into Nebraska, and later, what would become Salt Lake City, where they created a new state (Utah) founded on Mormon principles. Located near their grand temple is an almost equally grand Masonic temple built around the same time.

Masonry continued to leverage astonishing political power in North America. In fact, the Civil War may have been a Masonic plot to divide the country. The Rothschilds, who had departed Germany to take up primary residence in London, loaned money to both sides during the war, and British agents of the East India Company helped foment antagonism on both sides. Bostonian Albert Pike rapidly ascended to the leadership of American Freemasonry and became a general of the Confederacy, charged with enlisting the help of the Native Americans in conducting terror raids on pro-Union towns. Pike also helped create the Knights of the Golden Circle, whose initiates included members of the Confederate Secret Service, as well as John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James. Legend has it that after the war, these knights took a stash of gold to Canada to fund their secret attempts to revive the Confederacy. (Or was that gold taken to Mexico? Like many tales involving Masonry, alternative versions compete for historical accuracy.)

After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, President Andrew Johnson, a Freemason, pardoned Freemason Pike for his role in organizing Native American attacks on northern towns. This pardon was seminal in sparking impeachment hearings against Johnson in the press. In fact, however, the real reason for the impeachment was the firing of Freemason Edwin Stanton, who had taken defacto control of the country after the assassination. The actual plot came out of New York City, most likely fomented by Jay Gould. Evidence points to Stanton, Gould and Thomas Eckert profiteering off their advance knowledge of battle outcomes before the rest of Wall Street. Stanton had a huge network of spies, one that included Simon Wolf, the leader of B’nai B’rith, a masonic-style organization founded by recently-arrived German Jews on New York’s Lower East Side. Wolf was one of the last people to speak to Booth, a fact ignored in every history book except for Wolf’s autobiography.

After Johnson survived his impeachment trial by one vote, Pike allegedly helped create a new secret society designed to foment terror in the northern-controlled South, the Ku Klux Klan. He would go on to rewrite most of the Masonic rituals and re-create Masonry as we know it today in America. An 11-foot bronze statue of Pike stands at Third and D Streets in downtown Washington, D.C., although few outside Masonry seem to know anything about him. The statue has been owned and maintained by the National Parks Service since its placement was mandated by a joint session of Congress on April 9, 1898.

SKULL AND BONES

In 1833, William H. Russell and Alphonso Taft created an elite secret society at Yale University that has become known as Skull and Bones, after the emblem worn by its members. Soon, Russell began funding the abolitionist movement, which included the domestic terrorist John Brown, who became crucial to sparking the South to secede. At the same time, Russell created an officers’ training school in New Haven. After the war broke out, he became the most influential correspondent in the European press. His family would grow to become the biggest opium smugglers in North America, a family tree that includes the famous Forbes family. Most of what we know about Bones comes from the work of the late Antony C. Sutton, former research fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University.

In 1968, Sutton published Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, a book that documented enormous technological transfers between the United States and the Soviet Union. Sutton proved that Russia at the end of World War II was a backward, bombed-out shell of a country, and her rise to international power was accomplished only through hidden assistance from the US. When Sutton promised to continue his research, he was fired from the Hoover Institute and warned not to “break his rice bowl.” Sutton would go on to write 26 books detailing the corruption of US financial, medical, educational, and political systems. Although these books would sell tens of thousands of copies, none would ever be reviewed in any newspaper in America.

As Harvard Professor Richard Pipes wrote in Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future, “Sutton comes to conclusions that are uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists. For this reason his work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as ‘extreme’ or, more often, simply ignored.”

Sutton suspected a secret cabal was orchestrating events, but the key to unlocking their identity did not arrive until the early 1980s, when he received a letter asking if he would care to examine the membership list of Skull and Bones. “It was a ‘black bag’ job by a family member disgusted with their activities,” revealed Sutton. The membership list arrived in two volumes, black-leather bound. Living members and deceased members were listed in separate volumes. “I kept the stack of Xerox sheets for quite a while before I looked at them,” recalled Sutton. “When I did look—a picture jumped out: THIS was a significant part of the so-called Establishment.”

As Sutton investigated the Skull and Bones apparatus, he was shocked to discover that the society had played important roles in funding the rise of the Nazis, as well as in assisting the Russian Revolution, which had been organized primarily through Masonic  lodges in  Switzerland, England, and Russia. (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky—Freemasons all.) Since Skull and Bones was a chapter of a German-based secret society based on the philosophical principles of Georg W.F. Hegel, with its oppositional dialectic, Sutton soon began documenting how war and revolution had been manipulated for profit. When asked what German fraternity Bones had been based on, Sutton replied, “Most likely, the Illuminati.”

Although Skull and Bones was dominated by old-money families, two new-money families—the Harrimans and the Rockefellers, respective patriarchs of the Democratic and Republican parties— had taken on important roles.

Near the end of World War II, the occult and Masonic-styled Nazi SS secretly surrendered to Allen Dulles in Operation Sunrise. The massive transfer of Nazi war criminals to safety in North and South America was handled with the assistance of the Vatican. Churches became sanctuaries for Nazi spies and scientists, many of whom would end up inside the newly created American Gestapo, the CIA, which Dulles was placed in charge of. The escape was orchestrated through the Knights of Malta. Not only was Hitler’s intelligence chief, General Reinhardt Gehlen, a Malta Knight, but so were Dulles and many highly placed members of US military intelligence. The Nazis who were spirited to safety included experts in rocket science and mind control. Brainwashing had been a major field of study at the concentration camps, and the results of these grisly experiments had obviously been deemed of important national interest.

SCANDAL IN ITALY

Although countless Masonic lodges throughout the world have undoubtedly participated in political plots, few have been unveiled since Weishaupt was exposed in Bavaria. The one notable exception is Italy’s P2 scandal.

The story starts with the rapid ascension of Licio Gelli to Grand Master of Propaganda Massonica, a lodge recognized by the English Grand Lodge in 1972. Six years later, a journalist and disgruntled member published an article titled “The Great Vatican Lodge,” which claimed the Vatican Bank was being manipulated by 121 Freemasons inside the church. The list included cardinals, bishops, and high-ranking prelates. Since numerous papal bulls had forbidden Catholics to become Masons, these allegations were big news in Italy.) While investigating the bank’s financial improprieties, police stumbled onto P2’s complete membership, which included three cabinet ministers, eight admirals, 43 members of Parliament, 43 generals, heads of all three of Italy’s national security agencies, numerous judges, made mafia members, and hundreds of public servants and diplomats. The public officials were forced to resign after the lodge became linked to assassinations, terror attacks, drug-running, and a plot to stage a Fascist takeover of Italy. Their sordid list of activities included the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and perhaps even the untimely death of Pope John Paul I, who’d supported the investigation, and whose reign lasted a suspicious 33 days, the most important number in Masonic numerology.

According to a 1993 report on Mafia influence in Italian politics, “The admission of members of Cosa Nostra, even at high levels, in Masonry is not an occasional or episodic one, but a strategic choice. The oath of allegiance to Cosa Nostra remains the pivot point around which ‘uomini d’onore’ [men of honor] are prominently held. But the Masonic associations offer the Mafia a formidable instrument to extend their own power, to obtain favors and privileges in every field: both for the conclusion of big business and ‘fixing trials,’ as many collaborators with justice have revealed” (Commissione Parlamentare Antimafia, Relazione sui rapporti tra mafia é politica).

PEDOPHILE PRIESTS AND MIND CONTROL

In 1990, the US version of the P2 scandal threatened to unfold in Omaha, Nebraska, after the collapse of a relatively unknown bank, the Franklin Credit Union. Although this scandal could have brought down the leadership of the Republican Party, news never reached far outside of Nebraska. Most of what is known about the case comes from The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, by former state senator John W. DeCamp, another book that has sold tens of thousands of copies, despite never having been reviewed in any newspaper in America.

After several children in the Omaha area independently revealed to different police agencies that they’d been subjected to sexual abuse, torture, and illegal drug use, the cases were quietly swept under the rug. But on February 8, 1984, Edward Hobbs, a teller for five years at the Franklin Credit Union wrote a memo to state banking officials detailing massive fraud and improprieties inside the bank, which was controlled by Lawrence E. “Larry” King.

King immediately fired Hobbs, and his allegations would not be investigated for another four years. When the bank was finally raided by federal agents, it was discovered that $40 million was missing. The agents also discovered that King had built a bedroom inside the bank, stocked with child pornography. At the time, King was widely celebrated as the fastest-rising black star of the Republican Party, a man who had been permitted to open the National Republican Convention twice by singing the national anthem. Knight of Malta and CIA head William Casey was Larry King’s personal friend and mentor.

By 1990, Gary Caradori, who’d been hired by the banking committee of the state legislature to investigate the case, documented over 30 children who claimed to have been subjected to occult brainwashing, sexual abuse, and drug addiction. His research revealed that many of the children had been recruited directly out of Boys Town, the most famous Catholic orphanage in America. Warren Buffet, the second wealthiest man in America, has ties to Boys Town, and his wife worked at the Franklin Credit Union.”

On June 11, 1990, Caradori was killed in a suspicious plane crash. His briefcase, reportedly containing highly explosive photographs, was never found. However, most of Caradori’s videotaped interviews with the children remained. Here is what Paul Bonacci told Caradori on May 14, one month before Caradori was killed:

“We were picked up by a white limo and taken to a [Sacramento, CA,] hotel…. Nicholas and I were driven to an area that had big trees—it took about an hour to get there. There was a cage with a boy in it who was not wearing anything…. They told me to fuck the boy and stuff. At first I said no, and they held a gun to my balls and said do it or else lose them or something like that…. We were told to fuck him and stuff and beat on him. I didn’t try to hurt him. We were told to put our dicks in his mouth and stuff and sit on the boy’s penis and stuff and they filmed it. We did this stuff for 30 minutes or an hour when a man came in and kicked us and picked us up and threw us. He grabbed the boy and started fucking him and stuff…. The boy was bleeding from his rectum, and the men tossed him and me and stuff and put the boy right next to me and grabbed a gun and blew the boy’s head off.”

Bonacci was examined by psychiatrists and found to be suffering from multiple personality disorder, a splintering of the mind that occurs when children are subjected to sexual abuse, trauma, or brainwashing.

Enormous forces were mobilized in Omaha to shut down the Franklin investigation. The children were threatened if they did not recant their stories. People involved in the case began mysteriously dying all over Nebraska.

The children had identified many notables (including Omaha’s police chief, a major newspaper publisher, a prominent judge, and the treasurer of Ak-Sar-Ben, an exclusive Masonic-style organization for Omaha’s business elite) as being involved in their torture and abuse, but only Larry King would be convicted of child abuse. Strangely, one of the two children who refused to recant, Alicia Owen, would spend more time in jail than King, after being indicted of perjury by a kangaroo grand jury. According to DeCamp, the mechanism for controlling the jury came from the Union Pacific Railroad, a company built by E. H. Harriman using Freemason Rothschild funds. Harriman’s two sons would go on to become members of Skull and Bones. “Executives of the Union Pacific Railroad have been known for two things,” remarks DeCamp. “Homosexuality and Freemasonry.”

In 1959, 44-year-old Richard Condon published his second novel, The Manchurian Candidate. Condon had spent 22 years as a publicist, most notably for Walt Disney. His novel was written after several US soldiers captured in Korea signed statements supporting Communism while in prison camps. Most Americans had never heard of brainwashing until these cases were revealed in the newspapers. Condon detailed much of the science behind brainwashing, but mostly he wrote a savage indictment of America’s ruling elite.

The villain of his story was a 50-something Nordic beauty, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Eastern Star (a Masonic society created for wives of high-ranking Freemasons.) In the book, she mainlines heroin, holds parties for the leaders of both political parties, meets with the Pope, orchestrates multiple assassinations, and employs her 25-year-old brainwashed son as a sex slave. The book created an enormous sensation in Washington. Strangely, no Hollywood studio would touch it.

Director John Frankenheimer heard that Frank Sinatra was a fan of The Manchurian Candidate and bought the film option for very little. He signed Sinatra to play a lead role, and Sinatra’s involvement was the only reason the film got studio funding. When Sinatra called President John F. Kennedy to tell him the news, JFK had one question: “Who’s going to play the mother?”

The film appeared to mixed reviews in 1962. One year later, immediately after the assassination of JFK, the book and the film disappeared for 25 years. Why? Because they came far too close to the truth. (The book has been rereleased by Four Walls Eight Windows, and a remake of the film was released in 2004.)

In 1970, “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal,” a.k.a. the “Torbitt Document,” was circulated in Washington. Written under the pseudonym William Torbitt by a Texas lawyer who did not wish to be identified, the document claimed that the JFK assassination was orchestrated by Division Five of the FBI, working with the Defense Industrial Security Command. The head of the FBI (and Division Five) was homosexual Freemason J. Edgar Hoover, the first and only public official to create a Masonic lodge inside a federal building. Throughout his life Hoover held Masonic ceremonies on Monday nights in his office building, and it was widely believed that promotions depended on participation in these ceremonies. According to Torbitt, the assassination was funded through Swiss company Permindex and funneled through a liaison in Canada, L.M. Bloomfield, a sexual deviate. After more than four decades years of scrutiny, the Torbitt document was discovered to have been seeded with disinfo, although a few tidbits brought interesting leads to the case.

In fact, the assassination ran through a CIA base in Florida known as JM/Wave and the funds were provided by the Texas oil cartel that wanted JFK dead so he wouldn’t retract their oil depletion allowance which had made them among the richest people in America. Since JFK had closed JM/Wave and ordered its head fired (he wasn’t), and since JFK was promising to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and cast them to the wind (after the next election), all the executives at the base, as well as their entire Cuban refugee army had plenty of motivation for carrying out that murder most foul.

After the Franklin scandal erupted, DeCamp was visited many times by former CIA head William Colby, who encouraged the investigation and monitored it closely. Colby had run the CIA’s largest assassination program in Vietnam and was the attorney of the Nugan-Hand Bank, which had close ties to the heroin syndicate that flooded the US with drugs during the Vietnam War. Colby knew about the CIA’s MK-Ultra brainwashing program, undertaken with the assistance of Nazi scientists, and told DeCamp the program had gotten out of control. “Children were only supposed to be used with the permission of their parents,” said Colby. Eventually, however, Colby warned DeCamp to get away from the investigation. “This is much bigger than you ever dreamed,” he said. “Sometimes things are too big, too powerful, and the best thing we can do is survive. Write everything you know in a book, and then there’ll be no reason to kill you.”

After DeCamp self-published his book, Colby sent a copy to Attorney General Janet Reno, urging a full investigation. Shortly afterward, Colby mysteriously turned up dead.

Today most researchers on the JFK assassination agree that Lee Harvey Oswald was a real Manchurian Candidate, first subjected to mind control in 1955 when he entered the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol at age fifteen and fell under the command of hypnotist  and sexual deviant David Ferrie, whose library card would be found in Oswald’s wallet eight years later at the time of his arrest in Dallas.

On June 6, 2003, Lawrence Teeter, lawyer for Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, announced that Sirhan had been a victim of hypnotism and mind control and requested a new trial. He never got it. Sirhan remained incarcerated for 53 years before being paroled in 2021. He claims no memory of the assassination, despite having pled guilty.

Meanwhile, former Vice President Dick Cheney, a Freemason, is a former director of Union Pacific Railroad. A long list of Cheney’s relatives have been inducted into Bones. President George W. Bush is a third-generation Boner who flew to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command on September 11, 2001, where he met Warren Buffet, one of the largest stockholders in the CIA-connected Washington Post, although Buffet divested his 28% after the company was sold to Jeff Bezos.

The land on which the towers once stood is leased from Trinity Church, which owns much of the property around Wall Street. The Strategic Air Command is located near Omaha, Nebraska, the city with the most documented cases of multiple personality disorder, as well as the highest percentage of CIA personnel in the country.

Midsummer Night’s Madness: The Day a Town Went Bonkers

Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, site of a famous stone bridge across the Rhone first described by Symon Semeonis in 1323.

Friday, August 16, 1951, was a day unlike any other in the ancient town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, a close-knit community on the banks of the Rhone River, founded in the fifth century and filled with Roman and medieval architecture. Strangely, the first victims in what soon became known throughout France as le pain maudit (“the  accursed bread”) were all animals.

An astonished Laurain Moulin watched her cat suddenly go into convulsions and keel over dead in the kitchen. Moulin opened the door to the barnyard and saw several ducks staggering by, while others marched in unison, acting more like penguins. One duck was lying dead on the ground.

By early evening, the local doctors’ offices were filled with patients complaining of nausea, upset stomachs, insomnia and chills; their pupils were dilated, their temperature and blood pressure below normal. By morning, hundreds more were exhibiting the same symptoms. One woman in her twenties began having seizures. That night, two of the three doctors met to compare notes and concluded that over 200 people had been stricken by some sort of food poisoning that was linked to the town’s favorite baker, Roche Briand.

Wide-eyed and babbling, townspeople began appearing on street corners at all hours, some acting paranoid, others wearing beatific smiles and speaking of universal love; still others were dizzy, confused and had trouble executing the simplest chores. A few were hallucinating so wildly that they could barely distinguish fantasy from reality. An ambulance was called for an elderly man named Felix Mison, who seemed on the verge of a heart attack.

At 6 am on Sunday morning, Emile Testevin was spotted lying naked on the ground near his home, writhing as if in intense pain. He was brought inside by his mother. Although Emile’s father was already hallucinating, he took a wobbly bicycle ride to fetch the nearest doctor. The physician was puzzled by the behavior of the elder Testevin, who seemed positively bursting with euphoria while reporting his son’s condition.

Emile’s father hadn’t slept for two nights and was alternating between fits of depression and bursts of incredible energy and strength. As it turned out, barbituates and other sleeping medications had little impact on Pont-Saint-Esprit’s growing population of insomniacs, although they did seem to help with some of the convulsions. It was at this point that the doctors began to suspect ergotism as the cause of the mysterious outbreak.

Ergot is a parasitic mold that can form on rye, wheat and other cereal grains in high humidity. During the Middle Ages, epidemics of ergotism had appeared sporadically in Europe, usually after heavy rains during the harvest season. Symptoms included convulsions, seizures, nausea and vomiting. Many of the afflicted also experienced strange hallucinations, and their fingers and toes became gangrenous. The disease became known as “St. Anthony’s fire,” named after the order of the Roman Catholic monks who became famous for treating the illness (although treatment consisted of little more than putting patients in a hospital filled with religious icons). In 1650, a fungus was first suspected as the cause of the epidemics, but it wasn’t until 1676 that the first mention of ergot appears in the English language. The most severe outbreaks took place in Gatinais in 1694 and Wurttemberg in 1735, although today some researchers believe that the Salem witch trials of 1692 were also the result of ergot poisoning.

Felix Mison died on August 20, the outbreak’s first casualty. By Monday morning, the 14th Mobile Brigade of Montpellier and other police officials and toxicologists began filtering into town in the first attempts to restore calm and determine the cause of the illness. However, things were destined to get significantly worse before they got better. One hour before midnight, on Friday, August 23, shrieks and screams began resounding throughout the town, screams that would continue into the morning. The next day, the streets were filled with people in various states of undress, some completely naked, babbling incoherently. Some believed they were being eaten alive by snakes or insects; others became violent and tried to strangle their friends or relatives. It was especially wrenching to see children in the throes of such psychic distress. Homes were trashed as the residents piled up furniture against the doors and windows to protect themselves from imaginary invaders.

Unfortunately, the police responded with the worst possible tactic: tackling and restraining the delusional people and forcing them into overflowing barns and other makeshift hospitals that were being set up all around town to isolate the sick. At times, it took a dozen men to capture and subdue a single person. The following day, reinforcements arrived in the form of the militia, armed with more ambulances and more straitjackets. It was decided to move the delusional people into secure asylums, a strategy that merely amplified their desire to escape, while isolating them from the comfort of their familiar surroundings. Those who resisted violently were given electroshock therapy at the asylums, increasing their pain and confusion.

The police arrived at Emile Testevin’s home and insisted that he be taken to the asylum despite his family’s objections. Although Emile was calm now, he’d experienced some violent moments, and the police were concerned about what might happen should the 200-pound giant become agitated again. Emile was loaded into an ambulance already filled with psychotics who couldn’t understand why they were being removed from their homes or where they were going. One man cried out, “My belly is full of snails! I am sending out radio messages everywhere! Get me an x-ray and you will see!!”

When the ambulance arrived at the asylum outside Marseilles, Emile was the last to be unloaded. Seven men couldn’t remove him from the vehicle. The orderlies approached with a straitjacket, but when they tried to put it on him, Emile grabbed it and ripped it in half. The militia arrived with more men and more straitjackets. Emile tore through six more jackets before he could be subdued. He was taken inside, strapped to a bed, and locked in a secure room.

But when an orderly came back to check on him, Emile had somehow eaten through the leather straps (breaking many of his teeth in the process) and was bending the iron bars in the window so he could escape. Six orderlies were needed to move him to a subterranean room with no windows. By now, two other men had died, along with a woman who suffered from hyperthyroidism. The woman reportedly showed the early signs of gangrene on some of her toes, an almost certain indicator of ergot poisoning. Depending on whose statistics you trust, between five and seven people (most of them elderly and frail) would eventually die from the mysterious illness.

But just as the ergot theory was taking hold, an autopsy of Felix Mison, the first victim, indicated traces of mercury in his system. Although no traces of mercury would ever be found in bread samples or any of the other victims, many investigating scientists rushed to conclude that mercury-treated seeds were the culprit. Case closed.

Arthur Stoll.

Unexpectedly, however, two scientists from the prestigious Sandoz Laboratories in nearby Switzerland turned up in Pont-Saint-Esprit at the height of the outbreak: Arthur Stoll and Albert Hofmann, the chemists who discovered LSD-25. They had stumbled across the hallucinogen while investigating the active molecules in ergot, minute amounts of which had been used by European midwives after the 1700s to heighten contractions and stop postpartum bleeding. Sandoz wanted to know whether active ingredients in ergot had any medical applications.

Albert Hofmann.

Hoffman and Stoll had come to Pont-Saint-Esprit, they claimed, because the townspeople’s symptoms were much closer to LSD-25 than ergotism. At the time, however, no one had even heard of LSD. Hofmann had once described it as potentially “appalling, frightening and shocking.” He added that if LSD were ever to be used improperly, it might cause more destruction than the atomic bomb.

Both Hofmann and Stoll seemed certain that the ergot in the flour had somehow broken down to LSD-25. Ergot alone, they reasoned, couldn’t be the cause of the outbreak, because large amounts were needed to cause such widespread symptoms, and any bread tainted with such high concentration would be discolored and obviously rancid. LSD, on the other hand, was odorless, colorless, and thousands of times more potent. Both scientists agreed that mercury poisoning wasn’t the answer either, because no kidney nor liver damage had been found in any of the patients.

The events at Pont-Saint-Esprit would remain a mystery for years to come. The victims formed an association to sue the cartel that controlled flour distribution in France in the 1950s, but this powerful group would be very successful in delaying, appealing and subverting their case. That only left the baker, Roche Briand, to sue, but he’d already lost his business (no one wanted his bread anymore) and had become an insurance salesman. Ten years later, none of the victims had received any compensation for their suffering, and there still wasn’t a scientific consensus on the cause of the outbreak.

In 1968, John G. Fuller published a book titled The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire (Macmillan). He focused exclusively on Briand’s bread as the cause of the outbreak, dismissing other theories that the townspeople put forward (including the possibility of a chemical-warfare experiment). However, today many researchers will be inclined to look at Fuller as a person of interest in a possible coverup. Immediately prior to his book on Pont-Saint-Esprit, Fuller had published an account of Barney and Betty Hill, the first recorded case of alien abduction, an incident that allegedly took place as the New Hampshire couple returned from a vacation trip to Canada in the early 1960s. Many researchers have come to the conclusion that thousands of Americans were secretly hypnotized and dosed with LSD in the 1950s and early 60s as part of the CIA’s mind-control experiments, and the Hills may have been two such victims. According to this scenario, the alien-abduction story was planted through hypnosis to mask the activities of government scientists. The current alien-abduction mythology may, in fact, be largely an invention of the national security system as a cover, which might explain why UFO documentaries and features are so prevalent in the media, while investigations into the deep state exceedingly rare.

John G. Fuller.

There are several other connections that cast suspicions on Fuller’s work, including his relationship with hypnotist Dr. Andrija Puharich (aka Henry K. Puharich), a parapsychology researcher most famous as the man who introduced spoon-bender Uri Geller to the world. Puharich as been linked to the CIA’s MK/Ultra mind-control program and was also involved in a series of bizarre seances with some of our country’s wealthiest elite. Another connection is Dr. Karlis Osis, founder of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City, a research institute that worked closely with the CIA over the years. In the late 1950s, Osis offered Fuller the opportunity to be the first journalist to try LSD and write about its effects. Fuller turned down the offer. While these connections don’t prove Fuller was a witting accomplice of the CIA, they do suggest that he may have been a writer that the agency employed whenever a story needed containment.

In 2008, the events of Pont-Saint-Esprit were further investigated by Steven K. Kaplan, a professor of European history at Cornell University and an internationally recognized authority on French bread. Although it was written entirely in French, Kaplan’s Le Pain Maudit was the subject of a feature in the New York Times. Kaplan went to Pont-Saint-Esprit after the book was published to give a talk about the incident. Although 30 chairs were set up for his appearance, over 400 people attended, demonstrating that the town had not forgotten the experience. According to the Times, “The government did its best to smooth over the incident and after many inquiries and court cases the affair was finally dropped in 1978. Explanations abound, none of which Kaplan finds satisfying. The most popular one, poisoning by a form of ergot fungus, he finds unconvincing. Mercury poisoning caused by Panogen, a cleansing agent used in wheat containers, was disproved although Kaplan says the government used it as a coverup.”

Frank Olson.

And there the matter would have rested, were it not for a researcher named H.P. Albarelli Jr., whose book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments finally broke the case wide open. Albarelli spent ten years investigating the death of Olson, a US Army biochemist who’d allegedly killed himself in New York City on the night of November 28, 1953. Initially, Olson’s family was told he had jumped through a closed window (wearing only his underpants) from his room on the 10th floor of the Hotel Statler. What the CIA didn’t initially mention, however, is Olson had been dosed with LSD without his knowledge six days earlier and had been interrogated for 48 hours by mind control experts in an attempt to determine how much of a security risk he posed. Olson, it seems, had grown weary of his job, which involved weaponizing chemical and biological agents for the CIA at Camp Detrick (now Fort Detrick) in Frederick, MD, and was planning to ditch his career and start over as a dentist. However, before he could gracefully exit his high-security position, Olson made “a terrible mistake,” one that would bring about his untimely death. Albarelli determined that mistake was mentioning the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident to someone at Camp Detrick who wasn’t cleared for the information, who then reported him to the camp commander as a potential security risk.

Over 800 pages long, A Terrible Mistake is a riveting exploration into the CIA’s mind control and chemical weapons programs. When revelations about these programs threatened to emerge, then-CIA director Richard Helms made sure that most of those files were burned. But Helms was sacked by Richard Nixon during Watergate, and the new CIA chief, James Schlesinger, was also convinced the abuses needed to come out so they wouldn’t be repeated.

Former CIA Director William Colby (right) talks with former Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs Brent Scowcrof (middle) and former Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller (left) about the Vietnam War during a break from a meeting of the National Security Council on April 24, 1975.

A congressional commission controlled by then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was eventually created in 1975 to investigate allegations that the CIA was illegally operating inside the US. Colby was called to the White House by Rockefeller at the start of the investigation. According to Albarelli, Rockefeller lashed out at Colby during the meeting. “What the hell are you doing?” he said. “Why are you revealing all this stuff? Don’t you realize the commission is a dog-and-pony show?” The commission would eventually reveal that a Camp Detrick employee had died as a result of being secretly dosed with LSD. Although the report took great pains not to mention Olson by name, it soon became clear just who that person was.

One of the primary reasons why the existence of these programs had to be concealed is that they revealed secret connections between the CIA and the Sicilian men-of-honor society known popularly as the Mafia (and internally as Cosa Nostra). The key person in establishing this connection was a former OSS counterintelligence operative and narcotics agent named George Hunter White. White was the person who brokered the deal that set Lucky Luciano free and opened the doors for the French Connection to flood the US with heroin. White operated safe houses in New York and San Francisco where hundreds of people were dosed with LSD and then interrogated as White observed the sessions behind a two-way mirror. Low-level Mafia operatives were frequently the victims; meanwhile, upper-level Mafia members seemed to enjoy a close relationship with White.

George Hunter White.

According to Wikitree: “George Hunter White was born in Los Angeles, California on June 22, 1908.  His parents were Lafayette Dancy “L.D.” White, a Louisiana native who descended from a prominent family of physicians and plantation owners, and Hermine Brunner, the daughter of German immigrants, whose father made a significant amount of money in the lottery business. During White’s childhood, his grandparents on the Brunner side went through a much-publicized court battle involving alleged domestic abuse; this resulted in George White’s grandfather, Herman Brunner, living with the White family in Alhambra, California in the years leading up to his death in 1912.

In the 1930s, George White took a job with the Border Patrol, which led to a position with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). He applied several times to be a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), however, he did not demonstrate the right qualifications for the job. White continued to move up in the FBN, holding posts in California, Oregon, Texas, and New York.

White’s work in the FBN in the 1930s had already gone beyond routine drug busts. He worked directly under Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of Narcotics, and was assigned to high-profile cases that allowed him to make a name for himself. In the mid-1930s, he infiltrated a drug trafficking organization known as the Hip Sing Tong, apparently achieving a level of trust with the members after having “hung around the Oriental restaurants until he was accepted as a regular.”

Hip Sing Tong were involved in the “Tong Wars” in New York City’s Chinatown in the early 1900s.

As noted in his 1975 obituary, White’s overall personage and attitude led people to believe him honest and friendly (“For all his great bulk, Col. White was a wide-eyed sort of man, hale and very hearty…”). White took a “blood oath” with the Hip Sing Tong and stayed within their ranks for two years. In 1938, White and other Federal agents rounded up the group’s leaders and sent over 30 Tong members to prison. As noted by Douglas Valentine in the publication Counterpunch, the Tong case “cemented White’s status as the FBN’s top agent, and subsequently involved him [in] its most important, secret investigations.” [10]

George White was in the United States Army from 1942 to 1945. He attended “a British sabotage school near Toronto, Canada” during this time. In 1943, he left the FBN to begin working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA. In the OSS, White and other agents, “on a quest for truth serums,” secretly added the substance tetrahydocannabinol acetate (THCA) into food being consumed by “suspected communists, conscientious objectors, and mobsters.” [11]

In the early 1950s, White was tapped by Anslinger to work for the head of the CIA’s Technical Division Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, and Gottlieb’s project MK-ULTRA. [12] MK-Ultra was designed to be a test of the potential mind-control properties of psychotropic drugs, most notably LSD. While other scientists and CIA contractors were charged with dosing the substance through laboratories, universities, hospitals, and prisons, White’s territory for his MK-Ultra assignment involved unsuspecting citizens in large U.S. cities.

When Olson was brought to New York, White was supposed to take charge of his security, but he suddenly and unexpectedly had to depart for Los Angeles to attend his mother’s funeral. In his place, White selected Pierre Lafitte, a CIA operative who was also a member of the Corsican Mafia, to guard Olson and make sure that he didn’t escape.

Francois Spirito.

Olson was probably moved to the Statler (now demolished) because Lafitte had a cover job as a security guard there. When it came time to move Olson out of the hotel, Lafitte brought along another Corsican associate, Francois Spirito, to help him. Then things got out of hand. “Lafitte and Spirito killed Frank Olson,” claimed Albarelli. “Some people have misunderstood my book and think it was a planned assassination. In my view, it wasn’t. I think the intent that night was to take Olson back to Rockville, MD, where the CIA maintained an asylum for troubled people they didn’t know what to do with. And it wouldn’t have surprised anyone if Olson would have ended up hanging himself or dying from some drug overdose a few days later. But to plan an assassination where two guys throw someone through a closed window? It doesn’t make any sense, especially considering the guy they murdered just spent the last ten years figuring out how to kill someone with a pinprick. It’s just too dirty and too quick to have been planned.”

The smoking gun that Albarelli obtained through the Freedom of Information Act was an undated White House memo sent to CIA director William Colby that mentioned “George H. White, Pierre Lafitte, FNU Spirito and the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident.” This White House memo helped Albarelli put all the pieces of the puzzle together for the first time. He was also able to establish two of the key players in the 1975 coverup: Donald Rumsfeld, then chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and Rumsfeld’s top aide, Dick Cheney. On July 11, 1975, Cheney wrote a memo to Rumsfeld titled, “The Olson Affair.” The memo included statements that the president should make about Olson’s death at an upcoming press conference. Although the US government eventually reached a settlement with Olson’s family, Ford himself always maintained that the death was a suicide.

While working on this story, I came across an illuminating quote from one of the CIA’s scientists, Dr. Henry K. Beecher, in which he discussed the use of LSD in doses “so small that one can calculate that the water supply of a large city could be disastrously and undetectably (until too late) contaminated with quantities readily available…It should not be a difficult trick to sink a small container near the main outlet of water storage reservoirs, and the container arranged to ‘excrete’ a steady flow of the material over a period of many hours or days.”

At the time, some government scientists believed LSD could be a major advance in “non-violent” war. They were certainly interested in exploring its effects on civilian populations, especially at high doses.

Although a number of other large-scale LSD attacks were in the planning stages, most seemed to have been dropped abruptly. A Detrick employee said, “There was an adverse effect [in France]…what would be called a ‘black swan’ reaction.” However, the Special Operations Division did aerosol spraying through the exhaust pipe of an automobile driven around New York City (Operations Big City and Mad Hatter). “Although White’s records of the experiment were destroyed by the CIA in 1973,” said Abarelli, “We know he twice detonated aerosol devices filled with LSD, and also did at least one LSD experiment within a New York City subway car.”

But why Pont-Saint-Esprit, out of all the towns and villages in the world? “I never asked that question about any of the CIA’s LSD experiments,” said Albarelli. However, it turns out there were two US Army bases located near the town, and one of them may have housed Frank Olson and other members from the Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick for a few days during the experiment. Olson’s presence in Europe at the time was conclusively established after Albarelli examined his passport.

Unfortunately, Albert Hofmann, the man who first tripped on LSD, has since passed away. It would have been interesting to quiz him about the incident, which is curiously absent from his memoirs. When I told someone who knew Hofmann about these revelations (and Hoffman’s own possible role in the coverup), he responded by saying “Albert always said he wasn’t any angel. I wonder if this incident is what he was talking about when he said that.”

 

Appointment with the Apocalypse

Detail of Albrecht Durer’s Four Horsemen after the Book of Revelation; woodcut 1498

Morale at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) might have been reaching an all-time low early in 1993. The previous summer, the agency had initiated and botched a case against Randy Weaver in Idaho. (Weaver later collected $3.1 million in restitution for the death of his wife and son. ) Then came widespread accusations of sexual harassment inside the agency. 60 Minutes, the most-watched news show in the country, jumped all over that one.

FBI surveillance on the mother and son killed by snipers.

The ATF brass wanted something to turn around the bad publicity, and they wanted it fast. In March, they were scheduled to appear before Congress to defend their annual budget. The solution? They began planning the biggest, most elaborate raid in ATF history. On February 28, a mile-long, 80-vehicle caravan pulled out of Ford Hood, Texas and headed 50 miles northeast for an appointment with the Apocalypse near Waco.

“Raiding is the expertise of the ATF, and statistically, it’s not as dangerous as one might think,” writes Dick J. Reavis in The Ashes of Waco. “In 36 months, the agency had called out its SRT or SWAT teams 578 times, executed 603 search warrants, mostly against dope dealers, and had seized some 1,500 weapons. It had encountered gunfire on only two of its raids, and the only fatalities (three of them) had been among the suspects.

The ATF videotaped the planning sessions, as well as the training maneuvers at Fort Hood. Many agents carried cameras along with their flash-bang grenades, nylon handcuffs and assault rifles. A video camera was mounted on one of the three helicopters that were scheduled to arrive with the raiding party.

Unfortunately, there were serious problems with the raid’s planning and execution. The search warrant contained inflammatory and prejudicial comments. Legal citations were incorrect. It contained blatantly false information about a methamphetamine lab, info which had been fabricated to obtain free military assistance. Two-thirds of the warrant involved charges of child abuse, a crime for which the ATF had no jurisdiction. Many consultants had urged the ATF to conduct the raid before sunrise, but the designated time had been moved to to 9:30 am. The plan involved multiple “dynamic entries,” which meant forced entry from numerous sides and levels simultaneously.

The planning was shoddy because the ATF needed the raid to happen fast, and expected a cakewalk. It needed to happen during good lighting conditions to optimize the video footage. The target, a religious community called Mount Carmel, had been under observation for over a month. It housed about 130 people, of which two-thirds were women and children. The occupants ranged from very elderly to babies and included two pregnant women. An undercover agent who’d penetrated the community reported endless hours of Bible study, with two communion services daily. The last thing the ATF expected was armed resistance in the face of their overwhelming firepower. Had they a better understanding of the Students  of the Seven Seals who lived at Mount Carmel, the ATF might have realized they were about to stick their nose into a hornet’s nest.

St. John.

The Search for a Living Prophet

The Romans threw John the Apostle into a pot of boiling oil as punishment for spreading Christianity; but he survived and eventually was banished to the Greek isle of Patmos, where, around 90 AD, he wrote the Book of Revelation, a violent prophecy in which the unbelievers (read: Romans) are subjected to horrible tortures while the true followers of Christ are lifted into a golden city in heaven. Think of it as the original vengeance drama. Written before much of the New Testament, Revelation was placed at the end of the Bible. Martin Luther warned that excessive study of it could lead to insanity. It ends with a plea for the Apocalypse to come quickly.

William Miller.

In 1831, William Miller launched the Second Advent Awakening, the biggest American-born religious movement in history. According to Miller’s calculations, the end of the world was due on Oct. 22, 1844. Miller attracted a huge following of doomsday advocates, the survivalists of their time. When Jesus and the Apocalypse failed to appear at the appointed hour, the devotees had to recover from what they dubbed the “great disappointment.” Miller’s followers eventually blossomed into 84 groups of churches with over ten million members worldwide, the largest of which is the Seventh Day Adventist Church, with about 750,000 members in the United States. Adventists believe the Second Coming is imminent, and that the power of prophecy will flourish in the final days. Despite this, only one person since Miller has ascended to official “living prophet” status.

Victor Houteff.

In 1935, Bulgarian immigrant Victor Houteff declared himself a living prophet and was promptly banished from the church. He assembled a large band of devotees at Mount Carmel Center in Texas. Upon his death in 1955, his widow took over and announced the Second Coming was due April 22, 1959. But when the date came and passed without an Apocalypse, 10,000 members were left in disarray. Most stopped sending in contributions, leaving self-proclaimed prophet Ben Roden and about fifty “Branch Davidians,” as they called themselves, in charge of the once prosperous Mount Carmel.

Lois Roden.

Following Roden’s death in 1978, his widow, Lois, took over the church. Lois not only proclaimed herself a prophetess, she attracted a lot of attention in Adventist circles by declaring the Holy Spirit was feminine.

Vernon Wayne Howell joined the congregation in 1981. Born in Texas to a 15-year-old single mother, Howell had been passed between family members and physically and sexually abused during childhood. Due to dyslexia, he was held back many  times in school, earning the nickname “Mr.  Retardo.” At age nine, he became a devout Seventh Day Adventist. By age 12, he’d memorized large tracts of the King James Bible.

Vernon W. Howell.

When Howell arrived at Mount Carmel, he was a stuttering, insecure boy given to fits of self-pity. More than anything, he wanted contact with a living prophet. He formed a secret sexual liason with Lois Roden, then in her late sixties. With his encyclopedic command of the Bible, Howell became an inspirational figure whose “visions” were taken seriously, despite his ninth-grade education. This angered George Roden, Lois’ son, who saw himself as the future leader of the group. George suffered from Tourette’s syndrome and frequently exploded with uncontrollable rage and inappropriate behavior. When Howell took a 14-year-old member of the congregation as his wife, Lois acted the jilted lover and confessed her secret affair during Bible study class. George expelled Howell and his teenage bride from Mount Carmel at the point of an Uzi. Most of the congregation followed Howell to East Texas, where they lived communally in wretched conditions. Thus began his conversion from inspirational figure to living prophet. In 1987, Marc Breault joined the East Texas enclave and became Howell’s right-hand man, helping recruit dozens of new members to the community.

George Roden.

After his mother died in 1986, George Roden became completely unglued. Determined to wrest back his congregation, he dug up a corpse and challenged Howell to see who could raise the dead. Instead, Howell reported the corpse abuse to the local sheriff. The sheriff wanted evidence, so Howell and several armed followers crept back to Mount Carmel under cover of night with a camera. Before they embarked on this mission, however, Howell outfitted everyone with identical camouflage fatigues and armed them with AR-15 assault rifles.

A gun battle ensued and Roden was wounded. He would have likely been killed, except the neighbors called the police, who broke up the gunfight and arrested Howell and his men for attempted murder. During the trial, Roden wrote angry letters to the judge, threatening to reign down a pox of AIDS and herpes on him. The judge sentenced him to six months in jail for contempt. The trial ended in a hung jury. Two years later, Roden was convicted of an ax murder and locked in an insane asylum.

David Koresh and family.

Meanwhile, Howell and his followers rebuilt Mount Carmel, which had fallen into disrepair. They maintained a 24-hour armed vigil against possible retribution from Roden, who’d briefly escaped from the mental institution and continued to assert his ownership over the property. By paying back taxes and occupying the site, Howell hoped to gain full legal ownership within five years. In 1990, he changed his name to David Koresh and announced the Apocalypse was commencing in five years.

His group called themselves “Students of the Seven Seals,” not “Branch Davidians,” as they would later be known by the news media. Koresh yearned for recognition as a living prophet from the Adventist Church. His group lived a happy and communal life. They were an eclectic group of races, cultures and nationalities, some with advanced degrees in theology. One was the first black graduate of Harvard Law School.

Koresh formed a rock band, and the elders viewed him as a possible MTV-style prophet who could breathe life into a dying religious movement. He drove a souped-up Camaro and enjoyed target practice with semiautomatic assault weapons. He believed guns would come  in handy during the 1995 Apocalypse. “What are you going to do when the tanks are surrounding us?” he’d ask his congregation.

Adventists believe the Bible contains clues concerning the date and nature of Judgment Day. They also have a religious obligation to take claims of prophecy seriously. By creating down-home explanations for many confusing passages in Revelation, and by memorizing all 150 Psalms and treating them as prophecy, Koresh created a fresh take on doomsday Christianity that was irresistible to some Adventists. His congregation was not a collection of brainwashed zombies, but an educated and highly spiritual community. Koresh frequently came to Bible class straight from work, his hands soiled with axle grease, the tones of his voice always conversational, never bombastic like a typical Southern Baptist.

Life at Mount Carmel was spartan, but people stayed because it was spiritually charged. One never knew what outlandish prophesy Koresh might spout next. He had a knack for constantly topping himself, like Jackie Chan dreaming up new stunts. Serious problems began, however, soon after Breault left the community and moved back to Australia, a split that coincided with Koresh’s celibacy prophecy, which he called “The New Light.”

“At the time of the end, those who have wives should live as they have none,” said Koresh, quoting the Bible to support the new policy. It was time for male members at Mount Carmel to become celibate, except for Koresh, who was obligated to sire 24 children by 1995. He already had several wives at Mount Carmel, one of whom he’d seduced when she was twelve. (Koresh later admitted it was difficult keeping former couples from getting it on once in a while, just as it was difficult keeping his harem sexually satisfied.)

It wasn’t your typical American family, but the children were Koresh’s jewels. They were reportedly extremely well-mannered, quiet, obedient and showered with love. They’d never seen a television, never eaten junk food, never been to a public school. Their welfare had been monitered by the Texas Department of Human Services. The children showed no signs of physical or emotional abuse.

The community sincerely believed Koresh’s interpretations of the Bible, and accepted him as “The Lamb,” the only person capable of opening the seven seals that would bring about the Apocalypse. His matings with teenagers was unlawful, but conducted with parental approval. It was considered a sacred honor to bear his child. “It’s not like I really want to do this,” Koresh would always explain. “The Lord is telling me I have to.”

Marc Breault.

Instead of turning his newlywed wife over to “The House of David,” Marc Breault embarked on a vendetta to expose Koresh. He hired a private investigator to document Koresh’s history of statutory rape. When he couldn’t get the press or authorities interesting in the story, he began mixing exaggerations with real facts to produce a tantalizing stew of tabloid sensationalism. Eventually, he gave the story to an Australian TV show and began working on a book deal. Meanwhile, based on his evidence, the ATF elevated Koresh to ZBO.

Zee Big One

Zee Big One (ZBO) is “a press-drawing stunt that when shown to Congress at budget time justifies more funding,” wrote investigative reporter Carol Vinzant in Spy. “The attack on the Branch Davidians complex was, in the eyes of some of the agents, the ultimate ZBO.” In the spring of 1992, a United States Parcel Service driver opened a box of grenade hulls that were being shipped to Mount Carmel and reported it to the local sheriff, who alerted the ATF. A member of Koresh’s community was developing a profitable and entirely legal business selling firearms and survivalist fashion wear at gun shows. The empty grenade hulls were sewn into ammo vests, part of the official David Koresh survival gear.

On July 30, 1992, gun dealer Henry McMahon called Koresh, saying ATF agents were at his home asking questions about him. “Tell them to come out here,” replied Koresh. “If they want to see my guns, they are more than welcome.” The agents responded by motioning silently, “no, no,” and getting McMahon to hang up.

Robert Rodriguez

In January 1993, three undercover ATF agents occupied the house across the street from Mount Carmel and began videotaping and gathering intelligence. Although it was obvious they were government agents, Koresh welcomed their arrival and spent considerable time discussing the Bible with agent Robert Rodriguez, trying to convince him the government represented a false Babylonian power. He urged Rodriguez to move into Mount Carmel so he could have a better understanding of the community. They engaged in target practice together and inspected each other’s weapons. Koresh noticed Rodriguez’s gun had a hair trigger, standard issue for a police sniper, and had been converted to full automatic fire, normally an illegal modification unless one registered the gun and paid the proper taxes. “This is a dangerous weapon,” noted Koresh.

The day before launching “Operation Trojan Horse,” the ATF reserved rooms in local hotels for over a hundred agents and personnel. They also alerted the national and local media to be ready for a big story that was about to break. A highly inflammatory article attacking Koresh as a child abuser appeared in the Waco Tribune-Herald the morning of the raid. It wasn’t difficult to see a massive operation was underway, aimed at Mount Carmel.

David Jones, a local postman and Mount Carmel resident, was tipped off to the upcoming raid when a news cameraman asked for directions to “Rodenville.” While they spoke, an ATF sniper team drove past and National Guard helicopters flew overhead. Jones raced to Mount Carmel and found Koresh discussing theology with Rodriguez. He whispers in Koresh’s ear that the Feds are in route. Koresh remains calm. “We know they’re coming,” he said while shaking hands goodbye with the agent. “Do what you gotta do.”

Chuck Sarabyn.

Rodriguez called ATF Special Agent Chuck Sarabyn in a failed attempt to cancel the raid as the crucial element of surprise had been lost. Instead, however, Sarabyn panics and orders his troops to speed up, “They know we’re coming!” The Ft. Hood convoy was at Bellmead Civic Center, ten miles from Mount Carmel, with seventy-six ATF raiders loaded into two unprotected cattle trailers pulled by pickup trucks.

Despite the clear possibility of an ambush, Sarabyn felt he could not cancel a ZBO.

David Thibodeau.

There are many versions of what happened next, but the most believable accounts come from the surviving residents of Mount Carmel. Their perspective has been best documented by David Thibodeau, the drummer in Koresh’s band, in his book, A Place Called Waco. “David appeared in the cafeteria accompanied by four or five men armed with AR-15s,” writes Thibodeau. Koresh told his congregation to keep cool. “I want to talk it out with these people,” he said. “We want to work it out.”

A few minutes later the cattle cars filled with agents pulled up broadside to the front door. The first shots were probably fired by agents into the dog pen in front of the building, where an Alaskan malamute lived with her pups. All the dogs were killed. There is also evidence one panicky agent accidentally discharged two rounds into the radiator and windshield of an ATF vehicle.

Perry Jones

Koresh opened the front door. He was unarmed. “What’s going on?” he shouted. “There are women and children in here!” When he failed to hit the ground upon command, the agents opened fire, fatally wounding 64-year-old Perry Jones, who was standing next to Koresh. The door slammed shut and residents began to return fire. Under Texas law, defending oneself against excessive police force is legal.

Wayne Martin.

Within seconds, Harvard Law graduate Wayne Martin, a local attorney, called 911. “There’s 75 men around our building shooting at us at Mount Carmel,” said Martin. “Tell them there are women and children in here and to call it off!” Ten minutes passed before Lieutenant Lynch, a deputy sheriff known to Martin, picked up the line. “I have a right to defend myself!” shrieked Martin. “We want a cease fire!”

Strangely, there was no line of communication between local law enforcement and the raiding party, even though Lynch had visited the ATF command center earlier in the day. The command center was filled with phones and fax machines, all ready to blanket the news media with press releases, but had no communication with the raiding team. Apparently, none of the raiders had cell phone.

It would take two agonizing hours to arrange a cease fire, and it happened only after ATF agents ran out of bullets. During that time, six residents were killed and four were wounded, while four ATF agents were killed and sixteen wounded. Many of the wounded agents were lying helpless on the field of battle. Of all the residents, Koresh was the most seriously wounded, a bullet had blown through his side. News photos reveal ATF agents in panic and disarray, loading their wounded on the hoods of vehicles.

The ATF had arrived in overwhelming force, including air support, and assaulted a church, only to be driven back by less than a dozen armed men and at least one woman shooting back. Suddenly, instead of a ZBO, ATF had one of the biggest pubic relations disasters in American history in the making. The ATF agents were quickly replaced by the FBI, the media were drawn back a mile from the scene and all lines of communication to Mount Carmel were severed. “A crazy cult is holding their children hostage,” went the standard press release.

The most damaging “evidence” of what really happened that day is the bizarre disappearance of all videotape shot by the ATF. The explanation given was that all cameras malfunctioned simultaneously, producing no tapes whatsoever. It’s far more likely the tapes disappeared because they supported the claim of Mount Carmel residents, all of whom insisted the ATF fired first.

Even worse, no written reports were filed by any agents on the field of battle, a startling reversal of ATF policy. Later, when agents were questioned about the skirmish, interviews had to be canceled because they were producing evidence favorable to the defendants inside Mount Carmel.

Today, the ATF tells a much different story: “We were ambushed by a hail of machine gun fire the moment we got off the cattle cars.” This explanation doesn’t hold up. Photos reveal Mount Carmel heavily peppered with bullet holes, while the vehicles used as cover by the ATF bear few signs of incoming fire.

Dr. Alan Stone, a Harvard psychiatrist and law expert hired by the government to write a report on Waco, concluded: “If they were militants determined to ambush and kill as many ATF agents as possible, it seemed to me that given their firepower, the devastation could have been even worse….the agents brought to the compound in cattle cars could have been cattle going to slaughter if the Branch Davidians had taken full advantage of their tactical superiority.”

Tragically, the fact four ATF agents died while attempting the initial dynamic entry calls into suspicion any statements made by agents at the scene. Why? Because “testi-lying” (fabricating evidence against suspected criminals in order to obtain convictions) has become standard operating procedure for some agencies, and an unofficial wall of silence protects police engaged in vigilante retribution against cop-killers. Many law enforcement officers will always believe Koresh and his followers got what they deserved, and if it requires a few lies to make it stand up in court, who cares?

The Siege

The FBI brought in ten Bradley fighting vehicles, two Abrams tanks and a multitude of other armored vehicles. Shortwave radio and cell phones were electronically jammed. The only contact out was a single phone line the FBI ran from Mount Carmel to FBI negotiators off-site.

Koresh requested that Robert Rodriguez be installed as a negotiator, a logical choice since they had already developed a relationship. The request was denied. Instead, the FBI created a team of revolving negotiators, none of whom developed any sensitivity to Seventh Day Adventist doctrine. FBI negotiators dismissed all religious talk as “Bible babble,” not realizing Bible quotations were perhaps the best tool for bringing the residents out.

Early on, Koresh agreed to voluntarily surrender if a one-hour tape explaining his theology was aired on national radio. However, the night before, the residents had dug out the medicinal whiskey supply and held a party in the chapel while he lay wounded upstairs. Koresh abruptly canceled the surrender by saying God had told him to wait. “Some of us blamed the previous night’s binge, saying we’d sinned and acted wildly,” writes Thibodeau.

The FBI responded angrily and began a psychological war, playing loud music and the sounds of animals being tortured. Searchlights beamed into the building during the night. “Every time we thought we were cooperating, people were coming out, or we were doing what they asked, we’d be punished, almost right after complying,” says Clive Doyle, one of the survivors. “The electricity being cut off, the music being played, all that kind of stuff just gave us the attitude they certainly did not mean what they were promising, that we couldn’t trust them. All the things that went on for the next fifty-odd days just confirmed in our  minds they had no concern for our children at all.”

During the siege, snipers routinely mooned women with their exposed buttocks. They also gave the finger to the men inside and loudly called them “cocksuckers” and “motherfuckers,” behavior that contributed to the residents impression that they were surrounded by an immoral force sent by Babylon. Meanwhile, the tanks and armored vehicles circled Mount Carmel, crushing cars, trampling graves, destroying property and contaminating the crime scene.

During the siege, 35 residents voluntarily left Mount Carmel, mostly children and the elderly. The elderly were immediately put in chains and treated like hardened criminals, while the children were fed candy and other junk food. Most of the people remaining inside became convinced surrender was not a viable option by watching how the FBI treated those exiting Mount Carmel.

On April 15, after the residents celebrated several days of Passover, Koresh informed the FBI that God had given him permission to write down his interpretation of the Seven Seals, a major breakthrough since he had never written down any of his philosphy. He feverishly went to work on the manuscript. As soon as it was done, he planned to surrender. His aides expected the work to be completed within a week.

But the mood of the FBI had turned permanently sour. Residents were no longer able to peacefully surrender after April 15. Instead, anyone who left the compound was immediately subjected to a barrage of deadly flash-bang grenades. Apparently, the cost of keeping so much law enforcement and equipment at the site (estimated at $500 thousand per day) had reached the limit. Deep inside the bowels of the federal government, a final solution was being hatched for the Students of the Seven Seals.

The Final Solution

In January 1993, the United States and 130 other countries signed the Chemical Weapons Convention banning the use of CS gas in warfare. Use of this toxic chemical had been condemned by everyone from Amnesty Internatonal to the US Army.

On April 14, 1993, the Department of Justice secretly flew in two military officers, Brigadier General Paul J. Shoomaker and Colonel William “Jerry” Boykin, then Commander of Delta Force (B Squadron) Special Ops at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. They were flown by FBI transport to Waco to “assess the situation,” then flown to Washington to meet Attorney General Janet Reno, to discuss “contingency plans that may be used to bring the situation in Waco to an end,” according to an Army Operations Command memo obtained by WorldNetDaily in August 1999.

On Saturday, April 17, Reno suddenly agreed to the use of CS gas in ending the Waco siege. She would later offer several reasons for approving the gas attack: Intelligence had indicated Koresh was sexually abusing the children. Armed militia from around the country was converging on Mount Carmel to free the residents. The perimeter had become unstable. Finally, the agents at the scene were suffering from fatigue.

At 6 am on April 19, while it was still dark, the huge speakers began broadcasting a new message to the 83 people inside. “The siege is over. We’re going to put tear gas in the building. The tear gas is harmless, but it will make your environment uninhabitable. You are under arrest. Come out now with your hands up. There will be no shooting. This is not an assault.”

From several sides at once, M60A1 tanks modified for demolition began punching holes into the walls of Mount Carmel. According to the plan signed off on by Reno, this phase of the gas attack was supposed to continue for 48 hours if necessary. However, in the fine print of the plan, the part Reno may not have read, rapid escalation of the attack was approved if the tanks drew fire from the residents. Within a few minutes, four BV tanks began firing ferret rounds into the building. Four hundred canisters had been stockpiled for the attack. Ninety minutes later, they had practically expended the supply and put out an emergency request for more canisters.

“By noon the building is a tinderbox,” writes Thibodeau. “A thick layer of methylene chloride dust deposited by the CS gas coats the walls, floors, and ceilings, mingling with kerosene and propane vapors from our spilled lanterns and crushed heaters. To make things worse, a brisk, thirty-knot Texas wind whips through the holes ripped in the building like a potbellied stove with its damper flung open.”

Shortly after two pyrotechnic ferret round were fired into the house, one in the rear and one in the front, two fireballs raced through building. Within seconds, the entire structure was in flames. According to the survivors, the only logical exit for most people was through the cafeteria. Most of the women and children were huddled in a concrete vault nearby. The children had no gas masks, so they sought shelter under wet blankets. When people tried to exit, they were driven back into the building by sniper fire. With their escape cut off, they roasted alive.

Nine residents survived, all of whom emerged from locations visible to the telephoto lenses of the network TV cameras. The presence of those cameras may explain why they survived, unlike the unfortunate ones who attempted to exit through the rear.

Fire trucks were available to put out the blaze, but were held back and not allowed near the scene until nothing but ashes were left. Meanwhile, the tanks ran over bodies and pushed debris into the fire to make sure nothing remained standing. Texas Rangers, who were not allowed near the scene until much later in the day, believed the FBI was salting phony evidence, while destroying the crime scene to make an investigation impossible. What little evidence did remain disappeared quickly.

After the smoke and dust cleared, the ATF flag was run up the Mount Carmel flagpole, signaling victory. Only the bunker where the moms and kids roasted alive (or were poisoned by gas) was left standing. Meanwhile, the official press release went out and the official story became: “The cult set fire to the building and committed mass suicide rather than surrender.” It was spun in the media as a Jim Jones-style event.

Dr. Nizam Peerwani, medical examiner for Tarrant County, was in charge of the autopsies. Although 21 people appeared to have died from gunshot wounds, all bullet fragments were immediately confiscated by the FBI and never subjected to independent analysis. Many of the bodies were decapitated or mutilated beyond recognition. According to the official report, “There was a particular instance where all that remained was the arm and hand of a mother clasping a small child’s hand and remains of an arm. You could see how tightly the child’s hand was being squeezed by the mother.” The body of one charred six-year-old was bent backward until the head almost touched the feet, the result of CS gas suffocation. Two fetuses died instantly, expelled after their mothers’ deaths. Autopsies revealed 20 of the dead had bullet wounds, including Koresh, who was shot in the back of the head. Among the 25 children, one three-year-old had been stabbed in the heart with a knife. The major question unanswered: how many residents committed suicide to avoid being roasted alive and how many shot by snipers? Residents had been afraid to flee, as many believed the snipers wanted them all dead.

Texas Rangers tried to investigate, but were prevented from examining crucial evidence. It took four years before lies spread by the Justice Department unravelled, including the assertion no pyrotechnic rounds had been used, and no shots had been fired into the structure during the final assault, statements thoroughly debunked by the 1997 award-winning film Waco: Rules of Engagement by William Gadzecki.

The Cover-Up

The government engineered a slam-dunk cover-up almost immediately. A blatantly biased judge was selected for the criminal trial, held in San Antonio in 1993. “The government is not on trial here,” he would say repeatedly. Eleven members of the community were charged with the murder of the ATF agents, but the evidence against them was weak. The judge gave the jury 67 pages of instructions about how to render a verdict. After four days of deliberations, the jury found all eleven not guilty of murder or conspiracy to commit murder. Four were found guilty of manslaughter, with four others convicted on weapons charges. The jury felt none of the defendants deserved long prison terms, and they expected another trial to take place, one for the architects of the original assault plan.

The judge ignored the jury. He accused the defendants of firing the first shots and setting the fire and proceeded to sentence four defendants to 40 years, one to 20 years, one to 15, one to 10 and one to 5. The jury was outraged During appeals, all sentences were greatly reduced.

Thanks to the work of independent investigators, the cover-up began unraveling, as numerous assertions by ATF, FBI and Janet Reno kept turning up false. They claimed no pyrotechnic rounds were fired by the FBI during the siege or gas attack. They claimed no Delta Force assassins were on site. None of these assertions would hold up under scrutiny.

Journalists like Dick Reavis were paraded in front of Congress and lambasted for showing sympathy for Koresh and his community. The sickening bias of Congress was clear in the award-winning documentary, Waco: The Rules of Engagement. The most damaging evidence uncovered by the filmmakers was an infrared videotape shot from a helicopter during the CS gas attack, which revealed two snipers firing into the cafeteria.

After the initial cover-up failed to hold, Reno appointed former Senator John Danforth (R-MO) to conduct an “independent investigation,” which lasted 14 months, employed 74 people and cost $17 million. The investigation sifted through 2.3 million documents, interviewed 1,001 witnesses and examined thousands of pounds of physical evidence. Danforth state emphatically that the “government did not start or spread the fire….did not direct gunfire at the Davidians, and did not unlawfully employ the Armed Forces of the United States.” The report was a morass of obfuscation, utilizing Orwellian doublespeak at every turn.

In the preface, Danforth stated that he investigated whether the government engaged in “bad acts, not bad judgment.” He noted that 61% of the country, according to a Time magazine poll, believed the government had started the fire, a matter of grave concern. Instead of seeking the truth, he set out to calm the citizenry. “When 61% of the people believe that the government fails to ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also intentionally murders people by fire, the existence of public consent, the very basis of government, is imperiled.”

Only one man was criminally charged by Danforth: William Johnston, a former assistant US attorney in Waco who helped draw up the original warrant and was one of the lead prosecutors in the San Antonio trial. He was indicted on five felony counts and threatened with 21 months in jail.

Apparently, Johnston’s real “crime” had been to allow filmmakers into an evidence locker, where they discovered pyrotechnic rounds mislabeled as “silencers.” Later, he came forward and admitted he’d lied by saying no pyrotechnic rounds had been fired into Mount Carmel. Johnston quietly worked out a plea-bargain agreement that resulted in no jail time.

The ATF fired Charles Sarabyn and Phillip Chojnacki, two of the raid’s commanders. But when the agents threatened to sue, they were reinstated with back pay. ATF director Stephen Higgins was eventually forced to resign, and Deputy Director Daniel Hartnett and two other ranking ATF officials were temporarily suspended. However, one of them, ATF intelligence chief David Troy, was later promoted.

The internet was flooded by contradictory statement about the massacre, and the survivors have split into camps. The cover-up continues, and some websites are undoubtedly counterintelligence operations designed to confuse and divide, like chaff and flares dropped from a jet with a heat-seeking missile on its tail.

The most frightening development, the militarization of the police, has grown exponentially, as have the ranks of the government assassins.

The Second Anniversary

In 1995, a highly decorated veteran of the Gulf War named Timothy McVeigh (who was videotaped two years earlier as a spectator at Waco) became the designated fall-guy for the bombing of a nine-story federal building in Oklahoma City, a bombing staged on the two-year anniversary of the Waco tragedy.

One third of the Alfred E. Murrah building was destroyed and 168 were killed, including 19 children and two pregnant women. Most victims were crushed by falling debris. Thus the legacy of Ruby Ridge and Waco was captured through the greatest act of domestic terrorism on American soil, an event that shocked America and took most of the wind out of the sails of a growing militia movement. In other words, this event had the opposite effect of the FBI’s burning of Mount Carmel.

Andreas Strassmir.

McVeigh had been living at Elohim City, a right-wing religious compound and militia training camp where he’d met Andreas Strassmir, head of security. Strassmir’s grandfather had been one of the founders of the Nazi Party while his father had been chief-of-staff to German chancellor Helmet Kohl. He allegedly left the German army after four years in order to move to the USA to work for the DEA using his father’s CIA connections, but ended up at a remote white separatist cult in Oklahoma, where he became known for agitating for “blowing up a federal building,” according to ATF confidential informant Carol Howe, who had penetrated the cult. Although the plot involved a number of people, most of them disappeared from the official narrative, with the exception of McVeigh and his closest associates.

Strassmir, meanwhile, immediately fled back to safety in Germany after the bombing and remained hidden from public view while McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001. McVeigh could have been a spook working some deep-cover assignment involving hypnosis as well as wearing a biometric chip who got played like Oswald. He was so cool at his execution, I had to wonder if he was convinced the execution was going to be faked and he should act dead for the press until they were ready to relocate him into witness protection.

It’s somewhat suspicious McVeigh had zero statements to make before the execution, and left only a poem as his final statement. “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

That’s about as nebulous as one can get.

Rollie Rohm and Tom Crosslan.

On September 3, 2001, two cannabis activists would be assassinated by government snipers in Michigan. They planned a Waco-like siege so they could spread the real story of hemp legalization while exposing the brutal oppression they had been subjected to just for being activists for legalization. Their young son had already been taken away by the state, and the state was coming next for all their property and assets. Cornered in this way, they took up arms to make a last stand, but were killed quick before they knew what hit them, and long before any media could catch on to the real crime. Just as many bodies at Waco were mutilated, so was the body of Rollie Rohm, castrated while still alive, his assassins standing over him gloating while he bled out. It’s just something assassins like to do once in a while.

A few days later some planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York City and all mention of the two killings at Rainbow Farm disappeared like a snow devil in a winter storm, their misguided but brave attempt to recapture the legacy of Waco a failure.

 

Moretum & the hidden history of cannabis

Moretum, an early poem by Virgil

A poor farmer named Simylus awakes before dawn and rekindles the embers in his hearth.
Simylus grinds grain and wakes his African slave Scybale to fetch wood for the fire. He makes dough with the flour and kneads a loaf of bread. While he waits for it to bake, he mixes garlic, cheese, coriander seeds, vinegar, and a variety green leafy herbs in a mortar and pestle, and spreads the result on hot bread and consumes it before starting out to plough his field. The poem is most notable for coining the term “e pluribus unus,” a reference to moretum being ready to eat once the various colors and ingredients have merged into a single light-green paste.

 

Long before humans appeared on earth, tools had already been invented by earlier primates. We don’t know which came first, fire or the mortar and pestle, but it wasn’t until primates discovered both that most of the energy that had been required by the stomach and intestines to process plants could redirect into developing bigger brains. Our distant ancestors in Africa discovered early on that pounding plants, seeds and nuts with stones made both cooking and digestion easier.

The Ebers Papyrus, named for German Egyptologist Georg Ebers, contains the first written description of a mortar and pestle. It dates to 1550 BC, although it likely was copied from much earlier scrolls. Containing 700 medicinal remedies and incantations, the scroll is 20 meters long (approximately 110 pages). Ebers bought the manuscript from Edwin Smith in 1872, and three years later, Ebers published the first translation.

In the 16th Century BC, the Phoenicians were developing their alphabet, the first hymns of the Rig Veda were recorded in Sanskrit, and the Sumerian civilization was eclipsed by Babylon. Sumerians had invented beer, discovered opium (the happy plant), and learned how to make flour by pounding wheat berries. One of their favorite treats was pistachio encrusted dates. A mortar and pestle would have been used to pound the pistachios into powder before dipping the honey-soaked dates.

The Rig Veda describes the making of soma, which was considered the greatest medicine, the “king” of healing plants. There are numerous mentions of “pressing stones” used and the clacking sounds they made. Strangely, virtually no historian seems to realize “pressing stones” is Sanskrit for mortar and pestle.

Bhang.

In the 1920s, some historians began pointing out the obvious: soma was most likely cannabis. In fact, the descriptions of soma match the current recipes for modern bhang, which remains a popular drink in parts of India. Whole kolas, leaves and flowers, are blanched in boiling water and then pounded into a paste using a mortar and pestle. Typically, almonds, spices and hot milk are added, but the ancient recipes often included opium and ephedra.

In the late 1930s, Reefer Madness was launched by the just-created Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and a well-funded campaign to demonize cannabis swept across the world. At the same time, a campaign to misidentify soma as a mushroom was initiated by a vice president of America’s most powerful bank.

Check with Wikipedia today and you won’t find much of anything useful in the description of soma. The academic community refuses to accept the obvious and continues to obscure the real history of cannabis.

Someday this house of cards must fall.

Moretum.

Meanwhile, I encourage everyone to get a mortar and pestle. Pestos are easily made using any nut or seed with any green plant and any spices. Our modern pesto recipe originated in Northern Italy in the 1600s, but for millennia before that it was known as moretum.

 

Also made in mortars was Manna, the food that saved the Jews from starvation. Manna was just hemp seeds crushed into hempseed flour, which was baked into wafers. I have a separate blog on that subject if you seek further proof and clarification.

Poem attributed to the young Virgil and comprised of 124 hexameter lines and written in the Greek tradition (as in Callimachus’ Hecale and other poems involving meals with gods and people, aka Theoxeny).

Moretum

Already had the night completed ten
Of winter’s hours, and by his crowing had
The winged sentinel announced the day,
When Symilus the rustic husbandman
Of scanty farm, solicitous about
The coming day’s unpleasant emptiness,
Doth slowly raise the limbs extended on
His pallet low, and doth with anxious hand
Explore the stilly darkness, groping for
The hearth which, being burnt, at length he finds.
I’ th’ burnt-out log a little wood remained,
And ashes hid the glow of embers which
They covered o’er; with lowered face to these
The tilted lamp he places close, and with
A pin the wick in want of moisture out
Doth draw, the feeble flame he rouses up
With frequent puffs of breath. At length, although
With difficulty, having got a light,
He draws away, and shields his light from draughts
With partially encircling hand, and with
A key the doors he opens of the part
Shut off to store his grain, which he surveys.
On th’earth a scanty heap of corn was spread:
From this he for himself doth take as much
As did his measure need to fill it up,
Which ran to close on twice eight pounds in weight
He goes away from here and posts himself
Besides his quern,’ and on a little shelf
Which fixed to it for other uses did
The wall support, he puts his faithful light.
Then from his garment both his arms he frees;
Begirt was he with skin of hairy goat
And with the tail thereof he thoroughly
Doth brush the stones and hopper of the mill.
His hands he then doth summon to the work
And shares it out to each, to serving was
The left directed and the right to th’ toil.
This turns about in tireless circles and
The surface round in rapid motion puts,
And from the rapid thrusting of the stones
The pounded grain is running down. At times
The left relieves its wearied fellow hand,
And interchanges with it turn about.
Thereafter country ditties doth he sing
And solaces his toil with rustic speech,
And meanwhile calls on Scybale to rise.
His solitary housekeeper was she,
Her nationality was African,
And all her figure proves her native land.
Her hair was curly, thick her lips, and dark
Her colour, wide was she across the chest
With hanging breasts, her belly more compressed,
With slender legs and large and spreading foot,
And chaps in lengthy fissures numbed her heels.
He summons her and bids her lay upon
The hearth some logs wherewith to feed the fire,
And boil some chilly water on the flame.
As soon as toil of turning has fulfilled
Its normal end, he with his hand transfers
The copious meal from there into a sieve,
And shakes it. On the grid the refuse stays,
The real corn refined doth sink and by
The holes is filtered. Then immediately
He piles it on a board that’s smooth, and pours
Upon it tepid water, now he brought
Together flour and fluid intermixed,
With hardened hand he turns it o’er and o’er
And having worked the liquid in, the heap
He in the meantime strews with salt, and now
His kneaded work he lifts, and flattens it
With palms of hand to rounded cake, and it
With squares at equal distance pressed doth mark.
From there he takes it to the hearth (ere this
His Scybale had cleaned a fitting place),
And covers it with tiles and heaps the fire
Above. And while Vulcanus, Vesta too,
Perform their parts i’ th’ meantime, Symilus
Is not inactive in the vacant hour,
But other occupation finds himself;
And lest the corn alone may not be found
Acceptable to th’ palate he prepares
Some food which he may add to it. For him
No frame for smoking meat was hung above
The hearth, and backs and sides of bacon cured
With salt were lacking, but a cheese transfixed
By rope of broom through mid-circumference
Was hanging there, an ancient bundle, too,
Of dill together tied. So provident
Our hero makes himself some other wealth.
A garden to the cabin was attached,
Some scanty osiers with the slender rush
And reed perennial defended this;
A scanty space it was, but fertile in
The divers kinds of herbs, and nought to him
Was wanting that a poor man’s use requires;
Sometimes the well-to-do from him so poor
Requested many things. Nor was that work
A model of expense, but one of care:
If ever either rain or festal day
Detained him unemployed within his hut,
If toil of plough by any chance was stopped,
There always was that work of garden plot.
He knew the way to place the various plants,
And out of sight i’ th’ earth to set the seeds,
And how with fitting care to regulate
The neighbouring streams. And here was cabbage, here
Were beets, their foliage extending wide;
And fruitful sorrel, elecampane too
And mallows here were flourishing, and here
Was parsnip,’ leeks indebted to their head
For name, and here as well the poppy cool
And hurtful to the head, and lettuce too,
The pleasing rest at end of noble foods.
[And there the radish sweet doth thrust its points
Well into th’ earth] and there the heavy gourd
Has sunk to earth upon its belly wide.
But this was not the owner’s crop (for who
Than he more straightened is?). The people’s ’twas
And on the stated days a bundle did
He on his shoulder into th’ city bear,
When home he used to come with shoulder light
But pocket heavy, scarcely ever did
He with him bring the city markets’ meat.
The ruddy onion, and a bed of leek
-For cutting, hunger doth for him subdue-,
And cress which screws one’s face with acrid bite,
And endive, and the colewort which recalls
The lagging wish for sexual delights.
On something of the kind reflecting had
He then the garden entered, first when there
With fingers having lightly dug the earth
Away, he garlic roots with fibres thick,
And four of them doth pull; he after that
Desires the parsley’s graceful foliage,
And stiffness-causing rue,’ and, trembling on
Their slender thread, the coriander seeds,
And when he has collected these he comes
And sits him down beside the cheerful fire
And loudly for the mortar asks his wench.
Then singly each o’ th’ garlic heads be strips
From knotty body, and of outer coats
Deprives them, these rejected doth he throw
Away and strews at random on the ground.
The bulb preserved from th’ plant in water doth
He rinse, and throw it into th’ hollow stone.
On these he sprinkles grains of salt, and cheese
Is added, hard from taking up the salt.
Th’ aforesaid herbs he now doth introduce
And with his left hand ‘neath his hairy groin
Supports his garment;’ with his right he first
The reeking garlic with the pestle breaks,
Then everything he equally doth rub
I’ th’ mingled juice. His hand in circles move:
Till by degrees they one by one do lose
Their proper powers, and out of many comes
A single colour, not entirely green
Because the milky fragments this forbid,
Nor showing white as from the milk because
That colour’s altered by so many herbs.
The vapour keen doth oft assail the man’s
Uncovered nostrils, and with face and nose
Retracted doth he curse his early meal;
With back of hand his weeping eyes he oft
Doth wipe, and raging, heaps reviling on
The undeserving smoke. The work advanced:
No longer full of jottings as before,
But steadily the pestle circles smooth
Described. Some drops of olive oil he now
Instils, and pours upon its strength besides
A little of his scanty vinegar,
And mixes once again his handiwork,
And mixed withdraws it: then with fingers twain
Round all the mortar doth he go at last
And into one coherent ball doth bring
The diff’rent portions, that it may the name
And likeness of a finished salad fit.
And Scybale i’ th’ meantime busy too
He lifted out the bread; which, having wiped
His hands, he takes, and having now dispelled,
The fear of hunger, for the day secure,
With pair of leggings Symilus his legs
Encases, and with cap of skin on ‘s head
Beneath the thong-encircled yoke he puts
Th’ obedient bullocks, and upon the fields
He drives, and puts the ploughshare in the ground.

The Odio Incident

Her name is Silvia Odio and her story proved conclusively that Lee Harvey Oswald was a part of a larger conspiracy, testimony that should have blown the Warren Commission fairy tale to bits had not everyone on all sides ignored its implications.

Strange that none of the torch bearers seeking to dismantle the Warren Commission’s story put a spotlight on Odio. But then most citizen researchers were led like lemmings off a cliff by a former military intelligence officer named Mark Lane.

Decades later, however, British journalist Anthony Summers realized the immense implications of Odio’s testimony, tracked her down and re-interviewed her and her sister.

Like all military-style operations, despite impeccable planning, things typically go haywire the second the first wave hits the beach, and the assassination of JFK was certainly no different.

Oswald, for example, was never supposed to be taken alive, a huge blunder that made the clean-up extremely messy. The ultimate, of course, would have been to have arranged for Oswald to be shot dead while in the sniper’s nest with the Carcarno in his nitrate-soaked hands.

But Oswald had eaten lunch downstairs during the ambush, and gone straight to the lunch room to retrieve a coke out of a vending machine when the first policeman entered the building. Officer Roger Craig came in minutes later. He had witnessed a man flee the scene in a Rambler station wagon driven by a stocky Latino, probably David Morales, and would be the first to uncover the sniper’s nest.

After leaving the book depository, Oswald had been deposited at his temporarily rented room in Oak Cliff. Apparently, he came there to pick up a revolver. A Dallas police car stopped in front of the rooming house and honked its horn twice before moving on. In any assassination, the getaway is the most carefully planned part of the op, but it was obvious Oswald had no getaway plan.

Instead of fleeing downtown, where buses and trains were available, Oswald walked deeper into the suburbs, entering a movie theater, a perfect location for a clandestine meeting. Later, while in the Dallas jail, he reportedly attempted to make a phone call to a number associated with a former Naval Intelligence operative in North Carolina, but someone at the switchboard pulled the plug so that call never went through.

Originally, the assassination might have been planned to be blamed on Castro, and used as a pretense to invade Cuba. A lot of time and effort had gone into sheep-dipping Oswald as pro-Castro. But in the wacky wilderness of mirrors, Oswald was also sheep-dipped as a potential double agent, an anti-Castro fanatic who blamed the Bay of Pigs disaster on JFK’s refusal to send in jets to support the invasion. JFK did so only after being shown that the original sorties sent to destroy Cuba’s air force had failed miserably, despite the pilots’ conviction the raid had been successful. JFK was so disgusted when shown U-2 photos of the Cuban fleet mostly intact, he called off all further support.

The Bay of Pigs is a complex story. Allen Dulles, head of CIA, was fired because he screwed up the air cover and left Castro’s meager jet force intact. When the invaders lost the air war, it ended all hope of success. The invaders had been planning to construct their own runway near the beach for landing ammo and other supplies. But without command of the skies, all support had to retreat, leaving the troops defenseless on the beach.

It was a stupid plan anyway and never had much of a chance unless the invasion was the excuse to justify a rescue mission using the full might of USA forces. Like all Communist revolutions, Castro’s story is a bit strange. He was a rich kid funded and trained by the CIA but he abruptly decided to go commie, something that shocked many of his CIA mentors. His revolution was conducted over radio waves, with fake reports of revolutionary activity all over the island. Castro had puny military resources versus Baptista, but easily won the psy-war, helped by characters like E. Howard Hunt and Edward Lansdale,  both of whom were quite expert at psychological warfare. They pulled similar stunts leading up to the Bay of Pigs using Radio Swan, but had been unable to sway popular opinion. Castro had quickly purged his internal critics after taking power with mass arrests and executions.

JFK was furious at how inept the Dulles plan was, and refused to send in the calvary to the shock of his advisors. He did, however, buy back the survivors, which turned out to be a terrible idea since many ended up working on the executive action hit squad that killed Kennedy. It’s a tragedy worthy of Sophocles or Shakespeare.

In 1962, Odio’s father had been jailed, accused of plotting Castro’s murder. He had been one of the richest men in Cuba before the revolution and supported Castro until Castro “betrayed the cause.”  Sylvia led a luxurious and pampered existence up until her parents were jailed and stripped of all assets. The oldest of five children, she was forced to flee with her siblings, eventually landing in Dallas, destitute and living in a shelter with zero resources. Overwhelmed by her situation, she began having nervous breakdowns, disassociating to alleviate the unbearable anxiety. But soon, she recovered, landed a job and secured an apartment for her family. She was in the process of moving to an even bigger apartment when visited by three men, one month before JFK’s assassination.

Two of them were Cuban and claimed to be members of her father’s organization, the Junta Revolucionaria, a left-wing organization that was anti-imperialist but also anti-Castro. They claimed the white man with them, who they introduced as Leon Oswald, had volunteered to go to Cuba to kill Castro. They were seeking help translating and editing a fundraising pitch.

Having been warned by her father about strange men bearing tales of intrigue, Odio refused to permit them inside, never took the chain off the door, and told them she was not able to help them, so they left. The entire discussion was witnessed by her sister.

The next day, the tall leader of the group (who called himself Leopoldo), phoned to say: “Leon is a former Marine and an expert marksman. He says we Cubans don’t have guts because we should have killed Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs.”

A few weeks later, Odio saw Oswald on TV being shot by Ruby and instantly recognized him. She called the police and volunteered her story, and it became part of the public record.

Over the decades it’s been pretty well established that Leopoldo was the Intelligence Chief for Brigade 2506, the same group massacred at the Bay of Pigs, a man really named Bernardo De Torres. De Torres had been captured, jailed in Cuba and only recently released and returned to the States when he had his staged encounter with the Odio sisters.

De Torres later told his daughter he was in Florida the day of the assassination and had launched his own private investigation into the incident but had to abruptly halt it after discovering the truth. He showed up and volunteered as an investigator for Jim Garrison after Garrison launched his secret investigation. Yet every promising lead De Torres unveiled to Garrison led into a dead-end. De Torres’ primary aim seemed to have been casting suspicion on Castro as Kennedy’s real killer, a rabbit hole that periodically reemerges in the research community every decade or so. Garrison became convinced De Torres was secretly working with the CIA to disrupt his investigation.

After being dismissed from Garrison’s circle, De Torres went to work for super spook Mitch Werbell as an arms dealer in Latin America, and, according to some, became a major player in the narcotics trade, a feat also achieved by characters like Lucian Sarti and Barry Seal after JFK’s demise.

There’s an amazing photo of Frank Sturgis, Barry Seal, Felix Rodriguez, William Seymour, Porter Goss and others having a celebratory dinner in Mexico City. Only Sturgis took care to hide his face.

Gaeton Fonzi established De Torres was one at least 25 spooks operating in and around Dealey Plaza during the ambush. He was posing as a professional photographer. Apparently, De Torres kept those photos in a safe deposit box as his own personal life insurance policy.

Porter Goss rose to the top of American intelligence, first as head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and later as head of the CIA. In August of 2001, Goss visited Pakistan and met the head of the ISI, General Ahmad. A month later, he was having breakfast in Washington with Ahmad when they received news a plane had just crashed into one of the twin towers in New York.

Goss went on to oppose the creation of any independent 9/11 commission as he wanted the investigation confined to his committee. Goss’s investigation included information on Saudi Arabian and Pakistan involvement in the attack, but those 28 pages were classified by George W. Bush. Despite tremendous pressure to de-classify, those pages remain hidden from the American people.

Nevertheless, it soon became public knowledge General Ahmad had ordered Saheed Sheikh to send a $100,000 money wire to Mohamed Atta in Florida one month before the attacks.

What happened to High Times?

Once upon a time there lived a young dragon who loved to protect the weak and he became so popular, people built a temple in his honor to celebrate peace culture, and invited him to live inside. Donations flowed in from all over the empire because most people desire peace on earth, especially the ones who have tasted war. The nice dragon moved into the temple and kept guard on the treasure inside.

Another dragon lived nearby and was devoted to conflict and war. He was not popular. He was greedy. He liked to play people by pretending to be a nice dragon. But he was not nice and had blood on his fangs. But when it was useful, he pretended to support peace, which is how he infiltrated the temple and poisoned the peace dragon. The treasure was soon sold to buy a waterfront house in the Yale enclave in the Hamptons, a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, a horse farm in Ireland, and an apartment on Billionaires Row in Manhattan overlooking Central Park. The temple transformed into a nest of thieves.

There’s also a labyrinth, race horses with 5-pound ticks, and another savage murder in this story, and it’s not a fairy tale but the real story of what happened to High Times, and how the company was stolen by the secret leader of the terrorist Weather Underground and then run into the ground.

Since I filmed most everything I did while at High Times, and since I have the rights to exploit that footage, I’ve made a feature about a meeting that transpired after the art director got into a pissing war with the son of Tom Forcade’s sister.

At the time, the magazine was the envy of the industry, with the highest sell-through rate and highest paid advertising of any magazine in its class. We had 100,000 paid readers and 55 pages of paid advertising. (When I’d arrived, the magazine had under 20,000 readers.) The advertising, by the way, was the sleaziest stuff possible: Fake pill ads and then fake bud ads. But those rip-off ads brought in a half million a year so the bad dragon loved them.

The magazine was gutted by the bad dragon, but finding out what really happened was a voyage of discovery through the labyrinth.

Fortunately, I filmed the bad dragon in action, including a visit from his co-conspirator, a former military intelligence operative who came to the office to deliver a two-day magic show intended to persuade the impoverished and naive staff that blue skies were ahead.

Check out my 20-part series “The Strategic Meeting.” It plays just like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, but it’s all hilariously true.

Just keep in mind, bad dragons have no empathy and never display any real feelings, just backhanded compliments amid layers of sarcasm. If you look close you might catch the sneers.

Guide to Some Famous Fake Whistleblowers

When intel wants to lead independent researchers into a rabbit hole, they start by manufacturing a lightning rod. A fake whistleblower. Every major crime committed by the CIA is dominated by a fake whistleblower. Mark Lane is a great example.

The Apocalyptic Mike Ruppert

The fake whistleblower will get all the headlines. The fake whistleblower will be attacked through staged confrontations. These flame wars only serve to buttress the fake whistleblower’s position at the top of conspiracy mountain. I am reminded greatly of the feud between Mike Ruppert and Chip Berlet.

Ruppert exposed the war games on 9/11 that shielded the hijackings with fake radar blips blanketing the East Coast and then led his followers into Peak Oil, which was a scheme to double oil prices by falsely claiming we were about to run out. He also dug a 9/11 rabbit hole called “Lt. Vreeland.”

Berlet led the primary attack on 9/11 conspiracy theory, while the “truth” movement was deeply embedded with spooks of all stripes from day one. This should be considered evidence of an inside job.

Chip Berlet invented the word “conspiracism” and promoted the idea that all people who thought 9/11 might have been an inside job belonged in insane asylums. Berlet was briefly made Washington DC correspondent for High Times due to his connections to Michael Kennedy. Both were tutored in intel ops by Leonard Boudin, whose uncle had founded the American Communist Party with John Reed. Of course Louis and Reed were both spooks, as was Leonard as well as anyone connected to his “Committee on Public Safety.” In this case,  protecting “public safety” involved setting off hundreds of bombs and terrorizing America with leftwing violence for over a decade. Shades of 1984 newspeak.

Right after 9/11 the internet was flooded with conspiracy theory. Mostly crackpot info, but the more intellectual element pointed towards the Mossad. The leader of this meme called himself “Sean McBride” and he posted out of the Boston area. He never resorted to the racist language of his acolytes. I spent weeks debating McBride right after the event on a discussion board while getting pounded by haters.

One day, I posted fragments from Chip Berlet and McBride, revealing they were most likely the same person. Berlet was the chief debunker in the media of any Israeli connection to 9/11, a strong defender of Israel and considered an expert on Mossad operations. Berlet was a close associate of both Michael Kennedy and A.J. Weberman. Strangely, McBride went silent for hours. Typically, he was all over my posts. And when he did come back he explained he’d been busy “playing tennis.” Before long, Berlet lost his cushy paycheck from the CIA-connected Ford Foundation. I had to wonder if the two events might have been connected.

Walter Bowart

Walter Bowart was the first fake whistleblower on MK/Ultra. I have a letter or two from him in the archives. Bowart had a connection with Stephenson, indicating an MI6 component to exposing mind control.

The CIA was all over the LSD explosion and were behind much of the manufacture, distribution and profiteering. Their key operative was Ron Stark. Good luck finding anything real about him. The CIA’s alternative counterculture included Kerry Thornley, who put a smokescreen over the Boners involvement in the JFK hit. Thornley was assisted by Robert Anton Wilson in that regard.

Jan Irvin (right) turned Joe Rogan (left) onto DMT. I pay little attention to Rogan’s conspiracy-laden podcasts because he has a history of being played by intel stooges like Irvin.

I did podcast interviews with Jan Irvin and Ed Opperman some time ago after getting dumped by High Times. They sought me out and I was unaware of their Tin Foil Hattery. Irvin was involved in shifting Jack Herer away from cannabis and into amanita muscaria, a well-worn trail blazed initially by Gordon Wasson, a VP at JP Morgan. Irvin was greatly assisted in this mission by a pedophile named James Arthur (aka James Dukovic), who committed suicide after his crimes were exposed. Arthur abused some of Herer’s kids. Since Irvin has spent time in mental institutions, it’s possible he got programmed in the process. He’s a raving lunatic on the order of Mark Passio, and obviously those two support each other. In a nutshell, Irvin promotes the idea an Aleister Crowley sex magic cult run by Jews secretly runs the world. You have to pay Irvin to listen to my interview, but I undoubtedly went after McGowan and his theory that the entire counterculture was a CIA op from day one. McGowan was the one who invented the crisis actors rabbit hole.

Ed Opperman

Along these same lines, you’ll find the phony baloney Opperman Report. I think my interview with Ed got scrubbed. I did my best to call out the real intel operators infesting the counterculture movement. They involve lawyers, like Mark Lane, all members of the Communist-created National Lawyers Guild. On the super dark side of this group stood Michael Kennedy whose radical activities begin while stationed at Ft. Knox, KY, before he was relocated to Berkeley after getting mustered out. He was a secret leader of the terrorist Weather Underground.

I only saw Kennedy scared twice. The first was after he discovered New York magazine was investigating him for a potential cover story. I didn’t know it at the time, but Kennedy was connected to the murder of a San Francisco police officer. It was the first of numerous bombs set off by his unit, although they probably weren’t expecting a fatality, which is why they never took credit. During the planning, Kennedy’s wife was meeting with Bernadine Dohrn, as they had the same gynecologist and appointments were timed to coincide. This is spook ops 101.

Lance Taylor (center) changed his name to Afrika Bambaataa and began grooming kids entering Middle School.

Kennedy was terrified this might come out. His trajectory had moved swiftly from jousting with the government in numerous high-profile cases, to living in the Boner enclave in Wainscott and rubbing elbows with billionaires.

Funny thing about Opperman. He hung out with Yippies and Zippies in the early seventies and also knew Lance Taylor, who would later morph into Afrika Bambaataa. Unfortunately, Bambaataa was a pedophile who created a bizarre cult stuffed with Tin Foil Hattery. It’s dangerous to speak out about him because at least one insider who tried to expose the real story ended up getting murdered. Bam was able to get the center of gravity on hip hop for a brief time thanks to Planet Rock, his homage to Kraftwerk. Sadly, I played a crucial role in building up Bam’s reputation.

Towards the end of my Opperman interview, after I realized Ed was a McGowan fan and also supported Alex Jones’ outrageous lies that nobody died at Sandy Hook School….it was all crisis actors…. I cornered and roasted Ed over that issue. I can’t find that interview and it may be behind a paywall or scrubbed. I did make my own copy though. The list of people appearing on the Opperman Report gives a solid map to the Tin Foil Hat Patrol.

This may become my greatest lasting legacy. Far into the future, researchers may untangle intel’s massive campaign to manufacture lightning rods and unmask the network of intel sock puppets supporting ops like Alex Jones.

CODA:

Kennedy had zero experience with divorce litigation and Trump had a bulletproof Roy Cohn pre-nup. Kennedy began by telling Ivana to claim Donald had raped her against her will during their marriage. That was just the first of a long line of absurdities that back-fired. After it was over many months later, Ivana called Kennedy’s office as she had some questions about the bill he’d submitted.

Ivana and Kennedy’s wife seemed to go from best friends to no longer friends, and a rumor spread Ivana was happy with the final settlement, conveniently hidden behind a non-disclosure agreement.

My analysis in a nutshell is a coalition of East Coast old money and European royalty are working on keeping the status quo, which is why so much blather in our media on the Crown and the Pope as those magic shows require constant promotion to keep their hoodwinks going. All royals of the world are watching closely and most of them are related, so status quo is all in the family.

In order to manage the opposition, they must run all reform movements in secret. When you have a centuries old power structure, the secret police come with the territory, and the most effective leader was Adam Weishaupt, an orphan raised by Jesuits. But in my time, I may have clashed with his second coming in Kennedy, also raised by Jesuits from age 4.

Weishaupt ran the fake opposition against the Vatican during the Enlightenment Era, but upon his death, the church was called in, and he was granted full absolution.

How similar Kennedy received a full military funeral with army brass in attendance after running the terrorist Weather Underground and jousting with the CIA and Pentagon in numerous litigations. In other words, the fake opposition against the government. I submit this is evidence Kennedy began his career as a Vietnam war dissident while working secretly for G2.

Origins of Psychedelic Music

Cage staged a “happening” at the Stock Pavilion.

Summer 1966. A Beat symposium is held at the University of Illinois where John Cage is artist in residence.

A local Countess who had a long-running affair with John Roselli is the most powerful person in town not connected to the University. Among other holdings, she owns the local newspaper and TV station, and frequently jet-sets off to Europe, LA, and Palm Beach, when not holding court at the Champaign Country Club.

After the Italian Count she lifted out of poverty (to buy her title through marriage) was caught poking his secretary, she fired him. He fled back to Italy to plot his divorce settlement, but ended up with a bullet in the brain courtesy of Handsome Johnny.

Bill Harvey had been the first assassin she’d approached and declined. Roselli did not, however, and did it for free because the Countess had recently bank-rolled his return from Federal prison. Her empire was supervised by a local lawyer who was also the only known conduit to the Chicago mob.

Local teen Joe Sanderson was backpacking around the world. He would eventually become one of two Americans killed fighting for the Salvadorian revolution. David Foster Wallace had just entered classes at Yankee Ridge elementary, in the newly built suburb for the University of Illinois faculty. He would become one of the most celebrated novelists of his generation.

Spokesperson for the newly forged John Birch society, whose odd name was a palindrome, could be seen slinking around campus in trench coat and fedora, from one conspiratorial meeting to the next. He had recently testified before the Warren Commission. His house on West Ohio Street radiated with spooky vibrations, and children were cautioned to keep clear lest they be subjected to a sermon on the dangers of globalization.

A British noble, Sir Thomas  Willes Chitty 3rd, had recently arrived in town, intent on taking acid and having sex with the hottest super hottie he could find, on or off campus.

Allen Ginsberg informs the leather-coated, long-haired teens attending the Beat conference that his first psychedelic experience was on glue and this leads to a rush to Lincoln Square to buy glue and then to the barn at the Shirley Farm where they hold their secret beer and wine-fueled ceremonies, only this time with glue, and out pops Only Me, an amazing song, written by 15-year-old Mark Warwick, the first psychedelic anthem I ever heard, a song that urged everyone to “let their minds be free.”

The word “psychedelic” was coined in the mid-fifties in a letter from Humphry Osmond to Aldous Huxley. Osmond gave mescaline to Huxley in LA and Huxley soon wrote The Doors of Perception. Both men began looking for a word to describe their experiences with altered states. The book’s title came from England’s greatest visionary poet.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit.” 

“To make this mundane world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.”

But Osmond chose “psyche” (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show). 

“To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” 

Huxley on his first mescaline trip courtesy of British Intelligence.

Osmond announced the new word at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957. That same year, R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at JP Morgan, published a photo essay in Life magazine detailing a trip to Mexico to imbibe mushrooms with a Mazatec shaman.

Wasson would go on to publish a ridiculous book claiming Soma of the Rig Veda was a mushroom. This rabbit hole concealed the real identity of Soma, which was cannabis mixed with milk and spices, something known as bhang in India. At the time, Wasson was in close contact with intelligence agent Dr. Andrija Puharich who would soon be arranging seances with the rich and famous. Puharich had been a frequent visitor to Fort Detrick, where the CIA’s MK/Ultra project had originated. He would later become the biggest booster of fake Israeli psychic Uri Geller.

For those teens seeking a mind-altering experience in the early 1960s, Huxley’s book was often the first step. The rock band The Doors took their name from the book. Jim Morrison’s talents were staggering and their psychedelic jams were among the best of the era for evoking a mystical experience. All fueled by the band’s extensive tripping together. When I think of Morrison in the late sixties, I also think of Jean Michel Basquiat in the late eighties. They both died young, but left a massive body of work.

But in 1964, Timothy Leary had captured the center of gravity by publishing The Psychedelic Experience. Sadly the book was a complete mess of no use to anyone and inscrutable to the average teen as Finnegan’s Wake. Really it was just a money grab. Leary lifted ancient material from Tibet, so there wasn’t much original writing to do. The book led people into a rabbit hole and did zero to enhance enlightenment.

Leary’s book was nothing like Huxley’s poetic account of the spiritual effects of mescaline or Osmond’s descriptions of Native American peyote ceremonies, or Wasson’s description of the shamanistic use of magic mushrooms.

Instead Leary guided the youth (including the Beatles) to look east for enlightenment. It’s the same basic hoodwink laid down in The Razor’s Edge by British secret agent Somerset Maugham, who, like Osmond, worked for MI6. One thing about the early history of psychedelic studies is that most of the major players turned out to be secretly working for MI6, the CIA, or both.

The cliche of the bearded yogi living in a cave in the mountains who meditates until he reaches some satori moment and is transported to a permanent state of bliss is total jive. The religions of east and west are equally corrupt, run by oligarchies, and exist mostly to make money and ensnare acolytes. The Buddhists are perhaps the least corrupted (although there are good and bad in all cultures), but all talk of eternal life is complete bunk. Nothing lasts forever. There is no soul, no nirvana. But if you want to get popular fast, tell the people what they want to hear. If you are looking for enlightenment, take Zoroaster’s advice and just be as kind and empathetic in thought, word and deed as you possibly can. But also realize no state of bliss can last forever, and there is no bliss without an opposite: so everyone is vulnerable to spurts of paranoia, rage and jealousy and other states of mind from the dark side.

Westerners are used to looking east for enlightenment because eastern traditions are older and thought to be wiser. The Zoroastrians invented the word “magic,” and were among the first to learn the secrets of higher math, something learned through a study of harmony. They were also the most advanced astronomers and chemists of their time.

During the enlightenment era, secret societies based on eastern mysticism were all the rage and many fraudulent books were conceived purporting to reveal the true secrets of the universe. All these efforts were hoodwinks and money grabs.

Just as the emergence of psychedelics was carefully stage-managed by intelligence agencies, so was the evolution of these occult societies. Aleister Crowley was one of the first to declare himself an advanced yogi with magic powers out of The Razor’s Edge. In fact, it was Maugham who made Crowley famous through a novel titled The Magician. They were both secret agents plying dialectical games to advance secret agendas.

Groupies try to get close to the Beatles in LA.

Meanwhile, after Harrison laid down a raga in “She, Said” garage rockers across America began tinkering with eastern scales.

The 13th Floor Elevators were the first to use the word “psychedelic” in an album title in 1966 and had a minor hit with their first single, but never really fully penetrated outside Texas until Lenny Kaye released Nuggets. The Texas bands of the time had a distinctive sound with a lot of fast picking on the fat strings. The cowboy guitarist had been an icon for generations. Texas rock and surf rock shared similarities, but there were no eastern scales in Texas at the time. The first song to reference LSD was released by in 1960 by surf rockers, The Gamblers.

Mark Warwick’s song Only Me is a better example of psychedelic rock than Your Gonna Miss Me. Both songs were written in 1966.

Other songs in this vein also released in 1966 would include East West by Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a jam devised by Mike Bloomfield after his first gig in San Francisco, where he could have bumped into a slew of bands working on defining an emerging genre; and, of course Section 43 by Country Joe and the Fish, ranks high on the list of early psychedelia. The appearance of cheap, portable organs from England and Italy played a major role in crafting a psychedelic ambience, and most of the original psychedelic bands made use of either the Vox or the less expensive Farfisa.

In November of 1966, Bronx-based band Blues Magoos released the album Psychedelic Lollypop, which included the hit song We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet, which rose to #5 on the charts, far higher than anything by the 13th Floor Elevators. Ralph Scala on Vox and lead vocals.

One of the first novels to contain a description of having sex on LSD, it was written by a visiting Baron from England and set entirely in Champaign-Urbana, IL. The longhaired, leather-jacketed teens who pioneered the local garage rock scene make a brief appearance guarding the beer stash in the fridge at a student-faculty party.

The following year, Strawberry Alarm Clock and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band would form in LA, and H.P. Lovecraft in Chicago, while the Finchley Boys (Warwick’s band) would travel to San Francisco and become adopted by the Cockettes as “the next big thing,” only soon to break apart.

But it was the Cockettes themselves who became the next big thing as they launched glitter rock in a trip to New York City in 1971. Had the Finchleys hung around and gone on that voyage, they might have been as big as the New York Dolls. Glitter would eventually usurp psychedelia as the next big thing, and by the time punk rock appeared, the mystical excesses of acid rock were soundly rejected in favor of a return to more primitive garage rock.

After Peter Fonda gave Lennon and Harrison some Sandoz in LA in 1965, out popped She Said, She Said.

Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds were also there tripping. McCartney did not imbibe and left the later session when they were recording the song in a huff, refusing to contribute. In the week that followed their first trip, Lennon and Harrison could not relate to the other two because acid had changed them so profoundly. Although McCartney was the last to drop acid, he was the first to inform the public, which annoyed Lennon and Harrison.

Guy Maynard was the leader of the Seeds of Doubt, the principle rival to the Finchley Boys. In 2010, he wrote one of the best descriptions of an LSD trip in a book set in 1969 in Boston with flashbacks to 1966 in Champaign-Urbana.

She Said, She Said is an amazing tune that shifts from 4/4 to 3/4 while deploying a sitar scale. The seeds of acid rock were planted in Rubber Soul with a brief sitar solo, used only for its distinctive tone.  It was David Crosby who showed Harrison how to play raga scales on an acoustic guitar. He also suggested Harrison check out a dude named Ravi Shankar.

They kicked Fonda out of the party for talking incessantly about his gunshot wound in the stomach and how he was momentarily dead on the operating table from blood loss. Lennon was horrified and when Fonda showed the bullet wound, he said, “You make me feel like I’ve never been born.” Fonda’s talk of death while Lennon was tripping is reminiscent of Leary’s use of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a tripping manual, something that undoubtedly led to some seriously bad trips. Pushing that sort of dogma on western teens was the equivalent of distributing The Book of Revelation to teens in India as a true road to enlightenment.

Compare the intro to Eight Miles High to the opening moments of Coltrane’s Africa/Brass album, released in 1961. Some critics believe The Byrds wrote the first real psychedelic song. It counterpoints some Texas-style fast picking with an open D played on a 12-string. That chiming D would soon appear over and over in songs like Hey, Joe by the Leaves and Going All the Way by the Squires. Many attributed the sound to Bob Dylan, but Dylan claims it was all the Byrds covering his songs, and he had nothing to do with spreading the chiming D chord.

Southern California is where LSD landed because the film business has long had deep connections to military intelligence. Fonda starred in the first LSD film, The Trip, but there were others in Hollywood getting a supply of LSD-25 from Sandoz chemists who secretly worked under CIA supervision. The real acid guru in California was John Griggs, founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and he got the acid by stealing it from the fridge of an LA film producer. Griggs would soon turn up dead and his group swiftly usurped by intel operative Ron Stark.

If tyranny is to prevail, first, kill the peacemakers

KGB and CIA counterintelligence styles were vastly different because America is an open society while Soviet is closed.

KGB had an immense pool of people to pull from. They would seek out the right personality types for covert ops. Super hottie and bisexual candidates of both sexes that could kill on command without raising their blood pressure were the most highly prized recruits.

CIA agents were defectors or White Russians. It was much harder for them to pass as authentic. They relied mostly on hypnosis. Agents would be conditioned to resist breaking cover. 

KGB expected a long, protracted struggle and embedded hundreds of sleeper agents who were supposed to become Americans, raise children, even attend churches, and then maybe 20 years down the road, might get activated for a mission. CIA didn’t have that sort of patience.

Tai Chi was central to KGB philosophy, which meant directing energy not engaging it head-on. The first major maneuver was into the Civil Rights movement. And also recruiting lawyers, who were deemed essential to the cause.

The Communist lawyers, most of whom could have been true-believers, created the National Lawyers Guild, which positioned itself as the Knights in Shining Armor for the fight for equal rights in America. A large number of double agents were placed into the NLG, and that list would include Mark Lane, Michael Kennedy, Bill Kunstler, Bernadine Dohrn. In fact, these are the most famous members of the group.

Bernadine Dohn. CIA super hottie

In fact, Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Dohrn were the CIA’s most highly prized super hotties. Rumors swirled around Fonda’s sexuality for decades. Dohrn, on the other hand, forced bisexuality on all her cadres during her crackpot “Smash Monogamy!” movement.

Fred Hampton was trying to turn the Panthers non-violent while Kennedy and Dohrn were supplying them with assault rifles and C4 and telling them to “kill cops.”

When Fred began denouncing the Weather Underground as lunatics, Chicago police connected with the CIA murdered him, and Dohrn arrived first on the scene to lead press and use his murder as her fulcrum to fame. You can’t imagine a more dishonorable act than trying to exploit Hampton’s death to provoke violence.

It’s the same thing as what happened when Ghetto Brother Black Benji was murdered on the streets of the Bronx. The Ghetto Brothers wanted a war with the gang that killed him, and came to promise blood revenge to Benji’s mother, who said, “My son was all about peace.” Instead of a gang war, the Ghetto Brothers organized the Hoe Ave. Peace Conference that ended gang violence and allowed for the rise of Hip Hop. Hampton had done the same thing in Chicago, ending the war between the Latin Kings, Blackstone Rangers, Gaylords and Vice Lords.

Watch The Americans series about KGB sleepers on Amazon and then imagine its Dorhn and Ayers posing as sane, normal people by day while plotting cop killings at night. The woman on the left plays the Michael Kennedy role (protector of the agents in the field).

They were in direct communication with Soviet, Cuban, and Chinese agents, all of whom advised them not to kill cops, or even use bombs. Of course, they didn’t follow that advice and kept up their terror campaign until it had zero traction left, so they came out of the cold and got university jobs with pensions. KGB sleepers don’t get that treatment, much less cop killers with three dead bodies to explain.

The author of the series says the CIA inadvertently gave him the idea for a series about spies, explaining, “While I was taking the polygraph exam to get in, they asked the question, ‘Are you joining the CIA in order to gain experience about the intelligence community so that you can write about it later’—which had never occurred to me. I was totally joining the CIA because I wanted to be a spy. The job at CIA, which he later described as a mistake, helped him develop several storylines in the series, basing some plot lines on real-life stories, and integrating tactics and methods he learned in his training, such as dead drops and communication protocols.

Blame it on Bones

Skull and Bones has developed a reputation with some as having a membership that is heavily tilted towards the “Power Elite.” Regarding qualifications for membership, Lanny Davis, writing in the 1968 Yale yearbook, wrote: If the society had a good year, this is what the “ideal” group will consist of:

“A football captain; chairman of the Yale Daily News; a conspicuous radical; a Whiffenpoof (Yale choir); a swimming captain; a notorious drunk with a 94 average; a film-maker; a political columnist; a religious group leader; a chairman of the Lit; a foreigner; a ladies’ man with two motorcycles; an ex-service man; a black, and, if there are enough to go around; a guy nobody else in the group had heard of, ever …”

For much of its history Skull and Bones membership was almost exclusively limited to white Protestant males. Catholics had some success attaining memberships; Jews less so.

Sports was the means by which excluded groups eventually entered Skull and Bones, through its practice of tapping standout athletes. Some star football players were the first Jew (Al Hessberg, class of 1938), and African-American (Levi Jackson, class of 1950, who turned down the invitation).

Yale became coeducational in 1969, yet Skull & Bones remained all-male until 1992. An attempt to tap women for membership by the Bones class of 1971 was opposed by Bones alumni, who dubbed them the “bad club.”

“The issue,”as it came to be called by Bonesmen, was debated for decades. The class of 1991 tapped seven female members for membership in the next year’s class, so alumni changed the locks on the Tomb, and the Boners had to meet at the building of Manuscript Society.

A mail-in vote by members decided 368-320 to permit going co-ed, but a group of alumni led by William F. Buckley obtained a temporary restraining order to block the move. Other alumni, such as John Kerry and R. Inslee Clark, Jr., spoke out in favor of admitting women, and the dispute ended up on The New York Times editorial page. A second vote of alumni in October 1991 agreed to accept the Class of 1992, and the lawsuit was dropped.

One member of the 1991 class wrote to alumni, “Being a part of Bones is often an embarrassment, a source of ridicule and occasionally a good way to lose a friend … Very rarely is the Bones still seen as an honor, and never is it seen to represent the mainstream of Yale.”

When fomenting counterintelligence operations, the initial plans do not stop with the essential deed but stretch far into the future. Influencers and rabbit holes must be created. The clash between influencers will be orchestrated. That is done to divide people into one of two groups, both secretly controlled by counterintelligence. The legends created become “fact” over a few decades, while the real whistleblowers are de-toothed and disappeared.

As the first person to publish a national magazine article on how and why the CIA killed JFK, I became an influencer who needed to be de-toothed and disappeared, which is exactly what happened. Many years ago, a writer from Vice in Brooklyn took me to lunch at Cafe Luxembourg. The editor-in-chief was following my research on JFK and Lincoln assassinations and wanted to do a major expose on my research. Two days later, I was informed the story was off, and that editor had been fired.

When I wrote my first article, I was aware of Bones and their role in the event. Specifically, I knew Bonesman Prescott Bush had misdirected a lot of journalists, as well as at least one film crew. He played a major role in controlling the story from behind the curtain.

My article centered on James Jesus Angleton as primary conspirator, although I assumed he was working with the Dulles and Rockefeller brothers.

I don’t know where I picked it up, but supposedly, Angleton did not pledge to Bones. He would have been class of 1940. But when The Good Shepherd came out about his career, the film made it clear he was a Boner. Now there is no evidence of which society he tapped to, if any. If you have any, please put a link to the evidence, or remain silent.

Angelton was really a Brit at heart, raised in England’s posh schools. He was half Mexican and raised a devout Catholic.

Bones class of 1940 included McGeorge Bundy, who was JFK’s National Security Advisor. He played a key role in getting us into the Vietnam War, something JFK wanted to prevent. His advice to JFK was erratic during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Andrew Orrick was also Bones 1940. He went to Hasting College of Law in San Francisco after graduating, the alma mater of Michael John Kennedy. After running Nixon’s campaign for governor of California, Orrick became administer of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Orrick may have been tapped because he hit the longest home run in Yale baseball history, a record that likely no longer stands.

Towson Hoopes, class of 1944, Under Secretary of the Air Force.

Barry Zorthian, class of 1941, was US press officer in Saigon for 4.5 years, all during the early stages of the war.

John Chafee, class of 1947, Secretary of the Navy.

Charles Whitehouse, class of 1947, ambassador to Laos and Thailand and secret CIA agent.

George Bush was class of 1948. He was running the supply depots used for terror ops inside Cuba. Also a secret CIA agent.

William Sloane Coffin, class of 1949, clergyman and leading anti-war, anti-nuclear activist. Also a secret CIA agent.

John Kerry, founder of Vietnam Vets Against the War, went on to lead the coverup of the Iran-Contra-Cocaine scandal, in which Republicans were able to remove Jimmy Carter, who was pushing renewable energy and world peace. Obviously a secret intelligence operative.

This is just a tiny sampling of the power of Bones, and you can’t ignore the fact they were put in strategic positions on both sides of the war. The possible connection between Angleton, Orrick and Communist lawyer Kennedy (who ran the terrorist Weather Underground network before stealing High Times from the employees and running it into the ground while siphoning profits into his bank account) needs to be examined. It might explain why Kennedy began working to get rid of me right after I published that article about the CIA and Bones killing JFK.