See the construction-paper hearts? That means love.

I guess that we live in an interesting time: people are shaking off the idealistic dreams of their grandparents (maybe even great-grandparents) and looking at what’s left in the gray light of dawn.

The problem with any time of dogmatic belief– and that is what I believe the last 80 or so years have been– is that it ends in a sort of flight from reality, as the notions that people have come to live by are turned on their heads. The flight continues until it’s just too painful.

“Painful flight” are the two words that sprung to my mind as I read Marjorie Kehe’s Christian Science Monitor review of Jennet Conant’s A Covert Affair:

It’s [A Covert Affair is] also a useful reminder that, in the America that finally emerged from the Cold War, the Childs are still beloved icons, while Joseph McCarthy endures only as a symbol of shame.

I’m not reviewing Jennet’s book today. I’m reviewing two others: Julia Child’s My Life in France, and The Haunted Wood, by Weinstein et alia. The first is a glowing, self-congratulatory, PR piece written by someone with a lot to hide; the second provides a glimpse into what Julia was hiding.

There have been a lot of ‘revelatory’ books over the past couple of decades. I’m thinking of books like The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Blacklisted by History and, to a certain extent, The Haunted Wood. I’m not saying that any of their authors are heroes, just that these books deal with information that is painful for America’s elite. And naturally, some intellectuals have flown from the consequences of this information, since it challenges their cherished beliefs about themselves and the people they admire.

I knew someone who worked for one of the preeminent news channels in New York City. When Blacklisted by History came out, his station chief– who was Jamaican, not American– refused to cover it because, well, McCarthy was the bad guy and that’s that.

With all that’s happened over the past 40 years, Mr. Jamaica’s attitude is no longer tenable.  Governments have come and gone; and more contenders are vying for a slice from a shrinking pie. That means somebody’s going away disgruntled and sacred cows will fall.

Which brings me to the Childs.

It’s time to face the fact that the Childs worked for an illegal organization, the OSS. Why do I say illegal? Because both Churchill and Roosevelt overstepped their power and went behind the back of their respective governments when they collaborated secretly with Bill Stephenson (a businessman/British spy) and J. Edgar Hoover to form their personal espionage apparatus.

For all the murkiness surrounding espionage, no one has challenged that Stephenson was a British agent and the FDR relied on his advice when he put Donovan, Stephenson’s buddy, at the head of the OSS. Let me rephrase that: FDR relied on a British spy to set up the clearing house for US intelligence. In his biography, Stephenson claims he even had special instructions regarding his spy-work in the USA: he was to drum up the resources that Churchill needed for war.

I’d hate to deal with the counter-espionage fallout from those OSS hires. Maybe that’s why Angleton went crazy.

The Childs worked for the OSS– Julia worked directly for Donovan– in full knowledge that what they were doing was to be kept secret from the American public to prevent interference from Congress. According to Stephenson, the OSS’s war-time doings were kept secret until the early 60s, when Kim Philby’s defection threatened to blow the whole story wide open. Why still hide 20 years after this ‘benevolent’ organization was disbanded? Because the OSS, far from being humanitarian-good-guys, had undermined the balance of powers and rule of law to implement Churchill and FDR’s private goals. That’s treachery.

It gets uglier, because Stephenson’s boys were tasked with digging dirt on Americans who opposed British interests. This encompassed making up rumors and fabricating evidence of spy plots. (Sorta like McCarthy.)

The Haunted Wood has added a new dimension to the OSS story, gleaned from Soviet information sources. From its very beginning, the OSS had a close working relationship with the NKGB, which was the USSR’s foreign intelligence service. Julia’s boss, William Donovan, was the key player organizing this partnership; though it appears that OSS’ers gave the NKGB more information than they got in return. The NKGB side had contempt for the amateurishness of the OSS. As you might expect, the collaboration allowed the NKGB to ‘penetrate’ Donovan’s organization. (Read about it in Chapter 11.)

The NKGB/OSS partnership was kept secret from the American public too, on the advice of J. Edgar Hoover, because he knew that making it official would invite interference from Congress. That pesky rule of law again.

So instead, the NKGB/OSS  partnership was kept informal– and personal:

That month, the USSR’s Ambassador to the United States, Konstantin Umansky, informed the NKVD of a recent private conversation with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. He quoted Morgenthau, an FDR confidant, as asking “not on behalf of the American government but on my personal behalf to give me and Roosevelt the heads of German agents in the US… (1941)

The OSS: secretly commandeering government resources for personal vendettas. That’s what despotism looks like, and didn’t we get rid of Mussolini, Hitler, etc. because they were despots? The answer-on-the-street is usually affirmative. So why keep Stalin? We had capable generals ready and willing to march on Moscow.  Weinstein’s book sheds some light on the thorny reasons behind that ugly history.

Did Paul Cushing Child’s illegal work stop once the OSS was disbanded? It seems not. According to Julia, in 1954 Paul was an important US propaganda operative:

His title was exhibits officer for all of Germany, which meant he was America’s top visual-program man for the entire country. His job was to inform the German people about the U.S.A., and once again he was organizing exhibits, tours, and cross-cultural exchanges. Because of the geopolitical/propaganda importance of Germany, which was right smack up against the Iron Curtain, his department had a budget of ten million dollars a year, more than the combined budgets for all of the USIA’s other information programs around the world.

Paul worked with the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to bring its exhibits to the German public. All this at exactly the time the CIA was (in secret from Congress) working with MOMA to promote a non-Communist left agenda in Europe.

And what about Paul? Was he promoting the same agenda? According to Julia, at least one French politician thought so:

Counsul General Heywood Hill– whom Abe Manell called ‘Hill the Pill’– took Paul to meet the local préfet, Monsieur Paira. Wreathed in a cloud of smoke behind a rococo desk outfitted with three important looking telephones, Paira, a jowly Corsican, opened the meeting by attacking the USIS for attacking the Communists instead of informing French people about the U.S.A.

(The USIA was formerly called the USIS.)

The chances are good that Paul followed his old OSS contacts– and their money– into the non-Communist left foray that Frances Stonor Saunder’s book made so famous. Yet another secret operation kept hidden from Congress to avoid the rule of law.

I see a pattern here, and it isn’t one that makes me love the Childs. Who were this couple?

To answer that question, you have to read between the lines of Julia’s book, but not much. They’re the type of people who laugh at the French for sucking up to aristocrats, but change their cat’s name from “Minnette” to “Minnette Mimosa McWilliams Child” when they find out the feline’s a rare breed, not just a mutt. They’re the type of people who travel war-ravaged Europe eating, oblivious to the malnutrition around them. They detest money and privilege, but seek it out wherever they can. They’re hypocrites.

What strikes me most about this couple is their incongruity. Roald Dahl and his wife, Patricia Neal, made a show of their ‘perfect marriage’ to the press; Julia is eager to do the same.  Julia presents herself as a doting housewife, she presents Paul as her rock, and inspiration, and teacher, and indulgent husband. When Paul speaks in his own writing, however, he comes across as someone who’s settled for money. Paul is creepy. For instance, he wrote to his twin that Paris with Julia pleased him, because it reminded him of having lipstick on his belly-button. In photographs, Mr. Child’s eyes have a touch of the same human kindness shown by Goebbels and Richard Perle. (Remember that meme?)

Paul is more interesting than Julia. He seems to have done a bit of everything at one time or another. An American, Paul grew up with his widowed mother in France– a place he disliked at the time– then started to travel the world because he didn’t have money for college. (Work that one out.) Paul, at different times, was a stained-glass-window artisan, a low-level Hollywood employee, an OSS agent in Sri Lanka (then British Ceylon), a something on a China Sea command ship in World War II, a War-Room designer for the British General Mountbatten, a USIA propagandist/State Department affiliate, a cocktail-socialist,  a photographer, a dandy, a parasite off Julia’s money. Take your pick, he seems to have.

Julia’s memoir starts with her and Paul barreling towards Paris in a huge American car along a road built by the US Army Corps of Engineers. That’s a perfect metaphor  for Julia’s life. Barreling toward prestige at the taxpayer’s expense.

But don’t think that means she likes America, quite the contrary. She despises Pasadena, California (where she’s from), and falls deeper and deeper in ‘love’ with France. She adores France… until the day she decides that France is too much like Pasadena, and moves permanently to Cambridge, MA.

Why does Julia hate the place where she is from? Well, it’s filled with Republicans, Nixon-voters, housewives, people who are only concerned with their own comfort… her father.

Julia’s relationship with her father is the most interesting relationship in her book. Her father really got under her skin, ostensibly because he hated her for not marrying a Republican banker. I’ve heard many Cambridge-types lambast their enemies as “GOP” when they don’t want to talk about about why they really don’t like a person. In Julia’s case, her Dad thought that she and Paul were dangerously isolated in their socialist milieu, and that they had lost touch with their homeland.

Consider Julia’s choices from her father’s perspective: his daughter meets an older man while doing work that she can’t talk about. This older man is a bon vivant who likes lipstick on his belly-button and has no money. Daughter Julia is homely, uncultured, nearing spinsterhood, yet has money. She’s also naive and dangerously idealistic. What could Paul possibly see in Julia? thinks Pop McWilliams, and with good reason.

Were Paul and Julia isolated and out of touch?

Decades of secrecy,  subversion and disregard for democratic principles while claiming to uphold them can turn people a little weird. Lies turn people weird.

The wheels fell off for Paul and Julia when Paul’s close friend and OSS colleague, Jane Foster, got wind that she might be nabbed for spying for the USSR and fled the USA. Paul and Julia kept in contact with her while she was on the lamb, which didn’t look good for USIA’s top exhibitions man. But there were other problems. According to Julia, one of his associates reported him as a sexual deviant. Completely untrue! the indignant wife cries. Whatever the truth is about Paul’s pants or his loyalty, in 1959 he was pulled from Germany and sent to Sweden, then retired in  a rush: just months before he could have secured a $3000 per month pension.

Why the rush, Paul? Perhaps we’ll never know.

This series of events precipitated a ‘wounded’ period in Julia’s life, where she felt the evil forces of the GOP, McCarthy and Nixon were in an unholy alliance against her. She undertook to fight these forces of darkness however she could.

Let’s read an excerpt from an anti-McCarthyite letter that Julia Child wrote, of which she is particularly proud:

In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States… I respectfully suggest that you are doing both your college and your country a disservice… In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for out hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics.

Maybe, Julia, your work for Donovan, your husband’s propaganda work, the very probable espionage work of your beloved friends, have done your country a disservice. Maybe, in the blood-heat of getting your own way, you’ve worked to undermine freedom and the due process of law.

Whatever you think of FDR, the US and it’s allies during WWII or Soviet Russia, it’s worth keeping in mind concepts like “the balance of powers” and “rule of law” are not just pretty words on a piece of paper. These concepts are valued because without them, there’s little difference between an American President and a European Dictator. So even if you’ve got powerful friends, your opinions still need to be vetted by democratic bodies like Congress and the Senate BEFORE they’re acted upon. That’s what living in a democracy means. Hiding behind “the need for secrecy” is like a cancer patient refusing to take his chemotherapy, because “this could weaken me for a little while.”

And thanks to books like The Haunted Wood, we now know all that secrecy actually made the OSS easier to penetrate by really virulent organizations.

I’m not saying that intelligence operations are incompatible with democracy, but they ARE incompatible IF they are given completely free reign to do what they want. The only real check on them is a free media and working Congress, which is a whole different Gordian Knot.

I can kind of understand why Julia would adopt a siege-mentality toward Pasadena and her dad; then toward Washington D.C. and the “McCarthyites”; and finally toward France. With McCarthy, the congressional investigations into the OSS and CIA spending, the FBI (and even CIA, thank you Angleton) investigations into Soviet espionage, Julia  saw FDR’s pink edifice crashing down around her. She understood that the USA was not, yet, her private game reserve. So naturally, she set up fort in the Peoples’ Republic of Cambridge.

For readers who are unfamiliar with US politics and geography, Cambridge Massachusetts is like that very sheltered, damp spot in your garden where all sorts of strange fungi can flourish. And Julia flourished there; the rest is T.V. history.

We have a problem in the USA: we’ve come to believe our own propaganda. You can disapprove of demagoguery. You can disapprove of propaganda and political-witch-hunts. But you can’t disapprove of these things and still support the Childs, because the Childs are just another flavor of McCarthyites– and that may even be too kind to Julia and Paul, because I don’t think Senator McCarthy ever took up service for a foreign operative– wittingly or otherwise. But sadly, I believe these ethical distinctions will be forever lost on the good comrades of Cambridge, MA.

When it boils down to it, Julia did not love her own people. Did she feel that they denied her something which she deserved? Did she feel out-of-sync, being homely and mannish? Or did she just crave belonging to something ‘special’– irrespective of what that ‘something’ was? I guess it doesn’t matter now, because like her father, she’s dead. Eh bien, l’affaire conclue.

I had an idea for a Dahl-type story last week. Two protagonists; one an up-and-coming aide to a congressman, the other a Cambridge book-store owner. The aide has a criminal record because he damaged the book store during a protest in college, so in order to get a security clearance, he needs to ask the owner to make a statement on his behalf. The damage happened ten years ago and the aftermath was bitter, but, if he wants the promotion he has no option but to appeal to the store-owner’s better nature, etc. Things don’t work out as the aide plans.

I felt that this was good material to flex some Dahl-type muscles on, so after several months’ hiatus, I started reading my Dahl omnibus again. There are three stories that might help me: Taste, The Landlady and The Last Act.

You may not have heard of The Last Act, it’s one of the few really mean-spirited stories that Dahl wrote, but I think that it is also as close as you’re going to get to the real Dahl– that is, Dahl not hiding his nature while entertaining. The Last Act was one of his Playboy stories, which surprised me, because although sex is a central theme, there’s nothing sexy about this short story. It’s morbid and supremely sad. I think that a man could only find it sexy if he hated women– or at least was very, very angry at a woman– but even then the story’s not really a turn-on, but maybe some sort of emotional release, like a snuff-film.

So although I first read The Last Act- wow- a year ago now, I wasn’t in any hurry to analyze it because it’s complicated. I feel slightly more able to dissect it now, so here goes.

First, it’s written like third-hand gossip, delivered from a polished, attractive (there you go!) speaker. You can almost hear Bill Stephenson’s scandal-machine cranking. Dahl is delivering the goods on a juicy suicide.

The story is cinematic- we are given brief, evocative place descriptions every time the scene changes, and as this is a short story, the scene only changes twice.

There are two characters. Mrs. Anna Cooper and Conrad Kreuger. Conrad comes in half-way through; the first half of the story tells us about Anna’s emotional state. At first, I thought that it was daring to bring Conrad in so late, but on reflection, it’s necessary to keep the twist twisty. You see, up until the end, you’ll think that The Last Act is a story about how a co-dependent widow finds herself through working and psychotherapy.

Of course, these elements aren’t enough to explain this story’s momentum. The momentum comes from emotional manipulation; Dahl, even better than Arthur Machen, was a sublime manipulator. (It’s worth bearing in mind that he was also a nasty person in real life.)

Dahl keeps the first half of the story going by dropping one bomb after another. It’s devastating:

1) Anna suddenly looses a husband who she is not only very happy with, but also needs. A year later she’s not ready to move on when everyone else thinks she should be. She’s suicidal.

2) Her children leave the nest. She manages to hide her loneliness from them, but feels increasingly isolated.

3) In order to distract herself from her problems, she gets a job at an orphanage, working with single mothers who are giving up their babies under stressed circumstances. (Could it ever be any other way?) Her job involves dealing with coarse lawyers and adoptive mothers who decide they don’t want the children anymore.

Now, if I was 20, these things might roll off my back pretty easily, at least I wouldn’t understand them as I do now. So for anybody reading this post who didn’t get a knot in their stomach over that list, believe me, these aren’t just ‘unpleasant’, they’re monstrous, twisted things. Things that no sane person would wish on their worst enemy. So by page fourteen, I was very ready for something good to happen. BTW, Dahl was 50 when he wrote this story, ten years older than both protagonists.

His genius is in the way Dahl delivers these bombs:

The policeman who was speaking produced the crocodile wallet she had given Ed on their twentieth wedding anniversary, two years back, and as she reached out to take it, she found herself wondering whether it might not still be warm from having been close to her husband’s chest only a short while ago.

And…

It is an awful feeling, after twenty-three years of boisterous, busy, magical family life, to come down alone to breakfast in the mornings, to sit there in silence with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and to wonder what you are going to do with the day ahead.

…

And there were girls in the waiting room, young girls with ashen stony faces, and it became part of her duty to type their answers on an official form.

“The father’s name?”

“Don’t know.”

“You’ve no idea?”

“What’s the father’s name got to do with it?”

“My dear, if the father is known, then his consent has to be obtained as well as yours before the child can be offered for adoption.”

“The father isn’t known, don’t worry.”

…

Now, five months after the move, the wife had written to say that she no longer wanted to keep the child. Her husband, she announced, had died of a heart attach soon after they’d arrived in Texas. She herself had remarried almost at once, and her new husband “found it impossible to adjust to an adopted baby…”

All these bombs work because good gossip is the type that takes us out of our own worries for a little while, right? Dahl was able to portray these so well because a) he was paid to run a rumor mill in DC and obviously, he was good at knowing what to sell and b) these tragedies closely reflect things that actually happened to Dahl or his wife Patricia. The descriptions are quality, not quantity.

Now, enter Conrad Kreuger from Dallas. The name should give you a hint; Dahl’s crude anti-German prejudice landed him in trouble with British military authorities well before he ever joined Stephenson’s crew. The Texas angle is more interesting: Dahl’s mentor and idol, Charles Marsh, was from Texas, but so were many of Marsh’s and FDR’s more powerful political opponents. That was in the days before Northeastern politicians like the Bush family, who are from Connecticut, colonized the Lone Star State.

Spoiler alert: Kreuger, a gynecologist, meets up with his old flame Anna while she’s on a business trip to Dallas. Kreuger secretly hates Anna for dumping him in high school,  and therefore causing every unhappy event in his life: his failed ‘rebound’ marriage, his ex-wife gaining custody of their child, and his subsequent loneliness. He reads her fragile mental state and deftly manipulates her into committing suicide. End of story.

What’s really creepy about Kreuger is his deep understanding of Anna’s psychology- maybe it’s better to say: Kreuger’s understanding of female psychology in general is creepy. He knows just what to say to get her to do what he wants, he knows just what to do to knock her off balance: compliments followed by subtle put-downs; repeatedly turning away from her when she is most vulnerable, etc. Dr. Kreuger uses sex to break Anna, and that’s what The Final Act is about. (Is that what Playboy readers are really interested in?) Kreuger is armed like a soldier whose job is to cultivate and milk women. Do we know anybody else with that job description?

It doesn’t take a lot of insight to see that Kreuger is actually Dahl. Dahl was a notorious womanizer– even after the war– who viewed sex as both work and something dirty. He used it as a tool to get what he wanted at various times in his life, and like a hardened prostitute, he grew to hate his punters.

Where did all this anger come from? It’s tempting to look at mama, and in the case of Sofie Magdalene Dahl, there is probably good reason to look at her. Sofie Magdalene was Dahl’s father’s second wife, the first being a more glamorous French aristocrat who had died. Sofie felt somewhat insecure in the first wife’s shadow; insecure enough to be cruel to her stepchildren and make up a rumor that the first wife died of a botched abortion because she didn’t want any more of Dahl’s kids. (Shades of what’s to come?)

When Elder Dahl died, Roald was the only boy of Sofie’s in a household of girls. He was doted on, endlessly, and probably stifled by his mother’s neediness. When his best friend at school was expelled for sodomizing younger boys, Roald didn’t tell Sofie, because he wanted to protect her AND because he assumed that she would think he was in on the sodomy. Not a great relationship, but one he would never really pull himself away from– a situation that led one family member to characterize Great Missenden as “Valley of the Dahls”.

Where did this leave Roald? Comfortable with indirection, shaming and lying, or in other words, the more ‘feminine’ tools for getting people to do what you want. Where Roald was friends with men stronger than himself, say Marsh or Roosevelt or even some of the con-artists he befriended later, he adopted a girlish fawning attitude, something like adoration, and would resist any suggestion that his idols were less than ideal– up to a point. If that point was reached, the two men would part bitterly. Maybe the way Dahl related to other people is why he fit in with the Philby crowd.

Love is close to hate, especially when the love is an unhealthy love, and Roald used his skills dealing with women and flattering men to his best possible advantage. In The Last Act,  he draws back the veil for us a little, and we can see part of how a very gifted and very troubled author viewed his world. There’s something ugly about putting on a mask, and it’s possible that being a good entertainer is just the sunny side of being a deceitful, calculating person.

Close your eyes and think of England.

A friend recently recommended that I read a book on the JFK assassination by Peter Dale Scott, an ex-professor at UC Berkeley. I wasn’t far in when I bumped into my old buddy, Clare Boothe Luce.

You may remember Representative Clare from her fling with Roald Dahl– a romp intentionally designed to align her politics more closely with Britain’s during WWII. Her book, Saints for Now was given a courtesy plug by Ida Coudenhove-Kalergi Goerres in the American version of Ida’s Nazi-era book, The Hidden Face.

Well, it seems that when Clare wasn’t musing on the lives of saints, she was funding an anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy, well-armed, Cuban-exile group called ‘DRE’ (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil); she subsidized DRE along with her friend William Pawley, who in turn was close to Allen Dulles. (Dulles was one of Bill Stephenson’s top men– you know Stephenson, that British spy working in New York.  Allen worked for the OSS in Switzerland, then became the first head of the CIA. He was also a director of The Council on Foreign Relations, an organization whose current president, Richard Haas, recently made the news for calling Edward Snowden ‘not a whistle-blower’. Tweet, tweet!)

That last factoid makes me laugh, because back when it was cool to like China, the CFR gave Google executives a media platform to spin their cooperation with the Chinese government, which helped Beijing to suppress free speech via the internet. How’d that one work out for ya? Buhahaha!

Anywhooo, the first and second oldest professions putter on. I do wonder if, in light of all of Clare’s contacts, Dahl’s work should be given a different interpretation.  Perhaps Willy Wonka isn’t selling candy. Perhaps there’s truth in Say No to Grandpa Joe. And maybe all those Oompa-Loompas are really just nutball Cuban exiles. I’m kidding!

Prof. Scott sources his info on Clare Boothe Luce from “10 AH 83,85″; which is a reference to the Hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, (1979).

Calling Bettie Page?

We’re going back to our roots today by looking at two Orwell essays from his collection All Art is Propaganda. Both essays explore power-worship. This topic is timely, because of the violent, and very public, break-up of Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson.

What does power-worship have to do with Saatchi and Nigella? Nigella blended her private and public life to sell a special form of power-worship. Her relationship with Saatchi had more than a hint of power-worship. The dysfunction in their relationship mirrors the problems that Orwell identified in society when power-worship becomes the dominant ethos.

So, power-worship has everything to do with this power-couple. And Orwell’s got something to say about that. On with the show!

The first essay, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, was scheduled for print  in 1944, but its British publisher shelved it on grounds of obscenity. Benefit of Clergy is a review of The Secret Life of  Salvador Dali, a book Orwell characterized as “a strip tease act conducted in pink limelight”. To Orwell, Dali is the epitome of power-worship and the desire to be worshiped. Dali wants to be Napoleon.

The second essay, Raffles and Miss Blandish, was also written in 1944, but published in Horizon, the British magazine from which the CIA/IRD-funded Encounter (1953-1990) would later draw editorial talent*. (IRD, the Information Research Department, was the British spying organization to which Orwell handed over his list of communist “fellow travelers” in 1949; a list which included Encounter’s future editor Stephen Spender. Red scare or red recruitment drive?) Raffles and Miss Blandish is about the moral decay of crime stories over the period 1900-1940; Orwell believes this moral decay is attributable to power-worship.

The personality cult of Dali and the genre-wide power-worship in crime fiction display similar symptoms, according to Orwell. Power-worship is expressed sexually as sadism and masochism. It is expressed ethically as lawlessness.

Let’s draw some parallels.

Saatchi made millions as an art promoter, not just any promoter, but promoter to the richest artist in the world, Damien Hirst. Hirst’s art is famous for preserved sharks, rotting cow heads etc.

Dali was an art promoter– he made millions selling rotting cattle as art. Actually, Dali was selling donkey carcasses to well-heeled saps before Damien was a glint in his father’s eye.

Dali was a necrophiliac and sadist. He bragged about his narcissism. He liked to hurt women, or dream of hurting them, physically and emotionally. He liked to suck up to rich and powerful people. Dali thought that the normal rules didn’t apply to him.

Dali’s wife Gala was a masochist. Her idea of foreplay was to ask her husband to kill her, which annoyed Dali:  he was titillated by the thought of killing her, but the fact that she wanted him to do it was a turn-off.

I don’t know anything about Saatchi’s sex life.  I do know that he likes to hurt women, physically and emotionally. He likes to suck up to powerful people. He enjoys his power in the art-world and is phenomenally arrogant. I know that Saatchi’s marriage to Nigella is abusive; he thinks this abusiveness is normal; and that he filed for divorce. There’s a lot of Dali in Saatchi, and it’s likely there’s some Gala in Nigella.

It’s not hard to see how Saatchi’s behavior is violent and lawless. But what about the worshiper? What part does Nigella own?

Nigella Lawson: the domestic goddess, the “queen of food porn”. What is she selling? Her television personality is a whored-out Delia Smith minus culinary expertise. Nigella isn’t selling food, she’s selling the fantasy of a ‘kept woman’, which– if we’re honest– has more appeal to most women than dreams of corporate stardom.

What do I mean by ‘kept woman’? My first introduction to the concept was at a cocktail party hosted by a gay couple, one of the guys was a friend of my parents, and my folks had not yet met his partner. The partner turned out to be a muscular fellow who cultivated a biker mystique. When their introduction reached the ‘What do you do?’ phase, my mom answered that she was a housewife. The partner hissed: “I wish I could be a kept woman!”, then stomped away in a huff. His better half didn’t know what to say.

Since then, my understanding has evolved: a kept woman is used in private and valued in public. She is sexually desirable, and therefore a prized object. A warm pie cloistered behind closed (luxurious) doors. She serves whoever owns her, and that’s fine by her, as long as her owner is powerful and prestigious. What bursts the fantasy? 1) When her owner looses prestige or 2) When she’s no longer valued. When she’s taken for granted.

The sales pitch exploded very publicly for Saatchi’s soon-to-be ex-wife; it exploded via option two. Her public/personal life will never seem as glamorous again.

The ‘Kept Woman Fantasy’  is not the foundation of a healthy marriage. But it is an expression of power-worship from the viewpoint of the worshiper. When Dali was young, he found his own “Maecenas” in the Vicomte de Noailles,  but through arduous self-promotion Dali was eventually able to swap roles.

It’s easy to sympathize with Nigella in her time of humiliation. However, the damage Saatchi did to her is a natural consequence of the lifestyle-choice she cashes in on. A worshiper will attract someone who wants to be worshiped. Saatchi was an ass long before Nigella married him.

The Nigella/Saatchi saga displays facets of what Orwell saw happening throughout the Anglosphere. How did power-worship kill crime stories? According to Orwell, power-worship devalues ethical conduct and replaces the rule of law with “might makes right”.

Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the English-speaking peoples have been stories in which the hero fights against odds. This is true all the way from Robin Hood to Popeye the Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western world is Jack the Giant Killer, and there already exists a considerable literature which teaches, either overtly or implicitly, that one should side with the big man against the little man. Most of what is now written about foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this theme, and for several decades such phrases as “play the game,” “don’t hit a man when he’s down” and “it’s not cricket” have never failed to draw a snigger from anyone of intellectual pretensions.

Orwell compares the Sherlock Holmes stories to Edgar Wallace’s writing.

He (Sherlock Holmes) reasons logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the routine methods of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered it, on Scotland Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of his way to denounce Holmes by name. His ideal was the detective-inspector who catches criminals not because he is intellectually brilliant but because he is part of an all-powerful organization.

What type of behavior goes hand-in-hand with this power-worship? Violence and sadomasochistic exploitation. Orwell goes on to describe the subject matter of a typical 1940s crime novel:

The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish [and her repeated rape- a.nolen], the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty, and much else of the same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of being knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human behavior.

Where does power-worship lead us? Lawlessness. The rule of policy. The personality cult of the dictator.

In America, both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very much more marked. It is indeed ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for  crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe  and all the rest of the “log cabin to White House” brigade.

And…

It is a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large and bold way.

Does Orwell’s list remind you of anything? Drones, preemptive war, puppet governments, disposition matrices, “least misleading” answers… lawlessness.

Orwell believed art was vitally important because it teaches people how to think. What does power-worship look like through the lens of the Anglo-American public?

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesmen reader worships Stalin.

Santa Muerte? Obama? Hollywood? The hierarchy of academia, the military, etc? Which alter do you worship at? Has Gala crept into your life?

Power-worship was such a disgusting, modern phenomenon to Orwell that he was forced to make a concession to something he hated almost as much: the Britain of his grandfather. At least grandpa’s mores set some limit to depravity. He compares a 1910 crime novel to one from 1940:

Comparing the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behavior whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

IMHO, that’s a terrible sentence with a profound meaning. Let’s switch off the food porn.

*Encounter was set up despite an agreement between the CIA and the British government that the spying agency would not spend money propagandizing in Great Britain. Contrary to the wishes of his ELECTED government, Kim Philby was the MI6-CIA liaison for Encounter. (Note how MI6 is not abiding by instructions from outside itself.) The Foreign Office was also in on the plot, the aim being to promote an anti-Soviet leftist agenda with the help of a lot of rich people.

You’ll probably have noticed that the CIA drew many agents from Orwell’s milieu, that is, Western-educated, elitist, socialists. You may remember from my previous posts that when the Brit Stephenson staffed the OSS, he hired a hell of a lot of Soviet double-agents. Other UK-USA joint propaganda operations, like Encounter, were the brainchild of CIA/MI6/IRD agents with pronounced leftist sympathies– and loyalties beyond their respective elected governments.

Is socialism just a euphemism for serfdom? Are the blue-stockings rolling back 200 years of citizens’ rights? What’s the least untruthful answer?

Charles E Marsh, easily mistaken for Jesus.

If you live near deer, or chipmunks, you’ll be painfully aware that it is now tick season. If you’ve no experience with these insects, I’ll give you a hand: imagine a disgusting little parasite that looks like a dried scab when it’s hungry, and when it’s full, looks like a coffee bean but feels like a wilting grape. That squishiness comes from your cat’s blood (if not yours) and hundreds of little scab-babies.

Tick Season is the perfect time for a post on Charles Marsh. Charles Marsh was a Texas-based newspaperman. He owned several papers, and a host of other investments besides– Marsh was a millionaire in the 1930s and one of the richest men in the USA.

However, you won’t hear much about Marsh. Even amongst the circles of people interested in ‘deep politics’. Charles Marsh’s driving passion was to be a behind-the-scenes power-broker. He sought ways to get closer to power: he made sure his fleet of papers always supported FDR and even moved to Washington D.C. hoping to be accepted into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inner circle. (Franklin was sponsored by New York interests.) Marsh’s attempts to break into FDR’s confidence are what put me onto him, because they lead to his championing a young Brit named Roald Dahl.

The Roosevelts were a funny bunch of people. Both Franklin and Eleanor were born into money and the sheltered environs of wealthy New England, which meant they knew that 1) everybody else was a sinner and 2) God was with them.

However, Franklin’s political support was not aristocratic; it was Wall Street.  Elenor’s life was filled with similar contradictions: she was neither attractive nor well liked amongst her own set of people. She felt towards her ‘class’ much like Julia Child felt towards her set back in Pasadena– the bitterness of a woman who feels under-appreciated.  So this odd couple were an odd mix of money, bitterness, adventurism, socialism and greed, all tied together under the pink bow of humanitarianism.

I’m telling you this because the castles we build in our minds dictate how attackers will lay siege. Charles Marsh was one such attacker; he lay siege to the Roosevelts by attaching himself to a handsome young man who flirted with an old cripple and his neglected wife.

Roald Dahl and another spook.

Roald Dahl, a British airman who’d been grounded for health reasons, was stationed in Washington D.C. in 1942 under the guise of a diplomatic attaché, but with a secret mission to undermine American political resistance to fighting closely alongside Britain. Dahl was personally selected for this mission by Harold Balfour, representative of the RAF in Churchill’s War Cabinet.

Gabriel Pascal and his sugar-daddy George Bernhard Shaw are in the middle. (1942– long past skinny-dipping days!)

Dahl got his introduction to the President and his wife through a Hollywood movie man named Gabriel Pascal, who broke into film by swimming nude for George Bernhard Shaw. (Dahl had met Pascal through an old family friend, Alfred Chenhalls– the guy against whom Dahl’s sisters locked their bedroom doors every night. Chenhalls got a job for Pascal through Leslie Howard.)

Leslie Howard and Alfred Chenhalls (the fat one).

The Roosevelts liked Pascal’s little friend so much that they ended up inviting Roald to their weekend retreats, where he satisfied the emotional needs of the aging couple and reported back to Churchill. The Roosevelts probably knew this snitching was going on, as they partnered so closely with William Stephenson, the British spy, to undermine their fellow Americans political opponents. That type of behavior used to be called treason, but I digress…

Pascal introduced Dahl to Charles Marsh also; Dahl’s connection to the Roosevelts is what drew Marsh to the young man. Marsh took Dahl under his wing in an intense mentor-protégé relationship: the older man would dole advice down to Roald, who would eagerly lap it up and entertain his host with bawdy jokes. In return, Marsh got a foot into exclusive salons courtesy of His Majesty’s Government. Marsh would provide intelligence to the British through Dahl. (Not always wittingly!)

So you can think of the FDR government as a wound on a deer, and men like Charles Marsh as the ticks who followed the smell of blood to likely feeding spots. But what’s it like inside a tick’s head?

Alice Glass, like Pascal, got her start swimming naked for her patron.

Marsh was a collector of people. He had a wife, but spent most of his time with his exquisite young mistress, Alice Glass. (Alice, a woman just as vicious as her sponsor, made it her mission to sleep with every man Marsh brought back to their Virginia estate.)  Marsh would charm young male proteges like Dahl or Lyndon B Johnson. He used his money and media empire to collect people too, such as Indira Ghandi and Mother Theresa, who were both Marsh’s paid  “agents”  in India. Marsh was also a patron of artists, like sculptor Jacob Epstein.

How does one collect people? By sniffing out what they want and then promising to provide it (but never fulling delivering). Charles Marsh was an expert manipulator. I’ve written elsewhere about Roald Dahl’s emotional damage; Marsh filled Dahl’s need for powerful friends and a father figure. Roald hung on every word Marsh said, to the wonder of his British friends and family who, according to Donald Sturrock, found Marsh “pushy and patronizing” or “a terrible bully”.

Perhaps the most telling insight into Marsh’ character comes from this extract from Dahl’s authorized biography:

But there was a good reason for their [the Dahl family's] animosity. When he [Charles Marsh] came to England in 1950, Marsh had almost driven Alfhild’s husband insane.

Leslie Hansen, Roald’s brother in law, was highly intelligent and unconventional. He drew cartoons and caricatures, but he was also mentally unstable… Despite, or perhaps because of his idiosyncrasies, Leslie had been completely absorbed into the Dahl family and they all felt protective of him. But he was quite unable to deal either with Charles Marsh’s quasi-religious philosophy  or his overt generosity. As Roald put it, Charles “toppled an already wobbly brain clean over the precipice.” Hansen started to believe that Marsh was Jesus Christ returned to earth, and that he was his disciple. Roald was forced into the role of carer:

[Dahl quotation] “Every day he collapsed and jabbered and search the bible and saw portents and coincidences and said he was dying… Well it would have been OK for Charles to be JC and for Leslie to be St. Paul if the idea hadn’t driven him stark raving mad… It was as much as one could do to handle him and stop ourselves from being forced to send him to a lunatic asyulum… I spent hours and hours with him forcing him to realize that Marsh was not Jesus Christ , that he was an ordinary man, rather a good ordinary man nevertheless, who fornicated and joked and made merry just like everyone else… I then encouraged him to draw cartoons of Charles (a thing that would previously have been sacrilegious) and he became more cheerful… Truly, Claudia, it was a near thing and all pretty awful. The most awful thing of all being to hear the small child Astrid saying repeatedly, don’t cry daddy, we won’t leave you. Most pathetic thing I’ve every heard in my life. No-one of course cares very much about Leslie. But the terrors it reflected upon Alf and Astrid are very great.”

Roald eventually told the same Claudia, another Marsh mistress, that he blamed himself for encouraging Charles to visit the Dahls in England; he begged Charles not to return to their home in Amersham and to drop the “mystic bullshit”.

Part of Marsh’s act were extravagant displays of generosity to people that were useful to him: for instance, conspicuous investment in the Third World; sending vitamins to the malnourished constituents of rival European politicians; or supporting propaganda projects that powerful people aligned themselves with, such as Dahl’s RAF/Walt Disney effort with The Gremlins. All of these investments were under the guise of charity, of course.

Part of Disney’s Gremlins movie was to be shot at Alice Glass’ Virgina estate. Patriots, all!

Take a step back and admire Charles Marsh’s character: giving to the poor, starving people of war-torn Europe with irreproachable magnanimity, but then playing with weakest of his beneficiaries for his own amusement– to the point of driving Leslie mad. Marsh was not motivated by benevolence. Much like the Roosevelts, whose power he coveted, Marsh was God’s voice on earth, teaching the rest of us ‘goodness’, but with no real inner goodness himself.

Marsh’s hypocrisy is typical of the Yankee religious fanaticism that is broadcast over the megaphones at USAID, CNN, MSNBC… telling the rest of the world what’s right to think; a way of thinking that just happens to be highly profitable to those ‘Yankees’. This hypocrisy screams– yet it is endemic amongst our ‘intellectual’ class even now.

People like Marsh are so completely hypocritical that I wonder if there isn’t something wrong with them, some sort of cognitive deficiency of the type Joanna Ashmun described in her essay on narcissistic traits. Whatever their motivation, the ‘Charles Marsh’-style political manipulator has become so much a part of the Washington scene that they are now as American as the ticks on my cat’s back.

Keeps a home in the Washington Metro Area.

PS. Most of this information can be found in Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars or Sturrock’s book on Dahl.

William Stephenson’s medals on a clip, thank you Intrepid-Society.org

“There’s no doubt you [James Angleton] are easily the most interesting and fascinating figure the intelligence world has produced, and a living legend.”

— Clare Boothe Luce, courtesy of the CIA’s Angleton guru, David Robarge.

There’s a problem with the official history of the CIA: counterintelligence. Counterintelligence, or ‘routing out’ enemy spies, is never properly accounted for in any narrative that I’ve come across. Let me explain that a little bit further.

You’ll remember that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, was set up through a collaboration between William S. Stephenson, head of the “British” Security Coordinate (BSC) and J. Edgar Hoover, with the blessing of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Stephenson had a secret mission that he wasn’t supposed to tell the Americans. According to his autobiography, A Man Called Intrepid, he was to covertly influence US opinion in favor of fighting WWII with Britain by any means necessary. This meant lying, smear campaigns, as well as using intimidation tactics against FDR’s political opponents, such as  isolationists and pacifists.

FDR used Stephenson’s right-hand man, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, to set up the OSS as an American partner to the BSC. That means readers, that the premiere US intelligence service (which also worked intimately with Hoover’s FBI) was staffed with an enemy agent at its highest level and, by necessity to Stephenson’s mission,  many more lower down.

How does an organization set up and run by double agents conduct counterespionage? Trick question! It doesn’t.

Let’s do a little thought experiment: say that you are a British double agent posing as an American ‘Overseer of National Intelligence’. You’re tasked with finding enemy spies in America. You don’t really want to do this, obviously, because a good counterintelligence team may ‘out’ you as an agent of the British. What to do?

Solution: You hire a ‘Chief of Counterintelligence’ who a) typifies an American (like a poetry-writing Eagle Scout!!); b) is bad at the job; and c) has some horrible secret that could be used to discredit him should he somehow sniff you out.

Did Donovan/Stephenson hire such a patsy? Only if you think James Jesus Angleton had emotional issues and was out of his depth as Head of Counterintelligence at the CIA.

If you’ve never heard of James ‘Jimmy’ Jesus Angleton, here’s his bio:  Angleton worked for the OSS in Italy and was the CIA’s first head of counterintelligence. (His dad was a high-ranking executive at National Cash Register, parent organization to IBM. The root of our problems, freedom-loving techies!)

Jimmy Jesus is the least ‘cool’ CIA agent you’ll ever hear about. The official story goes like this: after years of faithful service, Jimmy went crazy and started telling his peers in friendly intel agencies ‘stuff’ that just couldn’t be true.

What type of stuff you ask? It’s hard to say, because after the CIA kicked Jimmy out they burned his trove of files. However, according to Tom Mangold in Cold Warrior, much of this burned ‘stuff’ had to do with untrustworthy agents in the CIA’s Soviet Division.

Angleton’s closest working buddies are said to have been loyal to him to the end (details are obscure), but every spook with a career knows that Jimmy was just plan crazy. The CIA still keeps their own public reading list  on Angleton (complete with notes on what you’re supposed to think about each book!) and for even shorter attention spans, there’s the Wikipedia summary: James Angleton became obsessed with the idea that the CIA was thoroughly infiltrated with KGB agents. Jesus, Jimmy!

Red-blooded CIA historians all know Angleton was crazy; they know this because Jimmy has become a case study in (CIA quote) “how not to conduct counterintelligence”. Jimmy’s methods are unfashionable, but did they at least catch enemy spooks? Well, the safe answer is a quiet ‘no’, because a) Angleton didn’t see through Kim Philby, the famous Soviet double agent and son of Saudi-powerbroker St. John Philby; and b) Angleton listened to an informant named Anatoliy Golitsyn, who was ‘just telling Angleton what he wanted to hear’ by claiming that the CIA was heavily infiltrated with Soviet ‘moles’ (spies).

Here we come to the screaming contradiction in the official history of counterespionage at the CIA: a crazy, incompetent man ran counterespionage for over twenty years and nobody noticed.

Hmmm. This is where Stephenson’s apologists invoke “government incompetence” while asking us to keep funding organizations like the CIA. That’s horse-talk: men like Stephenson are unethical, not stupid. This screaming contradiction doesn’t lead anywhere good for Agency leadership.

1) If you buy the ‘Crazy Angleton’ story, the next logical question is “Why didn’t CIA leadership care about counterespionage?”

2) If you don’t buy that story, the next logical question is “What was Angleton saying that scared the higher-ups at the CIA enough to shut him down?”

How the public perceives Angleton matters a great deal to the agency, as shown by their continued investment into shepherding public thought on him. (How often are movies and televisions shows recommended as valuable historical sources by real historians?!)

I’ve had the opportunity to ask a small number of  Angleton ‘experts’ the two preceding questions. Their replies have run the gambit from “Shut up, you’re not qualified!” to a sly smile and suave change-of-subject. My personal conclusion is that talking Jimmy-Jesus don’t get ya promoted.

Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about getting promoted. I’m not crushed under a mountain of classified newspaper clippings  nor bound by life-long gag orders. Therefore,  I’m going to talk about things that you don’t need security clearance to read, things that are easily verifiable and are on the public record.

These public-record things fall into two camps. The first deals with conflicts of interest inherent in having a foreign spy set up one’s intelligence apparatus. The second deals with the apparently self-defeating way CIA leadership responded to Angleton’s ‘going crazy’.

1) The OSS was set up by Bill Donovan, who came at the recommendation of a British spy whose mission was to spin information presented to US representatives and the public. The CIA drew heavily from the OSS ‘talent pool’. British agents had  incentive to join the OSS and easy access to the fledgeling organization. There’s no good reason why the CIA shouldn’t have been infiltrated left, right and center by the British; and we all know now that the British were infiltrated left, right and center by the Soviets. Oops! (Interested? Search ‘Cambridge Five’.)

2) OSS leadership opened their doors wide to KGB talent: Donovan oversaw this cooperation personally. (He nurtured the partnership secretly, on the advice of J. Edgar Hoover who knew such a partnership would be toxic if the public ever found out.) The Soviets had nothing but contempt for Donovan’s lack of professionalism and found it easy to abuse their partnership and infiltrate Wild Bill’s organization far beyond his original intention. (Interested? See The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev.)

3) Has history shown us that the OSS at least was riddled with Ruskie plants? Yes, it has; that’s part of what made the Venona decrypts a big deal. Since the CIA picked up so much talent from it’s parent organization, I suspect a good portion of CIA hires were also rotten.

Points 1), 2) and 3) should make us ask: Why are Angleton’s suspicions about widespread Soviet infiltration still looked on with disdain?

Now, onto what the CIA did to stop an ‘Angleton’ happening again:

4) Angleton was in office for twenty years; that’s long enough to see patterns even if one isn’t very bright. In response to Angleton’s disgrace, the CIA put limits on how long anyone may head the counterintelligence department– four years only [correction, five years]. This policy keeps institutional memory short: Soviet agents spend a lifetime working cover, spy-hunters have only 60 months to sniff the enemy out before the dept is shook up again. That’s a good environment for enemy spies.

5) Burning Angleton’s archives was a funny choice to make. If his records were in fact incinerated, the agency won’t be able to check what Angleton was telling their international partners. However, burning his archives makes perfect sense if CIA leadership was scared of what was contained therein.

6) The CIA nurtured a cult of ‘Angleton Is Not Sexy’ amongst generations of subsequent counterintelligence professionals/aficionados.  In his youth, Angleton had shown allegiance to ideas that ran contrary to Churchill’s globalist patrons: populism, small-government, anti-war, anti-international banking. Jimmy had kept up correspondence with folks like Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and T.S. Eliot. (Even after Pound was imprisoned in Italy!)  It’s possible that Angleton’s bird’s-eye view of the Agency dredged up old ‘America-First’ ideas about international banking and democracy that altered Jimmy’s view of Stephenson’s hires, leading Angleton to ask uncomfortable questions. Those questions aren’t sexy, boys.

The tricky thing about talking spook history is that spook historians can always fall back on “I’ve got classified information that I can’t show you but supports my point perfectly.” We’re all just supposed to believe them because, well, they’re paid professionals and therefore trustworthy.

I have yet to meet a professional intelligence historian whose judgement I trust. In the meantime, all I have to go on is common sense and the powerful question: Cui bono?

Cui bono from hiring, then humiliating, Angleton?

Churchill set up his spying apparatus through Stephenson before he became prime minister, while he was an obscure back-bencher. Winston set up a private network of informers in the global business community because British Intelligence deemed him not important enough (or too untrustworthy?) to receive their debriefings. Why would the chief of MI6 Admiral Sinclair exclude the famous half-American ‘British Bulldog’?

Churchill’s family was skint; his career was paid for by Vanderbilt (robber baron) heiress Consuelo, a deal brokered by her mother, Alva Belmont, and the son of Lord Rothschild’s American agent August Belmont, of horse-race fame. Read all about that arrangement in Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart. (Alva ultimately married August’s son, and used their money to patronize Mrs. Pankhurst and Clare Boothe Luce). Perhaps men like Admiral Sinclair weren’t entirely sure Alva’s interests were the same as British interests.

From the British point of view, there’s nothing British about new-money American buccaneers buying their way into Empire politics.  I used ” ” (quotation marks) around the “British” in BSC earlier because the BSC wasn’t very British at all. You could say that the British were its first victims.

Churchill was paid for by international business interests. Winston got his info from international business interests. Churchill represented international business interests. The established British intelligence services had to work with Churchill’s international-business-spook-network once he became PM. According to historian Ron Cynewulf Robbins:

It cannot be overlooked that there was mutual antipathy between Sir Stewart Menzies, head of British intelligence, and Stephenson. Churchill gave Stephenson the New York appointment over the objections of Menzies.

Given Churchill’s backers, it’s not hard to see why counterespionage was a low priority at the OSS and newly-fledged CIA. Americans may hope that counterintelligence is no longer a dumping-ground for the ‘artistic’ sons of the Security-Cleared, but considering the CIA’s current adventures would make a Robber Baron proud, such hope is probably misplaced.

David Robarge, the CIA’s chief ‘historian’.

I don’t envy academic gate-keepers: their job is to cover up really big lies, which is almost always impossible. In fact, in their attempt to mislead the public, they often hoist themselves on their own petard, which is exactly what CIA historian David Robarge did when he called Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior: “the most factually detailed, thoroughly researched study of Angleton.”

Cold Warrior is factually detailed, the problem for Robarge is that most of the facts run against the CIA’s official interpretation of Angleton’s career. The facts given in Cold Warrior suggest that Angleton was, in fact, on to something when he spoke about a ‘Monster Plot’ of deep Soviet penetration into the CIA. Far from showing Angleton to be a completely incompetent boob, Mangold’s book gives evidence of Angleton’s counterintelligence insights, insights which ought to look pretty damn smart to the post-Snowden CIA:

 When the computer age dawned over Langley, Anglton rejected the idea of computerizing his files. He was fearful that information technology would allow his staff’s precious secrets to be distributed to terminals throughout the CIA building.

I’ve spoken with someone who worked on installing Langley’s current computer system, and like any competent IT expert, they know computers are designed to replicate information quickly and will therefore always be a liability for spies– no matter how many system admins are fired.

But Angleton’s IT insights are not the crux of what I want to talk about today. Tom Mangold’s book is, on the surface, a hatchet-job against Angleton’s career and personality. The facts Mangold uses to back his claims do not support the conclusions he draws. As part of this deception, Mangold relies  heavily on the testimony of three men who were tasked with bringing Angleton down and burning his files: William Colby, George Kalaris and Leonard McCoy.

Burning Angleton’s files on Soviet penetration of the CIA and other American institutions was a really weird thing for the CIA to do. For an exploration of this topic, please see my post Jesus, Jimmy!, which explains why CIA leadership are still interested in shepherding the public’s perception of Angleton.

But back to Colby, Kalaris and McCoy. Mangold’s attitude towards these three men, and to post-Angleton CIA leadership, is fawning and largely uncritical. However the information Mangold gives us about the trio, when viewed dispassionately, suggests that Colby was probably a KGB asset and had a long standing feud with Angleton; it suggests McCoy had reason to hate Angleton for stymieing his career (McCoy was part of the CIA’s distrusted Soviet Division); and it also suggests that Kalaris was ignorant of Washington politics and had a stagnant career in a  South American backwater before the Angleton take-down. Colby’s three big sources have their own reasons for distorting Angleton’s legacy.

History, as Cleveland Cram well knows, is written by the victors.

I’ll let Mangold’s own words make my point that these three men are untrustworthy.  As background, William Colby served in the OSS (which was ripe with Soviet plants) in Italy alongside Angleton. Colby became chief of the CIA’s Far East Division, where he actively frustrated Angleton’s counterintelligence efforts, ostensibly to protect his own turf.

Mangold on Colby’s KGB ties:

During the Vietnam era, Angleton even went so far as to harbor doubts about Colby’s loyalty, suspicions that were raised after Colby had become the subject of an Angleton-directed security investigation.

While serving in Saigon, Colby had casually met a French medical doctor on three or four social occasions. According to the CIA’s book of rules, a station chief like Colby should have reported all substantive meetings with potentially useful foreigners, but he appears not have done so in this case. He had been unaware at the time that the Frenchman was suspected of being a Soviet GRU agent. Later, the CIA picked up some of the doctor’s incriminating radio transmissions from Vietnam. Years later, the doctor was caught in Paris by French security officials passing intelligence documents to his GRU case officer.

Colby quashed the investigation of his meetings with the French GRU agent after he became Executive Director-Comptroller of the CIA. At best, Colby was incompetent and sloppy– but you know what I think– Colby was recruited by the GRU in Saigon. Colby later became Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).

Mangold describes McCoy as, “a young Soviet Division reports officer who later rose to become deputy chief of the Counterintelligence Staff after Angleton.” From bête noire to deputy fox in the counterintelligence hen-house at Angleton’s expense!

Finally, Mangold on George Kalaris’ background: “George Kalaris could not have been more neutral to the Angleton controversies had he come from halfway up the Amazon– which, in effect he did.” Mangold adds this tidbit about Kalaris’ early career: “In the course of a notable career in the clandestine side of the house, he [Kalaris] became one of Colby’s trusted Far East specialists.” Kalaris may have been an ignorant castaway in Brazil, but was definitely not “neutral”!

It always amazes me how American ‘experts’ can switch regions of ‘expertise’ from one side of the globe to another at the drop of a hat. (This isn’t just a CIA-proper phenomenon, but a think-tank and academic problem too. Hmmm.) Something went wrong for Colby’s boy in the Far East: Kalaris was shunted off to Brazil before being called to Washington D.C. for Angleton’s undoing. Kalaris orchestrated the burning of Angleton’s files and oversaw the creation of Angleton’s  ‘official history’ at the CIA.

So these three men are Mangold’s primary sources,  a.nolen readers. It’s impossible for Mangold to completely sweep their biases under the rug; he tries to deflect criticism of his analysis by mentioning these biases and finding excuses why they don’t matter– a common trick that didn’t work on this reader.

While the characters of Kalaris, McCoy and Colby are fascinating, I am particularly interested in what Mangold accuses Angleton of doing, because these accusations shed light on Colby, and his superiors’, motives.

According to Mangold and his sources, Angleton was doing unprofessional work that didn’t follow acceptable business practice. Specifically, Angleton was using data from the 1920s and 1930s to try to ‘catch spies’ in the 1960s. He came up with theories that didn’t make sense to any of his superiors, THEREFORE the files which Angleton believed supported these theories had to be immediately burned, with a new, official history of Angleton’s research created to replace them. The lack of Soviet agents who were caught is evidence of Angleton’s incompetence. So says Mangold.

I don’t believe that story and I can use Mangold’s own evidence to counter it.

First of all, it wasn’t Angleton’s job to ‘catch’ spies. His job was to monitor them, as described by Mangold: “His [Angleton's] department was expected to collect information and to monitor clandestine operations aimed at disrupting and neutralizing the Soviet intelligence services.”

‘No spies being caught under Angleton’s watch,’ is only evidence of a lack of political will from his superiors, like James Schlesinger, to act on the information Angleton presented to them. It doesn’t necessarily mean Angleton was giving bad information– and we’ll never know if he was, because his files were burned by his replacement.

An anonymous source gives Mangold this description of how CIA leadership reacted when they found out about Angleton’s ‘Monster Plot’ investigations: “My God, if we had only known this was going on, we could have stopped it years ago. We just didn’t know; the seventh floor didn’t pay close attention to what Angleton was doing.”

This means, anolen.com readers, that CIA brass hired Angleton then pretty much ignored him, and everything he was doing, for twenty years. I believe ‘The Seventh Floor’ was so remiss because Angleton was hired to be a fig-leaf, someone to show Congress and to convince representatives that the sprawling CIA tumor was actually acting in the nation’s interests. ‘The Seventh Floor’ chose Angleton because they believed he wasn’t good enough to sniff out their conflicting loyalties. They didn’t see Angleton as a threat; therefore he was ignorable. You can find my reasoning here.

As a corollary to the ‘Floor Seven Didn’t Know’ story, Mangold belabors his point that Angleton’s superiors, the men Angleton reported Soviet-spy-evidence to, ‘just didn’t understand any of Angleton’s ramblings’. (Yet Angleton stayed on staff 20 years!)

For instance, Mangold quotes James Schlesinger:

“Listening to him was like looking at an Impressionist painting,” Schlesinger explains. “Jim’s mind was devious and allusive, and his conclusions were woven in a quite flimsy manner. His long briefings would wander on, and although he was attempting to convey a great deal, it was always smoke, hints, and bizarre allegations… if it had gone on much longer, and I had stayed, I would have seen there was nothing behind the curtain and I would have moved him.”

Uh, okay James, whatever you say. Colby’s press source Seymour Hersh (a Michael Hastings predecessor?) tells it this way:

“After talking to Angleton, I then called Colby up to tell him that I thought his man was totally off the reservation– that, in essence, he was totally crazy.”

If that wasn’t enough, lefty Mangold brings out the big guns: George H. Bush.

The following day, the future President of the United States telephoned George Kalaris to tell him about the meeting [with Angleton]. “Geroge, I listened very carefully to Jim Angleton yesterday, ” Bush said frankly.  “But I’m afraid I couldn’t really understand what he was talking about. It all sounded very complicated.”

And of course, Mangold’s readers are inundated by a barrage of  “Crazy! Incompetent! Nonsense!” from Kalaris, Colby and McCoy.

Personally, I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about the ‘Monster Plot':  ‘At least one CIA division, and dozens of public figures, have been infiltrated/recruited by the Soviets.’  We now know from the Venona files that the OSS, the CIA’s feeder-pool, was heavily infiltrated by Soviets. Since the 1970s, a lot of information has come out about celebrities and politicians who worked with Soviet agents; enough information to make authors like M. Stanton Evans question if McCarthy wasn’t too tame in his red hunts.

But Angleton’s insights were just too hard for Schlesinger, Bush, Colby, etc. to get their heads around. (Though they understood the Monster Plot well enough to know that Angleton’s work had to be burned!)

In reality, ‘The Seventh Floor’ understood what Angleton was on to so well that no dissent was tolerated once Angleton had been removed:

“Virtually everyone volunteered damaging appraisals of Angleton’s work. There was near unanimity that Colby had made the correct decision to fire him. Many officers said that Angleton’s retirement was the best thing that could have happened to the agency’s counterintelligence program.

Finally– this is the most interesting bit– Mangold says Angleton was incompetent in his research methods:

According to former CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston, “Jim’s [Angleton's] staff spent too much time reviewing old historical cases which had little relevance to current affairs. They would go over and over old cases like ‘The Trust’ and Rote Kapelle. They spent weeks and months on it.  To me it seemed like a waste of time.”

And…

Critics of Angleton’s methodology say that both he and Rocca wasted enormous quantities of time studying the gospels of prewar Soviet intelligence operations at the very moment that the KGB had shifted the style and emphasis of its operations against the West. Leonard McCoy points out that “The Trust” was largely irrelevant to the counterintelligence work of the 1960s because it had existed in a “totally different KGB and a totally different world.” He explains: “This was a world in the 1920s and early 1930s in which there were one and a half million refuees from the Soviet Union, and it was easly enough for Soviet officials to penetrate and manipulate a large group like that. No such group existed by the 1950s…”

Kim Philby, the rogue British spy who Angleton is criticized for not seeing through, had been recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s. He wasn’t outed until the 1960s. Angleton’s historical methods were not foolish, they were smart.

Here’s the thing about the 1920s and 1930s: the political climate in the US was such that influential Soviet sympathizers could be open about their allegiance. Much publicly-available– and vetted– information on likely Soviet agents exists from this period. Investigations surrounding Rote Kappelle and ‘The Trust’ are two notable sources, HOWEVER, The Lusk Report and the Palmer Raids are two even more likely sources for Angleton to have used. (Mangold is careful not to mention these *highly probable* sources.)

The Lusk Report and the Palmer Raids were the result of the US Department of Justice’s efforts to undermine foreign spies’ political machinations through the labor movement. The Palmer Raids were dragnet raids on suspected Soviet front operations, and while some Americans’ rights were violated, the raids broke up Trotsky’s henchman Ludwig Martens’ US spy networks. Being an outspoken American, I’m glad this happened on balance, because neither Trotsky, Lenin nor Stalin had any respect for anyone’s rights and Palmer had strong reasons to suspect certain East Coast labor organizations of being Bolshevik fronts. (Not all labor organizations were raided.)

The fall out from the Palmer Raids is interesting, because many prominent people in the Woodrow Wilson administration spoke out on behalf of the socialist ‘victims’. Famous names like Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound, Ernst Freund joined forces with the newly-flegded ACLU to lambast Palmer, and even Harvard professor Zechariah Chafee jumped on the bandwagon. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Freeland Post  canceled more than 2,000  of Palmer’s warrants as being illegal. In effect, The Wilson Administration came down on the side of Martens, though Palmer had disrupted operations enough to prevent a Bolshevik Revolution happening on American soil– for the time being.

The Wilson Administration’s actions are only surprising if you haven’t read Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, in which Sutton documents the close working relationship between investment bankers, mining magnates and Lenin’s regime. This collaboration was better known at the time than it is now.

The political backlash from Wilson’s administration became so vicious that Attorney General Palmer’s career was ruined; but his second-in-command, J. Edgar Hoover, had his career made. (Readers will remember that Hoover worked with Stephenson and FDR to set up what became the CIA. Hoover was an expert in manipulating Congress and undermining political opposition to the Executive Branch.)

Angleton would have gleaned a lot of useful information from reading about who opposed Palmer in Wilson’s cabinet, then looking into which other careers were fostered by these ‘broad-minded’ men.

Regular readers will know that I’m not adverse to historical revisionism. Having read Mangold’s book, this is what I think really went on with Angleton:

At some time during Angleton’s twenty-year tenure, perhaps after the Philby incident, Angleton realized there was a strong pro-Soviet current running through the Anglophile circles he was used to. This current was culturally alien to him and it didn’t sit well. The open secret of Soviet sympathies amongst some of the UK and the USA’s most well-heeled and powerful citizens looked more sinister to Angleton than it originally had back in the 1920s. Angleton’s buddies from Cambridge University had been recruited in the 1930s and were only just being outed as spies. Quietly, Angleton began to open files and pay more attention to dinner talk. He began to check the public record for powerful people who spoke out in support of known soviet agents like Ludwig Martens in the 1920s and 1930s, back when Philby was recruited.

Angleton’s inquiries lead him to suspect people close to the White House and CIA leadership. Angleton uncovered Soviet spy networks that had been in place since the OSS, and a rash of informants at the CIA’s Soviet Division. Angleton’s discoveries were so pervasive that he started to distrust the entire CIA structure, and began to segregate his files from those of the rest of the organization. None of Angleton’s activities raised red flags with CIA leadership because the leadership wasn’t paying attention to their stooge in counterintelligence.

When Angleton began to talk to his superiors, testing the water with names of 30 world leaders suspected of working with the Soviets, his superiors showed no political will to pursue Angleton’s claims. Men like James Schlesinger didn’t respect Angleton enough to take what he was doing seriously, until something happened, and they realized Angleton had information that was deadly to them. Suddenly Angleton was  ‘crazy’, his records had to be burned, and he would be sent as a sacrifice to the Church Committee. The CIA’s history would need to be rewritten by Colby and Kalaris through the Cram Report, something career-minded CIA professionals accept as gospel.

Now, I’m not claiming that everything Angleton did was smart. I’m not saying that Angleton was completely right or that he didn’t have emotional problems. I’m not saying Anatoliy Golitsyn wasn’t a troublemaker. I’m not saying that there weren’t serious cultural problems in Angleton’s counterintelligence division.

In fact, in light of all the ‘intelligence community’ pundits who have screamed “KGB!” since the beginning of Snowden’s revelations, I find this quote from Angleton about the Church Committee quite amusing:

The former Counterintelligence chief turned up at Langley sweaty, tired, and deeply distraught. As he calmed down, Angleton began to explain to Elder in quiet and measured tones that he had uncovered a “diabolical plot”.

“The Church Committee has opened up the CIA to a frontal assault by the KGB,” he said. “This is the KGB’s chance to go for the jugular. The whole plan is being masterminded by Kim Philby in Moscow. The KGB’s only object in the world is to destroy me and the agency. The committee is serving as the unwitting instrument of the KGB.”

Clearly, Angleton was capable of the same tunnel-vision as his sucessors are today.

However, if you have access to enough information, perhaps you don’t have to be very smart or balanced to realize that something is wrong at the CIA. I ask readers not to look to Angleton’s character for proof of vast Soviet infiltration, but to look to the reactions of Angleton’s enemies at the CIA. Forty years later and the CIA is still protecting traitors who feared Angleton.

Tom Mangold’s book, the CIA’s favorite Angleton book, does more to uncover the ‘Monster Plot’ than Angleton could ever have hoped to do in his lifetime. I encourage the public, and CIA employees, to read Cold Warrior and ask themselves if this is an organization they want to have access to their health records, financial records and personal communications.

P.S. Why Tom Mangold? Tom is a product of the BBC, an organization that was set up by the same people who set up the British Security Coordinate (BSC)– the BBC and BSC were both set up by Bill Stephenson and his supporters. The BSC worked with the OSS, which became the CIA. So you could say that the BBC and the CIA were birthed from the same mother.

P.P.S. If you’d like to learn more about why J. Edgar Hoover was the darling of America’s anti-democratic elite, and how he undermined ‘undesirable’ — not illegal– grass-roots political movements on the left and right, read The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, by William C Sullivan. This book explains why it’s toxic to have PRISM-like dragnet surveillance systems in a democracy: the controllers of such a system will use it to persecute their opposition, not the nation’s enemies.

Was Walt Disney the first American victim of FDR’s illegal spy network?

Last night I watched an old Disney cartoon called “The Golden Touch,” which is a retelling of the famous Greek myth about King Midas. This cartoon has a message: if you hoard gold, you’re not only stupid, but also immoral.

“The Golden Touch” makes a special effort to ridicule the idea that ‘Gold is Money’ by conspicuously showing ‘In Gold I Trust’ signs plastered all over the foolish King Midas’s palace.  The phrase ‘In God We Trust’ has been used on American coins and dollar bills since 1864.

I’m telling you this, because Walt Disney released “The Golden Touch” at an interesting time: the cartoon came out in March 1935, about a year after Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed his 1934 Gold Reserve Act, which was proving wildly unpopular amongst the public. The act was the last in a series of unpopular gold laws:

1) In 1933, Executive Order 6102  prohibited the “hoarding” of gold by any individual, partnership, association or corporation. Everyone, with small exceptions for tradesmen like jewelers and dentists, had to sell their gold to the Treasury before May 1st, 1933 when the price of gold was something like $23/ounce. This order was tweeked a few times in subsequent months.

2) One year later, in 1934, The Gold Reserve Act outlawed the private possession of gold. The Act also ordered the Treasury to buy gold  for $35/ounce– $12 higher than the market price before the Act became law!

Understandably, American gold owners felt cheated. The Treasury’s artificially high gold price also caused gold from all over the world to flow into the USA, where the Treasury was legally required to buy it. Some historians view FDR’s gold policy as economic warfare and part of the lead up to WWII.

So many people were outraged by FDR’s gold policy that by 1934 FDR had an epic PR battle on his hands. Franklin would need to use everything at his disposal to bend public will.

The point of this post, readers, is to suggest that Walt Disney began his collaboration with FDR well before the official date of 1941: Disney started his collaboration in 1934 when “The Golden Touch” began production and FDR desperately needed help. I argue Disney’s ‘help’ backfired on him and the Studios.

The production process for “The Golden Touch” had many unusual characteristics. Disney himself hadn’t directed a cartoon in some time, but decided to ‘get back in the game’ and oversea “The Golden Touch” personally.

According to Dave Hand, who ran one of Disney Studio’s production units:

“Well, it seems Walt got itchy fingers and decided HE would direct a picture. The fact that he had never directed any picture never occurred to him. So Walt took what I supposed to be a very good story, ‘King Midas and the Golden Touch’ from the story department. It was all pretty much ‘hush-hush’. He worked on it in his business office set-up. The thing that galled me was that he assigned every one of the ten animators to his ‘Midas’ picture. And I had to do with the beginner guys. The other two directors had to get along with second raters, also. We directors were not invited to see any preliminary animation—nothing was shown until preview time. The cost of the picture was way over budget it was rumored. So what—they were Walt’s costs. I mean to be fair minded, but to be honest, I’ve just got to say—it was a dismal flop. That was the first and last of Walt’s directorial attempts.”

Disney historian Jim Korkis disputes Hand’s version of events:

Of course, you have to be careful trusting even first-person accounts of events. Obviously, Walt had directed shorts before, just not while Hand was there at the studio. While the budget was high, the other Silly Symphonies for the year ranged from the $20,000-$35,000 so it wasn’t wildly over the cost of some of the other Silly Symphonies that year.

The Golden Touch was made at a cost of $35,458.19. Music Land that same year came in at $35,054.55 and The Tortoise and the Hare at $32,671.76. Of course, it could be argued that The Golden Touch with basically only two characters and no major special effects should have come in at a lower cost.

Walt did not steal away ten top animators. He only took two animators: the two top animators at the studio at the time.

Those two special animators were Norm Ferguson and Fred Moore, while storyboarding was done by Albert Hurter. Jack Kinney (who directed Disney propaganda cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face”) wrote this about “The Golden Touch” in his 1989 book Walt Disney and Other Assorted Characters :

“Burt [Gillett)]s exodus really griped Walt who said, ‘Who needs him? I’ll direct in his place.’ And so he did, using his top animators from The Three Little Pigs—Norm Ferguson and Freddie Moore. Walt moved into his own music room and started making The Golden Touch, the King Midas story.

“This was a very hush-hush operation, with just two animators, who were sworn to secrecy. The entire studio awaited this epic, and finally it was finished and previewed at the Alex Theater in Glendale. All personnel turned out to see what Walt had wrought. He had wrought a bomb! The Golden Touch laid a great big golden egg. That picture was the last Walt ever directed. We knew better than to discuss it, ever. It was forgotten and the studio went on to other things.

“Years later, Walt roared into Jaxon’s [Wilfred Jackson] office and started chewing him out about something or other. Jaxon was usually a very calm guy, but he was a redhead and this time he blew his cool. ‘Walt,’ he said, “I recollect that you once directed a picture called The Golden Touch.’ There was instant silence. Walt stared at Jaxon, then stomped out, slamming the door.

“As Jaxon described it, after a few beats, the door opened and Walt’s head popped back in. Wearing a heavy frown and very slowly punctuating his words with his finger, he said, ‘Never, ever mention that picture again.’ Then he slammed the door and clumped down the hall.

“Needless to say, it was never mentioned again.”

What I think we can take home is that “The Golden Touch” was a very secretive project that Disney was sensitive about and wanted to oversee himself. The cartoon was also a flop and I ask readers to remember that “The Golden Touch” was unprofitable for Disney.

“The Golden Touch”  itself was part of a larger propaganda campaign supporting FDR’s gold policy, which involved Good Housekeeping magazine, as well as other prominent media outlets. According to Jim Korkis:

The story [The Golden Touch] appeared in a full- page color adaptation in the November 1934 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine to publicize the upcoming release of the short. Six illustrated panels told the tale in rhyme: “A wiser, better, happier king. He’s learned that gold’s not everything.”

Nearly a decade later, in the comic book Walt Disney’s and Comics and Stories No. 20 (May 1942) there was a three-page illustrated text story of the short, using the illustrations from the Good Housekeeping magazine.

More intriguingly was that, in 1937, publisher David McKay’s Whitman Publishing Company released an entire hardcover book devoted to the story from the film. In close to a 150 pages (with a black and white illustration on each page and many full-page illustrations facing text pages, as well as six full-color pictures), an uncredited writer effectively expands on the story with some interesting additions including Midas sharing his hamburger with his cat at the end of the story: “His dining hall was no use to him now, for he could not eat gold. His bathroom was equally useless, as the water would become a liquid golden mass at his touch. His bedroom would be even more useless since who could sleep between golden sheets and wighed down by a golden eiderdown?”

“The Golden Touch” was clearly useful to FDR and his friends, but Walt Disney was not amused at being left to pay for the commercial flop. It could be that Disney was reluctant to dabble in propaganda again after getting his fingers burned on Midas…

Fast forward five years to 1940. Disney had just released to the public his personal masterpiece, Fantasia, which I wrote about here. Most critics loved it, except one in particular, Dorothy Thompson, who had switched her political allegiance to FDR one month before her review of Fantasia. (TIME called her the most influential women in the USA after Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife.) Dorothy Thompson tried to destroy Fantasia in her Herald Tribune review by claiming the film was ‘Nazi’! She painted Disney in colors which signaled to FDR’s well-monied supporters that Disney Studios should be shunned and shamed.

In 1940 Thompson’s readership was huge– in the millions– and she was one of the most widely-talked about female journalists. Just how bad was Thompson’s review of Fantasia? From Steven Watts’ The Magic Kingdom:

On November 25th 1940, Dorothy Thompson published a long review of Fantasia entitled “Minority Report”” in the New York Herald Tribune, and it set off a major imbroglio. Given the essay’s extreme sentiments, it was little wonder. “I left the theater in a condition bordering on nervous breakdown. I felt as though I had been subjected to an assault,” Thompson wrote. Disney’s film, she asserted, was “a performance of Satanic defilement,” “a remarkable nightmare, ” “brutal and brutalizing.” As she went on , she ratcheted her anger several notches higher: “All I could think to say of the ‘experience’ as I staggered out was that it was ‘Nazi.’ The word did not arise out of an obsession. Nazism is the abuse of power, the perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race turned into black magical destruction and so is ‘Fantasia.'” Disney and his concert film, Thompson accused, had launched an attack on “the civilized world” by providing a sick caricature of the “Decline of the West.” Warming to her theme, she made two specific complaints. First the film reflected a “sadistic, gloomy, fatalistic, pantheistic,” anti-humanist philosophy where “Nature is titanic; man is a moving lichen on the stone of time.” Second, she insisted, Disney and Stokowski had concocted an assault on civilized culture that made a  mockery of great classical composers. The degradation of the Beethoven segment alone should have been “sufficient to raise and army, if there is enough blood left in culture to defend itself,” Thompson wrote angrily, before noting that she stormed out of the theater unwilling to witness the film’s concluding degradation of Mussorgsky and Schubert.

Ms. Thompson’s wild accusations of Nazism and ‘misuse’ of classical music, as well as her preoccupation with culture wars, remind me of Herbert Marcuse’s work and the ‘Frankfurt School’ political theorists. In two years’ time FDR would employ Marcuse as part of his personal propaganda and intelligence apparatus, the OSS:

Marcuse worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) formed in 1942 to conduct psychological warfare against the Axis Powers. After the end of World War II, the pivotal section of the OSS, the Research and Analysis Branch, was assigned to the Department of State.

Were Walt Disney and his masterwork Fantasia the first victims of FDR’s WWII propaganda machine? Did Walt Disney, who was possibly reluctant to cooperate with FDR after “The Golden Touch”, find himself on the receiving end of Franklin’s media bitch-bulldog?

William Boyd of The Guardian says that William Stephenson, the British spy and FDR’s co-conspirator in forming the OSS, used his position as head of the British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York to influence reporting at Thompson’s employer, the Herald Tribune–  influence that was well entrenched by late 1940 when Thompson wrote her take-down of Fantasia.

Dorothy Thompson, whose employer The Herald Tribune, was manipulated by British spy and FDR crony William Stephenson.

But Dorothy Thompson’s attacks were not the only FDR-aligned catastrophe to hit Disney before he agreed to become Franklin’s ambassador to South America.

Fantasia was not a financial success and after 1940 Disney Studios was in need of money. On top of that, they were hit by a strike on May 29th 1941, which was lead by secret Communist Party member and Soviet spy Herbert Sorrell. (Bear in mind that FDR and Stalin were allies at this time, and secret FDR collaboration with the Soviet NKGB had started at around the time of the Disney strikes. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan would ‘legitimize’ this informal relationship between the NKGB and the OSS in 1944.) Perhaps all FDR had to do in 1941 was make a phone call?

Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, says that this strike hit Disney completely out of the blue: he couldn’t understand where it came from and why it had such “virulence”. The strike was one of two events that Disney couldn’t recover from, she says in Walt and El Grupo.

One week after the start of the strike on June 5th, FDR ‘asked’ Walt to take part in a US propaganda mission to South America, which is the subject of the Disney Corporation’s 2008 documentary Walt and El Grupo. (In the documentary Walt Disney described the 1941 period in his life as “the toughest for me” and filled with ” a lot of disappointments”. At 08:31 you can see a brief glimpse of a memo marked “WALT” and “Bob Carr” which outlines the propaganda plans for Disney’s South American trip. Bob Carr was a mayor of Orlando, Florida who oversaw the opening of the Disney theme park there. Carr’s politics seem to align with FDR’s.)

The Disney Studios strike wasn’t resolved until the end of Walt Disney’s South American tour of duty. Disney’s father had died in the meantime. But what does that matter? FDR got what he wanted.

Walt Disney Studios would limp through WWII making propaganda cartoons for FDR and his Brit-spy buddies. Remember BSC asset Roald Dahl and his gremlins?

Hey, Air Force! Merchandise!

Walt may have been forced to participate in 1941 propaganda drives, but whether he was or not, he made sure that Disney Studios wouldn’t loose money on disastrous government propaganda films. Consider this clip from Walt and El Grupo, where J B Kaufmann describes how Walt painstakingly negotiated with the US government to make sure Disney Studios wouldn’t be stuck with the bill for a propaganda flop… like what happened with “The Golden Touch”?

Once Disney worked out the kinks in his government contracts, he cooperated fully with US Armed Forces and the Executive Branch to make many different forms of propaganda, as described here by Lisa Briner of the Army Heritage and Education Center:

An important factor ensuring America’s ultimate victory over the Axis Powers in World War II was the overwhelming and unwavering support of the Home Front. Contributing much to creating and maintaining that Home Front support were Walt Disney films. Meanwhile, morale-boosting Disney-designed insignia that soon appeared on planes, trucks, flight jackets, and other military equipment accomplished the same for American and Allied forces.

During the war Disney made films for every branch of the U.S. government. Typical of the films was the 1943 “The Spirit of ’43” produced at the request of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. The film depicted Donald Duck dealing with federal income taxes and pointing out the benefit of paying his taxes in support of the American war effort.

At the Navy’s request, the Disney Studios also produced, in just three months, some 90,000 feet of training film to educate sailors on navigation tactics. Disney animators also worked closely with Hollywood producer Frank Capra and created what many consider to be the most brilliant animated maps to appear in a series of seven highly successful “Why We Fight” films.

During the war, over 90 percent of Disney employees were devoted to the production of training and propaganda films. In all, the Disney Studios produced some 400,000 feet of film representing some 68 hours of continuous film. Included among the films produced was “Der Fuehrer’s Face” again featuring Donald Duck. It won the Oscar as the best animated film for 1943.

Perhaps the importance of the Disney Studios to the war effort is best demonstrated by the fact that the U.S. Army deployed troops to protect the facilities, the only Hollywood studio accorded such treatment.

(Emphasis is my own- a.nolen)

I think it’s more than likely that FDR called on Disney for political support in 1934; I think it’s also very likely that Disney ended up feeling cheated by FDR. When FDR’s war effort got rolling, the president had to use his British illegal spy friends and their ‘dirty tricks’ to coerce his fellow American into jumping on board.

FDR’s propaganda machine cost Disney more than just his integrity. In 1941– the year Disney became an ‘official spokesperson’ for the US government in South America– Disney Studios lost its brilliant special effects guru, Herman Schultheis, who was responsible for many of the revolutionary artistic effects in Fantasia. Herman Schultheis was German-born and probably didn’t pass the US government’s ‘security clearance’ requirements. Schultheis left Disney to work in the research library at Librascope: a huge loss for Disney Studios and American cultural heritage.

How did Walt Disney feel about his wartime propaganda efforts? He was probably too scared to ever talk about it, but I suspect the 1961 creation of kind, loveable Prof. Ludwig Von Drake with Ward Kimball (who animated Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi) was a type of personal penance.

—

P.S. Writing this post on Disney turned up so many interesting tidbits on Dorothy Thompson that I just have to list some here.

First of all, Dorothy made her name as a suffragette in the New York political milieu that was so heavily financed by Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, who also financed the British agent provocateur and war-monger Emmeline Pankhurst, and whose family money made Winston Churchill’s career possible. Working for Alva as a suffragette also launched the career of Roald Dahl’s political bedfellow Clare Boothe Luce.

Curiously, both Dorothy Thompson and Clare Boothe Luce were given journalistic roles after their ‘suffragette’ ones: Dorothy covered Hitler for Cosmopolitan magazine (you know– it’s now a sex rag like the type George Orwell hated); while Clare Boothe Luce became an editor at both Vogue and Vanity Fair, and then covered WWII for TIME. You could say these fabulous women paved the way for journalistic mega-millionaires like Gawker.com’s Nick Denton.

Dorothy Thompson and Clare Boothe Luce both did a lot of ‘agenda flip-flopping’ throughout their careers– Dorothy was so bad that TIME magazine called her “iron-whimmed“, though you could argue Luce wasn’t much better. For most of her career Dorothy Thompson could be counted on to be a venomous ‘shrieker’ in support of whatever cause gained her strokes from the powerful. Dorothy paved the way for modern agenda prostitutes like Little Green Football’s Charles Johnson.

Finally, Dorothy and Clare had a famous falling out over Dorothy’s mid-campaign  switch from supporting Wendell Wilkie’s presidential bid to supporting FDR’s. Since these two women are credited with shaping many American women’s political opinions at the time, you could say that Dorothy’s switch had more than a touch of the Hegelian Dialectic about it. Dorothy Thompson and Clare Boothe Luce paved the way for modern democracy managers like the staff at BuzzFeed and their ex-editor Benny Johnson.

Mrs. Luce got into a scrap with Democrat Dorothy Thompson during the Roosevelt-Wilkie campaign, and witnessed the “almost physical pleasure” men got out of watching that fight. From this she learned that “men will turn what two women say into a hair-pulling battle, and the issue the women are fighting over will be forgotten.” (From The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9th 1980).

It seems I’ll never be short of reasons to dislike FDR’s ‘Office of Strategic Services’, the forerunner to our beloved CIA. Today I’m going to tell the sordid tale of how and why OSS/BSC heavy-weight Ernest Cuneo attacked Gen. George S. Patton in 1943.

Cuneo, a New York lawyer who represented radio personalities, used his client and BSC pet-journalist Drew Pearson to spread a story about Patton: that Patton had cruelly slapped a shell-shocked soldier during one of his hospital visits. In the original story Cuneo said that because of the attack, Patton would no longer be used in the European war theater. This is how Michael S. Sweeney explains the incident in his book Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press:

Pearson publicly defended what he had published and broadcast about Welles and Hull, but privately he fretted about some of this audience abandoning him. He conferred with Ernest Cuneo, his radio lawyer, who served the government as a liaison among British intelligence, the FBI and the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Cuneo said a big, exclusive story would make people forget the president’s criticism. And since his government job gave him access to military intelligence, he suggested Pearson broadcast a Patton story he had heard.79

Pearson apparently had no doubts about the story’s authenticity. He discussed the details with the War Department which declined to issue a denial. 80 Pearson’s radio network took the story to the Office of Censorship. On the afternoon of November 14^th, 1943, WMAL’s Neel sent Pearson’s script to the censors’ Broadcasting Division. The sixth and seventh pages included the following item:

Algiers– General George Patton, nicknamed “Blood and Guts,” will not be used in any European war theatre anymore. He was a bit too bloody for the morale of the Army. Inspecting an American hospital in Sicily, General Patton noticed several soldiers listed as “fatigue” patients. Fatigue means a cas of nerves or shell-shock. Patton ordered one man to stand up. The soldier, out of his head, told the General to duck down or the shells would hit him. Instead, Patton struck the soldier, knocking him down. The commanding doctor rushed in, told Patton that in the field Patton was in command of his troops, but in the hospital he, the doctor was in command of this patients. He ordered General Patton not to interfere. General Patton started to draw a gun, but was disarmed. He will not be used in important combat anymore.81

Sweeney, the author writing above, says Pearson’s story can’t be corroborated and is almost entirely false. Neither Pearson nor the US government appear to have taken any action against Ernest Cuneo. (It’s worth noting that the CIA is pleased with Sweeney’s depiction of US censorship efforts during WWII, because his book “focuses on the success of the program“.)

Sweeney suggests that Pearson’s story resulted in Patton being given less control over the European front, ultimately leaving more of Eastern Europe under Soviet control. Never the less, Patton continued to prove himself to be an excellent commander and by the end of the war he had immense prestige and popular appeal– a dangerous place to be under the FDR administration!

Why would a man like Cuneo attack Patton, especially in the middle of a war?

Ernest Cuneo with Margaret Watson.

Ernest Cuneo was a trusted member for FDR’s “palace guard”, perhaps more honestly named ‘traitorous spy ring’. General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, made Cuneo a liaison between the OSS, British Security Coordination (BSC), the FBI, the United States Department of State (‘Surrogate’ to the Rooskies!!), and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Prior to his spook appointment, Cuneo was a New York City lawyer/political wheeler-dealer and ‘fixer’ for the Roosevelt Administration.

General George S. Patton was the political opposite of Ernest Cuneo. Patton made a career out of the US Army: he served in the Pancho Villa Expedition, WWI and finally WWII. Patton distrusted the Soviets, Cuneo’s close-working allies. As early as 1943, one year after the OSS was officially formed, pro-Soviet OSS operatives like Cuneo were working out how to dispose of prominent Americans who didn’t support their agenda.

Gen. George Patton

What frightened Cuneo about Patton’s views? Consider that at the end of WWII, Patton suggested the USA should protect Europe by continuing to fight the Soviets. As you can imagine, this view was an anathema to the good OSS’ers who’d “drank the milk of FDR,” as Bill Colby’s boy Carl describes them. Shortly after airing his opinion, Patton died under mysterious circumstances.

It’s incredible to me that Cuneo could get away with smearing a general like Patton during WWII, especially under Washington’s pernicious ‘self-censorship’ regime. However, Cuneo’s actions are even more creepy when you compare them to what Soviet agents were trying to do in the US at the same time. There was little difference between FDR/BSC operations and Soviet operations against the American press, except maybe that FDR/BSC operations were more successful.

To flesh out that point, I’m going to describe a Soviet operation; an operation carried out and disclosed to the FBI by USSR agent Elizabeth Bentley. I’m also going to describe how Cuneo took over a huge swath of the American press on behalf of the OSS/BSC and then finally on behalf of the CIA. By the end of this you may feel that, from the perspective of the American people, there’s little difference between Moscow and Washington.

Soviet and OSS strategies were very similar with respect to the American media: they both wanted to control as much of it as possible so that they could broadcast their own messages, messages which were similar for the most part. To put Cuneo’s OSS propaganda in context, let’s look at what Elizabeth Bentley was doing for the Soviets.

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.

Elizabeth Bentley was a Soviet spy working in the 1930s- early ’40s. She was managed or ‘run’ by her lover Jacob ‘Golos’ (real name ‘Gold’). Neither of the pair were very good spooks because they were sloppy about security procedures. However, Elizabeth was given at least one interesting mission from my perspective: Gold told her to infiltrate the McClure publishing concern to find out if its editor (and owner) had ‘fascist’ sympathies– which really means Elizabeth was to find out if he could be useful to the Soviets. Kathryn S. Olmsted says this in Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley:

Unlike [Whittaker] Chambers, Elizabeth succeeded in rationalizing and accepting the Stalinist purges and the Hitler-Stalin pact. Timmy’s [Jacob Gold's] argument that the Soviets remained anti-fascist at heart seemed persuasive, especially after Elizabeth received her next assignment.

Timmy directed her to try again to spy on New York fascists. He wanted her to infiltrate the staff of a right-wing newspaper publisher, Richard Waldo of the McClure syndicate, to determine if he was a fascist agent. Elizabeth obediently took a job as Waldo’s secretary, but she reported to her disappointed lover that she found no evidence that her boss had fascist connections.

This mission appears to have happened sometime between August 1939 and November 1943, when Waldo died. It strikes me that what the Soviets couldn’t achieve by manipulating Waldo, their sympathizers ultimately achieved through the resources of allies at the OSS, namely Ernest Cuneo, who bought the McClure syndicate in 1952 after Waldo’s widow has sold it to James L. Lenahan. Lenahan had struggled to meet financial demands associated with the syndicate’s stock. According to a 1952 ‘News of Yore’ article by Erwin Knoll:

Control of the syndicate passed to the new owners with the pur­chase of a 1,000-share block of capital stock for $47,250 by Mr. Cuneo at an auction Thursday, Sept. 4. Mr. Cuneo outbid James L. Lenahan, former president and editor of the syndicate, and Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, attor­neys for the estate of the late Adelaide P. Waldo.

The attorneys had held the block of shares as security for a debt, and had themselves offered them for sale at auction.

Whatever financial pressure Lenahan was under, it was being ‘overseen’ by Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, the infamous Wall Street law firm. Samuel Untermeyer, the firm’s namesake, was a Woodrow Wilson supporter and active in carving up Austro-Hungarian resources after WWI. Untermeyer was a Zionist like his contemporary Herman Bernstein, and also like Bernstein, he dabbled in espionage:

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Untermyer acted as counsel to the German and Austro-Hungarian embassies. He also assisted an agent of the German government who wished to covertly purchase newspapers to influence public opinion.[93] After America’s entry into the war, Untermyer had to temporarily suspend his sympathies with the Central Powers. After the war, however, he became counsel for an American syndicate that had acquired a one third share of the confiscated Habsburg Estates.[94] Following the resolution of a dispute between the syndicate and Archduke Frederick of Austria, Untermyer represented the Habsburg heir, who was seeking restitution of the other two-thirds of the estates.[95] He also represented eighteen of the heirs of the late Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who claimed ownership of oil fields in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq).[96]

So I’m sure there were no conflicts of interest when Mr. Untermeyer’s firm took up the Waldo account!

Lenahan’s financial distress coincides with a notable period for the McClure syndicate: the later war years through 1952, when comic strips were used to promote Washington’s domestic and international agenda. Lenahan’s McClure syndicate had a special focus on distributing comic strips such as ‘Superman’, in which ‘the Man of Steel’ (who wasn’t Stalin) did fictional battle with Washington’s WWII enemies like Hitler and Emperor Hirohito.

The comic-book propaganda didn’t end inside the US border. In 1946 ‘Superman’ did battle with American domestic political opposition the Ku Klux Klan. All this government collaboration didn’t make Lenahan enough money to get out from under the debts arranged through Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, which ended up costing Lenahan the company. Shades of Disney’s ‘The Golden Touch’?

Cuneo bought McClure in 1952, after having made an initial investment in the syndicate one year earlier with his partner John F.C. Bryce. However, Cuneo’s interest in the media went back to his OSS days.

Cuneo’s OSS mission was propaganda-centered: he would manipulate a swathe of the American media, much like his boss/co-conspirator William Stephenson who used his NYC connections to pervert reporting at the Herald Tribune and other broadsheets. While working for the OSS Cuneo fed friendly journalists BRITISH propaganda. ‘Friendly journalists’ include the following: Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, Robert Ingersoll, Whitelaw Reid, Dorothy Thompson, Edmond Taylor; and very likely include Edward Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith and William Shirer. Cuneo worked alongside newspaperman (and Roald Dahl mentor) Charles Marsh, Eleanor Patterson (Washington Times Herald, NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune owner), A. H. Sulzberger (owner of the NYT), George Baker (owner of the New York Post), and Ogden Reid (owner of the Herald Tribune). Only Hearst publications declined to join the FDR/BSC propaganda campaign, according to Jennet Conant in The Irregulars. That would explain Orson Wells’ 1941 movie ‘Citizen Kane’!

Rosebud! I’ve just realized why I’m such a miserable old codger– forgive me, Franklin!

By 1952 the OSS had become the CIA and the war was over, but the intelligence services never decolonized American media. After Cuneo and John F. C. Bryce (another old OSS agent and James Bond inspiration) purchased the McClure syndicate, Bryce was made president.

According to plans announced just before E&P went to press, John Wheeler, chairman of the board of the four affiliated Bell concerns, will serve in a similar capacity at McClure. John F. C. Bryce, who with Mr. Cuneo pur­chased a substantial interest in the group in March, 1951, will be president of the new acquisition. He holds the same title in Con­solidated News Features and Associated Newspapers. Joseph B. Agnelli, executive vice-president and general manager of the four companies, will be executive vice-president of McClure.

(Joseph B. Agnelli may actually be Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat heir. I couldn’t find *anything* on ‘Joseph B. Agnelli’, but Gianni was in NYC at about the right time to be involved in the McClure purchase– his only son was born in NYC in 1953.)

The McClure syndicate wasn’t Cuneo’s only purchase. He was on something of a newspaper-buying spree in the early 1950s: Cuneo also purchased NANA (North American Newspaper Alliance). NANA was famous for having sent communist sympathizer (and future KGB agent!) Ernest Hemingway to cover the Spanish Civil War, in which he also fought alongside the Communists. Hemingway would later become a rather lack-luster OSS agent, even by their standards.*

By the mid-1950s Cuneo and John F. C. Bryce had control of four newspaper networks: McClure, NANA, Associated Newspapers (now DMG Media, publishers of UK’s Daily Mail) and Consolidated News Features. Cuneo made sure other OSS buddies had sweet jobs in his new empire– he made BSC agent and ‘James Bond’ creator Ian Flemming NANA’s European Vice President. All this spookage has naturally lead more reflective observers like Rolling Stone and Playboy contributor Jules Siegel to question if Cuneo’s NANA was a simple CIA front.

I hope I’ve shown that what happened to Gen Patton was not an isolated instance of ‘shadow government’ overstepping its bounds and interfering in the intellectual life of a nation. What happened to General Patton is a symptom of a much larger infection; I believe that what Elizabeth Bentley tried to do was no worse than what Cuneo or any of his pet-journalists did. Of course, the dark specter hanging over all of this is Patton’s sudden heart failure on Dec 21^st 1945. (What is it with spooks and heart failure?!)

I’m not an expert on the death of General Patton, however, it appears that some evidence has come to light suggesting that the General was assassinated after his initial recovery from a car accident in Germany. If you’re interested in the details, I recommend reading this article by Robert K. Wilcox. Given the vicious nature of Soviet sympathizers close to the White House– consider the case of Walt Disney and Leonid Andreyev– I can easily believe that Eisenhower worked with OSS/NKVD contacts to assassinate Patton. It certainly wouldn’t have phased the Commander in Chief!

“George, the only limit to our realization of tomorrow is your doubts today.”

—

*Hemingway’s KGB work was outed by the Venona decrypts, a selection of which were made public in the mid-1990s. Some CIA-aligned historians have a hard time accepting that Hemingway would do such a thing and bend over backwards to convince themselves that Hemingway’s heart wasn’t with the KGB by pointing to Hemingway’s uselessness to the Russians. Hemingway was so useless that the KGB soon dropped him. These historians’ rosy-lensed view of Hemingway’s KGB work ignores the fact that Hemingway was all but useless to the OSS too. Hemingway apologists may find themselves in a similar dilemma to the battered wife who insists “He loves me”!

About three months ago I watched a BBC documentary on Helen Duncan, the famous WWII psychic, titled The Unexplained: The Blitz Witch. Tony Robinson is the host and you can watch it for free on Youtube here:

Helen Duncan was a WWII-era spirit medium who made two notable predictions about the sinking of British warships HMS Hood in May, 1941 and HMS Barham that November; these predictions ‘came true’. Helen had a well-heeled clientele, which included the head of Scottish Intelligence Brigadier Roy C. Firebrace, who was present for her prediction of the destruction of HMS Hood. (Firebrace was complicit, if not entirely comfortable, in the ‘forced repatriation’ of soldiers after WWII, which resulted in the murder of over two million men by Stalin– in my last post, Curtis Dall was quoted calling these repatriations “Eisenhower’s forced-repatriations“, see Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Great Betrayal.) Apparently, portends of the next life weighed heavily on Firebrace even prior to the Yalta conference.

Helen Duncan and some of her ‘ectoplasmic’ manifestations.

Firebrace visited Helen Duncan because, like many well-connected Brits at the time, he believed her psychic powers could give him useful information. What he heard about HMS Hood startled him, according to Firebrace’s wartime secretary Dr. Mary Austin in Tony Robinson’s Unexplained documentary:

[Tony Robinson reads from a 1959 magazine interview with  Brigadier Firebrace] During the War, I was head of intelligence in Scotland and I had the opportunity of attending a séance with Mrs. Duncan in Edinburgh…

[Dr. Austin] Tragedy! HMS Hood is sunk and all the men are sunken… something like that. [Her boss] couldn’t wait to get back to a telephone to get the Admiralty to tell him what he’d heard, that Hood had gone down. And they said “Rubbish!” No such thing. No, no, no. Wrong.

[Tony Robinson] He got another telephone call back from the Admiralty.

[Dr. Austin] Yes. Not then, but two days later.

[Tony Robinson] And what did they say?

[Dr. Austin] She’s quite right. All was lost.

[Tony Robinson] You don’t think that there was any way that either the Brigadier or Helen Duncan could have known that the Hood was sunk?

[Dr. Austin] No, no. Quite impossible. Quite impossible.

What happened next sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland: MI5 called in a crack team to investigate Helen Duncan which included Ian Fleming.  Over two years later, in 1944, Helen was charged with espionage but that charge was quickly changed to ‘pretending to talk to the dead’, which is illegal in Britain because of a 1735 law against witchcraft. The use of this act grabbed headlines in all the wrong ways.

Helen Duncan was the second-to-last British subject to be tried under that anti-witchcraft law. (A 72 year old woman was silenced using the same law shortly afterward.) The choice to use the Witchcraft Act to prosecute Duncan was so weird that Churchill himself wrote this to his secretary:

HOME SECRETARY [Herbert Morrison]

Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was used in a modern Court of Justice.

What was the cost of the trial to the state, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded for a fortnight, and the Recorder [His Lordship Sir Gerald Dodson] kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery…

– From Nina Shandler’s The Strange Case of Hellish Nell

Helen was given a show trial, complete with a famous comic-impersonator prosecutor (the son of a well-known comedian), and a bevy of star witnesses, including the agent provocateur and mystic debunker Harry Price. Rich patrons hired Helen a flashy, theatrical lawyer and prominent supporters of Duncan, including Blitz war-hero Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding and high-ranking Freemason Alfred Dodd, testified on her behalf. (I ask readers to remember that Duncan had high-level masonic supporters.) The Crown got what it wanted in the end: Helen Duncan was convicted and locked away until the end of WWII.

The majority of modern presentations of Helen Duncan’s story focus on 1) questions such as “Was she really psychic?” or 2) outrage over her ‘religious persecution’. These presentations willfully miss the point. Helen Duncan probably was a German spy or at least being used by German spies. What’s shocking about Helen’s story is that she *wasn’t* tried as a spy, but as a witchy fraud. Putting Duncan’s beliefs on trial was hugely dangerous for the British Government because in the 1940s Spiritualism was a politically powerful force with followers in the millions and growing. The Spiritualist movement was largely a middle-class one, making it well-funded, well-educated and *potentially* revolutionary: too many people were like Alfred Conan Doyle– searching for sons who’d died in needless wars.

In answer to Churchill’s question, the Crown took this calculated risk because talking about what Helen was doing in terms of espionage gambled with the safety of ongoing black-ops in Germany.

This post, readers, is about how networks of ‘psychics’ are used by intelligence operations– NOT for actionable intelligence, but to manipulate people who believe in psychics. Helen Duncan was charged with espionage initially because 1) her predictions were demoralizing to military/spook brass and 2) she had a suspicious habit of visiting locations that were sensitive to the planning of upcoming D-Day operations. Helen Duncan looked a lot like an enemy spook, and UK intel should know, because they were running a very similar operation against German military/spook brass at the same time. This is how Richard Crossman, Britain’s Political Warfare Executive during WWII, describes anti-German ‘psychic’ operations:

 Crossman even claimed that there was an ‘Astrological Programme’ whose audience inside Germany probably consisted of about forty individuals at most, but which it was believed was popular with senior members of the Nazi Party.³³ Its aim was to play on the fact that many senior Nazis were known to have an interest in astrology, feeding them gloomy astrological predictions about their military campaigns.

Sound anything like what Helen Duncan was doing? :)

British intelligence has been involved with the occult for a very long time. Aleister Crowley had been infiltrating and disrupting ‘secret societies’ on behalf of MI5’s predecessors since the late 1890s. Harry Price, the highest-profile hostile Helen Duncan witness, had sown discord in the Spiritualist movement since 1920, when he gave up a seedy career in antiques to become a ‘debunker’ for the Society for Psychical Research, an organization which included Aleister Crowley’s spook boss, Everard Feilding, as one of its luminaries.

Harry Price, a gent who knew something about showmanship.

Why was the British secret service so interested in spiritualists and the occult in general? The best answer to that question I’ve found comes from Richard B. Spence’s book Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Secret Societies like the Masons and religious movements like Spiritualism were “gateways to the British Establishment” and feeder-pools into the intelligence community.

While Freemasonry had become a worldwide organization by the 1890s, with various branches and jurisdictions, the United Grand Lodge of England and Wales (UGLE) remained the largest regular body, and Britain the most Masonic of countries. By 1900, the UGLE boasted almost 3000 lodges wi nearly 200,000 brethren.23 That was still a tiny minority out of a general population of some 33 million, but Masonic affiliation had become a virtual union card for admission to the British establishment. Thus, the proportion of Masons in governmental service (including intelligence agencies) was much, much higher than in the population generally.

(Since Helen had prominent Masonic supporters, you can understand how gingerly spooks like Fleming had to treat the Duncan trail, for fear of stepping on important toes AND outing their own unsavory ‘tricks’.)

Spence puts forward a convincing argument that Crowley was a British intelligence agent since his days at Cambridge, and that Crowley worked for William Melville, the original ‘M’. Spence suggests that domestic intelligence pros like Melville were concerned that these occult organizations would provide cover for Irish nationalist, Jacobite (‘Legitimist’) and Papist agitators and other anti-government groups. (Masonic off-shoots did count a number of  “regime change” specialists in their top ranks, such as Samuel MacGregor Mathers and Bertram Ashburnahm who, along with others, were busy running arms and fermenting revolutions across Europe in the late Victorian era.)

The Brits’ greatest competitors in using the occult sphere for intelligence work were the German secret services; in fact, the Germans appear to have been more adept:

Reuss’ [Theodor Reuss, German Intel operative] main achievement (with some help from the Austrian industrialist Karl Kellner) was the creation circa 1902 of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the “Order of Oriental Templars.” Second only to the Illuminati, perhaps, the OTO has earned a reputation as a center of conspiratorial skullduggery and even the dubious title of “The World’s Most Dangerous Secret Society.” 31

Outwardly, the OTO seems to have remained rather small and exclusive, thugh Reuss tirelessly recruited, out of both spiritual zeal and vanity, but also to use the Order as a cover for German intelligence.

It shouldn’t be surprising that German spooks were adept at handling  subversive secret societies, seeing as they’d been dealing with organizations like ‘the Illuminati’ since 1776.

Back in Britain spymasters such as Melville, and his counterintelligence counterparts, may have reasoned that British occult movements were an unguarded back door for German spies. The circles that Crowley practiced his ‘magic’ in were so thick with German operatives that at times it was difficult for contemporary onlookers to tell which bunch of spooks, exactly, Crowley worked for!

Not only were influential Brits enamored with the paranormal, but prominent Americans were as well. Abraham Lincoln participated in séances in the White House; Woodrow Wilson consulted psychics; Franklin Delano Roosevelt was ‘read’ by a psychic FBI informer and friend of J. Edgar Hoover; and Ronald Reagan had a few of psychic advisors.

What I’d like readers to take home is that influential people all over the world took this occult stuff very seriously. (Some still do!) Intelligence professionals realized that manipulating these beliefs could provide valuable information and counterintelligence protection as well providing vehicles for ‘black ops’ and disinformation of the type I described previously.

All this ‘Hellish Nell’ stuff was a lifetime ago. So why do documentaries like Tony Robinson’s, and books like The Strange Case of Hellish Nell, skirt the intelligence/occult connection? I suggest their skittishness is because such operations are still ongoing.

Here’s a Google Maps image of psychics, and psychic research institutes, which advertise and are located around London’s Whitehall district. (Whitehall Road is between the River Thames and ‘Michael Francois Psychic’.)

Here’s a Google Maps image of practicing psychics’ location around the Capitol area of Washington D.C.

Psychics practicing near Congress.

Each red call out box is a psychic business. There are three on the road between the Capitol building and Dupont Circle, the embassy hot-spot/upper-crust neighborhood.

Here’s a similar map of the psychics plying their trade on Wall Street.

Red dots are publically advertising psychics.

Those two dots are just the psychics advertising through Google, when you actually walk those streets, it’s shocking how many seers/tarot readers work near the exchange. Here’s an October 2011 New York Magazine article documenting the phenomenon.

Millionaires are very concerned about their money,” says the psychic Frank Andrews, offering a breakdown of his new and unexpected clientele. “The billionaires, on the other hand—they come just for fun.” Such is the insecurity of the average Wall Street baron as the market roller-coasters and protesters mass at their door: Bankers are turning to the spirit world for guidance—the clairvoyant reading as an algorithm of last resort.

From later on in the same article:

Rosanna Schaffer-Shaw, a former belly dancer turned tarot-card reader and psychic who goes by “Fahrusha,” sees her Wall Street clients in her Alphabet City apartment. (Concerned with discretion, bankers are perhaps more likely to visit psychics who practice at home than they are to walk past a neon psychic sign and go into a glass-faced storefront.)

Fahrusha has a message for ­policy-makers in Washington. “If there was a better energy policy,” she says, “if there could be more investment in alternative energy … it would be fabulous. The economy could improve if people would look at green solutions.”

I ask her if that’s her professional psychic analysis or just her opinion.

“You know?” She thinks for a second and shrugs. “It’s so hard to separate the two.”

Gee– Al Gore agrees with Fahrusha! The fates decree that we should throw some more pork at alternative energy… Solyndra, cough cough. Obama’s energy disaster had filed for bankruptcy a few weeks before Fahrusha’s interview. (Good news is that Klain from the Solyndra scandal is now in charge of Ebola!)

My point with these maps is to show that there is definitely a market for the paranormal around major power centers. I’m certainly not the first person to have noticed this, and any “great user of people” would have harnessed that market long ago.

But is there an ongoing effort to protect modern ‘psychic’ operations?

I have not read every book on ‘Hellish Nell’. However, here’s a bit of background on some of the more accessible modern media concerning Helen Duncan.

1) Tony Robinson’s 2008 documentary was produced and directed by Thomas Viner for Channel Four, a British Government entity that was created to expand on the programming offered by the BBC. The BBC was set up with the help of William Stephenson, Churchill’s spymaster in NYC (See The Quiet Canadian by H. Montgomery Hyde) and founding father of what became the CIA. Viner also works for television channels Nat Geo and Discovery. Along with the History Channel, both Nat Geo and Discovery have pretty blatant intel connections, in my opinion. Viner’s documentary on Duncan focuses exclusively on the question of whether Duncan was truly psychic, with a few shout-outs to agent provocateur Harry Price thrown in for good measure.

2) Nina Shandler’s The Strange Case of Hellish Nell was published in 2006. Shandler is a psychologist turned historian, who claims to have been given ‘accidental’ access to British National Archives files on Helen Duncan that should have been secret until 2046 because they contain information vital to the UK’s “national security”. What a mistake! Shandler’s book reads more like a romance novel than an historical investigation and she doesn’t explore British Intelligence forays into the occult, even though Aleister Crowley’s spook antics have been public knowledge since Richard B. Spence’s 2000 article “Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley and British Intelligence in America, 1914-1918″, which appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. Instead, Shandler pays undo attention to cavity searches and wrings her hands about religious persecution.

3) Finally, onto Richard B. Spence himself. Spence is a regular on the History Channel, and a consultant to Washington’s International Spy Museum– a silly tourist trap that gins up anti-Russian feelings and flatters the US ‘intelligence community’. Having said that, Spence’s book Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult does contain interesting factual information and gossip about ‘The Beast’s’ spook-work.

Spence’s book does not contain any mention of Helen Duncan, even though a) the details of her case were highly publicized at the time including the fact that the original charge against her was espionage AND b) Crowley’s ‘handler’ Everard Feilding’s Society for Psychical Research played an important role in the Duncan story. Why, Mr. Spence? If the gossip around Crowley and the Wych-Elm/Charles Walton murders was worth including, why not the more important and well-documented Duncan case?

When I learned about history in school, my teachers were careful to tell me that the source of information is just as important as the information itself. The sources I’ve listed may have reasons to obscure intelligence relations to the occult. In an age where presidents talk to God, the paranormal can be quite useful.

I encourage any lawmakers who consult mediums *and* read anolen.com to know thyselves. If I still have Bulgakov fans reading, we can ask ourselves again: Is the Devil a German?

Aleister Crowley, a magician on and off the stage. Crowley performed at Moscow’s Aquarium Variety Theater in 1913, with the help of UK Intel asset Mikhail Lyiardopoulos, secretary of the Moscow Art Theater. A few years later MAT would become Bulgakov’s future employer. Gave me goose-bumps too.

In my previous post on The Cult of Intelligence, I speculated that Aleister Crowley’s cult in Cefalù, the “Abbey of Thelema”, had research goals similar to those of MK ULTRA.

I’ve since read more about the “Abbey” and was shocked to find that not only did Crowley’s cult anticipate the more sensational MK ULTRA research, but Crowley employed sophisticated “social influence” techniques which I wrote about in The Banality of Mind Control. Crowley’s cult drew from Freud’s theories and attacked the family just like the Sullivanian cult would do nearly forty years later. Crowley’s Cefalù experiment was the forerunner to much American-lead mind control research during the twentieth century.

This matters, readers, because while Crowley probably did have some genuine interest in the occult, he was always an intelligence agent first and foremost. Crowley viewed the world through an ‘intelligence’ lens– and did so since 1913 at least, when he wrote this on a visit to Russia:

Though little agitation was apparent in the general atmosphere of the Fair [at Nizhny Novgorod] the shrewd, astute, subtle, linx-eyed, past master, analytical, psychic, eerie, hard-bitten Secret Service Chief could nose there was a certain discontent with the regime. [From Crowley’s notes to his poem The Fun of the Fair.]

Everything that Crowley touched was open to being used by Britain’s intelligence services. This seriously undermines the religious sincerity of the occult work Crowley undertook, and leads me to wonder why Anglo-American spooks were promoting Crowley’s brand of the occult in their home territory.

Not only were Anglo-American spooks promoting ‘Crowleyesque’ occult ideas; this promotion was sustained over the course of nearly seventy years and spread to the USA by way of NYC. From his base in NYC, British/Canadian spy William Stephenson set up what became America’s ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ in the early Forties; in the 1950s the CIA’s MK ULTRA project dutifully jumped in where Crowley’s ‘mind control’ work had run out of money.

How close was Crowley to William Stephenson’s NYC spy machine? Crowley earned his American spy-boots in New York City during WWI. He worked to discredit anti-war and anti-British sentiments by pretending to be a rabid, pro-German, pro-Irish Nationalist pundit. Biographer Richard Spence believes Crowley played a role in the sinking of the Lusitania, which was used to pull America into WWI. Crowley had mastered Stephenson’s bag of tricks when ‘Intrepid’ was still a boy in school.

I suggest, readers, that the genesis of organizations like the OSS and CIA lies in the careers of Aleister Crowley and like-minded men. Seeing as the entire world is, in one way or another, suffering from the consequences of these mens’ choices, I believe it’s worth our time to reexamine what Crowley was doing.

In this post I’ll put forward that Crowley’s mind-control tactics were drawn from the “system of control” first devised by Adam Weishaupt. Crowley paired Weishaupt’s system with Edward Kelley’s tactics for exploiting the power of belief. I’ll then look at how Crowley’s tactics at Cefalù tally with Philip Zimbardo’s observations on “social influence”, as well as Amy Siskind’s and Daniel Shaw’s observations from their time in cults.

While Crowley had a shockingly sophisticated understanding of mind-control techniques, he hadn’t quite figured out who were the best targets for recruitment– Crowley had a lot of disillusioned followers, and by the time of his death only Jack Parson’s Los Angeles chapter was still on good terms with “The Beast”.

Finding the right target is important. My suspicion is that a large part of the MK ULTRA project aimed at identifying good targets for control, or encouraging the formation of more good targets. That’s where Crowley struggled, and I’ll be looking at the work of John W. Gittinger and his Personality Assessment System in the future.

Right now, let’s get on with Crowley and what he learned from the abortive ‘Illuminati’.

Throughout history, many intelligence professionals have been interested in the occult; by ‘occult’ I mean practicing magic and employing ‘secret knowledge’ to bring about their own will. I believe that the reason for this dual-interest is because both the occult and espionage are about establishing “systems of control”, they’re a natural pairing.

I wrote about “systems of control” while exploring Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s work on mind control. As a quick reminder, here’s how Zimbardo defines that phrase:

The behavior of large numbers of people must be managed efficiently. For this reason, persuaders develop “systems of control” that rely on basic rules and roles of socialization and that impart a sense of belonging. When interaction among people is restricted to interchange between their social roles, however, it becomes easier for ethical, moral, and human concerns to take a back seat. [From On Resisting Social Influence, with Susan Andersen]

Running an intelligence agency requires controlling large numbers of people; people who may not always feel it’s in their interest to cooperate with their intel handlers. Cults, secret societies and criminal organizations all face this same organizational problem– it’s not enough to collect information, a leader must have reliable minions to act on the information. The intelligence community’s ‘cooperation’ problem has been around a long time.

One way to get around this problem is to recruit people who are predisposed to identify with authority or who are naïve about the world and their own interests. Another way around is to collect ‘dirt’ on one’s followers, so that they can be blackmailed into obedience if necessary. Bearing this in mind, I’m going to provide a quote from Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones, which deals with the papal suppression of the Jesuits (1773) and the founding of the Illuminati:

The significance of the Illuminati lay not in its political effectiveness (it existed a little more than eight years), but rather in its method of internal organization. In borrowing freely from both the Jesuits and the Freemasons, Weishaupt created an extremely subtle system of control based on manipulation of the passions. Borrowing the idea of examination of conscience from the Jesuits and sacramental confession from the Catholic Church to which the Jesuits belonged, Weishaupt created a system of “Seelenspionage” that would allow him to control his adepts without their knowing that they were being controlled…

Weishaupt had not just issued a manifesto calling for revolution, he had created a system of control that would create disciplined cells which would do the bidding of their revolutionary masters often, it seemed, without the slightest inkling that they were being ordered to do so…

Weishaupt took the idea of examination of conscience and sacramental confession from the Jesuits and, after purging them of their religious elements, turned them into a system of intelligence gathering, spying, and informing, in which members were trained to spy on each other and inform their superiors. Weishaupt introduced what he called the Quibus Licet notebooks, in which the adept was encouraged to bare his soul for the inspection of his superiors…

Weishaupt created a technique of what came to be called “Seelenspionage,”or spying on the soul, whereby the superiors in the Illuminati could get access to the adept’s soul by close analysis of the seemingly random gestures, expressions, or words that betrayed the adept’s true feelings.

As part of the systematization of this semiotics, Weishaupt, not unlike Alfred Kinsey 150 years later, developed a chart and a code to document the psychic histories of the various members of the Illuminist cells. In his book on the Illuminati, van Duelman reprints the case history of Franz Xaver Zwack of Regensburg. In it we see a combination of the Kinsey sexual history, the Stasi file and credit rating all rolled up into one document whose purpose is control.

I was struck by the similarity between Weishaupt’s methods and the potential of the PRISM dragnet spying program; or government programs like the ‘Insider Threat Initiative‘. It seems that “systems of control” haven’t changed much since 1777. According to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666, Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, one of the first mystics Crowley studied was a protegé of Adam Weishaupt’s, Karl von Eckartshausen.

The Illuminati was an Enlightenment organization and therefore lacked an important element: the certainty and totality of God. After a few years Weishaupt began to quarrel with his aristocratic co-founder and the organization splintered. Later students of ‘mind-control’ recognized that Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ could be strengthened by exploiting the power of belief and investing the cult’s leadership with supernatural powers. Dr. John Dee’s occult writing was a natural place to look for inspiration; early in his career Crowley made a point of copying Dr. Dee’s writings during one of his trips to Oxford University.

Dr. John Dee (1527-1609) was part of Queen Elizabeth I’s espionage network; he was a mathematician and is credited with smuggling crucial navigation instruments out of Belgium which helped Her Majesty’s Navy remedy their ‘technology gap’. As he got older, he became more interested in Kabbalah and ‘controlling spirits’ through magical means. Dee came under the influence of a fraudster and confidence artist named Edward Kelley, who claimed to be able to talk to spirits and raise the dead.

The later half of Dee’s life was something of a tragi-comedy, as he loaned his library, his wife and his fortune to Kelley in exchange for Kelley’s cooperation in ‘talking with angels’ and uncovering magical secrets (and power). The product of this slow fleecing was a book titled Monas Hieroglyphica which is interpreted as a guide to Enochian Magic– invoking and controlling spirits.

Aleister Crowley saw the potential of fusing Weishaupt’s system and Kelley’s ‘Enochian Magic'; Crowley put this hybrid cult in the service of Britannia’s spooks at Cefalù.

Crowley’s Cefalù psyop was one that any student of cult dynamics would recognize: he established a system of control by encouraging isolating behavior and unhealthy power-worship. The ‘Abbey of Thelema’ appears to be his largest mind-control undertaking and his longest sustained media assault. It was also his most cynical abuse of his followers: Crowley began by recruiting two young, working-class, single mothers (Leah Hirsig and Nina Shumway) for his ‘sex magick’ and then used them to garner publicity through prurient media stories about orgies and bestiality.

The best reference I’ve found for details on the Cefalù cult is in the sympathetic biography of Crowley by Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. The following quotes come from this book and  show which control tactics ‘The Beast’ learned from Adam Weishaupt, as identified by E. Michael Jones.

She [Leah Hirsig] persuaded Crowley to review Shumway’s [Nina Shumway] magical diaries for the period. (All members of the Abbey kept such accounts to chart their spiritual progress.) Upon doing so, Crowley was “utterly appalled at the horrors of the human heart. I never dreamed such things were possible. I am physically sick– it is the greatest shock of my life. I had this mess in my own circle. It poisoned my work; it murdered my children.”

How Shumway’s alleged depravity ran against Crowley’s teaching is difficult for me to determine.

What about Weishaupt’s compromising  “sexual histories”? One of the chief purposes of the ‘Thelemic Abbey’ at Cefalù was to encourage acolytes to engage in compromising sexual acts; the more lewd the better– better for ‘magick’, of course! Crowley’s personal homosexual proclivities were very useful to that end; he offered himself to at least one male acolyte as a painted, cheap, old “New Orleans” hooker. (See the wall painting below!) The acolyte wasn’t interested.

You can’t talk about Aleister Crowley without talking about sex. Sex is useful to manipulators only if it can be diverted down the right channels. I’ll remind readers of Siskind’s observations on how sex was used by the Sullivanians:

The developement of my sexuality and my sense of myself as a sexual being was deeply affected by my experiences with Ralph Klein [a Sullivanian leader]. His voyeuristic comments and attitude impacted me in the sense that I believe I acted in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise. My early experimentation with sexual activity may or may not have taken place without his input, but I don’t think that my objectification of myself would have been the same. I was taught to distance my sexual feelings from my other emotions. Thankfully, I wasn’t always able to achieve this separation; but at certain points in my life I did have sexual encounters that were fairly impersonal. In the Sullivan Institute community, for anyone to become deeply emotionally involved with one person was considered dangerous.

Sex is useful for isolation if it can be divorced from its role in creating family. (Amy Siskind was also discouraged from having children by her Sullivanian manipulators.) Promoting promiscuous sex (sex that will never build strong relational bonds) or sex that will never result in offspring, is a great way of misguiding people’s natural tendency toward forming family groups and ensuring Nature will never pull the follower away from the cult.

Crowley’s particular take on using sex for isolation was perverting it towards power-worship by making it just another magical tool for self-aggrandizement. Crowley was interested in heterosexual sex and sodomy toward this end. You can read a sympathetic account of Crowley’s “sex magick” here:

Rejecting the prudish hypocrisy of the Victorian Christian world in which he was raised, Crowley identified sex as the most powerful force in life and the supreme source of magical power. Taking an apparent delight in outraging the British society of his time, Crowley made explicit use of the most “deviant” sexual acts — such as masturbation and homosexuality — as central components in his magical practice. At the same time, Crowley was also one of the first Western authors to take an interest in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of Tantra… One need now only browse the shelves of any Barnes and Noble bookstore or surf the endlessly proliferating web-sites on the Internet to discover the secrets of Tantra, Sex Magick and Tarot, practice Tantra without Tears or even engage in Wicca for Lovers. [From Unleashing the Beast by Keith Urban]

The excerpt above comes from an essay which ends with this question:

Thus, one might well argue that we are now living in a kind of “post-orgy world,” after all the great social and sexual revolutions have broken every imaginable taboo. Yet this has left us in a strange “undefined state,” in which we are left questioning our very being. As Jean Baudrillard observes, “The orgy is over, liberation is over…After a culture based on prohibition…this is a culture based on the questioning of one’s own definition: ‘Am I sexed? What sex am I?’…Liberation has left everyone in an undefined state…This is why there’s so much love-making.” [121] After all, as Crowley seems to have asked himself in the end, what is there left to do after every forbidden desire has been indulged and every taboo transgressed?

I’ll answer Urban by reminding him that Crowley’s initial followers were single mothers who struggled to make ends meet. After the orgy comes old age and children– after the orgy comes vulnerability– and the desire for protection from the powerful, at any price. Crowley understood vulnerability before he even got started in Sicily; he knew that single, vulnerable, mothers would make reliable followers. There would be no point burdening himself with other men’s children if Crowley didn’t understand how to exploit single mothers’ vulnerability.

Crowley’s Cefalù cult had anti-family ideology based on Freud’s theories which the Sullivanians would copy almost forty years later:

Crowley gave Hansi [Hirsig’s boy] and Howard [Shumway’s child]– whom he nicknamed “Dionysus” and “Hermes”– their first lessons in rock climbing. As they were mere toddlers, the ascents he chose must have been mercifully short. But the attitude Crowley displayed here was typical. Under his Thelemic creed, children were to be raised with full freedom to explore their talents and interests. Parents– especially mothers– were to refrain from fussing and over-protecting. The absence of hovering care, Crowley believed, could reduce the impact of the Freudian Oedipal complex, the remnants of which Crowley abhorred in himself.

Freedom from “fussing and over-protecting” can have different interpretations, so let me elucidate: little Hansi and Howard’s freedom from hovering parental care was ensured by Crowley, Hirsig and Shumway’s raging drug addictions. Conditions were so bad for the boys that when Hirsig’s sister came to rescue Hansi, she was given immediate custody on the grounds that the Abbey– a remarkably dirty place per Crowley’s orders– was unfit for children. At the time that Hirsig lost custody of Hansi, she was in Paris with Crowley on one of his many missions there.

Crowley understood how to isolate by attacking the family, immediate and extended, as early as 1907 when he tried to make a disciple of the Earl of Tankerville. The Tankerville incident occurred well before Cefalù, but it shows the depth of Crowley’s understanding:

For all his nervousness and vices, Tankerville was devoted to his family– a trait Crowley viewed as a sentimental encumbrance from which his student required extraction…

The Earl’s wife remained a persistent distraction, as were the children. It was essential that they [Crowley and the Earl] make a Great Retirement together. Crowley decided upon Morocco, by way of Paris, Marseilles, and Gibraltar. “I was of course in paradise,” Crowley wrote, “to be once more among Mohammedans, with their manliness, straightforwardness, subtlety and self-respect!” The trip was, plainly, a fulfillment of Crowley’s own desires, with the further hope that Tankerville, once forced into unfamiliar and rigorous conditions, would cast aside his Anglo-Saxon fears and prejudices. This was Crowley’s standard prescription for spiritual transformation… [From Lawrence Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt]

In the Middle East and North Africa homosexuality is not exactly encouraged but they do turn a blind eye to it, so the appeal for Crowley is clear. If you’ve ever noticed how expatriates’ behavior can come unhinged in an alien culture, you’ll understand why Crowley would wish to take his aristocratic quarry there. The Earl was not a good choice for indoctrination and quickly saw through Crowley in Morocco.

If Crowley could convince a target to join the Abbey, then life for them in Cefalù was highly regimented– just as life was for the Sullivanians, Siddha Yoga followers and for people in many other cults:

The training time frame would be just over three months. There would be an initial three days during which one was treaded graciously as a guest with an orientation on Abbey life. After this, one was either to leave or set to work. If the latter choice was made, there would be a day of silence, followed by three days of instruction, and then the taking of a solemn Magical Oath to pursue the Great Work pursuant to the teachings of Crowley’s A:.A:.. The remaining weeks were devoted principally to the study of Crowley’s writings, as well as careful yogic and magical practice (all to be carefully recorded in a diary, which was to be left available for others at the Abbey to read, so that all could learn from each other’s work) and manual labor essential to abbey functions… As for recreation, the Thelemites frequently shocked the Cefalù natives by their preference for nude bathing.

Regimented lifestyles are part of what Zimbardo termed “Basic Training in Compliance”. Crowley established a greeting ritual which everybody at the Abbey had to use: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” followed by “Love is the law, love under will”. If you didn’t use this greeting, you were evicted from the building. :)

Crowley also exploited what Zimbardo identified as “saturation and detachment”: Acolytes at the Abbey were not allowed to read beyond Crowley’s teachings, if they were, they were punished. Crowley painted a special room with pornographic scenes that he wanted his followers to immerse themselves in and become desensitized to– more on that later. In a nutshell: Crowleyesque weirdness had to become the new ‘normal’ for Thelema devotees.

Much like Daniel Shaw’s experience with his guru at Siddha Yoga, Crowley was fond of shaming his followers with emotional, verbal and sexual abuse, which included making them eat goat dung for its ‘enlightening’ effect.

Crowley was a great believer in pushing his students to the limit through means including intensive verbal abuse: The more difficult the training, the more a student would gain– if he was worthy… [Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt]

Crowley’s experiment at Cefalù showed remarkably sophisticated mind-control tactics, especially considering he implemented them forty years before the Sullivanians or MK ULTRA; and sixty years before Zimbardo wrote about resisting social influence. However, Cefalù was always a control experiment, and an exercise in manipulating the British and American media, it was never a real spiritual movement. Cefalù was about controlling large groups of people.

To prove this point, I put it to readers that Crowley wrote a tourist brochure about his pornographic bedroom murals in the Abbey’s ‘Chamber of Nightmares’ as soon as the paintings were finished– before an innocent ‘spiritual explorer’ could have been sure that his painting ‘therapy’ even worked and before the Abbey had attracted anyone besides Crowley and his two concubines:

The brochure raptly assured potential visitors– from whom Crowley hoped to draw new disciples– that the purpose of the Chambre “is to pass students of the Sacred Wisdom through the ordeal of contemplating every possible phantom which can assail the soul. Candidates for this initiation are prepared by a certain secret process before spending the night in this room; the effect is that the figures on the walls seem actually to become alive, to bewilder and obsess the spirit that has dared to confront their malignity.” This secret process may have involved one or more drugs. Opium, ether, cocaine, heroin, laudanum, hashish, and anhalonium were in constant supply at the Abbey, and Crowley administered them to himself in the Chambre on an almost nightly basis. The brochure described, in the third person, the self-purgation that Crowley pursued in the Abbey:

“Those who have come successfully through the trial say that they have become immunized from all possible infection by those ideas of evil which interfere between the soul and its divine Self. Having been forced to fathom the Abysses of Horror, to confront the most ghastly possibilities of Hell, they have attained permanent mastery of their minds. The process is similar to that of “Psycho-analysis”; it releases the subject from fear of Reality and the phantasms and neuroses thereby caused, by externalizing and thus disarming the spectres that line in ambush for the Soul of Man.” [From Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt]

This is an example of one of Crawley’s “nightmare” paintings at the Abbey:

Perhaps Crowley’s methods inspired the “Hyper-Realistic Training TM” gurus at Strategic Operations Inc, too!

As I mentioned before, Crowley struggled to attract ‘tourists’, and by the end of his life his only followers still sending Crowley money were in Los Angeles– the followers he had the least personal contact with. (Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist with high-level intelligence connections, was head of the Los Angeles Thelema chapter for a while.) Despite this failure, Crowley never lost his friends in dark places.

Crowley’s system of control was of interest to British military intel agent Capt. M.E. Townshend, one of many British spooks to have dealings with ‘The Beast’. Later in Crowley’s career he would establish a printing press with Major Robert Thynne and Major J. C.S. Mac Allen, called Mandrake Press, which was designed to publicise Crowley’s ideas. Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin can’t get his head around why the two Majors were interested in Crowley’s occult writing.(!)

Richard Spence, author of Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult opines that Crowley’s ‘real’ reason for being in Sicily was to spy on French and Italian naval movements at the behest of intel officer Everard Fielding, who I first mentioned in my post about “Hellish Nell“. Spence doesn’t attempt to explain Crowley’s relentless media courtship, which is only to be expected, as Spence (a Washington D.C. favorite) avoids investigating the parts of Crowley’s life which smell like occult-related psychological operations against the British public.

There are many people today who want to believe that Aleister Crowley was something more than an agent provocateur and an exploitative cult leader in His Majesty’s Service. They want to believe Crowley’s philosophizing has some merit beyond control, much like any cult member runs from the pain of disillusionment. I suggest that these desperate Crowley-believers have as much hope of finding spiritual enlightenment in the declassified MK ULTRA papers.

Throughout Crowley’s career (probably 1897 to his death), he used the cover of a magician or mystic during missions for British Intelligence– this fact doesn’t appear to cause contention. However, believers seem to assume that at some point the ‘cover’ transformed into a true religious quest and that Crowley’s courting the press– especially around his cult in Sicily– was something other than a psyop aimed at the Anglo-American public.

I encourage readers to consider the possibility that Crowley’s Cefalù experiment was conducted with the British public in mind; that Crowley’s scandalous media forays in the U.K. were no less ‘spooky’ than his scandalous media forays in NYC.

Nina Hamnett, a sort of ‘Roaring Twenties’ version of Tilda Swinton, was an acquaintance of Crowley and wrote this article for about him in 1934. Celebrities and similar scandals would ‘plague’ the Abbey during its short life in the early 1920s. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Even though the exploitative nature of Crowley’s undertakings has been well known since the 1930s, Crowley’s legacy was repackaged and marketed in the 1960s by cultural icons like Lucifer Rising creator Kenneth Anger, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Even today outfits like the BBC and the History Channel push Crowley, despite the fact that Emperor Aleister has no clothes. Is it possible that someone is still trying to mess with our heads?

Original 2011 cover of Wormwood Star, by Spencer Kansa.

Greetings, a.nolen readers! Spencer Kansa contacted me today demanding that this post be removed and threatening me with legal action– I’ve pasted a copy of his email in the ‘comments’ section of this post. Guess I hit a nerve…

In May of this year a revised edition of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron was released. This is a fascinating book because Marjorie Cameron was the wife, and probably the ‘handler’, of Jack Parsons. Parsons was Aleister Crowley’s chief L.A.- based acolyte; the L.A. Thelema lodge was the last to keep sending money to Crowley, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin. Jack Parsons had high-level military clearances and access to valuable jet-propulsion research: he was an intelligence prize.

Spencer Kansa’s book is the only biography of Marjorie Cameron I could find, though– on the surface– it’s unclear why Kansa should have any expertise on Cameron. Kansa’s research style is not professional, he’s sloppy about sourcing information. Kansa’s only qualifications appear to be extensive publishing contacts in the music industry (an industry with more than its fair share of Crowley promoters); and his interviews with “William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles and Herbert Huncke”. (Readers will remember that Allen Ginsberg gave Politics of Heroin writer Alfred McCoy a box of CIA TIME-Life notes on Vietnam’s heroin trade which became the basis for McCoy’s book, a book that protected CIA chief William Colby.)

Kansa’s ‘spookage’ doesn’t stop with Ginsberg.Wormwood Star is published by an outfit named ‘Mandrake Press’ in Oxford, which sounds like a homage to the ‘Mandrake Press’ Crowley set up with the mysterious British military figures Major Robert Thynne and Major J. C.S. Mac Allen.

Kansa’s connections are a two-edged sword for Crowley/Cameron fans: on the surface he should have no credibility as a biographer, but to my way of seeing the world, Kansa is likely to have an inside track because of his extraordinary access to ‘spooky’ characters. So if you’re willing to give Kansa’s information sources the benefit of the doubt, as I am, the next question is “Does Kansa write honestly?”

No, I don’t believe that Kansa writes honestly. Everything about this book is sympathetic to Crowley, Parsons, Cameron and Cameron’s promoter Kenneth Anger; everything about Wormwood Star preserves the cult of personality surrounding these people. Kansa doesn’t even try to incorporate Richard Spence’s research on Crowley’s intelligence connections, research that has been widely available for almost 15 years. Neither does Kansa examine Kenneth Anger’s ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ connections,  even though the congress has been a known CIA front for over a decade. Kansa’s neglect is easily explained by his resume, particularly because of the people Kansa was given access to interview.

Having said that, Wormwood Star provides a startling array of facts which, when they are extracted from Kansa’s sugar-coating, suggest that Cameron was an intelligence operative in American service, and possibly in the service of the U.K. and Israel too. Jack Parsons’ trouble with security clearances and espionage investigations– trouble which eventually cost him his job– has its roots in actions taken by Cameron, his wife. Ultimately it was Cameron who organized the attempted release of sensitive jet propulsion information to the Israelis; it was Cameron’s weird trip to Switzerland which garnered spook attention; it was Cameron’s strange lefty friends and domineering personality which worried the FBI.

So who was Marjorie Cameron? She came from a small town in Iowa; she had a stable, if somewhat puritanical, family; and she was liked and respected by her classmates despite her ‘artistic’ nature. However, Marjorie was not well-adjusted and from as young as 14 years old she would sneak out at night for casual sexual encounters. Throughout her life Marjorie seemed unemotional about sex; something which would come in handy when WWII broke out and she became a spook for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

The JCS consists of military leaders who the US president appoints to advise him; in Cameron’s case that president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who cooperated with William Stephenson’s ‘irregular’ spy network, the British Security Coordination (BSC) to get rid of his critics.

According to Kansa, Cameron was the only woman working in a team of cartographers for the JCS. She was also given a posting at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, where William Alanson White’s successor, Winfred Overholser, was now in charge. Overholser was a collaborator with the CIA’s MK ULTRA project, and prior to that he worked with mind-control drugs for Roosevelt’s OSS during WWII.

At some point, the JCS realized that Cameron could be useful entrapping men with “pro-German” sympathies in Washington D.C.; it’s unclear if any of her missions produced useful intelligence. I’ll remind readers that the BSC was busy organizing ‘dirty tricks’ like honey-traps in D.C. at the same time, one such honey-trap was author Roald Dahl .

After prostituting herself for the JCS, Cameron was given a job with Hollywood filmmakers creating war propaganda films in cooperation with the “Hollywood Navy”. If you want to know more about war-film propaganda and what would become the CIA’s MK ULTRA project, see my post on Carl Hovland and race riots.

According to Kansa, while making movies Cameron made friends with “strong union people who began to educate Marjorie about the military and the wider political ramifications of what was going on during the war”. I’ll remind readers that Roald Dahl got his introduction to the Roosevelts through Hollywood director Gabriel Pascal; Tinseltown in the 1940s seems to have well-established, and very elite, espionage connections. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising given William Stephenson’s investments in the movie business.

Not all of Cameron’s movie work was glamorous: she was given the job of washing GI uniforms that had been stripped from dead soldiers so that they could be used as costumes. At this time Cameron heard her brother had been injured in combat and she went AWOL to visit him, for which she was court martialed.

One might think that an AWOL/court martial would end Cameron’s association with the military. Quite the contrary, it opened up a new vista in her life. Suddenly, her father and brother both got jobs in California with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a highly sensitive military contractor, and Cameron was given an honorable discharge. Kansa states that Cameron never understood why she was given this discharge after the court martial.

I believe I do understand, readers, because not long after moving with her family to California, she shacked up with the JPL’s founder Jack Parsons. Parsons was a Thelema devotee and, according to Parsons, he had been corresponding with Crowley about a ‘magickal’ working with a new friend named L. Ron Hubbard. This working would invoke a special ‘sex-magick’ partner for Parsons. (Parsons’ first marriage was ‘untraditional’ and headed for divorce.) Perhaps Crowley made a phone call to colleagues in Washington after hearing about Parsons new Naval Intelligence friend?

Cameron says she was introduced to Jack Parsons by a friend from the Navy. Either way, Cameron, the Roosevelt honey-trap spook, appeared in the life of her dad’s new boss as miraculously as her dad’s new job appeared at JPL. Could a paramour with a dishonorable discharge have caused problems for Parsons’ high-level security clearances? I suspect so: an honorable discharge paved the way for Cameron’s placement.

Parsons met L. Ron Hubbard, a Naval Intelligence veteran a few months before Cameron came into Parsons’ life. As I’ve stated before, Parsons befriended Hubbard and took Hubbard into his magickal workings.Who was L. Ron Hubbard?

In the 1930s, prior to an obscure career for the Office of Naval Intelligence, L. Ron Hubbard was a student at George Washington University, where the Church of Scientology tells us his mentors were Dr. Fred August Moss and my old buddy, William Alanson White. White’s political beliefs inspired  the Sullivanian cult. According to information provided by Hubbard’s critic Caroline Letkeman, here’s a 1952 transcript of Hubbard explaining his relationship to White in the 1930s, when White was still superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s hospital (where Cameron had been posted in the early 1940s).

Parsons introduced Hubbard to Crowley via a letter, but Crowley seems to have taken an immediate dislike to Hubbard. (Competition?) Crowley’s disapproval didn’t stop Parsons from going into business with L. Ron. In retrospect Parsons and Hubbard’s company, Allied Enterprises, seems to have been a way for Hubbard to fleece Parsons, who’d grown rich on military contracts.

L. Ron Hubbard would go on to found what is now called Scientology, an organization with uneasy links to US intelligence. (I suspect, readers, that Scientology is the psy-op ‘that got away’.)

According to Kansa, Cameron didn’t take Parsons’ ‘magick’ seriously until after his death, however, she did take on an important communication role between Parsons and Crowley. In 1947 it was Cameron who left for Paris on a GI Bill scholarship, with the dual mission of contacting Crowley on behalf of Parsons to explain his involvement with L. Ron Hubbard. (Crowley died before she could see him.) During this trip Cameron thought she was being spied on by NYT correspondent Arthur Krock: “Cameron began to wonder if the Pulitzer Prize winning bureau chief was tailing her for the government, suspicious of why the wife of an important rocket scientist was journeying alone to Europe.”

Cameron did not use the GI Bill money to study art, but instead “seemingly on a whim” went to Switzerland, land of spooks. Her time in Bern was not pleasant, as she saw secret service agents around every corner. Guilty conscience? When Cameron got home, she found her husband under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Commission, ostensibly because of his Communist friends back in the 1930s. (The ghost of James Angleton walks again.) Parsons was eventually cleared, got his security clearances back, and took a new job with Hughes Aircraft Company. But all was not well…

Cameron’s and Parsons’ marriage was ‘untraditional’ like Parsons’ first one; but now Parsons began to get jealous– he often didn’t know where Cameron was or who she was with. Cameron decided to travel to an artists’ commune in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which Kansa says was favored by US veterans of WWII. (I suspect that a large contingent of these “veterans” were OSSers– what other veterans didn’t have to work after the war?!) Cameron was bitter over the HUAC investigation into her husband; she had been vocal in her criticism of American hypocrisy since WWII, but now she began to make noises about emigrating to places where there was less injustice… like Mexico, or Israel.

Back home, Parsons fretted that his new boss, Hughes, was also spying on him. Parsons nervously began looking for a job in Israel, Cameron’s chosen land. Herbert T. Rosenfeld seems to have strung Parsons along with this: first asking for a proposal for a Chemical factory which went nowhere for Parsons, then asking the American to knock out a rough-draft for a jet propulsion development program. Cameron, now back in the US, did the leg-work putting together this second proposal; it was Cameron who gave the typist classified documents to prepare for the Israelis in late 1950. The typist alerted the FBI, who investigated Parsons again. This is what one FBI agent had to say about Parsons and Cameron:

Subject [Jack Parsons] seems very much in love with his wife but she is not at all affectionate and does not seem to return his affection. She is the dominating personality of the two and controls the activities and thinking of subject to a very considerable degree. It is the opinion if subject were to have been in any way willfully involved in any activities of an international espionage nature, it would probably have to be at the instigation of his wife.

The fallout from the Israeli job search (which never came through) made it impossible for Parsons to get a job Stateside and for a while he pumped gas to support himself and his wife. Needless to say, he’d come a long way from the jet-setting playboy.

 While Cameron was pushing her husband to emigrate to the Holy Land, things were developing at the CIA. In 1951, a few months after Parson’s Israeli FUBAR was discovered, the CIA created ‘the Israeli desk’ for James Angleton, which meant Angleton, a counterintelligence man, got first access to Shin Bet’s information on the Soviets– this would be an important tool for dealing with the CIA’s Soviet Division, which Angleton suspected had been captured by the Russians. I think it’s interesting that in the months following Cameron’s/Parsons’ near-leak, one of the nation’s top rocket scientists was shut down and our ally Israel’s hopes were dashed.

Why might US allies have been treated so harshly? In Richard Bennett’s 2013 book Espionage: Spies and Secrets, Bennett writes this about Angleton:

Angleton began his career in espionage in the wartime OSS. During his time in Italy both before and after the end of the war, Angleton developed a deep relationship with the leaders of the Jewish underground, who later became senior officers in Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Because of these ties, he entered the CIA with the clear understanding that he would head the Israeli desk.

I had heard that Angleton got into bed with the Mafia in Italy, but I had no idea that Mossad had roots in the post-war Italian mess– and a bloody mess it was, with communist partisans taking revenge on anyone they didn’t like while the Americans looked on. How does Richard Bennett know this about the Israeli desk? It’s hard to say because he doesn’t source that particular information, but Bennett’s work is ‘respected’ enough to be referenced in the CIA’s “The Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf“, so we can speculate.

Things never got better for Jack Parsons: by 1952 the case against him was dropped due to lack of evidence, but the struggle had ruined his career and his security clearances were never restored. He eked out a living making explosives for Hollywood movies. Cameron never gave up her dream of living in Israel, and convinced Parsons to move to Mexico before taking another crack at the Middle East. Before any of this could come to pass, Parsons died in a freak accident at his home laboratory. When Cameron heard of his death, she exclaimed: “Who will take care of me now? I don’t know how to make a living.”

The apparent insensitivity of that remark might be excused on grounds of something like shock; but her next move shows what a cold fish Cameron really was. Parsons’ mother committed suicide immediately on hearing of her son’s death (they were unusually dependent on each other), and when Cameron found out, her first concern was to remove three lbs of pot she’d stashed at her mother-in-law’s house to avoid it being confiscated by police. Don’t worry, Cameron got the pot out.

Right after Parsons’ funeral Cameron left for Mexico where she had a rendezvous with a mysterious British couple, Nancie and Bill Patterson, who were representatives of another U.K.-based cult called the ‘White Eagle Lodge’. ‘White Eagle Lodge’ had been founded by a spiritualist duo, a medium and her husband much like ‘Hellish Nell’s’ team, which cashed in on channeling the ghost of famous spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle. The Pattersons helped Cameron conduct one of Crowley’s ‘blood rituals’ and after two months Cameron returned to the USA, a fervent believer in Thelema and amongst the first Americans to experience UFO phenomenon, says Kansa.

Embracing Thelema did little to curb Cameron’s drug addiction or alleviate her money worries. In the face of shrinking options, she professed that she really was the incarnate spirit of Babylon that her late husband and Crowley had dreamed about. She began trying to beget a “moonchild” through liaisons between herself, her small band of white witch-followers and willing black musician “wands”. Cameron was desperately trying to prove her place as a high priestess of Thelema and drum up a living in the process; Crowley’s heir Karl Germer would have none of it. (I’m reminded of Peter Wright’s observation that the intelligence business is a great user of people.) Cameron sunk into penury.

Instead of letting Cameron in on the Thelema business proper, Cameron was made an initiate of the Silver Star, which was a way of putting her under Crowley’s faithful Cefalù desciple Jane Wolfe’s control– the idea being to keep Cameron’s madness from sinking the Thelema ship. It sort of worked, but Cameron continued to court the media with stunts like sending her ‘witches’ over to service Bob Hope sexually (which they did, according to Kansa). For my international readers, Bob Hope was an American entertainer famous for his ‘USO Shows’, or entertaining active-duty soldiers.

Out of money and out of friends, in 1953 Cameron drifted into the orbit of a Hollywood ‘maker’, eccentric and homosexual named Samson de Brier, whose home was like a dingy, art nouveau museum, stuffed with wannabe starlets of both sexes. One of these starlets was Kenneth Anger, who would later reinvent Crowley’s system of control for the 1960s audience, using Cameron as the face of his endeavour.

During the early 1950s, at the beginning of the CIA’s ‘Congress For Cultural Freedom’, Anger was busy making a name for himself in Europe by plying CIA-funded artists such as Jean Cocteau with homoerotic films. But by 1953, Anger was back in the States, flush with his dead mama’s money, flush with a ‘belief’ in Thelema, and looking for a muse like Cameron. Anger would cast Cameron and her witches in the campy film he made with de Brier, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a sort of culturally confused homage to Crowley. Anger would spent the following years promoting Cameron as the new face of Thelema throughout the US and Europe, which didn’t sit well with what remained of Crowley’s European followers like Karl Germer.

Anger’s Thelema take-over bid included high-profile media escapades using his contacts in the film scene, art world and especially the commercial music industry– the industry from which Spencer Kansa draws his connections.

Cameron’s, and Thelema’s, usefulness to the Western 1960s cultural revolutions deserve their own post, as does Cameron’s relation to the founding of Scientology and then her struggle against it. (Scientology is far more profitable than Thelema ever was.) I’ll conclude this summary of Kansa’s book by pointing out that Scientology’s stronghold is in Hollywood and that the BBC takes special interest in Scientology. Thelema’s most modern incarnation first prospered through the British music industry, and is still promoted by high-profile musicians today. Any comment, Langley, MI6?

Rap artist ‘Jay-Z’ promoting Aleister Crowley’s system of control.

P.S. Long-time readers may notice several shocking similaries between Marjorie Cameron’s life and that of William Donovan’s secretary and T.V. chef Julia Child. I encourage interested readers to check out my double-review of Julia’s autobiography and The Haunted Wood.

Winston Churchill at canvas.

There are few twentieth century leaders who are more lionized than Winston Churchill. He has come to epitomize everything that is stalwart and excellent about Britain, a sort of Superman of ‘the Greatest Generation’. The truth is something different. I’ve had Winston’s name pop up more than once in my reading about the music business, art world, cult studies and the drug trade. I think the time is right to peel back the Bulldog’s facade– this post is a whirlwind tour of Churchill’s doings that don’t pass the smell test.

Winston Churchill was half-American and his political career was kicked off by American money– Vanderbilt money, to be exact. (Churchills had been politically active for some time, but their fortunes, and therefore influence, were waning before the Vanderbilts came into the picture.) The Vanderbilt family got its start through government contracts supporting the War of 1812, but by the time they had caught the Churchills’ attention they had their fingers in many pies, the most notorious of which was their exploitation of the railways: the Vanderbilts benefited from a sweet deal with the Federal Government which gifted public land as an incentive for railway development– huge tracts of the Continental US were given away in this manner. The Vanderbilts personify crony capitalism and government corruption.

This nouveau riche American family enters the Churchill dynasty via the arranged marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the heiress, to the Duke of Marlborough, Winston’s cousin. Their marriage was orchestrated by Consuelo’s mother Alva Vanderbilt and her lover Oliver Belmont, son of Lord Rothschild’s New York agent. This is how Consuelo’s biographer Amanda Mackenzie Stuart explains Alva Vanderbilt’s motivation for the marriage of her daughter, which was first envisioned on a trip to British India with her husband, lover Belmont, and Consuelo in tow:

The illusionists of the British Raj found a most appreciative audience in Alva, though even she was startled by the size of the Government House guest suite and the ‘ten native servants who were assigned… in beautiful royal liveries of red embroidered in gold to serve us’. What impressed her most, however, was the quasi-imperial role of both Lansdownes [Lord and Lady Lansdowne, Viceroy of India]…

There was no life in the shadows or sunlight by proxy for a Vicereine of India; and just as she had once pictured the Vanderbilts as Medicis, Alva could now visualise her daughter’s future [married to Lady Lansdowne’s nephew, Duke of Marlborough]. From Consuelo & Alva Vanderbilt by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

Despite her modern, white-washed image as a feminist icon, Alva Belmont was nothing but a controlling, materialistic, selfish user. How ironic that TIME magazine’s Clare Boothe Luce, the black-ops happy congresswoman, was promoted by a patroness who had day-dreams of British Rajdom…

Alva Belmont, seated second from right, lives her dream of oriental splendor at the opening of her tea house in 1914. Thank you mrmhadams.typepad.com

Alva Vanderbilt would divorce her husband and become Alva Belmont, patroness of Mrs. Pankhurst and Clare Boothe Luce, who I’ve written about in connection to Roald Dahl’s spy work in war-time Washington D.C. The Vanderbilts, and Alva, were never shy about betraying their fellow Americans; the spirit of representative government has never flowed strongly with them.

Winston was young when Consuelo’s doomed marriage took place, but the grasping, twisted quality of his immediate family would mold his psyche. There’s something corrupting about being the ‘poor relations’ of fabulously wealthy people, as Eleanor Roosevelt is testament to, and this corruption didn’t miss Winston.

Perhaps the earliest indication of Winston’s venality was his success in the art world, or I should say, ‘Charles Morin’s’ success in the art world. Winston Churchill, leader of the free world, was an art forger.

In 1921 Churchill exhibited several of his paintings signed with the name ‘Charles Morin’ at the Galerie Druet in Paris. Charles Morin was a reasonably well-known painter who died two years before, in 1919. The art showing in question, where Churchill sold six of his knock-offs, was organized by art critic Charles Montag, who Churchill had met during the Great War. At the time of the forgery, Churchill was already Secretary of State and fishing for more control over Palestine and Mesopotamia too.

Charles Montag is described this way by David Coombs at The Churchill Centre:

Although he is little regarded today, Montag was a friend and regular painting companion of Churchill until his death in 1956. Born in Switzerland in 1880, he must have been as energetic as he was charming, and amazingly well-connected with Impressionist painters, including Monet and Renoir, as well as Post- Impressionists like Bonnard and Matisse. He turned these talents to good account as an exhibition organizer and adviser to art collectors.

Montag was a savvy businessman in the vein of Joe Duveen, Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume: during WWII Montag worked with the Nazis to help them buy French art at bargain-basement prices. When Montag got caught and arrested at the end of the war, Churchill intervened to protect him. Douglas Cooper was responsible for apprehending Montag; Cooper was one of about 350 Allied agents called ‘monuments men’ tasked with tracking down loot. Apart from being a ‘monuments man’, Cooper was a squadron leader for Royal Air Force Intelligence and an independently wealthy Cubist art collector (conflict of interest?!). This is Cooper’s story according to the ‘Monuments Men Foundation‘, an American organization which promotes the Allied role in repatriating art displaced during WWII:

Cooper spent the month of February 1945 in Switzerland as a representative of the MFAA [Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives] and the French Recuperation Commission, interrogating various dealers and collectors who worked with the Nazis, including Theodore Fischer of the Fischer Gallery, who conducted the infamous sale of “degenerate” artworks in 1939. ⁹ According to John Richardson, Cooper also ordered the arrest of the Swiss dealer Charles Montag, who had been involved in the liquidation of the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, however, he was mysteriously released by higher authority.¹⁰ Undeterred, Cooper arrested him again, only to have his authority usurped once more by Winston Churchill, who came to the aid of Montag, his old friend and drawing instructor.¹¹

9. Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 416.

10., 11. Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 35-36.

During WWII, Churchill’s art world criminality became a joke at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, and it caused FDR some discomfort when Winnie’s nature came to light. Of course, die-hard fans of Winston refuse to see Churchill’s actions for what they are, and they often ignore Montag’s dealings with the Nazis entirely. I think that Churchill’s actions, and the company he kept, are windows to his character. It gets worse.

Churchill comes from a line of conspirators. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a founder of the Primrose League, which was the first secret society that British intelligence agent Aleister Crowley joined. The Primrose League was Crowley’s ticket to spy-work, according to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666:

Another positive early influence was Aunt Annie’s, the second wife of his uncle, Jonathan Crowley. In some ways she was his mother-substitute. Annie was well-educated and active in the Primrose League. Named for Disraeli’s [Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister] favorite flower, the League was an auxiliary of the then dominant Conservative Party, which Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, helped found.

The Primrose League may have facilitated Crowley’s introduction to clandestine work. Modeled on the Orange Order, the secretive fraternal hard core of Irish Protestantism, the Primrose League broke ground by admitting women (like Aunt Annie), and acted like the popular front of “Tory Democracy”. It also constituted a kind of secret society within the Conservative Party, an early form of political action committee that, e.g., spied on perceived enemies of Toryism. Despite his associations with the extremes of Left and Right, Crowley maintained that he always was a Tory at heart, and that may have been as true a statement about his political persuasion as he ever made. The Primrose League could have used a young man of such versatility and conviction– e.g., by using young Crowley’s interest in Celtic revivalism and dissident Jacobitism to monitor their adherents.

Through Aunt Annie’s efforts, Crowley claimed, he gained the patronage of two Primrose League luminaries, Charles Thomson Ritchie (later 1st Baron Ritchie) and Robert Gascoyne Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury. Cecil was not only Grand Master of the League, but also reigned as prime minister for most of 1885-1902. Ritchie was Salisbury’s loyal cabinet member and a former Secretary of the Admiralty. In 1895, Ritchie became the new member of Parliament for Croydon, home to Annie and Jonathan Crowley and Crowley Ale’s main brewery.  As a well-heeled and active supporter of Ritchie’s campaign, Annie Crowley could command his attention and, through him, solicit the help of Salisbury, who was always looking for young “men of ability.” This supports Aleister’s claim that he entered Cambridge in the autumn of 1895 with the help of Lord Salisbury and was earmarked by him for a career in the Diplomatic Service.

The League was set up to be a type of fifth column in support of the interests of its leaders, and to that end the secret society would promote the careers of its members.

Primrose League Bling: sparkler for ‘outstanding contributions’. Thank you, thehigginsbedfordcollections.blogspot.com

If you’ve read my blog over the last two years, you’ll know that I have  contempt for Winston Churchill’s spooky co-conspirator William Stephenson. Stephenson was a Canadian business magnate who got into the intelligence business as a way to attack his German economic competitors and drum up war business. As H. Montgomery Hyde details in The Quiet Canadian:

It was his connection with the Pressed Steel Company that first led Stephenson into the field of secret intelligence. In the course of the business trips which he made to Germany at this period in order to buy steel, he soon discovered that practically the whole of the German steel production had been turned over to the manufacture of armaments and munitions, although Germany had been expressly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles to maintain any armed forces. Unfortunately this state of affairs was not appreciated in Britain… Almost alone among parliamentary back benchers, for he was in the political wilderness during these critical years, Winston Churchill harped unceasingly on what he knew to be going on in the new Reich of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers.

Historian Thomas E. Mahl is much less impressed by Stephenson’s intelligence work, in Desperate Deception:

The Intelligence gathered by Stephenson and others was erroneous, and it led to policies that might have proved disastrous had not the United States come into the war. They reported prior to the war that the German economy was being fully mobilized for war, and in September 1939, that the German economy was strained to its limits– producing at a rate that was unsustainable. This analysis was totally wrong.

The “others” who Mahl refers to are Stephenson’s network of industrial spies– other businessmen like himself. Judging by Stephenson’s business contacts as listed by Hyde, these “others” controlled firms in Canada and the USA as well as firms throughout the British Empire. I don’t find these contacts surprising, given Churchill’s American family connections. What I find particularly gross is how Churchill superimposed this informal network of self-serving businessmen on top of Britain’s intelligence services once he came to power in 1940. According to historian Ron Cynewulf Robbins Britain’s intel pros resented this imposition too:

…Churchill launched Stephenson on his spymaster career by appointing him to head the British Security Co-ordination Service in New York before the United States had entered the Second World War…

It cannot be overlooked that there was mutual antipathy between Sir Stewart Menzies, head of British intelligence, and Stephenson. Churchill gave Stephenson the New York appointment over the objections of Menzies.

Prior to Stephenson’s appointment, Menzies had kept Stephenson’s ‘intelligence’ contributions at arm’s length– Stephenson was allowed to be an uncompensated informer who gave his information to one of Menzies’ subordinates, and this only after pressure was applied by City businessman/MP Ralph Glyn (later Lord Glyn). Prior to Churchill’s war appointments, he didn’t have the pull to get his private spies ‘plugged into’ national defense.[1] However, Churchill used (or was used by!) his industry buddies as early as 1936 to promote their war agenda, as Hyde writes:

Not being in Government, Churchill had no access to official information, so he decided to pursue various private lines of inquiry in order to obtain facts and figures in support of his arguments. Among them, indeed perhaps the most significant, were those provided by Stephenson through access he managed surreptitiously to obtain to the balance sheets of the steel firms of the Ruhr.

To add insult to injury, Stephenson became ‘British Intelligence’ in the USA, representing not only MI-6 (foreign intelligence); but also MI-5 (internal security); the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department and the Political Warfare Executive (which used the Foreign Office as a cover); the British Office of Naval Intelligence; the mysterious Security Executive; Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and finally the ‘dirty tricks’ department, the Special Operations Executive. All of these appointments came under Stephenson’s role as the head of the British Security Coordination in NYC. Stephenson, the businessman, took over Britain’s most sensitive intelligence spheres wholesale.

Stewart and Pamela Menzies in 1932. Thank you, spartacus-educational.com

Of course, once ensconced in New York City, Stephenson would show equal disdain for American government, and collaborate with the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and President Roosevelt to undermine the State Department and sidestep Congress:

Stephenson first arrived in the United States on April 2, 1940 ostensibly on an official mission for the Ministry of Supply. It was on this trip, even before Churchill’s May 10th, 1940 ascension to prime minister that the meeting took place which set the early close working relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and British Intelligence.

This meeting between Stephenson and J. Edgar Hoover had been smoothed over by a mutual friend, the boxer Gene Tunney: “I had known Sir William for several years. He wanted to make… contact with J. Edgar Hoover… [but] he did not want to make an official approach through well-placed English or American friends; he wanted to do so quietly and with no fanfare.”

Mahl explains Stephenson’s orders for stateside espionage with a quote from Ernest Cuneo, who readers will remember from my post on the assassination of Gen. Patton:

The influence of British Security Coordination in America to involved the United States in WWII and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the Ernest Cuneo papers in the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British Intelligence created Donovan’s CIO/OSS. “If the charge against Ellis is true,” wrote Cuneo,”… it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”

“If my buddy Ellis was a spy, that’d mean the CIA was run by Soviets. Can’t happen.”

Following on, Mahl writes:

Not only were the British the primary force in the conception and creation of the COI, which later became the OSS and whose pieces were finally reconstructed into the CIA, but a British officer, Dick Ellis, then ran the organization. This was done in deepest secrecy, because as Winston Churchill’s personal assistant, Major Desmond Morton wrote, “It is of course essential that this fact not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”

Anti-war sentiment was a potent political force in the USA in 1940, and democratic processes would have scuppered FDR’s war plans, had they been allowed to work. It has never been conclusively decided whether Dick Ellis was a Soviet spy, though Richard Trahair’s Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage says that Ellis probably was a Soviet agent, and may have been for 30 years. Personally, I’m not surprised by Ellis, because thanks to the Venona decrypts and books like The Haunted Wood, we know that the OSS was riddled with Soviet agents. Of course, all of this is disastrous news for anybody at the CIA who doesn’t like Russians; if you’re interested in reading more about how Churchill-backed Soviet infiltration has undermined American counterintelligence efforts, check out my post Jesus, Jimmy. I think that this ‘Soviet infiltration’ is best understood as ‘infiltration’ by people who had also backed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

The final stink wafting around Winston Churchill is a drug and cult related one. Mortimer Planno, the man who converted Bob Marley to Rastafarianism and who became the musician’s manager and political advisor, told journalist Hélène Lee that Winston Churchill had ultimate control over the drug market in Jamaica. Lee writes in The First Rasta:

He [Mortimer Planno] begins by confirming my doubts concerning the ganja trade. In the 1930s, he says, ganja was not yet illegal. The British even advised Guyana, with its big international debt, to plant and repay. But in 1953 Winston Churchill (who had been reelected prime minister in 1951) decided to put an end to the ganja trade. Norman Manley, Planno says, called him into his office and told him, “Morty, you must tell your half-Indian brothers to quit the ganja business.”

Norman Manley is one of the two cousins who ruled Jamaica for decades after the British demurred (the other was Alexander Bustamante); notice that Bob Marley’s handler Planno is on a first-name basis with Manley.

Mortimer Planno, thank you snipview.com.

Of course, it’s possible that Mortimer Planno is lying. However, there is circumstantial evidence which suggests that Planno is telling the truth, because the largest ganja supplier at that time, Leonard Percival Howell, was probably a tool of British intelligence:

First, Bob Marley’s guru Leonard Percival Howell– the first ‘Rasta’– ran a cult from his ganja plantation based on a system of control very similar to the one Crowley pioneered at Cefalù. Like Crowley, Howell exploited single mothers; encouraged drug use amongst his followers; and played to followers’ narcissism by promising them power. What was different about Howell’s system was that instead of promoting sex magic, he focused on Black supremacy: Howell’s target demographic (initially) was in Kingston’s poor Black ghettos, not the idle rich of London. Howell promised his Rastafarian followers that they would be God’s chosen people, that they would rule the world and be better than White people.[2] (If you’re interested in what Howell taught, check out The Promise Key, the ‘bible’ of musician Bob Marley’s guru Leonard P. Howell. This is a book that makes modern proponents of Rastafarianism very nervous.)

Second, Lenoard Howell’s early life is ‘spooky’. Howell came from a military family in Jamaica; he returned home from NYC in 1916 and joined the British West Indian Regiment but never saw combat– no one knows exactly what he did in service nor where he did it. By the end of the war Howell was in New York City just like Aleister Crowley, our ‘Primrose League’ buddy. Readers will remember that during WWI, Crowley carried out his ridiculous ‘pro-German’ and ‘pro-Irish Nationalist’ antics in NYC, which were British intelligence operations designed to undermine support for these groups. (See Secret Agent 666 by Richard Spence.)

No one knows much about what Leonard Percival Howell did for the six years immediately after the war either, besides working for an US Army transport ship based out of NYC. By 1924 Howell had plugged into a group of people who gave him the fundamental ideas of Rastafarianism and by 1932 he’d returned to Jamaica full of religious zeal. (In the mean time Howell’s strict Anglican father, Charles Theophilus Howell, had become Justice of the Peace on behalf of the British in his local district– portends of Jim Morrison?!)

Third, Leonard Howell had contact with at least one Communist agent working out of London (PROFINTERN agent George Padmore), so Howell was in the right crowd to be recruited for British Intelligence.

Finally, Howell’s huge plantation had regular working relationships with local law enforcement and British-backed politicians. Ganja sales funded political violence on the island– politically useful violence– which makes it all the more interesting that Churchill allegedly waited until 1953 to ‘crack down’.

Leonard Percival Howell

Hélène Lee doesn’t explore why in 1953 Churchill would suddenly decide to enforce the 1913 law outlawing ganja; a decision that would ultimately result in the destruction of Leonard Percival Howell’s Rastafarian cult at his Pinnacle Plantation in Jamaica. (More accurately, the plantation still belonged to Albert Chang, because although it’s likely that Howell paid Chang for the land, Chang never transferred the deed.)

What Lee does say is that the 1953/54 crack-down disrupted an international system which had previously been controlled by local Jamaican drug-lords. The crack-down didn’t stop the drug trade, but could very easily have changed who benefited from it: the Jamaican ganja trade in the U.K. continued swiftly, coming to an ugly head in the early Sixties with the Profumo affair– a highly publicised scandal which ended Conservative  rule.

It’s a tragedy for Jamaica that the drug trade, and the resulting political violence, wasn’t stopped– and stopped well before 1953. It’s a tragedy for the USA (and the world) that Winston et alia destroyed rule of law at the Federal level. It’s a tragedy for Britain that they lost an empire and almost 400,000 men for Winston’s economic ambitions.

I think this post shows that creatures like Churchill and his patrons don’t care about justice; they don’t care about law; and they don’t care about anyone other than themselves. I look forward to the day when Brits quit referring to Winston as “the great Briton”, and start using a more appropriate epithet, like “that American bastard”, or even better, “that globalist”.

[1] If you’re interested in knowing more about what it was like to be one of Churchill’s spies, I suggest reading my post Great Users of People, where I provide an excerpt from Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, in which Wright reminisces on the sad fate of Klop Ustinov.

[2] British intelligence was interested in exploiting anti-White prejudices, as shown by the report drawn up by George Orwell for Britain’s Information Research Department in 1949, in which he names people he suspects of being communist agents. Orwell made particular note of the “anti-white” prejudices of George Padmore and Paul Robeson, according to Francis Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War, which seethes with hatred for Orwell. George Orwell had strong communist sympathies himself, but became disillusioned with its Russian-side promoters. (George Orwell’s ideological shift may have easily inspired the CIA’s anti-Stalin, then ‘non-communist’, left crusade.)

For Rolling Stones fans, Orwell’s suspected communist agent list included the name of Tom Driberg, a.k.a Lord Bardwell, who was Mick Jagger’s political handler for a time. Next to Driberg’s name, Saunders says Orwell wrote “‘Homosexual’, ‘Commonly thought to be an underground member’, and ‘English Jew’.” Needless to say, Orwell’s list was not a ‘black list’, and many of the people he named went on to enjoy spectacular careers. Their success shouldn’t be surprising considering the CIA’s post-WWII promotion of the ‘non-Communist’ (read: not-Russian-controlled) left.

Greetings first-time a.nolen readers! If you are unaware of the IRS evidence suggesting that Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Empire are CIA assets, please see my post Do You Have A Key to the Playboy Mansion? Enjoy!

I started writing this post expecting to find that the literary brain behind Playboy magazine, Auguste Comte Spectorsky, had a few intelligence ties to William Stephenson’s publishing network in New York City during WWII. Instead, I stumbled onto ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom 2.0′.

The operation which Spectorsky ran for Hugh Hefner was/is a more sophisticated version of the ‘non-communist left’ crusade that CIA agents Melvin Lasky and Michael Josselson ran across the globe during the Cold War. Why was a more sophisticated strategy necessary?

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was fatally flawed in that it was obviously not organic to any of the regions where it metastasized: after WWII loud Americans suddenly appeared with gobs of money for any ‘intellectual’ who would present anti-Russian, leftist views. The game was obvious and anyone worthy of the appellation ‘intellectual’ would have known that US intelligence was behind it– after all, the US and Russia were the only countries left standing.

The CCF was never very successful and I suspect that the CIA realized well before Ernst Henry exposed the CCF in 1962 that appealing to intellect would not sell their message; the CIA’s best chance would be to wrap their politics in sex. Hence the weird, Orwellian hybrid of ‘sexual liberation’ and sexual exploitation that is The Playboy Empire.

Hefner’s magazine mimicked part of the CCF’s political message in as far as it promoted non-communist left ideas, however, Playboy dropped the Christian and more conservative political elements which the CCF included. Hefner never tried to be anything but American, so the message wasn’t burdened with the inherent fakeness of Americans posing as Spaniards, Indians or French, etc. Instead of selling the CIA through testimonials from already-famous intellectuals, Hefner sold the CIA through T&A, consumerism, and a mirage called ‘the Playboy lifestyle’.

Here’s where things really get interesting, because Playboy had to take up the core CCF message without allying itself with the CCF. Many authors who were promoted by the CCF also appeared on Playboy covers, but so did many Western intellectuals who made names for themselves by bashing the CCF. In fact, the first authors and politicians featured on Playboy covers were those championed by CCF critics like Allen Ginsberg and John Kenneth Galbraith. Playboy was self-conscious in its promotion of these ‘dissident’ intellectuals, as if to scream “We’re not CCF!” while promoting the core of the CCF message.

As I researched who Playboy promoted month by month from 1959-1976, I consistently recognized names from Frances Stonor Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War; names she celebrated as critics of the ugly Americans’ CIA operation. Saunders’ prejudices matter, because her work is considered the gold standard CCF exposé. The men Saunders plugged as ‘intellectually honest critics of the CIA’s agenda’ were the same ones that CIA-backed Playboy chose to promote in the face of the CCF’s implosion. Saunder’s heroes promoted the CIA’s leftist agenda in Playboy, but stripped it of the more moderate, conservative elements– elements that the older CCF had included.

This forced me to reevaluate Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War: in writing it she cut off an arm to save the CIA’s body. She protected CIA assets like Allen Ginsberg at the expense of CIA assets like T.S. Eliot. That’s why she’s still breathing, folks. The only question I have left about Saunders is why her book had to come out in 2000– I’m not going to dig into that question now, though I suspect the answer has something to do with Bill Colby floating face down in the Wicomico River circa 1996. (Colby told us in his autobiography that the CIA’s ‘non-communist’ left putsch was largely staffed by his old OSS friends.)

I’ve thrown my theory at you, so now I’m going to explain how I’ve come to this conclusion. First, I’ll provide what little background I have on A. C. Spectorsky, because his personality is interesting with respect to The Cult of Intelligence. Then I will present the results of my statistical analysis of Playboy covers between 1959-76, highlighting the mind-boggling number of known intelligence operatives who wrote for the publication. Next week I’m going to drill out Playboy’s ‘culture war’ politics– politics which mesh ominously with MK ULTRA operations that I’ve written about in the past.

Who was A. C. Spectorsky?

When I read in Warren Hinckle’s autobiography that he’d been given an introduction to Hugh Hefner by A. C. Spectorsky in a bid to fund Ramparts, I knew that I would have to learn more about the Playboy gatekeeper.

Auguste Comte Spectorsky is not an easy man to track down. Most of what I could find comes from Playboy contributor Steven Watts’ book Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. In July 1956, Watts says Hefner hired Spectorsky to be his “second in command” at the magazine, though Hinckle’s recollections show that Spectorsky had control of more than just the publication. Prior to July ’56 Playboy had already published one of Spectorsky’s stories under a pseudonym. This is how Watts says Hefner decided to hire ‘Spec':

The publisher [Hefner] had decided that someone carrying credentials with the East Coast Establishment would help Playboy to gain increased respectability… Equally important, he [Spectorsky] was content to remain in the background and support Hefner as a public symbol of the magazine. “I think Hef, the young sparkplug and head of the whole operation, is the guy who should be kept in the foreground,” he [Spectorsky] wrote in a staff memo.

How magnanimous of new-hire Spectorsky to affirm Hefner as the front man! Besides deciding what would go into Playboy– like how and where products would be placed– Spectorsky’s job included introducing Hefner to “important authors, publishers and agents”.

Spectorsky was born in Paris in 1910 to Russian émigré parents– that’s prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, but during the time when the Czar’s enemies (political undesirables) were sometimes driven to Western Europe for succor. For example, Trotsky was in Vienna at this time and Lenin was in Switzerland; from these places the future dictators drummed up support for what would become the Bolshevik Revolution.

I don’t know that Spectorsky’s parents were ‘political undesirables’, but when WWI began they fled Paris for New York City, where they were quickly absorbed into the more comfortable echelons of society. (Just like Trotsky had been.) After graduating in Physics and Math from NYU, A. C. Spectorsky’s first job was with the editorial staff of The New Yorker magazine.

Improbable doors never stopped opening for the young Auguste Comte: Spectorsky worked as Literary Editor for the Chicago Sun for six years “during the 1940s” before returning to NYC as “a writer and editor in movies, television and journalism”.

The literary world Spectorsky swam in was stuffed with ‘pinko millionaires’ and their henchmen. I’ll remind readers that every publishing concern except Hearst’s got behind FDR’s campaign to drag the USA into WWII to fight for the British, and that British master-spy William Stephenson’s media power-base was in NYC. (See Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars.)

To work in television, however, Spectorsky would have needed additional patronage; patronage that likely came from the circle around David Sarnoff, the military-media-mogul and ‘father of American television’. Sarnoff was versed in intelligence matters thanks to his war-time propaganda work and was an admirer of Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who championed the use of propaganda to subvert democracy. David Sarnoff is also credited with devising the American foreign policy tactic of ‘gang rioting’ to facilitate regime change. (By the mid Sixties the CIA was exploring how to incite rioting in American ‘inner cities’ via the MK ULTRA subproject 102 and the work of Muzafer Sherif.)

In short, A. C. Spectorsky had friends in all the right places and was close to those ‘pinko millionaires’ who have done so much to undermine civil society. Spectorsky’s literary career was built on flattering those millionaires: his most famous book, The Exurbanites, is a cloying homage to NYC’s intelligentsia:

The exurbanite is a displaced New Yorker. He has moved from the city to the country. So indeed have hundreds of thousands of Americans, especially since the second World War; but for the exurbanite the case is different; for him the change is an exile. He will never quite completely permit himself to be absorbed into his new surroundings; he will never acclimate… spiritually he will always been urban, an irreconcilable whose step… is still the steadiest when it returns to the familiar crowded cross-walks  of Madison Avenue.

Of course, literature is how you look at it and Spectorsky may be mocking the ‘East Coast Establishment’ in his book, but having lived that life myself, I believe it’s more likely that Spectorsky is regurgitating the provincial attitudes (and fears) which were lampooned on this New Yorker cover in 1976: We don’t know how Spectorsky was chosen to be the brains behind Playboy, but it happened, and he soon transferred his unfettered desire for approval away from the New York Literary Establishment to his new power-figure, Hugh Hefner. This is how Watts describes the relationship between these two men, it may remind readers of how cult followers identify with authority figures:

Nevertheless, he [Spectorsky] yearned for his boss’ [Hefner’s] approval. “He had a very strange relationship with Hefner,” Spectorsky’s wife reported. “Almost father-son, but the wrong way round. I don’t know why he had this tremendous need to please Hefner but he did.”

Spectorsky describes his own relationship with his boss this way: “To hate him as much as I’ve hated him, you really have to love him.”

Hefner, on the other hand, didn’t even bother to express condolences to Spectorsky when A.C.’s daughter died. Spectorsky put up with his narcissistic ‘boss’ because of a deep-seated insecurity about his worth as a writer, says Watts. Spectorsky’s opinion of his own talents was higher than anything literary he achieved in life; he tried to compensate for this with a flashy yacht and a luxurious lifestyle.

What Politics did Spectorsky Promote in Playboy?

Having given you a picture of Playboy’s literary gatekeeper Spectorsky, I’ll now go on to what type of ideas he chose to promote in Hefner’s mag. I’ve spent the last few days tabulating who and what was featured on every Playboy cover between 1959-1976. That’s 216 covers and about 140 authors total.

As I stated at the beginning of this post, there was a lot of cross-pollination between Playboy and the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the 1959-76 period, (the number in [brackets] is how many times the author was featured on a Playboy cover): Tennessee Williams [4], Bertrand Russell [3] (see University of Chicago CCF archives), as well as Alberto Moravia [5], Leslie Fielder [3], Norman Thomas [1], Vladimir Nabokov [14], Arthur Koestler [1], William Benton [2], William F. Buckley Jr. [6] and William Saroyan [6] (see Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War). Vladimir Nabokov was the cousin of CCF General Secretary Nicholas Nabokov.

Typically, if Spectorsky decided to feature an author on Playboy’s cover, they were featured twice, so a number of the CCF writers listed above were given extra-special promotion. However, intellectuals who made a name for themselves by criticizing the CCF were also promoted heavily: Allen Ginsberg [2], Gore Vidal [2], Graham Greene [4], Jean Paul Satre [2], John Kenneth Galbraith [3], Kenneth Tynan [5], Murray Kempton [2], Norman Mailer [7] and John La Carre [1]. The director Stanley Kubrick [2], another of Saunders’ beloved ‘Cold War ethos’ critics, was also promoted.

In The Cultural Cold War Saunders makes a particular effort to emphasize how the writers listed above, particularly Ginsberg [2], Tynan [5] and Mailer [7], ‘stood up’ to the CIA’s perversion of the intellectual sphere. For instance, here’s a quote from Saunders’ book, p. 216:

It [Quest, the CCF publication in India] probably didn’t deserve J. K. Galbraith’s sneer that ‘it broke new ground in ponderous, unfocused illiteracy’. Certainly Prime Minister Nehru didn’t like it, as he always distrusted the Congress as an ‘American front’. (The Cultural Cold War, p 216)

J. K. Galbraith was promoted by Hefner and Jawaharlal Nehru was the first head of state to be featured on a Playboy cover; Nehru’s issue was October 1962. (The outspokenly anti-CCF Prime Minister appeared eight months after Ernst Henri outed the Congress for Cultural Freedom!) Regular readers will remember that Frances Stonor Saunders makes no mention of Henri’s article in her book, but she almost certainly knew about it. The only other foreign heads of state to make a Playboy cover during this period were Fidel Castro (Exclusive Interview!) and Mao Tse Tung (His Poetry!)– Playboy played an influential role in introducing these communist leaders’ ideas to the American public. (Castro was promoted by Allen Ginsberg and fellow Playboy contributor Leroi Jones [1].)

The CIA agent’s hymn to Castro. Thank you, GinsbergBlog.

Saunders never gets tired of plugging Ginsberg and the ‘Beat’ poets as antidotes to the CIA’s cultural meddling:

With the rise of the New Left [think Ramparts magazine –a.nolen] and the Beats, the cultural outlaws who had existed on the margins of American society now entered the mainstream, bringing with them a contempt for what William Burroughs called a ‘sniveling, mealy-mouthed tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists and union officials… Alan Ginsberg, who in his 1956 lament Howl had mourned the wasted years– ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’– now advocated the joys of open homosexuality and hallucinogenic ‘Peyote solitudes’. Munching LSD, singing the body electric, reading poetry in the nude, navigating the world through a mist of benzedrine and dope, the Beats reclaimed Walt Whitman from stiffs like Norman Pearson Holmes [Literary scholar, J. J. Angleton’s sponsor with British intelligence –a.nolen], and sanctified him as the original hippy. They were scruffy rebels who sought to return chaos to order, in contrast to the obsession with formulae which characterized magazines like Encounter [CIA funded non-communist left magazine –a.nolen]. (p. 361)

The ‘Beat Generation’ writers were the second non-pornography cover feature for Playboy (June 1959); the first was Jazz, which the CIA had been using as a culture war tool since the early 50s. Playboy was a consistent proponent of Jazz throughout the Cold War; it later championed ‘pop’ music too. Playboy’s ‘dissident’ stance against traditional morality was the same stance that ‘Saunders-approved’ authors like Norman Mailer [7] took against the Congress for Cultural Freedom:

With equal conviction, Norman Mailer argued that America’s war in Vietnam was ‘the culmination to a long sequence of events which had begun in some unrecorded fashion toward the end of World War II. A consensus of the most powerful middle-aged and elderly WASPs in America– statesmen, corporation executives, generals, admirals, newspaper editors, and legislators– had pledged an intellectual troth: they had sworn with a faith worthy of medieval knights that Communism was the deadly foe of Christian culture. (p.371)

The typical Playboy contributor looks a lot more like Norman Mailer than a middle-aged, American WASP. So who were the typical Playboy contributors?

Authors were first promoted on Playboy’s cover regularly in Jan 1959: the first fifteen included three British intelligence agents P. G. Wodehouse, Roald Dahl, Robert Graves, plus one more likely British intel agent John Collier. (Collier’s career so closely resembles Dahl’s that it would be extraordinary if Stephenson hadn’t recruited him.) Let’s be conservative and say 20% of the first authors were British intel.

Open American intelligence operatives are the next most numerous: Richard Gehman and Marion Hargove both wrote allied propaganda for the military during WWII. Alberto Moravia’s journalistic career in Italy flourished under James Angleton’s propaganda regime; Moravia also participated in the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. 20% of these Playboy cover writers come from US intelligence.

Recap: 40% of A. C. Spectorsky’s first 15 authors who were promoted on Playboy’s cover were British or American intelligence agents/assets.

The next largest group are the probable American intelligence assets; I say probable because of their association with US agent Allen Ginsberg, who gave CIA notes on the heroin trade in Vietnam to Alfred McCoy so that McCoy could write The Politics of Heroin; and introduced Mick Jagger to his political handler, Tom Driberg, a British intelligence agent. These ‘friends of Ginsberg’ are 1) Jack Kerouac; who was discharged from the Marines after ten days’ service and mysteriously avoided prosecution for his role in the murder of David Kammerer and 2) Herbert Gold who would eventually occupy CIA asset Vladimir Nabokov’s chair at Cornell. That’s another 13% who had probable intel ties.

Finally, Ben Hecht had intelligence connections of a different type. In the US, he was a big proponent of racial integration, but in Israel he supported Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary group which ethnically cleansed chunks of Palestine for the Jewish state. (According to Judith Rice of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, the ‘American League for a Free Palestine’, a cover for Irgun stateside, cooperated with the NAACP to end segregation. Did the NAACP know what their Jewish partners were doing to Palestinians?) Charles Beaumont, another ‘first’ Playboy contributor, was one of Hecht’s working colleagues. Conservatively, Let’s tag on another 7%.

At the very least, between 47%-60% of contributors who were among the first 15 writers featured on Playboy’s cover had intelligence connections. I wonder why Spectorsky’s talent pool contained so many spooks? This sampling of writers is quite representative of Playboy contributors over the 1959-66 period, who were drawn from the intelligence community in shocking numbers.

Things really get interesting when we look at all-time contributors. I’ve broken the list up into pre-1966 contributors and 1967-76 contributors because 1966 was the year the New York Times was told to out the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Top 20 Playboy Contributors 1959-66.

Ian Fleming, the British master spy, is easily Playboy’s most promoted author ever– covers in 1965 were rarely without him and his literary achievement, the spook-fairy-princess ‘James Bond’, originally debuted on Playboy pages. (Why would a CIA organ want to promote Bond’s lifestyle in a magazine that encourages the objectification of sexual partners? See John Gittinger’s Personality Assessment System, The Cult of Intelligence and Great Users of People.)

I’ve mentioned most of the names on that list before; we all know that Ernest Hemingway was a CIA/OSS/KGB spy. J. P. Getty, a running contributor on money matters, ultimately funded CIA agent Kenneth Anger’s career. Robert Raurk was a poor man’s version of Hemingway, who covered the Mau Mau Rebellion (which Rolling Stones groupie Robert Fraser helped suppress via propaganda) for the CIA front TIME magazine (Feb. 16th 1953). Nat Hentoff is a pro-Israel ‘social justice’ activist who covered Jazz for major East Coast media outlets during the period in which the CIA used Jazz as a Culture War tool. (Hentoff now fights anti-semitism from the CATO Institute.)

Shepherd Mead was a vice president of the advertising firm Benton & Bowles. Benton & Bowles rose to fame on the coat-tails of the Radio industry in the USA, an industry that has always had deep ties to the intelligence community. Benton, the company’s founder, shared David Sarnoff and Edward Bernays’ vision that communications should be used to reeducate the public. Jean Shepherd was also a radio personality, making a smooth transition into media from serving in the US Army Signal Corps during WWII.

Gerald Kersh was a British-born WWII propagandist; Budd Schulberg was in the OSS (he arrested photographer Leni Riefenstahl so that US heavies could interrogate her).

The ‘science fiction’ faction of Playboy contributors is fascinating: Ray Bradbury was a regular at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), whose leading lights included Jack Parsons, the top-secret Jet propulsion scientist and Aleister Crowley (UK Intel) devotee; as well as Karl Germer’s successor to the intelligence-heavy O.T.O. Grady McMurty; and L. Ron Hubbard. (See Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter). The LASFS had a weird military bent too, as lasfsinc.info describes:

At the same time, with World War II in progress and most SF [science fiction] fans over 18 in the Armed Services, the LASFS took on the atmosphere of a fannish USO. Los Angeles was a major embarkation center for soldiers and sailors shipping out into the Pacific, and LASFS members were always ready to stop fighting long enough to greet and play host to fans in uniform passing through L.A. to the front.

Other science fiction/horror contributors include Ray Russell (a contributor to the CIA’s Paris Review), and the previously mentioned Charles Beaumont. Roald Dahl, besides being a UK intel operative, was also gifted in writing the macabre which he infused with his anger toward women and his anti-German prejudices. (See Storyteller, by Donald Sturrock.)

Ken Purdy was a personal friend of Spectorsky’s who shot himself in the early Seventies; I couldn’t find anything about “William Iversen”, who doesn’t seem to have written beyond Playboy, but he did take on a strong anti-marriage stance in Hefner’s rag.

Let’s consider the next ‘era’ 1967 to 1976, the year William Colby’s tenure at the CIA ended.

Top 20 Playboy Contributors 1967-76.

Both Len Deighton (famous for spy fiction) and Arthur C. Clarke were in the RAF during WWII, Deighton was an RAF Special Investigations Unit photographer and Clarke worked on sensitive, cutting edge radar technology. Clarke became a well-known a science fiction author and championed LGBT issues from his adopted Sri Lanka, where he was given a type of knighthood. Dan Greenberg worked with Kenneth Tynan on Oh! Calcutta! and was famous for writing How To Be A Jewish Mother; Kenneth Tynan was a favorite CCF ‘dissenter’. According to Saunders, Tynan lampooned the CCF on the BBC TV Show That Was The Week That Was several months after Ernst Henri outed the CIA operation in 1962, i.e. Tynan and the BBC slammed the CCF around the same time Playboy featured anti-CCF Nehru.

Evan Hunter is interesting because he was an executive editor for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency which was founded in NYC in 1946. Scott Meredith’s first client was British intel agent P.G. Wodehouse, who had to run to the USA after making suspect radio broadcasts from Berlin during WWII; MI5 quickly cleared Wodehouse of any wrongdoing, but the general public was not so forgiving and considered him a traitor. Scott Meredith also represented Playboy mega-contributors Norman Mailer and Arthur C. Clarke.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. supported Frank Platt, a CIA agent and Farfield Foundation director, for president of the PEN organization even after the CIA’s congress (and Frank Platt!) had been thoroughly outed (See Saunder’s Cultural Cold War).  William F Buckley Jr was a CIA agent who worked under E. Howard Hunt. Irwin Shaw was the type of writer who the CIA’s Paris Review likes to promote. (Salon did a piece on the PR’s CIA connection in 2012– a.nolen is now taking bets on when Glenn Greenwald’s Salon will be outed as an Agency front.)

Woody Allen is the famous director and darling of Hollywood, who has recently been accused by the daughter of his one-time wife Mia Farrow of molesting her as a child. Isaac Bashevis Singer, another Paris Review (CIA) favorite, wrote about counter-culture and politics from an Orthodox Jewish perspective. John Cheever is the archetypical ‘WASP hypocrite’ writer and poster-child for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Alan Watts, whose book I quoted from earlier about Spectorsky, was a defrocked minister and an LSD proponent.

That’s a lot of names. Probably enough for one post. I’ve put up a list of Playboy contributors 1959-76 and how many cover promos they had, so you can see for yourself how the CIA ranked your favorite Mid-Century author! (This list is only comprehensive for writers who were featured more than once, a handful of remaining single-shot promos are coming soon.) Next week there will be something for everyone:

• I’ll tie Playboy politics into the larger CIA agenda during the 1950s, 60s and 70s– the agenda we know in part because of William Colby’s leaks.
• We’ll also see how Frances Stonor Saunders ties into the Angleton/Colby squabble that did so much to shape American intelligence.
• More on Ramparts and what got Gawker contributor Adrian Chen fired!

OSCAR: The Most Unintentionally Honest Hollywood Propaganda Film.

Last month I looked at A.C. Spectorsky, the brains behind CIA front Playboy magazine, and who he decided to promote on his magazine’s cover between 1959-76. By far the most promoted movie director was accused pedophile Woody Allen [9 separate covers], followed by convicted pedophile Roman Polanski [2] and Lolita director Stanley Kubrick [2]. However, the 1963 movie Cleopatra is the only film to be featured on two Playboy covers during this period. Why would this film have been given so much promotion by Spectorsky?

January 1963, Spectorsky’s first Cleopatra plug.

February 1963, Spectorsky’s second Cleopatra plug: “The Chicks of Cleopatra”.

I decided I’d better watch Cleopatra. It wasn’t long before I realized that this marathon film is a garish, 192 minute ad for the American ‘New World Order’– specifically, directors Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rouben Mamoulian and Darryl F. Zanuck try to equate American dominance in the post-WWII era with Alexander the Great’s ‘global empire’.

Don’t take my word for it:

Liz Taylor: [talking to Rex Harrison about Alexander the Great] Your ambitions must always have been his. They still must be… Make his dream yours, Caesar, his grand design. Pick it up where he left off. Out of the patchwork of conquest, one world. And out of one world, one nation. One people on earth living in peace!

The whole ridiculous spectacle of this ‘classic’ Hollywood movie is to sell the idea of world government– as represented by the voluptuous Taylor and her masterful lover, played by Rex Harrison. Incredibly, Hollywood potentates chose two famous tyrants, an ancient Egyptian goddess-queen and her Imperial Roman sugar-daddy, to sell their vision of the ‘Pax Americana’. I can’t tell if they didn’t see themselves, or if they were just laughing at the general public.

IMDb credits the film to three countries: USA, U.K. and Switzerland. The production companies were Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (as Producers Pictures Corporation), and two Swiss firms, MCL Films S.A. and Walwa Films S.A., which appear to have been created specifically for Cleopatra (they have no other production credits on IMDb.) Presumably ‘U.K.’ was included because of Rex Harrison, Richard Burton and leading lady Taylor, who had dual US/U.K. citizenship, though I’m not sure when she achieved this.

Darryl F. Zanuck

In reality, Cleopatra is a thoroughly globalist movie. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation was created by Darryl Zanuck in 1935 after he left United Artists. Zanuck’s company took off during WWII, challenging its more established competitors RKO and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Fox’s war-time success may have had something to do with Zanuck being made a Colonel in the Army Signal Corps, Fox historian Peter Lev attributes the firm’s growth to Zanuck’s military placement. The US military isn’t shy about their connection to Twentieth Century Fox either, according to ARMY.mil:

… years before people like Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep and George Clooney made their grand entrances down the red carpet to find out if they’d won the coveted award, another group of Hollywood legends produced award-winning films for the Army leaving a piece of Hollywood on display at the Signal Corps Museum.

Darryl Zanuck, who headed 20th Century Fox and received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Irving Thalberg Memorial Award, was a colonel in the Signal Corps during World War II. Also in the Signal Corps during World War II was Oscar winning director Frank Capra, and Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.

The efforts of these and others who served in Astoria, N.Y. with the 834th Signal Service Photographic Detachment at the Signal Corps Photographic Center produced military training films as well as Academy Award winning documentaries after the war, according to Signal Corps Museum director Robert Anzuoni.

Zanuck’s partnership with the military and intelligence is elucidated in Nick Browne’s Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History:

A very different form of war-related nonfiction film making in Hollywood involved military training and educational films. The studios began to regularly produce these one- and two-reel films in late 1940, primarily through a Hollywood based reserve unit of the Army Signal Corps comprised of some two dozen officers and 300 GIs trained in film production. The unit was headed by Lt. Col. Nathan Levinson, who also acted as vice chair (under Darryl Zanuck) of the Motion Picture Academy Research Council, an organization that coordinated industry support for the Signal Corp’s production efforts. By 1941 these efforts were well underway, and Zanuck was increasingly involved. In fact, Zanuck himself made a trip to Washington in August to meet with Army brass about Hollywood’s military-related film making operations… The military leaders were favorably impressed, and Zanuck was forthright about the industry’s pro-military, anti-isolationist stance– a position he and other studio heads would publicly defend before the Senate only a few weeks later.

The occasion of Zanuck’s Senate testimony was the so-called propaganda hearings, held in Washington in September 1941. The hearings were convened by a cadre of isolationists who decided to take on the tide of interventionism. Gauging Hollywood as an ideal target, Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald P. Nye demanded that the Interstate Commerce Committee investigate what Nye termed the “propaganda machine” in Hollywood which was run by the studios “almost as if they were being operated by a central agency”. The committee hearings focused on seventeen “war mongering” feature films, twelve of which were produced in Hollywood– including Foreign Correspondent and The Great Dictator— along with four British imports and one studio released foreign picture.

I’ve highlighted ‘along with four British imports’ because, although we don’t know which films these are, we do know that William Stephenson, the British spymaster who worked with FDR to set up the OSS, had cornered the British film market with his ‘Sound City Films’ which ran the world-famous Shepperton Studios. (See The Quiet Canadian.) Stephenson’s intelligence mission was to pull the USA into WWII to fight for the British; Stephenson and his allies like FDR did this by using ‘dirty tricks’– harassment, threats, lies– to pressure isolationists and crush any dissent. Senators Nye and Wheeler were the nation’s last defense against traitors like FDR and foreign spooks like Stephenson, who collaborated with Hollywood moguls to push their war– and ultimately imperialist– agenda.

‘Wild Bill’ Donovan pins a medal on Bill Stephenson, who took over British Intelligence after Churchill ascended to power.

I’ll remind readers that FDR’s war effort, and his newly created intelligence networks, were heavily invested in film propaganda. Marjorie Cameron, the wife/handler of US jet propulsion expert Jack Parsons, was given a job with Hollywood filmmakers creating war propaganda films in cooperation with the “Hollywood Navy” after working as a ‘honey trap’ for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The JCS used Cameron against men with “pro-German” sympathies, according to her biographer Spencer Kansa.

Another intelligence creep and ‘father’ of modern communication studies, Carl Hovland, spent WWII analyzing how wartime audiences would respond to messages in propaganda movies such as Why We Fight. This is how one author on social-judgment-theory.wikispaces.com describes Hovland’s contribution to the war effort: “Like many other early communications theorists, he worked with the U.S. War Department during World War II to study the effectiveness of persuasive films and audience resistance to those films.” Hovland’s research provided the basis for his collaborator Muzafer Sherif’s work on race riots for the CIA’s MK ULTRA program.

Finally, when media personalities wouldn’t cooperate with FDR’s spook buddies of their own accord, they were forced through ‘dirty tricks': take the case of Walt Disney.

The US intelligence community has always been heavily invested in Hollywood, and Hollywood– especially liberal Hollywood— has always been eager to oblige.

Browne’s fascinating book goes on to discuss one of Cleopatra’s producers, Walter Wanger, and his hawkish political activism:

Actually, Hollywood had been struggling both internally and publicly with issues of politics and propaganda for several years. Among the more notable of these struggles involved Foreign Correspondent some two years earlier. In 1939, Walter Wanger was battling Hollywood’s self-censorship agency, the PCA [Production Code Administration], over various political aspects of the story. Wanger made little headway and was still livid over what he considered the PCA’s mutilation of Blockade, a 1938 film set against the Spanish Civil War, so he decided to go public with his concerns, lambasting the Hays Office and the PCA in a series of speeches and editorials…

By 1940-1941, however, as the war in Europe intensified and as the prospect of US intervention increased, neither Hays or the PCA could discourage film makers from taking on geopolitical and war-related subjects. Indeed Roosevelt himself had appealed to the movie industry in 1940 to support both the defense build up at home and the Allied effort overseas… FDR praised Hollywood’s war effort and Senator Ernest McFarland threatened to ask the Dies Committee on Un-Americanism to investigate the isolationists [like Senators Wheeler and Nye].

It appears that before ‘Un-American’ activities committees were used to ‘persecute’ communists in Hollywood, Roosevelt’s pink hawks used the same hammer to silence critics of their Hollywood collaborators! Were these pro-war Hollywood ‘reds’ paid in the coin they minted?

Walter Wanger

It’s particularly interesting to me that Cleopatra’s producer, Wanger, got his knickers in a knot about the censorship of Blockade, a movie that in its original form glorified the communist fighters in Spain.  This movie indirectly flattered American collaborators with the communists in Spain, like OSS/CIA/KGB agent Ernest Hemingway; and Bill Donovan’s good friend Milton Wolff, who belonged to the Communist Party in Spain and recruited heavily from his communist Spanish Civil War colleagues for both the OSS and British Secret Services:

Before the United States entered World War II, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who founded the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, enlisted Wolff’s services. At Donovan’s urging, Wolff helped recruit for the British Special Services.

Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans, with their language skills and entree to anti-fascist groups in Europe, were well suited for intelligence work. After the United States entered the war, Wolff also recruited Lincoln veterans for the OSS.

But when Wolff enlisted in the Army in 1942, his advancement at officer’s training school was blocked, he said, and he was labeled a “premature anti-fascist.” He was given noncombat roles but eventually served in Burma and with the OSS in Europe.

(Milton Wolff helped the BSC, British Security Coordination, recruit Communist party members too, according to Mark Seaman in Special Operations Executive: A New Instrument of War.)

OSS recruits from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were not limited to Wolff’s efforts, OSS operatives Donald Downes and Arthur Goldberg also used this strategy, according to author Jon Wiener in Professors, Politics and Pop. Of course, the OSS was riddled with Soviet spies and sympathizers; OSS recruits would go on to become the CIA’s leading lights. One of these lights, CIA director Bill Colby, quashed an internal investigation of his own dealings with a known KGB agent in Saigon. (See Cold Warrior, Tom Mangold.)

… and she said, “Alexander the Great”!

There’s one more sordid aspect to Cleopatra’s relationship with Playboy magazine: Ben Hecht, the Irgun member and Playboy mega-contributor, was part of the team who wrote Cleopatra’s script, though his involvement was not originally acknowledged. Why?

Hecht’s political baby, Irgun, was a Jewish terrorist organization in Palestine that bombed British government offices and ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages in preparation for Israel’s foundation. Hecht worked with Irgun’s American front organizations to drum up support for the terrorists, you can read a sympathetic account of Hecht’s activities from Judith Rice of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.

Ben Hecht

Irgun’s political strategy was cynical, for example, they partnered with the NAACP stateside to end segregation. Readers will remember that the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] was founded in 1909, but only had one Black amongst its executives and took twenty years to get its first Black president. Besides partnering with Jewish extremists, the NAACP played an interesting ‘supporting role’ in the Playboy empire by providing the pornographers with ‘Black friends‘. Needless to say, Irgun’s policies in Israel were different to the policies it supported via the NAACP in the United States. Why?

In summary, Spectorsky promoted Cleopatra in Playboy because 1) it was written by one of his Zionist spook friends; 2) it was directed by Hollywood’s ambassador to the US ‘intelligence community’ and 3) it was produced by FDR’s Hollywood propaganda commissar.

Another CIA front plugs Cleopatra.

Journalist Drew Pearson graces the cover of TIME on Dec 13th, 1948.

According to the authors of KGB controller Yuri Modin’s biography My 5 Cambridge Friends (1994), the American FBI was first alerted to the existence of the ‘Cambridge Five’ spies by prominent American journalist Drew Pearson. Pearson wrote a sloppy piece of pro-Stalin propaganda which contained correspondence between Winston Churchill and Harry Truman; correspondence which could only have been pilfered by a highly-placed Soviet mole.

After Pearson’s article was published Yuri Modin et alia say that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI began to search the White House, US State Department, and the British Embassy in Washington D.C. for the source of the leaks. Pearson’s foolish article, coupled with information from the slowly-churning VENONA project, eventually lead the Americans to identify Donald Maclean of Philby’s network.

This is how Modin describes Pearson’s piece, from My 5 Cambridge Friends:

On June 15^th 1945, Drew Pearson, a well-known American journalist, published a seven-page magazine article revealing the full substance of the Stalin-Hopkins talks at the Kremlin, as well as that of Churchill’s telegrams to Truman. His piece contained so much exact detail that the FBI’s suspicions were thoroughly aroused. There was another reason: Pearson seemed to have gone out of his way to paint Stalin as tolerant, genial, open-minded and respectful of democracy, whereas in fact there was no question whatever that Uncle Joe planned to offer the West the smallest possible concession over Poland.

I was not able to find the name of the magazine in which Pearson’s pro-Stalin article appeared, which means I can’t verify what Modin et alia say about the piece. Modin claims that the article contained the substance of the Stalin-Hopkins Kremlin talks; Churchill-Truman correspondence from June 5^th 1945 (telegrams 72 and 73); and five Hopkins-Churchill telephone transcripts which Pearson wrote about even though Hopkins had failed to report them to the communications control room at the White House.

According to Modin, Pearson’s information was doubly dangerous to the ‘Cambridge Five’ because of Soviet sloppiness: when Pearson published on June 15^th 1945, Maclean had just leaked telegrams 72 and 73 from New York City. Soviet technicians in NYC did not encode their dispatches to Moscow well, so the Americans could have identified that the leak of telegrams 72 and 73 had originated from the British Embassy in D.C. by going over their recordings of Soviet transmissions. Four years later in 1950, VENONA leader Meredith Gardner had cottoned on to this sloppy Soviet mistake.

Picture from the NSA’s hagiography. Gardner’s 1951 work on Soviet transmissions of the same telegrams 72 and 73 from Maclean ultimately uncovered the Cambridge Five, unfortunately Gardner also tipped off Philby.

Modin asserts that only the British Embassy in D.C. would have had access to all Pearson’s information, but the FBI didn’t dig deeply enough to see that. What Modin claims doesn’t make sense– if the Brits had access to the full Hopkins-Stalin transcripts they could have had access to all of Pearson’s leaked information. However, Harry Hopkins, FDR’s emissary between Churchill and Stalin, certainly had access to this data. Hopkins is also known to have done work for the KGB.

Harry Hopkins’ July 18, 1938 cover, the last of three TIME covers enjoyed by the KGB asset.

Yuri Modin goes out of his way to absolve the White House from any responsibility for the leaks because Modin wanted to protect Harry Hopkins, who was not outed as a Soviet spy until the publication of The Sword and the Shield by Prof. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin five years after Modin’s book. (Andrew, Cambridge University’s espionage guru, outs Hopkins in the most sympathetic way possible. Glad to know that problem’s fixed.) This is what Modin claims happened with the Pearson article:

What really happened? The American journalist [Pearson] was an unwitting tool of Moscow. His article was orchestrated by the Soviet secret services without his knowing it. Naturally, his information was lifted straight from the document [telegrams 72 and 73] that had been purloined by Maclean and transmitted by Henry to the Centre [Soviet intelligence HQ].

If Pearson really was part of a Soviet propaganda offensive as Yuri Modin and his co-authors claim, it was unforgivably stupid to use information that alerted unfriendly elements in the FBI to the existence of the ‘Cambridge Five’. Modin asks us to believe that the Soviets told Pearson to endanger one of the most profitable spy-rings in history in exchange for a few clumsy political points for Stalin. Unlikely. Who was Pearson really working for?

Regular readers will remember Drew Pearson from my post on the  assassination of Gen. George Patton: in 1943 Pearson was used by FDR-henchman Ernest Cuneo– who was also Pearson’s media lawyer– to place a false story about Patton slapping a shell-shocked soldier in Pearson’s NBC radio show Drew Pearson Comments. The purpose of this attack against Patton was to lobby for Patton’s removal from the European War Theater because Patton had suggested continuing the war against FDR’s good buddy Stalin once Germany fell. When Patton couldn’t be removed through dirty tricks, he had an ‘accident’.

Pearson sailed through the Patton debacle relatively unscathed because of Cuneo’s political power. Readers will remember that both Pearson and Cuneo had close working relations with William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination– a Frankenstein-like creation formed when Stephenson grabbed control of no less than eight different intelligence offices after Churchill’s ascent to power. Cuneo was an official liaison between the OSS, British Security Coordination (BSC), the FBI, the United States Department of State and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.

Cuneo’s mission with the OSS was to flood American media with British propaganda, to which end he purchased 1) a huge number of American newspaper concerns and 2) the loyalty of many journalists, including Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, Robert Ingersoll, Whitelaw Reid, Dorothy Thompson, Edmond Taylor; and very likely including Edward Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith and William Shirer.

Perhaps the most telling thing about Cuneo and his loyalties is this quote in which he defends his British intelligence friend Dick Ellis against allegations of working for the Soviets, from Thomas Mahl’s Desperate Deception:

The influence of British Security Coordination in America to involve the United States in WWII and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the Ernest Cuneo papers in the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British Intelligence created Donovan’s CIO/OSS. “If the charge against Ellis [Dick Ellis] is true,” wrote Cuneo,”… it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”

Charles Howard ‘Dick’ Ellis, courtesy of mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com

The MI5 investigation into Dick Ellis’ work for the Soviets was carried out by Peter Wright, who also did a similar investigation into Kim Philby, which earned Wright a lot of animosity from MI6. This is how Wright describes the Ellis investigation in Spycatcher:

The real difficulty with the Ellis case was trying to determine whether he was working for the Germans or the Russians, or both…

The first thing which convinced me Ellis was always a Russian spy was the discovery of the distribution of the Abwehr officer’s report in which he claimed Von Petrov’s British source was a Captain Ellis. The report was sent routinely to Kim Philby in the Counterintelligence Department. He had scrawled in the margin: “Who is this man Ellis? NFA,” meaning “No further action” before burying the report in the files. At the time Ellis’ office was just a few doors down the corridor, but it seemed to me to be a most suspicious oversight by the normally eagle-eyed Philby.

Ellis wasn’t just Ernest Cuneo’s pal, he was also a BSC buddy of William Stephenson who retired shortly after Philby fell under suspicion. Later, Ellis had odd dealings with Philby over the defection of Soviet agent Vladimir Petrov. Ellis eventually confessed to spying for the Germans, but never the Soviets. British Prime minister Margaret Thatcher refused to confirm or deny Dick Ellis’s work for Soviet intelligence— so I leave it to readers to surmise what Cuneo’s assertion about his friend Dick Ellis and the KGB means for the CIA.

So much for Pearson’s lawyer … what about Pearson himself? In short, Drew Pearson was one of William Stephenson’s pet American journalists who could be relied on to promote British interests in his writing. Could Drew Pearson have been the “unwitting tool of Moscow” while at the same time being the witting tool of the FDR administration?

I think that Pearson’s handler-cum-lawyer, Ernest Cuneo, and Pearson’s ultimate sponsor, William Stephenson, would have noticed if their boy was being used as an “unwitting tool of Moscow” and Cuneo/Stephenson would have moved to reclaim Drew. I dare say Moscow would have been smart enough not to use Pearson in the way Modin claims.

I believe it’s far more likely that a proactive friend of Stalin in the White House, someone like Harry Hopkins, could have leaked telegraphs 72 and 73 to Pearson while being unaware of the damage he inadvertently did to the British ‘Cambridge Five’ because of freakish ciphering sloppiness by the Soviets in NYC.

So was Drew Pearson really a Soviet agent? Yes and no– he was a Soviet agent in the same way as Bill Colby was a Soviet agent. Drew Pearson was part of that incestuous espionage fifth column in which it’s difficult to distinguish between KGB, BSC and CIA.

Readers interested in how the spook world works will want to know that Drew Pearson’s heir and protégé Jack Anderson was also part of this fifth column.

Jack Anderson was a Mormon journalist and a WWII news correspondent for the Americans before Pearson and his patrons took Anderson under their collective wing. According to William Colby’s self-serving 1974 ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, the CIA spied on Anderson after he published mobster Johnny Rosselli’s information about the planned Castro assassination– i.e. Colby made Anderson look good in the ‘Family Jewels’. Colby’s sheltering of Anderson probably means that Anderson was one of Colby’s pet journalists to whom the CIA director leaked information that 1) damaged his enemies within the Agency and 2) benefited the KGB. Colby had suspicious dealings with a known KGB agent in Saigon, dealings which he hid from the CIA. (See Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior.)

As you can see, high-level double-dealing between US, U.K. and Soviet potentates is a long-term problem that I believe had its roots in the 1890s, well before Pearson’s stupid article.

Ironically, it was the ‘help’ of Stephenson’s sneaky American allies which kicked-off the undoing of the ‘Cambridge Five’. In their eagerness to help their Soviet allies and lie to the American people, clumsy White House conspirators compromised their British buddies’ operation. It’s almost enough to make one pity Kim Philby.

Two CIA men swap notes. Thank you dallasnews.com.

Today I’m going to offer some thoughts building on ideas from Addiction and Control, where I speculated on how addiction may be used by exploitative organizations such as the ‘intelligence community’ to control its members.

When William Egan Colby decided to publish his autobiography in 1978, he made this rather extraordinary claim:

…I remembered a talk I had with Donovan [William Donovan, OSS head] several years before. I had asked him how you get young paratroopers to behave like choir boys on Saturday night after spending six days learning to be aggressive, devious and heroic. He answered that he didn’t know, but nevertheless it just had to be done. It would be many years before I would have to develop a better answer than Donovan’s.

Colby claims something remarkable in this quote, he claims he developed a system of control for his subordinates that involves them leading a double life: six days doing “devious” work, one evening acting like a “choir boy”. I believe Colby was saying that he found a way to make his subordinates reliably present an ethical face to the outside world, while in reality they spent most of their time being unethical.

Colby may be lying in the excerpt above. However, there is a third party who provides information suggesting that such a conversation may have taken place between Donovan and Colby. CIA/OSS agent Ray S. Cline provides context for Donovan and Colby’s cryptic conversation in  Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA, 1976:

It was easy enough for Roosevelt to provide a charter and authorize Donovan to start an agency and spend several millions of largely unvouchered dollars. Still, it was not easy for Donovan to acquire the staff he needed, find office space for them, get them paid either as civil or military personnel, and impart some sense of specific duties to his fledgling outfit…

“Wild Bill” deserves his sobriquet mainly for two reasons. First, he permitted the “wildest,” loosest kind of administrative and procedural chaos to develop while he concentrated on recruiting talent wherever he could find it – in universities, businesses, law firms, in the armed services, at Georgetown cocktail parties, in fact, anywhere he happened to meet or hear about bright and eager men and women who wanted to help. His immediate lieutenants and their assistants were all at work on the same task, and it was a long time before any systematic method of structuring the polyglot staff complement was worked out. Donovan really did not care. He counted on some able young men from his law firm in New York to straighten out the worst administrative messes, arguing that the record would justify his agency if it was good and excuse all waste and confusion…

The second way in which Donovan deserved the term “Wild’ was his own personal fascination with bravery and derring-do. He empathized most with the men behind enemy lines. He was constantly traveling to faraway theaters of war to be as near them as possible, and he left to his subordinates the more humdrum business of processing secret intelligence reports in Washington and preparing analytical studies for the President or the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

Fortunately Donovan had good sense about choosing subordinates. Some were undoubtedly freaks, but the quotient of talent was high and for the most part it rose to the top of the agency. One of Donovan’s greatest achievements was setting in motion a train of events that drew to him and to intelligence work a host of able men and women who imparted to intellectual life in the foreign field some of the verve and drive that New Deal lawyers and political scientists had given to domestic affairs under Roosevelt in the 1930s.

When CIA-yes-man Ray Cline ended his overt career in intelligence, he became a Georgetown University crony.

Cline offers a sympathetic view of Donovan’s management techniques, but I think the underlying chaos shines through anyway. When the OSS was transformed into the CIA in 1947, its leaders inherited a mess of “freaks”, Georgetown party kids, mobsters and NYC lawyers who didn’t mind being unethical, but whose behavior would not stand up to public scrutiny. This presented a control problem for the CIA because in order to survive its early years the organization had to appear to act in the public’s interest. Also, if you build your team out of folks who have contempt for the law, you’ll have a hard time making them follow your rules unless you devise some type of extraordinary system. Who were Donovan and Colby, and how did they find themselves in a position to ‘solve’ the criminal/”choir boy” control problem?

William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was the American manager for the OSS– Franklin Roosevelt’s sidekick organization to British spy William Stephenson’s ‘British Security Coordination’, an illegal spy network designed to undermine FDR’s political opponents and secure America’s participation in Churchill’s war. Long-time a.nolen readers will remember that television chef Julia Child was Donovan’s secretary, and that her husband Paul retired from public service in haste while under suspicion for KGB collaboration.

Prior to his OSS work Donovan was a well-to-do Catholic lawyer in NYC, who had befriended William Stephenson during WWI and became the District Attorney for Buffalo, NY. Donovan first made a name for himself in ‘public service’ during Prohibition by enforcing the anti-alcohol laws against ‘WASPs’ and Buffalo city’s German mayor Francis Schawb, while other mobsters, like the *suspected bootleggers* (and Irish-Catholic) Kennedy family were allowed to enrich themselves. This sort of narrow ethnic favoritism dedication to the Federal Government brought Donovan to the attention of NY’s one-time governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his supporters who in 1942 tapped Donovan to run the OSS, an organization that President Truman would later oppose on grounds that it was an American “Gestapo”. (“Cheka” would have been a more accurate appellation.)

There’s a lot about William Egan Colby’s personality which mimics Donovan’s. William Colby worked under Donovan in the OSS and was a rising star in Donovan’s law firm during the interim period between 1945 and Colby’s joining the CIA. Colby was also Catholic, though of a tortured variety: his father (a military man) had converted after a falling out with this “New England” family and there seems to have been a kind of self-conscious zealotry in Colby’s faith– he even served as an “alter boy” throughout college! Like Donovan, Colby nurtured a persecution complex due to his Catholicism, and he whines about not being invited into more fashionable Princeton University society, though he was admitted into the university. Just as Donovan, Colby always wanted to be part of Protestant ‘clubs’, but was never satisfied with the attention he received once he joined!

Colby describes his family as liberal Catholics, much like how the founder of Ramparts magazine (and Hugh Hefner fanboy) Edward M. Keating described himself. Colby also liked to sing-and-dance about both his father’s and his own championship of Black causes; Black America may be surprised to hear that the CIA’s #1 heroin dealer is actually on their team.

While at Princeton Colby organized a gas-pump attendants’ union; at Donovan’s law firm he joined the ACLU and got his hands dirty in New York City Democratic party politics– i.e. “Tammany Hall”. In a recent interview on C-SPAN, Colby’s son Carl described his father’s political views by saying that the old man had “drunk the milk of FDR”.

So, in many respects, Colby and Donovan were birds of a feather; they were also at the core of what would become the CIA.

Colby left Donovan’s NYC law firm to take up a post at the National Labor Relations Board in Washington D.C.. From there, he would find his way to the CIA.

Despite the skepticism of more far-sighted statesman like Harry Truman, the OSS did live on in what we know as the CIA. However, the agency’s after-the-fact legitimization did nothing to ‘clean up’ the rowdy mess who formed its staff.

I searched the rest of Colby’s autobiography for some explanation of what his “answer” to the CIA’s control problem might have been. There were few clues, except this one about how Colby chose to “educate” his agency underlings:

What was needed, in short, was an educational campaign. In those changing times, when the nation was no longer willing to take it on faith that  anyone in government, and especially in CIA, was an honorable man, we were obliged to demonstrate that we were honorable by showing what we were doing. And as Executive Director, I thought I could start the process by making sure that our own CIA employees knew what the facts and the rules were, so they could defend their work in their own minds and to their friends and neighbors. Once this base was laid, we could then consider how to get the message over to the public.

I’m reminded of the rather pathetic list of talking points which NSA employees were sent home with after the Snowden ‘revelations’ so that they could defend their employer from their relatives’ healthy questions over Thanksgiving dinner. In all seriousness though, Colby’s ‘education’ campaign was about keeping the “choir boy” story consistent across agents. In Honorable Men, Colby then goes on to opine how this education campaign should be applied to us, the general public, via journalism. As we all know, Colby was a great friend to journalists.

The “education” quotation aside, Colby doesn’t elaborate on what his “better answer” might have been, however Occam’s Razor may point us in the right direction. The ‘addiction’ answer to Colby’s control problem would have been a very natural one for him to alight upon. He had first-hand experience running the old opiate networks in Vietnam, and it was under his watch that the horrific heroin epidemic swept through American GIs. This grotesque treachery was part of the economic system which kept Colby’s unpopular Catholic candidate in power in South Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem). Later, Colby was head lawyer for criminals who continued this drug trade after Saigon fell.

Madame Nhu at prayer. Nhu was the unofficial South Vietnamese first lady and wife of Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother; Diem was a “lifelong bachelor”. You’ll notice that this image was splashed across LIFE magazine, the CIA front.

The MK ULTRA papers may also offer some insight, because they show that the agency was very interested in addiction and addicts. The CIA even funded one experiment titled: “Use of Benzimidazole Derivative with Potent Morphene-Like Properties Orally as a Presumption Reinforcer in Conditioning of Drug-Seeking Behavior in Rats”,  which was presented to an audience at The National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH. (See MK ULTRA MORI ID # 151771, 12/24/1959.)

Through the MK ULTRA program the CIA focused on the addictive qualities of prescription drugs, for instance cough-syrup medicine codeine and substitutes for codeine (probably things like ‘OxyContin’); carisoprodol (part of ‘date rape’ cocktails, trade name ‘Soma’– yes, like Brave New World); and phenyramidol (a muscle relaxant, brand name ‘Cabral’). Readers will notice that all three of these drugs are regularly prescribed in the USA, sometimes also in Europe. The CIA worked closely with Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, as well as Smith, Kline and French (now GlaxoSmithKline). The National Institute of Mental Health and the Office of Naval Research were close partners on the codeine work.

The CIA wasn’t just interested in prescription drug addicts, but also alcohol abuse. In John Mark’s book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, he talks about a Naval Intelligence program called CHATTER: another ‘truth serum’ quest which was supported by the CIA out of Frankfurt, Germany. Candidate serums included heroin, barbiturates, amphetamines and alcohol. CIA agents who tested LSD out on themselves would “come down” with “alcohol parties”; according to Marks other CIA research had concocted “a potion to accelerate the effects of liquor, called an ‘alcohol extender’.” George White, himself an alcoholic, would use alcohol as part of his drug-den interrogations. Hard-drinking was (and still is) part of agency culture and in Honorable Men Colby makes it clear that he was a careful student of his CIA colleagues’ drinking habits.

My point is that the CIA was as interested in ‘socially acceptable’ habit-forming substances as it was in fringe drugs like LSD or magic mushrooms, perhaps even more so.

Colby and his friends would not have been interested in the ‘burn out’ type of addict; they’d have needed to harness the ‘highly functioning’ type of addict. For an idea of what ‘functioning’ addicts look like please see my post Addiction and Control.

What makes a functioning addict different? According to employees of the rather painfully named Klean Addiction Treatment Centers:

Believe it or not, addicts can be found in places such as hospitals, law offices, and teacher’s lounges. Addicts are frequently highly driven people who seek extremes in life. They may perform surgery and then step out for a shot of heroin. They may even be preachers, given the community’s trust and the generous donations of parishioners.

It appears that the type of individual Donovan recruited for the OSS was of the type who may be prone to ‘functioning’ addictions. The Klean Center goes on to list three other characteristics which define highly functioning addicts.

1. “Denial”

High functioning addicts and alcoholics must live in a world of denial in order to keep their ruse afloat. They may also rationalize their substance abuse by pointing out that they have important jobs, despite the fact that they experience blackouts on a regular basis. The people who see the truth of the situation, often those closest to them [the addict], must endure the wild mood swings, frantic lifestyle, and perpetual instability of life with an addict.

To me, this strongly echoes Yuri Modin’s observations about the spook hoi polloi, and the self-defeating behavior lionized in Ian Fleming’s James Bond franchise. The “denial” behavior also reminds me of Ernest Hemingway, who until recently was the patron saint of OSS fanboys.

Shaken, not stirred.

2. “Confinement”

A high-functioning heroin addict is often confined to a set routine. He needs his fixes at certain times of the day and he has to rely on his dealer being available when he needs to score. High functioning heroin addicts often are loath to travel, because any time away from their fix will mean dope sickness (early withdrawal) and a frantic search for more… Prescription drugs and high functioning addiction often go hand-in-hand. There are many people who think they are functioning ‘just fine’ since their drug of choice is prescribed to them.

This is where an addiction-based ‘system of control’ has teeth, because the addict will want to stay by people who have access to whatever it is he ‘needs’. That may be a health care plan which subsidies his pills, or the company of other alcoholics/individuals who share his addiction culture, say, at the local military base where he is posted/visiting. Two real-life examples: 1) Back during the Vietnam War, the legal drinking age was lowered for active-duty soldiers on Army bases. 2) Trans-advocates, like Jennifer Pritzker’s Palm Center, are eager for the military to take on the costs of hormone supplements for GIs who opt for sex changes. (Do spooks see something exploitable in the ‘trans’ community, like they see in the homosexual community?) Easy and cheap access to the necessary ‘fix’ serves to bind the addict to their masters.

On that note, here’s a quote from Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, according to ‘Living Theatre’ documentary producers ArthurMag.com:

Anita’s [Anita Pallenberg] Roman world centered around the Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck… And so it all went round in a little avant-garde elite, as often as not drawn together by a taste for drugs, of which the LT was a center. And drugs were not copious in those days.

In the early 1960s Anita Pallenberg was being groomed by the CIA in Rome through their asset Playboy magazine; the Living Theatre received CIA funds through the Farfield Foundation. Colby ran the CIA’s covert political programs in Italy between 1953-58 and his policies promoted ‘non-communist leftist’ thinking to counteract Moscow’s political influence, so it’s likely that he established whatever programs dealt with Anita.

Readers interested in other ways that ‘confinement’ is useful for control may appreciate my post The Cult of Intelligence and Sullivanians, or The Fourth Wall Cult.

3. “Double Lives”

High-functioning alcoholics and addicts often need to lead a double life in order to satisfy all of their needs. They cannot afford to have one life spill into another and so may go to great lengths. Some will find bars on the other side of town from where they live in hopes of not running into any ″straight″ friends or colleagues. Others will hide in shame of their drug addiction and may disappear during off-work hours, only to reappear at home or work appearing frazzled, tired, and bleary. Family members might look for signs such as mysteriously disappearing funds, extra credit cards, and even secret bank accounts.

Cheryl Steinberg, a recovering addict who writes for Palm Partners Recovery Center says this about functioning addicts:

There’s your ‘typical’ drug addict, the type that’s usually referred to as “junkie,” – you know, the homeless person getting high on the streets, possibly prostituting themselves (male and female) – and then there’s the ‘functional addict.’ This type of drug addict is seemingly “normal.” They have their life together, for the most part. They hold a steady job, have a place to live, have a car…all the typical things that describe a normal, functioning member of society. But the functional addict is really someone who is just good at ‘passing’ for something they’re not.

It occurred to me that the people best suited to live a double life, particularly one that requires hiding behavior, are those people who have a lot of practice lying. Philippe de Vosjoli’s observations about the intelligence community containing compulsive liars may shed light on the criminal/”choir boy” system; what better incentive to maintain the charade than if your ability to feed an addiction depends on your loyalty to the agency? Narcissists also have a lot of practice hiding unflattering behavior from others– and even from themselves.

It seems that functioning addicts develop skill-sets and needs which make their condition a well-suited “answer” to Colby’s criminal/”choir boy” problem. But just because somebody compulsively hurts themselves, does it mean that they would also hurt others? Does addiction predispose someone to unethical behavior?

Alcoholics Anonymous, the alcoholism recovery program that has been in existence since 1939, has recognized an attitude toward life which they characterize as being a “dry drunk”– this means that the alcoholic may abstain from drinking, but hasn’t addressed the underlying personal problems which lead to them seeking comfort in alcohol in the first place. For this reason, “dry drunks” are much more likely to relapse.

Bill Dinker, the admissions director at Discovery Place and a HuffPo addiction contributor, describes the characteristics of a ‘dry drunk’ here, regular readers will notice the similarities to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). This overlap may explain Randi Kreger’s statistics about the overwhelming prevalence of substance abuse amongst people diagnosed with NPD. My point is, “dry drunks” and people diagnosed with NPD tend not to live ethically, and that hinders their recovery and personal growth.

alcoholrehab.com says this under ‘Ethical Living in Recovery‘:

The main reason for why most people will abandon their addiction is because their life has become unbearable. Giving up alcohol or drugs is a great start but it is unlikely to be enough to make everything right in the individual’s life. This is because it was usually the unsatisfactory way they engaged with the world that made substance abuse so attractive in the first place. In order to really gain in recovery the individual is going to need to approach life in a new way. The addict already knows that an unethical life has not brought them any closer to happiness so it makes sense that they now try the opposite way of living.

In Alcoholics Anonymous they like to use the metaphor of the sober horse thief. This refers to the idea that you can sober up a horse thief, but they will still be a horse thief. In order words, just because somebody gives up alcohol or drugs it does not necessarily mean that they will become a better person. More work will be required in order to achieve this.

The same source goes on to say: “Many of the recovery programs such as the 12 Steps advocate ethical living. This is because it is known that those who decide to live such a life are less likely to relapse.” Also, “This attitude [the ethical attitude] to life is all about empowerment and freedom. The individual no longer just does things because they are told to – they understand for themselves what is right and what is wrong.”

Bill Colby wanted to employ “devious” people who did what they were told to do; not the type of people who, unlike addicts, “take responsibility for their actions in the world”. Why? As alcoholrehab.com relates:

Ethically living is not about following the rules. If the individual decides that a rule is unethical they may decide not to follow it.

Ethical people are difficult to control; they don’t make good CIA agents.

I’d like to take a moment here to point out that people with NPD, which can be viewed as an addiction to false beliefs about oneself, rarely ‘recover’. This tragedy may be explained by looking at what Alcoholics Anonymous has learned: to manage addiction, you have to take responsibility for your actions and remove yourself from situations which might lead you into relapse. What if your addiction is to denying responsibility for your actions and your dealer is in your head? Assuming that a narcissist has enough self-awareness to want to get better, the cards are stacked against him. As I’ve stated in other posts, any narcissistic person who makes that ‘leap’ away from NPD behavior deserves a tremendous amount of respect.

If Colby’s criminal/”choir boy” system exploited addiction, particularly addiction to ‘socially acceptable’ drugs, where would the agency have learned about such addictions? Unsurprisingly, Alcoholics Anonymous would have been a good place to start. Hold onto your hats readers, because AA was a spin-off from the ‘Oxford Group’, otherwise known as Moral Re-Armament: that strange cult which swept through US and UK power circles in the inter-war years and that launched Tom Driberg’s spook career. According to L. Allen Ragels in a paper published by California State University’s Dear Habermas journal:

Alcoholics Anonymous – AA as it is generally known – was started in the 1930s as a spinoff from the Oxford Group, a religious movement whose ideas were sometimes alleged to help chronic drinkers. With the aid and approval of key members of the power elite such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., AA grew from an obscure idea to what many have come to regard as a national treasure: society’s premier (practically only) way of treating alcohol, drug, and related addiction problems. By now, AA certainly must have more than a million members, with groups organized in virtually every city, town, and village, along with numerous foreign countries. Moreover, AA’s core doctrine, the famous Twelve Steps, has been adopted by hundreds of parallel organizations with programs that address problems such as gambling, overeating, emotional troubles, and related family issues. Without question, AA and the Twelve Steps are among America’s most well known and revered institutions.

As readers know from my post on Eisenhower’s Money Plates, the Rockefeller clan is never far from spook activity, and they had good reason to be interested in just who attended AA meetings.

2/11/1940 AP article describing J D Rockefeller Jr’s interest in Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you expaa.org.

I’m not saying that the 12 Steps don’t work for some people, nor that there aren’t sincere, knowledgeable people working through AA. I’m saying that the organization is a repository of very valuable information.

I’ve presented some evidence in this post which suggests that Colby may have found a way of harnessing the “freaks”, etc. who staff the CIA by exploiting addiction. I’m not saying everybody who works for the CIA is an addict, goodness knows there are plenty of 9-5’ers there who don’t do much beyond routine bureaucratic work. These aren’t the type who need to be controlled through something like addiction, a steady paycheck is enough in their case. I’ll go out on a limb and say that addiction *probably is* unusually prevalent amongst more trusted CIA employees, the ones who do very ugly, dangerous or illegal things for the agency. These are *not* the type of employees who  make it to the top, to ‘Floor Seven’.

William Colby sold drugs, but I’ve never come across anything which suggests that he used them; nor that he drank to excess; had ‘pants problems’, etc. The CIA is an organization which exploits other people’s weaknesses [1], an organization which encourages these weaknesses through vehicles like Playboy and drug networks— its leaders have better reason than most to understand why vices are dis-empowering.

This should give us commoners food for thought, because the agency has shown interest in manipulating us too, for example, through their riot investigations and voter profiling research. How often are promiscuous politicians, drug-addled celebrities or self-absorbed “divas” paraded before us in the media? Are the voter-profilers trying to encourage self-defeating behavior amongst the general public? Are they trying to extend their control beyond Donovan’s network of “freaks”? In The Banality of Mind Control I suggest that this is exactly what they’re trying to do; Colby’s ‘verbal diarrhea’ may offer us insight as to how and why.

[1] In Honorable Men Colby does talk about his early CIA training which focused on exploiting personal weaknesses:

… I [William Colby] was trained in that special branch of psychology and human relations that teaches how to spot and recruit foreigners to serve as agents and then how to be sympathetic but in control, building on their personal problems or political doubts about their loyalty  to their own country…

Although I thought the material used in these courses considerably inferior to what I had been exposed to at Princeton, the training was valuable on how to fight the Communist apparatus…

Colby doesn’t explain what training he received during his Princeton days (late 1930s) either, only that he hung out with the most FDR-aligned professors at the university’s School of Public and International Affairs and studied “such problems as black education, the Cuban sugar trade, and civil liberties in Jersey City under Boss Hague”.