Playboy’s editorial board in 1970: (L-R) BACK Robie Macauley, Nat Lehrman, Richard M. Koff, Murray Fisher, Arthur Kretchmer. FRONT Sheldon Wax, Auguste Comte Spectorsky, Jack Kessie. Thank you, Wikipedia.

In Part I of this series I showed how A.C. Spectorsky, Playboy’s link with the “East Coast Establishment”, showcased an inordinate number of intelligence community writers on the magazine’s cover. To give an idea of how just many spooks Spectorsky featured between ’59-’76:  30% of cover-featured contributors had strong intelligence connections and their work represents about 35% of featured stories. [A]

Last time I also looked at Playboy’s weird, Orwellian promotion of racial integration alongside Black nationalism. I’m going to build on this ‘strange bedfellows’ theme today with ‘Billionaires and Communists'; as well as ‘Literary Brahmins and Pulp Publishers’.

Billionaires and Communists

Playboy magazine worships wealth; the ‘playboy lifestyle’ is one of endless, unrelenting consumption. Spectorsky’s biographer Steven Watts speculates that Spectorsky fixated on luxuries was a way of distracting himself from his failed writing career– I think that view is too simplistic. Playboy featured an impressive number of mega-wealthy writers alongside a solid coterie of self-consciously communist ones; what unites these groups is their participation in the ‘intelligence community’.

Who were Playboy’s favorite multimillionaires? J. P. Getty [22 Playboy covers!], the Anglophile oil magnate and antiquities collector, had a special relationship with Spectorsky and contributed on money matters with articles titled “Big Business Booby Traps”, “You Can Make A Million Today” and “How I Made My First Billion”. Needless to say, I don’t put much store by Getty’s financial advice; he’s interesting to me because he (ultimately) funded Kenneth Anger’s ‘Thelema’ cult with the Rolling Stones.

Other Playboy rich-kids are no less interesting: Bennet Cerf [2] was a founder of Random House publishing, one of the largest concerns in an industry known for its cooperation with the OSS and CIA. (See The Irregulars, by Jennet Conant for a start.) Howard Hughes [3] was the Hollywood-and-Aerospace mogul who partnered with the CIA — he was the Agency’s ‘cover billionaire’ for the 1972 ‘Glomar Explorer’ escapade.

Howard Hughes. In 1946, Hughes had an accident testing a reconnaissance plane. After his medical treatment he showed a drastic personality change: Hughes became an eccentric recluse, wore tissue boxes for shoes and only peed into bottles. His business interests were eventually taken over by a group of Mormons.

William Benton [2 covers] was a senator and founder of the radio-heavy advertizing agency Benton & Bowles. He created ‘The Voice of America’ which is a radio news organization and a blatant US propaganda machine. Benton was also a UNESCO ambassador and “the first to propose the motion for expulsion of Joseph McCarthy from the U.S. Senate in 1951”.

Benton’s extensive media holdings provided springboards for other Playboy contributors. Shepherd Mead [4] was Benton’s employee at Benton & Bowles: Mead served as vice president of the ad agency, but found fame and fortune by writing books such as How to succeed in business without really trying; the dastard’s guide to fame and fortune.

Benton & Bowles’ influence, and therefore William Benton’s influence, spread from advertizing into the entertainment business. B&B invented and dominated the “radio soap opera” as a vehicle for placing products. B&B spun the concept out to television with ‘As The World Turns’, a serious money-earner which the firm ran for Proctor & Gamble on CBS.

Many Playboy heavyweights came from CBS in one form or another: Jean Shepherd [12 covers], who is known for his coverage of Playboy contributor Martin Luther King Jr.’s [1] ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, had a nightly radio show on CBS; Robert L. Green [2 covers], Playboy’s fashion director, child psychologist and Washington D.C. public relations guru, had his own CBS radio show; Steve Allen [2], who got his start in radio during WWII, had is own CBS television show; John Crosby [2] who was part of the Army News Service during WWII, also had a CBS t.v. show; Charles Beaumont [4], an early Playboy contributor, wrote for CBS’s The Twilight Zone; Larry Siegel [3] is known for CBS’s The Carol Burnett Show (though this came after his Playboy work); Max Shulman [1]  is known for his CBS TV character ‘Dobie Gillis’; and finally, spooky Los Angeles Science Fiction Society guru Ray Bradbury [13] reached audiences through the CBS Television Workshop in the early 1950s.

For readers unaccustomed to American acronyms, ‘CBS’ stands for ‘Columbia Broadcasting System’ which was founded as a radio broadcaster in New York City in 1927; its television arm was added in 1941. CBS is privately owned– the majority owner is Sumner Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein)– but in practice CBS, along with ABC and NBC, is roughly analogous to Britain’s BBC. The US radio industry has always had close ties to the British and American militaries.

I’m not quite done with William Benton: besides his ad interests, Benton owned Encyclopedia Britannica and had a working relationship with CIA chief Allen Dulles; documents released by the Agency show that Benton allowed the CIA to write chunks of the reference series. EB’s high-ranking employee Mortimer Alder [2 Playboy covers] put together the corporation’s ‘Great Books’ line.

So it seems that being featured in Playboy was something of a ‘perk’ for William Benton’s employees and writers from Benton’s partner CBS.

Swirling around the fabulous wealth represented in Spectorsky’s stables was a radical communist contingent: this shouldn’t be surprising, because Communism, particularly Bolshevism, has always had well-heeled Western backing. Allen Ginsberg [2 covers], the pedophile CIA operative, was a supporter of Fidel Castro [1 cover] (Castro’s father was an international ‘labor broker’ who cruelly exploited imported Haitian workers, as well as native Cuban ones!). Also among Playboy’s ‘communists’ was the conflicted Black supremacist Leroi Jones [1], whose publishing company featured Ginsberg’s and Jack Kerouac’s [3] writing. Jed Birmingham, a William S Burroughs [1 cover] aficionado, writes this about Leroi Jones:

I was especially struck by [Leroi] Jones’ work as an editor. It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur. This does not include his founding of Totem Press and that press’s publications with Cornith Books. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.

It seems that Playboy’s second-favorite Black supremacist was well-connected in NYC literary circles!

Other writers in Ginsberg’s circle– though not necessarily as radical as Ginsberg– were Terry Southern [3], who I’ll talk about more in connection with the CIA’s Paris Review; Jerry Yulsman [2] an Army photographer who wrote ‘adult novels'; Dan Wakefield [4] the civil rights reporter who made a name for himself by gushing over ‘All My Children‘, a soap opera of the ilk Benton & Bowles devised; Herbert Gold [13] the Fulbright scholar who took over CIA asset Vladimir Nabokov’s chair at Cornell University; and Alan Harrington [3], the writer known for being a friend of Timothy Leary.

The international wing of Playboy’s post-WWII commies is held up by Evgeny Yevtushenko [3], a cautious Soviet poet who was on the safe side of every thaw; and Germaine Greer [3] a Marxist woman’s lib’er who is still with us.

I’ll remind readers that in his autobiography Colby credited his old OSS friends with the CIA’s ‘anti-communist’ (read anti-Kremlin) offensive; those old OSS’er were disproportionately represented fighting for the communists during the Spanish Civil War. Naturally, Playboy’s communist ties are more ‘old school’ than just post-WWII newbies like Ginsberg. Marquis Childs [2] was an FDR crony and a WWII propagandist; Justice William O. Douglas [2] was one of FDR’s supreme court appointees; Leslie Fiedler [3] was a Trotskyite communist and a WWII intelligence agent who translated Japanese cyphers; Nelson Algren (born Nelson Algren Abraham) [2] was a communist until he decided he liked fellow-traveler Ernest Hemingway [5] and the Paris Review better; Norman Thomas [1] was a CIA asset and the president of the American Socialist Party; Kingsley Amis [2] was a spoiled communist academic until he realized that the money was elsewhere; Pietro di Donato [1] was an Italian scribe with communist sympathies; Frederic Morton [3] (born Fritz Mandelbaum) changed his name to fit in with the NYC labor movement; and my personal favorite, Bernard Wolfe [2] who was Trotsky’s personal secretary (some say bodyguard) in Mexico until Trotsky’s assassination; Wolfe then joined the US Merchant Marines and was appointed as a “military correspondent by a number of science magazines” during WWII. Why not?!

When not wiping the nose of one of history’s worst mass-murderers, nor writing WWII propaganda for the US military, Wolfe indulged his passion for hypnosis (1949). Later, he found Playboy.

The dizzying list of names and histories above feels quite natural to me, because of what I know about how the Bolshevik revolution was funded and implemented, thanks to the writing Mikhail Bulgakov, Leonid Andreyev and others. To someone unaware of communist revolutionaries’ support from the American and British establishments, the pairing of millionaires and communists may seem incongruent– for more information, I recommend my posts Is the Devil a German? and A Death in Finland. In the meantime, more strange bedfellows…

Literary Brahmins and Pulp Publishers

‘Incongruent’ may also describe Spectorsky’s policy of hiring writers from ‘high-end’ outfits like the CIA’s TIME or the CIA’s Paris Review, as well as low-end magazine mills such as the Magazine Management Company.

I doubt TIME, the CIA’s ‘cosmopolitan’ news and culture mouthpiece, needs an introduction, but the Paris Review is a little less well know. The PR was founded in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton as part of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. When PR was thoroughly discredited as an independent cultural organ in 2000, its life-long editor Plimpton did not resign, but stayed in situ until he died in 2008– it didn’t seem to bother anybody in America’s literary establishment that this flagship publication was CIA, which ought to tell us all something.

A large number of Playboy contributors wrote for/were profiled by PR, including ‘beat writer’ Jack Kerouac and Leslie Fiedler who debuted his ‘Huck Finn and Jim are Gay‘ theory on PR pages. But PR’s closest tie is to Playboy’s Terry Southern [3], who had a particularly tight relationship to the Paris Review. Southern’s work was published in PR’s first issue and many thereafter; PR’s new editor, Lorin Stein, even named a month after Terry. (Stein took over after Plimpton died.)

Lorin Stein, the guy who took over the Paris Review after founder George Plimpton finally died. But he’s not CIA.

So much for the ‘highbrow’ side of Playboy; I don’t find it surprising that one CIA media outfit would recycle talent from other, loud, CIA outfits. However, Magazine Management Company is a different creature– it didn’t court publicity at all. Some of its own employees, like Marvel comics editor Roy Thomas, didn’t even know it existed until well into their tenure. No one seems to know when, exactly, the company was founded either, but Magazine Management was in business by 1947 and employed two Playboy contributors Mario Puzo [2 covers] of ‘The Godfather’ fame, and Bruce Jay Friedman [5]. Both of these men worked for the US Air Force before their writing careers: Friedman served under an officer who became a ‘counter-culture’ guru, and Puzo was a ‘public relations officer’ in Germany. Naturally, Magazine Management was based out of New York City.

Magazine Management company output in the 1970s.

Magazine Management churned out men’s science fantasy mags, pornography, and was the parent company to Marvel comics. Its founder, Martin Goodman, was the son of Lithuanian immigrants who explains his success with the usual rags-to-riches spiel. Whatever the real story is, Goodman owned several publishing concerns by the 1930s;  these concerns had multiple names at the same time (eventually there were 56 shell companies!) making them difficult to track even to industry insiders– clearly Goodman wanted to hide something. From what I can tell, ‘the Goodman group’ was at the heart of the pulp fiction industry. Which brings me on to… George Orwell.

I wrote about Orwell’s distaste for American pulp fiction way back in 2012. Here’s the pertinent quote from Orwell’s collection of essays All Art is Propaganda, Orwell is describing American pulp fiction magazines during WWII:

Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are written for devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it ought to be emphasized that on its level the moral code of the English boys’ papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty are never held up to admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the American gangster story. The huge sale of the Yank Mags in England shows that there is a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem able to produce it. When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how promptly “anti-Fascism” was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story, “When Hell Came to America,” in which the agents of a “blood-maddened European dictator” are trying to conquer the U.S.A. with death rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces mid-air, others in which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc. etc.

It seems that somebody in the 1940s New York pulp fiction market was working to gin up a particularly nasty type of anti-German propaganda in service of the war effort. As I said, nobody knows when, exactly, Magazine Management got started, but after WWII they provided a good home for ex-Air Force men and later contributed to Playboy’s writers.

Magazine Management Company’s Captain America saves buddy strapped to Japanese bomb.

According to Roy Thomas, Goodman would follow DC Comics president Jack Liebowitz’s lead with comic book ideas; any competition between the firms was not on an ideological plane. I’ll remind readers that Goodman’s competitors, DC Comics, weren’t averse to wartime (or peacetime!) propaganda: their Superman character fought every WWII dictator save the other man of steel, Stalin.

DC comics was founded by an international-jet-setting Army Major named Malcolm Wheeler-Nichols, a friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Guess What? Wheeler-Nichols was an intelligence officer with the Army, tasked with gathering “intelligence in the shifting alliances between Cossacks, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Bolsheviks”. Wheeler-Nichols also served in Mexico under General John Pershing alongside another jet-setter: James Jesus Angleton’s father.

DC Comics’ Man of Steel has Hitler on his right, Emperor Hirohito on his left, as he straddles the globe.

Wheeler-Nichols’ Army career did not end well. Wheeler-Nichols’ family claims that his Army superiors tried to assassinate the comic genius because he treated his African-American soldiers so well… I think it’s more likely that Wheeler-Nichols’ ‘camaraderie’ problems stemmed from his open letter to President Harding criticizing the Army administration (“Prussianism”, favoritism and inefficiency were among his gripes), an offense which would land any officer a court-martial. Wheeler-Nichols was convicted and discharged; he then went into the comic business.

So Playboy’s low-class Magazine Management connection actually gave them an ‘in’ on privileged intel circles!

I think that’s enough for this week. Next week I’ll treat readers to Timothy Leary’s self-incriminating explanation of how the CIA implements the Hegelian Dialectic. Leary’s insights shed light on Francis Stonor Saunder’s CIA connection and Gawker’s firing of Adrian Chen. See you then!

[A] This is a conceptually tricky statistic, because in my mind, being featured by Playboy in itself shows that a writer was an asset of the Agency. My estimations are based on what I know about Cold War operations beyond Playboy and who has openly admitted to, or shown beyond reasonable doubt to have worked for some sort of espionage outfit. This necessitates some subjective decisions on my part– very few intelligence agents are conclusively ‘outed’ by their employers like Ernest Hemingway has been. These estimates are the best I can make given what I know now.

Timothy Leary’s mug shot prior to his jail break and flight to Algeria.

About a year ago I came across an article titled “Timothy Leary and the CIA” by Walter H. Bowart, who wrote a book about MK ULTRA one year before John Marks did, but did so with Marks’ help. Bowart’s book, Operation Mind Control (1978), was based on personal accounts of brainwashing from people Bowart found through classified advertisements in Rolling Stone and Soldier of Fortune magazines. (Rolling Stone was the home of CIA chief William Colby’s pet literary agent David Obst.)

In “Timothy Leary and the CIA” Bowart describes an interview he conducted with Leary in prison after Leary’s stunt in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver, which Playboy covered in ’71. I’ll point out that not just anybody can get access to prisoners like Leary; especially if that ‘anybody’ writes things which the US government doesn’t like. Here’s the pertinent part of Bowart’s reported interview, taken from “mindcontrolforums.com” as archived by the Wayback Machine:

“Have you ever knowingly worked for the CIA?” I [W.H. Bowart] asked.

“If I were working for the CIA,” he [Timothy Leary] said, ” I would have ten people working making a living exposing me. If I were the CIA, I’d own New Republic. I’d own The New Masses. I’d own Rolling Stone. I’d have 50 groups of people exposing the CIA…” “Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?” I asked. Without hesitating Leary said, “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people…

Of course, Bowart could be lying, Leary could be lying. I can’t speak to either man’s motivation, however, what Leary described is a well-known political manipulation strategy. The ‘Hegelian Dialectic’ strategy, which I last wrote about with regard to Benny Johnson, necessitates controlling all ‘sides’ of an argument– that means controlling all sources of information. When presented with a carefully chosen array of information, a rational person will be compelled to draw the desired conclusion while still believing they are forming their own opinion, which is the gold standard for behavior conditioning. The Hegelian Dialectic doesn’t work if, say, there’s only one news agency: there has to be a CNBC, a FOX, a CNN, etc. There has to be the appearance of diversity.

I can’t know if Leary was lying in the quote above, but I can do a thought experiment like the one Poul Henning-Kamp did for the intelligence community’s involvement in open-source software, which allowed him to predict HEARTBLEED. Would the CIA, an organization which barters in information, benefit from implementing the Hegelian Dialect in American media? Of course they would. What’s more, we know that the Agency did this in Europe during the Cold War… which brings me back to Playboy.

The only reason I was able to put Playboy’s selection of featured writers into context was because I had read a book called The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders. Saunders introduced me to the 1960s culture-industry names which popped up so many times on Playboy covers; her book is the ‘gold standard’ exposé of the CIA’s anti-Kremlin leftist crusade in Europe after WWII.

Who is Frances Stonor Saunders? She’s the daughter of a disinherited British noblewoman and commoner Donald Robin Slomnicki Saunders; she’s a BBC radio host; and was arts editor at The New Statesman, a British magazine known for its one-time mindless support of Stalin and for being used by the KGB as late as 1994 to place “anti-American” propaganda. That’s the story.

As a person, Frances Stonor Saunders bears extreme bitterness: her writing seethes with hatred for the German people; conservatives; and all fellow lefties whose opinions don’t match her own. There are very few people for whom Frances doesn’t have contempt. However, in The Cultural Cold War Frances shows an uncharacteristic, child-like admiration for Ramparts magazine, as well as the ‘Beat writers’ including Allen Ginsberg; theater wild-child Kenneth Tynan; Norman Mailer; Indian politician Jawaharlal Nehru; John Kenneth Galbraith; and director Stanley Kubrick. These chosen people are the world’s hope in the face of blundering CIA aggression, according to Frances. In her own words:

With the rise of the New Left 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, 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)

And…

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)

Of course, readers will remember all those names from my analysis of Playboy’s featured authors: Spectorsky and the CCF 2.0, Part I, Part II. All Saunder’s ‘heroes’ were lauded by the CIA’s Playboy outfit, too.

Saunders agrees with the CIA on more than just Beat writers. She places the blame for CIA excesses at the feet of James Angleton and his ‘crew’ through well-chosen quotes from Allen Ginsberg’s writing:

Allen Ginsberg even fantasized that T.S. Eliot was part of a literary conspiracy mounted by his, Eliot’s, friend James Jesus Angleton. In a 1978 sketch called ‘T.S. Eliot Entered My Dreams’, Ginsberg imagined that ‘On the fantail of a boat to Europe, Eliot was reclining… “And yourself, “ I [Ginsberg] said, “What do you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA. After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend?”

In Saunder’s quote, Ginsberg goes on to opine: “The subsidization of magazines like Encounter which held Eliotic style as a touchstone of sophistication and competence… failed to create an alternative free vital decentralized individualistic culture. Instead, we had the worst of Capitalist Imperialism”. (p 249)

By ‘Eliotic’ Saunders means ‘in the style of T.S. Eliot’. Saunders presents Ginsberg’s imaginings as though they contain fact; she goes on to support Ginsberg’s assertions by making assertions of her own: a James-Angleton-CIA-literary-conspiracy caused Ezra Pound to be awarded the Bollinger Prize. (You can read her theory in The Cultural Cold War.)

What Saunders fails to mention is that both Eliot and Pound lead their field before the OSS was a twinkle in Stephenson’s eye. Despite modern judgments about their politics, these men were stars of the last literary generation not deeply captured by the intelligence community. What’s important about Saunders’ stance on Eliot and Pound is that she knows it’s a ‘safe’ stance to take: bashing them is not going to anger her patrons. Who are Saunders’ patrons?

It may strike readers as odd that Saunders, who spent years researching how the CIA co-opted the post-WWII literary community, would put so much naive trust in the Beat writers, who were promoted by outfits like The Paris Review which Saunders herself identified as a CIA front. Experience would suggest prudence and caution when dealing with the ‘Beats’, yet the thought that Allen Ginsberg might be just corrupt as CIA literary golden-boy Peter Matthiessen never flutters across Saunders’ consciousness.

It may also seem stupid that Saunders would blame the CIA’s counterintelligence chief for ‘anti-communist left’ abuses that clearly originate from something like the CIA’s “Special Communications Programs” division. I mean really, Frances, James Jesus Angleton only had 24 hours in his day and by the time the CCF got rolling he had other things to worry about.

I say Saunders’ position ‘seems stupid’, because of course Frances Stonor Saunders is following a well-trodden CIA path when she blames Agency excesses on Angleton: every official ‘exposer’ does this, from John Marks to Tom Mangold. James Angleton’s legacy is the black hole that CIA propagandists throw their garbage into. Bill Colby started that practice in the ’70s.

In writing The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders protected the legacy of CIA assets like Allen Ginsberg at the expense of CIA assets like T. S. Eliot. Frances Stonor Saunders promoted the same ‘intellectuals’ as Playboy promoted 40 years before in response to the obvious failure of the Congress For Cultural Freedom. Why would a pornography rag care about obscure ‘Beat’ writing? Why would an American pornography rag feature an Indian politician like Jawaharlal Nehru at all– but especially as Playboy’s first ever featured politician? See A.C. Spectorsky and CCF 2.o.

It’s almost as if somebody at the CIA called Frances up and said: “Franny, here’s a list of men who Spectorsky promoted in order to deal with the CCF setback. Write a history of the CCF that justifies Spectorsky’s strategy in hindsight. Can you do that, Franny?”

Now we have The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.

Frances Stonor Saunders’ intellectual dishonesty puts her in ugly company; it also casts a shadow over her favored leftist publication: Ramparts magazine. But that shadow is just one of many. Ramparts magazine founder Warren Hinckle went to Hugh Hefner, the Playboy front man, for funding. (See Hinckle’s autobiography.) Playboy followed Ramparts’ lead when they published the work of Black supremacist Eldridge Cleaver; both magazines published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Paris Review crony Terry Southern, amongst others. Playboy and Ramparts traveled a very similar path… which means that Ramparts traveled a similar path to a CIA front.

Now back to Timothy Leary’s suggestion about the CIA “owning” magazines like Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone prides itself on breaking news stories which are damaging to the US government and ‘intelligence community’. Rolling Stone magazine is an off-shoot of Ramparts: it was founded by two of Warren Hinckle’s employees when Ramparts folded. Rolling Stone’s founders were Jann Wenner and his patron (perhaps better described as ‘handler’) Ralph Gleason, who prior to becoming a Jazz critic, worked for the Office of War Information during WWII. (The ‘intelligence community used Jazz as a cultural weapon abroad.) Ramparts was also the vehicle David Horowitz and Peter Collier used to place Perry Fellwock’s ‘anti-NSA’ leaks in 1972. Ramparts and Rolling Stone have a lineage.

Jann Wenner cofounded Rolling Stone, you can read about his background in this JewishCurrents.org article. Like Gawker’s Nick Denton, Wenner displays extremely narcissistic characteristics: superficially charming; ruthlessly exploitative of employees; with the emotional maturity of a two-year old, according to Salon’s David Weir. Also like Denton, and many media-oriented intelligence professionals, Wenner is homosexual.

There’s a ‘lineage’ between the magazines which are used to leak sensitive intelligence information. Adrian Chen tripped over that lineage when he tried to equate Edward Snowden with Perry Fellwock in Nick Denton’s online publication Gawker.com.

Gawker’s coverage of the ‘Snowden Saga’ was designed to encourage apathy in readers: Denton tried to accomplish this by exploiting side-shows, as well as through Adrian Chen’s dismissive coverage of the leaks.

What do I mean by ‘exploiting sideshows’? Denton’s ‘Snowden Saga’ editorial policy was to marginalize concern over the NSA leaks by associating that concern with ‘lunatic fringe’ pundits and their unnewsworthy antics.  Denton employed his own Hegelian Dialect to attempt this marginalization, for example, he covered an obscure squabble between a spooky, pro-NSA Naval War College professor and a nameless blogger, who sparred over the prof’s violation of the Hatch Act by lobbying for the NSA: “unhinged spook” + “small-government wingnut” = “only crazies are concerned about Snowden issues”.

It may interest readers to know that the two protagonists from above took very different paths: the mysterious, nameless “wingnut” stopped blogging (xxtwitterwarcommittee.wordpress) and disappeared shortly before “spook” was fired from his teaching job for personal indiscretions;  “spook” now writes about evil Russian and Iranian espionage in Ukraine via The Kyiv Post, Jed Sunden’s former rag, which is funded by reality t.v. freak Mohammad Zahoor.

Zhanna Kobylinska implements The Kyiv Post’s version of the American propaganda outfit Zunzuneo. She also does PR for a well-connected cult in Kiev.

Denton’s second, more subtle, strategy was to assign Adrian Chen to the ‘Snowden Saga': Chen took the establishment line of promoting Tor, while dismissing Snowden as a misguided idealist, and dismissing privacy fears as overblown. Chen shot himself in the foot with his magnum opus, a lengthy investigative piece that compared Snowden to Perry Fellwock, the first NSA whistleblower, who now thinks he was used and regrets his actions.

In the 1970s Perry Fellwock leaked his NSA information to two Ramparts journalists, David Horowitz and Peter Collier. Adrian Chen got fired because he suggested that David Horowitz was an intelligence agent, and that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras were too. Chen didn’t know what anolen.com readers know about the CIA’s ties to Playboy, and the ugly shadow they cast over Ramparts. Chen came very close to writing about the stuff I’ve been writing about for almost a year now, and that cost Chen his job because his editor, Nick Denton, is likely part of the ‘intelligence community’ too. (The pro-outsourcing wing of the ‘intelligence community’ was *best* served by Denton’s editorial policy; the public interest was not served well at all.)

Where is Adrian Chen now? Currently Adrian is a managing editor for The New Inquiry in NYC; I have no idea how he’s supporting himself.

There has been an interesting development with Chen’s old overseer at Gawker.com, John Cook. Soon after Chen was fired, Cook also left Gawker for a position as “Editor in Chief” at billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s The Intercept, which also employs Glenn Greenwald. In a weird twist, Cook quickly left The Intercept and returned to Gawker.com, which is known for notoriously low pay. Cook’s new Gawker title is “Executive Editor for Investigations”– so Denton must have forgiven Cook for letting Adrian’s Fellwock piece print.

Was Cook promoted to his level of incompetence at The Intercept, or did something else sour the beer? Your answer is as good as mine.

I’m going to wind this up by harkening back to Timothy Leary’s observation: “If I were the CIA, I’d own New Republic. I’d own The New Masses. I’d own Rolling Stone. I’d have 50 groups of people exposing the CIA…””

There has been a diverse list of publications mentioned in this post: Ramparts, Playboy, The New Statesman, Rolling Stone, The Intercept, Gawker.com, The Kyiv Post. Regular readers know that I’ve criticized most of these titles over the last few years. If Leary’s right, then I’ve just been criticizing the same thing all along.

I guess the USSR didn’t lose. ;)

Founder ‘Eugene’ Kaspersky owns the logo in 1991 2012.

On Monday I read for the first time about something that Kaspersky Lab, a Russian anti-virus software company, calls the “Equation Group“. The Equation Group is the latest ‘tech scare’ coming from the NSA– sorry, that Kaspersky strongly suggests comes from the NSA. The NSA’ers are back and they’re more devious than you’ve ever seen them before!

My understanding is that Kaspersky Lab has not uncovered previously unknown spying tools, but has found out interesting details about already identified ones. For instance, the NSA developed thumb drive software that detects when the drive is used in computers which don’t have an internet connection (this helps the NSA map ‘air-gapped’ computer systems); and software that runs at such a basic level that it can’t be erased, or even monitored on your computer, so that the NSA has your machine forever. You can read Kaspersky’s press release here, but this is the pertinent quote:

The Equation group is probably one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world; and they are the most advanced threat actor we have seen.

Kaspersky’s revelations are often trumpeted in the American press, for instance, the American-Israeli STUXNET virus that ‘got away’ and endangered every nuclear reactor on the planet. ‘Equation Group’  is no exception: Wired, Ars Technica, International Business Times, etc. have all sounded off on the NSA’s latest super-villain weapons. You’ll remember Wired as the outfit that let Kevin Poulsen write an article about his fellow Freedom of the Press Foundation Technical Advisory Board member, Runa Sandvik, and her TOR party with Snowden.

The American press associates three adjectives with the Equation group: “sophisticated”, “threat”, “expensive”. It *appears* that Kaspersky Lab has just cost the NSA a lot of money. On Monday I wondered if Kaspersky had experienced any retaliation from this, so I posted the following question on the blog of Kaspersky Lab’s lead researcher Costin Raiu:

This report and the work you detail in the post are awesome achievements Costin; congrats to you and the team at Kaspersky. Have you or Kaspersky Labs received any blowback from either the US government, or any organization, for making these revelations?

Although Costin makes an admirable effort to address the questions which are posted on his blog– no matter how trivial– he hasn’t touched this one and I’m beginning to think he never will. I suspect the reason is because Kaspersky hasn’t received any (real) blowback.

I’ll remind readers that the NSA likes to ‘leak’ about it’s vast technical superiority. The first NSA leaks ever, Perry Fellwock’s leaks, were sensationalist accounts of the NSA’s masterful capabilities against the struggling Russians; they were also leaked to David Horowitz, who was/is probably an American intel asset. You could view ‘Snowden’s revelations’ as a backhanded compliment to the NSA too– they don’t seem to have inspired self-examination in the ‘intelligence community’. And now, in 2015, we have a Russian firm proselytizing.

A KGB-tainted Russian firm, no less.

Bloomberg News, America’s portal to the business world, recently accused Kaspersky Lab founder, Evgeny ‘Eugene’ Kaspersky, of having KGB ties. The article says that Kaspersky Lab only investigates American espionage outfits, not Russian ones. Kaspersky posted a typical reply saying that US investigator FireEye, a CIA-funded In-Q-Tel concern, did all the work on Russian threats for them: “FireEye did some great research, so publishing our own after theirs made no sense.”

In the Midwest, we call this ‘one hand washing the other’.

Bloomberg’s KGB accusations are actually not the first against Kaspersky. Wired’s Noah Shachtman broke the ice in 2012:

But Kaspersky’s rise is particularly notable—and to some, downright troubling—given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB.

Back in 2012 Kaspersky wrote a blog post denying these allegations, and frankly, Shachtman doesn’t seem to have slowed Kaspersky down. Right now, in 2015, many Western media outfits like the New York Observer, PC Magazine, The Moscow Times have already given  ‘Eugene’ a platform from which to refute Bloomberg’s claims. (The English-speaking public has a long history of coping with the Russian name Evgeny, so to me the use of ‘Eugene’ seems disingenuous and smarmy.)

I consider the ruckus around Kaspersky’s KGB ties to be evidence of the US media’s extreme cynicism and hypocrisy. Of course Kaspersky has KGB ties. Guess what? He’s also got ties with the NSA. Back in early 2014, Kaspersky was on the bandwagon screaming that Snowden was a “traitor” who “belongs in the ninth circle of hell”; Kaspersky behaved just like ex-NSA head Michael Hayden and MI5 hag Dame Stella Rimington. Kaspersky went on record saying that his Lab wouldn’t hire Snowden nearly one year before I, and probably most laypeople, had seen through Edward. This makes me suspect that Kaspersky’s relation to the NSA and/or the CIA is of the ‘contractor‘ nature. I’ll go out on a limb and say that the NSA likes Kaspersky’s KGB ties and probably encourages the anti-virus oligarch to snuggle up to the Kremlin as much as possible– then come Stateside for a cup’a joe.

What Bloomberg should be asking is not whether Kaspersky Lab has KGB ties, but to which espionage outfit he’d side with on the occasion that the NSA’s and the FSB’s interests collide. As I’ve written elsewhere, these two espionage operations have strong incentives to cooperate (for instance, manipulating Islamic extremists) and have obviously done so with respect to Edward Snowden; if the Rooskies were 100% antagonistic to the Americans, they’d have sent Edward home with a white cone on his head. (Which makes the forced landing of the Bolivian diplomatic plane in 2013 a meaningless bit of theater, doesn’t it?)

Click for Kaspersky’s “Equation Group” Victims Map. The only “Islamic Scholars” targeted are in the USA and the U.K.; i.e. the ones we let in.

The FSB/KGB and NSA/CIA cooperation has sound historical precedents too, the CIA’s founders–particularly William Donovan– actively sought to cultivate partnerships with Russian intelligence agencies and to hide these partnerships from Congress and the American people. Donovan worked with the Rooskies on the sly because J. Edgar Hoover advised him to: Hoover understood that such partnerships would be (correctly) identified as contrary to the public interest. The OSS and its daughter, the CIA, have always existed to lie to and manipulate the voting public; little has changed.

I believe that all of the KGB connections which Wired and Bloomberg accuse Kaspersky of are true. However, the American media– which is deeply captured by US intelligence– has given Kaspersky more than ample opportunity to refute these claims. I’ll also point out that Kaspersky keeps some high-level company, according to Noah Shachtman at Wired:

Over the past 72 hours, Kaspersky explains, he flew from Mexico to Germany and back to take part in another conference. “Kissinger, McCain, presidents, government ministers” were all there, he says. “I have panel. Left of me, minister of defense of Italy. Right of me, former head of CIA. I’m like, ‘Whoa, colleagues.'”

Bloomberg take note: “Whoa, colleagues.”

In his biography Honorable Men, William Colby, the CIA chief who cooperated with KGB assets, strongly suggests that Henry Kissinger also cooperated with Russian heavies and kept the CIA in the dark about the cooperation– Colby says he doesn’t blame Kissinger for doing so! My point is, at the top of the pile there’s little to distinguish KGB from CIA from NSA from FSB. It’s all about who is useful when– the little people on the bottom are just collateral damage.

Our government doesn’t have to be this way; but in order to fix things the general public needs to understand the nature of the people who are exploiting them. I’m going to continue writing about Kaspersky to that goal, but my post on Colby’s second wife, The Ambassadress, deals with the same ‘sickness’.

When Kaspersky isn’t hobnobbing with Henry Kissinger or ex-CIA chiefs, he’s beating the American porn industry on its own turf: the US legal system. Kaspersky recently “won” a case brought by an Ad agency that claimed “trade libel” because Kaspersky blocked their software on obscenity grounds– a Washington judge threw the case out. Usually in the USA, porn wins by wrapping itself in the flag while its ‘amen choir’ in the media sing “Free Speech!”. It looks like this Russian can trump pornographers’ interests.

Kaspersky’s ‘anti-virus’ products are selling well in the USA; his company has a strong American presence; he’s been lauded by the American chamber of Commerce in Moscow. Kaspersky has been flattered as a ‘Top 100 Global Thinker‘ by Foreign Policy magazine (US government mouthpiece); Kaspersky was named a “top innovator” by CRN, which “salutes the most influential and innovative channel executives in North America“; and ‘Eugene’ won the V3 Technology Award, just like Steve Jobs. But that’s not all: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev gave Kaspersky the Russian Federation National Award in Science and Technology; he’s won China’s National Friendship Award; and he’s been granted an honorary doctorate from the U.K.’ s Plymouth University.

In fact, Kaspersky Lab’s holding company is registered in the United Kingdom and Kaspersky’s first wife and business partner Natalya (not ‘Natalie’) was trained in the early 1990s by the U.K.’s Open University. Most Russians were struggling to find food when Natalya was getting her British degree– and most British billionaires were looking for an ‘in’ on Yeltsin’s corrupt privatizations.

On closer inspection Kaspersky Lab looks more like an Anglo-American multinational than a Russian firm. (Natalya’s corporate offshoot is now heavily invested in German tech companies.) Kaspersky’s ex has also come out in support of Putin’s internet censorship, according to The New York Times:

Natalya Kaspersky, chief executive of InfoWatch, a software company that provides data protection services, said some new restrictions were needed in Russia to protect children and that the fears of government censorship seemed overblown.

“We might argue if such ‘black list’ approach is efficient in the modern Internet assuming the sites might quickly move to another address,” Ms. Kaspersky wrote in an e-mail. “However, it is better than nothing.”

She added, “Right now we have a tremendous freedom of speech in mass media, with no prohibited topics at all.”

If Natalya had changed her name to ‘Natalie Casperson”, she’d probably be sitting on McAffe’s board right now!

I think I’ve made my point about Kaspersky’s backing. Kaspersky is particularly useful because of his KGB roots: unsophisticated people will assume ‘KGB-aligned’ means ‘not American controlled’. The next question is: how is ‘Eugene’ using the platform he’s been given?

When Kaspersky isn’t blogging about his exotic holidays, he’s calling for global cooperation to combat internet “threat actor” abuses. We all need to band together to protect a couple of thousand “prestigious” targets from NSA attacks– no doubt by installing products that Kaspersky will have designed. In 2012 at the ITU Telecom World conference, Kaspersky gave his audience an idea of what such products might look like:

In his keynote address, Eugene Kaspersky described the essential measures to protect industrial control systems. A new, secure unit to obtain trusted workflow information is the first step towards an efficient protection against cyber-warfare. In response to such challenges, Kaspersky Lab is working on a Secure Operating System, which will serve as the trusted node for Industrial Control Systems.

That was one year before Snowden told the world about the NSA’s horrific industrial espionage capability. Kaspersky was already positioning himself to benefit from the fallout.

There are a couple of things going on with Kaspersky’s ‘Equation’ revelations: 1) the NSA is continuing its decades-long propaganda offensive by touting its technology dominance vis-a-vis Russia; 2) Kaspersky is engaging in ‘elite-targeted propaganda’ to build a climate of fear; and 3) Kaspersky is ‘astroturfing’– he’s trying to set himself up as an organic political alternative to abusive American technology companies. Those three points need a little fleshing out.

1) In Adrian Chen’s career-ending article on Perry Fellwock, he says this about the first NSA leaker’s information in Ramparts magazine:

And there, in 1972, was a rogue analyst, some kid in his 20s, describing the NSA’s business down to the colors of the badges worn at its headquarters. Winslow Peck [Perry Fellwock] claimed that the NSA had broken all of the Soviets’ codes…

Of course, ‘Snowden’s revelations’ are also a sneaky compliment to the US intelligence community’s ability to intrude on the privacy of everyone. Now Kaspersky is following suit with “the most advanced threat actor we have seen”.

What does the NSA get out of blowing its own horn? I’ll speculate that the tools we hear about through Kaspersky are tools which have already been compromised in some way, as Thomas Fox Brewster reports in Forbes. Also, GCN reports:

The Kaspersky revelations are not the first time firmware reprogramming has been mentioned in relation to the NSA. In December 2013, German magazine Der Spiegel published a lengthy investigative piece on the activities of the NSA, which had several months earlier been shown to have intercepted the mobile phone conversations of a number of state leaders, including that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

As a part of that investigation, the magazine detailed the contents of what it called the NSA’s Spy Catalog, a years-in-the-making collection of NSA-developed malware and surveillance hardware. That included, according to documents the magazine obtained, “spyware capable of embedding itself unnoticed into hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung.”

During the Cold War, US strategists liked to tout their nuclear superiority as a ‘deterrent’ to the use of nuclear weapons (they say). Could the NSA be trying to demoralize their opponents (domestic and international) with claims of “omnipotence”? Or are they working with their industry partners to see which ‘suspect’ organizations are sending in orders to replace products from the following (Equation-compromised) tech companies: Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital, Toshiba, Micron?

2) Perhaps the best reason for the NSA to ‘out’ its own tech superiority is to drum up money for more research. Maybe the NSA’s ‘leak’ game with Kaspersky is about “elite targeted propaganda”, like the 1950 National Security Council Report-68 (NSC-68) which journalist Alex Doherty says was used to browbeat skeptical US elites into supporting massive Cold War military spending. Wall Street Journal writer Henry A. Crumpton got in on this act three days after Kaspersky’s “Equation” revelations by whining about how the USA is losing tech superiority to Islamic terrorists– a “weakness of our own making” because of budget deadlock!

Are Kaspersky’s ‘revelations’ about drumming up more funding for NSA spooks, which in turn drums up more demand for Kaspersky’s “leadership” and security products? I strongly suspect so.

3) Astroturfing is a political strategy whereby establishment actors try to present their interests as those of honest, grass-roots political activists. In his reply to Noah Shachtman’s 2012 Wired article, Kaspersky says the following:

And finally, the very mission of our company is to fight cyber-crime all around the world – together with our colleagues in the industry. We don’t do it just because it happens to be our business; we also do it because we believe that protecting the world from malware is critically important and will continue to allow us to live in a better, safer, more open and effective society. It’s our underlying principle by which we stand firmly and always will.

You see, Kaspersky isn’t in business for the money or power, he made himself a billionaire out of altruism!

Kaspersky ends his reply to Wired’s Noah Shachtman with this emboldened statement: “I’m just a man who’s “here to save the world”.”

In the real world Kaspersky is setting himself up to be managed opposition to NSA abuses; the NSA probably believes Kaspersky is believable in this role because he’s Russian therefore ‘not controlled by Americans’. He just wants to save the world like the Americans… Someday soon we’ll hear how Kaspersky is funding an open-source initiative that ‘wards off’ NSA intrusions.

In conclusion, Kaspersky is an American asset who’s hiding behind the heavy perfume of a Russian corporation. I’m not trying to imply that the NSA is not an abusive organization; I am saying that managed opposition figures like Kaspersky are as untrustworthy as the NSA. If the Snowden debacle has taught us anything, it’s that US citizens need to redefine how we view the world. It’s not about ‘Russia vs. America’, nor even ‘CIA vs. KGB’. It’s about plutocrats versus the groups of people they leech off of; it’s about parasites trying to remain invisible to their hosts. Anything that Kaspersky recommends to protect against NSA abuses *is not the answer*. If you want intelligent advice about internet security, I’d go to guys like Poul-Henning Kamp.

Ivan Maiskii (second from left), the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943, with Winston Churchill at the Allied ambassadors’ lunch at the Soviet embassy, September 1941. Thank you, nybooks.com.

Earlier in the year I posted an article from the World Marxist Review titled Who Finances Anti-Communism? The article was written in February 1962 by a man styled ‘Ernst Henri’, and it was the first ‘outing’ of the CIA’s anti-Kremlin cultural offensive called the Congress for Cultural Freedom– it’s the first outing that I’m aware of, at least.

Henri’s article exposed how the CIA used insincere ‘charitable’ organizations to fund “anti-communist” cultural expositions. From my experience working in the non-profit sector, Henri was right on the money with his criticism of the Rockefeller, Ford and so many other hypocritical ‘foundations’. However, there are a few things that bother me about Henri’s article, which is why I described it as “seeming” to side with the Russians.

My two nagging doubts are 1) the language Henri uses to describe the CIA’s “anti-communist” offensive and 2) Henri’s focus on the Moral Re-Armament movement, which was founded three decades before the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). In this post I’ll argue that Henri worked for British as well as Soviet intel, and that some of the fruits around Henri bear hallmarks of being British-run ‘double crossed’ agents.

I’m going to start by looking at Henri’s ‘language problem’. Henri overwhelmingly describes the Congress as “anti-communist”. The next most common adjective is “reactionary” which is a slippery description; I understand “reactionary” as ‘going against the writer’s particular flavor of communist agenda’. Henri calls CCF collaborators “conservatives”, “fascist”, “right-wing”, “anti-Soviet” and “counter-revolutionary”– there’s even a smattering of slurs like “Hitlerism” and “White Russian”.

The only inkling that the Left might be involved comes from this quote describing Congress assets:

In the foreground are prominent personalities in science, literature and the arts, representing a variety of political trends, from Conservatives to Right-wing Socialists.

Henri’s use of language obscures the fact that the CIA’s agenda was a leftist agenda; he never explicitly states that the “anti-communist” crusade used leftist politics to fight the Soviets. You could read Henri’s article and not understand the extent to which the left, and sometimes the far left, was in cahoots with the CIA.

It’s as if Henri wanted to hide the strategy behind the CIA’s operation from World Marxist Review readers (controlling the Left), and only expose some of the tactics behind the campaign (front organizations, etc.).

Someone who cared about communism or the Soviet cause would want to arm WMR readers with the knowledge of exactly what ideologies to look for in a CIA ‘anti-Communist’ agent, e.g. “They promote Black American musicians to discredit Soviet critics of American race politics” — Henri doesn’t point these recurring themes out. By not being explicit about CIA strategy, Henri left the door open for a re-branding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom through Spectorsky’s Playboy operation, amongst others.

The uncomfortable fact is that Henri was going soft on the CIA in his article: its far easier to sacrifice front organizations than it is to formulate an entirely new strategy. I don’t believe Henri’s accusations against the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, etc. were wrong, but they were incomplete. Henri’s vague references to ‘anti-communist’ plotting came without proper explanation, so were therefore alarmist and risked hobbling the communist community with suspicion.

Even more troubling is that the BBC was ‘on board’ with Henri’s agenda by the end of 1962. Several months after Henri’s CCF exposé appeared in World Marxist Review, BBC television aired a derogatory send-up of the CCF on That Was The Week That Was, hosted by Playboy stalwart Kenneth Tynan.

To pour fuel on that fire, Frances Stonor Saunders, who I believe is managed opposition to the CIA, reused Henri’s terminology in her book The Cultural Cold War (2000). Saunders’ book is the gold-standard exposé of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and even though she doesn’t acknowledge Henri’s article in her writing, she recycles Henri’s language. Henri’s ‘Anti-Communist’ becomes ‘non-Communist’ in Saunders’ work. This nomenclature is misleading, because the CIA’s efforts were never ‘non-Communist’ nor ‘anti-Communist’, they were anti-Kremlin.

Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War and CIA asset. Saunders was arts editor at the New Statesman, which you’ll read about more than once in this post.

The CIA isn’t against communism, they promote it through agents like Allen Ginsberg; and some of the CIA’s leading lights fought with the communists in Spain. What the CIA is against is any form of communism which they can’t control. Frances Stonor Saunders wrote her book on the CCF to protect ongoing CIA operations which involve the Left; she used Henri’s misleading language to perpetuate misconceptions about the Agency’s politics. So if Saunders shared goals with Henri, then who was Ernst Henri?

Here’s the bell-ringer: Ernst Henri’s real name was Semen Rostovskii and he worked for the Soviet Ambassador in London, Ivan Maiskii. According to Richard B. Spence in Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, Rostovskii was also the guy who recruited the ‘Cambridge Five’– the most notorious group of four Soviet double agents ever. Rostovskii ran in the same well-heeled ‘communist’ circles that agent provocateur Aleister Crowley haunted in the 1920s-30s; in fact, Rostovskii had a number of high-level British Intelligence acquaintances. Why might this be?

Ivan Maiskii

According to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Rostovskii’s boss, Ivan Maiskii, had “unparalleled access to the British establishment”, which would explain Rostovskii’s well-placed friends. Maiskii was a Bolshevik revolutionary and good friends with George Bernard Shaw; Shaw founded Frances Stonor Saunder’s one-time employer the New Statesman and Shaw’s network placed British spy Roald Dahl into the confidence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (see Storyteller, Donald Sturrock). Maiskii had the ear of other powerful British figures too, including Winston Churchill and the media baron Lord Beaverbrook. Back in the motherland, Maiskii was instrumental in getting Stalin to support Zionist immigration policies to Israel and Maiskii was a confidant to mass-murderer Lavrenti Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police. According to biography.com:

In 1941, Stalin appointed Beria deputy prime minister, and Beria eventually joined the Politburo. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Stalin proudly introduced Beria to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “our Himmler,” referring to Hitler’s head of the Gestapo.

Semen Rostovskii was in the employ of a very nasty Soviet power-broker who was on friendly terms with British businessmen. According to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666, Rostovskii ran in British circles which were no less Soviet and no less privileged:

The Ring’s [the Cambridge Five’s] recruiter at Cambridge was the Soviet agent Semen Rostovskii (a.k.a Ernst Henri), a protege of Moscow’s then ambassador in London, Ivan Maiskii– whose name will later be linked to Crowley’s by none other than Philby.

Rostovskii’s operation got underway in 1933, around the time the Gibarti-Crowley note was written. One of Rostovskii’s accomplices was the young Cambridge communist Brian Howard. He, in turn, was a friend of Crowley’s erstwhile roommate, Gerald Hamilton. Howard also connects to another of the Mage’s left-leaning homosexual associates, Tom Driberg, about who more in the following chapter.

Judging by Spence’s quote above, it would be easy to assume that Brian Howard, Gerald Hamilton and Tom Driberg [1] were in the employ of Soviet intelligence– to a certain extent they all were. However, they all worked for British intelligence too! Rostovskii’s ‘pink’ British friends all have the whiff of ‘double cross’ about them. Brian Howard worked for MI5, was a BBC propagandist, and a New Statesman contributor according to this ‘Gay for Today‘ article; Hamilton was a fixer for ‘Red’ media baron Willi Münzenberg as well as an informer to British intel. These boys were all parlor communists who enjoyed the good life and the best opportunities that the British Empire could provide.

Tom Driberg is the member of Rostovskii’s circle who is most relevant to his Who Finances Anti-Communism? exposé because of Driberg’s personal connection to Moral Re-Armament. Tom Driberg’s name is indelibly linked to MRA, because Driberg made himself and MRA famous through his anti-MRA antics in the late 1920s.

Before I go into Driberg’s MRA connection, I’m going to introduce some of the controversy around Driberg’s espionage work because his spook involvement is contested. Biographer Francis Wheen is, on the whole, dismissive of the suggestion that Driberg worked for any intelligence agency. However, Wheen documents one ‘job’ after another which smells spooky: from Driberg’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War alongside Ernst Hemingway, to Driberg’s providing intelligence dossiers to Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia. (Julia Child’s husband Paul Cushing Child worked for Mountbatten too, see her autobiography.)

Not everyone feels as confident about Driberg’s innocence, for instance, here’s Richard Spence’s introduction to Driberg:

Driberg had been a Communist Party member since 1920. He also was a homosexual, like so many others Agent Crowley’s path had crossed. Despite (or maybe because of ) his politics and sexuality, Driberg had become a gossip columnist at the Daily Express. Collecting gossip, after all, is just another way of gathering intelligence. Driberg may have been informing to His Majesty’s authorities for years, but about the time he renewed association with Crowley [1932], Maxwell Knight, now employed by MI5, recruited him as an informant. Max used Driberg to keep tabs on “cafe communists” and fellow-traveler liberals, precisely the crowd Crowley was so busy cultivating.

Wheen saves special scorn for researchers who accuse Driberg of Soviet intelligence connections. Wheen dismisses KGB connections as malicious gossip inspired by– grab your bonnets, ladies– Lord Rothschild. Wheen names two authors in connection with this ‘plot’, Chapman Pincher and Peter Wright. Whether a plot exists or not, here’s what Wright has to say about Driberg in Spy Catcher:

Tom Driberg was another MP named by the Czech defectors [Frolik and August]. I went to see Driberg myself , and he finally admitted that he was providing material to a Czech controller for money. For a while we ran Driberg on, but apart from picking up a mass of salacious detail about Labor Party peccadilloes, he had nothing of interest for us.

His only lasting story concerned the time he lent a Cabinet Minister his flat so that the Minister could try and conduct an affair in strict privacy. Driberg was determined to find the identity of the women who was the recipient of the Minster’s favors, and one evening after the Minister had vacated, he searched the flat and found a letter addressed to a prominent female member of the Labor Party. Driberg claimed to be horrified by his discovery and raised it with the Minister concerned, suggesting that he ought to be more careful in case word of his activities ever became public! Since Driberg was certainly providing the same stories to his Czech friends, his concern for Labor Party confidentiality seemed hollow, to say the least.

Tom Driberg, Lord Bardwell. In the few months between flunking out of Oxford and being hired by the Daily Express, Driberg would turn tricks or look for casual pick-ups in dark doorways along London’s Rupert Street. (See, Tom Driberg, His Life and Indiscretions, by Francis Wheen.) Photo courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery.

So what was the slippery Driberg doing around Moral Re-Armament in 1928? Moral Re-Armament, which was known as the Oxford Group until 1938, would have remained relatively unknown were it not for the work of Tom Driberg through Lord Beaverbrook’s publication the Daily Express. In 1928 Driberg made a name for himself by ginning up a fantastic amount of negative publicity for MRA, which he attacked from the perspective of his own sexuality. Wheen describes Driberg’s multi-article campaign this way:

Barely a month after he joined the paper [Beaverbrook’s Daily Express] it brought him his first scoop. Having heard from friends at Oxford of an odd American evangelist, Dr. Frank Buchman, who had surfaced in the city and was recruiting students to his cause, Tom attended one of the Buchman groups’ Sunday evening meetings in a private room at the Randolph Hotel…

Tom’s articles were the first reports in a popular national paper of a movement which was soon better known as the Oxford Group and eventually, in the 1940s, won international fame– or notoriety, according to taste– as Moral Re-Armament. Tom became MRA’s most unrelenting scourge, accusing them of ‘zeal amounting to fanaticism, persistent crude invasions of physical and spiritual privacy… an obsessive and often impertinent harping on sin, especially sexual sin.’… One Buchmanite, J. P. Thornton-Duesbery (the master of St. Peter’s College, Oxford), was so stung by Tom’s tireless hostility that in 1964 he published a book whose sole purpose was to defend Moral Re-Armament against Tom.

Driberg was so intimately connected with Moral Re-Armament that two years after Rostovskii’s ‘exposé‘ of MRA in 1962, MRA stalwarts were still attacking Driberg.

Tom Driberg’s spooky doings went farther than just writing about Moral Re-Armament. According to Wheen, Driberg actually organized a gang raid on one of the MRA meetings, which ended in an anti-climax because Driberg got the location wrong.

I believe that Driberg was actually working to promote MRA; no sincere critic would organize a mob against such a cult, because a successful raid would have made a martyr out of Frank Buchman. Driberg was managed opposition to MRA. MRA was probably an Anglo-American intelligence operation designed to get impressionable yet useful people with more conservative leanings into political alignment: Buchmanites were a manageable political alternative at a time (1920s-30s) when some class-conscious movements presented a real challenge to elitist interests. The obnoxious gossip king Driberg was a perfect foil to the MRA operation.

Rostovskii’s 1962 tirade against Moral Re-Armament as a millionaire’s “anti-communist” cult is similar to Tom Driberg’s 1928 tirade against Moral Re-Armament as millionaire’s ‘anti-sex’ cult; you could say that Rostovskii recycled Driberg’s criticisms with ‘communism’ substituted for ‘sex’. I find it fascinating that a 1960s Soviet spook was so in tune with a British gossip column from 1928. Perhaps the reason for this synchronicity is that neither men were sincere in their professed beliefs.

Driberg’s sexuality informed his political life; his homosexuality and  promiscuity may have marked out his usefulness to intelligence handlers. Driberg’s sympathetic biographer Frances Wheen writes that Tom’s attraction to communism was largely based on his desire for working-class men:

Like George Orwell, Tom had a rather romanticized vision of the working class, and especially of working-class men. (In Tom’s case it was both political and homo-erotic: those sinewy thighs and rough hands, that heroic nobility in adversity, the sweat of labour…) Unlike Orwell, however, he was too fond of the comforts available to ‘pampered Londoners’ to become anything more than a tourist. Tom’s visits to depressed areas– like his sexual encounters with working-class men– were passionately arousing but also impersonal and brief.

And…

Tom would then speak of his achievements in selling the CP’s [Communist Party’s] paper, Workers’ Weekly, at the gates of factories in Cowley– which, as Taylor pointed out, ‘enabled him to become acquainted with the better looking factory workers’. Perhaps Tom Stephensen’s accusations of frivolity were justified. Taylor later admitted: ‘I did not take my political activities very seriously.’ [A.J.P. Taylor was Driberg’s friend and the other Communist Party member at Oxford in the mid 1920s, though other communist sympathizers were present.– a.nolen]

Driberg’s political insincerity aside, Rostovskii must have had a reason for recycling Driberg’s Moral Re-Armament work and tying it onto the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Who Finances Anti-Communism?– there’s no easy way to weave the two together because Moral Re-Armament existed long before the CIA existed. Moral Re-Armament was in swing back when the Soviets were firm friends with British and American elites: the evangelical group that became MRA was founded in 1921 by Swiss-American Frank Buchman. In my opinion, MRA’s mission was to hijack Christianity in service of internationalist business interests. If Rostovskii sincerely wanted to expose ‘spookish’ behavior by Buchman, then he needed to do that in another article separate from the CIA affairs, because MRA had its genesis in different battles.

Frank Buchman of Moral Re-Armament fame.

It seems to me that Rostovskii included Driberg’s old ‘target’ in Who Finances Anti-Communism? because doing so contributed to the “conservative” fog obscuring the CIA’s sponsorship of the Left. Rostovskii could have easily been aware of Driberg’s work on this increasingly obsolete cult through Brian Howard; Rostovskii’s scuppering of MRA may have even done the UKUSA spooks a favor. By 1962 the Imperial political landscape was very different to that of the pre-war years and I believe that ‘christiany’ Moral Re-Armament was baggage that Anglo-American spooks no longer needed (see my post A.C. Spectorsky and CCF 2.0). Helping cold warriors was strange work for a Soviet diplomat, wasn’t it?

Brian Howard, son of American expatriates in Britain whose ancestry is surprising. Howard inspired the bright young things of Evelyn Waugh’s writing.

Just how ‘Rooskie’ was Rostovskii himself? Rostovskii ran in the same circles as Aleister Crowley, who MI5 considered a bone fide Soviet agent by 1933. According to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666, Crowley’s intelligence specialty was infiltrating political movements and destroying them, otherwise known as being an agent provocateur. Given Crowley’s pattern of provocation in Golden Dawn in the 1900s; and then again amongst German spy networks in NYC during WWI; it seems reasonable to surmise that by the mid thirties Crowley was disrupting communist and socialist networks in the UK. That means his intelligence buddies, like Tom Driberg, were probably in the same business.

But why would a Soviet diplomatic attaché want to associate with a used-up hack like Crowley and his intel buddies? Rostovskii and Crowley were likely collaborators during the lead up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, which resulted in the installation of the Bolshevik government. Rostovskii and The Beast had good reason to protect the communist and socialist movements in the U.K. from elements which Bolshevik apparatchiks and British investors couldn’t control.

How did this strange pairing of Bolsheviks and British millionaires come about?

Rich Brits, the Brits who controlled the intelligence sphere, were opposed to the Tsar. As Richard Spence writes in his biography of Crowley, “The Empire of the Tsar was Britain’s most dangerous international rival and potential enemy.” In 1896 Crowley was *probably* recruited by British Intelligence with the Russian theater in mind; his first missions were to Russia (1897, 1910, 1913) and Crowley always had his eye open for signs of revolution in the Russian Empire. (See Secret Agent 666). Of course, Crowley’s dalliances with the Russian theater during these missions caught Mikhail Bulkagov’s attention.

I strongly suspect that MI6 gained control of German-funded political agitator Leon Trotsky as fallout from the fighting between German and British spooks in the USA during WWI. Crowley was part of this fighting: he posed as a rabidly pro-Kaiser pundit in newspapers which targeted the German-American population while working to undermine German interests stateside, see Secret Agent 666.

According to the Guardian in 2001, documents released by Britain’s Public Records Office (which I haven’t seen) show that in February 1917 Trotsky was arrested by MI5 in Canada while making his way from New York City to Russia with “with $10,000 subscribed by Socialists and Germans”. Trotsky was quickly released on orders from Britain’s MI6, which allowed him to carry on to Russia… the rest is history.

Crowley was heavily involved in breaking up and taking over the US-based German spy networks which, judging by the British Public Records releases, are likely to have supported Trotsky. Trotsky’s success would have put men like Rostovskii in power. There’s no good reason to believe that Rostovskii and Crowley were working against each other with respect to Britain’s domestic political scene in 1933.

What’s more, Anglo-American-Soviet relations were close by 1933: President F.D. Roosevelt had been elected the previous November and officially recognized the USSR. Later, FDR – a good friend to both Stalin and the British– would ensure the USSR’s continued existence by secretly giving Stalin huge amounts of American technology and funding (see Lend Lease and Harry Dexter White). The American Ambassador to Moscow (1933-36), William Christian Bullitt, was very friendly to the Soviets and negotiated sweet business deals with them– he also inspired Bulgakov’s send-up of American intervention in Soviet Russia: the Spring Ball of the Full Moon in Master and Margarita. Was Rostovskii’s boss, the Soviet Ambassador to London Ivan Maiskii, any less business-friendly? His “unparalleled access to the British establishment” would suggest not.

Fresh from the USSR, William Bullitt lets FDR take questions during a 1937 cruise.

Far from being enemies, Crowley, FDR, Churchill, Rostovskii and Maiskii– and lesser mortals like Tom Driberg– were all batting for the same team. From what I can tell, Semen Rostovskii, the recruiter of the “Cambridge Five”, was surrounded by a mess of British double agents and informers. When a network has a couple of agent provocateurs, it’s compromised. When a network is one seething mass of agent provocateurs, it’s managed opposition. Rostovskii was probably working with Crowley and his MI6 buds to control Britain’s domestic socialist and communist movements, and possibly to prevent them being used by other spy outfits. Rostovskii’s collaboration with British intelligence is probably also why the Cambridge Five’s fifth member has been so elusive.

Driberg will get his own post shortly, because he’s the prototype of our current obnoxious lefty gossip columnists like Gawker’s Nick Denton and Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner. I think, readers, that Crowley recruited Driberg out of Oxford for the British in much the same way Crowley was recruited out of Cambridge– the other ‘elite’ U.K. university. This is how Wheen describes that campus meeting, which lead Crowley to anoint Driberg as the one to “succeed him as the Great Beast”:

As well as favorable notices from the university magazines, Tom’s concert [a poetry reading at Oxford in the summer of 1927, ‘Homage to Beethoven’] was noticed in the next issue of the Sunday Times, under the heading ‘Musical Innovation’. For the second time in as many months the names of Driberg and Christ Church appeared in the national press in a context that cannot have pleased the college authorities. The Sunday Times item was also drawn to the attention of Aleister Crowley, the legendary black magician who rejoiced in the title of ‘the wickedest man in the world’ or, more concisely, ‘The Great Beast’. It is not certain why Crowley was so interested in the report of ‘Homage to Beethoven'; perhaps word had reached him that Tom’s weird lyrics included references to Beelzebub. Whatever the reason, Crowley invited Tom to lunch at the Tour Eiffel restaurant in Percy Street… The two men met again from time to time after this lunch…

Yet it was Tom who made money out of Crowley, not vice versa. By rather dubious means he acquired Crowley’s manuscript diary, which recorded his daily magical and sexual doings; many years later Tom sold this for a handsome sum to Jimmy Page, the guitarist with the rock group Led Zeppelin. [These could easily be the sex diaries that Ken Anger and Alfred Kinsey were looking for in the 1950s.– a.nolen.] In 1973 Tom raised more money by auctioning at Christie’s several volumes presented to him by Crowley. They included a copy of the Book of the Law, inscribed ‘To True Thomas of the Eildon Hills with all best wishes from Boleskine and Alterarff’. In the same lot was a letter from Crowley urging Tom to study the Koran: ‘I also hope that you will be pleased by the sincerity and simplicity of the Mohammedan faith , and learn up the words, so as not to make any more howlers like “Moslems”.

This is how Spence describes Driberg’s relation to The Beast:

Arguably, Crowley’s most important contact in the British Left was Tom Driberg. The Beast had known him since the mid-1920s, when Driberg was an Oxford student and aspiring occultist. They re-established contact when Crowley came back to London in summer 1932. In the years to come, the talkative Driberg made various wild claims about his relationship with the Beast, including being Crowley’s named heir.

Readers will remember that Rostovskii began recruiting the ‘Cambridge Five’ in 1933.

In conclusion, the Brits are known for their ‘double crossing’ and using enemy agents to British ends; they claim a perfect record of this against the Germans in WWII. Practice makes perfect. I’ll also point out that it’s a lot easier to run a double against an enemy if that enemy is only hostile a fraction of the time. Semen Rostovskii, the recruiter of the “Cambridge Five”, seems to have protected British and American interests against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics via the World Marxist Review. Could it be that Rostovskii’s ‘Cambridge Five’ were a bunch of spooks who the Brits didn’t ‘double cross’ very well? Whatever the answer, we can be sure that Rostovskii was a ‘champion of freedom’ in the same vein as Aleister Crowley, Winston Churchill, Tom Driberg and Eugene Kaspersky.

P.S. For more information on how wealthy Brits and Americans subsidized the Bolshevik Revolution, please see Is The Devil a German? and A Death in Finland. For more information on how Rostovskii’s protection of CIA strategy allowed the agency to regroup under the Playboy banner, see A.C. Spectorsky and the CFF 2.0, as well as An American Pravda I, II and III.

[1] Regular readers will remember Driberg as Mick Jagger’s political handler, and the Member of Parliament who George Orwell denounced to the Information Research Department as “’Homosexual’, ‘Commonly thought to be an underground member [of the Communist Party]’, and ‘English Jew’.” (All true, according to Driberg’s biographer Francis Wheen.)

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 Zanuck’s military placement to the firm’s growth. 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 it’s British counterpart, the BSC:

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.

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.

A few weeks ago I bought a book titled My 5 Cambridge Friends: Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, by “Their KGB Controller”. Here’s the cover of the book.

My 5 Cambridge Friends is not what it purports to be: the “account” of Yuri Modin ripped from KGB archives and bleeding on a plate in front of Western readers. Modin’s “account” has been thoroughly cooked and presented in digestible bites by co-authors Jean-Charles Deniau and Aguieska Ziarek, and probably the translator Anthony Roberts too. I know this because the writing is tailored for English-speaking people and crafted like a B&N-ready historical narrative from page one. ‘Yuri Modin’ makes numerous and astute references to Western popular culture– he mentions spy novelist John le Carré a suspicious amount– yet Russian popular culture references are vanishingly rare.

Why would Modin have become involved in a writing project like this? In 1994, when My 5 Cambridge Friends came out, Yuri Modin was a retired spook in Moscow which probably means he had stopped receiving his pension. Western governments were eager to control any embarrassing information that may have leaked out during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, so an outpouring of ‘KGB Archives’ writing was published at this time– Lesley Milne’s pathetic biography of Mikhail Bulgakov was also part of this propaganda offensive. Therefore, even though it’s unlikely that Modin actually wrote the majority of this book, I’ll refer to him as the author in this post.

The reason I bought My 5 Cambridge Friends is because of one quote on a ‘Cambridge Five’ Wikipedia page that was attributed to it:

Philby never meddled in his friend’s private life; nor did he ever allude to Burgess’s homosexual affairs. He once told me that he viewed Guy’s homosexual tastes as a sickness– and none of his business.

(This quote is actually in My 5 Cambridge Friends.)

If this information is true then Philby’s opinion is a very interesting one, because it was Philby who coalesced the core of the ‘Cambridge Five’. Philby chose three “sick” men to be the core of this particular espionage network: mutual lovers Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt. ‘Yuri Modin’ describes Philby’s strategy:

Kim Philby now set about his first mission, which was to recruit one or two other agents to form an embryonic network. He traveled up to Cambridge during the month of May. There he met Guy Burgess, told him what he had done and seen that winter in Vienna and thus convinced him to join his fledgling group… Philby asked Burgess to forage among his friends, and Burgess came up with Anthony Blunt.

What was the dynamic like between these men? According to Modin:

In May 1934, Kim Philby traveled up to Cambridge to see Burgess. For once it was not Philby who was bewitched by Burgess, but the other way around.

In turn, Burgess was the ‘alpha’ amongst his group of homosexual friends:

A few weeks before his trip to Rome, Burgess in his role of talent scout had supposedly roped in yet another choice recruit. He had seduced intellectually– and, it has been said, physically too– a promising young Cambridge undergraduate by the name of Donald Maclean, who henceforth became a trusted member of his cell of activists.

And..

Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess were very close at Cambridge. Blunt was madly in love, lost in admiration for Guy’s brilliant intellect and dancing wit.

Based on Modin’s account, it appears that idealization was a big part of Philby’s network: Maclean and Blunt idealized Burgess, Burgess idealized Philby. Read cult-survivor Daniel Shaw’s opinions on how idealization is used by narcissistic cult leaders here.

Homosexuals are a minority of the general population and it strikes me as odd that Philby would just happen to target three of them for the core of his spy group; it seems especially odd considering that Philby had a low opinion of their behavior. Was the homosexual population a special target for security services in general?

Kim Philby used Guy Burgess (pictured) to recruit other homosexuals from his milieu.

U.K. Intelligence’s favored recruiting grounds at Oxford and Cambridge Universities certainly had large homosexual populations in the 1920s and 30s. According to Francis Wheen’s biography of Tom Driberg, Oxford University hosted an undergraduate class where homosexuality was the norm rather than the exception. (In fact, one graduate says boys who liked girls in the 1920s were likely to be “sent down”, i.e. not complete their degree.) Clearly, Cambridge university also hosted a large gay student body in the 1930s. If homosexuality has an intelligence utility, it’s unlikely that the Brits were unaware of that utility, since they were recruiting LGBT agents like Aleister Crowley from these establishments from at least the 1890s.

Some members of the British secret services believed that gay networks formed around men in power. According to Modin, David Footman, the assistant director of MI6’s Political Intelligence Department, asked Burgess to use his network of homosexual contacts to open an unofficial dialogue channel between Neville Chamberlain (British Prime Minister) and French Premier Édouard Daladier– neither of whom were gay to my knowledge. Footman’s schemes are not necessarily proof of an agency-wide recruiting policy, but they do show that a leading British spook saw something exploitable in the gay milieu.

Soviet intelligence definitely considered homosexuality a desirable trait amongst spies. According to one report, The Theory and Practice of Soviet Intelligence, published by the CIA and written by Soviet defector Alexander Orlov:

Considerable [recruiting] success was achieved among foreign diplomats tinted with homosexual perversions; it is no secret that the biggest concentration of homosexuals can be found in the diplomatic services of Western countries. Those of these who agreed to work for the Russian network were instructed to approach other homosexual members of the diplomatic corps, a strategy which was remarkably successful. Even when those approached declined the offer to collaborate, they would not denounce the recruiter to the authorities. Soviet intelligence officers were amazed at the mutual consideration and true loyalty which prevailed among homosexuals.

Of course, Orlov’s use of the word ‘loyalty’ is misleading, these people were traitors to their own country, but the Soviets had found a way of activating reliability amongst their homosexual assets in a way that their employers at the Western “diplomatic services” had not figured out (or found ethically unacceptable).

A young Donald Maclean, whose open career was in the British Foreign Service.

Given British and Soviet intel’s interest in homosexuals’ utility for espionage, and given that Kim Philby took such pains to recruit them, it’s weird that Philby would downplay Burgess/Blunt/possibly Maclean’s orientation to his Soviet contact Modin by saying their gayness was “none of his business”. It’s almost as if Philby was trying to hide a tradecraft tactic from Yuri Modin… do genuine double agents hide such things?

Whatever Philby believed about the state of Soviet tradecraft, it should be noted that similar patterns of behavior arose between Western and Soviet homosexual milieus. In Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over, authors Rita James Simon and Alison Brooks say the following:

Yet, during the Stalinist age, Soviet persecution of gay men was neither continuous nor total. In the case of well-known personalities such as Eisenstein, the popular opera tenor Sergei Lemeshev, the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, and numerous male ballet dancers, the authorities were willing to look the other way, provided the man was married and kept his homosexuality out of public view. A considerable number of Soviet gay men were in the Red Army, or were in the diplomatic corps or were entertainers.

Currently gay men are over-represented in the US military; the Soviets noticed that Western diplomatic corps appealed to gays; and I leave it to readers to assess if the LGBT community is highly represented in the Western entertainment industry. The Soviets probably first developed their intelligence strategy with respect to homosexuals on their own turf: through their own propaganda and censorship efforts or through what they learned from their British partners after the Bolshevik Revolution.

What might this Soviet strategy of activating reliability have looked like in practice? I’ll remind readers that Kim Philby came from a powerful intelligence family; he had a masterful, magnetic personality and is often described as handsome. Might this have explained Burgess’s infatuation with him and, consequently, the reliability of Burgess’s conquests?

The young Kim Philby: a desirable heterosexual?

In As Political Chips, an essay on homosexuality’s political use written by Marni Esque, the author asserts that heterosexual men can be highly desirable to gay ones: “Happiness is thus almost impossible to attain, especially since the attraction for working boys goes with a desire to have “normal,” heterosexual boys.” Esque associates this type of homosexual longing with a desire for “virility, physical superiority, the opposition between the “strong” and the “weak,””. Esque goes on to suggest that at the root of some homosexuality is the childlike desire to be affirmed and protected:

The working boy seems to live a mythical world where the values are reversed,where all that was prohibited is finally allowed, where happiness is accessible: “Come to me, and you will be as happy as I am, and as strong.”

Could it be that a connected, urbane womanizer like Philby held a charm for men like Burgess, Blunt and possibly Maclean? Could it be that what men like Footman and the Soviet intel apparatus understood was that some homosexuals’ unquenchable desire for affirmation and belonging could be used to make them do irrational, dangerous things? Were the Soviets exploiting power-worship, much like Nigella Lawson, the battered goddess of food-porn, exploited power-worship through her ‘kept woman’ sales pitch?

I think this sort of exploitation was very likely and I’ve written about it elsewhere in Great Users of People, The Cult of Intelligence and A Call for Papers. Yuri Modin’s account of his work with the Cambridge Five provides some other insights as to how people who want affirmation from the powerful are used by intelligence services. I was shocked to read this statement in chapter one:

…the agent who thinks he’s James Bond has no place at all in a real intelligence service. There are those who try to ape Ian Fleming’s fictional spy, bristling with gadgets, sexually voracious, intrepid and constantly involved with battles of one kind or another. I’ve known a few like that, and none of them ever went very far.

This quote shocked me because much of Philby, Burgess and Blunt’s behavior is ‘James Bond-like’, even as it is described by Modin. Modin goes on to say that it’s better if intelligence agents are 1) not too bright (he calls them “soldiers” at heart); 2) somewhat childlike; yet 3) politically astute so that they can anticipate their masters’ whims and 4) without mental or physical ailments. In contrast to these observations, Modin goes on to say that many intel agents are either alcoholics or that they drink to forget; that they may have “weird relationships with woman”; gamble impulsively; they may be fragile and highly-strung; and are often wracked by guilt.

A number of the spy characteristics described by Modin– both the typical ones and the desirable ones– are consistent with behavior associated with narcissism, which is an anxiety-ridden, childlike preoccupation with one’s undeveloped self.  I’ve speculated elsewhere that narcissism is useful to exploitative organizations because narcissistic people are incredibly easy to manipulate. Many of Modin’s ‘typical’ spook characteristics are also somewhat James-Bondish: drinking, gambling, unhealthy relationships with women.

On first reading Modin’s observations about intelligence agents, I thought he was contradicting himself. ‘Drinking to forget’ is not indicative of a healthy mind, neither are weird relationships with women, nor being “wracked by guilt”. The agents who Modin brags about running could have been prototypes for James Bond. Was Modin saying that his underlings, and many other ‘pros’ in the trade, were destined to go nowhere in the intelligence hierarchy?

If Modin and his co-writers weren’t contradicting themselves, then they’ve given us insight into how the spook-world is organized. The ‘James Bonds'; the narcissists; and the emotionally crippled people described by Philippe de Vosjoli are the ‘worker bees’ of the intelligence community. They’re not designed to make it to ‘Floor Seven’. They are flattered into doing what more mature, balanced men with options and good judgment would never choose to do themselves. Perhaps that’s why the guys who ‘took the fall’ as the ‘Cambridge Five’ were disproportionately gay, even though they were from connected families… as Orlov wrote “they would not denounce the recruiter to the authorities”.

When I say ‘taking the fall’ I am implying that there were more ‘Soviet’ agents in British Intel employ than the four/five which were uncovered as part of the ‘Cambridge’ ring. At this time, I don’t doubt John Cairncross was giving Soviets information that some parts of the British government were unhappy with, but I do doubt that he was the outer limit of Philby’s network– I will write more on this in the future.

If Modin’s description of intel worker-bees is accurate, then it shows that Playboy’s (the CIA’s) promotion of the James Bond fairytale was designed to appeal to lower-caste intel operatives… the hoi polloi of the espionage sphere.

But where does all this leave Kim Philby– was he just a foot soldier too?

Yes and no. St. John Philby, Kim’s father, actually had power outside of the British establishment through his influence at the Saudi royal court and their mineral rights. This means that, for a while, Kim had power outside of MI6 and could have been truly dangerous to Stephenson and the London financial barons.

However, there are things about Kim Philby that weakened him. Kim was a womanizer– which means that he had impersonal sexual encounters. Regular readers will remember that CIA personality profiler John Gittinger was very interested in people who like self-centered sex as part of his Personality Assessment System, which the CIA used in a bid to manipulate people on an industrial scale.

While Philby (according to Modin) felt homosexuality was “sick”, there are many people who would say the same about womanizing. I’ve only known two womanizers: their behavior was motivated by 1) anger towards women and 2) the power-trip that came from stringing women along. Neither motivation is vastly different from those of a typical rapist or pedophile, it’s just that womanizers tend to use lies where criminals use force.

Kim Philby was a narcissistic man if one ever existed: a consummate user who caused the deaths of many people in order to further his career. As I’ve stated before, exploitative organizations manipulate narcissists. Kim was also second-generation intel, which is important because people born into cults like the ‘intelligence community’ are less likely to identify exploitative behavior as being exploitative.

At this time I believe Kim Philby was a ‘worker-bee’ too, though for a while he had the dangerous potential to become something more. I think that Philby was also more stable than the other agents he recruited and consequently he was given more responsibility by both the British and the Soviets than were the notoriously flighty, irresponsible Burgess and Blunt, or the impossibly idealistic Maclean.

I will write more about the strange case of Kim Philby and the ‘Cambridge Five’ in the coming weeks, but I think readers will already have deduced my opinion on this group from my writing about Ernst Henri: not all is as it seems with these ‘Soviet’ quints.

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.

Anatoliy Golitsyn and his wife Svetlana dine out at the Coconut Grove in L.A. circa 1961.

This is awkward. It seems that the ‘Cambridge Five’ are numbered five because of information from Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB major who defected to the USA in 1961. These are Golitsyn’s words circa March 1962, according to Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher:

Golitsin said he knew of a famous “Ring of Five” spies, recruited in Britain in the 1930s. They all knew each other, he said, and all knew the others were spies. But Golitsin could identify none of them, other than the fact that one of them had the code name Stanley, and was connected with recent KGB operations in the Middle East. The lead fitted Kim Philby perfectly, who was currently working in Beirut for the Observer newspaper. He said that two of the other five were obviously Burgess and Maclean. We thought that a fourth might be Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and a former wartime MI5 officer who fell under suspicion after the Burgess and Maclean defections in 1951. But the identity of the fifth was a complete mystery. As a result of Golitsin’s three serials concerning the Ring of Five, the Philby and Blunt cases were exhumed, and a reassessment ordered.

Golitsyn is not a popular figure. On their website, the CIA cautiously implies Golitsyn fed counterintelligence director James Angleton disinformation about Soviet penetration of Western intelligence services— the famous ‘Monster Plot’. David Robarge, the CIA chief historian, takes the denunciation one step further:

Given the Soviets’ record of success at penetration and deception operations going back to the 1920s, and with no current evidence to the contrary, Angleton was justified in presuming CIA also was victimized. However, there was no other source, human or technical, that he could use to guide him on the molehunt — only his favored source, KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, and their symbiotic relationship soon became professionally unbalanced as the manipulative and self-promoting defector’s allegations of international treachery grew more fantastical…

According to Robarge, the consequences of this “unbalanced” relationship were:

For roughly the next 10 years, distracted by unsubstantiated theories of Soviet “strategic deception,” Angleton and his staff embarked on counterproductive and sometimes harmful efforts to find moles and prove Moscow’s malevolent designs.

Christopher Andrew, Cambridge University’s weather vane for what is politically acceptable to say about espionage, summarizes Golitsyn more neatly as an “unreliable conspiracy theorist”.

Golitsyn is so reviled in upwardly-mobile intelligence circles that he’s become the ‘Dezinformatsiya’ case study for trainee spooks– a bit like how Angleton is the case study for “how not to conduct counterintelligence”. The CIA drills into its newbie counterintelligence recruits that Angleton was wrong and that Golitsyn was probably sent by the KGB to hobble Western counterintelligence efforts.

So it’s awkward that establishment intelligence historians, including Prof. Andrew, should continue to throw about phrases like ‘The Cambridge Five’ or ‘The Magnificent Five‘ when talking about Philby’s spy ring. According to their canon, the source of this information was “unreliable”.

A book by Chris Andrew and Chris Andrew.

As far as I can tell, pinning the number five onto the Cambridge ring is unjustified. Prior to 1961, British VENONA-type decrypts (Moscow to London KGB channel) mention a “valuable argentura [spy ring] of Stanley, Hicks and Johnson”, which makes a ‘Cambridge Three’. If the Americans/British suspected there were more than three spies in the Cambridge ring at that time, the VENONA decrypts contained handles for an estimated 800 other recruited Soviet agents to chose from, according to Peter Wright in Spycatcher.

VENONA aside, there were plenty of Cambridge ‘friends’ to come under suspicion: Victor Rothschild (provided the spies with valuable intelligence connections); James Klugman (Cambridge undergrad who recruited John Cairncross); Harry Pollitt (British Communist Party General Secretary who controlled Klugman); and goodness only knows how many Michael Straight-like characters were rolling around University halls. To say that there were ‘five’ in Philby’s network seems a bit hopeful, frankly.

So if the source of the ‘five’ meme is unreliable, and given the historical record points to the possibility of more than Burgess/Blunt/Maclean/Philby/Plus One in the Cambridge ring, why do we still keep hearing about the ‘Cambridge Five’ from people who know better? Probably because it suits the intelligence establishment to continue to minimize the number of agents publicly tainted by this scandal. If such minimization is important now, imagine how important it was for the British in 1963.

Readers will remember that none of the ‘Cambridge Five’ actually faced justice for their actions. Maclean made it to the USSR, Burgess ran before he really had to. There was little political will to prosecute Kim Philby for over a decade, and absolutely zero to prosecute the Queen Mother’s cousin Anthony Blunt. According to The Daily Mail, Blunt’s treachery was well known in royal circles since 1948:

A royal source tells the story of how, in 1948, a young ex-officer, Philip Hay, came to Buckingham Palace to be interviewed for the post of Private Secretary to the widowed Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, mother of the present Duke.

As he walked down a red-carpeted corridor with Sir Alan Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, they passed Blunt in silence. When they were out of earshot, Sir Alan whispered to Hay: ‘That’s our Russian spy.’

Catching a spy like Blunt, who was so well understood by his ‘victims’, was hardly a counterintelligence coup. Perhaps the reason that ‘experts’ latched onto Golitsyn’s “Ring of Five” was because 5 – 4 = 1, and 1 is the absolute minimum number of spies needed to explain the ‘tip-off’ which helped Philby evade justice in 1963, when imperial politics turned against Kim.

The search for this one remaining spy has generated a huge amount of media coverage; coverage which for the most part discounts the possibility of a ‘Cambridge Six’, or ‘Cambridge Eight’ etc., despite the fact that a larger spy network was very likely. I think that this unnatural focus on five has served a very specific propaganda goal: to obscure the wide-spread collaboration between elements in Britain’s intelligence community and the KGB. It would damage this ‘fifth column’ if the general public became aware of the extent of their influence. Further exposure of British double-dealing would also have damaged relations with their American counterparts: the Americans were used to lying about their own KGB collaborations, but were not used to being lied to themselves.

Debate around ‘Who was the fifth man?’ has been carefully crafted in order to shepherd public interest away from the possibility of further treachery by trusted ‘intelligence community’ leaders. I have not read every book on the ‘Cambridge Five’ but from what I’ve read so far, the sparky media squabble surrounding this lone ‘fifth man’ was channeled into two camps: 1) Chapman Pincher along with MI5 colleagues Peter Wright and Arthur Martin, who pushed Roger Hollis as the fifth agent and 2) those more ‘urbane’ analysts who objected to Wright’s ‘divisive’ methods. On the whole, group two favors Yuri Modin’s allegations that odd-man-out John Cairncross was the ‘fifth’. (Wikipedia favors Cairncross, btw.)

Fighting between these two camps took place in print, sometimes with weird bitterness– take ‘Yuri Modin’ (in reality, his ghostwriters) on Peter Wright’s questioning of Guy Burgess’ lower-class acquaintances, such as repairmen, etc.:

The vindictive attempts of former officers of British Intelligence (specifically Peter Wright and Arthur Martin) to unearth these so-called agents recruited by arch-fiend Burgess make me laugh. I hate to think that the organizations against which I strove my working life were run by people whose thought processes never went beyond the most simplistic notions of true or false, good or bad, necessary or desirable; but Wright and Martin are certainly people of that ilk.

Later, Modin opines:

Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher states that the reason why the KGB allowed Blunt to do this [transfer to Surveyor of Kings’ Pictures] was that we had another mole inside MI5. Wright concluded, rather hastily, that the other agent was Roger Hollis. In 1987, when Wright’s book was published, British intelligence carried out a detailed inquiry which turned up nothing new. Peter Wright had no proof of what he said. It’s too easy to cast grave suspicion on a colleague, as Wright did on Hollis, without anything like sufficient evidence.

‘Yuri Modin’ has very strong feelings on the subject of the ‘Cambridge Five’ and has little tolerance for anyone who doesn’t share his view that John Cairncross was ‘the fifth man’. I’ll point out two obvious things: 1) even the real Yuri Modin didn’t have access to every KGB illegal’s file; 2) Hollis is a much bigger fish than Cairncross. Hollis ran MI5, while John Cairncross was a much lower-level intelligence functionary, so Cairncross being the ‘fifth man’ is far less alarming.

Yuri Modin

Why might ‘Yuri Modin’ have such strong feelings? Well, the introduction to My 5 Cambridge Friends was written by David Leitch from the Sunday Times. Leitch was part of a spy-outing team which included his newspaper colleague Barrie Penrose, as well as Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and John Le Carré, the troika with whom Leitch wrote a book on Kim Philby– ‘The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation’. Who are these men?

In the late 60s, David Leitch worked closely with Bruce Page to ‘expose’ Kim Philby as a KGB agent for the Sunday Times’ Insight team– an ‘exposure’ that would never have happened without intelligence approval. Leitch is also the first man to have claimed in print that John Cairncross was the ‘fifth’ spy, hence his introduction to Modin’s book. Leitch is now dead, but Bruce Page is going strong: in 2013 he wrote a politically-sensitive biography of power-broker Rupert Murdoch in the wake of the hacking scandal.

Leitch’s other journalistic partner, Phillip Knightley, is an established media ‘expert’ on intelligence matters, which means he works closely with the intelligence community. Tellingly, in 2010 Phillip Knightley acted as a bail sureties provider for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The leaks pro Phillip Knightley.

John Le Carré is the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, an MI5 and MI6 agent who began writing spy thrillers while still working in intelligence. When ‘Le Carré’ found out he had a readership, he became an ‘ex intelligence officer’. Le Carré has enjoyed a celebrated, orthodox career in mainstream publishing by interpreting current events for the public in politically acceptable ways– all with a sprinkling of ‘James Bond’ dust.

John Le Carré puckering under the discomfort of an awkward pose.

While the ‘fifth man’ debate is mostly centered around Cambridge spies, you’ll find Wright-haters popping up in the oddest places. Take this quote from biographer Francis Wheen in Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions:

At about the same time as [Anthony] Blunt was briefing [Nigel] West, Wright was busily unburdening himself of a lifetime’s secrets– and paranoid anti-Communist obsessions– to Chapman Pincher.

Wheen starts his book by claiming that allegations of Tom Driberg’s spying stem from a plot between Lord Rothschild, Peter Wright and others in the “queer fraternity of spy-writers”. Who is Francis Wheen?

Francis Wheen and his machinery for cranking out Driberg biographies.

Francis Wheen is a BBC radio broadcaster from a privileged army background, who found his calling working for the New Statesman (as in Frances Stonor Saunders and George Bernard Shaw). Wheen is an expert on Karl Marx who supported NATO’s intervention in the former Yugoslavia. His other interest is the spooky Tom Driberg, about whom Wheen has written two biographies. You can read about Tom Driberg’s connection to the Rolling Stones here, and Driberg’s connection to Soviet illegal agent Ernst Henri here.

The ‘other side’ to this spectacle is no less suspect. Chapman Pincher was a well-known journalist who worked closely with British intelligence figures, sometimes even lying for them, as happened with the Christmas Island hydrogen bomb test demonstrations. Peter Wright is a second-generation intelligence agent with strong ties to the Marconi Company. According to Spycatcher, Wright was involved in MI6 attempts to murder the Cypriot General Georgios Grivas, and claimed to be James Angleton’s go-to man for help on CIA plans to assassinate Castro. Peter Wright was also involved in LSD testing as in the MK ULTRA program. Arthur Martin was Wright’s MI5 sidekick. None of these men are ‘good guys’.

Chapman Pincher, eager for any intel honcho to “use” him.

My point with these biographies is to show that neither side to the squabbling over the ‘fifth man’ is free of intelligence connections. Neither side takes the logical position: there were more spies than simply Golitsyn’s five and it really doesn’t matter who the ‘fifth’ one was. Because of this willful foolishness, I conclude that neither side was/is motivated by a sincere desire to uncover the truth about Philby’s spy ring– most likely both sides are working for the same masters.

If you’re willing to view the ‘debate’ over the ‘fifth man’ in the same way as I do, then you’ll be hit by the sobering reality that academia, the media, politicians like Margaret Thatcher and the ‘watchdogs’ of the intelligence community organized themselves to mislead the public over the extent of British intelligence’s cooperation with the KGB. Why might they do that?

The official story of Kim Philby’s career begins and ends with Zionism. We’re told that Kim was recruited to the KGB through the beguiling Zionist and Communist Litzi Friedmann (born Alice Kohlmann). Litzi’s contacts in England were Philby’s first KGB handlers.

Litzi Friedmann/Alice Kohlmann

After Litzi come the Rothschilds. Introductions from Victor Rothschild, who worked with his uncle Lord Rothschild as a sort of tag-team on Zionist issues, put Philby’s recruits inside the ‘charmed circle’ of British intelligence.

Victor’s on the left.

Finally in 1962, complains from Flora Solomon to Victor (the 3^rd Lord Rothschild by this time) about Philby’s KGB work in the 1930s sealed his fate. Flora’s complaints were motivated by Philby’s “anti-Israel” writing for the Observer.

Flora Solomon

So, we’re told that Kim’s career sweetened and soured along with his relation to Zionism; the most dramatic moments being punctuated by the Rothschild family. All sides of the ‘Fifth Man’ debate concur on these details.

I believe that this official story flatters Zionist power and uses the ‘Rothschild’ name to distract from other important power-politics. Philby didn’t end up in Beirut by accident; neither was the timing of his defection to the USSR dictated by the whim of a jealous ex-lover. To illustrate my point, I offer a time line placing Kim’s Beirut work and defection into context with the power-politics which were playing out in Middle East.

Events leading up to Kim Philby’s ‘Defection’

1940 From this date onward Khairallah Talfah, Saddam Hussein’s uncle, begins his intermittent care of the three-year old Hussein, due to the following: 1) Saddam’s father’s desertion of the family; 2) Saddam’s mother’s mental illness; and 3) an abusive step-father. (Why is this important? Please see my post The Cult of Intelligence and Sullivanians, or Fourth Wall Cult.)

1941 Khairallah Talfah cooperates with the Nazis in an attempt to free Iraq from British Imperial domination. This puts Talfah at odds with the post-WWII Iraqi regime, which was beholden to the British.

May 25th 1951 Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess defect to the USSR, though this was not confirmed in the press until 1956. Kim Philby’s association with the pair forces him to defend his actions publicly, which he does with great skill. It’s unclear what else Philby does between 1951 an 1956.

1953 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s American-smelling radio program ‘Voice of the Arabs’ begins broadcasting. The program promotes Nasser’s ‘Pan-Arabist’ and anti-European-Imperialist ideology. The American-smelling print media nexus in Beirut, Lebanon also promotes Nasser’s politics.

1956 At 18 years old Saddam Hussein is part of an assassination attempt on King Faisal II (an Imperial British puppet-king) and Prime Minister/General Nuri al-Said, who handed Iraq’s oil rights to the British. Both attempts fail.

August 1956 After being forced out of MI5 but avoiding prosecution for this suspected spy-work, Kim Philby is posted to Beirut to serve as a correspondent to The Economist and The Observer. Kim teams up with his father St. John Philby (a regional political insider and confidant of the Saudi royal family) who is also living in the city. Kim’s journalistic work is a cover: Kim Philby gives information to the KGB (Modin, My 5 Cambridge Friends) and MI6, which hired him as a type of consultant.

October 29^th-31st 1956 Israel, Great Britain and France invade Egypt in order to take control of the Suez Canal and to remove Nasser from power. The three aggressors are defeated in their primary goals, leaving the USA and USSR free to try and fill the power vacuum left by previous colonial powers.

1957 Saddam Hussein tries to assassinate a Communist supporter of Iraq’s new Prime Minister, Abd al-Karim Qasim. On turning 20, Saddam Hussein joins the Ba’ath Party in Iraq after careful grooming from his uncle Talfah. Note Saddam’s career in wet-work started well before his Ba’athist political career.

February 1^st 1958 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser forms an alliance with the Syrian branch of the Ba’ath party to form the United Arab Republic. The other notable branch of the Ba’ath party is in Iraq.

October 7th, 1959 According to Biography.com: “Saddam and other members of the Ba-ath Party attempted to assassinate Iraq’s then-president, Abd al-Karim Qasim, whose resistance to joining the nascent United Arab Republic and alliance with Iraq’s communist party had put him at odds with the Ba’athists.” Biography.com neglects to tell readers that this assassination attempt was supported by the CIA.

When the assassination fails, Hussein leaves for Egypt where Nasser is still in power. Somebody pays for Saddam Hussein to get a law degree while in Egypt.

December 1961 Anatoly Golitsyn, a senior KGB officer, defects to the West.

March 1962 Anatoly Golitsyn starts talking to American counterintelligence about a ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring.

August 1962 Lord Rothschild brings Flora Solomon in to MI5 to accuse Philby of trying to recruit her to the KGB in the 1930s. ‘Cambridge Five’ case reopened. Peter Wright takes Solomon’s statement for MI5.

January 10th 1963 Nicholas Elliot, a good friend of Philby and previous MI6 station head in Beirut returns to Beirut to extract a ‘confession’ from Philby and is authorized to offer Philby immunity from prosecution. Elliot succeeds in getting a confession from Philby, who was suffering from a head wound, but Philby doesn’t try to return to Britain with the immunity offer.

16th January 1963 According to Tom Carver: “Peter Lunn, who had replaced Nicholas Elliott as Beirut station chief, ordered Philby to report to the British Embassy, where it would have been possible to arrest him. Philby pleaded continued problems with his head injury and didn’t go. He later told [his lover] Eleanor that ‘the minute that call came through, I knew the balloon was up.’”

23^rd January 1963 Kim Philby defects to the Soviet Union.

8th February 1963 Ramadan Revolution happens in Iraq: Ba’athist revolutionaries assassinate Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim with CIA support. Saddam Hussein returns to Iraq from Egypt after the initial stages of the revolution, and things start going right for him. By 1968 Saddam is one of the most powerful men in Iraq and a driving force behind the Ba’ath party.

I think this series of events provokes questions about the ‘Cambridge Five’ narrative; even if only to make one wonder why Philby’s defection isn’t discussed in terms of the turmoil in Iraq, a country which Allen Dulles called “the most dangerous spot in the world” under Communist-affiliated Qasim’s rule, 1958-63. Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA from 1953-1961.

These questions become more pointed with more background information. I’ll start by pointing out that the rudderless Saddam Hussein, an exploited twenty-five year old, was being groomed by somebody in Egypt during 1959-63. Readers will remember that Anita Pallenberg, an 18 year old with a murky past, was being groomed by the CIA through Playboy magazine in Rome at roughly the same time. Where Anita found ‘belonging’ through the twisted world of CIA-sponsored counter-culture, Saddam found belonging in the Ba’ath party and their CIA-supported intrigues. Somehow the CIA identified Saddam as a useful asset– probably through his spooky Uncle Talfah– and the Agency shipped Saddam off to their friends in Egypt when things got too hot for him in Baghdad.

A youthful portrait of Saddam Hussein

CIA involvement with Egyptian president Nasser’s regime is well known, according to ex-Voice of America employee and historian John Buescher:

The Dulles brothers provided military advisors and equipment to the Egyptian army. Through clandestine contacts, both the State Department and the CIA gave Egyptian leaders, especially Nasser, important intelligence training and assistance in moderating potential internal political rivals and in conducting propaganda campaigns.

Nasser was personally close to CIA leadership, the ‘new kids on the block’, according to CIA historian Ricky-Dale Calhoun:

Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles took a particularly favorable view of Nasser, even after it became known that Nasser had agreed to purchase arms from the Soviet Bloc on very attractive barter terms. The CIA station chief in Cairo, Miles Copeland, was on even more cordial terms with Nasser—and he shared Nasser’s distrust of the British.

Egypt became a focal point for American intelligence after the Suez Crisis, which opened the possibility for America to take over ‘patronage’ of the country in place of the British or French. Nasser’s ‘pan-Arabist’ ideology echoes long-standing American anti-imperialist propaganda: a cynical, hypocritical position favored by creeps like Claire Boothe Luce for flattering native governments and cherry-picking assets from crumbling European empires. Boothe Luce’s penchant for anti-imperialism is why the British sent spook-gigolo Roald Dahl to influence her during WWII; her husband’s media empire would later become a cover for the CIA.

Could the “assistance in moderating potential internal political rivals” of which John Buescher writes have included setting up Nasser’s dedicated radio station ‘Voice of the Arabs’? US intelligence had a well-established working relationship with both British and American radio media for propaganda purposes– FDR had been giving ‘fireside chats’ since the early Thirties. I find the name ‘Voice of the Arabs’ strikingly similar to that of US Government propaganda vehicle ‘Voice of America’, an Office of War Information monstrosity that was founded in 1942 and cooperated with the BBC to pummel the rest of the world with Washington D.C.’s point of view. The ‘Voice of America’ is now brought to you by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the same people who manage Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and who fund the Tor Project.

Laura James, from the Economist Intelligence Unit– The Economist like Kim Philby– has this to say about ‘Voice of the Arabs’ and it’s Egyptian intelligence connection:

“The Voice of the Arabs” had been very carefully designed to become a regional phenomenon. Following the establishment of the new Egyptian intelligence service in March 1953, the Interior Minister, Zakaria Mohieddin, and intelligence officer Fathi al-Dib had formulated an Arab nationalist action plan, which included the development of a radio show as well as funding for Arab nationalist writers and students to study in Egypt.

Students like Saddam Hussein, I wonder…

The other prong to Nasser’s propaganda offensive came from Beirut, Kim Philby’s new base. Beirut had been the Middle East’s information hub since American missionaries set up printing presses there in the 1830s. According to historian Lucy Ladikoff:

Eli Smith’s activities in Syria had far reaching results especially after the removal of his American mission’s printing press from Malta to Beirut. This was of great use to the Arabic language. “Though it was not the missionaries themselves who worked to save the language from its decay, still it was their means, such as schools and new educational systems, printing press equipped to issue books in the Arabic language, and their money that were at the service of the great, enlightened and intellectual Arabs of the period.

Besides having control of Beirut’s influential press, the Americans had a stranglehold on the education system. The American University in Beirut, one of the CIA’s favored recruiting hubs, was founded in 1866 by a protestant missionary using British and American money. It goes without saying that missionaries have always been a useful source of information for Western intelligence agencies– especially in hostile regimes like that of the Imperial Chinese. Regular readers will remember that the talkative Bill-Colby-henchman David Obst was *probably* collecting information from missionaries in Taiwan prior to his Stateside espionage.

I think I’ve established that the CIA had a close working relationship with Saddam Hussein’s Egyptian protector between 1959-63 and that Beirut was a spook-hub, a bit like Vienna is today. In light of these facts Kim Philby’s ‘exile’ from London is more understandable: it wasn’t an exile at all, but simply facilitated his next mission. Why was someone with Kim Philby’s baggage sent to operate around the “most dangerous spot in the world”?

Between Kim and his father St. John, there were few people in the world with better intelligence contacts for the Middle Eastern sphere; Beirut offered the best market for the Philbys’ services.

St. John Philby

St. John’s contacts were hard won. He was the last in a line of intrepid British agents who manipulated the fanatical tribes of the Arab Peninsula; in St. John’s case, he’s noted for playing the Sauds against another British ally, Sharif Hussein bin Ali. The Brits’ history of double-dealing and broken promises, particularly in regard to Anglo-French Declaration and the Balfour Declaration, made St. John’s job very difficult.

While St. John is considered a traitor for favoring Standard Oil interests over British ones when the Saudis were negotiating oil concessions in the 1930s, it’s often overlooked that the British made themselves so reviled with their dishonest policies that awarding the rights to their buddies the Americans was probably the best outcome that London could hope for. (Standard Oil executives had close ties to the OSS and CIA, so St. John’s choice paid Churchill great dividends later.)

St. John is also considered an enemy of Israel, even though his plan for the settlement of Israel, which respected native Arabs’ political rights, was the Jewish State’s only reasonable shot at long-term viability, as even actors like Henry Kissinger now recognize.

In short, between Kim Philby’s MI6/KGB/CIA contacts and St. John Philby’s Arab ties there was little the pair didn’t know about American hopes in the Middle East and how these hopes could be manipulated or even dashed. Bear this in mind when considering Saddam Hussein’s myriad of failed assassination attempts against different targets prior to Kim Philby’s expulsion from the Middle East.

I chose the word ‘expulsion’ very carefully, because I believe it’s a better description of what happened in January 1963 than ‘defection’. MI6 did not consider Philby a dangerous KGB agent otherwise they wouldn’t have continued to use him and he certainly wouldn’t have been posted to Beirut just as the Suez was heating up. The British position is supported by the fact that the KGB harbored doubts about Philby’s loyalty (See My 5 Cambridge Friends)– doubts that didn’t go away after his defection.

What’s far more likely to have happened in 1963 was that Kim Philby became too much of a liability as British Intelligence became more dependent on the Frankenstein they created over in Langley. British double-dealing with the KGB at the expense of American interests in the Middle East became costly. The best and safest way to contain Kim was behind the Iron Curtain; part of the price Churchill’s intelligence services paid for their ‘desperate deception’ was 50 years of control (and counting!) in the Arab Peninsula.

I do not mean to imply that Rothschild or Zionist interests play no role in the ‘Cambridge Five’ nor that they are unconnected with KGB spying. I’m saying that they don’t deserve the preeminent position in the Philby narrative. I suspect that Litzi was useful for establishing Philby’s communist credentials, and that Flora was just a useful idiot. Victor Rothschild was one agent in a shameful tradition of privileged intrigue, which I discuss in Is the Devil a German? and to which ends the lives of Kim Philby, Saddam Hussein and millions of regular people are just collateral damage.

Readers may also be interested in my posts on Abaddon, A Death in Finland and Jihad Al What?

Author Richard Condon.

About a year ago I began to look into the work of John Marks, author of the famous 1979 book Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. Marks is managed opposition to the CIA, I explain that more fully here, but in a nutshell the agency would never have involuntarily released the sensationalist MK ULTRA documents to anyone not in their employ.

Marks’ coverage of the MK ULTRA material is dismissive and glosses over important abuses, such as the CIA’s interest in 1) manufacturing race riots and 2) election profiling with an eye to manipulating voters. Marks’ propaganda offensive would have had its genesis under director William Colby’s tenure at the CIA, but continued under George Bush Sr. and Stansfield Turner. Everything about Search for the Manchurian Candidate would have been pre-approved by ‘floor seven’ at Langley.

Marks’ CIA sponsorship makes his choice of title very interesting. ‘Manchurian Candidate’ is a reference to a 1959 book by Richard Condon, who was one of Playboy magazine’s favored contributors in the 1980s. (He had one cover feature on the September 1986 issue.) The premise behind Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate is that a Korean War veteran, Raymond Shaw, is surreptitiously brainwashed by uncouth Soviets and effete Chinamen while ‘lost on patrol’ for a few weeks. Raymond then becomes the perfect assassin, whose control is activated by seeing a playing card– the Queen of Diamonds.

Condon was exploiting popular interest in “brainwashing” during the 1950s-60s, when the American public was whipped into a frenzy about the USSR’s psychological warfare capabilities– of course, the public had as much or more to fear from the CIA but that wasn’t generally known at the time. If you’d like to know more about what the Agency was probably doing, please see my post The Banality of Mind Control.

As I’ve written in previous posts, Playboy magazine ran covers preempting many of John Marks’ revelations about the MK ULTRA project, which goes to show that Marks, Colby et alia were ‘outing’ programs which had already been compromised and that Playboy’s editor, A. C. Spectorsky, was plugged into the crowd who were conducting MK ULTRA research for the CIA. Readers will remember that a 1973 IRS investigation into the Bank and Castle Trust of Nassau showed that Playboy banked with other CIA fronts. (The investigation was scuppered on “national security” grounds, see Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin, 1992.)

Richard Condon’s Playboy cover plugging ‘Prizzi’s Family’.

Richard Condon’s connection with the CIA’s Playboy front is one of the more bizarre intelligence stories I’ve come across. Condon’s career was posthumously blighted by a very ugly plagiarism scandal: he had a penchant for lifting work from another Playboy contributor, Robert Graves, who had a total of five Playboy cover appearances between 1959-76, and who was one of the first ever featured Playboy authors.

Robert Graves is notable for his British intelligence connections: he was a close friend of T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”, and wrote the politically sensitive biography of Lawrence in 1927, after having taken a professorship at the University of Cairo. To learn more about British intelligence intrigues in the Middle East during this time, please see my post Kim Philby and Saddam Hussein. Kim Philby’s father, St. John Philby, was basically continuing T.E. Lawrence’s work.

In 2003 Richard Condon was outed for having lifted many, many sections from Graves’ I, Claudius and using them in The Manchurian Candidate without any attribution. This was not Condon’s first infatuation with Graves, throughout Condon’s career he showed a preoccupation with Graves’ work:

On p. 127 of his [Condon’s] first novel, The Oldest Confession, one of the characters in the book purchases a copy of Graves’ Antigua, Penny, Puce! Then, in Some Angry Angel, the book that followed The Manchurian Candidate, Condon makes a direct reference to Graves. In a long, convoluted passage on page 25, Condon reflects on “mistresses” and their, apparently peripheral relationship, at least to the reader, to Graves’s writings about “Major Male” Deities and “Major Female” Deities. As Some Angry Angel was published only a year after The Manchurian Candidate, there is little question about Condon’s familiarity with Graves’ works.

Tellingly, Condon never considered his own work anything more than type-for-hire, in his own words:

He never had any pretensions about his writing. “I have never written for any other reason than to earn a living, ” Condon told People magazine. “I am a pawnbroker of myth.”

I find Condon’s attitude toward his writing interesting because of the obvious favor it found with Colby’s circle. Why might the CIA director have a soft spot for The Manchurian Candidate? Consider this quote from p. 263, describing the hero Marco’s efforts to counteract Raymond’s brainwashing:

However, there was one relentless, inexorable strength on Marco’s side: in combination or singly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Army Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency represented maximum police efficiency. Such efficiency suspends the law of averages and flattens defeat with patience.

I think that quotation neatly sums up Condon’s patronage. Condon’s partisanship doesn’t end there. The Manchurian Candidate is a tour de force of what William Colby’s boy Carl calls “the milk of FDR”, of which his father had drunk copiously. Condon’s book is not about Soviet brainwashing, it’s about the ‘evils’ of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the senator most famous for having gone up against the pro-Soviet ‘fifth column’ which FDR set up in Washington during his record four terms as president– FDR’s ‘fifth column’ included the OSS, which later became the CIA. The majority of Condon’s book is spent in 2-D diatribes against his ‘McCarthy’ character, Sen. Johnny Iselin, and the political master-mind who made Iselin, his dragon-woman wife Eleanor Shaw Iselin.

The ‘twist’ in Condon’s story is that Raymond’s ultimate controller is really his mother, who by building her second husband into a ‘McCarthy’ served the ends of the Soviets against the ‘real America’– the supporters of the ACLU and FDR. I’d like to remind readers of Quinn Norton’s observation about the US ‘intelligence community’:

The question is who gets to be part of the “we” that are being kept allegedly safe by all this exploiting and listening and decrypting and profiling. When they attacked Natanz with Stuxnet and left all the other nuclear facilities vulnerable, we were quietly put on notice that the “we” in question began and ended with the IC itself. That’s the greatest danger.

When the IC or the DOD or the Executive branch are the only true Americans, and the rest of us are subordinate Americans, or worse the non-people that aren’t associated with America, then we can only become lesser people as time goes on.

By ‘IC’ Quinn Norton means ‘intelligence community’. In Condon’s world, the only “true Americans” are those who got behind FDR’s program. Long-time anolen readers will remember that these are the exact same sentiments expressed by OSS director William Donovan’s secretary Julia Child and her creepy husband Paul.

For instance, the only people for whom Condon has more contempt than the Chinese or Russians are Americans who opposed FDR’s policies. He spends most of the book building a straw-woman out of Raymond’s politically astute mother, who was as happy joining “The Daughters of the American Revolution” as “The Friends of Soviet Russia”. Raymond’s step-father, a villain, refers to WWII derogatorily as “Roosevelt’s War”; the only happy time in Raymond’s life comes from a romp with the daughter of a “radical” politician who his mother accuses of being a Soviet spy and who gives copiously to the American Civil Liberties Union. (Readers will remember that the ACLU was set up by ‘concerned citizens’ in response to the Department of Justice’s destruction of Leon Trotsky’s provocateur networks amongst American immigrants.)

It may also interest readers to know that the evil, anti-Communist Iselins were also against President David Dwight Dwight David Eisenhower in Condon’s fictional work– it seems that the people who bankrolled FDR also had a soft spot for Ike. On the opposite side, Condon reserves special contempt for the “religieuse”, “crypto-Republicans” and drunks.

There’s a heavy dose of Cultural Marxism in Condon’s work too: the only American G.I. “healthy” enough to withstand Soviet/Chinese brainwashing is Ben Marco, the womanizer who lives the perfect ‘Playboy Lifestyle‘– and gives a black eye to any woman who doesn’t ‘make nice’. His “healthy” attitude to sex allows him to stay “sane” under the pressures of mind-control, according to Condon.

Condon’s work is the worst type of pulp– pretentious pulp. He’s fond of quoting classical references and he peppers his work with clumsy, contemporary-culture fads. Condon was nothing more than a cheap hack… but a hack who appealed to minds at the CIA. How did Condon get their attention?

Condon was born in NYC and got his first break selling articles to Esquire magazine– he then married a model and became a publicist for Disney Studios, which Condon describes as “pimping”. Sometime in between all of this Condon worked for the US Merchant Marines.

According to Richard Derus at Library Thing:

For 22 years, he [Richard Condon] was a movie publicist, working for almost every major Hollywood studio. With characteristic panache, he later described himself as “a drummer boy for the gnomes and elves of the silver screen.”

I’ll remind readers of the US ‘intelligence community’s’ close ties to Hollywood, which will put the next big event in Condon’s life into context:

Employed by United Artists as an ad writer, he [Condon] complained that he was wasting time in Hollywood and wished to write a novel. Without Condon’s knowledge, his boss deducted amounts from his salary then fired him after a year giving him the amount of money he had deducted in the form of a Mexican bank account and the key to a house overlooking the ocean in Mexico. He told him to go write his book. His second novel, The Manchurian Candidate, featured a dedication to his benefactor. The movie made from it in 1962 made him famous. Prizzi’s Honor (1982) was likewise made into a successful movie.

It seems that the ground-work for Condon’s ridiculously pro-CIA novel, The Manchurian Candidate, was laid for him by the good men at United Artists. Condon’s book was published under the ‘Signet’ imprint by the New American Library which, like so many suspicious media concerns, was founded in NYC just after the establishment of the CIA in 1947. The Manchurian Candidate’s back material advertises a clutch of Signet books by British agent Ian Fleming and Klop Ustinov’s son Peter, who wrote The Loser: “A fierce and funny novel about a fanatical young Nazi soldier who comes to grief when faced with Italian temperament– and a lovely Italian girl.” Readers will remember Klop as the spy-without-a-pension from Great Users of People. Of course, Ian Fleming was all over Playboy between 1959-76, and Peter Ustinov got one cover (for his acting work). The New American Library is now part of Penguin Books USA.

What about Condon’s other famous book? Prizzi’s Honor is a mob novel. Of course the OSS, CIA and the Mafia were/are close working allies— naturally both Prizzi’s Honor and Manchurian Candidate were made into Hollywood movies starring Playboy stalwarts Frank Sinatra and Jack Nicholson.

Sinatra’s 1962 Manchurian Candidate.

Nicholson’s Prizzi’s Honor, a “comic love story” about the murderous business of organized crime.

The Manchurian Candidate was even redone in 2004 with the lead played by a refined Black actor, Denzel Washington.

Denzel plays Ben Marco, just in case you forgot who the good guys are.

I believe that the American ‘intelligence community’ sponsored Richard Condon’s career– it seems that most of this type of sponsorship was done through the CIA and their cultural programs. Condon’s Manchurian Candidate was designed to bolster public faith in the ‘intelligence community’ and counter Soviet technological superiority propaganda. Manchurian Candidate was also useful for pushing CIA mind-control programs into the background behind Soviet ones– that’s why Colby et alia were so eager to use the novel in their MK ULTRA ‘leak’ through John Marks. (You can’t reference Marks’ work without being reminded of the Soviet mind control novel: ‘justification’ by association.)

I’d also like to point out that much of what Sen. McCarthy warned the American public about in the 1950s– wide scale Soviet penetration of US power circles– has been shown to have been accurate by subsequent declassification of KGB records and the VENONA transcripts. McCarthy’s methods can certainly be criticized– though I’ve yet to hear any of his detractors explain how McCarthy should have gone about fighting the Soviet-friendly fifth column in Washington D.C. and Hollywood. The persistence and acceptance of simple-minded political tripe like Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate stands testament to the organization and power of this fifth column. The ACLU– sponsors of Edward Snowden’s public appearances— is not on the side of the people, any more than are the FBI, the CIA, Military Intelligence or fake ‘liberals’ like Richard Condon.

One of the fun things about blogging is to see how readers respond to my posts. Lately, there’s been interest in my writing on narcissism with reference to the ongoing sex education/pedophile scandal around Benjamin Levin, Ontario’s one-time deputy education minister, as well as the 2002 scandal around S&M aficionado and *completely unqualified* weapons inspector, Harvey “Jack” McGeorge.

McGeorge’s and Levin’s separate exposures are not isolated events; there are an awful lot of compromised people in influential positions. Remember the 2013 implosions around Tim Giardina, the “No 2 officer at the military command in charge of all US nuclear war-fighting forces” and Michael Carey, who was “in charge of US intercontinental nuclear missiles”? Giardina was fired for being a hopeless gambling addict, and two weeks later Carey lost his plum post for rampant alcohol abuse. Besides that type of sad story, there seems to be a never-ending parade of pedophiles around the BBC, US and UK governments.

It could be that these cases are just a very large number of unfortunate anomalies, however the sheer quantity of them suggests to me *it’s possible* that people with exploitable weaknesses are sought out for positions of influence. I’ll also point out just how rare some of these weaknesses are: alcohol dependence affects somewhere between 1.7-3.7% of the general population; gambling disorders affect something like 1% of the population; and pedophiles are something below 4%.

I’ve already written about why I suspect narcissists are recruited for the military and intelligence communities– their insecurities make them extraordinarily reliable for their controllers. I have no reason to believe that the compromised people involved in all of the cases I mentioned above are unusually ‘narcissistic’, however they all have shown behaviors which *suggest* addiction problems.

My question for this post is: Are people who suffer from addictions unusually controllable, like people who suffer from excessive narcissism? I’m going to try to answer that by looking at my own experiences and then by looking at what mental health professionals call “co-dependence”.

As I’ve stated in other posts: I’ve never worked for the US military nor the ‘intelligence community’, but I have worked alongside them and I’ve fraternized with them. So all of my observations in this post come from my various personal experiences, which I’ve no way of proving are representative of these communities as a whole, although I suspect that my experiences are not unique.

The military and intelligence communities are unusually tolerant of addiction amongst their own members. The ‘get out of jail free’ card is ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder': much behavior is forgiven on the grounds that the individual is suffering from battle stress– which may be a perfectly humane and reasonable explanation of the bad behavior, but tends to ignore the fact that 1) the person may still be suffering from an addiction and 2) the addiction could have been in place well before any combat experiences.

What do I mean by ‘tolerant’? I’ve seen veteran police officers excuse soldiers’ ‘buzzed’ (i.e. drunk) driving on PTSD grounds on three separate occasions– three different drivers in three different states. Alcoholism is something that the ‘IC’ and military seem very willing to turn a blind eye to; there is a culture of heavy drinking in these communities which extends from the grunts all the way to the higher-ups. I’ve also seen an inexplicable number of professional ‘second chances’ given out as a result of self-destructive, addiction-related behavior.

Alcoholism isn’t the only addiction which is given leeway by the military and ‘IC': in my experience there is a pervasive culture in these institutions which considers casual sex ‘macho’ as long as it’s kept away from ‘the chain of command’. I’m told that quite a number of recruits join on the expectation that they’ll have access to women they’d otherwise not have. Amongst the ‘IC’ agencies, it’s not unheard of for ‘office meetings’ to be regularly held in strip clubs. Your tax dollars at work.

Sleeping around and haunting strip clubs by themselves are not the same thing as having a sex addiction, but an active sex addict would have more ease fitting in with these crowds than they would most. On the flip side, someone struggling with alcoholism would find it difficult to ‘stay on the wagon’ in these cultures.

(In the case of the sex addicts, it might be worth remembering that the CIA’s personality profiler, John Gittinger, was interested in people who are preoccupied with self-centered sex for control purposes and impersonal sex is a feature of some sex addictions. Readers may also be interested in my post about Kim Philby’s views on homosexuality and how the military is particularly attractive to the LGBT community.)

But why would the military and intelligence communities be tolerant of addiction in this way? Surely these organizations have extra incentive to recognize that people with addictions are likely to have judgment problems.

I think one obvious answer is that some of these people are promoted because their addictions would be career-killers if they ever became public– a sort of built-in fail-safe should the individual ever become unreliable. However, as anybody who has ever managed people knows, negative incentives aren’t the best way to get cooperation from your employees, it’s better to make them want to work for you. Is there something about the nature of addiction which could make the addict dependent on their patrons/employers?

Time for another anecdote: I was talking with a lifetime member of the military and ‘intelligence community’ about their job. They expressed a deep dissatisfaction about the things they were asked to do and the reasons they were asked to do them; the person expressed a great deal of pain and disillusionment in this regard. I suggested that it was time to move to the private sector, where their skill set would probably even earn them more money. The individual turned inward at this suggestion, and flippantly said: “But then I’d have to work for a living.”

There’s an ugly side and a pathetic side to that flippant comment. First of all, it’s true, many government employees sail through their careers with minimal effort– that’s not just a military or ‘IC’ thing. However, the individual in question was also struggling with addiction issues which would not be tolerated in the private sector to the extent they are tolerated in the structured, sheltered world of the military– and the individual knew that. This individual had a relationship with their employer which you could describe as ‘co-dependent': the individual did what was asked of them because their employer enabled their addiction(s).

‘Co-dependent’ is a psychiatric term that I’ve come to understand as ‘a type of person who looks for relationships which help them avoid emotions that they are terrified of feeling’– emotions that would “annihilate” them. This means that co-dependent relationships are not love-based, but based on the need to cover up those scary feelings with:

• security (financial, physical, etc.)
• feeling of belonging, worthiness, specialness, ‘secret team’
• enabling of addiction, or feeling that their addiction is ‘okay’.

Besides better understood addictions such as those to drugs, alcohol and medications, “enabling of addiction” includes addictions to sex, power, gambling, pornography, overworking, overeating, spending, exercise/ ‘cult of the body’ addictions; or ‘spiritual’ addictions like miracle cures, ‘personal empowerment’ schemes, religious ‘epiphanies’, psychics, gurus, cults or other “emotions for sale”. Co-dependent people want relationships that enable their addiction, or at least that ‘don’t judge’ it.

Bearing ‘co-dependence’ in mind, I’d like to bring up the case of Tim Giardina and Micheal Carey again. Giardina spent an inordinate amount of time in casinos– something like 15 hours a week at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa alone. (How many working a.nolen readers have the time to do that?!) He wasn’t dropped from his highly sensitive position with the US nuclear arsenal until he was caught faking $500 chips; when this story broke in 2013 Giardina was still insisting that he didn’t have a gambling problem.

Carey, previously a ‘major general’ in the US Air Force, blew his career by getting terribly drunk while on a sensitive mission to Russia, where he did some high-profile wenching and crashed the stage at a bar, ‘La Cantina’, during a musical act– despite being barely able to stand. This is how the Air Force describes it:

Maj Gen Carey consumed alcoholic beverages to the extent that it impacted his conduct during briefings, during the banquets, during the tour of the monastery, and on the walk to Red Square for dinner.

Apparently, Carey’s drinking began on the flight over to Moscow and continued the whole trip. Personally, if I drank continuously over a flight to Moscow, I’d never disembark. The sad fact is that Carey had been developing his alcohol tolerance over a long time.

Back in 2013 when the cringe-worthy Carey/Giardina details first came out, talking heads used the events to lambast military contractors: “See! The background checks weren’t good enough!” I suspect these critics represent the ‘lifetime spook’ contingent who made hay out of Edward Snowden’s contracting past. I also suspect that their criticisms are entirely insincere– key figures from the US nuclear arsenal are just as ‘surveilled’ as any member of the ‘IC’, and as Quinn Norton reminds us: “The IC are some of the most surveilled humans in history.” I’m 100% confident in my assertion not because of the counterintelligence concerns surrounding the nuclear arsenal– counterintelligence has never been a high priority amongst US spooks— but because there’s no way that the powers-that-be would risk putting men in Carey’s or Giardina’s positions who weren’t reliable. They wouldn’t want someone in charge of big bombs who might suddenly develop an opinion should an unpopular order come down the pipe. Those guys were watched very closely and their superiors– the men who got Carey and Giardina appointed– were entirely aware of the men’s weaknesses, though I do accept that the official counterintelligence organs ‘in charge’ may not have been.

The long and short of it is that co-dependence keeps the co-dependent inside an unhealthy, self-destructive relationship. “I do this for them, they do this for me and we get along just fine.” The problem is that there’s nothing “just fine” if a codependent, say… runs the US nuclear arsenal according to cue in exchange for support of his gambling addiction. Imagine the dangers which that sort of arrangement entails, especially now that the DoD classes the Founding Fathers as “extremists”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap between medical definitions of ‘co-dependency’, addiction and ‘narcissism’, the personality disorder I’ve identified as being useful to exploitative organizations. Tian Dayton, a clinical psychologist, offers this explanation:

A narcissist often prefers to have people around him who behave in such a way as to meet and gratify his own needs or enhance his own vision of himself. If they act separately, have too many of their own points of view or their own opinions they threaten the narcissist’s equilibrium.

How does this mirror addiction? The addict is ever absorbed with getting their next fix; that’s how they maintain their equilibrium, albeit very dysfunctionally. Their needs come first.

The narcissist also tends to be absorbed in themselves and in meeting their next need and rather unaware and even uncaring of the needs of those around them.

Same with the addict: the needs of those around them have to come second to their meeting their own, often overpowering desire for their next “fix” whether it be a drink, drug, food or sexual encounter. Both the narcissist and the addict are first and foremost self absorbed. They come first.

Addiction creates a kind of narcissism. It is constantly preoccupying; it takes a person over body, mind and soul.

Unfortunately, the mental health profession doesn’t seem to have a firm handle on ‘personality disorders’ and it’s often unclear where one ends and the next one begins– I consider the ‘cluster B‘ disorders a good example of this confusion. I believe the inter-relational problems I’m writing about today are as old as humanity and certainly predate more modern world-views like those of clinical psychology; I strongly suspect St. Augustine was talking about the same problems when he addressed the “bondage” of sin in Confessions. I will continue to use modern, medical labels for these behaviors in this post, though I doubt very much that they are internally consistent, i.e. where does an addict end and a narcissist begin?

According to Randi Kreger in an article for Psychology Today, substance abuse is prevalent amongst people who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD):

People with NPD and BPD [Borderline Personality Disorder] use alcohol and other drugs at astounding rates to kill the pain. Of people with a diagnosis of NPD, during their lifetimes, 64.2% also have a substance abuse disorder (73.5% men; 50.5% women) and 51.1% have alcohol abuse or dependence.

Joseph Burgo muddies the waters even more in an Atlantic article titled Where Narcissism Meets Addiction:

As Nathanson has noted, a struggle with profound shame lies at the heart of a broad range of addictive behaviors such as over-eating, alcoholism and sexual compulsivity.

In other words, addictive behavior is a defense against unconscious shame.

As I discussed in an earlier article for The Atlantic narcissism is another way to ward off unconscious shame – indeed, narcissism is the primary defense against shame.

From what I’ve read, feelings of shame are what separate narcissists from ‘psychopaths’– another slippery psychiatric label. My understanding of this is that a narcissist does feel shame, but they’ll run from that feeling by off-loading the cause of the shame onto somebody else. Here’s an example: if a more healthy man cheats on his wife, he’ll feel shame for 1) having broken his oath, 2) being a poor example to his children, 3) letting down his wife. Hopefully, the negative shame-feeling will trigger introspection and prevent the behavior from happening again– personal growth.

According to the experts, this won’t happen with a narcissist. The narcissist may attribute the shame-feeling to “enemies telling my wife about the affair” or may even turn the whole thing on its head and convince himself that it was really his wife who was cheating… anything to avoid that terrifying feeling of being bad, which once acknowledged ‘must be’ absolute and irreversible, the narcissist thinks. There’s no room for personal growth in a narcissist’s world, you’re either perfect or a nothing.

If my understanding of what motivates a narcissist is correct, then to be a narcissist is to be backed into a corner by an engulfing fear, it’s often described as an “annihilating” fear, and this type of fear is something that I’ll probably never really understand. If the experts are correct and fear motivates narcissism, then I believe that anyone who takes serious steps to confront that fear and unlearn narcissistic behavior deserves a tremendous amount of respect.

So if narcissism has a lot of overlap with addiction, does it also have overlap with ‘co-dependence’? This one is harder to pin down, apparently there is a relationship between co-dependence and narcissism, but there doesn’t seem to be much academic work describing that relationship. My hunch is that the blogger from TheRawness has it pinned:

Although narcissists and codependents may seem like opposites on a superficial level, when viewing them from the outside, because they are both filled with toxic shame, they are far more similar than people suspect, in ways that aren’t always obvious. As I’ve said in previous posts, there is a little bit of codependence in every narcissist and a little bit of narcissism in every codependent.

To my mind, this echoes the relationship between the narcissistic cult leader and the narcissistic cult follower. I suspect that what shrinks call “co-dependent”, “addiction” and “narcissistic” are really just different views of the same self-defeating behavior. I think that St. Augustine might even be one step ahead of the head-doctors, in that he equates “sinful” choices with bondage and slavery, perhaps for reasons that the leaders of the “intelligence community” understand very well.

For of a forward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom; and custom not resisted, became necessity. By which links, as it were, joined together (whence I called it a chain) a hard bondage held me enthralled. – St. Augustine, Confessions.

For anyone interested in how spooks influence American culture, the career of William Egan Colby is the gift that keeps on giving. Two months before the former CIA director was found floating face down in the Wicomico River, he participated in the release of a single-player, Adventure-genre video game!

Spycraft: The Great Game was released by Activision in February 1996 and featured Colby, as well as former KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin, who both appeared in the game as themselves and who both worked as consultants for the venture.

Kosta Andreadis for ign.com: “William Colby, who tragically died shortly after the game’s release, even appears as himself offering titbits of information and advice on being a covert agent working for the CIA.”

The premise of the game follows: a rookie CIA agent is tasked with keeping nuclear weapons out of a Pakistani terrorist’s hands, while installing a pro-USA president in Russia. Spycraft was released in 1996, so any parallels to the Yeltsin era and the fall of the USSR are completely coincidental. It seems that CIA honchos were thinking of uses for Islamic radicals well before 9-11-2001; when I was working think-tanks in the 2000s, there was still good money to be made scaremongering about nuclear mujahideen.

Needless to say, Colby didn’t need peanuts from entertainment consulting gigs; he was a well-established lawyer for the international drug cartel which he helped set up during his time in Vietnam. So why would he get involved with something small-fry like gaming?

To answer that question, I suggest looking at the background of the issuing company, Activision, one of the largest third-party game developers prior to its merger with Vivendi Games in 2008. Activision is famous for its Call of Duty series. Call of Duty is a first-person shooter where British/American/Red Army soldiers shoot Nazis; in subsequent releases more Allies were added and finally ultra-nationalist Russians were tagged on to the bad-guy list. So nothing to do with US government policy.

See anyone here you can relate to?

Activision also put out a less-successful James Bond series of games; and has gone into business with many big names in American media, including: LucasArts, Disney Interactive, Dreamworks SKG and MGM Interactive. Activision and Blizzard split away from Vivendi Games in 2013 and are now their own company ‘Activision Blizzard’.

Of course, readers will remember that Blizzard was outed in 2005 by none other than Greg Hoglund for running spyware– “The Warden”– through their World of Warcraft online gaming network. Blizzard was logging email addresses, cached web addresses and the names of other programs running on World of Warcraft players’ machines. Later, Hoglund would be shamed through the implosion of his company HP Gary, which was part of a well-publicized but insincere attempt by CIA-funded Palantir to discredit ‘internet activists’ like Glenn Greenwald. The NSA would go on to use World of Warcraft to spy on people with anti-government views. If you’d like to learn more about Hoglund’s work with the intelligence community, please see my post Security Theater 3000. Needless to say, Activision Blizzard’s split with Vivendi came two months after the Edward Snowden stuff came out and the NSA’s World of Warcraft fiasco hit headlines.

So Colby’s gaming firm Activision ‘found its level’ when they chose to merge with the disgraced Blizzard. It gets even better though, readers, because Activision provides an interesting link between the US intelligence community’s promotion of 1) Jazz-politics after WWII and 2) The Rolling Stones.

Activision was formed when Atari’s four best programmers were poached by a ‘venture capitalist’ named Richard Muchmore (who got rich through a spin-off from US government contractor SRI International, as in The Tor Project) and an ex-music industry executive named Jim Levy. The story goes that theses four programmers wanted Atari to treat them more like record labels treat musicians– because record labels have a great history of treating talent well. Fortunately for the quartet, Jim Levy’s previous company, GRT Corp, had just gone bankrupt so he was willing to play ‘overseer’.

Jim Levy posing with Activision merchandise.

Prior to Activision, Jim Levy was vice-president of GRT Corporation and headed their ‘Music Tapes’ division. GRT is short for ‘General Recorded Tape’, a Californian recording tape manufacturer which branched out into the music business by buying  Chicago-based Chess Records in 1969. After the purchase GRT retained the heir to Chess Records, Marshall Chess, as one of their own executives.

Chess Records was founded in Chicago in 1947: the same year suspicious film distributor Cinema 16 was founded in NYC; and suspicious Richard Condon publisher Signet books was founded; and comic book publisher Magazine Management Company was first confirmed to exist. The CIA was also founded in 1947.

Chess Records was started by Evelyn Arons under the name ‘Aristocrat Records Corporation'; it was designed to produce pop and “race” records. Arons was contacted by Leonard and Phil Chess, born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyż, who were also part of Chicago’s Jewish community and wanted to be producers for some of the talent they employed in their low-rent club, The Macomba Lounge.

Phil, Leonard and Marshall Chess.

The Chess brothers were rough customers who ran exploitative businesses in depressed Black neighborhoods, such as the picturesquely named bar “Cut-Rate Liquor”. The Macomba Lounge also catered to Black customers, and while musical acts were the ‘up front’ draw, the lounge served as a market for prostitutes of all stripes and was a well-known drug dealing venue as early as 1946. Prior to the booze business, the ‘Chess’ family were small-time military contractors selling used cardboard to a local installation.

Evelyn Arons and the Chess brothers were not good businesspeople, historians of their company point out Chess management practices were far below industry standards and documentation was spotty; neither were the partners ahead of the curve on music trends. What they lacked in professionalism and expertise they made up for in 1) the sheer quantity of records recorded and 2) inexplicable advertizing patronage from an outfit called Cash Box magazine, which was founded in 1942. The Chess boys were also allowed in on a deal to sponsor a Billboard magazine column called “Rhythm and Blues Tattler”, which helped to promote the firm. 1940s data on Billboard is scarce, but the music trade magazine competed with Cash Box and was owned (prior to 2009) by The Nielsen Company, which doubled the size of its Chicago headquarters during WWII and opened a new office in the U.K. in 1939.

Eventually, the Chess boys bought Arons out and she went on to form American Distributing [a.k.a. American Record Distributors] with her second husband Art Sheridan of Vee-Jay Records, the record company which introduced The Beatles (the ‘house-trained’ version of The Rolling Stones) and their music to American audiences.

The Chess brothers had numerous successes, the most notable of which was a performer called McKinley Morganfield, who went by the stage name ‘Muddy Waters’.

Muddy Waters participated in a European tour in 1958, at the height of the US intelligence community’s Jazz offensive against the USSR. This is how David Carletta describes the offensive in his essay “Those White Guys Are Working for Me”: Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz, and the Cultural Politics of the Cold War during the Eisenhower Administration, published in the International Social Science Review:

Convinced that cultural influence was linked to political and economic power, the Eisenhower administration (1953-61) sponsored America’s premier jazz musicians’ goodwill tours abroad as part of its cultural foreign policy agenda. These tours helped the United States government in its global propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and its communist allies, who widely reported and successfully exploited the racial tension and violence that accompanied the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. These “jazz ambassadors” also helped the United States government counter claims made by communist propagandists that hyper-materialistic capitalists were “cultural barbarians” who produced commodities rather than sophisticated culture. (1) In short, they helped the Eisenhower administration combat communism during the early years of the Cold War.

Muddy Waters’ next big splash was at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. The festival just happened to be marred by violent rioting, which was attributed to 12,000 “college jazz fans” who were denied admission to the music festival. (The entire population of Newport city in 1960 was 47,000, please see my post The CIA and Race Riots.)  The violence didn’t slow festival organizers down; Muddy Waters and Dizzy Gillespie would play together at the 1965 event.

Contemporary coverage of the riots, thank you the60sat50.blogspot.com.

Starting in 1947, the Chess brothers had developed a political sensibility that was at odds with their own lifestyle and previous business practices: they promoted music which challenged segregation and the ‘color barrier’. The brothers’ new-found politics curiously echoed FDR’s vision for the future and they showed a penchant for exploiting race tensions, much like Eleanor Roosevelt. (See Spinning Blues Into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records by Nadine Cohodas.) This political turn-around may be explained by Leonard Chess’ brief stint in the military, he had been drafted in ’43 and went to work at the Macomba Lounge on his release. The brothers’ interest in music production followed not long afterward.

The Macomba Lounge offered the Chess brothers access to extraordinary talent. Muddy Waters was a star in his own right, however, he wrote one particular song which would resonate across the music industry: “Rollin’ Stone”. This song’s title would later be used to name a musical act, a magazine and a recording company. Muddy Waters would end up having to sue Chess Records for back royalties in the 1970s.

Here’s where GRT Corp comes back in, readers. In 1969 Leonard’s son Marshall Chess took over management of Chess Records, which was soon bought by the GRT Corporation (just in time for the lawsuits?!); Marshall continued as Chess Records’ president after the acquisition, but he left to found Rolling Stones Records along with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman in 1970. This was at the height of Kenneth Anger’s influence on the music group.

Marshall Chess and Mick Jagger.

I’ve written about The Rolling Stones and their intelligence connections ad nauseam, please see Rolling Through the Intelligence Community for a taster, but you can get a full dose here. In a nutshell, there’s not much about The Stones that doesn’t smell psy-op: from their dealings with Mau-Mau magician Robert Fraser; to spook Tom Driberg; to cult leader Kenneth Anger; to MK ULTRA child Anita Pallenberg; to intelligence-affiliated American mobster Meyer Lanksy. It just don’t look good, Mick.

Rolling Stone magazine isn’t much better. This magazine was founded by two veterans from Ramparts magazine– the magazine Warren Hinckle went to CIA asset Hugh Hefner to fund. These veterans were Jann Wenner and his patron (perhaps better described as ‘handler’) Ralph Gleason, who prior to becoming a Jazz critic, worked for the Office of War Information during WWII. Cough, cough.

Ramparts was the vehicle David Horowitz and Peter Collier used to place Perry Fellwock’s ‘anti-NSA’ leaks in 1972; more recently Adrian Chen lost his job at Gawker because he compared Perry Fellwock to Edward Snowden… with disastrous implications for Glenn Greenwald. Don’t worry– Chen’s now scaremongering about evil Rooskie internet trolls over at The New York Times magazine, so he’s been forgiven.

Rolling Stone continues Rampart’s tradition of being a ‘safe’ place for spooks like William Colby to leak out stories that are ‘damaging’ to the intelligence community. You can find my reasoning in An American Pravda, Part III and Bergdahl’s Saga.

But what about Rolling Stones Records? RSR was founded by a band that stinks of psy-op, alongside the son of a Chicagoland sleazebag who dealt in goods that the CIA was after.

Let’s summarize: Chess Records provided politically useful material at a time when the CIA needed such material. GRT Corp, which absorbed the Chess’ brothers assets and personnel in ’69, provided ‘music industry know-how’ for Activision’s talent stable… a talent stable with whom William Egan Colby felt comfortable working.

If you told me last Friday that a video game linked Colby with US intelligence Jazz plots and The Rolling Stones, I’d have said: “Imaginative.” Just goes to show that the truth can be stranger than fiction.

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”.

Several months ago I wrote about Edward Snowden’s usefulness to those in the ‘intelligence community’ who feel threatened by rampant outsourcing. I speculated that Snowden’s position as a ‘contractor-traitor’ was helpful to spooks who wanted to protect their power base from private sector competition. Today I’m going highlight another area where the passage of time has shown us how Snowden helped US spooks: international cooperation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, anyone who had read William Colby’s 1978 autobiography, the cynically-titled Honorable Men, would have seen Edward coming.

Colby ends his life story with a handful of Nostradamus-like declarations about where the intelligence community and world politics are headed. I’ll let the horse speak:

This then is the future dimension of intelligence. It must become an international resource to help humanity identify and resolve its problems through negotiation and cooperation rather than continue to suffer or fight over them. To the extent that American intelligence provides its products to help the American people make better decisions, it will lead this process, and its material also will become available for others in the world to use. But I believe we will see, and should welcome, an institutionalizing of this process on the international level, so that information and assessments about world problems can be made conveniently available to all, applying to intelligence as a whole the techniques and experience of such specialized world information centers as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Labor Organization, and the host of semiofficial and private centers and services that are contributing to this same process in their particular fields. This does not mean that intelligence should in any way be consolidated into one gigantic intelligence center, which would collapse of its own weight, but rather that the concept of the intelligence “community” of separate agencies in the United States gradually be expanded to the world level, recognizing specialization where it is appropriate, exchanging different appreciations to seek better comprehensive judgments, and ensuring that each item appears in its appropriate horizontal and vertical proportion in final over-all assessments.

As the nations move into this new era of international dissemination of information, they will come to appreciate the benefits of greater knowledge they will gain. They will also be dissuaded from attempting to conceal information for strategic advantage, realizing the futility of any such attempt in the face of America’s intelligence machinery. And then the words from John (8:23), which Allen Dulles prized so highly and placed in CIA’s entrance hall, will truly characterize the role of American intelligence: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”– free of war, misery, and ignorance. [End of book.]

Snowden happened, primarily, because factions within US partner-countries’ intelligence services were failing to “appreciate the benefits of greater knowledge” which further integration with US spookery could give them. Germany was probably one of the most painful hold-outs; I say that because so much Snowden-activity has centered around Germany.

US intelligence agents Jacob Appelbaum (Tor Project) and Laura Poitras both reside in Germany; here they are accepting their 2015 Deutscher Filmpreis.

Just in case readers haven’t been following the ‘intelligence community’ developments in Europe post-Snowden, here’s a good summary of recent scandals surrounding Germany’s intelligence organ BND from MS Risk, a consulting firm based out of the Isle of Man (article published May 22^nd, 2015):

The BND is actively seeking a more substantial cooperation with NSA, since it relies on NSA intelligence. Especially now that BND needs to track German individuals travelling to Iraq and Syria and fighting for ISIS and similar terror groups and the subsequent return of these individuals back to Germany…

This scandal goes along with the latest trend that finds the states trying to increase their surveillance powers under the justification of the new forms of security threats that have arose. They promote the necessity of these more intrusive measures that should be adopted even if they operate against the individuals’ privacy rights. France’s lower house recently adopted a sweeping new spying bill that would give French intelligence the power to deploy hi-tech tools such as vehicle tracking and mobile phone identification devices against individual without judicial oversight. Moreover, before the British elections, Prime Minister David Cameron had promised to authorise British intelligence agencies to read ‘’all messages sent over the Internet’’ in a package of legal provisions named as the ‘’snoopers’ carter’’ by its opponents. Germany is not an exception as it tries to increase its surveillance abilities against the security threat posed by individuals fighting alongside terror groups and many German nationals that are returning from Iraq and Syria and could potentially organise attacks inside Germany. However, BND’s actions brought the German people’s outrage both against the agency and against the German leadership, complicating the government’s plan towards the adoption of a legislation that would increase BND’s powers as it happened in other European countries.

Two years after the ‘Snowden Revelations’ the intelligence apparatus in Germany, the U.K. and France are working as closely with the USA as ever, and are seeking to become even more abusive against citizens. The US congress has failed to curb the ‘intelligence community’s’ strident abuse of power. In hindsight, the only thing that Snowden accomplished is to project an image of all-powerful US security services across the globe, without having to release much proof to the public. Most of us have to take it on faith that what the journalists speaking for Edward claim about the NSA, etc. is actually true. Snowden is, after all, just one more kid in a long line of “whistle-blowers” who tout American technological superiority… with the help of the ACLU.

Now that we can benefit from two years’ worth of hindsight, it may be worth re-examining some of the floor-shows which went on immediately after Snowden’s flight to Russia. Let’s start with Wayne Madsen’s Disappearing Interview.

On June 29^th 2013, The Observer and The Guardian published an interview with Wayne Madsen by Jamie Doward. Madsen talked about the NSA’s cooperation with German and British espionage outfits, as well as cooperation with the intelligence services of Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Italy. Here’s the nut of the story:

Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.

Madsen said the countries had “formal second and third party status” under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.

Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.

In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog, Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming concerned about the “half story” told by EU politicians regarding the extent of the NSA’s activities in Europe.

He said that under the agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the “NSA gets the lion’s share” of the sigint “take”. In return, the third parties to the NSA agreements received “highly sanitised intelligence”.

Madsen said he was alarmed at the “sanctimonious outcry” of political leaders who were “feigning shock” about the spying operations while staying silent about their own arrangements with the US, and was particularly concerned that senior German politicians had accused the UK of spying when their country had a similar third-party deal with the NSA…

Madsen’s disclosures have prompted calls for European governments to come clean on their arrangements with the NSA. “There needs to be transparency as to whether or not it is legal for the US or any other security service to interrogate private material,” said John Cooper QC, a leading international human rights lawyer. “The problem here is that none of these arrangements has been debated in any democratic arena. I agree with William Hague that sometimes things have to be done in secret, but you don’t break the law in secret.” [From Revealed: secret European deals to hand over private data to America]

I strongly encourage all anolen readers to review the full article here. Note how Madsen was particularly sensitive to German political hypocrisy. By associating these WWII-vintage information sharing agreements with Snowden’s leaks, Madsen besmirched networks that the NSA would like to remain intact– even to build on, according to Colby. Madsen’s sort of criticism is *not* what US IC pros intended when they engineered Snowden; they did not want their German allies taking fire in that way, at that time. The US ‘IC’ had to take dramatic action to recapture the narrative.

As readers will no doubt remember, Madsen’s article was met by a ferocious, 24-hour attack through Twitter from a cadre of Naval War College professors; Madsen’s Observer/Guardian interview was pulled shortly after its publication with no explanation as to why it was pulled. At IntrepidReport.com, Madsen described the Twitter diatribe as “offensive information warfare”, he goes on:

The favorite tool for this NSA media “war room” operation on the banks of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay is Twitter. Whether the target is journalist Glenn Greenwald, this editor, Representative Justin Amash (R-MI), former Vice President Al Gore, and the handful of NSA whistleblowers who have come forward, including Snowden, the War College’s “NSA” troika of professors—former National Security Agency officer John Schindler and his two sycophantic assistants, Tom Nichols and Stephen Knott—enlist the aid of a committed group of Twitter “followers” to launch vicious attacks against any and all comers. Their followers range from Charles Johnson of the peculiar website “Little Green Footballs,” who is a washed up former band member for the group “Chicago,” to former Tory member of the British Parliament Louise Mensch, whose only claim to fame is resigning amid the Rupert Murdoch phone tapping scandal.

The NSA² troika in Newport, Rhode Island can also rely on a few polemicists who masquerade as journalists. Chief among them is Michael C. Moynihan, a writer for The Daily Beast and the Jewish Tablet website, who once worked for a neo-conservative group in Stockholm called Timbro and served on the editorial board of a Swedish magazine called “Neo,” as in “neo-con.” Timbro has been associated with the activities of Karl Rove and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. Moynihan’s libelous screeds, some of which have been directed against this editor, are complemented by those of Joshua Foust, who claims to be a national security reporter, but who has collected pay checks from a Defense Intelligence Agency contractor. The Newport troika and their media allies can always be assured of the constant support of the website Business Insider.com. The site was started by DoubleClick founder Kevin Ryan, who also happens to serve on the board of the Nazi collaborator George Soros-financed Human Rights Watch, is close to outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and is a member of the always-suspect Council on Foreign Relations.

As acerbic and vicious as these pro-NSA “wannabe” journalists can be, they do not hold a torch to the caustic and defamatory Twitter feed that ushers forth from Schindler, whose media appearances on CNN, CNBC, and MS-NBC skyrocketed in the wake of the Snowden revelations and media commentary on them, claims to have been an NSA intelligence and counter-intelligence officer and a consultant for the FBI.

The Twitter-warriors who Madsen names did not limit themselves to attacks on Madsen, but anybody high-profile enough to make a splash who questioned the official Snowden narrative. The tenor of these attacks was important: frantic, ad hominem screeds and strident assertions of NSA propaganda were the norm.

I’m not in a position to know how far the NWC crowd was aware of their place in a larger game; it’s hard to pretend to be a bore consistently, everyday, for a period of more than six months.  It could very well be that they honestly thought their behavior projected an aura of strength. We do know that there are people in the ‘IC’ who still understand how to approach the public, because Ed Snowden’s crafted appearances are usually polite and eloquent. Therefore, even though the NWC tweeters were “caustic”, somebody inside the ‘IC’ let them keep going for over half a year, so the troika served someone’s purpose.

What purpose might that have been? Together, these tweeters provided a high-profile theatrical act as NSA ‘insiders’ who were ‘on the defensive’ after the Snowden leaks. I believe the goal of this act was to undermine any resistance to further integration with US intelligence amongst second- and third-tier NSA partners by stirring up a ‘siege mentality‘. The bad PR Dr. Schindler et alia presented to the general public aggravated criticism of the ‘IC’ and reinforced the desired apprehension amongst spooks. What if they vote to limit all of our powers!? To borrow a 9/11 analogy, Snowden and intemperate Twitter-warriors ensured that the NSA’s international partners were “all Israelis now”.

These NWC professors, and their echo chamber, would often tag their tweets with ‘#SnowdenOp’, as in ‘Snowden is a Russian Operative’. They repeated this meme tirelessly– and still do– but I’ll talk about that more later.

I don’t think that one has to be ‘intelligence savvy’ to see what went on with the ‘pulling’ of Madsen’s interview, nor the fabulous American media support which the NWC troika received. I believe a far more interesting question is why this undertaking ended so badly for Dr. Schindler. Whatever the answer, the drama around Wayne Madsen’s interview gets even better…

Less than two weeks after Madsen’s interview was withdrawn, Jacob Appelbaum, who was exempted from similar attacks by the Twitter-troika mentioned above, wrote a very similar article to Madsen’s which was published in Germany’s Der Spiegel. The Der Spiegel article also focused on NSA collaboration with foreign intelligence services, but in a vague and wishy-washy way. Appelbaum qualifies German cooperation with the NSA by implying 1) the Germans only conduct US-assisted surveillance on high-priority targets and 2) that German politicians don’t know about the collaboration.

Appelbaum only focuses in depth on Israeli-US and UK-US espionage cooperation, probably because as far as their reputation as American-collaborators goes, Israel and the U.K. don’t have anything to lose.  Appelbaum’s article reads like a balm on German-intelligence-nerves.

The first page of Jacob Appelbaum’s Der Spiegel interview with Snowden, which addressed issues that Masden brought up.

The context of Appelbaum’s article is as suspicious as its contents. Appelbaum claims Laura Poitras asked him to be the technology ‘sounding board’ for an anonymous contact who she was cultivating:

“In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me,” Appelbaum said. “She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her.”

“She was in the process of putting questions together and thought that asking some specific technical questions was an important part of the source verification process. One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower. I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment.”

The story goes that Poitras used Appelbaum because she figured he would be able to divine whether her contact– Snowden– really was NSA. She figured that Appelbaum would be able to identify knowledgeable answers to questions about secret NSA programs… now how could Appelbaum know such things?

Appelbaum also claims that he conducted the Der Spiegel interview with Snowden well before Snowden came out with his revelations, and that Snowden was happy for Appelbaum to sit on the interview until whatever time behooved the Tor advocate to publish it… that time just happened to be several days after Madsen’s interview on the same topic was pulled from British press. Appelbaum tells us:

“At a later point, I also had direct contact with Edward Snowden in which I revealed my own identity. At that time, he expressed his willingness to have his feelings and observations on these topics published when I thought the time was right.”

And finally, in case anybody might find all these coincidences too hard to swallow, Appelbaum dictates this to Der Spiegel readers:

“It is critical to understand that these questions were not asked in a context that is reactive to this week’s or even this month’s events. They were asked in a relatively quiet period, when Snowden was likely enjoying his last moments in a Hawaiian paradise — a paradise he abandoned so that every person on the planet might come to understand the current situation as he does.”

I’m going to move on from Madsen/Appelbaum now and address another canard swirling around the Snowden debate: that Snowden was somehow working for the Russians when he leaked NSA documents in Hong Kong, and that the show-down between Russia and the USA over Snowden is something other than theater. It is not in Russian nor US interests to fight over NSA surveillance; both governments stand too much to gain by cooperating. Colby recognized this way back in ’78:

Ignorance, suspicion and misunderstanding have been the sources of too many wars, either because they generated hostility and hatred or a false belief that the other side could be easily defeated…

Recent years have brought a major change in the role of intelligence in this regard, from the old effort for strategic or tactical advantages to a new contribution to reassurance and understanding. The most dramatic example occurred in the SALT negotiations between the United States and the USSR…

One of the aspects of that agreement [SALT I] shows what intelligence can offer a future world. Both the USSR and the United States were considering the next strategic step of deploying nationwide antiballistic-missile systems to destroy incoming hostile missiles. But agreement was reached that neither would do so, leaving both sides vulnerable to retaliation and thus deterring a first use…

International statesmen are gradually becoming accustomed to conducting their negotiation on the basis of common understandings of the facts and factors involved rather than believing they can profit from private and secret knowledge withheld from the other side (although Soviet military officers still try to persuade their American counterparts to keep from civilian negotiators on both sides “secret” military information about Soviet weapons being negotiated over, since the Soviet weapons are too “secret” to discuss with Soviet civilians, despite the fact that they are known in detail to American intelligence.)

Anything Colby says about the Soviet military can, of course, also be applied to the American military. The US and Russian big-wigs aren’t fighting each other; they’re far more afraid of their own people than they are of their counterparts in Moscow/Washington D.C.. This was as true in Colby’s day as it is now, when talking-heads spew endless noise about Snowden’s ‘KGB ties’.

I think, anolen readers, that the American ‘IC’ didn’t want anybody ‘outside the fold’ opining on what Snowden did in light of its impact on international espionage cooperation. ‘IC’ pundits were able to spin the ‘revelations’ in a way which encouraged a ‘siege mentality’ amongst the NSA’s international partners– hence the NWC Twitter work and Glenn Greenwald’s harping on relatively benign spying between governments and on government-funded entities. This siege mentality was manipulated to overcome overseas resistance to increased cooperation– increased dependence— on Amerika.

“I’m excited to be in Germany and I look forward to all the Handys.”

The reason that American intelligence professionals were willing to take the extraordinary risks which they took by engineering Snowden was that the ‘siege mentality’ Snowden induced amongst foreign spooks helped prepare the way for long-cherished US intelligence goals, according to Bill Colby. This siege mentality aggravated group-think amongst spooks, a delirium which I compared to cult-members’ intolerance of independent thinking in The Cult of Intelligence.

Of course, I have no ties to the intelligence community and my opinions in this post are just opinions. However, William Colby’s opinions carry a little more weight. There’s a strange poetry about the US IC’s ‘grand strategy’ being revealed in the final pages of the autobiography of their manipulator-in-chief.

Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen, a regular on Cash Box covers, was artist of the year in 1985.

I first wrote about Cash Box, a music industry trade magazine, in my post William Colby’s Computer Game. Cash Box was largely responsible for the success of music promoters Phil and Leonard Chess, as Nadine Cohodas describes in Spinning Blues Into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records:

By now either Leonard or Phil or the company were regulars in Cash Box. It was rare to find an issue that didn’t have some piece of news about the brothers’ comings or goings or some mention of a new release, either as an “award-o’-the-week” or a “sleeper”. Other label owners and their records were mentioned– the Biharis, Syd Nathan at King, Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic, Blaine at Jubilee– but few, if any, with the frequency of the Chess brothers. While Chess and Checkers records were reviewed regularly at Billboard, gossip about the company was much rarer…

Cash Box was devoted to the jutebox industry and paid particular attention to the small, independent labels. The free publicity for Chess and Checker in chit chat columns came from Leonard’s boldness in pushing Chess records and as well as the interest of young, ambitious writers at the magazine looking for copy to fill their weekly columns.

In an industry built on hype, Cash Box’s patronage was invaluable to the Chess company; you can read about Chess Record’s likely intelligence connections here. In short, the Chess brothers managed Jazz talent like Muddy Waters who was active in Europe during the period of CIA-backed Jazz events which were designed to counter Soviet propaganda on the continent. The heir to Chess Records, Marshall Chess, would go on to run Rolling Stones Records. The Rolling Stones have a number of suspicious ‘intelligence community‘ and organized crime ties too.

So, what about a “murder”? Cash Box made headlines in 1989 when one of their employees was gunned down after showing reluctance to continue to rig music industry charts. The victim, Kevin Hughes, was the son of a Baptist farmer out of rural Illinois who dropped out of college to work at Cash Box. After an initial attempt at a cover-up involving police Lt. Tommy Jacobs, the chief suspects emerged as former Cash Box Nashville director Richard F. “Tony” D’Antonio and business partner Chuck Dixon, whose clients dominated Cash Box’s independent country music charts. Dixon was a 1980s version of the Chess Brothers. Both Dixon and D’Antonio put forward that they had links to ‘mafia’ style organized crime. In 2003, a grand jury found D’Antonio guilty of first-degree murder, but Dixon had died by that time. How could a music trade magazine have become involved with crime of this nature? Let’s investigate where, when and who started Cash Box.

Cash Box magazine was “formally launched” in 1942 in Chicago, which was the Chess brothers’ base as well as that of The Nielsen Company, which at some point owned Billboard magazine, the other big music-trade publication out of New York City. The Nielsen Company expanded dramatically during WWII. Note that by 1947 Cash Box was a respected industry publication and handing out obscene amounts of free advertizing to the Chess brothers.

In William Colby’s Computer Game, I wrote that Cash Box was Billboard’s main competitor. While this is the standard story given by music historians, on further inspection it’s not true. Billboard was the advertizing vehicle-of-choice for the major labels, while Cash Box was the budget alternative for the ‘independents’. Between the two publications, they cornered both strata of the music industry. Billboard was the more prestigious because of the greater sums of money involved, but the two magazines shared editorial and writing talent– in fact it would be easier to count the Cash Box honchos who didn’t also write/work for Billboard at some time. The organizations were close professionally… and politically.

According to John Broven in Record Makers and Breakers, Cash Box was the brainchild of Bill Gersh, a coin-operated jutebox marketing expert who would later spearhead coverage of the coin-operated video game industry. Readers interested in Bill Colby’s connection to Activision will be glad to know that Gersh’s Cash Box and a separate publication started by Gersh, The Marketplace, were premier publications covering coin-operated video games such as ‘Pong’ made by Atari, the firm from which Activision poached their initial stable of programmers. These programmers were managed by an old GRT/Chess Records hand, Jim Levy. Cash Box was instrumental in starting the video game industry.

Cash Box is among the best sources for information on the early video game industry. 1972 ‘Pong’ ad, thank you http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com.

The important thing to remember about Gersh is that if you wanted to know how to reach regular people (especially men) through low-brow, coin-operated entertainment during WWII and beyond, he was the expert to go to. Gersh was a premiere source for ‘competitive intelligence’, or industrial espionage. (Readers interested in the propaganda value of pornography may like my post Ron Jeremy: OSS Brat.)

Billboard May 12th 1962 ad for a coin-operated entertainment device.

Bill Gersh’s coin-op expertise was widely recognized. According to pinballcollectorsresource.com:

Bill Gersh was a long time participant in the Coin Op Industry. He originated Cash Box a publication that out lived him. After selling Cash Box he began publishing an industry newsletter called Marketplace that was aimed at the coin machine operator. With a gigantic resource of historical information, in addition to publishing current news and opinions with in the industry, he would occasionally add a Pictorial History section to his publication.

And according to Dick Bueschel in The Coin Slot Magazine #087, 1982:

… Bill Gersh (the best known reporter of the coin machine industry for over half a century, a feature writer for The Billboard [Billboard– a.nolen], and later Automatic Age and The Coin Machine Journal since 1929, and today the editor and publisher of The Marketplace, the highly respected Pinball and video game newsletter)…

In 1946, at about the same time that Cash Box began its promotion of The Chess brothers’ company, they hired a sales and advertizing veteran from Billboard magazine named Bob Austin, whose contacts put the magazine on the map and drew in significant ad revenue. I was unable to find out about Austin’s career prior to Billboard, but he certainly knew the right people at Playboy Enterprises.

From Jet Magazine, Dec 19 1968. The award winners were Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane (both deceased by that time), Duke Ellington, Cannonball Adderley, Oliver Nelson, James Brown, Lalo Schifrin and Odell Brown. Austin and Parnes, both former Cash Box executives by 1968, started Record World in 1964. Record World was famous for its coverage of the drug-addled Disco phenomenon, and ranked 3rd after Billboard and Cash Box in terms of music world influence.

Playboy magazine, a CIA front, made a point of promoting Jazz music from its earliest days, which corresponded with the US intelligence community’s anti-Moscow Jazz promotion in Europe during the Cold War.

While Gersh was Cash Box’s industry guru, and ad sales were done by Austin, the magazine’s promotion was done by Joe and Norman Orleck, president and vice president, respectively. The Orlecks liked to combine business and charity work, and their legacy shows how closely Billboard and Cash Box were aligned politically.

Billboard May 12 1962 article featuring Joe Orleck.

Billboard June 16th 1962 article. ‘BMW’ is Billboard Music Week, i.e. Billboard.

In 1962 Billboard treated its readers to play-by-play coverage of Joe Orleck’s, and Billboard publisher Roger Littleford’s, work for the United Jewish Appeal on behalf of Israeli democracy. Considering the politics of Cash Box’s founders, the magazine’s support of the Chess brothers is less of a mystery, because Phil and Leonard Chess came from the same Chicago community.

While Gersh and the Orlecks were based out of Chicago, most of the editorial talent came from NYC, and later from one university in New York City. The big three Cash Box editors, Marty Ostrow, Ira Howard and Irv Lichtman, were all hired in the mid 1950s “by way of a senior year work experience program that involved college graduation credits from the Baruch School division of City College in downtown New York” according to John Broven. (Cash Box already had at least one editor from City College at the time of their hiring, Sid Parnes.)  A recurring theme throughout Cash Box’s history is that important hiring decisions are made out of NYC, not Chicago, nor L.A., the home of future Cash Box owner, George Albert. A shocking number of famous popular music concerns all found their genesis in Manhattan following WWII– just like Cinema 16, Signet Books, The Living Theater and Magazine Management Company.

Cash Box’s operating methods were never very transparent, and there was always corruption in the charting process, according to Broven’s interviews with Cash Box editors. However, things got even worse in 1956/57, when ‘financial troubles’ necessitated help from George Albert, who according to Irv Lichtman, had ties to organized crime. By 1959 Cash Box was embroiled in congressional hearings on music-industry-wide corruption, called the “Payola Hearings”. (Alan Freed, a Chess Records business partner and exploiter of The Coronets, was exposed for his massive corruption during these hearings, though these days the industry is disposed to view him favorably.)

According to Nadine Cahonas in Spinning Blues into Gold, The Coronets were forced to hand over undue writing credits and royalties to Alan Freed, because of his “necessary influence” in the music business. Freed was a close family friend to the Chess brothers.

While George Albert had a distinct mafioso flavor, he doesn’t appear to have been in control of the Cash Box operation, because important hiring decisions were still being made via the NYC crowd. According to Rob Simbeck, writing for Nashville Scene, when Nashville-based Cash Box editor Jim Sharp left, a former NYC Cash Box staffer named Tom McEntee took his place after several months of leaderless chaos.

Tom McEntee had been a New York Cash Box staffer in the 1960s, when the magazine was at its peak of power and prestige. He had moved to Nashville and opened an industry tip sheet called The Country Music Survey—founding as an adjunct the annual conference that became the Country Radio Seminar. He then promoted for both major and independent labels. As the mid-’80s approached, though, he was between gigs, playing the Pac-Man machine in the lobby of the United Artists Tower on Music Row to kill time. D’Antonio started hanging around the machine as well, and the two became friendly.

Cash Box Nashville vice-president/general manager Jim Sharp had just left the magazine, and owner George Albert hired McEntee to replace him. One of his first acts was to hire D’Antonio.

“It was my first day, and I needed bodies,” McEntee says. “Tony had worked in Vegas. I think he told me he had worked the crap tables and knew numbers. If somebody puts down a $6 bet and it’s 35-to-1, you’ve got to be instantly figuring the payoff, and there are a lot of bets going around, so you had to be good with numbers. I said, ‘Come on, I’ll teach you how to be the chart man.’ He worked his ass off seven days a week.”

Six months later, D’Antonio was handling the charts more or less himself. The paper had added more reporting stations and “he was overwhelmed,” McEntee says. “He needed help, and I didn’t have the budget to hire. I told him to call the colleges—MTSU, Belmont—and ask for interns. He interviewed this kid and said, ‘I like him. Can we put him on?’ I interviewed him too and thought he was fine, so I said, ‘Go ahead.’ ”

The unpaid intern, who would later drop out of Belmont when the job became full-time, was Kevin Hughes.

Readers will remember that it was United Artists who set up Richard Condon’s career as a CIA propagandist through writing such as The Manchurian Candidate. Who was Tom McEntee?

Tom McEntee was a sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces during the Vietnam War, who distinguished himself in translating code. He also had a marked interest in music and psychology. McEntee would go on to found the Country Radio Seminar in 1970, immediately after 1) his Vietnam service and 2) moving to Nashville. CRS is an influential non-profit dedicated to promoting its own vision of country music, one of the best-selling musical genres in the USA. I am unaware of any major country music organization which doesn’t participate in or support this Nashville-newbie’s out-of-the-blue non-profit.

McEntee’s non-profit logo, courtesy of their website.

McEntee’s CRS would become a carrot in the new ‘payola’ scandal surrounding Cash Box magazine under D’Antonio’s control in the 1980s:

The idea, Gentry says, was to shower the jockeys with gifts—free trips to Nashville, free hotel rooms, registration to the Country Radio Seminar, even whores and drugs. “That’s what we did,” he says. “You had to keep them in your pocket. And then when they didn’t play ball, you came back and said, ‘In the last year from me alone, you accepted over $8,000 in gifts and cash. I wonder what your boss or the FCC would say about this.’ ’Cause now you own ’em. You get ’em in deep enough, and then you own ’em.”

While Cash Box was stacking its charts this way, they were also getting creative about ripping off struggling artists…

The bottom-line payoff was supposed to be a buzz and a chart presence irresistible to the major labels. “The pretense of the promoters,” Bradshaw says, “is that if you do well on the independent charts, the majors will suck you right up, which was in fact just the opposite. Most majors wouldn’t touch somebody on those charts.”

Working the independents, Gentry says unequivocally, amounted to “just screwing them [struggling musicians] out of money.”

You can read Simbeck’s full exposé of the Cash Box scheme here.

Why would a Vietnam Special Forces veteran be interested in a tacky venture like Cash Box? There is evidence which suggests that the US Armed Services have made significant capital investments into the Nashville music scene.

The US military doesn’t like to talk about how much money it spends inside the music business, but in 2010 the Marine Corps did release some figures to Walter Pincus, who published them in The Washington Post— still the CIA’s Own Newspaper. Using the Marine Corps figures, Pincus extrapolated that the DoD forked out an estimated $500 million for music band-related PR in 2010. The Marines employ at least 730 professional musicians, while the Army calls itself “the largest and oldest employer of musicians in the country.” Pincus goes on:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates … often makes the comparison that the number of people in military bands is larger than the number of State Department Foreign Service officers.

It’s probable that a revolving door exists between the music industry and the military, at least for musicians. However, the military’s reach extends into promotion and distribution as well. Pincus describes how military-produced music is sold commercially through a network of private sector distributors, at least one of which is based out of Nashville:

Al McCree, a retired Air Force fighter pilot, owns Altissimo Recordings, a Nashville record label featuring music of the service bands. He formed it in 1991, after he retired. While serving, he wrote a song in honor of Air Force families that was recorded by an Air Force band. Seeing that service band recordings were not available commercially, he developed a business in which the performance was free and could be pressed and resold once he dealt with getting licenses from copyright owners of the music.

The services got nothing.

“We are very proud of what we do. We are providing fabulous recordings of these magnificent bands to audiences all over the world,” McCree said in an interview.

His company is not alone. The Marine Band Web site lists eight other private firms that sell CDs using the band’s material.

Asked about the service bands, McCree said that they had “long been an instrument of military PR” and that he was aware that there had always been a “debate within the military as to whether they are cost-effective.”

I’ll point out to readers that ‘Country Music’ culture is the only music biz culture where supporting the military is openly fashionable– even a necessity. Remember the Dixie Chicks? Remember how back in 2003 Natalie Maines criticized Bush II’s Iraq war effort and the band was blacklisted by the entire country music industry, and still is to this day? I put it to readers that such a response to popular commentary on an unpopular war is *not a normal* reaction from an industry guided by market forces.

To put Pincus’ $500 million into perspective, country music record sales in 2010 were 43,718,000 units. At $12 an album, that’s approximately $525 million in revenue from sales. $525 million > $500 million… just. If even a fraction of the military’s $500 million finds its way to Nashville, then the US military is a major force in country music.

I’ll also point out that Pincus’ estimate of $500 million takes no account of the Pentagon’s spending on propaganda such as its musical variety television program, ‘Command Performance‘ which has featured the talents of The Black Eyed Peas, Ludacris, Aerosmith, KISS, Def Leppard and GWAR; nor the fabulous sums spent entertaining the troops overseas through ‘USO Shows’, etc. Like so much WaPo reporting, Pincus’s sloppy estimates protect the US government from criticism.

I won’t elaborate much more on the ‘intelligence community’ and their connections to the music business– if you’re interested please see my writing on Jazz or The Rolling Stones. However, in Honorable Men, Bill Colby lets us know that in the early 1950s the CIA was acutely aware of the propaganda value of music: in European countries they even stockpiled “recordings of national music to use when and if the country was occupied by Russian soldiers”, presumably to play on stay-behind, US-controlled radio transmitters.

My point is that the Armed Services have been using music for propaganda purposes for a very long time, and that practice has likely shaped what we know as ‘the music industry’. Tie in unfortunate mob connections with the ‘intelligence community’… and you have a recipe for disaster.

It took nearly 15 years for D’Antonio to be convicted of murdering Kevin Hughes, and charges were only brought after Dixon had passed beyond the reach of justice. I don’t think any of this dirt should be surprising, given the genesis of Cash Box and it’s likely mafia and ‘intelligence community’ ties.

There is a lot of criticism of the music industry and the values it promotes inside the USA, but such criticism is usually poo-pooed by ‘establishment’ journalists and academics on the grounds that the industry is simply giving listeners what the market demands. This argument is an extension of the ‘democratic’ American ideal, where decisions are supposed to be made by the will of the majority. If you don’t like it, you’re on your own, so shut up. I think it’s time that we as a nation recognize that our cultural offerings are no more of a ‘choice’ than the ‘choice’ between Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton…

Russian depiction of the ‘Whore of Babylon’, courtesy of Guy Penn, an ex-Catholic and one of Madonna’s legion of gay fans who struggles with his idolatry of the songstress. See power-worship.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll notice that my writing on ‘systems of control’ started with an interest in Aleister Crowley and his cult experiment at Cefalù, Italy. As far as I can tell, this was the first modern instance of a British intelligence asset using ‘mind control’ techniques, namely exploitation of social pressure, addiction and ‘personality disorders’/character weaknesses to build a network of reliable agents. (For more on Crowley’s intelligence work, please see Secret Agent 666 by Richard Spence.)

I believe that Crowley’s goal was to control his followers in much the same way Kenneth Anger and William Colby sought to control their underlings, the difference being Anger and Colby had the benefit of a few more decades of technology. Despite this advantage, the basic toolkit remains the same– that’s why I’m writing about ‘elementals’ today. Identifying ‘elementals’ was a big part of Crowley’s system of control, because ‘elementals’ were people whose psychological profile made them open to his domination. Prior to Crowley’s identification of ‘elementals’, he wasted time trying to indoctrinate people who were not vulnerable enough to manipulation, such as the Earl of Tankerville. While Crowley’s understanding of the psychological profile of ‘elementals’ was sophisticated, I think it developed over time and was not exhaustive.

In this post I’m going to elaborate on the type of person Crowley identified as an ‘elemental’ and the characteristics of three Crowley devotees who fit the ‘elemental’ description: John Whiteside Parsons, Marjorie Cameron and Wilfred Smith.

In Magick in Theory and Practice, under the chapter heading “OF OUR LADY BABALON AND OF THE BEAST WHEREON SHE RIDETH”, Crowley explains the nature of what he calls “elemental” beings. Crowley wrote in an obscure, poetic fashion but it’s worth slogging through to the end:

The Book of the Dead contains many chapters intended to enable the magical entity of a man who is dead, and so deprived (according to the theory of death then current) of the material vehicle for executing his will, to take on the form of certain animals, such as a golden hawk or a crocodile, and in such form to go about the earth “taking his pleasure among the living.”

…

We need not, however, consider this question of death. It may often be convenient for the living to go about the world in some such incognito. Now, then, conceive of this magical body as creative force, seeking manifestation…

There are two ways by which this aim may be effected. The first method is to build up an appropriate body from its elements. This is, generally speaking, a very hard thing to do…

The second method sounds very easy and amusing. You take some organism already existing, which happens to be suitable to your purpose. You drive out the magical being which inhabits it, and take possession…

Yet it might happen that the Will of the other being was to invite the Magician to indwell its instrument.

Moreover, it is extremely difficult thus to expatriate another magical being; for though, unless it is a complete microcosm like a human being, it cannot be called a star, it is a little bit of a star, and part of the body of Nuit.

But there is no call for all this frightfulness. There is no need to knock the girl down, unless she refuses to do what you want, and she will always comply if you say a few nice things to her.

Especially on the subject of the Wand or the Disk.

You can always use the body inhabited by an elemental, such as an eagle, hare, wolf, or any convenient animal, by making a very simple compact. You take over the responsibility for the animal, thus building it up into your own magical hierarchy. This represents a tremendous gain to the animal...

It completely fulfills its ambition by an alliance of this extremely intimate sort with a Star. The magician, on the other hand, is able to transform and retransform himself in a thousand ways by accepting a retinue of such adherents. In this way the projection of the “astral” or Body of Light may be made absolutely tangible and practical. At the same time, the magician must realise that in undertaking the Karma of any elemental, he is assuming a very serious responsibility. The bond which unites him with that elemental is love; and, though it is only a small part of the outfit of a magician, it is the whole of the outfit of the elemental. He will, therefore, suffer intensely in case of any error or misfortune occurring to his protegee. This feeling is rather peculiar. It is quite instinctive with the best men. They hear of the destruction of a city of a few thousand inhabitants with entire callousness, but then they hear of a dog having hurt its paw, they feel Weltschmertz acutely.

It is not necessary to say much more than this concerning transformations. Those to whom the subject naturally appeals will readily understand the importance of what has been said. Those who are otherwise inclined may reflect that a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.

What Crowley is saying is that men like himself, “magicians”, can draw power from ‘taking over’ the “Will” of a “retinue” of “adherents”. Crowley recognized that there are certain people who actually want to be controlled by a powerful master; such control is a “ tremendous gain to the animal”. Crowley labeled people who want to be controlled “elementals”.

Crowley also recognized that the basis of this control was a twisted type of “love”; “love” that is everything to the ‘elemental’, and of very little consequence to the elemental’s controller. This is the relationship between a narcissist and a co-dependent who seeks out an abusive relationship which makes them feel ‘chosen'; it is the “simple compact” Crowley refers to. The co-dependent is narcissistic in their quest for the attention which they’re addicted to (i.e. “say a few nice things to her”); the narcissist sees the co-dependent as nothing more than a tool to be used. Think Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and his coterie of gay followers. [1] It may be that what distinguishes a co-dependent from a narcissist is the position which they take in relation to each other.

On the subject of Kim Philby, readers will remember that he was very much like what Crowley describes as “the best of men”. I point to Philby’s ridiculous infatuation with his pet fox as an example. In that strange sentence about “the best of men” above, Crowley was describing a typical characteristic of the way narcissists relate to other people as opposed to animals. Animals are easier for the narcissist to project their own will onto because animals don’t talk back or demand much. I’m sure that Philby was far more burdened by managing Burgess’ ‘love’ than he was by meeting the spartan needs of a desert fox.

Thank you, Nonesuch Expeditions.

Exploiting unhealthy “love” relationships is at the heart of every abusive system of control, and it’s something which the ‘intelligence community’ excels at, please see my post Great Users of People. Crowley was competent enough with his psychological tools to write about them as early as 1913, so we know that British Intelligence had a sophisticated understanding of this type of manipulation before WWI. Judging by how the Nazi and Fascist governments treated Crowley’s henchman, these governments also had a good handle on what Thelema was about– probably inherited from previous regimes’ dealings with subversive cults like the Illuminati.

Crowley recognized that there is a psychological profile for people who are open to being used, he also recognized that the characteristics of people who want to be used mimic those of users, like himself. Crowley’s insight was to understand the narcissistic traits amongst addicts, co-dependents and cult-followers. This brings me to my first ‘elemental': Wilfred Smith. Smith was a devotee of Thelema who became too popular amongst Crowley’s other followers, so Crowley banished him by manipulating Smith’s narcissism through the essay: “Is Smith a God?”

Wilfred Talbot Smith

Smith was a womanizer whose charismatic appeal rivaled Crowley’s, according to ‘John Carter’ in Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. Because Smith was involved in Crowley’s inner circle, it’s reasonable to assume that he used drugs regularly too, and so is likely to have been weakened by addiction. What separated Smith from Crowley was Smith’s desire to be led, and when Crowley flattered Smith’s narcissism by suggesting he was a ‘godhead’ rather than just another ‘elemental’, Crowley could send Smith outside the community on a never-ending pilgrimage of self-godhood-discovery. Problem solved!

Smith was influential in the last Thelema lodge to remain on good terms with Crowley, the Los Angeles ‘Agape’ chapter. In L.A. Smith recruited another ‘elemental’ to the fold, one John ‘Jack’ Whiteside Parsons of Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the father of the American rocket program.

John Whiteside Parsons

Crowley’s Cefalù cult devotee Jane Wolfe, an actress who returned to the Agape Lodge when Mussolini closed down Crowley’s operation, recorded her first meeting with Parsons in December 1940 inside her ‘magical record’– a diary which Crowley was at liberty to peruse:

Unknown to me, John Whitside Parsons, a newcomer, began astral travels…

Incidentally, I take Jack Parsons to be a child who “shall behold them all”.

26 years of age, 6’2”, vital, potentially bisexual at the very least, University of the State of California and Cal. Tech., now engaged in Cal Tech chemical laboratories developing “bigger and better” explosives for Uncle Sam. Travels under sealed orders from the government… Has had mystical experiences which gave him a sense of equality all round, although he is hierarchical in feeling and in the established order.

I wonder if John Gittinger could have developed a better psychological profile after one meeting; certainly Crowley put Wolfe’s information to good use– many in the Agape Lodge recognized Parsons’ usefulness as a figurehead, according to Carter. Besides being attractive, Parsons had genuine creative intelligence and was able to practically apply technology when other Cal Tech academics were only able to regurgitate German research.

Although precocious in his scientific and ‘magickal’ working, and outwardly confident with women, Parsons’ womanizing had something of ‘overcompensation’ about it: while he put forward the notion that his relationships were ‘open’ he was very hurt when one partner in particular, Betty, the 18-year old sister of his wife, left him for California new-comer L. Ron Hubbard.

L Ron Hubbard suffered from a variety of addictions, like most people in this post. Hubbard had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the psychological effects of different drugs. Thank you TonyOrtega.org.

Instead of hating L. Ron, L. Ron’s mastery of Betty seems to have drawn Parsons closer too him. Parsons wrote this in a letter to Crowley:

About three months ago I met Capt. L. Ron Hubbard, a writer and explorer of whom I had known for some time… He is a gentleman; he has red hair, green eyes, is honest and intelligent, and we have become great friends. He moved in with me about two months ago, and although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to him.

Although Ron has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduce he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. He describes his Angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress…

We are pooling our resources in a partnership that will act as a limited company to control our business ventures. I think I have made a great gain, and as Betty and I are the best of friends there is little loss. I cared for her deeply but I have no desire to control her emotions, and I can, I hope, control my own.

I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in mind… The next time I tie up with a woman it will be on my own terms.

Thy son, John.

In Sex and Rockets, John Carter describes Parsons as “immature”, “quite impressionable and vulnerable”. Parsons was also deeply enmeshed with his mother, who immediately committed suicide on hearing of her son’s untimely demise in 1952. John Parsons was not an emotionally healthy man, but prone to extremes and when L. Ron Hubbard entered Parsons’ life he brought additional destabilizing influences. Hubbard was present at Parsons’ fevered ‘Babalon Working’, a two-month, drug-fueled ritual designed to conjure Betty’s replacement, the ‘Lady of Babylon’, otherwise known as Parsons’ sex-partner “elemental”, who would help him reach greater ‘magickal’ heights. Hubbard was omnipresent during this ‘Babalon Working’– Carter describes the affair as a “Dee-Kelley operation“– and the founder of Scientology channeled the spirits over the course of Parsons’ seances. According to Cater, Parsons’ “elemental” magically appeared two months later:

The elemental was Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron, sprung from Parsons’ head like Sophia from the Godhead or Pallas Athena from Zeus. She actually arrived at the lodge before Parsons left for the desert with Hubbard…Cameron came back two weeks later after some friends of Parsons tracked her down at the employment office. This time she came to stay.

Parsons described Cameron as an “air of fire type with bronze red hair…”

‘The Black Egg’, Marjorie Cameron’s self-portrait.

What really happened, readers, probably has something to do with Naval Intelligence officer L. Ron Hubbard’s and Marjorie Cameron’s connection to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C. prior to their both relocating to Los Angeles. Cameron had been posted to the hospital in the early 1940s, around the same time she was working as a honey-trap for FDR’s critics via the Joint Chiefs of Staff; while Hubbard’s connection began in the 1930s when William Alanson White was superintendent.  St. Elizabeth’s superintendent during the 1940s, Winfred Overholser, was an old OSS man who helped FDR’s crew test out new drugs. (Overholser was also Ezra Pound’s warden during the poet’s 12 years of political imprisonment in Washington.) L. Ron Hubbard claims Overholser’s predecessor, William A. White, as one of his mentors but Hubbard’s relationship to Overholser himself was rocky, according to sources from Scientology critic Caroline Letkeman. One big twisted family.

Parsons displayed some of the same characteristics as Guy Burgess: outwardly confident, promiscuous, self-absorbed but essentially looking for a more domineering figure to guide him– Parsons was a “beta” Crowley like Burgess was a “beta” Philby. (The cult follower has some of the narcissistic traits of the cult leader.)

Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard both recognized Parsons’ value as a tool. L. Ron ran off with the bacon, so to speak, when he inserted Cameron and Crowley was not pleased that his pet project had been co-opted under his nose. Crowley wrote this to Parsons on April 19^th 1946:

“You have got me completely puzzled by your remarks about the elemental… I thought I had a most morbid imagination, as good as any man’s, but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea what you can possible mean.”

Marjorie Cameron would stay with Parsons (albeit unfaithfully) until his untimely death in 1952.

As you might expect, Parsons was not the one in control of his relationship with Cameron: the ‘Lady of Babalon’ who he summoned certainly wore the pants. When Parsons died Cameron’s first concern was how she would support herself; hours later when his mom committed suicide Cameron’s first concern was saving the pot she’d stashed at her in-law’s.

In 1947 Cameron had attempted to assume the role as intermediary between Parsons and Crowley, but The Beast died shortly before she could meet him in Europe. Later Kenneth Anger would help promote Cameron as an heiress to Crowley’s retinue of adherents, but with very limited success. Cameron would also squabble with L Ron Hubbard for a share of the ‘adherent’ market, according to Kenneth Anger in this 2014 Esquire interview:

In 1946, Parsons and Cameron practiced a magic ritual known as the “Babalon Working” to conceive  a “moonchild” as the Thelemic “messiah”.

The “scribe” for this ceremony was a man Parsons had met only a few months earlier, but who – so Parsons told Crowley – displayed distinctly promising occult possibilities. He was a science-fiction writer named L Ron Hubbard. The Babalon Working failed: Cameron did not conceive. Hubbard ran off with Parsons’ former mistress, a substantial amount of Parsons’ money and a yacht both men owned in a business arrangement.

The official Scientology version of Hubbard’s occult activities is he was working undercover to expose and destroy a “black magic cult”. But Hubbard, Anger says, was “a pathological liar, you can’t believe anything he said”. What Hubbard took from meeting Parsons, Anger says, was the blueprint of a hermetic brotherhood in which the acquisition of one layer of knowledge leads to the next. “The difference is, Scientology makes everybody pay. Hubbard told Parsons that inventing a religion was a good way to make money. But Scientology is a cult. The whole thing is what I call a racket.”

I’ve written quite a bit about Marjorie Cameron already, suffice it to say that she was an emotionally distant woman with a penchant for casual sex and drug-addiction problems so severe that she neglected her young daughter, exposing the child to abuse from pedophiles. I’m not sure that Cameron should be classified as a ‘functioning addict‘, but since her chief duty seemed to be lying down, she cleared the bar for FDR’s anti-democratic espionage team. To be fair, as she aged Cameron developed some understanding of her place in the world, according to her spooky-smelling biographer Spencer Kansa in Wormwood Star:

Back in 1969, the British Sunday Times ran an expose on Hubbard’s participation with Jack in The Babalon Working and cited Aleister Crowley as a catalytic influence on Hubbard’s teachings. To counter this claim, Hubbard issued a cover story in which he painted himself as a cloak-and dagger intelligence agent, sent in to the Fleming mansion on South Orange Grove, to rescue his future wife Betty from the evil clutches of Jack Parsons’ black magic ring. This dubious scenario played hard and fast with the facts, yet in the subsequent radio broadcast Cameron, surprisingly, gave credence to this line, musing how Hubbard, “may have been an agent – as he claims.”

In discussions with [the OTO’s] William Breeze she also reconsidered the circumstances surrounding her own initial involvement with Jack: “She would space-out and say, ‘Maybe I was sent in there’ (to Jack’s house on Orange Grove) ‘maybe I was an intelligence drone.’”

It was clear that over recent years there’d been a sea change in Cameron’s view of L. Ron Hubbard, as Breeze explains: “She may have reached some sort of accord with the Scientologists. She was approached by them and knew some people in LA – that’s how she got Jack’s FBI file. She wasn’t down on them and she wasn’t down on Hubbard anymore. She actually liked Ron. She thought he was charming.”

Over the decades, The Church of Scientology had grown into a multimillion dollar empire, boasting movie star converts, but one person whose low opinion of Hubbard had decidedly not wavered, and had only grown more virulent over time, was Kenneth Anger.

Marjorie Cameron was a user and a person who was used; I doubt if any of her convictions ran deep– other than convictions about her own specialness and entitlement. For a more full examination of her life in the intelligence community, please see my post Wormwood Star. For an explanation of how she got noticed by the intelligence community, please see my post Eisenhower’s Money Plates. It’s likely that Cameron was used in US-targeted ‘counter-culture’ psy-ops well after Parsons’ death and she *probably* had ties to the Mormon cabal inside the ‘intelligence community’.

Marjorie Cameron in Kenneth Anger’s 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

To wrap this up, I admit that when I first started researching Crowley I was disgusted with the way he wrapped himself up in imagery from Jewish mysticism, Old-Testament trappings and cryptic references from the Book of Revelations. Crowley seemed like the worst type of medieval throwback. However, as I learn about ‘mind control’ I find Crowley’s poetry less dishonest. There are potions which can turn people into monsters. There are ‘magic words'; there are golem and succubae. These things don’t work through Harry-Potter-like bolts of lighting, they seem to have a psychological basis– though I believe psychologists are no better at explaining Crowley’s ‘magick’ than alchemists were.

[1] A heterosexual example of this power-worship would be Nigella Lawson and her ‘kept woman’ sales pitch.

There has been teeth-gnashing in the American media lately over the presidential hopes of billionaire real-estate developer Donald Trump. The sticking point is that Trump exploits wide-spread dissatisfaction with illegal immigration to get voters’ attention.

What’s exceptional about Trump’s platform is that the illegal immigration grievance is allowed to be aired. Discontent over how the federal government in particular encourages illegal immigration is a politically powerful issue and has been for decades. Despite the issue’s obvious political capital, nobody in the US political machine really tackles it because American elites need vast quantities of cheap labor to undermine US citizens’ economic and political clout. Illegal immigration is one of the pillars of American imperial power– the country doesn’t need it, but the elites do. So why is illegal immigration getting some airtime now?

Trump is being allowed to exploit justified illegal immigration concerns because there are deep divisions in the US establishment over how to handle Iran.

In this post, I’ll spend a little time reminding readers about what Donald Trump is, then I’ll look at Trump on Iran and conclude with observations from our spook buddies in the Twittersphere.

There is nothing about Trump’s past, nor the way he made his fortune, that suggests he is ‘conservative’ or sensitive to the struggles of most Americans. Despite this, Trump is being championed/vilified through both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ media outlets– and especially through Twitter– as some sort of champion of the silent, ‘conservative’ majority.

Would a conservative use his daughter– or any woman– to sell condos in this way?

Ivanka Trump on the Trump website.

Selling the family assets in Chicago.

Daddy’s little girl in Harper’s Bazaar.

Back before Trump’s fall out with Univision, NBC he was a business partner to both.

If Univision manipulates people, what does that make a Univision content provider, like Donald? In fact, Trump’s tacky Miss USA pageant promotes Washington D.C. values, not American ones. Remember the ‘Miss California Controversy’ in 2009? Trump’s show chose celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, real name Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., as a judge for that year’s pageant. Mr. ‘Hilton’ had a gay marriage agenda and asked the Californian contestant Carrie Prejean her “thoughts on legalizing gay marriage”. Her answer cost her the title and drew “thinly veiled disgust” from ‘Hilton’, who later called her “a dumb bitch”. What was her answer?

“I think it’s great Americans are able to choose one or the other,” she said. “We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think it should be, between a man and a woman.”

Mr. Trump’s beauty pageant penalized the leading contestant for giving a conservative answer. It’s widely believed that Ms. Prejean’s conservative politics cost her Trump’s crown.

If Trump’s previous politics weren’t enough to blow the cover on this latest deception, consider that he is a New York real estate developer. NYC’s real estate business is incredibly corrupt– even the smallest construction projects need ‘fixers’, i.e. professional consultants who know who to pay off in local government to prevent harassment and ‘shake-downs’ of developers. You don’t get rich in that business without playing fast and loose with the law– just like the illegal immigrants Trump criticizes.

Trump’s business has gone bankrupt no less than four times, each time involving his gambling operations in Atlantic City, The Tackiest Place on Earth. When ordinary people like you or I go bankrupt, it makes getting subsequent loans– especially loans for the same type of project– more difficult. But Donald Trump isn’t hampered by market forces. Trump has the connections and the credit lines to insulate himself, which suggests he’s simply the promotional face of *someone else’s money*. Perhaps that’s why he’s so sensitive to criticisms of ‘his fortune’.

Whose money might Trump front for? Trump’s financial success is based around NYC and its surrounding environs… remember too big to fail? Trump’s backing probably comes from the same financial interests which pay to promote social change agendas in the USA and abroad, and which benefit so much from illegal immigration and the resultant social dysfunction.

I think that even a casual observer will recognize that Donald Trump screams “managed opposition”. So why is he being trotted out to oppose a policy which is central to the USA’s oligarchical power structure?

Trump’s political career is not about appealing to the masses, it’s about threatening a subset of American elites who back negotiating with Iran rather than crushing Iran under a jackboot. The jackboot contingent is threatening the negotiating contingent with unleashing popular discontent to push through their war agenda.

Unfortunately, the USA signed the world up for a nuclear Middle East when we decided to ignore Israel’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. Once that became our policy, it was imperative for Israel’s neighbors to arm themselves in a similar fashion if they could possibly find a way. Obama’s strategy of negotiating– i.e. influencing how Iran chooses to protect itself– is a more enlightened strategy, but there’s nothing about being an American oligarch which predisposes someone to enlightenment.

There are a significant number of American power-brokers who share the blind Realitatsflucht of those mid-century politicians who doomed the ‘Jewish State’ by poo-pooing St. John Philby’s plan for Israel which respected native Arabs’ rights. These hawks probably don’t like the reception which Bibi recently received from the Obama administration; they probably feel time is not on their side. Hence, The Hair in 2016.

This hawkish anti-Iran faction is threatening to ‘rock the boat’ by unleashing popular unrest unless their peers follow suit and support the ‘jackboot’ method of dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. However, ‘the threat of Trump’ is not a credible threat for the hawks to make. Neither the hawks nor the negotiators can afford to let popular anti-illegal immigration sentiment off its leash, which is why a narcissistic NYC property mogul/casino operator is spearheading criticism of law-breaking. When it’s time to shut Donald up, gory details from his unsavory past will be suddenly discovered by Gawker, etc. The hopes of millions of law-abiding American citizens will be consumed in Trump’s fireball of corruption and demoralization.

Much of Trump’s popular assault has been conducted through Twitter, a medium which lends itself to unsupported assertions, personal attacks and social pressure tactics which Philip Zimbardo identified as typical of mind control strategies.

Trump is a master of the sound-byte, as you can see from his attacks on the disgusting John McCain:

As regular readers may already have guessed, our usual ‘intelligence community’ buddies are at the front of the pack giving Trump media exposure. Trump’s critics employ the same demagoguery as his supporters, namely the unqualified assertions and personal attacks. If you were interested in my post on Edward Snowden and William Colby, you’ll recognize Charles Johnson and Business Insider.

Business Insider, the rag which NSA Twitter pundits could always rely on printed this July 11^th 2015, Donald Trump Just Gave An Amazingly Surreal Speech in Los Vegas:

Right-leaning campaign strategist Liz Mair and the Potomac Group’s Greg Valliere both told Business Insider last week that Trump appealed to a part of the electorate that appreciates the real-estate mogul’s willingness to say what other candidates would not.

“He has supporters who hate the status quo, who like someone who says what people are thinking but won’t discuss publicly,” Valliere said.

I’d like to stress that media exposure is what’s important, not necessarily media support. If Trump truly were a threat to the establishment, the mainstream media would ignore him or failing that it would universally condemn him. Instead, Trump serves a purpose, so he’s given a microphone. On that note, here’s Benny Johnson, the ‘intelligence community’ asset who once placed a story about how much danger US operative Edward Snowden faces from US intelligence:

You’ll notice that Benny takes the cautious position on Trump that one would expect from a Jeb Bush employee, as Jeb has made a multi-lingual America his personal future. Never the less, Benny and IJReview still provide Trump with media exposure because the Bushes and Trump agree on the Iran issue.

If you’re interested in why the intelligence community needs to control all sides of public debate, please see my examination of Benny Johnson’s career: @BennyJohnson is Good at his Job and Benny’s New Job! Judging by the tone of the sources above, I’d wager that the ‘IC’ feels its interests are served by stirring up fear amongst American elites who are realistic enough to negotiate with Iran, therefore the ‘IC’ is willing to cooperate and give Trump some attention. Perhaps the ‘IC’ feels that limiting Bibi’s ambition and allowing Iran to develop some regional strength will take their ‘sandbox‘ away from them. Losing power was never part of Colby’s plan.

I don’t fault the American public for looking for candidates who promote the public’s interest, but we have to be smart about identifying the real thing. Donald Trump is not the real thing just like Ross Perot, who made his fortune on IBM’s back, wasn’t the real thing. Let’s get ugly and demand someone sincere.

Contract Time: Allen Klein with Yoko Ono and a distracted John Lennon.

As part of my research for The Cash Box Murder, I bought a copy of Cash Box magazine from 1969 for its masthead. I had no idea that the magazine contained an ‘International’ news section which turned out to be very informative.

As you can imagine, the Great Britain section was dominated by Beatles news. I’m not a Beatles fan myself and the information contained in the column was new to me– it may also be new to some a.nolen readers, so I’m going to reproduce a few paragraphs in full:

David Platz of Essex Music has emerged as the new big wheel at The Beatles’ Apple Corps and the general supervising their operation to win the takeover battle with Associated TeleVision for Northern Songs. He has disclosed that he will be active in putting “the Apple shop in order,” and if the Beatle bid for Northern is successful, he will be the “expert in music publishing” who will join the reconstituted Northern board. In return for his services, Platz will receive 10% of the Northern and Apple annual turnover, estimated to be worth an additional GBP 500,000 income for the Essex group. Platz is one of the most astute executives in international publishing and has been in on the ground floor of every British pop trend [on] behalf of Essex over the past ten years. He handles the Rolling Stones‘ publishing interests amongst other perennial money-spinners. Platz has been conferring with The Beatles and other interested parties about the strategy for the Northern struggle and firming up the fortunes of the financially groggy but potentially prosperous Apple empire.

Beatle business manager Allen Klein revealed that he has pledged the 45,000 shares in Metro Goldwyn Mayer owned by his company ABKCO as collateral for the GBP 1.5 million cash loan which Ansbacher, the Beatle merchant bankers, made to underwrite the bit for Northern. Slater Walker Investments, financial advisers to institutional shareholders in Northern stock like Hambros, Howard and Wyndham, EBOR and Invan Unit Trust, has urged them not to accept the ATV offer worth 37 shillings and sixpence per share which was due to close May 2^nd. Slater Walker made no comment on the Beatle counter offer worth 42 shillings and sixpence per share. The institutions it advises hold about 14% of Northern’s voting capital, and could mount an effective blocking operation in the takeover tussle.

That snippet associates a number of corporate entities with The Fab Four; some of these entities are better understood today than they were in 1969. Sit back, readers, as I explain how this unsavory lot connects The Beatles’ with a selection of ugly pursuits, from war propaganda to international arms dealing.

Let’s start with Northern Songs, which was a holding company that owned rights to The Beatles’ early songs. Northern was started in 1963 by Lennon and McCartney, along with their manager Brian Epstein and Epstein’s friend, ‘Dick James’ born Reginald Leon Isaac Vapnick. Although Epstein was supposed to be working in Lennon and McCartney’s interests, he and James gave themselves the majority of shares in Northern— it appears that the Beatles didn’t realize James controlled the company at the time of its creation.

Dick James was the son of Eastern European immigrants who had come to Great Britain in 1912 to escape an unfavorable political climate; in 1942 James joined the Army Medical Corps, where he was assigned to a band that toured Britain and the Middle East throughout WWII. After the war, he found himself with the right connections to launch his music career, which included representing money-spinners like Elton John. For information on how the US military uses music for propaganda purposes, please see my post on Cash Box.

Brian Epstein was equally colorful and also descended from Eastern European immigrants to the U.K. His family was in the furniture business just like Andrew Loog Oldham’s sponsor, mobster Alec Morris. The Epsteins later owned one of the largest music retail outlets in Northern Britain.

Brian Epstein

Brian Epstein served in the British Army as did Dick James, but during the mid-Fifties not during WWII. He was discharged after he was caught impersonating an officer at the Army and Navy Club in Piccadilly– Epstein appears to have done this regularly as a way to pick up homosexual flings. Readers interested in Addiction and Control should know that Epstein was hooked on prescription sleeping tablets and amphetamines. Readers interested in CIA psychologist John Gittinger’s system of control or Kim Philby’s views on homosexuality should know that Epstein was also promiscuous: he searched out “rough sex”, that is sado-masochistic sex, with random strangers and regularly patronized rent boys. These characteristics suggest that Epstein was vulnerable to manipulation from ‘cult leaders’, or intelligence handlers, as I’ve discussed in Elementals, Or Soul Hacking as well as Kim Philby on Homosexuality.

After Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose in 1967, the Beatles wanted to renegotiate their contract with James and realized that he controlled the majority stake in Northern Songs. They wanted their new holding company, Apple Corps, to own their early songs which gave rise to the “takeover battle” described in Cash Box. Apple Corps was founded in 1968, and according to Tom Hormby of lowendmac.com:

Apple Corps would finance a record label and other pet projects of the band members while also providing a “front” for their financial activities to reduce personal liability and taxes.

Ultimately, Apple Records was the only successful and long lived division of Apple Corps. The label released all Beatles records after 1968 and was also home to other artists including Ravi Shankar.

Less successful divisions included Apple Electronics, Apple Movies, and the Apple Boutique, the most ostentatious of Apple Corps’ businesses. Paul McCartney described the Apple Boutique as a “beautiful place where you can buy beautiful things – a controlled weirdness – a kind of Western communism.” (Uncontrolled Weirdness)

In 1969 Dick James sold his Northern Songs stake surreptitiously, he told neither the Beatles nor anybody at Apple Corps about the sale, to a company called Associated Television– the “ATV” from above– which was controlled by the shadowy Lew Grade.

Lew Grade, thanks to the ATV website.

Lew Grade, who eventually became Lord Grade of Elstree, was born Lovat Winogradsky and came from the same immigrant community as James and Epstein. Grade will be familiar to American readers as a producer of Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show. His life’s work was low-quality television programming; he’s often described as the British Samuel Goldwyn. During the course of Grade’s forty-year t.v. career he patronized famous names that will be familiar to a.nolen readers:

International acclaim came with the casting of Burt Lancaster in Moses The Lawgiver and the casting of everyone from Olivier to Peter Ustinov in Jesus Of Nazareth, for which Lew had an audience with the Pope. ‘He’s got great charisma,’ said Lew of John Paul II. ‘I’d like to sign him up.’

Grade got his start in show business in 1926 when he won a dance competition judged by mob-groupie Fred Astaire, after which Grade made a living as an international cabaret dancer.

Lew Grade as a portly professional dancer in 1933.

If the mafioso-groupie=> dancehall-darling=> media-mogul combination sounds familiar to a.nolen readers, it’s because Rolling Stone manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s sugar-daddy Alec Morris broke into the world of showbiz the same way, just replace ‘Fred Astaire’ with ‘George Raft’. Loog Oldham would not have got his position with The Stones where it not for his mother’s lover’s assistance; Morris himself had ties to Meyer Lanksy and by extension the CIA. Loog Oldham’s fantastic music career dried up when Lansky/Raft’s U.K. gambling operations were shut down by British authorities in the late Sixties.

Grade joined the British Army during WWII and was involved in sourcing entertainment for the troops. According to the Daily Mail:

On his first and last day in uniform, he rode a motorcycle into a tree, which caused his knees to swell up ‘to a frightening size’.

He was better placed negotiating performance contracts for the comedians emerging from the Services – Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock were his clients. He also represented the Dagenham Girl Pipers and enticed Bob Hope, Louis Armstrong and Edith Piaf to appear on the British stage.

WWII was very good to Grade and allowed him to groom American connections like Bob Hope, who I recently mentioned with regard to Marjorie Cameron’s sexual services and his association with USO Shows. By the 1960s Lew Grade had established himself as a heavyweight in British media– music and television programming– through his firm ATV. According to The Independent:

Grade’s biggest break came almost by accident. At the start of commercial television he was rather casually involved in the formation of Associated Television, an uneasy alliance which included the Pye group, Lord Renwick, a leading stockbroker, and Norman Collins, the novelist and former BBC executive who was the true father of ATV.

ATV was not in an “alliance” with Pye group, ATV owned a “substantial interest” in Pye Records. Of course, Pye Records were the UK distributors of Chess and Checkers Records, including works by super-star Muddy Waters, who was active in Europe during the CIA’s Jazz ‘cultural offensive’. (Pye also distributed Chess Records in South Africa in the 1960s, when Jazz was considered subversive. ) You can read more about the exploitative Phil and Leonard Chess here, Leonard’s son Marshall Chess went on to become distributor for The Rolling Stones in 1969.

ATV logo in the 1970s.

I think I’ve presented enough information to show that Brian Epstein and Dick James were ultimately loyal to people at ATV, people like Norman Collins, who was a high-ranking propagandist at the BBC during WWII and beyond, as well as Lord Renwick, who served as Controller of Communications at the Air Ministry; Controller of Communications Equipment at the Ministry of Aircraft Production and as Chairman of the Airborne Forces Committee during WWII. Readers will remember how important Royal Air Force contracts were to Brian Jones’ home town of Cheltenham, Gloucester.

The Beatles never wrested control of their early work from ATV. David Platz, who the Beatles hired to put their financial house in order, never delivered on the Northern bid– which won’t be surprising once I explain his business background. According to The Independent:

Platz was born in Hanover of Jewish stock. His parents, aware of the political climate in pre-war Germany, sent their two children to Britain for safe keeping, and so, at the outset of the Second World War, he and his sister, Gina, arrived in Neasden, Middlesex.

No formal musical training, not even a great love of music, led him to his first job. It was obtained by chance. His guardian thought a school-leaver would be suitably placed in the publishing world. David was impressed with the suggestion, thinking it would be literary, and disappointed to find it was music. Aged 14, he found himself as an office boy with Southern Music in the then shrine of music publishers, Denmark Street, London. His early business awareness soon took him through the copyright department, then to the Latin-American music division, as manager.

Some few years later a new managing director of Southern Music was required but Platz, at 28, was considered too young for the post and turned down. The opportunity arose for him to leave Southern Music and front a new company, Essex Music…

Essex Music was a success story from its outset, and due solely to the personality of the man that ran it… The Rolling Stones were early conquests and then the clients poured in.

Platz’s first job was for Southern Records in 1943. Southern Records, now ‘peermusic’, was set up by Ralph Sylvester Peer, a veteran talent scout for Columbia, Okeh and Victor records, who “was the prominent early businessman in country music” according to The Country Music Hall of Fame. I wrote about Nashville’s weird connection to the US military here.

Ralph Sylvester Peer. He always had that expression.

Country music wasn’t Peer’s only business interest according to the peermusic website:

Peer recognized the potential for growth in the Latin market after a trip to Mexico City in 1928 when he met composer Agustin Lara. He brought this rich musical culture to the world when RCA-Victor sought to increase its presence in Latin America by signing such Latin luminaries as Lara, “the Musical Poet,” and Perez Prado, “the Mambo King.” These composers created some of peermusic’s signature Latin music hits, including “Granada,” “Sólamente Una Vez” and “Mambo #5.” The tradition continued to create many legends including Rafael Hernández, Benny Moré and Tito Puente and songs such as “Perfidia,” “Besame Mucho,” “Brasil,” and “Mas Que Nada..”

While the 1930s saw peermusic extending its presence in Latin America, the company was also opening offices throughout Europe. By the end of World War II, with the help of peermusic’s London executive Tom Ward, the once-fledgling company had truly become a worldwide force, acquiring and developing local repertoire throughout Europe that have since become classics by artists such as Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Yves Montand, Henri Salvador, and Fred Bongusto.

…by the 1950s peermusic was as vested in U.S. artists and their music as ever. At this point they were determined not to merely remain current, but to look forward. With this thought in mind, at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, peermusic signed none other than rock legend Buddy Holly. Before long, a new wave of rock and pop artists, including The Rolling Stones and Donovan, started their careers at peermusic’s London studios.

Southern scored a coup in the 1930s-40s by promoting South American music at the same time as the Rockefeller family’s foray into ‘Inter-American Affairs‘, during which the banking clan collaborated with William Stephenson’s ‘British Security Coordination’ to use spookish means to undermine Latin American democracies in favor of FDR, just like they were doing back home in the USA. Music has always served as an important military propaganda tool.

BrainPickings.org: “In 1941, Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, asked Walt Disney to make a goodwill tour across South America, hoping the universal popularity of his characters would help diffuse anti-Axis sentiments in the region.” See the FDR/KGB connection with Disney’s forced tour at Walt and El Grupo.

The Beatles had made another stupid, and spooky, hiring decision when they put Platz in charge of Apple Corps. Platz had a close working relationship with Beatles manager Allen Klein, which extended beyond their business with the Fab Four. According to this 1984 The Times article provided by fans of musical group Procol Harum, Mr Justice Walton, the judge presiding over a breach of contract case involving Rolling Stones copyrights and Westminster Music, said that Platz and Klein were “thick as thieves”.

Readers will remember that Allen Klein, from NYC not London, took over Andrew Loog Oldham’s job after a highly suspicious drug bust in 1967: a mysterious man from California with multiple passports gave the Stones illegal drugs just before a police raid on the band. William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks suggest that the CIA had trouble keeping track of their fake passport collection over the period of the raids.

Cash Box tells us that acquiring Northern Songs was important to Klein, as he was willing to pledge 45,000 Metro Goldwyn Meyer shares toward the deal, shares that were owned by his company, ABKCO. ABKCO is an acronym for “Allen & Betty Klein and Company”. Several months after this Cash Box article was printed The Beatles signed a contract with ABKCO which the band would later regret and spend over a decade trying to extricate themselves from through multiple lawsuits and many millions of dollars.

ABKCO logo.

ABKCO is litigious in its own right. In 1997 it was ABKCO which brought the lawsuit against The Verve for using a few extra notes from The Stones’ “The Last Time” than was specified in their sampling contract; in 1999 Andrew Loog Oldham got in on the lawsuit and profited from it too.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer was, of course, one of the most viciously pro-war movie studios in the run up to WWII, which you can read about in Stephen Vaughn’s Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics or in my post Cleopatra!, which explains how FDR and William Stephenson used Hollywood contacts to push their war/ imperialist agenda. I find it interesting that the Beatles’ manager would put his own money in a pro-war, pro-establishment outfit like MGM.

MGM Stars promoting the war effort, thank you SilverScreenBlog.

Klein worked with an investment bank to broker the proposed Northern Songs takeover, that bank was Ansbacher, which Cash Box describes as “the Beatle merchant Bankers”.

Ansbacher’s last logo.

Ansbacher was not a warm, fuzzy institution. In 2007 it was revealed that the bank was the lynch-pin in a nasty arms dealing scandal, according to The Guardian:

The arms company BAE Systems used a secret payments system to transfer more than £13m to a company linked to David Hart, the controversial former Conservative defence adviser, according to legal sources.

He has acted as a lobbyist both for Britain’s biggest arms company and also for the giant military manufacturer Boeing in the US.

Mr Hart, an Old Etonian who lives in a Suffolk mansion, became notorious in the 1980s for helping the then prime minster Margaret Thatcher break the miners’ strike in an operation he ran from a luxury suite at Claridges hotel, in London.

BAE is alleged to have paid the money into a previously unknown offshore company linked to Mr Hart called Defence Consultancy Ltd (DCL).

The company was registered anonymously in 1997 in the British Virgin Islands, with a bank account in the Channel Islands tax haven of Guernsey, at the Henry Ansbacher merchant bank. Mr Hart’s late father, Louis “Boy” Hart, was the bank’s chairman.

This is the latest allegation to emerge from corruption investigations into BAE, being conducted by prosecutors from three countries – Switzerland, Sweden, and the Serious Fraud Office in the UK.

Ansbacher hit troubled waters in 1993, when the Apartheid-era South African spin-off of the British Barclays National Bank, First National, bought the bank. (This British-derived concern seems to have done well in the fall-out from the 1994 regime change.) During negotiations it emerged that Swiss firm Pargesa Holdings owned 62% of Ansbacher. Pargesa is a very prominent multinational specializing in fossil fuel investments, with huge stakes in Total S.A. and Suez S.A., amongst other energy and mining firms. The Guardian goes on to state:

Ansbacher has at times been tinged by scandal: Lord Spens, a former director, was involved in the Guinness affair, and its current chairman advised Robert Maxwell on a deal now being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. The merchant bank made a pre-tax loss for 1991, but a small pre-tax profit in first half of 1992.

The Guinness Affair involved artificially raising the price of Guinness stock in anticipation of buying out another distillery; the scandal epitomized rampant corruption in London’s financial sector. Robert Maxwell, born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, was yet another British subject to escape Nazi persecution. Maxwell was also a disgraced publishing magnet and embezzler, whose daughter recently made the news for being a procuress of underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein.

In 2002, Ansbacher made the Irish press for all the wrong reasons:

At the centre of the scandal is Ansbacher, an international group of “boutique” banks specialising in “wealth preservation” for the super-rich. In Ireland Ansbacher and its predecessors ran an illegal banking operation that helped a select group of the well heeled and politically connected, the so-called “golden circles”, to dodge tax over the course of two decades.

The Beatles chose some pretty ugly people to manage their affairs; hardly people who fit in with the band’s ‘love & peace’ image. Unsurprisingly, the investment bank advising Northern Songs shareholders, Slater Walker, was no better. The bank collapsed in 1975 after its founder Jim Slater misused millions of GBP manipulating share deals, Slater was replaced by the equally corrupt playboy and Anglo-French billionaire financier Jimmy Goldsmith after a Bank of England bailout. (Jimmy’s daughter Jemima is famous for her strange, failed marriage to Pakistani politician Imran Khan.)

The cover of a James Goldsmith biography.

But which companies hired Slater Walker? Which companies did Brian Epstein and Dick James allow to benefit from Beatles intellectual property in the first place, prior to ATV? Cash Box tells us: “Hambros, Howard and Wyndham, EBOR and Invan Unit Trust”.

• Hambros was a UK-based bank that specialized in flogging British Government debt to various Scandinavian countries and financing the ugly diamond trade— you need high-level connections to set up a concern like Hambros, which is now part of Société Générale.

• Howard and Wyndham was a huge British media concern, specializing in theaters which featured live plays– an important propaganda vehicle in the U.K.

• EBOR Unit Trust was a British life assurance concern— a sort of mutual fund rolled up with an insurance company. The British insurance industry is not very transparent and is dominated by Lloyds of London, an insurance market that is a quasi-governmental organization in its own right and has always been at the heart of British power circles.

• INVAN Unit Trust was set up by Slater Walker to elbow in on the life assurance business, presumably they paid Slater Walker for investment advice too.

None of these firms held the philosophy that “all you need is love”, but they were all clued into a smart investment that even John Lennon didn’t fully understand. Apple Corps would never gain control of the rights to early Beatles songs, these rights would eventually pass to the late Michael Jackson and his partnership with Sony Music.

Readers will have noticed that ’67-’69 was a tumultuous time for Britain’s two most socially influential bands, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, whose management switched from British to American hands. Also in 1969, The Rolling Stones got entangled with Kenneth Anger’s Crowley-inspired cult, while the The Beatles got mixed up in Hare Krishna. Money changes hands; talent joins cults.

I’m going to end this post by stepping away from the Cash Box article and talking about Steve Jobs’ Apple Computer. As readers no doubt already know, Apple Computer was involved in a drawn-out legal battle with Apple Corps, because– let’s be honest– Steve Jobs stole Apple Corps’ name in 1976.

Thank you, TechCrunch.

Jobs certainly knew about the Beatles’ corporation when he chose “Apple” and American trademark law was well established by that time, so the name was a very odd choice for Jobs. What is even more odd is that Apple Computer Inc. has won every trademark battle brought by Apple Corps in defense of its name– there have been three separate series of litigation over the decades. By ‘won’ I mean each case was settled in Apple Computer’s favor, often with only paltry sums being paid to the Beatles’ firm despite obvious trademark and other infringements. All in all, Apple Corps received about $29 million from Apple Computer Inc. over the span of 30 years.

Considering that Jobs actually stole a trademark from one of the most popular music groups in history, $29 million is quite paltry. However, it’s $29 million that Apple Computer didn’t need to lose– why not ‘Banana Computer’, or ‘Grapefruit Inc.’?

For a long time, Jobs refused to give an answer. Then, after the third settlement, he revealed that he chose ‘Apple’ because he was on a freakish, all-apple diet at the time of the company’s founding. Needless to say, that excuse is lame.

I don’t think that Jobs was a stupid man; I think his lawyers would have advised him against naming his company after the Beatles’ firm in any ordinary situation. I don’t think that the founding of Apple Inc., one of the NSA’s corporate spying buddies, was an ordinary situation for reasons I’ve just detailed in this post. The Beatles were financially connected to companies with close ties to Anglo-American military and propaganda concerns– spooky concerns. After striking it rich, the Beatles were probably casting around for music-related investments through Allen Klein and Ansbacher with its Boeing connections. Somebody probably tipped The Four off to a smart technology investment, which was fronted by the kid of a Las Vegas casino operator and political science professor Abdulfattah John Jandali. (For more on Las Vegas, Meyer Lanksy and the CIA, please see The Rolling Stones and Meyer Lansky?)

Jindali, Jobs’ biological father who had a habit of deserting his children, is an interesting character according to The Las Vegas Sun:

Jandali, who was born in Syria and educated in Beirut, has lived in Reno for decades, including working as a political-science professor at UNR in the late 1960s… Jandali’s time in Nevada is somewhat unclear. In addition to teaching at UNR in the late ’60s, he has managed several Reno restaurants and worked in Las Vegas for a time.

(Readers interested in American and British intelligence’s investment in Beirut, and particularly in education and publishing concerns there, will like my post Kim Philby and Saddam Hussein.)

When Jobs found out that one of his favorite bands wanted to invest in his firm, he probably saw a great marketing opportunity, and there were probably informal talks about sharing the ‘Apple’ name– talks at the ‘Klein’ level, not the ‘Lennon’ or ‘McCartney’ level.

I dare say that cooler British ‘intelligence community’ heads prevailed and quashed the proposed linkage for reasons that Reddit would have been wise to ponder before supporting the Tor Project. Jobs, and his American handlers, were probably ticked and decided to give two fingers to their special friends across the pond.

We have a saying in the Midwest: When you lie with dogs, you rise with fleas.