Thank you, Time.com.
For the last few days I’ve been reading Bill Landis‘ biography of Kenneth Anger; the book purports itself to be an unauthorized biography and apparently Anger ‘lawyered up’ when he heard Landis was pursuing the project. Needless to say, the book was published to critical acclaim in 1995 and is largely complimentary of Anger. This Buffalo News review is splashed across the book’s back cover:
“As good a biography as we’re likely to get of an artist who cherishes the mystery he as created of his life.”
If that sounds a little tepid to you, Buffalo News had good reason. While Landis clearly made an effort to interview Anger’s family and not-so-enthused acquaintances like Bruce Byron, there is surprisingly little context given to Anger’s story. Bill Landis was an Air Force brat who in the 1980s left Wall Street to become a porn star under the pseudonym ‘Bobby Spector‘. In the 1990s Landis ‘went respectable’ by documenting the sleazy underbelly of NYC’s film scene in publications like The Village Voice, as well as hosting exploitation film screenings across the United States.
The uncomfortable fact is that during the period 1947-1968, Kenneth Anger was everywhere the CIA was. In the early fifties, Anger courted the CIA-funded Jean Cocteau in Paris while Cocteau frontlined for the CIA’s ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’. In the mid Fifties, Anger investigated/promoted Crowley’s Cefalù sex cult with Alfred Kinsey, just as the CIA was reviving Crowley’s ‘system of control’ research through MK ULTRA. In the mid-to-late 1960s, Anger pushed LSD use and exploited San Fransisco’s demimonde just like MK ULTRA’s George White had for his spy research.
It’s not hard to notice the overlap between Anger’s work and the CIA’s; I leave it to readers to surmise why Landis failed to do so. MK ULTRA and the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ are both well-document CIA programs: the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was known to be a CIA front since at least 1978 when CIA head William Colby outed the congress along with Gloria Steinem in his autobiography. The MK ULTRA/LSD connection in San Fransisco has been widely recognized since 1979, when John Marks published his iconic book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
In this post, I’m going to add the historical context to Anger’s early career in Europe, New York City and San Fransisco; the context that Bill Landis should have included in his– otherwise– reasonably good book on Anger. This context covers two aspects to Anger’s career: 1) his ‘rise’ to the European film scene in the early 1950s and 2) Anger’s association with Kinsey and how both Kinsey and Anger’s work paralleled George White’s LSD/prostitution work for the CIA.
Ken Anger and ‘Operation Congress’
Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer) first ‘got noticed’ as an underground film creator with his homoerotic short ‘Fireworks’ (1947), in which an Anger-like character turns tricks, then finally gets beat up/raped by a bunch of burly sailors. ‘Fireworks’ is widely recognized as the film which opened up gay pornography to a more main-stream audience. You can watch it on Youtube if you want to.
What interests me about Anger’s film was that it caught the eye of Amos Vogel (born Vogelbaum), a NYC transplant by way of Israel, whose family left Austria after the Anschluss. [Correction, Vogel wanted to go to Israel, but stayed in NYC instead.– a.nolen] In October 1947, one month after the CIA was founded, Vogel founded Cinema 16, an ‘underground’ film distribution network. Vogel contacted Anger about ‘Fireworks’, according to Landis, and ‘Fireworks’ was among the first films promoted by Cinema 16.
‘Catching the eye of Cinema 16′ appears to have launched Anger’s career: it sent him to Europe; got him a Ford Foundation grant; and gave him street cred in San Fransisco during the later 1960s. Cinema 16 also gave him important contacts– in 1962, while living in NYC, Anger was housed by an old friend from Cinema 16, Marie Menken, who was then working for CIA-front TIME magazine “in the cable room taking communications from overseas”, says Landis. More on her later.
Cinema 16 played ‘Fireworks’ publicly for the first time in 1948 at the Los Angeles Coronet Theater; the film got favorable reviews from Lewis Jacobs in Hollywood Quarterly. Cinema 16 and Hollywood Quarterly seem to have had a symbiotic relationship: HQ ran a gushing introductory piece on Cinema 16 written by Cinema 16’s founder Amos Vogel.
Amos Vogel, Anger’s ticket to intelligence work.
Hollywood Quarterly (1945-1957) was financed by UCLA and featured the writing Theodor Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School which, like Vogel’s family, left Europe when the political winds turned against them. Academics from the Frankfurt School would go on to work at the OSS and later receive CIA largess. (See Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture By Chris Robé.) Hollywood Quarterly was amenable to reinventing itself to fit the CIA’s anti-Stalin leftist politics and purged itself of communist-smelling contributors in 1951. (See Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal by Saverio Giovacchini.)
What was Hollywood Quaretly’s mission? The University of California Press says this about its publication:
Writing Just After the end of World War II, the editors of the Hollywood Quarterly posed the following question: “What part will the motion picture and the radio play in the consolidation of the victory, in the creation of new patterns of world culture and understanding?”
None of the information I’ve presented above proves that Hollywood Quarterly or Cinema 16 were CIA fronts, it only proves that they acted like CIA fronts. Unfortunately for the legacy of Kenneth Anger, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was a CIA operation beyond question, and Cinema 16 propelled Anger onto Congress-frontman Jean Cocteau’s lap.
In 1948 Cocteau hosted the Festival of Damned Film in Biarritz, France. Fresh from his Cinema 16 success, Anger sent Cocteau a copy of ‘Fireworks’, which Cocteau adored and gave his ‘Poetic Film Prize’ at the festival. Cocteau’s enthusiasm eventually lead Anger to move to Paris in 1950.
Jean Cocteau was a practical man. When Paris was under German occupation, he cooperated with the Germans. When Paris was under American occupation, he cooperated with the Americans. In her book on the Congress of Cultural Freedom (The Cultural Cold War, 2000), Francis Stonor Saunders details Jean Cocteau’s work for the CIA promoting the anti-Stalinist left across Europe.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom, or ‘Operation Congress’ as Saunders calls it, really started in NYC in 1949, with a meeting of anti-Stalinist leftists at– of course– the luscious Waldorf Astoria hotel. The CIA’s operatives were setting up the Congress during 1950– when Anger moved to Paris– and by early 1951, the Congress announced that Jean Cocteau would be among its keynote speakers at its first festival in April 1952. Music from Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was also on the CIA’s playbill.
Kenneth Anger’s antics with his supporter Jean Cocteau spanned the period 1950- Fall 1953. Anger hung out with Cocteau while Cocteau was negotiating with CIA representatives. During this time, Cocteau and Anger would scandalize Parisian audiences with a production of Igor Stravinsky’s/Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Oedipus Rex– the production was scandalous because Cocteau dared show his face so soon after collaborating with the Nazis. Judging from a few clues in Landis’s biography, Anger’s antics with Cocteau/Stravinsky presaged the CIA’s antics with Cocteau/Stravinsky by a couple of months.
The ever-entertaining Jean Cocteau.
Anger spent two periods in Paris, 1950-mid 53 and late 1955-58, but his artistry failed to impress the more established French cultural scene both times. By 1958 biographer Landis says Anger’s reputation in France was on “tenuous ground” because he was “a gauche American with a reputation for pop iconography”. Many Americans who worked with the CIA’s heavy-handed Congress eventually drew ire from the French, as Saunders documents in the chapter titled ‘Cette Fête Américaine’:
Diane Josselson [wife of a prominent Congress organizer Michael] remembered the Paris of this time as brimful with anti-Americanism, a “Yanqui Go Home” mentality everywhere: “The people one met weren’t really like that, but they did have an idea that the typical American was gross.” Many Americans were irked by this ungenerous response to their largess. “I could get quite distressed at Europeans if I allowed myself to,” confessed C.D. Jackson.
I ask readers to remember the name C.D. Jackson.
During Anger’s second Paris stay in 1958 he entered his Hollywood-shot film starring Thelema-promoter Marjorie Cameron, ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’, into the film competition hosted by the World’s Fair in Brussels– a venue where Soviet and American artistic offerings went head-to-head. Anger’s ‘Pleasure Dome’ lost because, Landis says, the Soviets had stacked the judges. Anger’s friend from Cinema 16 and the CIA-funded TIME magazine, Marie Menken, also attended the ‘stacked’ film competition in Brussels.
Why was the lady who handled TIME magazine’s international cables at a film festival? Because her superior at TIME, C.D. Jackson, was also a Congress for Cultural Freedom organizer. Anger’s performance at the Worlds’ Fair had important culture-war implications. Here’s what Saunders has to say about C.D. Jackson at TIME:
In the early 1950s, one man alone did more than any other to set the agenda for American cultural warfare. As president of the National Committee for a Free Europe, and later, special adviser to Eisenhower on psychological warfare, C.D. Jackson was one of the most influential covert strategists in America… Graduating from Princeton in 1924, ‘C.D.’ joined the family firm and travelled extensively in Europe, cultivating contacts which would provide a valuable resource during later years. In 1931 he joined Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire as an advertising executive. During the war, he was one of America’s leading psychological warfare specialists, serving as deputy chief for the Office of War Information Overseas, North Africa and Middle East, and then deputy chief of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which was under Eisenhower’s command.)
After the war, C.D. returned to Time-Life Inc. where he became vice-president of Time. He was an early activist in Allen Dulles’s New York crowd, one of the Park Avenue Cowboys. Then, in 1951, he was invited to take part in a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services. This led to a job as an ‘outside’ director of the CIA covert operations via The Truth Campaign and the National Committee for a Free Europe…
When C.D. Jackson wasn’t doing all that, he found time to be on the board of the United Negro College Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of New York!
Psychological warfare expert Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson.
My point is, readers, that Ken Anger had some surprisingly well-placed friends and a knack for knowing what the CIA is interested in, then inserting himself in the middle of it. It’s almost as though Ken Anger was an Agency asset himself…
Going to San Fransisco?
I’ve covered a period in Anger’s life stretching between 1947-1958 in the first half of this post. For the next half we need to return to 1947 when Dr. Alfred Kinsey contacted Anger wanting to buy a copy of ‘Fireworks’ for his ‘sexual history’ collection. Kinsey would become a father-figure to Anger.
I first referenced Kinsey in my post about Aleister Crowley’s System of Control, in which I quoted E. Michael Jones on Adam Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ for his organization ‘The Illuminati':
As part of the systematization of this semiotics, Weishaupt, not unlike Alfred Kinsey 150 years later, developed a chart and a code to document the psychic histories of the various members of the Illuminist cells. In his book on the Illuminati, van Duelman reprints the case history of Franz Xaver Zwack of Regensburg. In it we see a combination of the Kinsey sexual history, the Stasi file and credit rating all rolled up into one document whose purpose is control.
Alfred Kinsey was a spiritual father to Anger; they shared an interest in Aleister Crowley, but Kinsey thought Crowley was a fraud– according to Landis, Kinsey was only interested in getting his hands on Crowley’s sex diaries for his ‘sex history’ collection, which provided the impetus for Anger’s and Kinsey’s pilgrimage to Cefalù in 1955. (Did Kinsey think the diaries were still there?!) After Kinsey’s death in 1956, Anger would describe himself as an archivist, “a volunteer working for the Kinsey Institute”. Anger’s affiliation with the Institute would certainly help him in 1965, when San Fransisco police picked him up on suspicion that he had made a snuff film, according to Landis: “The Kinsey Institute shielded him, classifying him as a freelance gatherer of sex films.”
Kinsey’s methods for growing his ‘sex history’ collection were strikingly similar to MK ULTRA agent George White’s methods for growing his sex and drug knowledge: working with local police to exploit the demimonde.
George White was an old OSS man who worked in the New York Police Department Narcotics division; he’d wanted to join the CIA prior to 1952 but powerful enemies, including J Edgar Hoover, had stymied his career. When Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s ‘Technical Services Staff’ (TSS) division, approached White in 1952 White agreed to help the CIA test drugs on unwitting, marginalised people who White knew from his drug work in NYC. This is how an anonymous TSS source describes White’s test subjects to John Marks: “He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs.”
George White. Thank you, sfweekly.com.
In May 1953, around the time Anger left Paris and returned to Hollywood to make ‘Pleasure Dome’, White set up the first Greenwich Village (NYC) drug-test den for the CIA. Prostitutes would lure men to the dens, drug them with substances including LSD and then CIA guys would observe through one-way mirrors and recording devices.
Unwitting drug-tests went so well for the CIA that in early 1955 Gottlieb transferred White to San Fransisco where he set up a new ‘safehouse’ for the same purposes. According to Marks, White decorated the den with tastes oddly reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s: “he went out and bought items that gave the place the air of the brothel it was to become: Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can-can dancer and photos of manacled women in black stockings.”
The purpose of the San Fransisco safehouse was not limited to unwitting drug-testing. Marks says: “TSS officials wanted to find out everything they could about how to apply sex to spying, and the prostitute project became a general learning and then training ground for CIA carnal operations… At first, nobody really knew how to use them [prostitutes]. How do you train them? How do you work them? How do you take a woman who is willing to use her body to get money out of a guy to get things which are much more important, like state secrets?”
Brace yourselves, readers, because this is where our old friend John Gittinger comes in. According to Marks:
The San Fransisco safehouse specialized in prostitutes. “But this was before The Hite Report and before any hooker had written a book,” recalls a TSS man, “so first we had to go out and learn about their world. In the beginning, we didn’t know what a john was or what a pimp did.” Sid Gottlieb decided to send his top staff psychologist, John Gittinger, to San Fransisco to probe the demimonde.
George White supplied the prostitutes for the study, although White, in turn , delegated much of the pimping function to one of his assistants, Ira ‘Ike’ Feldman.
While Gittinger was doing his personality assessments from behind a one-way mirror, CIA agents were learning other things, according to another one of Marks’ anonymous MK ULTRA sources:
We didn’t know in those days about hidden sadism and all that sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. We began to understand that when people wanted sex, it wasn’t just what we had thought of– you know, the missionary position…
In 1955 while White was ‘learning about sex’ in San Fransisco, Anger was touring Europe’s pick-up hot-spots with Kinsey looking for ‘sex histories’ for the old man’s collection.
Whoever Marks’ anonymous sources are, they were being disingenuous in the excerpt above, because as early as 1947 Alfred Kinsey’s sex ‘studies’ had brought deviant sexual behavior to the attention of the reading public, mainly via press coverage in CIA-backed TIME magazine. Marks’ MK ULTRA men seem suspiciously innocent; probably because Marks wanted to avoid using the name ‘Kinsey’.
Because of George White’s CIA connections, he could ‘learn about sex and how to use it for spying’ with the help of the San Fransisco Police department, as Marks elaborates:
As the chief Federal narcotics agent in San Fransisco, White was in a position to reward or punish a prostitute. He set up a system whereby he and Feldman provided Gittinger with all the hookers the psychologist wanted. White paid off the women with a fixed number of “chits”. For each chit, White owed one favor. “So the next time the girl was arrested with a john,” says an MK ULTRA veteran, “she would give the cop George White’s phone number. The police all knew White and cooperated with him without asking questions.”
Gittinger wasn’t the only scientist to use the CIA’s den for ‘scientific’ purposes: Dr. James Hamilton of Stanford Medical School (another old OSS man) used the den for “studies connected to unwitting drug experiments and deviant sexual practices,” according to Marks. Could other academics have been involved, I wonder?
Eventually more CIA drug-testing dens were set up: one near San Fransisco in Marin County, and in 1961 a third was set up in New York (the first den there was closed when White moved to California). The ‘new’ NYC den was managed by another OSS veteran, Charles Siragusa.
What I’d like readers to take home is that over the period 1953-1963, we know that the CIA was abusing vulnerable people of the ‘demimonde’ to collect sex histories, sex statistics and do LSD testing.What was Alfred Kinsey doing during this period? Pretty much the same thing as White.
Staring in 1947, the same year the CIA was founded, Kinsey set up his Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at the University of Indiana, from which Kinsey would base his operation until his death in 1956. 1947 was also the year Kinsey met Anger; Kinsey approached Anger about buying a copy of ‘Fireworks’ for his ‘sexual history’ collection. (Note, Kinsey knew about ‘Fireworks’ before its first public showing by Cinema 16 in 1948!)
Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, one year after setting up his institute, and then published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953– the year George White and John Gittinger began tracking ‘human sexuality’ in New York; and also the year Hugh Hefner set up Playboy, which was eventually revealed to be banked by the CIA. Wikipedia, the storm-drain of popular opinion, says this about Kinsey’s work during 1947-56: “His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.” and “The Kinsey Reports, which led to a storm of controversy, are regarded by many as a precursor to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.”
How did Kinsey gather the “sexual histories” necessary to write his famous reports? Pretty much the same way White’s CIA buddies got them. This is what Anger’s biographer, Bill Landis writes:
Kinsey’s powers of persuasion were enormous, rivaling any cult leader. Beginning in the 1940s, despite rampant sexual repression and the suppression of pornography in American society, he could persuade straight, middle-class people to speak about their sexual practices and perversions…
Armed with financing from both Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey’s work with sexual outlaws was thorough… The Times Square hustlers’ grapevine would spread the line that a guy in a hotel just wanted to listen, ask a few questions, then you could leave. The street people knew Kinsey wasn’t a cop after he had built up a reputation in the area…
The three ordinary Midwesterners calling themselves scientists worked in seedy hotel rooms in Times Square (and many other red-light districts in the United States) measuring the exact dimensions of a male hustler’s genitals, even if it meant paying him a little extra. This would happen after the loosening-up period, in which the interviewee described in detail his sex life. Not surprisingly, Kinsey was often hassled for this research by law enforcement officials. After he was taken, irate, to the station house, he would call someone at Indiana University who would confirm his position, releasing him from this latest hot water.
While the ‘University of Indiana’ acted for Kinsey much like the CIA worked for White’s henchman, Kinsey’s relationship with police forces across the country was far from antagonistic according to Landis:
Anger was overwhelmed by Prok’s [Alfred Kinsey’s] collection of more than five thousand stag films. “Through the years Kinsey built up contacts,” Anger explains. “Let’s say a police department in Memphis confiscates a blue film. Instead of throwing out the films, they’d ship them to Prok. He had some that were from 1910.”
Anger says that Kinsey cast a seriously wide net with law enforcement– a net at least as wide as White’s. In my opinion, it would be hard for Kinsey to establish such extensive contacts without the help of some seriously organized friends. Could Alfred Kinsey’s research have had any use to the CIA? Landis says this:
Prok’s [Alfred Kinsey’s] data provided him with a certain power. Pomeroy stated that Kinsey “like secrets, that their possession gave him a sense of power…. [His subjects] included political, social, and business leaders of the first rank, and with his intimate knowledge of their lives [he] could have figuratively blown up the U.S. Socially and politically.”
Kinsey’s ‘groundbreaking’ sex investigations landed him on the cover of CIA-front TIME magazine in 1953, though he’d got plenty of exposure from this outlet on the release of his first report in 1948.
My point is that Kinsey’s work would have been enormously interesting to the CIA– and lo and behold, when Anger failed to tread water in Paris, the homoerotic filmmaker next turned up at the side of a well-know sexologist who was busy ‘challenging’ the sexual mores of the nation by claiming around half of men are homosexual in some way. Kinsey and Anger just happened to share an interest in Aleister Crowley and decided to travel to Cefalù together… so that they could shoot a documentary for the BBC!
Yes, you read that correctly. The BBC had Kinsey and Anger make a documentary about Aleister Crowley’s ‘Thelema Abbey’ in 1955, which was mysteriously lost after its initial broadcast. Here’s what Landis says:
An extraordinary photograph of Kinsey with Anger at Thelema Abbey ran in Picture Post magazine, the British equivalent to Life. [of TIME-Life fame– a.nolen]. The often-seen photo of a bald, scowling Crowley hangs on a wall, and Prok’s arms are outstretched, Christ-like, as he eyes the photo… Anger hovers submissively before his two fathers, Kinsey and Crowley, impishly holding a lantern…
Thelema Abbey, a half-hour sound film, was made of this event and shown on British TV, sponsored by Picture Post. Anger takes credit for this work in his filmography, though he claims that when he went to Picture Post to pick up his print, the magazine had closed and the films was lost forever.
As I first described in The Empire is Listening, the BBC was birthed from the same mother as the CIA, namely the fortune and contacts of William Stephenson. How odd that the BBC wanted to make a documentary featuring a man whose ‘sexual histories’ would have been of extreme interest to the CIA… and again, Anger is in the middle of it all!
A young Ken Anger shows off his favorite tatoo. Thank you fromthebarrelhouse.com.
Kinsey died in 1956, but Anger was just getting started. Even though Paris and the Brussels World’s Fair didn’t work out, Anger still found helpers back home. In 1961 Anger bunked with Marjorie Cameron in Los Angeles, then in 1962 he moved back to NYC to stay with Marie Menken. In 1963 Cinema 16 closed down, pinching off Anger’s funds. Miraculously, the Ford Foundation decided to give him a $10,000 grant just in time, which Anger used to move to San Fransisco in 1963– from then it seems Anger’s money troubles were over.
Regular readers know that the MK ULTRA program was largely wound up by 1963, but the LSD plague it helped unleash was just getting started. This is how Bill Landis describes Anger’s work during the San Fransisco period, 1963-68:
He had been a spectacular scenemaker on several levels– prominent occultist, LSD proselytizer, sexual libertine, vanguard filmmaker.
During this time Anger made some of his most infamous friends: occultist Anton LaVey (born Howard Stanton Levey) and Manson family associate/murderer Bobby Beausoleil. Landis writes:
Both Anger and LaVey existed in a fringe sexploitation area. Anger’s films had become adult house fare. LaVey was familiar with fifties-style Betty Page dominance /submission mentality, and he appeared in nudie spreads for second-string men’s mags…
Devil worship at this point in the sixties was an excuse for exhibitionist behavior and kinky sex.
In San Fransisco, Anger came into his own as a promoter of isolating sex and Aleister Crowley’s system of control. In 1967 Anger’s antics and films were plugged by Newsweek, The New York Times and Playboy magazine.
Anger’s work is important, because by the late 1960s the well-connected Sullivanian cult, and the CIA’s personality profiler John Gittinger, had realised that isolating sex is a great tool for controlling people. America’s intelligence community had embraced the ‘system of control’ that Crowley formulated fifty years before, and Anger was promoting it through hippie fandom.
By 1968 Landis says things were coming “unglued” for Anger in San Fransisco; his buddies Beausoleil and LaVey had contacts with the Manson family which may have become uncomfortable for Anger. Whatever Anger’s reasons for leaving were, he left San Fransisco in 1968 and moved to London, where he was immediately plugged into U.K. music industry royalty.
I’m not going to talk about Anger’s interaction with the Rolling Stones here; except to say that Landis was cynical about Anger’s post 1968-work in London. He described it this way:
He [Anger] made a pilgrimage to England, Crowley’s homeland. It was as much a business trip as a spiritual adventure. Like his idol, Anger was about to take up the obscure occupation of fixing heads.
The mod London of 1968 held a plethora of potential investors for Anger who were in desperate need of having their heads fixed. Wealthy, troubled, addicted rock stars and jaded billionaire socialites with their heads into hard drugs and mysticism wielded a huge influence over their peers, but their personal problems, fueled by intense lives consumed by work, left them vulnerable to a higher power.
Landis adds:
Anger was an expert in the effects of certain drugs on different personalities…
Whatever the particulars were of his intake, Anger possessed a tremendous understanding of the myriad ways heroin, speed, cocaine and hallucinogens, and the various combinations thereof, can connect with various individuals. London was a head’s paradise, fertile ground for an alchemist.
Wasn’t this knowledge exactly what the drug-related parts of MK ULTRA were after?
I believe the information I’ve presented in this post strongly suggests that Kenneth Anger is a CIA asset and probably has been since his ‘discovery’ in 1947, the year the CIA was born. Anger’s probable work for the intelligence community casts his ideology and body of work in a very dark light, the same light that his mentor Aleister Crowley is now viewed in. Far from being a ‘bringer of light’, Kenneth Anger serves a very earthly ‘system of control’.
Ken Anger in 2013. No portraits in that attic. Thank you, theguardian.com.
