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John Birch Society

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The John Birch Society (JBS) is a conservative U.S. organization that was founded in California in 1958 to fight the threat of Communism.^{[citation needed]}

It represents itself as “a membership-based organization dedicated to restoring and preserving freedom under the United States Constitution.” It states that its members come from all walks of life and are active throughout the 50 states as part of local chapters. The Society invites all Americans to explore its website, learn more about the John Birch Society, and consider joining with in its mission to achieve “Less Government, More Responsibility, and – With God’s Help – a Better World.”^{[citation needed]}

JBS advocates the abolition of income tax, and the repeal of civil rights legislation, which it sees as being Communist in inspiration. For this reason, its opponents characterize it as a white citizens’ society dedicated to preventing minorities from gaining political power.^{[citation needed]}

At one time, the John Birch Society was very powerful and members included prominent residents of California including the Knott family. In their early days, Birchers shared a common ideology and some overlapping membership with Fred Schwarz and his California-based Christian Anti-communism Crusade.^{[citation needed]}

Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Personnel 2.1 Council 3 Contact Information 4 Resources and articles 4.1 Related Sourcewatch articles 4.2 References 4.3 External links 4.4 Books 5 Critiques of the Society

History

Chip Berlet wrote in 2010 that: “It is worth noting that the founder of the Society, Robert Welch, worked as a researcher for the anti-collectivist NAM before setting up the JBS. In 1964 the masthead of the JBS magazine American Opinion read like a Who’s Who of ultraconservatism: Editorial Advisory Committee, Clarence Manion, Ludwig Von Mises, J. Howard Pew, and Robert W. Stoddard; Associate Editors Revilo P. Oliver and E. Merrill Root; Contributing Editors Medford Evans and Hans Sennholz.” [1]

The JBS was established in Indianapolis on December 9, 1958 by a group of 12 “patriotic and public-spirited” men led by Robert Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. A transcript of Welch’s two-day presentation at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with each new JBS member receiving a copy. “According to Welch,” writes Political Research Associates in its analysis of the Birchers, “both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians known as “the insiders”. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the US government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new world order managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’ The Birch Society incorporated many themes from pre-WWII rightist groups opposed to the New Deal, and had its base in the business nationalist sector…”[2]

JBS’s objective was to fight communism using communism’s own techniques — organization of front groups, infiltration of other groups and letter-writing campaigns. The society was named in honor of John Morrison Birch, a Fundamentalist Baptist missionary from Georgia, who had served as an intelligence officer in China during World War II and was killed by Chinese communists in 1945 and dubbed “the first American victim of the Cold War” by the Society.

Welch saw “collectivism” as the main threat to western civilization, and liberals as secret communist traitors who provide the cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with one-world socialist government. “There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general,” he wrote, “but communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction.”"[3]

One of the first public activities of the JBS was a “Get US out of UN!” campaign, which alleged in 1959 that the “Real nature of [the] UN is to build One World Government (New World Order).” One Man’s Opinion, a magazine launched by Welch in 1956, was renamed American Opinion and became the Birch Society’s official publication.

In 1960, Welch advised JBS members to “join your local PTA [Parent Teachers Association] at the beginning of the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over.”

By March of 1961, Welch claimed between 60,000 and 100,000 members–but a more realistic estimate is closer to 10,000–”a staff of twenty-eight people in the Home Office; about thirty Coordinators (or Major Coordinators) in the field, who are fully-paid as to salary and expenses; and about one hundred Coordinators (or Section Leaders as they are called in some areas), who work on a volunteer basis as to all or part of their salary, or expenses, or both.” According to its profile by Political Research Associates, JBS “pioneered grassroots lobbying, combining educational meetings, petition drives, and letter writing campaigns. One early campaign against the second Summit Conference between the US and the Soviet Union generated over 600,000 postcards and letters, according to the Society. A June 1964 Birch campaign to oppose Xerox Corporation sponsorship of TV programs favorable to the UN produced 51,279 letters from 12,785 individuals.”[4]

The JBS was viewed by mainstream journalists and politicians as an extremist, wing-nut organization of conspiracy theorists. Much of its early conspiracism, according to Political Research Associates, “reflects an ultraconservative business nationalist critique of business internationalists networked through groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR is viewed through a conspiracist lens as puppets of the Rockefeller family in a 1952 book by McCarthy fan, Emanuel M. Josephson, Rockefeller, ‘Internationalist’: The Man Who Misrules the World. In 1962 Dan Smoot‘s The Invisible Government added several other policy groups to the list of conspirators, including the Committee for Economic Development, the Advertising Council, the Atlantic Council (formerly the Atlantic Union Committee), the Business Advisory Council, and the Trilateral Commission. Smoot had worked at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC before leaving to establish an anticommunist newsletter, the Dan Smoot Report. The shift from countersubversion on behalf of the FBI to countersubversion in the private sector was an easy one. The basic thesis was the same. In Smoot’s concluding chapter, he wrote, ‘Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship, under the control of the Kremlin.’” Birchers elaborated on an earlier Illuminati Freemason conspiracy theory, imagining “an unbroken ideologically-driven conspiracy linking the Illuminati, the French Revolution, the rise of Marxism and Communism, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the United Nations”[5]

Republican mainstream unhappiness with the Birchers intensified after Welch circulated a letter calling President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.” Welch went further in a book titled The Politician, written in 1956 and published by the JBS in 1963, which declared that Eisenhower’s brother Milton was Ike’s superior within the Communist apparatus and alleging that other top government officials were also communist tools, including “ex president Truman and Roosevelt, and the last Sec. Of State John Foster Dulles and former CIA Director Allan W. Dulles.” Conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., an early friend and admirer of Welch, regarded his accusations against Eisenhower as “paranoid and idiotic libels” and attempted unsuccessfully to purge Welch from the JBS. Welch responded by attempting to take over Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization founded with assistance from Buckley.

In October 1964, the Idaho Statesman newspaper expressed concern about what it called an “ominous” increase in JBS-led “ultra right” radio and television broadcasts, which it said then numbered 7,000 weekly and cost an estimated $10 million annually. “By virtue of saturation tactics used, radical, reactionary propaganda is producing an impact even on large numbers of people who, themselves, are in no sense extremists or sympathetic to extremists views,” declared a Statesman editorial. “When day after day they hear distortions of fact and sinister charges against persons or groups, often emanating from organizations with conspicuously respectable sounding names, it is no wonder that the result is: Confusion on some important public issues; stimulation of latent prejudices; creation of suspicion, fear and mistrust in relation not only to their representatives in government, but even in relation to their neighbors.”

The Statesman article went on to charge “that there are many local communities in which the tactics of the extremists have made life miserable for good citizens … through spying, nocturnal phone calls, economic and social pressures, stoning, even bombings, and other tactics alien to the American way of working out political decisions. … An unchecked increase in this kind of propaganda is degrading the American political dialogue to such a point as to damage our self-respect at home and our reputation for public responsibility abroad. These radical, reactionary positions are undermining American Democracy.”

Birch Society influence on US politics hit its high point in the years around the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost to incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Welch had supported Goldwater over Nixon for the Republican nomination, but the membership split, with two-thirds supporting Goldwater and one-third supporting Nixon. A number of Birch members and their allies were Goldwater supporters in 1964 and some were delegates at the 1964 Republican convention. The Goldwater campaign in turn brought together the nucleus of what later became known as the New Right, many of whom had been groomed by the Birch Society but whose more pragmatic members realized that the group’s conspiracism and its affiliation with racism and anti-Semitism were impediments to electoral success. Birch Society members also authored several widely-distributed books that promoted conspiracy theories and mobilized support for the Goldwater campaign:

• A Choice, Not an Echo by Phyllis Schlafly, suggested that the Republican Party was secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the Bilderberger banking conference, whose policies were designed to usher in global communist conquest. “A Choice, Not an Echo” became one of Goldwater’s campaign slogans.
• The Gravediggers, co-authored by Schlafly and retired Rear Admiral Chester Ward of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, claimed that U.S. military strategy and tactics were actually designed to pave the way for global communist conquest.
• None Dare Call It Treason, by John Stormer, sold over seven million copies, making it one of the largest-selling paperback books of the day. It decried “the concurrent decay in America’s schools, churches, and press which has conditioned the American people to accept 20 years of retreat in the face of the communist enemy.”

In April 1966, the New York Times reported on “the increasing tempo of radical right attacks on local government, libraries, school boards, parent-teachers associations, mental health programs, the Republican party and, most recently, the ecumenical movement. … The Birch Society is by far the most successful and ‘respectable’ radical right organization in the country. It operates alone or in support of other extremist organizations whose major preoccupation, like that of the Birchers, is the internal Communist conspiracy in the United States.”

The Birch Society was organized into cells, imitating Welch’s understanding of Communist organizing techniques. “This cell segregation is aimed at preventing infiltration by the ‘Communists’ or other groups seeking inside information about the society,” the Times reported. “Ernest Brosang, the New Jersey regional coordinator, contends that it is virtually impossible for opponents of the society to penetrate its policy-making levels.” Its activities included distribution of segregationist literature, attacks on race “mongrelization,” agitation against the United Nations, and petitions to impeach liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. To spread their message, Birchers held Sunday showings of right-wing documentary films and operated such as “Let Freedom Ring,” a nationwide network of recorded telephone messages. They also helped organized the “Minutemen,” a paramilitary group training to lead guerrilla warfare once the Communists took over.”

A later John Birch Society chairman, US Representative Dr. Larry McDonald, was killed in the 1983 KAL-007 shootdown.

By the time of Welch’s death in 1985, the Birch Society’s membership and influence had declined, but the the UN role in the Gulf War and President Bush’s call for a “New World Order” unwittingly echoed Birch claims about the goals of the internationalist One World Government conspiracy. Growing right-wing populism in the United States helped the JBS position itself for a comeback, and by 1995 its membership had grown again to more than 55,000.

Today the John Birch Society still sees communism as a threat, and sees the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe as false and “planned” by the Russian/Eastern European governments which it sees controlled by “the insiders”. The Society has been active in supporting the audit of and eventual dismantling of, the Federal Reserve System. The current legislation was initiated by Ron Paul. The Birch Society believes that the U.S. Constitution only gave Congress the ability to coin money, and did not intend for it to delegate this power to a banking monopoly, or to transform it into a fiat currency not backed by any precious metals.[6]

The John Birch Society is now based in Grand Chute, Wisconsin. The Society said its membership has doubled in recent years, lately thanks to the policies of the Obama administration. However, it would not provide firm numbers, other than to say it has tens of thousands of members. CEO, Arthur Thompson, explained: “We don’t want want to let our enemies know our strengths or our weaknesses.” The John Birch Society still holds meetings in living rooms and public libraries, but now also maintains a website inviting users to download literature and join a chapter.[7] In 2009, the site saw a 60 percent increase in traffic. [8] Additionally, the John Birch Society has become a co-sponsor of the upcoming February 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C.

Personnel

Accessed February 2008:^[1]

• CEO – Arthur Thompson
• President – John F. McManus
• Vice President – Larry O. Waters

Council

• Nathaniel E. Adamson, Jr. – Charlottesville, Virginia
• Robert K. Bell – Executive Committee, Tulsa, Oklahoma
• William H. Blewster – Mesa, Arizona
• Ray Clark – Lake Arrowhead, California
• Arthur D. Crino – Executive Committee, Tigard, Oregon
• Clark L. Curry – Executive Committee, Edmond, Oklahoma
• David Eisenberg – Tucson, Arizona
• Paul Leithart – Columbus, OH
• Nelson Bunker Hunt – Dallas, Texas
• Daniel L. McBride – Simi Valley, California
• John F. McManus – Wakefield, Massachusetts
• Dominick Odorizzi – Northridge, California
• Jess Roques – Jackson, Mississippi
• F. Ward Rowley – New London, New Hampshire
• Glen J. Schmitz – Springfield, Minnesota
• Thomas D. Sellers – Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
• George Wallace – Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Clifford Wasem – Executive Committee,Clarkston, Washington

Contact Information

• John Birch Society website
• JBS’s biweekly magazine, The New American

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch articles

• Gary Allen
• Tim LaHaye
• James Perloff
• Martin Durham

References

1. ↑ Leadership, John Birch Society, accessed February 3, 2008.

External links

• John Birch Society website
• “John Birch Society,” Political Research Associates
• “Birch Society Investigated,” Idaho Statesman, October 9, 1964.
• Ronald Sullivan, “Foes of Rising Birch Society Organize in Jersey,” New York Times, April 20, 1966, pp. 1, 34.
• Ed Hiserodt, “Another Look at Nuclear Energy,” The New American (John Birch Society magazine), April 30, 2007.
• Ed Hiserodt, “Myths About Nuclear Energy,” The New American (John Birch Society magazine), April 30, 2007.
• FBI files and documents pertaining to the Birch Society: “[9]“
• Blaire Beddow, “The John Birch Society and Nationalism in the United States“, 2003.

Note: Portions of this article were adapted from the John Birch Society article on Wikipedia.

Books

• Lisa McGirr, “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right“, 2001.
• David Farber (JBS) and Jeffe Roche, The Conservative Sixties (Peter Lang Publishing, 2003).
• David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 315–23.

Critiques of the Society

• Grove, Gene. (1961). Inside the John Birch Society. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett.
• Janson, Donald & Eismann, Bernard. (1963). “The John Birch Society” pages 25–54 from The Far Right, New York: McGraw-Hill.
• “Birch Society Investigated,” Idaho Statesman, October 9, 1964.
• Broyles, J. Allen. (1964). The John Birch Society: Anatomy of a Protest. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Ronald Sullivan, “Foes of Rising Birch Society Organize in Jersey,” New York Times, April 20, 1966, pp. 1, 34.
• Epstein, Benjamin R., and Arnold Forster. (1966). The Radical Right: Report on the John Birch Society and Its Allies. New York: Vintage Books.
• De Koster, Lester. (1967). The Citizen and the John Birch Society. A Reformed Journal monograph. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
• Grupp, Fred W., Jr. (1969). “The Political Perspectives of Birch Society Members.” In Robert A. Schoenberger (Ed.), The American Right
• Moore, William V. (1981). The John Birch Society: A Southern Profile. Paper, annual meeting, Southern Political Science Association, Memphis, TN.
• Johnson, George. (1983). Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. Los Angeles: Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin.
• Berlet, Chip. (1989). “Trashing the Birchers: Secrets of the Paranoid Right.” Boston Phoenix, July 20, pp. 10, 23.
• Kraft, Charles Jeffrey. (1992). A Preliminary Socio-Economic and State Demographic Profile of the John Birch Society. Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates.
• Hardisty, Jean V. (1999). Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers. Boston: Beacon.
• Stewart, Charles J., “The master conspiracy of the John Birch Society: from communism to the new world order“, Western Journal of Communication, Vol 66 (4), (Fall 2002): p424(24).
• Turner, William W. Power on the Right. Berkeley CA: Ramparts Press, 1971. [10]
• Eckard V. Toy, Jr., “The Right Side of the 1960s: The Origins of the John Birch Society in the Pacific Northwest,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 105 (2), Summer 2004.

Retrieved from “http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_Birch_Society&oldid=497911“

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THE MAN WHO HEARD TOO MUCH

Peter Whitmey
Abbotsford, B.C.

Published in The Third Decade, November 1990
[Updates bracketed and italicized.]

      Sometimes it doesn’t pay to listen in on other people’s conversations, especially if they might have been involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That’s apparently how a man named Richard Giesbrecht of Winnipeg, Manitoba, came to feel, looking back at the events that took place on February 13, 1964, at Winnipeg International Airport.[1]
According to a report prepared by FBI agent Merle Nelson from the Grand Forks, North Dakota, office,[2] Giesbrecht had sat down at a table in the airport lounge where he was to meet a client. Directly in front of him in the next booth were two men, one of whom was heavy set, between 45 and 50, with dark bushy hair and bushy, pronounced eyebrows, and wearing heavy-looking, plastic-framed glasses. [“bushy” only in reference to eyebrows, according to CD 645, the FBI’s six-page report] He also recalled that the other man, who had his back to Giesbrecht, appeared to be around 50 years of age, and was wearing a light tweed suit, despite the winter weather, along with two-tone brown shoes. His hair was red, he had a badly pock-marked neck, was wearing a hearing aid in his right ear, and spoke with an accent (which the FBI reportedly believed was “southern”). [The accent was described as slightly European in CD 645.]
Giesbrecht indicated to Nelson that he couldn’t help overhearing the two men’s conversation, in that they were not only discussing the assassination of President Kennedy, which had occurred three months earlier, but appeared to have inside information about the event. As summarized in the May 2, 1964, edition of the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS (the informant’s name was withheld “for security reasons”):

   …both men expressed concern over how much of the plot to kill Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald had passed on to his wife…The pair apparently agreed that even should the Commission currently investigating the assassination conclude that Oswald was guilty, the FBI would not stop the investigation. A man named Isaacs, and his relationship with Oswald was also discussed. The pair found it odd that a man of Isaacs’ background would become mixed up with Oswald, whom they described as a “psycho.” Isaacs had apparently been spotted near the President in TV film of Mr. Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas. At the time of the airport conversation he was being followed by a man named either Hoffman or Hockman [or “Haughtman,” according to CD 645], who was to “relieve” him and destroy a 1958 model automobile Isaacs had in his possession. [Identified as a Dodge in CD 645]
The older of the two men…told his companion (that) “we have more money at our disposal now than at any other time.” He disclosed that the group of which both men were apparently a part, would be holding a meeting March 18 [1964] in a Kansas City, Missouri hotel. [identified as the Townhouse Motor Hotel, which the FBI discovered was actually in Wichita, Kansas] The group was to reserve rooms under the name of a textile concern [Giesbrecht might have heard the name “Ero Manufacturing” which Lawrence Meyers of Chicago, a friend of Jack Ruby’s, worked for, and thought he had heard “Arrow” as in shirts] The two switched their conversation and began discussing airplanes after a third man, sitting at a separate table, apparently signaled them that someone was in earshot of their discussion.
The FBI informant testified the man sitting separately stared at him, in such a manner that he got up and left the room in an attempt to locate the police…

The Winnipeg article, with its dramatic implications, appeared on the front page under the heading “PROBE KENNEDY DEATH HERE: FBI Man visits Winnipeg to Check Assassination Clue.” The remainder of the article [which was written by Don Newman, now a distinguished CBC-NEWSWORLD Ottawa Bureau Chief] reads like a James Bond novel, as Giesbrecht attempted to leave upon realizing that the third man was not only glaring at him but had signaled to the other two men. The informant described this third man as being about 35, six feet tall, weighing 200 pounds, with a deformed nose, fair hair and flushed cheeks [which sounds a lot like the unidentified man photographed at the Russian Embassy in Mexico City, identified as “Henry Lee Oswald”]. Giesbrecht had noticed that he appeared to be left-handed, with either scars or tattoos on the fingers of that hand.
As Giesbrecht headed for the RCMP office on the ground floor of the airport, the third man pursued him, blocking his path to their office. However, Giesbrecht managed to locate a phone and was in the process of describing his experience to a corporal at the downtown RCMP office when the third man suddenly approached him, at which point he hung up and headed for the flight ready rooms on the second floor. After going through two rooms and doubling back to the main floor, he managed to elude his pursuer. He decided to contact his lawyer [whom I was later able to contact in Prince George, B.C.], and through the United States Consulate in Winnipeg was put in touch with FBI agent Nelson. Two weeks later, on February 27, Nelson, Giesbrecht and his lawyer returned to the airport, where the FBI agent made his initial report.[3] According to the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, “the testimony is now believed in the hands of a Presidential Commission headed by U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren.” [Although an FBI memo indicates it wasn’t provided to the Warren Commission, it must have been, as it was given a Commission Document Number—645.]
In its concluding paragraph, the FREE PRESS speculated that the informant’s testimony had again “sparked rumours that Oswald was but a cog in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. One theory holds that the plan was originated by a right-wing organization”[4]—a theory proposed by author Thomas Buchanan in a series of articles for a French newspaper, and later that year in his book WHO KILLED KENNEDY? (London: Secker and Warburg) Initially published in Britain, a revised version was released in the United States by Putnam, deleting references to possible Mafia involvement.[5] (Many of Buchanan’s suspicions were later developed in the mysterious 1968 book FAREWELL AMERICA.)[6]
Despite the Warren Commission’s assurance that Oswald had acted alone in Dallas, there was too much evidence of a conspiracy to quell a growing list of “assassination buffs” and the American public in general.[7] With the publication of RUSH TO JUDGMENT by Mark Lane and Edward Epstein’s INQUEST in mid-1966, along with numerous magazine articles on the subject, the desire for a new investigation was becoming widespread.
Even LIFE magazine, which had supported the Warren Commission’s “lone assassin” case from the beginning, dramatically reversed its position in the fall of 1966.[8] In October, editorialist Loudon Wainwright seriously questioned the Warren Commission’s findings, followed by a detailed examination of the Zapruder film (which LIFE owned) by Governor Connally and his wife.[9] The combination of Connally’s insistence that he was hit by a separate shot, and the limitations of Oswald’s antiquated Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, led LIFE to conclude that the possibility of only one assassin being involved was “a matter of reasonable doubt.”
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, where Oswald had lived both as a child and during a five-month period in 1963, the district attorney, Jim Garrison, began his own investigation in late 1966, undoubtedly influenced by the growing controversy. After the NEW ORLEANS STATES-ITEM revealed the “JFK Death Plot Probe” on Feb. 17, 1967, Garrison was forced to call a press conference at which he indicated arrests were imminent.[10] Unfortunately, one of his prime suspects, David W. Ferrie, was found dead in his apartment on Feb. 22, as Garrison’s staff gathered evidence about him.[11] (Ferrie had been interviewed by the FBI shortly after the assassination, based on a tip given to Garrison linking Ferrie to Oswald.)[12]
It didn’t take long for both the national and international media to become aware of Garrison’s investigation and events developing in New Orleans, with numerous articles appearing on the controversial district attorney. Included was a skeptical report in LIFE in early March featuring a photograph of Ferrie,[13] which had also been published in various newspapers in both the United States and Canada. Although coverage of the assassination controversy was not as extensive in Canada as in the U.S., several reports did appear, some of it pre-dating Garrison’s revelations, in MACLEAN’S,[14] SATURDAY NIGHT,[15] and CANADIAN FORUM,[16] in addition to a resurgence of American reporting.
Back in Winnipeg, whose readers had been left in the dark as to the significance of the conversation at the Winnipeg airport described in May of 1964, a local connection to the Garrison investigation was announced in the March 17, 1967, edition of the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS. This time the headline read “CONSPIRACY PROBERS MAY HEAR WINNIPEGGER—New Orleans Says It’s ‘Very Interested’ in Report Suspected Pilot Seen Here.”[17] Again agreeing not to reveal his identity, they reported that a local man, who had overheard a conversation suggesting a conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy three years earlier, “…feels certain that on Feb. 13 (1964) at the Winnipeg airport he saw David Ferrie, the pilot who was once investigated as an alleged ‘getaway pilot’ in the Kennedy case and who was found dead in his bed late last month before New Orleans authorities could arrest him.” According to the reporter, Peter Van Bennekom [whom I was later able to locate at UPI in Wash., D.C., where he was a senior partner], Giesbrecht noticed a photo of Ferrie in the paper [THE WINNIPEG TRIBUNE] while visiting a friend[18] in the hospital and recognized him from his false eyebrows. The reporter pointed out that Ferrie was in his late forties and wore a bushy toupee and false, bushy eyebrows, consistent with the description given by the informant in 1964, when the man had never heard of David Ferrie. (It is interesting to note that Ferrie’s name was mentioned in a staff interview—conducted by a member of the Warren Commission—an interview with a high school acquaintance of Oswald’s related to the Civil Air Patrol until they both belonged to in New Orleans under the leadership of Captain David Ferrie, who was later fired by Eastern Air Lines after being convicted of molesting several teenage boys.[19])
In his interview with Van Bennekom (who moved to Mexico City the following year),[20] the unnamed informer indicated that he had been trying to contact Garrison for three days with his story without success, which was probably due to the fact that the preliminary hearing involving a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, also accused of being part of an assassination conspiracy, had just gotten underway.[21] However, Van Bennekom was able to speak with an assistant district attorney in New Orleans by the name of Michael Karmazin, who was actually not part of the investigating team (which I learned from a telephone conversation with him).[22] Karmazin told Van Bennekom that Garrison’s office was not “yet aware of the information available in Winnipeg.”[23] He went on to state that Garrison’s office would be contacted, and the informant would be “shown pictures of other people suspected by Mr. Garrison of having taken part in the plot,” in the hope that “the local informant could “identify one of the other men he saw at the airport.” Karmazin was particularly impressed with the fact that the description of one of the men from 1964 so closely matched Ferrie [except for the heavy-framed glasses, although I did later find a photo of Ferrie in his C.A.P. uniform wearing thin-framed glasses, but he could have possibly been wearing either sunglasses or reading glasses].
In regard to Ferrie’s movements at that time, Karmazin mentioned to Van Bennekom that he had very likely “made a trip to Canada, in February, 1964” and indicated that Garrison’s staff were aware of the fact that Ferrie had “been out of the country” as well as “working out of Chicago a little.” Ferrie had also made numerous phone calls to Toronto, Mexico and Central America, according to phone records seized by Garrison (from the office of New Orleans lawyer G. Wray Gill.)[24] [I later wrote an article entitled “Did David Ferrie Lie To The Secret Service?” based on the twelve pages of long-distance phone records, which showed that Ferrie had made numerous collect calls from all over the country, including Dallas, Ft. Worth and Houston, from 1961 until Dec. 1963. However, Garrison discovered that the November, 1963, phone records had not been included, although one call from Houston a week before the assassination appeared on the December telephone statement. Ferrie had told the Secret Service that he hadn’t been to Texas for at least ten years until his impromptu hunting/skating trip with two young male friends on Nov. 22.]
One call in particular, made from lawyer G. Wray Gill’s office to a hotel suite in Chicago, caught Garrison’s eye, in that the number, WH 4-4970, corresponded with another phone call, identified in Warren Commission’s exhibits (CE 2350), to the very same number.[25] In this case, the call was made from the Ero Manufacturing Company in Kansas City on the same day [incorrect; see comment below] as Ferrie’s call—Sept. 24, 1963—which happened to be the day Oswald supposedly left New Orleans for his mysterious trip to Mexico. Garrison was able to determine that the Kansas City caller was most likely Lawrence V. Meyers, an employee of Ero Manufacturers,[26] (possibly the textile concern referred to in the Winnipeg conversation.) [I later realized that the Meyers call from K. C. to the same Chicago number was made on Nov. 20, 1963, not Sept. 24, and was definitely made by Meyers, based on his own business phone records.][27] The FBI had interviewed Meyers on Dec. 4, 1963, in connection with the fact that he and a young girlfriend named Jean Aase from Chicago (who also went by “Jean West”) had visited Dallas on November 20, where they dropped into the Carousel Club to visit Jack Ruby, whom Meyers had known for some time. (Ruby was also invited to meet the couple at the Cabana Motel, a reported “mob” hangout, on the night of the assassination.)[28] An FBI report also revealed that Jean Aase’s phone number was WH 4-4970, although in an interview with her no reference was made to the phone call from David Ferrie to her number.[29] Burt Griffin (now a judge), who questioned Meyers for the Warren Commission in August 1964, also did not ask him if he was familiar with David Ferrie.[30] [Nor whether he was familiar with Jean Aase, whom I later located and eventually interviewed in Minneapolis in 1998, accompanied by her lawyer. She had clearly been relieved to learn from me earlier that Meyers was dead, but downplayed her initial reaction during the 1998 interview, undoubtedly on the advice of her lawyer.]
(Several years later, after Garrison’s investigation, a CBS producer in Los Angeles, Peter Noyes [who told me he was the basis for the “Lou Grant” character], published a book, LEGACY OF DOUBT, in which he revealed for the first time that a man in Los Angeles who was questioned by the Dallas Sheriff’s office after he emerged from the Dal-Tex building near the assassination site had given them a false name, or at least a new one. Until September 10, 1963, his name had been Eugene Hale Brading, with a long criminal record, but was changed to Jim Braden. While in Dallas he visited the offices of H. L. Hunt, supposedly on oil business, and was, like Meyers, registered at the Cabana Motel. Noyes also discovered that in the fall of 1963 Braden was working in New Orleans with an office on the same floor of the Pere Marquette Building as G. Wray Gill, David Ferrie’s employer.)[31] [Beverly Oliver also claims, in a July 1993 letter to THE THIRD DECADE, that she, too, was at the Cabana on Nov. 21, 1963, and danced with Jack Lawrence, another suspect.]
Although Giesbrecht had been discouraged “from pursuing the matter” by the FBI in 1964, he nevertheless, despite some apprehension, felt it was “his duty to give the New Orleans authorities whatever information he can.”[32] At least at this point no one other than the RCMP, the FBI, Garrison and certain members of the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS staff knew his name. [But this was soon to change.]
Throughout 1967, coverage of the Kennedy assassination became more extensive and controversial than ever, both on television and in print. Journalists supporting both sides of the debate expressed their views in virtually every major magazine in the United States, including ATLANTIC, COMMONWEAL, COMMENTARY, ESQUIRE, THE NATION, NATIONAL REVIEW, NEW REPUBLIC, NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, NEW YORKER, NEWSWEEK, PLAYBOY, RAMPARTS, REPORTER, SATURDAY EVENING POST, SATURDAY REVIEW, SENIOR SCHOLASTIC, TIME AND U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT.[33]
In addition, there was an outpouring of books on the subject that year, such as: DEATH OF A PRESIDENT by William Manchester (serialized in LOOK magazine and a controversy in itself),[34] THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION by Charles Roberts of NEWSWEEK, who was in the Dallas motorcade;[35] ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT by the late Sylvia Meagher; FORGIVE MY GRIEF (four volumes) by a Midlothian, Texas newspaper editor, Penn Jones, Jr. [who has since passed away]; THE SCAVENGERS AND CRITICS OF THE WARREN COMMISSION by Robert Lewis; PLOT OR POLITICS: THE GARRISON CASE AND ITS CAST by James and Wardlow; SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS by philosophy professor and LIFE magazine consultant Josiah Thompson (who became a successful private investigator);[36] and LEE: A PORTRAIT OF LEE HARVEY OSWALD BY HIS BROTHER (also serialized in LOOK magazine).[37]
Television also got into the act, beginning in June of that year, when NBC presented a highly critical evaluation of Garrison’s investigation; it was so biased, however, that Garrison won the right to an equal amount of time to present his point of view (later he appeared as a guest of Johnny Carson’s on THE TONIGHT SHOW)[38] [depicted in the “Director’s Cut” of the film “JFK”]. Also, in June 1967 CBS broadcast a four-part examination of the WARREN REPORT and by and large defended the “lone assassin” verdict.[39]
However, it was MACLEAN’S, the Canadian weekly magazine [then monthly] that first identified Giesbrecht as the man who thought Ferrie was one of the men he overheard discussing the assassination.[40] In the November 1967 edition, reporter Jon Ruddy [who sadly died in an accident while in his beloved Mexico a few years ago] presented a chilling description of Giesbrecht’s experience with a number of details not mentioned in the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS reports; unlike the previous accounts, Ruddy not only referred to the informant by name but included a photograph of the 35-year-old Mennonite and father of four sitting at the very table where he had heard the conversation.[41]
In the MACLEAN’S article, Giesbrecht revealed that when he was first interviewed by FBI agent Merle Nelson, he was told that “this looks like the break we’ve been waiting for,” only to be told several months later to “forget the whole thing” because it was “too big”—a tactic used by the FBI with many other witnesses both in Dallas and elsewhere. (However, it could be that the FBI was concerned that informants such as Giesbrecht might possibly put themselves in danger by discussing their allegations with others, particularly the news media.)
According to the MACLEAN’S report, Giesbrecht went back to the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS in February 1967, after seeing the photo of Ferrie, feeling frustrated by the FBI’s seeming lack of interest. He was contacted by one of Garrison’s assistants several times as well as by Garrison himself that summer, confirming that Ferrie had been in Winnipeg on February 13, 1964. [The few documents I have obtained from the Boxley file don’t verify this statement.] As a result of Garrison’s call [which one of his sons has on reel-to-reel tape, apparently], Giesbrecht tentatively agreed to appear at Clay Shaw’s trial [reported in local papers and in other papers across Canada], which didn’t get underway until Jan. 1969, as a result of long legal delays as described in Judge Garrison’s 1988 book ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS.
Ruddy’s report also presented a much more detailed account of the conversation. Reference had been made to an “auntie” (possibly slang for an older homosexual) arriving from California for the upcoming meeting in Kansas City; Giesbrecht suspected the two men themselves were homosexuals because of their “high-pitched, precise-sounding voices.” [CD 645 makes reference to a niece of one of the men going to California, and Ferrie’s voice is described as simply Canadian or northern American, while the other man’s sounded educated and slightly European. Giesbrecht might have been influenced by his conversation with Garrison, who placed a lot of importance on the homosexual angle.] The name “Romeniuk” was mentioned several times. According to Ruddy’s report:

“…Ferrie asked about paper or merchandise coming out of Nevada. Latin Accent said it was too risky and that a house or shop had been closed down at a place called Mercury (located northwest of Las Vegas near the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Proving Grounds.) He said that a “good shipment” had reached Caracas from Newport, possibly referring to military arms related to anti-Castro activities. [As pointed out to me by researcher Larry Haapanen, the word “Caracas” was inexplicably included with some other unrelated words in Oswald’s notebook, and was a hotbed of both anti-Castro and pro-Castro political activities in Venezuela leading up to the assassination. Newport could refer to Nova Scotia, where a large weapons manufacturing company existed, or possibly the Mafia-riddled town in Kentucky, or possibly the Naval base in Rhode Island. Mercury might have been in reference to the extreme anti-Communist magazine AMERICAN MERCURY, commonly called MERCURY, which had operated out of Wichita in the early 1960s, but was moved to McLean, Texas, on the Mexican border in 1963.]

In the course of mentioning the third man in the restaurant, whom he now recalled having “a nose that seemed flat, a fighter’s nose,” Giesbrecht described again, but in much more detail, how he was followed as he attempted to reach the airport RCMP office. After learning where it was located, he changed his mind when he noticed the third man standing near a covered bridge leading to the office. Returning to the mezzanine, he got directions to the nearest phone, and was in the process of relaying his story to an RCMP corporal when the brutish man with tattoos on his fingers appeared again. Giesbrecht quickly hung up and headed for a crowded flight room, waiting awhile before leaving the mezzanine for the parking lot. As he drove away, undoubtedly feeling a tremendous sense of anxiety, Giesbrecht recalled having done “a sort of foolish thing.” Feeling badly about having stood up his client, he described tearing up and burning notes he had taken of the airport conversation, although that night he rewrote them [with his brother’s help] and “hid them in a dresser drawer.” This would explain how Giesbrecht was able to recall so many details even three years later. [Giesbrecht might have destroyed his notes as well, in case he was being followed by the third man.] In the concluding paragraph of the article, Giesbrecht expressed again his frustration in dealing with the FBI, his desire to help Garrison, and the feeling of being like a “child that wants to convey something and nobody’s listening.”
The publication of the MACLEAN’S article and the interest shown by Garrison and his staff were encouraging signs, but if Giesbrecht’s allegations did provide evidence of a conspiracy (which he believed was the case), MACLEAN’S decision to reveal his identity may have been a mistake.[42] Following the contact between Giesbrecht and Garrison’s office and the detailed report by Jon Ruddy, the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS now decided to identify “the informer” themselves, in a brief report on January 5, 1968, which also listed his address in Winnipeg[43] [where his widow still lives to this day]. Giesbrecht had been asked to testify at the Clay Shaw trial, tentatively set to begin on February 15 (although it did not, in fact, get underway until January, 1969, as a result of various legal maneuvers by Shaw’s lawyers). The previous Wednesday, January 3, Garrison had phoned Giesbrecht and was quoted as describing him as an “important and relevant witness.”[44]
Despite the fact that Giesbrecht had already been interviewed several times, he agreed to yet another interview, this time with journalist Val Werier, a writer for the now-defunct WINNIPEG TRIBUNE.[45] At the outset of the article, dated February 1, 1968, Werier [who still writes freelance for the WFP] indicated that Giesbrecht had agreed to testify at the Shaw trial and would be flown to New Orleans “soon to appear as a key witness.”[46] The remainder of the lengthy article summarized interviews with both Giesbrecht and his former boss, Peter Thiessen,[47] both of whom were in the life insurance business. In describing the conversation between Giesbrecht and Thiessen in the Winnipeg hospital where Giesbrecht saw the photo of David Ferrie [which was not included in a WFP article that day], Thiessen was quoted as stating that “it is obvious to me now that he had recognized the man in the paper” and recalled that Giesbrecht “got quite a shock when he saw the picture…He wasn’t his normal healthy colour.” Giesbrecht had apparently told Thiessen “the entire story” a year earlier, at which time “he wondered whether the remarks that Mr. Giesbrecht overheard were significant. Now he felt that the picture made them so.”
Giesbrecht described to Werier the airport incident of February 13, 1964, once again, although several details not previously mentioned were included. For instance, in describing Ferrie, he suggested that the skin on one side of his face “appeared shiny and tight,” as if it had been burned. The NEW YORK TIMES, in their February 23, 1967, report on Ferrie’s mysterious and untimely death, pointed out that Ferrie had worn “false eyebrows and a wig to cover burns he had once suffered.”[48] According to the same report, a “source” within Garrison’s office also stated that Garrison theorized that “Kennedy’s assassination grew out of a plot by anti-Communist forces to kill President Fidel Castro of Cuba. According to this theory, the conspirators planned to send Lee Harvey Oswald to Cuba to kill Premier Castro, and later decided to attack President Kennedy when Oswald was denied entry into Cuba.” Had the Warren Commission been aware of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro dating back to 1960, Garrison’s speculation might have been much more convincing.
The article by Werier also referred to the film footage of Kennedy landing that supposedly showed a man named Isaacs in the background, but, unlike previous reports, the writer described a landing in “Texas”, which means it could have been news film showing the President disembarking at one of several stops on his political tour, possibly Houston or Ft. Worth.[49] In addition, Werier described Ferrie pointing to an aircraft from the Horizon Room, referring to it as “like the one I told you I flew during the war”; previous articles didn’t mention anything about “the war.” He concluded his article by referring to several conversations between Giesbrecht and “Garrison, or his aides,” and the fact that Garrison had “uncovered evidence that Ferrie was in Winnipeg on Feb. 13, 1964.” Looking ahead to the trial, Werier stated that “it will be interesting to know whether the forthcoming trial of Mr. Shaw will reveal why Mr. Ferrie did come to Winnipeg and the identify of the man who was with him, when Mr. Giesbrecht overheard the conversation four years ago.” [There was no follow-up report in either Winnipeg paper to explain why Giesbrecht did not testify, and when I spoke to Werier he only vaguely recalled his article.]
In January, 1968, after months of research and direct contact with Garrison’s staff, former FBI agent-turned-journalist William Turner produced an in-depth report for RAMPARTS magazine entitled “The Garrison Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.”[50] The left-wing magazine had already covered the assassination in a number of penetrating articles such as “In the Shadow of Dallas”[51] (Nov. 1966), which described a growing number of suspicious deaths of either witnesses, relatives or reporters linked somehow to the events in Dallas; a conspiracy scenario entitled “The Case For Three Assassins,” by David Welsh and David Lifton (who wrote BEST EVIDENCE years later in 1981), which appeared in the January 1967 edition;[52] and two previous reports by Turner on the Garrison investigation in April 1967 (“The Plot Thickens”)[53] and June, 1967 (“The Inquest”).[54]
In the course of Turner’s 24-page examination of Garrison’s probe, the American public and possibly unknown co-conspirators first became aware of Giesbrecht’s allegations in a two-paragraph summary of his story.[55] In addition, Turner revealed his name and the fact that he was from Winnipeg. He mentioned that Giesbrecht had recently been shown an assortment of photographs, from which he identified Ferrie as the man with the bushy eyebrows. This identification presumably took place in New Orleans, although this was not actually stated. [It would appear that this did not happen, as Giesbrecht never did go to New Orleans and meet with Garrison. He only spoke to him over the phone from his home.]
In reference to a man named Isaacs, who seemed to be linked somehow to Oswald and allegedly appeared in film footage near the President when he arrived in Texas, Turner indicated that a classified document did, in fact, exist, entitled “Harold Isaacs.” An unnamed Garrison investigator[56] had located a man somewhere in Texas with that name, who admitted to owning a 1958 Ford which had been destroyed in a wrecking yard. [The investigator was William Wood, aka William Boxley, but the man named Harold Isaacs was not the subject of the still-classified document—CD 1080—and the 1958 vehicle discussed at the Winnipeg Airport was a Dodge.] Finally, Turner, in reference to the Kansas City meeting mentioned in the Winnipeg conversation [which was to take place at the Townhouse Motor Hotel, located at Broadway and Kellogg Sts. in Wichita, Kansas, as the FBI had discovered, as reflected in a report I obtained in 1999], pointed out that this happened to be the headquarters of the Minutemen, a right-wing, paramilitary organization that Garrison suspected was involved in the assassination. [Wichita had been the head office of AMERICAN MERCURY magazine in the early 1960s, however, and was the home of oilman Fred Koch, who had cofounded the John Birch Society in the 1950s, as pointed out in a June, 1994 VANITY FAIR article on the family.]
(Turner wrote a lengthy article on the Minutemen and its founder, Robert DePugh, in the January 1967 edition of RAMPARTS, with much of his information provided by a defector named Jerry Milton Brooks. He had served “as DePugh’s intelligence and security officer until he became squeamish over the Minutemen’s intent to overthrow the government”.[57] Intriguingly, Brooks made reference to Guy Banister, who had headed an anti-Castro organization in New Orleans with links to the CIA, until his death in 1964. Banister was closely associated with both David Ferrie and Lee Oswald, according to Garrison’s investigation, which became public knowledge a month after Turner’s article was published.)
Five months after his report on Garrison, Turner once again made reference to Richard Giesbrecht’s allegations, shortly after Martin Luther King’s death. In his article for RAMPARTS, “Some Disturbing Parallels,” Turner wrote:

   One parallel that must not be allowed to develop further in the King case is the pattern of cover-up that characterized the Kennedy assassination. For instance, Richard Giesbrecht, a reputable Winnipeg, Canada businessman…overheard two men…talking about inside details of the assassination. A few weeks later, he contends, the FBI called him back and told him, “Forget what you heard. It’s too big.” One of the men, says Giesbrecht, was the late David Ferrie, an ex-CIA pilot and central figure in the Garrison probe. Significantly, Giesbrecht is not to be found in the National Archives [which was not the case, but all reports were still classified] nor is his name mentioned in the WARREN REPORT or its volumes. He is one of a number of key witnesses who, as far as the official version is concerned, never existed. [Somewhat overstated, but the six-page report, CD 645, did not provide his name, as he was considered an informer.][58]

Despite Turner’s comments about Giesbrecht, no reference was made to him by either Garrison or any journalists covering the New Orleans investigation, except for a summary of the February 13, 1964, incident, along with the dialogue of a telephone conversation with Giesbrecht that was included in THE KENNEDY CONSPIRACY, published in early 1969 and written by Paris Flammonde.[59] Unfortunately, since the book’s approach to the assassination was closely linked to Garrison’s investigation, which resulted in acquittal for Clay Shaw in March 1969,[60] the book did not sell many copies and was panned by reviewers, including Sylvia Meagher, author of ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT.[61] Unlike Turner, whose information was derived from Garrison himself,[62] Flammonde makes reference to both the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS and MACLEAN’S articles in summarizing what he described as a “fascinating incident.”[63] [I later learned from an FBI report that THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER had published a lengthy report in their Jan. 28, 1968 issue, based on interviews with Giesbrecht, Van Bennekom, and Louis Ivon of Garrison’s office, amongst others, which I was able to obtain from their librarian.]
Flammonde also indicated from his conversations with Garrison that “he accepts Ferrie, who was easily recognizable because of his red wig and false eyebrows, as one of the Winnipeg men.”[64] In addition, Flammonde suggested that the other man at the table “may have been Maj. L. M. Bloomfield, a former OSS officer, now living in Montreal” [although no description of Bloomfield was provided to compare to the description of the second man given to the FBI by Giesbrecht]. He identified Bloomfield, who is referred to in Garrison’s 1988 book (but not his 1970 book) as being a member of the board of directors of the CIA-sponsored Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome—an organization which also had Clay Shaw on its board (which was investigated by the Montreal paper LE DEVOIR with a March 16, 1967, report cited by Garrison in his 1988 book, ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS.)[65]
Presumably obtaining Giesbrecht’s phone number from Garrison’s office (although there were only three “R. Giesbrecht” listings in the 1967 Winnipeg phone book, two of which were also listed back in 1964),[66] Flammonde made contact with Giesbrecht in the fall of 1967.[67] In reply to a question about Giesbrecht’s identification of Ferrie, he indicated he was “a hundred percent” certain that one of the two men he overheard was David Ferrie.[68] He was also asked if he had been “recently contacted by the FBI or any other United States government intelligence agency,”[69] to which he replied “no comment.” Giesbrecht felt that the FBI “had done a good job, maybe…”, but seemed frustrated that their investigation (if any) was not out in the open. [FBI documents reveal that DeLoach and his assistants in Washington, D.C., concluded that Giesbrecht’s allegations were “hoax-like,” although when I spoke to DeLoach by phone a few years ago he had no recollection of the Winnipeg event.] When asked about the other man, Giesbrecht was willing to describe his appearance, but when asked if he had any idea who he might be, he again replied “no comment” (possibly fearing reprisal).[70]
Although the trial of Clay Shaw, which took place in early 1969, resulted in an acquittal for the New Orleans businessman, it is interesting to note that the jury also concluded that the evidence presented had supported the growing belief that a conspiracy was involved.[71] Despite indications he would appear, there is no sign that Richard Giesbrecht did, in fact, testify, possibly because of threats to his life. [In a Dec. 13, 1968 CBC-TV interview in Winnipeg, Giesbrecht was still prepared to testify, but, according to one of his sons and author Flammonde, he changed his mind after a threat was made to his family’s safety.] I learned from a close relative in Winnipeg that Giesbrecht later agreed to testify in Washington D.C. at the HSCA hearings with RCMP protection but (again) changed his mind at the last minute.[72]
In June 1970 William Turner of RAMPARTS, who had referred to Giesbrecht in two 1968 articles, reported once again on developments within the Minutemen organization, which he had suspected was “the group” planning to meet in Kansas City, as described by Giesbrecht.[73] [Even though the FBI did determine that the Townhouse Motor Hotel was actually in Wichita, and indicated in a report that no sales meeting had been scheduled there for March 18, 1964, they didn’t seem to consider the likelihood that it would have been cancelled.] Turner had been subpoenaed by lawyers representing Robert DePugh, founder of the Minutemen, who had been charged with jumping bail on an illegal weapons charge. Before being caught in New Mexico, DePugh, disguised as a hippie, had been on the run for 18 months (which became the basis of his 1973 publication entitled CAN YOU SURVIVE: GUIDELINES FOR RESISTANCE TO TYRANNY FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY), convinced that “an opposing element of the radical right had marked him for death.” DePugh had suggested to Turner in October 1967 that a splinter group of former Minutemen were attempting to promote fascism in the United States “in the guise of anti-Communism.” In regard to the Kennedy assassination, Turner (at the urging of Garrison) “posed the possibility that renegade Minutemen had been involved…DePugh readily agreed, saying that he had some evidence that might explain unanswered questions abut events in Dealey Plaza in Dallas.” A few months after making this comment, DePugh had disappeared, in fear for his life, suspecting that the FBI itself “was in cahoots with this very element.” Although the possibility of collusion between the FBI and a fascist organization such as the American Nazi Party sounds hard to believe, DePugh’s comment reminded me of an earlier discovery while looking through old copies of the extreme anti-Communist magazine AMERICAN MERCURY. Amongst the regular contributors of this Bible of hate-mongers were such notable individuals as General Walker of Dallas,[74] whom Oswald allegedly fired on in the spring of 1963; Professor Revilo Oliver from Illinois,[75] George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the ANP,[76] and none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself[77]—four “experts” on the spread of Communism within the U.S.A.
DePugh also revealed in his 1970 interview with Turner that he had spoken directly to Garrison in October 1967 (not long after Garrison’s contact with Giesbrecht) and verified that three individuals being investigated by Garrison were at one time members of the Minutemen (possibly including Ferrie and Banister). Turner learned from DePugh that “some of his former members are literally Nazis, having gone over to the ANP,”[78] which included John Pratler,[79] convicted of assassinating George Lincoln Rockwell in August 1967, firing at him from a rooftop as the ANP leader prepared to drive away from a laundromat.[80] According to DePugh, the ANP was chiefly financed by a prominent Texas millionaire (a member of the Hunt family perhaps?), and had become associated with a “sympathetic clique” based in California calling itself “the Real Minutemen,” suggesting that DePugh’s organization was becoming soft from the point of view of certain extremists.
It would appear that DePugh had good reason to fear for his life, according to a “reliable reporter” referred to in Turner’s 1970 article. Allegedly, “a sometime employee of Guy Banister’s New Orleans detective agency” had tape-recorded evidence between himself and a “right-winger in Denver” of a $7500 offer to have DePugh killed, along with DePugh’s associate Walter Peyson, both of whom were fugitives at the time.
Robert DePugh’s activities during the early sixties are also discussed at length in the 1987 book ARMED AND DANGEROUS, by James Coates.[81] According to Coates, who had covered the HSCA hearings in 1978, DePugh had posters printed only a few months after Kennedy’s assassination, warning twenty members of Congress who had voted in favour of a bill that DePugh feared would lead to the abolition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It is interesting to note that the content of the posters had originally been printed on the front page of the Minutemen’s “hate sheet” ON TARGET (whose logo was a picture of the cross hairs of a telescopic sight) shortly before the assassination and read as follows:

   See the old man on the corner where you buy your paper? He may have a silencer-equipped pistol under his coat. That extra fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide-gas gun. What about your milk-man? Arsenic works slow but sure. Your auto mechanic may stay up nights studying booby traps. These patriots are not going to let you take their freedom away from them. They have learned the silent knife, the strangler’s cord, the target rifle that hits sparrows at 200 yards. Only their leaders restrain them.
Traitors beware! Even now the cross hairs are on the back of your necks…[82]

Kennedy himself was certainly considered a traitor by both the “anti-Castro” movement and neo-Nazis, such as the Minutemen and the John Birch Society. In fact, a “Wanted For Treason” poster showing his “mug shot” and a long list of “crimes” was circulated in Dallas prior to Kennedy’s arrival.[83] A full-page advertisement in the DALLAS MORNING NEWS on November 22 (with its ominous-looking thick black border) attacking his policies also reflected the animosity that existed. Coupled with DePugh’s jailhouse comments to Turner, it could be that one of those “target rifles” was aimed at JFK’s neck by renegade “patriots” unwilling to be restrained any longer.
The FBI actually received a warning that “a militant revolutionary group may attempt to assinated (sic) President Kennedy on his proposed trip to Dallas…”[84] The memo was dated November 17, 1963, and sent from Washington D.C. to all Special Agents In Charge. This included the New Orleans office where security guard William Walter took note of the warning as it came over the telex at 1:45 a.m. He contacted five local SACs and wrote their names at the bottom of the bulletin.[85] While having his hair cut on November 22, Walter learned to his chagrin that Kennedy had been assassinated and ran back to the office where he reread the warning. Later that day he typed a copy, which he took home, which he provided to the 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee. (It was subsequently printed in the Feb. 1978 special edition of the L.A. FREE PRESS and is also referred to by Garrison in his book ON THE TRAIL…). It should be noted that when Walter decided to look at the original again after the FBI’s “lone assassin” conclusions became public knowledge (through intentional leaks to the press) in Dec. 1963, it had disappeared and has not surfaced since.[86]
In his book ARMED AND DANGEROUS, Coates also points out in a brief discussion of the Garrison investigation that the New Orleans D.A. (now an appellate court judge in New Orleans) [he died in the fall of 1992] claimed to uncover “…evidence that the triggerman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a member of the heavily armed extremists known as Minutemen”.[87] Although there is no convincing evidence to prove this assertion, a large number of Minutemen were charged with a variety of crimes, including evidence that “…many group members had been assigned assassination targets, including President Johnson and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg”.[88] Again the possibility that Kennedy was also on that list comes immediately to mind.
As paranoid as ever, DePugh wrote urgently to his readers in the April 1, 1964, edition of ON TARGET to purchase a weapon immediately, recommending a number of different high-powered weapons for males, females and even children, suggesting their lives might “depend on it.”[89] Just as DePugh had indicated losing members to the ANP under George Rockwell, the head of the ANP mentioned to author Harry Jones of Kansas City (THE MINUTEMEN) in a March 1967 interview, that “…Minutemen had recruited dozens of his members,”[90] although there was the strong possibility of infiltration and counterinfiltration taking place between the two organizations.
According to Turner, Rockwell also had connections to Guy Banister, the former FBI agent from Chicago, who ran the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean in New Orleans until his death in 1964. Banister worked “closely with American Nazi Party members…,”[91] which included association with Maurice Gatlin, who was both a partner in Banister’s “league” and Rockwell’s attorney in that area of the country.[92]
Banister was also closely associated with the anti-Castro movement and, according to a number of witnesses, including his secretary at 544 Camp/531 Lafayette (a corner office with entrances on both streets), was also in frequent contact with Lee Harvey Oswald.[93] In fact, the address “544 Camp” was stamped on some of the leaflets Oswald began handing out in August, 1963 [which it turns out had been mailed from CIA headquarters, as pointed out by Jim DiEugenio], although the material encouraged readers to support Castro through the Fair Play For Cuba Committee—a chapter established by Oswald himself. Numerous books have suggested that these activities were nothing more than a ploy designed to provide a fictitious “pro-Castro” image for Oswald,[94] but for reasons that even Oswald was not aware of prior to his arrest in Dallas. By then he knew that he had undoubtedly been set up.
By the fall of 1967, Banister, Ferrie, Rockwell and others were all dead; if DePugh was threatened with death, it could be that a small group of fanatics with links to both the Minutemen and the ANP (or to “the real Minutemen”), encouraged from a safe distance by organized crime and anti-Castro elements, made a decision to kill Kennedy, Connally and possibly even Johnson as they came down Elm Street together on Nov. 22, 1963, against both the wishes and knowledge of Rockwell and DePugh. If Oswald was involved, it would not be too difficult to leave evidence incriminating to Oswald, Castro and Communism in general.[95]
There certainly was ample evidence that other gunmen were involved in the assassination, much of which was either downplayed or ignored by both the FBI and the Warren Commission, such as: smoke rising from the grassy knoll; the sound of gunshots from that area [which I later discussed in my article “Mary Woodward: The First Dissenting Witness,” published in TFD]; suspicious-looking men in cars using two-way radios behind the knoll; footprints behind the wooden fence above the knoll; the smell of smoke that several members of the motorcade reported detecting; a phony Secret Service agent on the grassy knoll; the sighting of two men on the sixth floor of the depository building [one of whom was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, possibly Richard Cain from Chicago]; men fleeing from the TSBD in a Rambler station wagon, including “Oswald”; and a man seen running down the bank behind the grassy knoll, picked up by a car that sped away. [I later wrote about the source of this report, Tom Tilson, and concluded that it was not a credible story.][96]
The conversation that Richard Giesbrecht had overheard certainly suggested that a right-wing conspiracy was responsible for the assassination, and, if David Ferrie was indeed part of that conversation, then undoubtedly members of organized crime and the anti-Castro movement in both New Orleans and Dallas were at least aware of the impending “hit”.[97] The [Winnipeg] conversation had also made reference to a man named “Isaacs,” although no first name was apparently mentioned, as discussed earlier. William Turner referred to Isaacs in the January 1968 RAMPARTS article and [appeared] to have been led to believe by a Garrison investigator that the man’s first name was possibly “Harold”, in that the FBI had interviewed a man by that name on May 22, 1964 [no interview, just background check].[98] Garrison’s unnamed investigator, most likely William Boxley a.k.a. William Wood,[99] had located a “Harold R. Isaacs” somewhere in Texas.[100] (There is a 1989 listing under that name in Livingston, Texas, not far from Houston). The man readily admitted to previously owning a 1958 Ford which had been destroyed. [The FBI’s report on Giesbrecht indicated it was a 1958 Dodge that was being discussed.] However, Garrison and Turner could have been intentionally misled by the investigator if it was Boxley, in that Garrison eventually discovered that Boxley was working “undercover” for the CIA (which is described in Garrison’s 1988 book).[101]
As pointed out by Turner, a classified document about a man named “Harold R. Isaacs” did exist,[102] but it certainly did not deal with a resident of Texas. In fact, had Turner visited a major Canadian bookstore or library in 1968, he might have come across a book on the assassination written in Europe entitled FAREWELL AMERICA, not published in the United States.[103] In the appendix of the book, a list of all the classified documents withheld from public viewing was provided, which included CD 1080 : “Information on Harold R. Isaacs”, dated 5-22-64, FBI Boston.[104] [I later received an article written by William Turner from REBEL magazine in 1984 in which he described his involvement in distributing copies of FAREWELL AMERICA to researchers and libraries in the U.S., after a large shipment mysteriously arrived at his home in California from Montreal. It also turned out that Tom Bethell had provided the list of classified CDs to Mary Ferrell, which he had obtained from the National Archives, as described in his book ELECTRIC WINDMILL. In addition, Garrison received a copy of the original manuscript for FAREWELL AMERICA from the French editor, as described in ON THE TRAIL…]
The timing of the FBI’s interview with Professor Isaacs of M.I.T. [no interview took place], a journalist, writer and SE Asia research specialist at the Center For International Studies,[105] is intriguing. It [the background check] took place only three weeks after the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ran its account of the airport incident, in which the name “Isaacs” was mentioned. The FBI was most likely also aware of the fact that Professor Isaacs was working for a CIA-funded branch of M.I.T., which became public knowledge that year in the revealing book THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT.[106] Earlier in his career, Isaacs had been suspected of being “pro-Communist,”[107] and also had appeared to have been associated with Marilyn Dorothea Murret,[108] a teacher, and world traveler, who had spent some time in Japan; she also happened to be a first cousin of Lee Harvey Oswald, and saw him frequently in New Orleans in 1963.[109] [The FBI found no evidence that Prof. Isaacs and Marilyn Murret had ever met.]
I was able to contact Mrs. Isaacs, whose husband died two years ago [1988] after a distinguished literary and academic career. It was surprising to learn from her that, despite being actively involved in her husband’s career, she was not aware that he had been interviewed or at least investigated by the FBI, related somehow to the assassination. In fact, she pointed out to me that they spent the 1963–64 school year in Tokyo, living at International House, where Professor Isaacs was lecturing. From there they went to Hawaii, returning to Boston on June 13, 1964 (on their grandson’s birthday), several weeks after the FBI report date listed, suggesting that an FBI report on Professor Isaacs’s background might have been written without his knowledge.[110] [This was the case, based on unfounded allegation by a right-wing reporter named Paul Allen, which the FBI subsequently dismissed.]
In 1975 the first page of CD 1080, which accidentally became available at the National Archives after being misfiled, was included in the book COUP D’ÉTAT IN AMERICA.[111] Oddly enough, although the report is a biographical description of Isaacs, based on “FBI interviews with him in the early fifties,” along with information provided by the secretary to the president of M.I.T., it is entitled “Marilyn Dorothea Murret,” who is not even mentioned. However, in a previous FBI report, CD 942, it was alleged that “Murret was linked in some manner with the…apparatus of Professor Harold Isaacs.”[112] [As I stated earlier, the FBI investigation was based on the accusations of right-wing reporter Paul Allen, who had written a column about three women whom he claimed were “defectors,” one being Marilyn Murret, which led to an interview with an FBI agent in Boston in which he tried to link Murret to Isaacs, and accused Prof. Isaacs of masterminding a plot to assassinate President Lyndon Johnson.]
The authors of COUP D’ÉTAT IN AMERICA [one of whom had made a name for himself by going through Bob Dylan’s garbage] stated that “Isaacs was a disillusioned leftist intellectual who had become a professional anti-Communist on a very high ‘think tank’ level[113] at the C.I.A.-financed M.I.T. research center, and suggested that Murret was using her position as a teacher and world traveler “as a cover for spying activities she was performing for Harold R. Isaacs.”[114] [I later wrote to and spoke with Marilyn Murret at her home in New Orleans, but she would not discuss anything related to the assassination.] Certainly the Warren Commission appeared to be interested in both Isaacs and Murret, in that a memo was sent to the FBI in Boston dated May 7, 1964, from Washington, D.C. requesting a background check on Harold Isaacs,[115] most likely written by either Howard Willens, who acted as liaison between the Commission and the Department of Justice, or by J. Lee Rankin, chief counsel.
It is difficult to know if the request from the W.C.’s staff related to Isaacs (and Murret) had any connection with the Richard Giesbrecht allegations. However, contrary to William Turner’s assertion in the June, 1968, RAMPARTS article that Giesbrecht officially “never existed,”[116] there were, in fact, two commission documents, CD 645 and CD 866, both of which dealt with the Winnipeg incident.[117] [I later received over a dozen FBI reports related to Giesbrecht, whose name originally was misspelled “Giesbright” on several FBI documents, which presumably had been included in CD 866. Most are listed in summary form at NARA’s website, and have been declassified.] However, it is important to note that it was not until March 1967 that Giesbrecht was able to identify one of the men [overheard] as David Ferrie. By then neither the FBI nor the CIA had any desire to reexamine the case for a multitude of reasons [and therefore, as reflected in several FBI memos, continued to discount Giesbrecht’s allegations, and considered him to be a publicity seeker with an overactive imagination].[118]
In 1987 I wrote to Judge Garrison [now deceased] and included a copy of the MACLEAN’S article,[119] after having spoken to a relative of Giesbrecht’s in Winnipeg[120] [I later discovered that I was talking to Richard Giesbrecht after all, as his address and phone number were published in the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS after the MACLEAN’S report], as well as Michael Karmazin in New Orleans [121] and Merle Nelson in Sioux Falls, SD.[122] Even though Garrison is obviously still determined to prove that a conspiracy involving right-wingers caused Kennedy’s death, I never received a reply from him. [I later sent the issue of TTD which included this article, and his secretary assured me that Judge Garrison had read it; it was mailed back to me from the courthouse.] No reference is made to Giesbrecht in his second book, ON THE TRAIL…, although David Ferrie is discussed at length.[123]
In March 1989 I contacted Karmazin again after reading Garrison’s book, and he suggested sending any questions I might have about the Giesbrecht incident to him, to be forwarded to Garrison personally, whom he still knew well. Because he is a busy man, it was suggested that I leave space below each question for Garrison to write his response. Again I did not receive a reply, so I mailed the questions to Garrison’s secretary,[124] to whom I had spoken. I learned from her and Karmazin that Garrison has become distrustful of other “assassination buffs”, which had prompted Karmazin’s suggestion in the first place. In June 1989 I called Karmazin again and learned that he hadn’t been able to deliver my questions, in that Garrison was out of town promoting his book. I am still waiting for a reply.[125] [I never did receive any answers to my questions, nor was I able to reach Karmazin again.]
In addition to Garrison’s book, the 25^th anniversary of the assassination saw the publication of several other books on the subject, including CONTRACT ON AMERICA, by David Scheim [which he had published earlier at his own expense], MAFIA KINGFISH, by John Davis [whom I later met at the 1991 SUNY-Fredonia College JFK conference, where he was the keynote speaker], and FINAL DISCLOSURE, by David Belin (who was a staff lawyer for the Warren Commission). I wrote to all three authors in regard to Giesbrecht, who is not mentioned in any of these books. I learned from David Scheim that he had never heard of the incident, although he expressed some interest. On the other hand, John Davis, who had earlier written about the Kennedy family [he is a first cousin of the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis] and the assassination in 1984, stated in his reply: “…I am well acquainted with the Giesbrecht allegation. I did not include it in my new book because I did not have the time to check it out.”[126] Ironically, he also referred to a Winnipeg researcher with whom he had corresponded for some time. Despite having written several articles on “dead suspects,” including Ferrie, for this journal (TTD), Davis’s colleague, Scott Van Wynsberghe, only vaguely knew about Giesbrecht’s allegation from the brief reference in Turner’s January 1968 RAMPARTS article [which was quite misleading, as noted earlier]. In the case of Belin, who previously wrote NOVEMBER 22, 1963: YOU BE THE JURY in 1973, his response to my long letter on a number of topics was quite blunt: “I have read your May 15 letter. You are just plain wrong in your conclusions…I regret that you do not recognize the truth about the assassination.”[127] Mr. Belin did not comment on the Giesbrecht incident, which I had brought to his attention in my letter. [I also sent my article to Burt Griffin and Robert Blakey, but got no comment from either. Blakey did mail it back, but with no letter included, which I thought was very inconsiderate.]
It could be, of course, that the Giesbrecht allegations were not considered worth investigating any further by either the FBI or the Warren Commission (assuming they knew about it). [FBI documents clearly indicate that Giesbrecht was not taken seriously at Headquarters, and although the W. C. did receive the original report and follow-up memos, airtels, etc., there is no reference to the incident in the Warren Commission’s 26 volumes. Every document was classified “secret” and sent to the National Archives.] Nor was there necessarily any relationship with Professor Harold Isaacs in Boston. [This seemed to be a totally separate FBI investigation, with no apparent connection to the Winnipeg incident, although the FBI might have suspected “Isaacs” was the M.I.T. professor.]
Curiously enough, the FBI office [in Boston] not only wrote a classified report on Isaacs (with references to Marilyn Murret), but also prepared a report, CD 480, likewise classified, entitled “Marguerite Oswald in Boston,”[128] dated March 4, 1964, shortly after her Warren Commission testimony [which probably dealt with Mark Lane and her]. In addition, they wrote another report that was withheld from public viewing, CD 988, entitled “Info Concerning General Edwin Walker”,[129] who was a member of the right-wing organization called the John Birch Society, and who had been fired by President Kennedy in 1962 for promoting the Society’s beliefs while stationed in West Germany.[130] Walker subsequently returned to his hometown, Dallas, where he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1962,[131] coming dead last in the Democratic primaries won by John Connally. In April 1963, he was allegedly fired at by Lee Harvey Oswald, according to Marina Oswald,[132] even though two men in a car were seen fleeing from the area.[133]
In connection with the FBI’s Boston and Walker investigations, it should be noted that Belmont, Mass., west of Boston, was the headquarters of the John Birch Society, named after an army intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communists shortly after WW II ended.[134] It was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, and its governing body included a former USAF Lieutenant-General, a former chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, a former aide to General MacArthur, a former dean of Notre Dame Law School, a former ambassador to Argentina, and a former Internal Revenue chief, along with several prominent businessmen.[135]
When I spoke to Richard Giesbrecht, Sr., in the fall of 1987,[136] I was told that a daughter of the “airport informer” had drowned while the family was vacationing in the Detroit area, and that foul play had been suspected.[137] While reading the book HOFFA’S MAN by Richard Hammer and Joe Franco (written in 1987), I learned that Jimmy Hoffa had a summer home on Lake Orion, near Detroit, where he and his cronies quite often met. I couldn’t help wonder [at the time] if the drowning happened to take place at that particular lake.[138] Unfortunately, I was unable to check out this possibility with Mr. Giesbrecht, who I had learned was not a relative of the “airport informer” after all, but the man himself.[139] [I later discovered through a conversation with a cousin, Mel Giesbrecht, who lives in the same community as me, that the area “Dicky” was referring to was Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, a popular summer vacation spot east of Grand Forks, ND. I was able to obtain a report on the daughter’s death, which occurred during the day in the motel swimming pool, and appeared to be an unfortunate accident.]
I also received a reply[140] from former FBI agent James Hosty, who had been responsible for keeping close contact with the Oswalds after they arrived in Dallas from the Soviet Union [taking over the case after the Oswalds moved from Ft. Worth; although he met Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine, he never actually spoke to Lee Oswald], in case they were operating under the direction of the KGB. Hosty indicated to me that he was aware of the Giesbrecht allegations and had, in fact, read both the FBI reports and the RCMP’s own statement, which he claimed “were furnished to the Warren Commission.” [I wrote to the RCMP about a possible report, and was required to apply through Canada’s Access to Information Act, but was told there was no such report in their files.] He suggested that the MACLEAN’S article, which I had enclosed with my letter, “is a distortion.” He was quite adamant that the man with the “Southern” or “Latin” accent was actually East European and had a last name which was Russian (Ukrainian actually) [consistent with CD 645, which referred to the accent as slightly European], and that the other man “did not, in any way, resemble Ferrie, who was distinctive to say the least.” [Clearly, Mr. Giesbrecht was certain it was Ferrie, and his 1964 description was quite consistent with Ferrie’s features and accent.] Hosty believes that “Isaacs” was “undoubtedly V.V. Kostikov, the KGB General that Oswald met with in Mexico City right after [prior to] the assassination.” Oswald had allegedly written a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. on November 9, 1963 (intercepted by the FBI),[141] in which he made reference to “comrade Kostin.”[142] Consistent with Garrison’s theory mentioned at the time of Ferrie’s death, Oswald’s letter pointed out difficulties he had encountered dealing with the Cuban Embassy, where he expected to obtain a visa enabling him to travel to Cuba.[143] From Garrison’s point of view, however, Oswald’s “pro-Castro” position was nothing more than an act, possibly designed in part to allow him to visit Cuba in order to kill Castro. [Although it turned out that the CIA and the Mafia had teamed up in 1960 in an attempt to assassinate Castro, not revealed until the mid-1970s, there is no evidence that Oswald was involved in this murky operation.] Hosty, on the other hand, clearly believes that Oswald was an agent of the KGB. In Hosty’s opinion, “the public has been subjected to a double disinformation campaign. First, by the U.S. government that was afraid of starting World War II and then the Soviet Union and Castro ‘apologists’ who felt they were saving détente and the peace process.”[144] [Hosty wrote his own book a few years later, but did not mention the Winnipeg Airport Incident.]
Until March 30, 1989, Richard Giesbrecht continued to live at the same address where he was living in 1964 [when he died from cancer of the brain], having retired at the young age of 49 after an “extremely successful career as an insurance underwriter, gaining notoriety as a member of the ‘Million Dollar Round Table,’ while with National Agencies, Ltd. Dick retired…from Mony Life in 1980 to spend time at home. His bike riding and walks became a passion [according to a letter and obituary sent to me by Mr. Giesbrecht’s former boss, the same man whom he had visited in hospital when he saw the photo of David Ferrie on the front page of the WINNIPEG TRIBUNE]. Mr. Giesbrecht died at the age of 57, leaving behind his wife of 30 years, a daughter and two sons, as well as three grandchildren.”[145] He was undoubtedly aware of the fact that he probably crossed paths with members of an organization, most likely paramilitary with links to organized crime, that had managed, so far, to get away with the murder of President John. F. Kennedy. As former FBI agent Merle Nelson stated in a 1987 telephone conversation with me after receiving the MACLEAN’S article, “…it was a long time ago.” For some, easy to forget; for others, impossible.

NOTES:

Russell Maguire, The American Mercury, & Racially-Conscious Conservatism

Editor’s Note: Describing Russell Maguire as a Racially-Conscious Conservative is like calling Adolph Hitler a Jewish-Conscious Conservative.  Russell Maguire is considered the Godfather of Assault Rifles, in fact.  Without the Thompson Submachine Gun paving the way for further developments in the Assault Rifle industry, there would have been no AK-15.   

Draper confidante, anti-Semite and pro-Nazi

KEVIN COOGAN
THE DEFENDERS OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION AND THE LEAGUE OF EMPIRE
LOYALISTS: THE FIRST POSTWAR ANGLO-AMERICAN REVOLTS AGAINST THE “ONE
WORLD ORDER”

The belief that any participation in global institutions such as the
United Nations poses a clear threat to national sovereignty has been a
cornerstone of the Anglo-American far right stretching back to the
1950s. This study examines one of the earliest of such groups, the
Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC), an organization of
retired high ranking American military officers that was founded in
1953 and led by former Marine Corps Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle
(1893-1978).  I also look at the DAC’s British counterpart, Arthur
Keith (A.K.) Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), which was
founded in 1954. The DAC and LEL continually warned against what they
claimed was an attempt by murky international conspirators to strip
U.S. and U.K. citizens of all vestiges of national sovereignty and
patriotic feeling in order to reduce them to helpless slaves of a vast
police state administered under the banner of the United Nations.
Anti-globalist arguments first developed by groups like the DAC and
LEL in the early 1950s continue to resonate inside the far right
militia movement today.

The DAC and LEL were equally obsessed with the notion that there
existed an organized Jewish conspiracy intent on building a “One World
Order.” Although both groups were fiercely anti-Semitic, neither of
them was “Nazi.” Appeals – both overt and covert – to National
Socialism were absent from their publications. The DAC and LEL existed
in a twilight world that included far right military men, religious
fundamentalists, Franco supporters, staunch segregationists and
longtime anti-Semites. It is the core conspiratorial anti-Semitic
belief structure of both organizations that places them well beyond
the confines of conventional political discourse.

Part One: Pedro Del Valle and the Creation of the DAC

WHO WAS PEDRO DEL VALLE?

The stereotype of the American far rightist as a buffoonish figure
with little sense of the outside world could not be less apt when
looking at Pedro del Valle, the DAC’s founder and leader until his
death in 1978 at age 85.

Pedro Augusto Jose del Valle Barcay Muñoz was born on August 28, 1893,
in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when it was still under the control of
Imperial Spain. His father, Francesco, a surgeon and former mayor of
San Juan, had been educated at the University of Seville, the
Sorbonne, and Johns Hopkins. In 1900 Pedro del Valle became an
American citizen after his family relocated from Puerto Rico to
Maryland. Upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis,
del Valle joined the United States Marine Corps (USMC). He first saw
action in 1916, when he participated in the capture of Santo Domingo.
In World War I he led a Marine Corps detachment on the USS Texas that
deployed with the British Grand Fleet.

In the late 1920s del Valle was stationed in Haiti before becoming
active in the war against Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua. He later
reported that as a young officer, “I found everywhere evidence of
Communist organization commencing with Sandino’s red bandits.”  He
next served in Havana as an intelligence officer under Admiral Charles
Freeman following the 1933 Cuban Sergeant’s Revolt. Del Valle was then
assigned to Rome, where he served as an Assistant Naval Attaché in the
U.S. Embassy from October 1935 to June 1937. He accompanied the
Italian Armed Forces in the conquest of Ethiopia as a U.S. military
observer and received the Order of the Crown of Italy, the Colonial
Order of the Star of Italy, and the Italian Bronze Medal for Military
Valor.  During his stint in Ethiopia, del Valle also became good
friends with some of Fascist Italy’s top military officers.

Following his return to the United States to attend the Army War
College, del Valle worked at USMC headquarters as an Executive Officer
in the Division of Plans and Policies. During World War II, he led the
11th Marine Regiment of the First Marine Division in the defense of
Guadalcanal where he earned the Legion of Merit. After a brief stint
in Washington, del Valle again returned to the Pacific in April 1944,
this time as Commanding General of the Third Artillery, Third
Amphibious Corps, and fought the Japanese on Guam. His crowning
achievement came when, as Commanding General of the First Marine
Division, he played a critical role in the capture of Okinawa in June
1945 for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. After
the war, he again returned to Washington serving first as the USMC
Inspector General and – from 1946 to his retirement in 1948 – as
Director of Personnel for the Marines.

After his retirement and in financial debt, del Valle turned to
Sosthenes Behn, the head of ITT and an old friend of his father, for
employment. Behn first chose him to represent ITT in the Middle East.
>From his office in Cairo, del Valle visited Istanbul, Damascus, Beirut
and Athens. After a short stint at ITT’s Rome office, he relocated to
Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he served as president of ITT for all
South America.

Maj Gen Edwin A Walker – American Insurrectionist

OVERTURES TO THE FAR RIGHT

Del Valle’s ties to the radical right – ties that almost certainly
existed during his Marine Corps days – continued unabated while he
worked for ITT.  On 12/19/49, for example, he sent a letter of support
to Conde McGinley, founder of Common Sense, one of the most notorious
far right and anti-Semitic journals in America. Del Valle told
McGinley, “If the Truman welfare state triumphs we shall lose our
republic and emerge a very sad socialist oligarchy which will shortly
be overthrown by a communist dictatorship.” In another letter, del
Valle reported, “I have warned Senator McCarthy because I know his
life is in danger.”  In an 8/8/50 missive to Captain J.M. Kimbraugh,
del Valle claimed

Treason is everywhere about us and I do not believe that we have any
chance unless some strong military person is able to seize power by
means of a “coup d’etat” and take the Communist bull by the horns
right at home.

In still another letter from Buenos Aires, del Valle said, “If the
Truman government were not completely in the power of the
Zionist-Marxist minority, we should not have any difficulty” in
getting the United States to leave the UN as long as Russia remained a
member.

Del Valle’s increasing public visibility, which included the insertion
of his 1951 “Open Letter to President Truman” into the Congressional
Record, made Behn increasingly uncomfortable. Nor did his position
improve after ITT’s Washington representative labeled him
anti-Semitic. In late 1951 del Valle left ITT and returned to his home
in Maryland.

CLASHES WITH THE CIA

While still in Buenos Aires, del Valle regularly wrote letters to
the Pentagon and CIA urging them to create a new organization under
the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to wage guerrilla warfare
behind Soviet and Chinese lines, an organization that he offered to
lead.  Del Valle then received an invitation from Admiral Forrest
Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, to visit Washington to discuss his
ideas. After arriving in D.C, however, del Valle was told that Admiral
Sherman was away but that Walter Bedell Smith, the new head of the
CIA, wanted to meet him. One of Eisenhower’s closest aides in World
War II, Bedell Smith had just replaced Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter at
CIA. Instead of discussing plans for guerrilla warfare, Bedell Smith
told del Valle that “he had just the job” for him as head of the CIA
station in Japan. He did so in the false belief that del Valle “had
crossed swords” with General MacArthur during World War II and would
therefore be willing to help “pull the rug out from under MacArthur.”
Del Valle promptly informed Bedell Smith that he considered MacArthur
“the ablest general and statesman the country possessed.”

The confrontation between del Valle and Bedell Smith also echoed a
longstanding dispute inside U.S. Intelligence dating back to World War
II when General MacArthur prevented the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the precursor agency to the CIA, from effectively functioning
in areas under his command. The CIA’s reluctance to engage in
aggressive “rollback” operations against the Soviet Union further
angered hardliners.

CREATING A POLITICAL/PARAMILITARY NETWORK

Del Valle’s clash with the CIA took place at a time when the
predominantly Midwest-based isolationist wing of the Republican Party
was coming under increasing attack from the internationalist branch of
the Party. The internationalists’ roots were largely in East Coast
banking and industrial interests as well as in
internationalist-oriented policy organizations like the Council on
Foreign Relations and the Ford Foundation. Ivy League graduates from
elite Eastern families also played a prominent role in organizations
like the CIA. The struggle between the “isolationists” and the
“internationalists” for the soul of the GOP reached a peak at the
party’s 1952 convention. Senator Robert A. Taft, the choice of the
isolationists, entered the convention hall with an apparent clear
majority of delegates, only to lose the nomination to former General
Dwight D. Eisenhower after a series of questionable parliamentary
maneuvers disqualified a number of key Taft delegates.

Del Valle, for his part, set out to organize a network of hard right
organizations to galvanize public opinion against the internationalist
elite. In a 7/19/51 letter to an American rightist named Jane Graham,
he argued, “We must organize the citizens in each state as vigilantes
against sabotage and other forms of treason. Then link them up in some
national headquarters.” Del Valle initially placed his hopes in
America Plus Inc., a Los Angeles-based group that operated in some
fourteen states. In an 8/14/51 letter to America Plus leader Irvin
Borders, del Valle stated

I am going to suggest that we have a body of Minutemen or vigilantes,
which in fact all your members are. While your movement is entirely
political, the vigilantes could in addition have a semi-military
purpose in checking the violence and sabotage, which the enemy
constantly perpetrates in our country.

In an 8/27/51 letter he sent from Buenos Aires to General Douglas
MacArthur in New York (with copies to leading right-wingers Merwin K.
Hart, Conde McGinley, Major R.H. Williams, California Senator Jack
Tenney and Lt. General A.C. Wedemeyer [Ret.]), del Valle called for
the creation of The Minutemen of America. Its most important functions
would include “Intelligence, Operations, Supply, Finance, Public
Relations and Personnel.” The “central authority of the Minutemen”
would keep the members advised of sabotage, intended sabotage, and all

subversive activities. At such times as appropriate, the necessary
action will be taken to supplement the work of the FBI in bringing
subversives to justice, and especially in forestalling them in their
nefarious activity wherever possible.

When confronting “saboteurs,” particularly inside the labor movement,
del Valle warned that “great resistance, and some violence, is to be
expected.”

In his draft articles of incorporation for the Minutemen, del Valle
said it would be organized with

one squad leader and four men each, at the smallest local level; into
platoons of one platoon leader and two or more squads each at the next
largest level; into companies of 100 men led by a centurion; commandos
led by commanders of two or more companies; into legions of two or
more commandos led by a legionary, and finally, at state level, into
divisions led by a State Councilor.

Del Valle’s draft also included a denunciation of the supposed threat
to U.S. sovereignty posed by the UN:

Further to corrupt, misinterpret and weaken our national fundamental
political philosophy we have become a member of a huge international
aggregation, known as the United Nations, into which the United States
of America has surrendered a large part of its sovereignty into the
hands of a heterogeneous conglomeration of representatives of all
races, colors, and states of enlightenment, most of whom cannot
properly “represent” their peoples because they did not select them,
and none of whose interests exactly coincide with ours.

In the United Nations Christianity, the basis of our form of
government, can only with difficulty make its voice heard in this
modern Tower of Babel amidst the din and clangor of clashing
materialistic interests, including those of Soviet Russia, our sworn
enemy and protagonists of anti-Christ.

Americans, he argued, were especially threatened with proposed
international agreements like the “so-called ‘Genocide Convention’”
which would allow a U.S. citizen “without his consent, because he has
caused mental discomfort to a certain minority, [to] be deported for
trial in a foreign land by a foreign court” and thus be denied “our
guarantees of free speech, trial by a jury, and habeas corpus.”

Del Valle elaborated on his belief that America was under siege in a
letter to Marine Corps Colonel Samuel Griffith. He told Griffith:
“should our own government unfortunately fall into the hands of the
Communist Anti-Christ, I for one will follow my great-grandfather’s
example [who fought with Wellington against the French in Spain – KC]
and will take to the hills, gun in hand, until I am killed or they are
driven out!”

LAUNCHING THE DAC

After meeting in Washington’s Army-Navy Club in 1953, del Valle, Lt.

Col. John H. Coffman, USMC (Ret.), and Lt. Col. Eugene Cowles Pomeroy
(Ret.) formed the Defenders of the American Constitution with del
Valle as president to spread the anti “One Worldist” gospel into the
highest ranks of the U.S. military. Coffman, the DAC’s secretary and
legal counsel, had seen action in Nicaragua, China, and Guadalcanal
during his service with the Marines. As for Pomeroy, he had served in
World War I as well as on intelligence missions in the Far East.  An
Executive Council also was established with Brigadier General Bonner
Fellers (Ret.) as Chairman. Other members included Major General
Claire Chennault, USAF (Ret.), one of the leading figures in the
pro-Taiwan “China Lobby,” as well as a handful of right-wingers from
civilian backgrounds.

The DAC first gained public notice in December 1953 after Coffman
filed a Habeas Corpus proceeding in the U.S. District Court in
Washington, D.C., against the Secretaries of State, Defense and the
Army in the “Keefe Case,” named after Army Private Richard Keefe, who
was serving with U.S. forces in France. After getting drunk one night
and driving off from a bistro in a stolen cab, Keefe was arrested by
local gendarmes. The French government then decided to put Keefe on
trial instead of following the usual procedure of turning him over to
American MP’s for an Army court-martial. The DAC turned the incident
into a cause celebre and argued that the Senate ratification of a
treaty placing U.S. servicemen in foreign countries under the
jurisdiction of local authorities was an abrogation of their rights
under the U.S. Constitution.

The DAC further hoped the Keefe case would aid the Senate’s passage of
the proposed “Bricker Amendment” to the Constitution. The measure,
introduced in 1951 by Ohio Senator John Bricker in the midst of the
Korean War, would have dramatically reduced the power given to the
President and Congress by the Constitution to negotiate and sign
foreign treaties by making treaty ratification essentially dependent
on the approval of the then 48 states. An article in the far right
News Bulletin of the Cinema Education Guild, reprinted by the DAC,
argued that the Bricker Amendment

will permanently curb those starry-eyed dreamers who are obsessed with
the illusion that we can solve all of our problems and emerge into a
shining new world by just eliminating all national governments . . .
and having in their place one big super-duper dictatorship to rule
“the brave new world.”

In April 1953 hearings before Congress, pro-Bricker congressmen
mercilessly attacked Secretary of State John Foster Dulles over U.S.
involvement in foreign treaties.  An exasperated Dulles responded by
insisting that the Bricker Amendment would have made even the creation
of NATO impossible; an argument that failed to win many converts.  The
Senate finally defeated the Bricker Amendment by a single vote.

Taking advantage of the controversy surrounding the DAC, del Valle ran
for governor of Maryland, only to fail miserably in the Republican
primary. The DAC also began publishing its four page monthly
newsletter Task Force, whose first issue appeared in May 1954. Its
second issue prominently featured del Valle’s “Open Letter to the
American People,” where he laid out the DAC’s views on foreign
entanglements:

We have seen the United Nations fail to promote peaceful intercourse
between its member nations, and to become a dangerous international
soapbox for the Kremlin. We have seen spies and saboteurs of the
Kremlin penetrate almost every branch of our own government. It is
reported that there are over five million illegally living in our
country. . . .We have seen our every effort to support the real
anti-communist nations, Nationalist China, South Korea, Germany and
Spain sabotaged by foreign influences. . . .

The impotence of the sinister United Nations has been amply
demonstrated. . . . Mere numerical majorities of peoples can override
our will . . . and can, through the devious means of treaties and
conventions forced upon us, open the way for the surrender of our
precious Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Beast of the Kremlin
sits in the highest councils, together with some of its puppets. Yet
Spain, the one country which has defeated communism within its borders
in a bloody conflict, is not invited to be a member.

Del Valle was not alone in his fervent opposition to the UN. The
September 1954 Task Force ran an article that quoted Indiana
Republican Senator William E. Jenner, who memorably described the UN
Charter as “the machine gun that looks like a baby carriage.”
According to Jenner, the UN would abolish the Bill of Rights and
replace it with “a body of . . . privileges and duties modeled exactly
upon the Soviet Constitution.” North Dakota Republican Congressman
Usher Burdick claimed that the “real purpose (of the UN) was to build
a world government controlled by the Communists and their dupes in the
United States.”

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF A “SUPER PATRIOT”

Pedro del Valle appeared on the surface to be a somewhat
unconventional military man turned super patriot who appealed to the
heritage of George Washington and the Founding Fathers. An examination
of his personal papers, however, provides a much more complex picture.

Although del Valle regularly denounced “big government” for limiting
individual freedom – even calling for the abolition of both the IRS
and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) – he clearly admired
Mussolini’s Italy. After the war del Valle maintained good ties with
Italy’s “Black Prince” Junio Valerio Borghese, whom he had first met
during the Ethiopia campaign. A convicted war criminal, Borghese
became one of Italy’s most powerful postwar far rightists as well as
the first president of Italy’s neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano
(MSI).  Del Valle also argued that America should back Eastern
European governments-in-exile in order to encourage “so-called
‘fascist’ groups” to build a new “underground” should the Soviet Union
overrun Europe militarily.

Del Valle was also close to Franco’s Spain. In a 2/23/50 letter to
Nevada Senator Pat McCarran, del Valle even offered to become the
first U.S. Ambassador to Spain should America recognize Franco.
Through his good friend, the Madrid-based Marques de Prat y
Nantouillet, who headed a rightwing religious movement called Active
United Christians, del Valle met Franco in 1952. He returned to Spain
on other occasions, most notably in 1964 when he tried to help the
Marques put together an anti-communist “worldwide Christian movement”
with proposed financing from Arab nations and far right Texas
millionaires. During this visit, del Valle also met with another good
friend, General José Diaz Villegas, a member of the Spanish Army
general staff who had a special interest in Africa.

As a Hispanic Catholic, del Valle had little sympathy for Nordic
racialism and Nazi ideology. His view of Nazi Germany, however, was
peculiar to say the least. In an 8/9/1962 letter to J. Paul Thornton,
a California organizer for the far-right National States Rights Party
(NSRP), del Valle said:

I knew Mussolini personally and served with his forces in Ethiopia as
U.S. observer. I never met Hitler but lived in Germany under his
creation and believe he might somehow [have] fought free of his bosses
and created a free world far better than the one we now live in. But
let this be known! Hitler was sponsored and financed by the same House
of Rothschild bankers who eventually liquidated him.

From the late 1950s on, del Valle maintained a friendly
correspondence with American Nazi Party (ANP) leader George Lincoln
Rockwell and he gave Rockwell occasional small financial
contributions.  Del Valle’s main disagreement with Rockwell seems to
have been over the fact that the Nazis were anti-Christian.  Del Valle
also had no hesitation in favorably citing a statement from Rockwell’s
Nazi successor in his memoir Semper Fidelis.

THE DAC AND “THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA”

Anastase Vonsiatsky

While working as an ITT executive in Buenos Aires in 1949, Del Valle
became involved with a group called the Suvarov Union, an
Argentine-based network of White Russian exiles. The Suvarov Union was
led by General Boris Smyslovsky-Holmston, a former White Russian
officer who had fought the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. He then
joined the German Army as “Colonel von Regenau” and led a fierce
guerrilla warfare campaign behind Soviet lines during World War II.
Smyslovsky-Holmston told del Valle that he had some 10,000 supporters
worldwide who were eager to open up offensive operations in Siberia
with American backing should the Pentagon approve such an operation.
The Suvarov Union, along with a group of far right Russian monarchists
based in New York and London, recognized the former Russian Grand Duke
Cyril – a Nazi sympathizer who lived in France during the 1930s – as
the true Czar.

Stratemeyer George Gen

The DAC’s involvement with the White Russian community led many of its
members to join a far right pseudo-chivalric order known as the
“Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta,” which
was headquartered in the small town of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. The
Military Affairs Committee of the Knights at one point included an
astonishing list of former generals and admirals, including del Valle,
Gen. Lemuel Shepherd, Lt. Gen. George Stratemeyer, Maj. Gen. Charles
Willoughby, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, Admiral Charles M. Cooke and
Rear Admiral Francis T. Spellman among others. The “Shickshinny
Knights” were led by Charles Pichel, a Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s
who maintained murky ties to the White Russian community.  Pichel
claimed that his Knights represented a branch of the Order that had
survived in Russia under the Emperor Paul I after Napoleon had
suppressed the main group. He further said he derived his order’s
legitimacy from “Czar” Cyril himself.

Part Two: The DAC and Conspiracy Theory

THE DAC AGAINST “THE UNSEEN MASTERS”

Although in outward appearance the DAC seemed to be an association of
intensely anti-Communist former military men, Del Valle and his
colleagues never truly believed that there was an independent threat
to America from Russia. It is striking just how little information
there is about Soviet-style communism in the pages of Task Force.
There are no informed discussions about Politburo changes, Soviet
foreign policy, the Sino-Soviet split, or the composition and
deployment of Soviet military forces. This is because the DAC viewed
the U.S.-Soviet conflict through an intense conspiratorial prism. The
group argued that Russia itself was secretly controlled by a
“one-worldist conspiracy” led by Jewish banking houses headquartered
in New York City.  Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch – and
not Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin – were the real
power behind twentieth century Communism. The June 1955 Task Force
claimed, “the Communist regimes are weak and their people rebellious.
The only strength they possess is the faction within the American
government which puts the Soviet Union first.” [Italics in original.]
This mysterious “faction” was itself, of course, controlled by the
Jews.

The DAC viewed contemporary world history in general as a massive
conspiracy of shadow men, puppets and politicians controlled from
behind the scenes by a small cabal of secret Jewish masters. DAC fear
mongering came in two basic forms; the first downplayed the Hand of
Zion while the second highlighted it. While Task Force perpetually
alluded to the existence of a vast shadowy conspiracy, it frequently
avoided directly accusing the Jews of being in charge and let the
reader fill in the blanks.

One example of “Anti-Semitism Lite” comes in an article entitled
“Regardless of Who Is Elected President, Invisible Rulers Govern
United States” that appeared in the October 1955 Task Force.  In it we
learn that top advisors to President Eisenhower – Including his
brother Milton and Nelson Rockefeller – exist “merely to transmit
orders handed down from higher sources much as a messenger boy
delivers a Western Union telegram.” To see the “Unseen Masters” or
“International Conspirators” as composed of “any one racial group as
is so often charged” is wrong. But “to the extent that some racial
groups’ representation in the World Conspiracy is greater” because
“they are more astute at seizing opportunity than others, more
avaricious in their greed for power, more skilled in the art of
deception and intrigue and more adept in the pursuits which
concentrate the bulk of the world’s wealth in their hands,” such
observations were accurate. Whatever the racial composition of the
conspiracy, “crack-brained” social scientists paid by wealthy
foundations and international bankers were now hard at work pushing
for “one universal government in which the industrial economy,
religious beliefs and social customs of the human race” would be
forced into a common mold resulting in “slavery for all men and
freedom for none.”

The academic eggheads and bankers who used the UN to create the World
Bank, the Mutual Trade Agreements Act, and the International Labor
Organization were now ready to add on such “little frills as Human
Rights, Genocide, UNESCO, the social mixing and inter-marriage of the
white and black races” as well as “all the other queer little
ideological touches so dear to the hearts of the boys with the tinted
lips, mincing steps and high-pitched vocal equipment.” The UN’s
proposed power to interfere in domestic legislation would especially
wreck havoc with segregation and labor law. As an article in the
February 1955 Task Force stated, “Our marriage laws and our laws with
relation to employer and employee are no part of the United Nations.”

COLONEL POMEROY’S FAMOUS MAP

In January 1955, Task Force revealed conclusive proof of the
conspirators’ master plan for world domination in the form of a map.
DAC vice president Colonel Eugene Pomeroy said that on a 1954 trip to
London he had been given the map from a brave British woman patriot
who had infiltrated the September 1952 London conference of the World
Association of Parliamentarians for World Government (also known as
the United World Federalists). The map, which divided up the world
into a series of zones and regions with longitude and latitude lines
duly noted, was the World Parliamentarians attempt to envision a
rationally organized globe and not one split along preexisting
national political lines.

The DAC, however, saw the map as the blueprint for One World
domination that would commence once the UN began changing its Charter.
The map split the U.S. into four zones, leading Pomeroy to warn that
“a Mau Mau Chief” could rule the South “as Commissar” while the states
from “the Atlantic to the Rockies quite likely would be under the
dictatorship of Huk Filipinos while the Pacific Coast states in all
likelihood could expect a Red Chinese as their overlord.” Because the
conspirators desired the standard of living throughout the world to be
uniform, they further planned to reduce the average American to
“somewhere on a level of an Australian Bushman, and practically all
American surplus production would be exported.” The One World economy
would be built on “a deforested desert of America.” Pomeroy then
warned,

The blueprint for One World will not tolerate control of immigration.
The United States can expect that its West Coast will be inundated by
hordes of Red Chinese coolies. The East and the rest of the country
can expect to be overrun by millions from the Levant, India, Malaya,
East Indies, Africa. The American branch of the white race will be
another “lost race” and would take its place in history along with the
Aztecs.

Of course to operate this global scheme, force, overwhelming force, is
essential. This has been foreseen and every national unit as now
existing must contribute recruits for an International Police. We can
look forward to being policed by Turks, Hindus, African Tribesmen and
Red Chinese distributed throughout the four regions.

Pomeroy concluded his article with the prediction that “by 1960, the
United States as we know it, Constitution and all, will disappear from
the Earth.”

Far from repudiating Pomeroy’s extraordinary claims when 1960 came
and went, del Valle embraced them. In an 8/30/63 letter to a
California far rightist West Wuichet, del Valle wrote:

As to the projected sub-division of the USA by the UN, we have
absolute proof of this from a fine British lady who became a United
World Federalist for the purpose. Task Force has published this
un-challenged three times. Make no mistake, this is part of the plan
of the take-over. The race war is just the cover for the main
operation and has fooled many otherwise intelligent White Christians.

Pomeroy’s magic map, a contemporary version of The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, was so popular that Task Force reprinted it three
times. The DAC also published the map – along with other documents
from the September 1952 London conference of the World Association of
Parliamentarians for World Government – as a special pamphlet.

FROM THE KHAZARS TO THE PROTOCOLS

Along with Anti-Semitism Lite, the DAC cognoscenti freely imbibed the
harder stuff. A far right book entitled Iron Curtain Over America,
which was published in 1951 by John Beaty, served as an ideological
linchpin for the DAC. An English professor and former head of Southern
Methodist University in Dallas, Beaty had been an Army Intelligence
(G-2) officer in Washington from1941 to 1947. Del Valle knew Beaty
and, after Beaty’s death, his widow Josephine spent many years as the
DAC’s Vice President.

Beaty argued in Iron Curtain that Communist Russia was really under
the domination of the Khazars, a group originally from the South of
Russia that had converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages.
According to Beaty, the Khazars had now taken control of both Russia
and America. In his book Religion and the Racist Right, Michael Barkun
summarizes Beatty’s argument this way:

The reforms of Czar Alexander II, misguided in Beaty’s view, gave the
“Judaized Khazars” the ability to infiltrate and corrupt Russia as a
whole. They did so with four aims in mind: the development of
communism, the fomenting of revolution, the growth of Zionism, and the
transfer of their numbers to America. Hence, he argued, they were able
not only to seize control of Russia but to provide their conspiracy
with an American base as a minority “obsessed with its own objectives
which are not those of Western Christian civilization.”

Beaty further claimed that the Khazars – after more or less taking
control over the Democratic Party – tricked America into war with
Germany to kill off as many Aryans as possible. The Khazars were
simultaneously the masters of Soviet Russia because “Stalin,
Kagonovich, Beria, Molotov, and Litvinoff all have Jewish blood or are
married to Jewesses.”

Iron Curtain went through an astonishing seventeen printings in the
1950s. Del Valle publicly endorsed it and helped Beaty distribute
copies to select military officers.  Other leading retired military
men like General George Stratemeyer – himself a member of the Military
Affairs Committee of the Charles Pichel-led Knights of Malta –
publicly praised Beaty’s opus. When asked by the Jewish
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to repudiate Iron Curtain, Stratemeyer
refused to do so and instead publicly attacked the ADL.

Del Valle’s conviction that Russia was under Jewish control led him to
a major clash with Common Sense, a hard right magazine famous for its
obsession with Jewish power. A major patron of Common Sense, del Valle
served as president of the journal’s parent body, the Christian
Educational Fund.  In its 6/5/1967 issue – around the time of the Six
Day War – Common Sense broke with orthodoxy and ran a story suggesting
that Joseph Stalin has actually saved Russia from a Trotsky-led Jewish
takeover; an opinion not entirely unknown inside the far right. Del
Valle, however, was so outraged by the article that he broke his
long-standing ties to the journal.

Del Valle also had no qualms about citing from The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. In an April 12, 1961 speech before the United States
Daughters of 1812, he repeatedly invoked The Protocols to prove the
existence of an “Invisible Government” that was now hard at work
plotting to reduce America to a province or set of provinces in a
future World Government centered around the UN. Del Valle also used
The Protocols to buttress his claim that “Communism and Socialism”
were first introduced to Russia by the Invisible Government to destroy
that nation.

Part Three: The DAC and the Paramilitary Right

FROM THE CONSTITUTION PARTY TO GUERRILA WARFARE

In 1960 the DAC achieved new prominence inside the far right after
Brig. General Merritt B. Curtis USMC (Ret.), the Secretary and General
Counsel for the DAC, was chosen as the presidential candidate of the
Constitution Party, a third party effort set up to compete in that
year’s presidential election.  The DAC’s role in the Constitution
Party seems to have served another purpose as well since there is
evidence that the DAC attempted to organize “militia type” networks
under the guise of electorial politics. Del Valle’s papers show that
the former general played a role in the creation of a shadowy
paramilitary network that divided up sections of the United States
into four “zones.”  In a 7/23/1963 letter to Brig. General W.L. Lee,
USAF (Ret.), del Valle said that it was agreed to organize everything
“under cover of voter organization [for the Constitution Party – KC],
which is not inconsistent with our being an effective state militia as
well.” Del Valle explained his approach to organizing resistance in
the “USSA (United Slave States of America)” this way:

My struggle is two-fold: 1. Strictly legal, constitutional, political
efforts to restore constitutional government, and 2. alerting all
White Christian Americans to the nature of the enemy within and urging
that they use Article II of the Bill of Rights to arm and organize for
the defense of their homes, families, community, state and country.

Rev GLK Smith and The Christian Identity Movement

From the 1950s on, del Valle was a featured speaker at countless far
right gatherings that included representatives from the KKK, Christian
Identity, the Minutemen, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and
innumerable other far right splinter groups. He also developed his own
information network to keep him abreast of developments inside the
radical right.

COUP FEARS IN AMERICA

In an 8/12/1966 letter to the American rightist Mary Davidson, del
Valle suggested that the solution to America’s problems was clear:
“the only way to cut the Gordian knot is by a military coup d’etat.”
Throughout the early 1960s, in fact, the fear of a coup d’etat from
either the right or left was surprisingly commonplace.

Rev Wesley A. Swift – Christian Identity

On November 24, 1961, the prominent American syndicated newspaper
columnist Drew Pearson published a story in the Washington Post about
the increasing turn to the far right by high-ranking U.S. military
men. Pearson singled out Major General Edwin Walker, head of the 24th
Infantry Division in Germany, for politicizing his troops with
rightwing propaganda.  Pearson highlighted a letter to one of Walker’s
military supporters, Arch Roberts, from the French rightist Hillaire
du Berrier, who compared the Kennedy Administration’s crackdown on
Walker to de Gaulle’s attack on the rebel French generals who led the
O.A.S. The article also cited del Valle who, Pearson said, comes close
“to urging armed insurrection” when he made statements calling for the
“organization of a powerful armed resistance force to defeat the aims
of the Usurpers and bring about a return to constitutional
government.”

The fear that American generals were thinking along O.A.S. lines
helped inspire a series of liberal cultural icons from the early 1960s
like Seven Days in May and Doctor Strangelove.  Nor can there be any
doubt that far right groups like Robert De Pugh’s Minutemen did in
fact fantasize about fighting a guerrilla war against the
establishment. Two books, The John Franklin Letters (by an anonymous
author) and Get Ye Up into the High Mountains by the Reverend Dallas
Roquemore, capture the mentality of many of these far right would-be
Che Guevaras. The John Franklin Letters was premised on the idea that
after the U.S. has been betrayed into the hands of UN bureaucrats, a
civil war ensues that is led by a paramilitary group called the
“Rangers.”  According to The John Franklin Letters:

The beginning of the end comes in 1963, when the World Health
Organization sends in a Yugoslav inspector, under powers granted by
the President of the United States, to search any house he chooses.
The Yugoslav discovers in the house of a good American a file of
anti-Communist magazines, seizes them as deleterious to the mental
health of the community, and is shot by the American, who escapes into
the woods. But the infiltration continues. By 1970, the United States
has become part of the World Authority dominated by the
Soviet-Asian-African bloc, and this Authority suspends the country’s
right to govern itself because of the “historic psychological
genocide” against the Negro race. United Nations administrators,
mostly Red Chinese, are sent in to rule. Harlem, triumphant, arises
and loots the liquor stores. The city proletariat, its sense of
decency destroyed by public housing, begins to raid the suburbs. In
short order, twenty million Americans are “done away with,” while the
people are subjected to torture by blowtorch and rock-n’-roll, the
latter on television.

Meanwhile the good American begins to fight back. As far back as 1967,
John Franklin and his friends had been stockpiling rifles. And now
they act. Franklin describes in gory detail a total of fourteen
patriotic murders: two by fire, one by hammer, one by strangling, two
by bow and arrow, one by defenestration, one by drowning and the rest.
These brave actions are sufficient to turn the tide – despite the
atomic bomb, a huge invasion army, and absolute terror. By 1976, the
people all over the world go into the streets, and everywhere
Communism falls.

Roquemore’s Get Ye Up Into the High Mountain served as a training
manual both for guerrilla warfare and survivalism and included advice
on how to properly mutilate the dead body of the Communist enemy. Like
The John Franklin Letters, Roquemore’s book is also premised on a U.S.
civil war breaking out sometime around 1970. Although distributed by
the far right Liberty Lobby, Get Ye was produced by an extreme
rightist organization called The Soldiers of the Cross led by Kenneth
Goff. Goff reported that Roquemore, a Baptist Minister, had also
worked “with our cadet groups for several years and had developed a
corps of young people who can exist in the mountains under the most
hazardous conditions.”

THE PERILS OF “OPERATION WATER MOCCASIN”

While liberals fretted that the American military top brass was about
to launch a rightwing coup d’etat, the notion that the “Eastern
Establishment” elite was conspiring to sell the nation out to the UN
became an idée fixe inside the far right. Campaigning in the 1962
California Republican primary for governor, Richard Nixon found
himself being bombarded with a pamphlet “with the United Nations
insignia on the cover, Department of State Publication 7277.” The
pamphlet was presented as proof  “that the government was about to
sign over America’s armed forces to a Soviet Colonel.” In reality it
was a typical UN document outlining the idea of the creation of a UN
Peace Force sometime in the distant future to help prepare for a world
free from atomic weapons. As the current UN assistant general
secretary was a Soviet colonel, however, the far right was convinced
that the document really revealed a UN plot to disarm America and hand
it over to the Russkies.

A March 1963 Task Force story on a planned U.S. military maneuver
codenamed “Operation Water Moccasin” helped launch another panic wave.
According to the Army, Water Moccasin was a planned exercise in
counter-insurgency involving 2,000 to 3,000 troops – along with
“foreign military participation” – that was scheduled to take place
over some 2,500 acres in the backwoods of Georgia. Task Force insisted
that Water Moccasin was really a cover for “a crash program to disarm
the United States of America and make us a province of the United
Nations.” The scare set off by Task Force and other far right outlets
forced the Army to dramatically limit the scope of the deployment
after frantic calls began pouring in to Congressmen about Water
Moccasin.

Nor was Water Moccasin the only plot against the Republic. The July
21, 1963 New York Times recorded a host of others:

35,000 Communist Chinese troops bearing arms and wearing deceptively
dyed powder-blue uniforms are poised on the Mexican border, about to
invade San Diego; the U.S. has turned over – or will at any moment –
its Army, Navy and Air Force to the command of a Russian colonel in
the United Nations; almost every well-known American or free-world
leader is, in reality, a top Communist agent; a U.S. Army
guerrilla-warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is
in actuality a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over our
country.

Del Valle’s papers also provide rare glimpses into the underground
world of the far right. He was in contact with the far rightist Col.
William P. Gale (Ret.), whom he described as “a natural leader and a
fighter and perhaps miscast in a purely political role.” Nonetheless,
Gale was “doing a fine job of another sort out there, preparing for
the inevitable clash between Christianity and the anti-Christians.”
Del Valle, however, had problems with Gale and other British
Israelites like Wesley Smith. Smith, in particular, was seen as
“wildly anti-Catholic.”  Gale, however, seems to have been considered
indispensable. There is also a suggestion that Gale was acting on
orders from some unidentified group above him.

Exactly how much del Valle’s paramilitary network operated in reality
– as opposed to Walter Mitty-like fantasy – is hard to determine and
many questions remain unanswered.  It seems undeniable, however, that
the DAC was, in fact, committed to building an armed underground
resistance movement to the “New World Order” even if the scope of such
activity remains highly murky to this day.

Part Four: The DAC and the League of Empire Loyalists

FIRST OVERTURES

The DAC and LEL were set up within a year of each other; the DAC
sometime in mid to late 1953 and the LEL in October 1954. (The LEL’s
publication Candour, however, began publishing in late October 1953,
almost simultaneous with the DAC’s creation.) There were other
intriguing similarities. Like the DAC, the LEL had some leading
retired military men in its ranks, most prominently Field-Marshal Lord
Ironside, who had headed up the British expedition to overthrow the
Soviet government in 1919. Ironside was a member of the LEL’s General
Council, along with the Earl of Buchan, Lt. General Sir Balfour
Hutchison, Brigadier A.R. Wallis and other retired military men.  Del
Valle was also a friend of Admiral Charles Freeman (Ret.).  Freeman
became the U.S. agent for Kenneth De Courcy’s Intelligence Digest
after the war. De Courcy, in turn, had extensive contacts with
far-right British military and intelligence circles favored by the
LEL.

The LEL’s founder and leader Arthur Keith Chesterton (better known as
“A.K.”) was the cousin of the famous writer G.K. Chesterton. A
one-time member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF),
Chesterton broke with Mosley in 1938. During World War II, he
supported England’s efforts against Hitler and thus never had to face
the charge of treason that haunted Mosley throughout his postwar
career.  In the late 1940s, Chesterton even held a fairly prestigious
job in Lord Beaverbrook’s press empire.

>From its inception, the LEL combined “rightwing Tory Empire loyalism
and conspiratorial anti-Semitism.”  Its members regularly heckled
speakers and disrupted political meetings, most famously the 1958 Tory
Political Conference in Blackpool that culminated in fist fights
between League members and Tory stewards. (After that debacle, the
Tories implemented strong measures against LEL sympathizers in its
ranks.) The LEL also served as the

most important training ground for the next generation of British
neo-fascists and extreme loyalists. It contained men like John
Tyndall, Martin Webster, Colin Jordan and John Bean, men who, after
leaving Chesterton and indulging in the Nazi fantasy, returned (with
the exception of Jordan) to provide the leadership of the National
Front. Chesterton was the focal point of ‘respectability’ around which
these men circulated.

The journalist George Thayer, who interviewed leading members of the
LEL, summarized its program this way: 1) British sovereignty should be
maintained at all cost; 2) instead of liquidating its Empire, England
should continue to build it; and 3) Third World immigration to England
must be stopped. For the LEL

Any tendency towards world government or international alliances that
requires a partial relinquishing of British sovereignty is an anathema
. . . The UN, NATO, SEATO, CENTO, and the Common Market are all
“monster plots to rob Britain of her independence and strength.”

In November 1954 the DAC’s co-founder Col. Eugene Pomeroy spent eight
days in London where he held extensive talks with LEL leaders. Pomeroy
told Task Force readers that the DAC and LEL “have in common the
driving force of the same ideology.”  In a more candid 11/10/54 letter
to del Valle, Pomeroy reported that the LEL felt that “the Jews seem
to exercise even greater influence here over the British Parliament
and politicians than they do at home.” The group was firmly convinced
that Winston Churchill and his son Randolph (along with Anthony Eden)
were “the abject slaves of Bernie Baruch.”

The LEL shared the DAC’s obsession with the “hidden hand.” One 1950s
LEL pamphlet, The Menace of World Government, claimed

There is a hidden power, which only to close students of international
politics is a revealed power, wielded by a known group of
international financial interests, who brought into existence the UN
and the International Bank as instruments to secure its further
advance to world domination. It has openly declared war on nationhood
and racial pride. It approves of every approach, direct or functional,
which will render mankind defenseless against its cold war in the West
and the hot war in Asia to stampede us into NATO, the European Union,
and their projected Pacific counterparts. It uses dread of the H-bomb
to try to secure acceptance of its full World Government. Once our
sovereignty is abandoned, and we are completely at its mercy, it will
drop its disguise as the foe of Russian aggression and betray us to
the Soviet conspiracy as surely as it betrayed us at Yalta through the
incredible simpleton Roosevelt and his incredible adviser, Alger Hiss.
Hiss, let it be known, was only a fugleman. His protectors were
powerful men who constituted – and still constitute – the effective
hidden government of the United States.

FROM THE NEW UNHAPPY LORDS TO THE NATIONAL FRONT

The LEL’s polemics against the “one world order” culminated with
the1965 publication of Chesterton’s book, The New Unhappy Lords (NUL).
In NUL, Chesterton set out to document a conspiratorial plot by “Money
Power” to establish “world tyranny” by using both “Communism and Loan
Capitalism as twin instruments with which to subdue and govern, not
the British nations alone, but all mankind.”  NUL quickly went through
several editions and it continues to be sold today. Its success led
Chesterton’s biographer to remark that A.K’s “extremely doubtful
privilege” is “to go down in modern history as the man most
responsible for keeping alive, spreading, and developing the British
tradition of conspiracy thinking.”

Writing in seemingly reasonable tones, in NUL Chesterton attacks
British foreign policy for the loss of the Suez Canal and other former
colonies as well as for the government’s support for Third World
immigration. He also criticized British involvement in a “Federated
Europe,” the European Common Market, the Treaty of Rome, and any
attempt to implement a NAFTA-like “Free Trade Area” that would bring
Britain’s tariff policies into line with the Common Market:

This would have meant joining the British economy to competitive
economies, and the reservations intended to safeguard the British
farmers and overseas producers must soon have been jettisoned, the
complementary economy covered by the Imperial Preference system would
have been abandoned and the British market flooded by products from
Common Market countries with a lower standard of living.

Chesterton, however, used his critique of what he saw as specific
failures by the British establishment to prove that “Money Power’s”
hidden hand now pulled England’s strings. His attacks on such elite
groups as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), the
American Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), and the Bilderberger
Society as well as on organizations like NATO and the UN, served a
larger narrative goal; namely, proving the existence of a vast Jewish
conspiracy. In a chapter entitled “Is the Conspiracy Jewish?” he
claims that “the major Zionist objective” is no less than “One World.”
“Moscow and Peking” were “no more than branch headquarters of the
conspiracy” whose “supreme headquarters” for the “overthrow of the
West” was actually based in New York. According to A.K.,

World Jewry is the most powerful single force on earth and it follows
that all the major policies which have been ruthlessly pursued through
the last several decades must have the stamp of Jewish approval.

Indeed, “when Hitler rebelled against the Money Power,” World Jewry
decided to “smash him and his barter system.”

Not long after the publication of New Unhappy Lords, Chesterton LEL’s
played a pivotal role in the 1967 founding of the National Front (NF),
England’s most significant postwar far-right party. The NF was
established out of a merger of the LEL, the British National Party,
the Greater Britain Movement, and the Racial Preservation Society.
Chesterton served as the NF’s chairman for its first four years.
Unlike the DAC-backed Constitution Party, the NF was a real political
force until the late 1970s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Party stole
much of its anti-immigrant thunder and the group spiraled into rapid
decline.

DEL VALLE AND CHESTERTON

Del Valle and Chesterton maintained regular contacts for two decades.
In 1962, for example, Chesterton asked del Valle to supply him with
contact addresses for American rightists who might be willing to help
Candour out of some serious financial problems.  After Del Valle sent
Chesterton some names, Austin Brooks, the LEL’s number two man, then
visited the United States in 1963 on a fundraising tour.  A.K. also
sent del Valle updates on his trips to South Africa and Rhodesia.

Lt. Col. Wm. Potter Gale – Constitution Party

In 1966 Chesterton asked del Valle to write an introduction to a
proposed American edition of NUL that the Chicago-based rightwing
publisher Henry Regnery had agreed to issue. Regnery, however, backed
out of the deal at the last minute. Chesterton next approached another
American conservative publisher, Devin Adair, but it too rejected the
book.  At Chesterton’s request, del Valle searched for yet another
American publisher. Through Josephine Beaty, the DAC Vice President
and widow of Iron Curtain over America author John Beaty, del Valle
found OMNI Press/Christian Book Club located in Hawthorne, California.
When OMNI’s edition of NUL appeared, it included a short introduction
by del Valle that praised Chesterton for bringing the reader “face to
face with the fact that a conspiracy to rule the world does exist and
that it is rapidly approaching its goal.” NUL also showed that “the
powerhouse of this conspiracy resides not in Moscow, nor in London,
but in New York.” For del Valle, The New Unhappy Lords was “a treasure
house of facts which patriots of all nations can use in the struggle
against the Satanic power of the Conspiracy.”

SAMOVARS AND SPOOKS

The DAC and LEL were also linked to the same White Russian network
that del Valle first encountered when he was an ITT executive in
Buenos Aires.  Task Force’s special London correspondent George
Knupffer embodied these connections. Born in Saint Petersburg,
Knupffer was a leading figure in the White Russian monarchist
community in London. He published his own newsletter, The Plain
Speaker, while also contributing occasional articles to Candour.
Knupffer first met Colonel Pomeroy in London in November 1954 as a
representative of “His Imperial Highness” the Grand Duke Vladimir, the
son of the late Grand Duke Cyril. Knupffer also helped lead Mladorossy
(Union of Young Russia), a far-right and extremely anti-Semitic
political organization that maintained a quasi-military wing known as
the Russian Revolutionary Forces (RRF). A former intelligence officer
himself,   Pomeroy used his visit to London to seek out contacts with
East European exiles such as General Wladyslaw Anders, a Polish
military leader who wanted the West to back a Polish exile army.
Captain Henry Kerby, the man who arranged Pomeroy’s meeting with
Anders, was a former MI6 officer and Russian expert turned Tory
parliamentarian. Kerby, in turn, maintained longstanding close ties to
Knupffer.

In his first article for Task Force in December 1955, Knupffer claimed
that New York banking houses like Kuhn Loeb were behind the Bolshevik
Revolution. He then argued that Russia was no longer completely under
the control of the “conspiracy” that had its roots in a two-thousand
year old clash of “two Messianisms”; namely, the Christian world view
that looked to the “world beyond the grave, of life everlasting” and
the messianism that focused on “this world of material power and
possessions.” The Russian Communist regime, Knupffer said, was now
being forced “slowly but surely” to adjust itself “to the wishes and
needs of the Russian people.” Since Moscow “is no longer an effective
tool for the achievement of world domination by the materialistic
messianists,”

if we continue to see only the enemy in Moscow, we will be stabbed in
the back by the enemy in New York, who wants to lead us. But that
enemy, like the one in Russia, is only using America as a base.

Knupffer concluded that both Russia and America were “victims of a
subtle and powerful subversive force which they have not recognized in
time.”

In 1956 the DAC touched off a heated controversy after Task Force
reprinted a lengthy attack on a Russian exile group known as the
National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) by Peter J.
Huxley-Blythe, then a protégé of Knupffer.  The article, “Insecure
Security,” accused the CIA of financing the NTS that Huxley-Blythe
claimed was really under KGB control. Knupffer and other White Russian
monarchists especially despised the NTS because it had collaborated
with CIA plans to balkanize the former Russian Empire by supporting an
independent Ukraine.  Huxley-Blythe’s piece so enraged the Solidarists
that Task Force was forced to print a rebuttal by NTS’s Washington
representative to avoid a lawsuit.

Knupffer and del Valle also tried to develop a far right network
around the globe that included a proposed “World Committee for Truth
and Liberty.” In a 6/26/1967 letter to del Valle, Knupffer reported
that he had visited Rhodesia, South Africa, Portugal, and Spain to
seek backing for the committee.  In his 7/3/1967 letter replying to
Knupffer, del Valle noted:

There already exists a measure of cooperation between our nationalists
and those of other countries, especially yours. Coordination would
increase our effectiveness. Chesterton and I have helped one another
in a small way . . . I too was in Spain in May and I believe I have
good sympathetic contacts there. You may be certain I understand that
the sources of help must not be mentioned. I’m sure [Wickliffe]
Vennard, Oliver [R.P. Oliver, a leading American far rightist] and
[Frank] Serpico [OMNI's publisher] understand the need for discretion.

Finally, both Del Valle and Knupffer became entangled in the weird
“Knights of Malta” group headed by Charles Pichel and Del Valle’s
continued ties to Pichel, whom Knupffer despised, would eventually end
their collaboration.

Part Five: Conspiracy Theory, Globalization, and the Contemporary
Right

THE PERSISTANCE OF CONSPIRACY THEORY

Even as British National Front flourished in the1970s, the American
right populist third party movement led by Alabama Governor George
Wallace collapsed in the wake of the Nixon Administration’s “Southern
Strategy” and the attempted assassination of Wallace. America’s defeat
in Vietnam – combined with the Watergate crisis – led to a further
weakening of the right. The 1970s also saw a dramatic decline of the
DAC, although Task Force continued to publish and del Valle grew
closer to the far-right Liberty Lobby.  After del Valle’s death on
April 28, 1978 at age 85, however, the DAC ceased to exist.

The DAC’s addiction to conspiracy theory never waned from its founding
to its demise. A conspiratorial mentality, in fact, seems endemic to
the American far right. In the late 1950s, for example, the John Birch
Society (JBS) arose as the preeminent group on the far right. Although
the JBS rejected anti-Semitism, it proved incapable of abandoning a
conspiratorial mindset. JBS founder Robert Welsh even famously accused
then President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a conscious agent of the
Kremlin.  In the 1960s a more popular version of the idea that the
“Eastern elite” was engaged in weakening America for the benefit of
Communism was promulgated in a series of rightwing best sellers; most
famously John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason and two Phyllis
Schlafly books, A Choice Not an Echo and The Gravediggers. Activists
from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign spread these and
similar writings across the country.

During the early 1980s, the militia movement rediscovered arguments
first advanced by groups like the DAC. Contemporary militia polemics
about “UN invaders” on American soil, for example, recycle myths first
developed in the1950s. These fantasies were updated to include – among
other things – plots involving UFOs, weather control, Satanic cults,
the Trilateral Commission and Y2K. We have also seen charges that Bill
Clinton murdered one of his close White House advisors and dumped his
body in a federal park; Hillary Clinton is a lesbian witch; George
Bush Sr. used the phrase “new world order” to speak in code to his
Masonic-Illuminati cronies; and that Yale’s Skull and Bones fraternity
secretly runs America on behalf of the Illuminati. Although the
militia movement covers a wide variety of individuals and
organizations, the seemingly endless proliferation of wild conspiracy
theories remain central to it.

THE RADICAL RIGHT

As events have shown, the “hidden hand” model – far from being
obsolete – possesses a remarkable ability to mutate with
circumstances. The hidden hand model resembles a basic plot narrative
or fable that exists in a perpetual state of endless mutation of
characters and sub-plots while never losing it major themes.
Understanding the way rigidly prefabricated worldviews function as
internally consistent interpretative systems may usefully supplement
more conventional “cause and effect” social science attempts to
understand the radical right. Because revolutionary utopian groups
frequently derive their identity from a hyper-ideological outlook that
does not neatly map onto conventional political logic, we must take
this reality into consideration.

One fundamental question – for me anyway – when looking at
anti-globalization movements from both the left and the right is the
degree to which they are committed to what is essentially a skeptical
(as opposed to Jacobin) Enlightenment view of humanity that posits
parliamentary politics as part of a continual debate over the nature
of the good. Groups that reject such an approach are frequently
predisposed to conspiratorial interpretations of history – no matter
how divorced such theories may be from material reality. They can also
have a potential “revolutionary” dimension whether or not they
function on the far right, far left or in the garb of religious
movements/New Age sects. Extremist groups frequently view pluralistic
discourse, parliamentary government, and civil society itself – in the
form of democratic capitalist, democratic socialist, or even moderate
theocratic or monarchic forms – as intrinsically evil. In such a view,
the persistence of civil society obfuscates

1)        the machinations of a monolithic ruling class for the far left;
2)        the domination of evil international Jewish bankers and their
Illuminati cohorts for the far right; and
3)        the relentless spread of godless atheism for fundamentalist
Christians, fanatical Jews, Muslim zealots or New Age millenarian
sects.

In all these cases the fundamental target of critique is, for lack of
a better word, the “system” itself. As we have seen in the case of
both the DAC and LEL, what such oppositional groups may perceive as an
adverse result of globalization – which for the far left could be the
increase in the power of multinational corporations, for the far right
the rise of foreign immigration, and for the domestic religious right
the introduction of competing religious ideologies (all of which are
not in themselves intrinsically irrational observations) – are simply
used to prove the existence of the larger hidden hand conspiracy.

THE JANUS FACE OF THE ETHNOCRATIC RIGHT

For purposes of this analysis, I would distinguish between two kinds
of groups on the right as “ideal types”; namely, the traditional
conservative, either in the Edmund Burke Anglo-American vein or the
Christian Democratic Continental tradition on the one hand, and the
revolutionary groupuscular right on the other.  Populist right
movements such as Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National, Gianfranco
Fini’s Alleanza Nationale, Jörg Haider’s Freiheitliche Partei
Österreichs and similar formations fluctuate between both poles. They
may even embrace an ostensible commitment to a “long march through the
institutions” while holding on to a conspiratorial way of seeing the
world.  Roger Griffin describes new right populist political parties
that accept Enlightenment discourse to some degree (as opposed to
merely mimicking pre-war fascist ideology) as being based on
“ethnocratic liberalism” which he defines as

a type of party politics which is not technically a form of fascism,
or even a disguised form, for it lacks the core palingenetic vision .
. . Rather it enthusiastically embraces the liberal system, but
considers only one ethnic group full members of civil society . . .
This contaminated, restrictive form of liberalism poses considerable
taxonomic problems because, while it aims to retain liberal
institutions and procedures and remain economically and diplomatically
part of the international liberal democratic community, its axiomatic
denial of the universality of human rights predisposes it to behave
against ethnic out groups as violently as a fascist regime.

To my way of thinking when examining such hybrid formations, one
size simply does not fit all. Nor are all these parties frozen in time
and incapable of mutation. Griffin’s definition may be more apt in
regard to France’s Front National, Germany’s Partei die Republikaner,
and Belgium’s Vlaams Blok but such parties, it should be noted, also
have a long history of fascist (or Vichy) nostalgia. But does this
same model also apply to Norway’s Fremskrittspartei, Holland’s Lijst
Pim Fortuyn, Italy’s Lega Nord or Denmark’s Dansk Folkepartiei? Do
these parties “axiomatically” deny the universality of human rights
just because they object to illegal immigration, high taxes, or full
integration into the EU? And where does one place more ambiguous
parties like the AN that modeled its own turn away from fascist
nostalgia and towards the center-right on the example set by Italy’s
Communist Party?

While traditional leftist “watchdog” groups often operate on the basis
of a 1930s paradigm in which the rise of the populist center-right is
invariably prelude to a seizure of power by the far right, this way of
thinking may prove as misguided as that of those 1930s American
rightists who were convinced that the growth of Roosevelt’s New Deal
was paving the way for the Bolshevik takeover of the United States. We
may even see the growth of European right parties that mimic more
American themes involving low taxes, law and order, small government,
and even certain libertarian tendencies rather than more orthodox
fascist positions. After all, the right populist parties in Denmark
and Norway first arose as popular movements against high taxation, a
model that also played an important role in the 1970s America right
electorial revival.  Even the widespread popularity of former New York
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani inside an increasingly crime-infested urban
France may be indicative of this broader trend.

As elements of the European right pass from “groupuscularity” to
mass politics at least some groups (or some fractions inside them) may
feel increasingly inclined to abandon a commitment to conspiratorial
thinking when dealing with issue of globalization. Against this, I
would posit the continuing influence of a more marginal and frequently
violent fringe right that still inhabit a crepuscular world somewhere
between Adolf Hitler and Madame Blavatsky.  This world – where
conspiracy theory easily blends with racial determinism and rampant
anti-Semitism – continues to hold high the banner of fascist
revolution.

One could view the history of the 1970s British NF – which suffered a
series of bruising factional struggles between more conventional
orthodox Tory-leaning elements and the core fascist nostalgia clique
of John Tyndall, Martin Webster and their skinhead supporters for
control over the party – in this light. It was in fact the NF’s
inability to purge fascists and anti-Semites like Tyndall and Webster
from top leadership positions that dramatically contributed to its
political marginality in spite of its popular views against
immigration. In that sense the NF may have been the result of two
outside bodies of political gravity, the hard groupuscular right and
the right Tory establishment, covertly fighting each other for the
future direction of the party. The same may be true in regard to the
fights between Le Pen and Bruno Mégret in the FN and between Fini and
Pino Rauti inside the old MSI.

A rough model that incorporates the groupuscular right, the right
populists, and the establishment right might look something like this:

Right Radical Groupuscule        Right Populist Party        Established
Conservative Party
Strong tendency to conspiracy theory,
Hatred of conventional parliamentary politics
Strong ideological commitment the main force holding the group
together

Prone to deadly factionalism inside rigid internal structure

Base frequently from fringe bohemian elements of society / Pagan,
atheist, extreme Christian
Examples:
Unite Radicale/Young Europe/National Alliance        Fluctuating influence of
conspiracy theory and ideology, waivers between parliamentary and
groupuscule practices and worldviews
Frequently has both authoritarian/charismatic leader as well as strong
factional opponents willing to split from the party

Marginalized elements of established religious groups (Lefebrve
Catholics/Ulster Protestants) and small businessmen

Examples: Front National, Alleanza Nationale/1970s British National
Front        Rejects conspiracy theory Parliamentary Practice
Tendency to pragmatically moderate ideology in order to maintain power

Marked by internal faction fighting within context of broader unity
and willingness to compromise
Backed by established religious and business tendencies

Examples: Tory Party
Christian Social Union
Christian Democrats
→
↔                                                   ←

There may well exist fuzzy (and at times not so fuzzy) crossovers
between elements of the Janus-face “ethnocratic” right and the more
“groupuscular” radical right, including a shared interest in
conspiracy theory. However, political formations from the right may
also continue further down the parliamentary path just as the Italian
Communist Party did from the left.  One possible way to determine
where the actual center of political gravity lies inside such parties
would be to seriously examine both the extent to which a particular
party’s literature and rhetoric either actively promotes or panders to
variations on the hidden hand conspiracy theory in explaining issues
related to globalization as well as how influential and widespread
these views are among the group’s members.

Conclusion

Looking back on the DAC and LEL, it is clear that they were among the
first radical right groups to operate in an “interdependent world” and
with the multinational institutions – the United Nations, the World
Bank, NATO, SEATO, and the European Common Market – that helped shape
it. Far from being “isolationists” in the case of the DAC – or
“anti-American” as the LEL is sometimes described – both groups saw
themselves as part of a worldwide “counter-conspiracy” against their
imagined enemies.  Using conservative rhetoric and patriotic images,
they actually expressed deeply radical views directed against the
established political, cultural and economic elites of their time. The
ferocity of their fervor against the “one world order” strongly
suggests that they didn’t simply react to the creation of groups like
the UN or the World Bank in a cause and effect way. If anything, I
would argue that it was their pre-existing conspiratorial ideology
that allowed them to see such institutions as demonic in the first
place. Because this was so, their views were largely immune to logical
refutation, as the case of Colonel Pomeroy’s famous map so vividly
demonstrates.

Yet an unswerving commitment to a rigid conspiratorial worldview can
easily doom a group to political marginality. In the case of the DAC,
it is clear that it first emerged not from the streets but from former
high-ranking U.S. military officers who mirrored beliefs held in
broader layers of society.  At its inception, the DAC maintained ties
to important sections of the Republican Party just as the LEL included
sympathizers from the Tories. Yet as anti-Semitism continued to be
further and further discredited in the 1950s – while the threat of
Soviet Communism increased – the DAC and LEL remained incapable of
ideologically adapting to the new reality. As a result, they quickly
went from being influence peddlers on the fringe of well-established
parties and institutions and entered into a shadow world of political
and social marginality from which they never returned. Their very
marginality, paradoxically, led them to play an ideologically – and at
times organizationally – significant role in the rise of new radical
populist tendencies from the right.

Finally, a more careful examination of the complex role that
conspiracy theory plays both within the far right and the larger
community as a whole may, I suggest, give us further insight into
predicting how such groups will respond to broader issues related to
globalization. The power that conspiratorial thinking of the most
virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Western form now holds in large
sections of Muslim societies further reminds us that the issues
addressed in this paper are far from being limited to either the
United States or Europe.

An investigative journalist, Kevin Coogan is the author of Dreamer of
the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International
(New York: Autonomedia, 1999).

Brief Notes On The Political Importance of Secret Societies

By Jonathan Marshall
Webmaster Note: This article appears to miss the point regarding exactly WHY it was so important

to so many right wing  factions to artificially create a “believable pretender to the Czarist throne.”

Without the presence of someone who could claim, correctly or not, a relation or connection as the heir to

the throne of the Czarist Monarchy, the efforts at unseating the Communist leadership would be

greatly diminished and neutralized.   This is exactly why the Communists assassinated all the Romanoffs.

And this also lends credibility to the so-called Pichel Order of SMOM which now has its HQ in Benton,

Tennessee.   People like Pedro del Valle, James Angleton, the John Birchers and Anastase Vonsiatsky, deMohrenschildt’s

immediate superior, all had a vested interest in regaining the rights to  the Czarist leadership position after they took care

of JFK and brought down the Iron Curtain.   Vonsiatsky had been promised the role of the newly appointed Fascist

leader or World Vohjd of a conquered Communist Russia by von Ribbentrop, Himmler and Hitler himself as Vonsiatsky

often bragged to his Putnam, CT neighbors and friends.   Goliniewski would have been the titular head of this new

Fascist Czarist empire, but Vonsiatsky would have been the real leader.

United States
Anna Anderson was not the only Anastasia claimant; her chief rival in the United
States was Mrs Eugenia Smith. Smith’s claims, although considered shaky by the best
scholars, were powerfully supported by the testimony of one Michael M. Goleniewski,
who hailed from Poland yet claimed to have known Anastasia as a child.
In his Polish identity, Goleniewski was, verifiably, perhaps the most important official
from East Bloc intelligence ever to defect into the arms of the CIA. Goleniewski
joined the Soviet intelligence apparatus in Poland at the end of WW2, and by 1955 had
reached the rank of colonel and deputy chief of Glowny Zarzad Informacji, the Polish
intelligence agency. His responsibilities included counterintelligence and foreign
technical espionage. In April 1958 he contacted the Americans and began passing top
secret information to the West. At Christmas, 1960, fearing that his cover was blown,
he defected to the United States. In all, he transmitted or brought with him more than
five thousand pages of documents on Soviet, East German and Polish intelligence.
His most important contribution was in the field of counterintelligence, the murky
world of plugging leaks and catching ‘moles’ who work secretly for foreign services.
According to his admirers, Goleniewski’s leads and information led to the capture of a
small army of Soviet ‘moles’ in Britain, Sweden, West Germany, Israel, Denmark and
France. His most important catch was the high ranking MI6 official George Blake,
whose unmasking led in turn to the exposure of Kim Philby, the most famous ‘mole’ of
all time.
Most disturbing of all, however, for the CIA, was Goleniewski’s claim that the East
Bloc intelligence services were receiving timely information from a source or sources
within the CIA itself. According to one CIA counterintelligence officer, Goleniewski
was ‘the first and primary source’ on a ‘mole’ in the Agency. In short, if Goleniewski is
to be believed, the CIA was as penetrated by Russian agents as the British services had
been. His accusations led to a controversy that has raged for more than twenty years
over the reliability of US intelligence. The CIA’s counterintelligence chief, James
Angleton, was convinced that Goleniewski was a KGB plant or provocation agent, and
distanced the Agency from the Polish defector. Nonetheless, Angleton came to accept
the claim of a later defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, who confirmed that the CIA had indeed
been penetrated. (18)
Among the Americans identified by Goleniewski as Soviet agents was none other than
Henry Kissinger, whom Goleniewski claimed to have recruited shortly after WW2
while working in the Army’s counterintelligence corps in Germany. This claim -
supported by former Army intelligence agent Frank A. Capell – naturally undermined
Goleniewski’s credibility in some circles. More damaging, however, wasGoleniewski’s claim not to be Polish at all, but rather the true heir to the Russian
throne, the Czarevitch, son of Nicholas 2. According to Goleniewski, he escaped with
his father and the entire Imperial Family; the execution was merely a politicallycontrived cover story.
Goleniewski’s announcement immediately made his position at the CIA all the more
untenable, yet he was not without influential supporters. His most highly placed
admirer was Herman E Kimsey, a former Army intelligence officer who served as
CIA’s Chief of Research and Analysis from 1954 to 1962. As Allen Dulles’ right-hand
man, Kimsey was also said to have been in charge of recruiting assassins for the
Agency. Forced out of the CIA with Allan Dulles following the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
Kimsey later asserted publicly that Goleniewski had been tested by CIA experts for
fingerprints, blood diseases, dental work, and other characteristics, and had been
confirmed as the Czarevitch.
Others who supported Goleniewski’s lineage included the John Birch Society (through
its journal American Opinion), the Philadelphia-based lay Catholic Order of the
Carmelites (an anti-communist organisation), the conservative journalist Guy
Richards, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia,
and the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta.
In 1981 the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the
religious arm of the White Russian Community, canonised the Imperial family as
martyrs to the Bolsheviks. In short, they do not now recognise Goleniewski’s claim
that the family survived. In 1964, however, the Synod married him in an Orthodox
ceremony under the name of Alexei Nicholaevich Romanov. (19) The Synod’s late
change of heart may reflect the fact that a major source of its funding, the Tolstoy
Foundation, was a leading conduit of funds from the CIA, which had lost faith in, and
was trying to discredit Goleniewski.
Goleniewski’s most constant defender was the Knights of Malta (SOJ) based in
Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, which asserted a rightful lineage back to the original
Knights of St. John of Jerusalem who rivalled the Templars as leaders of armed
Christendom in the early Middle Ages. The order claimed its legitimacy in 1878 from
protection granted it by Czar Peter I of Russia following Napoleon’s seizure of Malta,
then the home base of the Knights. Peter I was also the alleged founder of the Secret
Circle, a group of Church and Army leaders who pledged to protect God and Country.
This clandestine patriotic organisation, to which Goleniewski said he belonged,
supposedly infiltrated its modern followers into almost every intelligence agency in
Europe in order to battle the Bolshevik menace. (20)
The SOJ rests upon an ecclesiastical alliance of Roman Catholics, traditionalist Old
Roman Catholics, and Russian Orthodox believers. Its members refer to the New Mass
as an “unspeakable abomination” and take violent exception to the “infidel marauders”
who have corrupted the Vatican in recent years. The order’s former grand master, Col.
Thourot Pichel, said the foundations of Christianity were “about ready to face
destruction” from the “world menace of Marxism and Moscow” unless the Catholic
Traditionalist Movement and the SOJ could turn the tide. (21) Another spokesman
refers to the SOJ as “the army of the Catholic Church”, and boasts that as an army the
SOJ devised a tunnel finder device for use by American troops in Vietnam. (22)
The SOJ’s membership reads like a who’s who of military and intelligence veterans. Its’two associate chiefs of international intelligence’ in 1970 were Herman Kimsey and
former Army intelligence officer, Kyril de Shismarev. Shismarev, whose father had
commanded a regiment in Russia’s pre-war Imperial Guard, had known Alexei
Romanov as a youth and vouched for Goleniewski. (23) On the order’s ‘military affairs
committee’ sat, among others, Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, Douglas
MacArthur’s chief of G-2 in the Pacific theatre, and a renowned right-winger; Lt.
General P.A. del Valle, a member of the neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby and the National
States Rights Party (24); Admiral Charles M. Cooke, former commander of the Far
Eastern Fleet and an unofficial adviser in 1950 to the armed forces of the Republic of
China; and Lt. Col. Philip Corso, a 20-year veteran of Army intelligence (25) who
went to work for Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) and once sued liberal columnist
Drew Pearson for defamation.(26) Finally, the Honorary Grand Admiral of the SOJ is
Admiral Sir Barry Domville, a former British intelligence chief who was interned
during WW2 as a fascist sympathiser.(27) .
Goleniewski’s leading defenders in the SOJ have a curious but important relationship
with the unfinished investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
For example, the Army intelligence officer, Philip Corso identified Lee Harvey
Oswald as a CIA ‘asset’ and named the alleged CIA officials whom Oswald allegedly
contacted in Moscow during his ‘defection’ to the Soviet Union. The CIA’s Herman
Kimsey, right-hand man to Allen Dulles who later served on the Warren Commission,
allegedly had first hand information implicating the KGB in Kennedy’s assassination.
In this scenario Oswald thought he was working for US intelligence when the KGB
duped him into joining the plot.
Kimsey, now dead, has a spokesman in Hugh McDonald, former Chief of Detectives
of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who says he also served as an Army
intelligence officer and CIA contract agent. In the Fall of 1964, Kimsey, having retired
from the CIA with Dulles, was working with McDonald, then Chief of Security for
Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Kimsey allegedly told McDonald
at that time details of the plot to kill Kennedy. The actual assassin, Kimsey
maintained, was a contract killer sometimes employed by Kimsey on behalf of the
CIA. In his book Appointment in Dallas (1975), McDonald says he tracked this killer
down in London and learned from him that the paymaster for the hit, codenamed
‘Troit’, set Oswald up as a patsy.
Who was ‘Troit’? McDonald ‘reveals’ in his later book LBJ And The JFK Conspiracy,
that the KGB planned the assassination between 1961 and 1963. (Interestingly enough,
McDonald’s co-author, Robin Moore, produced the film MacArthur with funds from
the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, whose New York newspaper, News
World, has accepted Goleniewski as the Czarevitch.) The John Birch Society organ
American Opinion, which also backs Goleniewski, buys the McDonald thesis and
suggests that ‘Troit’ was none other than George De Morenschildt, a White Russian
geologist with strong connections to French and American intelligence who became
Oswald’s patron in Texas in 1962 and ’63. American Opinion acknowledges as the
source of this hypothesis the veteran Army intelligence officer Frank Capell, who
succeeded Col. Pichel as head of the Shickshinny order of the SOJ and who, as we
have seen, defended Goleniewski’s assertion that Kissinger was a Soviet agent. (28)
But Capell was not the first to finger de Morenschildt. In 1967, according to an FBI
memo, McDonald himself and his friend Leonard Davidov, a fellow CIA contract
agent, friend of Kimsey, and Goldwater security staffer, sought information about

deMorenschildt’s involvement in the assassination from I. Irving Davidson, a CIAconnected

Washington lobbyist for Haiti, a country where de Morenschildt was
actively pursuing business deals and intelligence missions. (29)
In short, the McDonald/Kimsey/Capell network appears to have been a disinformation
clique centred around the SOJ, and aiming to smear the Soviets (and Goldwater
opponent Lyndon Johnson) with responsibility for one of the great political crimes in
American history. But there is a special relevance here for the Goleniewski case.
Following the JFK assassination a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, claimed that he had
access to the Oswald file in the Soviet Union, and to know that Oswald was never
recruited or even questioned by the KGB during his stay in that country. Nosenko’s
story fell down on numerous points, and the CIA’s counterintelligence branch
concluded that he was a provocation agent, a KGB agent meant, among other things,
to mislead the United States about Oswald’s relationship with Soviet intelligence.
This interpretation of Nosenko’s defection has been adopted by the journalist Edward
Epstein, who concludes in his book Legend that Oswald did shoot the president and
that both he and de Morenschildt had worked for the KGB. Epstein is now an avid
defender of Goleniewski, whom he refers to as Romanov. (30) The fact that Nosenko
was ultimately rehabilitated within the CIA, and the counterintelligence bureau
decimated in a purge that culminated in late 1974 with the firing of James Angleton,
suggests to Epstein that Goleniewski was right: the CIA had been penetrated at the top
by one or more Soviet ‘moles’ who protected Nosenko at the expense of loyal agency
officials. Thus the Epstein/Mcdonald/Kimsey scenario for the JFK assassination is
intimately supported by their position on the Goleniewski/mole question.
The stakes are high in this controversy: nothing short of blaming the KGB for the
assassination and exposing leading CIA officials as traitors. But the matter goes
farther than that. In a recent issue of Commentary magazine, Epstein argues that the
United States should shun arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union because the
CIA’s ability to verify such an agreement has been neutralised through ‘disinformation’
and double agents within the agency. Although Epstein does not cite the Goleniewski
case directly, his argument is a direct outgrowth of his conclusions reached through
conversations with that defector and with veterans of CIA counterintelligence. Thus
the twenty-year dispute over Goleniewski’s bona fides continues to impinge on the
highest levels of national policy.(31)
A Note on SMOM
The SOJ is not recognised by most historians as the legitimate successor to the
crusading Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The ‘true’ organisation is, instead,
generally accepted to be the papal order, Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The
10,000 members of this order, scattered throughout the globe, are pledged to defend
the Church and to carry on the hospitaller tradition of the original knights. According
to Steven Birmingham, “The Knights of Malta comprise what is perhaps the most
exclusive club on earth. They are more than the Catholic aristocracy; they are the
nobility, royalty. While the Knights of Columbus are associated with lodge meetings
and bingo, the Knights of Malta can pick up a telephone and chat with the Pope.” A
total of forty countries recognise SMOM’s sovereignty and accredit its ambassadors.
(The Vatican recently upgraded its relationship with SMOM to ambassadorial level.
AP 11 January 1983)SMOM’s membership suggests an occult political significance rivalling that of Italy’s
P2 lodge. Indeed, there was considerable overlap between the two, even though
staunch Catholics like those in SMOM have long been warned away from
freemasonry. One of Licio Gelli’s closest collaborators was the SMOM ambassador to
Montevideo, Umberto Ortolani, who gave Gelli refuge after his flight from Italy.
Ortolani was also the Uruguayan representative of the recently failed Banco
Ambrosiano in Italy. Other joint members of SMOM and P2 included Admiral
Giovanni Torrisi, chief of staff for defence; General Giulio Grassini, head of the
internal intelligence agency SISDE; General Giusseppe Santovito, head of military
espionage and counterintelligence; General Giovanni Allavena, an officer in the old
intelligence agency SIFAR; and Giovanni Guidi, president of the Banco di Roma.
Altogether at least three presidents of the Republic, three prime ministers, and five
chiefs of staff were members of SMOM.
In the United States the list is no less impressive. Leading businessmen, politicians,
and professionals have eagerly joined its ranks; Frank Sinatra even turned to his mafia
contacts in an unsuccessful bid to become a member. But a significant number of
intelligence veterans are also members. These include William Casey, currently
director of the CIA; John McCone, former director of the CIA; and Clare Booth Luce,
a member of President Reagan’s foreign intelligence advisory board. Two of the
highest honours bestowed by the Italian branch of SMOM were awarded in 1946 and
1948 respectively, to James Angleton, then a young veteran of OSS (who would soon
take charge of the Vatican desk at the CIA), and Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi spy who
oversaw the post-war reconstruction of German intelligence under CIA auspices. (32)
The Angleton connection to SMOM is suggestive in view of his opposition to the SOJbacked Michael Goleniewski.(33) The existence of so many intelligence veterans in
both Knights of Malta organisations, and their polarisation around the Goleniewski
issue, may point to the existence of powerful cliques within the American intelligence
community. We have other evidence of just such a phenomenon. Former CIA officer
David Atlee Phillips writes of “that small circle of well-bred, highly educated
adventurers who were known to some in the CIA as the ‘Knights Templars’ – Allen
Dulles, Frank Wisner, Kermit Roosevelt, Tracey Barnes, Dick Bissell, and kindred
spirits. (34) Other CIA veterans have confirmed the existence of similar associations
within the agency, with names like the “Century group” and the “Gold Key group”.
Further research is obviously needed to uncover the membership and significance of
these secret societies within the intelligence communities themselves.
These examples of the role of secret societies in Western society are hardly
exhaustive. One could mention the fascist-inspired Ordre de Jaques Cartier which
ruled the province of Quebec for 30 years and still exercises enormous influence; the
Round Table groups in Britain and the Commonwealth countries; or, leaving the West,
the Triads and other societies that organise the social and political fabric of overseas
Chinese communities.
Even with these few examples, however, it should be clear that secret societies
continue to proliferate in the “modern” world and, in some specialised spheres at least,
can influence or even decide important policy debates. Their methods, needless to say,
are non- or anti-democratic, which explains the authoritarian character of so many of
them. Essentially, secret societies like those described here are instruments designed to
covertly seize state power. Because they rely so heavily on secrecy as a modus
operandi, it would seem that, as in Italy, exposure is the best means to dismantle them.This article is a call for further work in exactly that direction.
Notes
18.David Martin Wilderness of Mirrors (New York 1981) p103
19.Peter Koltypin, letter to author 10 October 1981; Guy Richards Imperial Agent
(New York 1966) p 247
20.Richards pp91-93
21.Col. Thourot Pichel History of the Hereditary Government of the Sovereign
Order of St John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta (Shickshinny, Pa. 1970)
22.James Wathen Is the Order of St. John Masonic? (Rockford, Ill. Tan Books
1973)
23.Shismarev helped Goleniewski track down the remnants of the Czar’s fortune.
One of Shismarev’s contacts was his “old friend and retired banker” Rudolph
Iselin of Basle, whose (son?) Felix was an IG Farben agent before and during
WW2.
24.Del Valle has charged – in the spirit of Goleniewski and Frank Capell – that
“the conspiracy headed by Dr. Kissinger is clothed in pseudo legality through
our surrender … of our armed forces.” (Washington Observer 1 May 1971)
25.Guy Richards calls Corso “one of the most remarkable men in Washington.”
Corso, he writes, “has made personal friends in the CIA, FBI, Defense
Intelligence Agency, NSA, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps whose
loyalty to him transcends bureaucratic boundaries whenever they believe the
interests of the country are at stake.” (Imperial Agent p24)
26.Pearson also happened to be one of Goleniewski’s detractors, thanks to CIA
leaks. Corso was a leading Goleniewski defender. (Imperial Agent p267)
27.Col. Pichel History op.cit.
28.American Opinion March and February 1976 on Goleniewski and the JFK
assassination
29.House Select Committee on Assassinations, appendix pp57-59
30.Houston Post May 30 1981
31.Commentary July 1982
32.Kevin Coogan The Men Behind Counter-reformation in Parapolitics /USA 6;
L’Expresso 28 June 1981
33.Angleton did, however, have an obscure connection to SOJ through his early
literary mentor, Ezra Pound. Pound refers in his later cantos to P.A. del Valle, a
member of the SOJ military affairs committee. And Mary Pound de Rachewiltz
met her husband Boris at a picnic with the Princess Troubetzkoi, whose
husband is one of the leaders of the Pichel order.
34.D.A. Phillips Night Watch (New York 1977) p 123

Sabotage! The Secret War Against America

by Michael Sayers & Albert E. Kahn
Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942
(notes of the book)

Vice President Wallace quote, May 8, 1942: …Hitler and Japan will cooperate to do the unexpected…fifth columnists in the U.S will sabotage not merely our war material plants, but our minds.

Forward by the authors:

Nazi Germany is the creation of spies and saboteurs.

The burning of the Reichstag by Hermann Goerings’s arsonists is history’s supreme act of sabotage that consolidated Nazi power.

At the home of Cologne banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder a secret bargain was struck with arch-saboteur Franz von Papen that brought ex-Reichswehr spy Hitler to power.

Leaders of the Nazi state are:

• criminals, like Dr. Robert Ley.
• terrorists, like Captain Fritz Wiedemann.
• assassins, like Baron Manfred von Killinger.

The same ganster types head Italy under Mussolini and Japan. In Japan, political murders by the secret Black Dragon Society paved their way to power.

The Axis’ saboteurs are like a second army operating on a world scale, wrecking: industry, agriculture, transport, the press, finance, labor, the armed forces, politics.

Even some Americans play a part.

PART I

Chapter 1 – “The Ghosts That Walk Again”

March 1941, sabotage caused the Pittsburgh Express to derail, 5 killed, 121 injured. Fascist Ukrainian saboteurs working for the Nazis were suspected.

The Hour, an anti-fascist newsletter in New York City revealed:

• the Pittsburgh area was infested with a fascist Ukrainian terrorist organization.
• Capt. Leonid Klimenko

  - a Ukrainian emissary from the German War Office.

  - before the wreck met with key fifth columnists working in the Pittsburgh area.

Fiodore Wozniak (“the Firebug”)

• sabotage agent for Germany.
• January 1917, burned and blew up a shell-assembly plant near Kingsland, New Jersey. $17 million damage.
• April 1941, he walked into the office of The Hour and told them not to write about him anymore.

June 1939, Supreme Court Justice Roberts handed down the decision which said Germany waged undeclared war by sabotage on the U.S. between 1914-1917.

Capt. Franz von Papen

• German ambassador in Washington.
• organized German sabotage in the U.S.
• January 1915, received coded message by Zimmerman (the Kaiser’s Minister of Foreign Affairs) with sabotage instructions.
• purchased a New York firm, G. Amsinck & Co., which was used as a front for sabotage work.
• dispatched his sabotage agents all over the U.S. (at least a $40 million project).
• described Americans as “idiotic Yankees.”
• wanted to invade Canada.
• expulsed from the U.S., was promoted in Germany.
• U.S. damage more than $150 million.

Baron Manfred von Killinger

• in pre-Hitler Germany was a pioneer Storm Troop chief.
• arranged the murder of Catholic Minister Matthias Erzberger, escaped conviction because of his high Nazi connections.
• helped plan the Reichstag Fire with Hermann Goering, Ernst Roehm & others.
• 1937, came to U.S., set up West Coast units of the German American Bund for Nazi espionage-sabotage against American shipping and aircraft industries.

Capt. Fritz Wiedeman

• WWI friend of Hitler.
• when von Killinger was exposed he replaced him.
• collaborated with the Japanese.
• paymaster for Nazi underground in U.S. Paid out more than $5 million (NY Times 2/20/41).

Baron Edgar von Spiegel

• New Orleans Consul General.
• a former U-boat commander, now a Nazi saboteur-diplomat.
• tried to blackmail an American newspaper which caused a State Dept. investigation.

Dr. Herbert Scholz

• consul at Boston
• rep. of Himmler’s Gestapo in the U.S.
• pressured German-Americans to assist the Bund and the Nazi secret service.
• set up an espionage-sabotage network along the Boston waterfront.

Col. Walther Nicolai (called the “Silent Colonel”)

• during WWI was chief of Section IIIB (Intelligence) of the German High Command.
• after WWI, was funded by Alfred Hugenberg (financial backer of Nazi party) to reorganize Section IIIB and help destroy the German Republic.

Guenther Gustav Rumrich

• young German-American, worked for Section IIIB.
• 1938, placed on trial in NYC for sabotage and espionage. But the real “big fish” got away.

  - Dr. Schmidt, alias “Sanders”

  - Capt. Lt. Eric Pfeiffer, in charge of espionage in N. & S. America.

  - Dr. I. Griebl, organized a ring of saboteurs in American defense factories.

Frederick Joubert Duquesne.

• had worked for Nicolai in WWI.
• was in charge of sabotage of British shipping in South American ports.
• 1918, arrested in the U.S., but escaped.
• 1941, began sabotaging U.S. electric power and gas plants.
• June 1941, arrested by the FBI.

Paul Scheffer

• worked under Col. Oberhaus, one of Nicolai’s lieutenants in Section IIIB.
• posed as a liberal journalist for Goebbels’ newspaper Das Reich.
• 1930-36, went to the Soviet Union and helped sabotage Soviet agriculture. His contact was Mikhail Alexandrovich Chernov.

  - in the pay of German Intelligence.

  - headed The People’s Commission of Trade in the Ukraine.

  - Later became head of The People’s Commisariat of Agriculture of U.S.S.R.

  - 1938, Chernov and 20 others were tried in Moscow, Chernov was sentenced to be shot.

   

• 1938, Scheffer went to U.S., by 1941 was living in U.S. and picked up by the FBI when Germany declared war on the U.S.

During WWI, a team traveled around the U.S. infecting mules, horses and cattle with diseases. Thousands of soldiers also died.

• sent by Col. Nicolai.
• financed by von Papen.
• Anton Dilger, a German-American medical graduate from John Hopkins University created germs in a lab he set up in Chevy Chase, near Washington. He later revolted against his mission and was murdered by German spies.

Chapter 2 – “Saboteurs At Work”

September 1941, FBI established:

• Germany laid plans for sabotage of U.S. defense industries, transport and shipping.
• $$ from Dutch, Spanish & South American banks.
• spies and saboteurs worked in American defense plants and on U.S. steamship lines.

William G. Sebold was a German-American whom the Nazi secret police trained in sabotage & espionage not knowing he was an FBI informant. The Gestapo trained him at a school in Hamburg, Germany:

• Leica camera, microphotographic reductions, codes, telegraphy, short-wave radio, secret inks, explosives, poisons.
• the “Collectors” got hold of info.
• the “Transmitters” forwarded data to Germany.
• the “Couriers” carried messages to and from Germany.
• the “Drops” were addresses where reports were sent.
• the “Specialists” were the saboteurs.

Sebold was trained as a “Transmitter.”

School chief was Dr. Nicolaus Adolf Fritz Ritter. He sent Sebold to the U.S. using the name William G. Sawyer.

• set up office in the Newsweek Building in NYC.
• $$ sent to him through a Mexican branch of the Chase National Bank, Dec. 1940.
• his contacts:

  - Herman Lang, worked at the Norden Plant, former Nazi Storm Trooper with Hitler, knows Hermann Goering.

  - Else Weustenfeld, worked in a law office in NYC.

  - Lily Barbara Carola Stein, Long Island, link between German Military Intelligence and its agents in U.S. Her $$ came through Amsterdam and S. American Banks.

  - Frederick Joubert Duquesne, NYC, expert saboteur, invented bombs, built short-wave radio in Long Island to transmit to Germany. $$ came from Dr. Ritter through Chase National Bank. Duquesne had at least 30 spies in U.S. working for him.

Another group worked in NYC area under Kurt Frederick Ludwig.

• reported to Heinrich Himmler, head of Gestapo in Germany.
• worked with Lucy Boehmler, member of the Queens, New York unit of The German American Bund.
• Rene Charles Froehlich, soldier at Fort Jay, Governors Island.

Ludwig’s real leader was Ulrich von der Osten, high officer in German Military Intelligence, killed by a taxi cab in Times Square, March 1941. He had a report on the defenses of Pearl Harbor and Hickham Field.

June 28, 1941, the FBI rounded up the entire Duquesne ring, and later Ludwig’s group.

Devices for fire setting, explosions or cause wreckage of machinery:

• incendiary bomb disguised as chiclets.
• “cigars” (developed by Dr. Scheele in 1915)
• “fire-pencil”
• “fire-envelope” discovered by FBI in 1941.
• “Zepplinite” for forest fires. Delayed-action hydrogen gas balloon.
• Time bombs, traditional – British Pavilion at the NY World’s Fair 7/4/40.
• “can of food”
• “cabbage-bomb”
• “piece of coal”
• “cracker” disguised as a spark plug for planes, and explodes when it reaches a certain temperature.

Special acids deteriorates cloth

• parachutes
• airplane fabrics
• uniforms

Poisons during WWI in canned foods for the Allies.

Wrecking military equipment.

The German American Bund

• organized to help the Nazis recruit spies and saboteurs in key jobs in American industries.
• The Bund Fuehrer Fritz Kuhn had been a chemist at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit.
• slowdowns and strikes on production lines.
• infiltrated the Harrison, New Jersey gas works of the Public Service Corporation, supplied much gas to New Jersey’s defense industries.
• infiltrated the New York Liquidometer plant, warship and aircraft parts for U.S. Army & Navy.

Nazi agents have long wanted to take over the American labor movement so they could sabotage production.

• Detroit 1939, formed The National Workers League, headed by Parker Sage (pro-American propaganda, fight Jew bosses, etc.)
• the auto workers figured them out, but they didn’t go away.
• collaborated with the KKK. Suddenly the KKK reversed their position of opposing organized labor and encouraged their members to capture executive positions in the auto workers union.

  - Packard plant

  - at the Sojourner Truth Settlement (defense housing project) black workers were prevented from entering their homes, caused riots.

Chapter 3 – “Sabotage By Cartel”

1915, Dr. Heinrich Albert created a fake munitions concern, the Bridgeport Projectile Company. $$ came from the German Foreign Office. Said it was a British-financed corp.

Large scale economic sabotage by creating artificial scarcities, tied up machinery & supplies.

• bought liquid chlorine.
• bought up stocks of carbolic acid.

Exposed by U.S. Secret Service and expelled from U.S. along with von Papen.

During WWI von Papen’s associate and rival was Capt. Franz von Rintelen.

• arrived in U.S. March 1915.
• NY firm E.V. Gibbon, Inc.
• bought up large amounts of ammo hoping to create a shortage, but wasn’t very effective.
• returned to traditional time-bomb & fire-pencil sabotage.

But the tactic of economic sabotage would become the official policy of the Third Reich. Bought up whole industries and achieved colossal economic sabotage through manipulation of international partnerships, cartels and patent pools.

• American production of military optical instruments were sabotaged because of the cartel formed between Bausch and Lomb Optical Company of Rochester, NY and Carl Zeiss of Jena, Germany.
• Remington Arms has been restricted to use their patented Tetracene, used in guns & ammo, because of their cartel agreement with the German trust, I.G. Farben.
• Beryllium (“the magic metal”) makes steel almost unbreakable. The Beryllium Corporation of America had an agreement with the German firm of Seimens and Halske which gave the Nazis exclusive rights in Europe, and their American partner couldn’t ship any products to England.
• ALCOA’s (Aluminum Corp. of America) agreement with I.G. Farben resulted in U.S. magnesium production in 1940 at 5,680 tons, while in Germany was 19,000 tons. Similar agreement restricted aluminum production to 3/4 to 1/2 of Germany’s production.
• an agreement between General Electric and the German Krupp trust gave Nazis veto power over American production of tungsten carbide (for tool manufacture). 1940 Nazi Germany was producing as much as 20x as America.
• Jasco, Inc., a chemical company in Baton Rouge, LA organized by Standard Oil of New Jersey and the German trust I.G. Farben in 1930 was under German control. September 1939, the Germans ordered Standard to dismantle the plant.

According to the Senate Truman Committee:

• Because of German agreements with Standard Oil of New Jersey development of synthetic rubber and oil production in U.S. was delayed.
• Standard helped the Nazis in 1939 design their plant facilities in Germany for making synthetic aviation gasoline.
• Standard withheld info from the U.S. while giving it to Germany.

Chemnyco, Inc. of NY

• American rep. of I.G. Farben.
• collected info on American war production for the German Gov. and Nazi saboteurs in the U.S.

Bendix Aviation

• a General Motors affiliate.
• because of a patent pool with Robert Bosch Company of Stuttgart they had to send military info to the Nazis as late as May, 1940.

April 22, 1942, Pres. Roosevelt ordered the seizure of all patents controlled directly or indirectly by the enemy.

Chapter 4 – “Tokyo Terrorists”

Los Angeles and its war industries would be crippled if the aqueduct system that supplies the water was sabotaged.

In Los Angeles, a member of the Black Dragon, a secret Japanese terrorist society, was found with a short-wave radio, maps of Hawaii’s fortifications, plans of the LA water supply system.

The Japanese Intelligence Service

• collaborated with the Germans shortly after Hitler came to power.
• Germany’s Section IIIB aide Major Gen. Ott (later German Ambassador to Tokyo) helped Japanese espionage & sabotage activities in Asia and the Americas.
• the chief base for joint Nazi-Japanese operations in the Western Hemisphere was El Salvador.
• by 1936 was virtually in control of the Japanese Gov. and High Command.
• the Japanese Military Servicemen’s League (by 1941 had 7,200 members) and The Imperial Comradeship League (by 1941 had 4,800 members) were controlled by The Black Dragon. Served as schools of espionage & sabotage. Mostly on the West Coast and Hawaii.
• before Pearl Harbor, moved in droves and took up residents and business near military establishments, oil storage tanks, oil wells, harbors and ports in Calif. 3,000 Japanese lived on Terminal Island at the entrance to Los Angeles.
• after Dec. 7, when FBI raided Japanese communities they found guns, ammo, spying & sabotaging equipment.
• the Japanese Consulates in American cities communicated with Japanese fishing fleets in the pacific.

The manager of the San Francisco branch of Mitsubishi tried to get info from the trade journal Petroleum World in 1940.

February 20, 1942, they were set back when President Roosevelt issued an executive order evacuating anyone alien or citizen from military areas, and throughout the West Coast area a mass evacuation of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. They were forced to rely on mostly non-Japanese agents and the Nazi underground.

White Russian Fascists

• under Japanese command for years.
• leader was “Count” Anastase Andreivitch Vonsiatsky of Thompsen, Connecticut.

  - master spy & saboteur in 3 continents.

  - ex-Czarist officer and agent of the Japanese High Command.

  - wife was a millionaire.

  - prepared for his “Holy Crusade” against Bolshevism.

  - recruited White Russian emigre’s in all parts of the world for his “Crusade.”

  - 1933, founded the “Russian National Fascist Revolutionary Party,” swastika as the emblem.

  - branches in NYC, SF, LA, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Harbin, Manchukuo.

  - conspired with the German American Bund and other Axis agencies to bring about a fascist coup in the U.S.

  - financed smuggling of saboteurs & spies in Soviet Russia.

  - trained men at his Connecticut estate.

   

• Vonsiatsky was in contact with:

  - William Dudley Pelley, chief of the Silver Shirts.

  - Robert Edward Edmondson, anti-Semetic pamphleteer.

  - Henry Allen, head of the American White Guard, ex-convict, and collaborator with the Nazi-inspired Gold Shirts of Mexico.

  - Father Charles Coughlin, pro-Axis propagandist in Royal Oak, Michigan.

   

• He helped finance arms to the fascist forces in Spain when the Hitler-instigated Franco revolt broke out.

Important Japanese, German & Italian functionaries visited regularly Vonsiatsky’s Thompson, Conn. headquarters. Discussed fascist coup in the U.S.

150,00 White Russians living in Japanese territory, headed by saboteur-spy Lt. Gen. Gregory Semenoff, an ex-Czarist.

One week before Pearl Harbor they joined the Japanese Army under the command of Major Batase.

Vonsiatsky

• went on to Tokyo.
• went to Dairen, Manchukuo, one of the Far Eastern centers of fascist White Russian operations.
• went to Germany, met with Alfred Rosenberg, Dr. Goebbels, & reps. of the Military Intelligence of the German High Command.
• then back to U.S.

Shortly before Pearl Harbor in Chicago a secret meeting with:

• G. Wilhelm Kunze, head of the German American Bund.
• Otto Willumeit, head of the Chicago division of the Bund.
• Father Aleksi Pelypenko, a Ukranian priest.
• “Count” Vonsiatsky.

Vonsiatsky helped finance Nazi agents in U.S. but wanted Berlin to guarantee him a high post in Russia when the Nazi armies take over.

Pelypenko later reported all he knew about Vonsiatsky to the FBI.

Summer of 1941, Fiodore “The Firebug” Wozniak asked Pelypenko to get him a sabotage job, he needed the work.

Chapter 5 – “Bombers and Killers”

The Ukrainian National Home, “a mutual benefit society” at East 6th Street, NYC.

• 1938, kidnapping, torture, murder.
• two of the gang, Gula and Sacoda, were executed at Sing Sing, were members of ODWU

William Piznak, Ukrainian-American arrested for having sabotage equipment in his basement at 225 E. 95th St. His brother, Michael Piznak, had also lived in the house.

• attorney for the Ukrainian-American Society.

The Hetman

• a Berlin-directed Ukrainian organization.
• supervised by Alfred Rosenberg’s Foreign Political Office of the Nazi Party.

ODWU

• another Berlin-directed Ukrainian terrorist organization.
• founded 1931 in the U.S. by Omelian Senyk-Gribiwisky, a Ukrainian terrorist from Berlin.
• supervised by Col. Walther Nicolai’s Section IIIB (German Military Intelligence).
• more powerful than the Hetman.

Both have built their cells in American industrial centers. Have branches throughout Europe, Asia, N. & S. America. In regular communication with German, Japanese & Italian agents.

The Ukrainian fifth column is the most important auxiliary of the international Nazi espionage & sabotage machine, and the only place it can’t function is in the Ukraine because in 1938 the Soviet authorities shot its chief ring-leaders.

Baltic German Dr. Paul Rohrbach helped establish an “Independent Ukraine” under German rule (Ukrainians were then under the Russian Czar). Kaiser Wilhelm liked the idea because of the Ukrainian wheat and oil.

1918, the Kaiser established an “Independent Ukraine” under German “protection.”

• Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, commander of the German forces in the Ukraine.
• Dr. Rohrbach was Eichhorn’s advisor.
• the government was set up by General Pavel Petrovitch Skoropadski.

  - a Russian cavalryman.

  - didn’t speak a word of Ukrainian.

  - received title of “The Hetman” (Head Man) of the Ukraine.

  - his cabinet were Russian and Ukrainian murderers & terrorists.

But the newly-formed Red Army & guerrilla bands crushed them, so they returned to Berlin, where they became the protégés of The German High Command and began plotting with the Nazi Party to overthrow the Weimar Republic.

The “Hetman Organization” was placed under Dr. Alfred Rosenberg.

• chief Nazi advocate of Eastward expansion.

Ukrainian fifth column in the U.S., known as OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists)

• organized by Col. Nicolai of the Intelligence Service of the High Command.
• headed by Col. Eugene Konovaletz.

  - 1922, Hitler met and liked him.

  - rapist and killer.

  - also worked for the Japanese General Staff.

   

• OUN cells in Soviet Russia, France, Rumania, Czechoslavakia, Poland, South America, Canada, U.S.
• espionage, sabotage & assassination schools for OUN members
• 1928-31, sabotaged factories and farms in Poland. Assassinated Polish politicians.

1938, Soviet Gov. smashed the entire OUN in the Ukraine. Hitler and Nicolai thought Col. Konovaletz knew too much about German Government’s secrets so they blew him up with a bomb disguised as a gift.

1933, Col. Nicolai selected Omelian Senyk-Gribiwisky (“Salesman of Terror”) to organize the Nazi-Ukrainian network in the U.S.

• Col. Konvaletz’s right-hand man.
• linked to almost every major assassination in Poland in the early post-war years.

ODWU front organizations mushroomed in industrial cities where Ukrainian-Americans lived.

May 1934, Senyk-Gribiwisky founded the “Ukrainian Aviation School” at Montgomery, NY.

• perfect for training spies & saboteurs.
• one of the financiers, Demetrius Gula, was later executed at Sing Sing.
• the chief “flying instructor”, Burton H. Gilligan, associated with The German American Bund.

By 1935 more than 100 ODWU units in the U.S in important industrial centers.

• workers, insurance agents, salesmen, priests, journalists.

Vassil Avramenko

• headed Avramenko Film Co.
• worked with the powerful ODWU unit in Pittsburgh.
• partner was Kalina Lissiuk.

1941, Senyk-Gribiwinsky was to receive a high gov. position in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine but was shot while marching into the Soviet Ukraine with Hitler’s armies.

Svoboda, newspaper of the Ukrainian Nationalist Association – 40,000 members.

• pro-Axis propaganda in American cities.
• headquarters, 83 Grand St., Jersey City.
• editor, Luke “Big Mouse” Myshuha (Ukrainian).

  - 1939, his contact was to be a Nazi-Ukrainian agent in Rome (no more contact with Berlin).

   

• headquarters was a clearing house for espionage directives from Berlin, Tokyo and Rome.

Chapter 6 – “How Many Were Sabotaged?”

February 9, 1942, the great liner Normandie (name changed to S.S. Lafayette) burned and sank at the pier in the North River (NYC).

• officially ruled an accident, but was probably sabotaged by the Germans.

8 ships headed for Russia with supplies either sank or were forced back to port from shifting cargo, wasn’t properly secured. This has never been a problem before. Probably sabotage.

1941, industrial disasters caused American production a loss of 1.5 billion man-hours.

Spring 1942, Forest Fires

• North Carolina
• New Jersey
• Rhode Island (worst in their history)
• Connecticut

In New Hampshire the German sabotage device the “Zepplinite” was found but the candle had burned out.

Chapter 7 – “Counter-Sabotage”

Agencies for fighting sabotage in U.S.:

• FBI (in supreme charge)
• G2 (Military Intelligence)
• Naval Intelligence

Sept. 6, 1939, Roosevelt put FBI in supreme charge. Later that same month a General Intelligence Division was established in Wash. under FBI direction.

Summer of 1942 in NY area 49 members of two large Nazi espionage-sabotage rings were arrested.

• one ring was headed by Frederick Joubert Duquesne, an agent of Col. Nicolai.
• the other headed by Kurt Frederick Ludwig, an agent of Heinrich Himmler.

June 1942, another ring was smashed by the FBI when they raided Anastase Vonsiatsky’s headquarters at Thompson, Connecticut. Arrested:

• Anastase Vonsiatsky
• Gerhardt Wilhelm Kunze, former Fuehrer of the German American Bund.
• Dr. Otto Willumeit of Chicago, former leader of the Chicago unit of the German American Bund.
• Reverend Kurt E. Molzahn, pastor of a Philadelphia Lutheran Church, go-between for the spy ring. (the only one who pleaded not guilty)
• Dr. Wolfgang Ebell, a physician of El Paso, TX, home used as headquarters for German & Japanese agents.

June 1942, 8 saboteurs landed by German subs in Florida & Long Island were arrested by the FBI.

Following America’s entry into the war, the FBI successfully raided homes and hideouts in every part of the country. U.S. defense plants organized anti-sabotage units and cooperated with the FBI, Military & Naval Intelligence.

PART II

“Psychological Sabotage”

Undermining morale, warping public opinion. It is a secret war directed against the mind and spirit of the people. Nazi “strategist of terror” Dr. Ewald Banse: “The enemy’s nation’s originally solid, powerful and well-knit fabric must be gradually disintegrated, broken down, rotted, so that it falls apart like a fungus treaded upon in a forest.”

Weapons of the Axis psychological saboteurs include:

• disruptive propaganda, malicious rumors & lies, artificially created opposition movements, deliberate exploitation of genuine opposition movements, bribery, corruption & intimidation.

Their job is to soften up the people, and to make them easy prey for the Gestapo hangmen.

In the U.S. the psychological saboteurs have had 5 major objectives:

1) race hatred to disrupt the American people.
2) undermine the confidence in the government & Roosevelt Administration.
3) isolate & prevent U.S. from joining any anti-Axis alliance
4) keep the U.S. unprepared for the Second World War.
5) build an American fascist party as a fifth column ally to the Axis attack.

Chapter 8 – “The Secret Offensive”

1940, Hitler’s 5th column of psychological saboteurs were at work in each country before the Nazis invaded: Holland, Norway, Poland, France.

August 1940, George Sylvester Viereck, one of the leading Nazi agents in the U.S., head & brains of the propaganda machine.

• met with Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota.
• met with Representative Hamilton Fish.
• delivered large envelope to Sen. Rush D. Holt of W. Virginia.

Hitler, Dr. Colin Ross (Nazi ideologist of the “Germanization” program), and Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels wanted to “Germanize” America. Goebbels: “Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in North America. No other country has so many social and racial tensions. We shall be able to play on many strings there.”

After 1933, Nazi-controlled German-American organizations on U.S. soil popped up all over. Supervised by Ernstt Wilhelm Bohle from Berlin.

• head of the Foreign Division of the Nazi Party in 1934.
• appointed to the position of Gauleiter of the Disrict of Germans Abroad.

According to a Swiss newspaper Bohle had 548 groups in 45 countries under him. 25,000 propaganda agents and 2,500 special Gestapo men.

The Psychological Laboratory

• agency of the Third Reich in Berlin assisting Bohle.
• opened in 1929.
• under he supervision of Col. Hans von Voss, commander of the German Army’s Division of Psychology.
• when Hitler came to power the Laboratory acquired two new special divisions, under Col. Nicolai and Col. Dr. Albrecht Blau.
• research into “American national psychology.”
• The German American Bund (an “American citizens’ group”) spread propaganda that the Roosevelt administration had fallen into the hands of Jews and communists. 1936, headed by Fritz Kuhn.

  - chemist at the Ford Motor Company.

  - 1919, in Bavaria had been a member of the Epp Brigade which murdered and terrorized democratic Germans.

The German American Bund didn’t appeal to non-Germans, so they looked for other groups. 1933-39 more than 750 of these organizations sprang up. Set Gentile against Jew.

By 1937 their anti-Semetic propaganda was successful but they still needed a leader that people could look up to, like Hitler in Germany. One candidate was Father Charles E. Coughlin:

• magazine Social Justice in 1939 had a circulation of 1,000,000.
• weekly radio show on over 47 stations, 4,000,000 listeners.
• was pro-fascist.
• his organization, the Christian Front, formed in 1938, 200,000 members by 1939.

The Christian Front, the German American Bund, the Christian Mobilizers, Silver Shirts, and others roamed the streets of NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Akron & other cities attacking men & women. Campaign of psychological sabotage.

January 13, 1940, FBI caught 17 members of the Christian Front red-handed planning to kill about a dozen Congressmen, kill Jews, seize Post Offices, the Customs House, and armories in NYC. Much of their ammo had been stolen from the National Guard. They hailed Coughlin as their leader.

Because the trial was rigged, they were all found not guilty, but Coughlin’s organization never really grew into a mass movement.

Hermann Schwarzmann, leader of the Astoria, Long Island unit of the German American Bund, thought Charles Lindbergh would make a great leader.

Col. Walther Nicolai’s Section IIIB had personality-analysis of hundreds of leading statesmen throughout the world. (bribe, blackmail)

• one of Dr. Blau’s ace “observers” was F. Schoenemann, who (as a “foreign correspondent”) accompanied Roosevelt on his 1936 trip to Lincoln, Nebraska.
• August Halfeld, a personal emissary of Dr. Goebbels, also kept an eye on Roosevelt.

Goebbels, the Nazis and their fifth column allies in the U.S. called for the impeachment of Roosevelt. Said he was a traitor.

• William Kullgren – fifth column leader of Atascadero, CA.
• Parker Sage’s Detroit National Workers League.
• William Dudley Pelley – chief of the Silver Shirts.
• Francis P. Moran – Director of the Christian Front in Boston.
• Governor Philip F. La Follette of Wisconsin.
• former Governor William Murray of Oklahoma.
• Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan.

The American Fellowship Forum (published a magazine called Today’s Challenge)

• founded in NYC on March 16, 1939.
• National Director was Dr. Friedrich Ernest Ferdinand Auhagen, Prof. of German Literature at Columbia University.

  - Nazi agent

  - former 2nd Lieutenant in Kaiser’s army.

  - entered German Intelligence after Hitler seized power.

  - received $$ from Dr. G. Kurt Johannsen, Nazi paymaster in Hamburg, Germany.

  - also received $$ from German-American industrialist Dr. Ferdinand A. Kertess, Pres. Of the Chemical Marketing Company of NYC, and one of the incorporators of the American Fellowship Forum. Espionage work for the German Government.

  - conferred with Friedhelm Draeger, German Consul in NYC. (U.S. section leader of Ernst Bohle’s Ausland’s-Organization and was in charge of espionage-sabotage operations in the NY area.)

  - lived in Elmhurst, Long Island.

  - met frequently with Dr. Herbert Scholz, Boston Consul, key Gestapo agent on the East Coast.

With the outbreak of war in Europe, committees similar to the American Fellowship Forum sprang up overnight in America with a hands off policy toward the war in Europe.

Rep. Hamilton Fish’s committee “National Committee to Keep America Out of Foreign Wars.”

• set it up just before visiting Nazi Germany, fall 1939.
• just before outbreak of the war he met with Axis leaders, including:

  - Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister of the Third Reich.

  - Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy.

   

• used Joachim von Ribbentropp’s private plane.

Isolationist businessman Avery Brundage’s “peace” group, Citizen’s Keep America Out of War Committee.

• Chicago
• invited Charles A. Lindbergh to speak at Soldiers Field, which he accepted.

3 other important Committees formed under the sponsorship of certain isolationist Senators & Representatives:

• The Islands for War Debts Committee
• War Debts Defense Committee
• Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee

Oct. 21, 1940, all these Committees attempted to unite into a single powerful anti-Administration and isolationist bloc, called the No Foreign Wars Committee.

• Washington Conference
• 50 reps. from “peace” organizations
• headed by Verne Marshall, Mid-Western isolationist newspaper publisher.
• financed in part by oil man William Rhoads Davis, who had large investments in Germany.

The America First Committee

• 1940, organized by R. Douglas Stuart, Jr.

  - Yale University

  - heir to the Quaker Oats fortune.

• speaker at an early meeting was Charles A. Lindberg.
• more promising than the other committees.

Chapter 9 – “The Head and Brains”

George Sylvester Vierek

• kept portraits of Hitler & Kaiser Wilhelm in his NY apartment.
• July 1940, used Congressman Fish’s office to send out copies of Sen. Lundeen’s speeches.
• born in Munich, Germany 1884.
• became an American citizen in 1901.
• employ of German Imperialism.
• WWI defended the Kaiser’s Germany & spread propaganda opposing America’s entry into the war siding with the Allies.
• received $100,000 from the Central Powers for his propaganda services during WWI.
• $$ from paymasters connected with the von Papen sabotage ring.

  - such as Dr. Consantin Dumba, Ambassador of Austria-Hungary and one of the 1st diplomats to be expelled from the U.S.

  - such as Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, German Ambassador to Washington who supervised sabotage operations in America.

• went to work for Hitler when he came to power.
• Received $$ from Dr. Otto Kiep, Nazi Consul General in New York.
• received $$ from an American publicity firm which was under contract to the German Tourist Bureau.
• “correspondent” for a Munich newspaper edited by Dr. Giselher Wirsing, an assistant of Dr. Goebbels.
• received $500 a month from the German Library of Information, the official Nazi propaganda agency in NYC.

  - Viereck edited the Library’s publication Facts in Review and sent it free to prominent Americans.

• Viereck was registered with the U.S. State Dept. as a paid propaganda agent of the Gov. of the Third Reich.

Flanders Hall, Inc. in New Jersey

• financed by Viereck, fronted for him.
• small publishing concern incorporated by the Hauck brothers.
• 1915, the father, Adolf Hauck,Sr. & Viereck served on a committee “raising funds for German war orphans.”
• by mid-summer 1940 published a dozen propaganda books.

  - original texts provided by German Institute of Information in Berlin.

• reprinted a speech by Sen. Ernest Lundeen attacking Lord Lothian, then (6/40)British Ambassador to the U.S. (Vierick had written the speech for Sen. Lundeen)
• published a manuscript by Rep. Stephen A. Day of Illinois, attacking the policy of the Administration.
• ex-Senator Rush D. Holt of W. Virginia wrote a book for Flanders Hall but was never published. But Viereck sent a manuscript to Berlin which was intercepted by the British at Bermuda.
• To help prevent Roosevelt’s $4.8 billion Selective Service Bill (defense program) from passing in Congress, Viereck wrote speeches for Sen. Lundeen.

  - just before giving one of Viereck’s speeches, Aug. 31, 1940, Sen. Lundeen was killed in a plane crash. So a similar version was delivered by Theodore H. Hoffman, head of the Steuben Society.

The Franking Privilege

• Viereck figured out that by placing pro-Axis propaganda in the Congressional Record tens of thousands of reprints could be mailed out postage-free by Congressmen using the “franking privilege.”
• many Congressmen used for this probably didn’t know what was going on.

To avoid direct contact with Rep. Fish’s office Viereck had Prescott Dennet set up a special propaganda “committee” in Wash. D.C. in spring 1940.

• an isolationist publicist in Wash. D.C.
• operated under 3 different names:

  - War Debts Defense Committee

  - Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee

  - Islands for War Debts Committee

   

• franked envelopes for addressing went to the Christian Front, Silver Shirts, America First Committee, & others.

  - William Dudley Pelley sent out brochures advertising the “Protocols of Zion.”

  - one chief re-distributor for American First was Ralph Townsend, a paid Japanese agent in San Francisco.

German propaganda objectives:

• strengthen and replenish Germany.
• weaken and harass Germany’s foe’s.
• keep America out of the war.

Chapter 10 – “America First!”

The America First Committee rally in Philadelphia 5/29/41

• 16,000 attended, some gave nazi salute when cheering.
• none of the speakers really knew that Germany was behind it, pulling the strings.
• Charles A. Lindbergh called for the overthrow of the Roosevelt Administration. “Are we going to let Jews run this country?”

At Charles Lindbergh’s suggestion, Douglas Stuart, Jr. asked General Robert E. Wood (Chairman of the Board of Sears, Roebuck & Co.) to lead America First.

Stuart met with wealthy ex-diplomat William R. Castle.

• former Under-Secretary of State in the Hoover Administration.
• in close touch with former Pres. Hoover, Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, Gen. Wood, Charles Lindbergh, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, & other anti-Administration bigwigs.
• his views were publicized in official German and Japanese propaganda journals.

America First Committee financed by:

• William H. Regnery, Chicago millionaire.
• Clay Judson, Chicago attorney
• Stuart
• Gen. Wood

The original committee included:

• Henry Ford, given a medal by Hitler.
• Avery Brundage, former Chairman of the American Olympic Games Committee when in Berlin 1936.
• Charles A. Lindbergh, later the Committee’s #1 hero & spokesman, medal from Hitler.

Main objective – Keep America out of the War!

Many were probably sincere, not knowing they were dupes of Nazi & Japanese agents.

Jan. 22, 1941, Short-wave radio broadcast by Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich: “The America First Committee is truly American and truly patriotic!”

Members of he German American Bund moved quietly into the chapters of the America First Committee. Other supporters were: William Pelley’s Silver Shirts, The Christian Fronters, the KKK, White Russian Fascists, Christian Mobilizers, & others.

The American Legion in California found that the entire fifth column in the U.S. had joined the America First movement.

Laura Ingalls

• popular & powerful speaker for the America First Committee.
• famous aviatrix
• paid Nazi agent
• socialite, dancer, actress
• Sept. 1939, “bombed” the White House with anti-war leaflets.
• $$ came from Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, head of the Gestapo in the U.S. (his title was Second Secretary of the German Embassy in Washington).
• worked with Hans Thomson, The German Charge’ d’Affaires.
• Fritz Weidemann, German Consul in San Francisco.
• arrested by the FBI for failing to register as an agent of the Third Reich. Sentenced to 8 months to 2 years.

Frank B. Burch, distinguished member of the Akron, Ohio community.

• a founder of the America First Committee in Akron, Ohio.
• elected to state Senate in 1923.
• hated Roosevelt & the New Deal.
• 1939 duped by Dr. Karl Kapp, German Consul at Cleaveland, fell for he “international Jew” line.
• gave lists of names to Kapp, who turned them over to George Sylvester Vierek.
• front for Nazi propaganda in the mid-west.
• Sept. 1941 indicted for not registering as an agent of the German Gov.

1939 Hollywood, a screenwriter takes a trip to Nazi Germany. His list:

• Fraulein Reimann, German Embassy (London).
• Herr Leichtenstern, one of Goebbels’ right-hand men.
• Herr Bohle (Ernst Wilhelm Bohle), specialist in psychological saboage in U.S.

He came back with $$, some of it he gave to G. Allison Phelps.

• head of “The American Group” in Hollywood.
• had a radio broadcast in Hollywood, KMTR.
• said Hollywood was controlled by “alien forces” & “communists” who were producing movies to involve the U.S. in the war against Germany.
• fall 1940, published a pamphlet with names of “Reds” (all Jewish names) in Hollywood. An almost identical list of names appeared in the 1/12/40 issue of the official Nazi propaganda newsletter, Welt-Dienst.

A year prior to the Welt-Dienst issue Hitler spoke out against Hollywood. Said it was a center of anti-Nazism, democracy and communism, can’t be tolerated any longer.

Shortly after, Fritz Kuhn, Fuehrer of the German American Bund, demanded a “thorough cleansing of the Hollywood film industry of all alien, subversive elements.”

William Dudley Pelley printed an article: “Who’s Who In Hollywood – Find the Gentile!”

Early 1941, G. Allison Phelps began broadcasting demands for an investigation of the movie industry. He then went to Washingon D.C. & worked out of the office of Sen. Robert Rice Reynolds of N. Carolina.

Returned to the West Coast and broadcasted that his efforts in Washington would soon be apparent.

At the request of Senator Gerald P. Nye of N. Dakota, on Aug. 1 1941 Sen. Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri introduced Senate Resolution No. 152, which said that movies & radio have been used for propaganda for participation in the war. Therefore, the Committee on Interstate Commerce will investigate any propaganda by the movie industry.

The Committee on Interstate Commerce was headed by Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, leader of the America First Committee congressional bloc.

The America First “investigators” objected to the anti-Nazi films:

• The Great Dictator
• Confessions of a Spy
• Escape
• Man Hunt
• I Married a Nazi

but not the Nazi-produced films, like Victory In The West.

Wendell Willkie made public statements exposing the anti-Hollywood witch-hunt and the “investigation” was dropped.

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

• The office of Scribner’s Commentator magazine moved there.

  - published by Douglas M. Seward, editor George T. Egleston, both promoted America First Committee and Lindbergh.

• Summer of 1941 became the unofficial headquarters of the America First Committee.
• visitors that summer included Charles Lindbergh, General Robert E. Wood, Senator Burton Wheeler, Senator Gerald Nye, ex-Senator Rush Holt, Ralph Townsend (secret Japanese agent from San Francisco), Louise Carus (also joined the editorial staff, daughter of German-American industrialist of La Salle, Illinois, at whose home Nazi spy Dr. Auhagen was arrested by federal agents). Seward Bishop Collins

  - wealthy former NY editor

  - moved into a large estate at Lake Geneva.

  - stored short-wave radio equipment in his garage.

  - 1938 provided bail for Mrs. Ignatz Griebl, wife of he Nazi spy who fled the U.S. that year.

  - had a bookstore in NYC, meeting place for fifth columnists.

In August 1941 Stewerd & Eggleson published the 1st issue of their newspaper The Herald.

• pro-Nazi propaganda.
• plugged America First Committee.

Later, when facing the Washington Federal Grand Jury for Axis propaganda, they said they got $100,000 from Charles S. Payson, NY millionaire & admirer of Linbergh, but the money mostly went to finance Scribner’s Commentator. They said the $30,000 that financed The Herald was given to them anonymously, they didn’t know who it was. The source of The Herald’s foreign news came straight from the Propaganda Ministries of Berlin, Rome, & Tokyo, via short-wave radio.

Their publications were distributed throughout the country for free.

Also mailed out copies to the U.S. armed forces.

This was psychological sabotage.

Sept. 11, 1941 – Lindbergh declared that only 3 groups wanted war: “The British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration.”

The German American Bund proposed Lindbergh for President of the U.S.

Col. Joseph M. Patterson’s Daily News called for the formation of an “American First Party.”

Col. Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune called for an “America First Party.”

Nov. 1941 secret meeting in Wash. to discuss political plans for the America First Committee.

• General Wood
• Senators Nye, Wheeler, Taft
• Reps. Karl Mundt & Day, and others.

Their plans:

1) launch campaign to impeach Sec. of Navy Frank Knox.
2) align the clergy against aid to the Soviet Union by stressing the “Bolshevik menace.”
3) non-interventionist propaganda, more than before.
4) set up an America First Party in time for the 1942 elections.

Dec. 7, 1941 – Japan bombs Pearl Harbor.

Chapter 11 – “America At War”

Dec. 12, 1941 – The America First Committee officially disbanded.

Dec. 17, 1941 – secret meeting at the home of Edwin Sibley Webster Jr., wealthy Wall Street broker and former Exec. Director of the NY Chapter of the American First Committee.

• Lindbergh
• Horace J. Haase

Haase said they would come to power later, with Lindbergh the leader.

A few weeks later Haase set up an organization called “Americans for Peace.”

3 days before Pearl Harbor the Chicago Tribune printed highly confidential military information. Sec. of War Henry L. Stimson denounced it saying they revealed military secrets to the enemy.

The psychological sabotage continued after the war:

• undermine the people’s confidence in wartime leadership
• stirring up prejudices against Allied nations
• racial propaganda
• artificial antagonisms between business and labor
• William Randolph Hearst
• Capt. Joseph M. Paterson
• Capt. Robert R. McCormick
• Sen. Gerald P. Nye
• Rep. Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan
• Rep. Martin Dies of Texas
• Rep. Harold Knutson of Minnesota
• Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana
• Sen. C. Wayland Brooks of Illinois
• Rep. Stephen Day of Illinois
• Rep. Dewey Short of Missouri
• Rep. Paul Schafer of Michigan
• Sen. Robert Rice Reynolds of N. Carolina, Chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee

Chapter 12 – “America Strikes Back”

The Axis powers underestimated America’s response to the war.

Many of the psychological saboteurs were sentenced to prison.

Special Grand Juries were set up in many parts of the U.S. to investigate enemy propaganda activities.

• NY Grand Jury indicted many German American Bund members.
• Washington Federal Grand Jury indicted many men and women for trying to sabotage the morale among American soldiers and sailors by picturing the United Nations as weak and ineffective, America’s leaders as untrustworthy and the war as a “Jewish plot.”

Archibald MacLeish, Director of the Office of Facts and Figures, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 17, 1942: “…the most pernicious and pervasive defeatism in not practiced by those who violate the statutes of their country openly. It is practiced by those who take scrupulous care to stay within the law – to come, as one of them is reported to have told his staff, ‘as close to treason as I dare.’”

The tiny group of defeatist Congressmen continue their work in Washington D.C.

The answer to the problem of wartime psychological sabotage lies with the American people themselves.

http://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95973

Here is a recording done during the Longines Chronoscope program in 1952 where the guest was Robert Morris special counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS).   Morris was later implicated as one of the lynchpins along with Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby behind the plot to murder John F. Kennedy.   Morris and Willoughby headed up the Dallas John Birch Society.   Notice that SISS is the sound made by snakes in the grass.  Richard Condon later exposed Robert Morris as one of his primary suspects plotting to kill JFK in his novel “The Manchurian Candidate.”    During the last years of his life, Robert Morris, spent countless hours in a lawsuit filed against NYNEX in an attempt to find out the name of the person who telephoned him to question him about his activities in Miami, Florida related to the plot to murder President John F. Kennedy.  Mae Brussel and William Turner both linked Charles Willoughby and Robert Morris together in an article in Ramparts Magazine as the duo behind the plot to murder JFK.   And Dick Russell’s informant in The Man Who Knew Too Much, also fingered Charles Willoughby as one of the main plotters against JFK.

Whittaker Chambers identified Morris as being the real brains behind Joe McCarthy’s McCarthyism campaigns.  In this recording you might be amazed to find that Robert Morris has a rather unimpressive countenance and appearance and delivery combined with either a strong New Jersey accent bordering on a permanent speech impediment with which he apparently struggled.

Condon implied that Morris should be subjected to a Frontal Lobotomy because of his paranoid rantings about Communists and other alleged threats to American Democracy.   Morris later defended Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker after the Ole Miss Riots and he defended Otto F. Otepka after the Walt Whitman Rostow hearings that resulted in the firing of Otto Otepka for leaking confidential documents about Rostow to the press.  Most serious scholars now agree that McCarthyism was a fabricated hoax perpetrated on the American public and that the entire Cold War was also an experiment in psychological warfare at the level of Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in the 1940′s when thousands of listeners became convinced that the United States was actually being attacked by invaders from Mars.

Morris used these tactics to actually convince millions of people that McCarthy had definitively identified over 200 card-carrying Communists employed by the U.S. Government in sensitive positions.  Morris was head of both counter-intelligence and psychological warfare operations in the Pacific when he actually wrote pamphlets which were then translated and dropped onto Japanese soil behind enemy lines in an attempt to demoralize the opposition and debilitate the support from Japanese citizens for the war.   Morris was a conniving and self-promoting sleaze ball and slime ball and a snake-in-the-grass of major proportions.   Richard Condon referred to him in The Manchurian Candidate as “R. Morris a Benedect Arnold.”   Morris worked for decades with various right wing extremists with pro-Nazi sentiments in an attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government and install a pro-fascist regime headed up by ex-Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.

Otepka also had Oswald’s defector dossier on his desk and was the person responsible for actually approving any passport applications filed by anyone suspected of being somehow controversial or dangerous to America.   Otepka and Morris both were well aware of Oswald’s defection and renouncing of his citizenship and yet they allowed him to re-enter the country after his visit to Russia.

FOREKNOWLEDGE AND JFK ASSASSINATION

One of the hallmarks and “fingerprints of intelligence” that allegedly makes the assassination of President Kennedy a covert intelligence operation is the foreknowledge certain people had of the event, and expressing it to others before it occurred.

Please note how many of these incidents involved Army Intelligence operatives or current or former Army officers and how infrequently these incidents involved actual CIA agents or operatives.   Only E. Howard Hunt, who made a death bed confession about his alleged “bench warmer” role in the JFK assassination had extensive experience as a CIA agent.

- Bray – See: Bray v. Bendix trial transcripts re: JEFCOTT.

- Cambridge, England – Telephone call. See: Bowen, Howard.

- Cheramie, Rose – Jack Ruby associate.  See: Louisiana State Police (HSCA)

- Condon, Richard in his novel “The Manchurian Candidate” when he described the list of conspirators who were planning on killing Senator Kennedy in the 1958-1959 timeframe.  This list included John Birchers like Dr. Robert J. Morris from Dallas, a former Naval officer, former Army Major George Racey Jordan, Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, an Army cryptogropher during World War II, Army Maj. General Charles A. Willoughby and other assorted long time Nazi supporters and outright fascists like Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, Senator J. Strom Thurmond, in the U.S. Army Reserve,  Ray Steiner Cline of the CIA and the World Anti-communist League, Wickliffe Preston Draper of  The Pioneer Fund, who held a commission as a Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, Anastase Vonsiatsky of the Russian Nationalist Fascist Party and the Order of St. John Knights of Malta sponsored by Russian Czars for generations, who also held an Army Reserver commission at one time, Air Force Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, James Madole from New York, the White Supremacist who started the National Renaissance Party and a few others who were either Eugenicists, affiliated with Wickliffe Draper’s Pioneer Fund, Nazi sympathizers, Racists or so anti-Communist that they became closet Nazis.

- Dinkin, Eugene B. – American soldier in Germany, claims to have picked up on the assassination plot from Army Security Agency monitor of OAS, the Algerian French Generals, went AOL and tried to inform American ambassador. See : Russell, Dick, TMWKTM.

Echevarria, Homer a member of Alpha 66 and the 30 th of November Movement bragged in Chicago after JFK’s visit there that “…we now have enough money to take care of Kennedy.   He will no longer be a thorn in our side.”

- Grace, William – “Shortly before the assassination an executive of the Grace Lines was found unconscious in the street. Taken to a hospital, he mumbled that the president was to be shot. He had an appointment with Army Intelligence agents before he was found.” – (Paris Flamonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy). Also : “An executive of the Grace Lines suffered a concussion after coming into contact with an Army Intelligence agent. While in a delirium he said, ‘The President is in danger!…”. [Also Note LHO wrote to mother/brother he "made reservations on a Grace liner." ]

- Lorenz, Marina described how she rode in an automobile caravan from Miami to Dallas right after JFK’s Miami visit and met with Jack Ruby, E. Howard Hunt and others in Dallas to plot JFK’s eventual demise.

- Martinez, Jorge Soto – On Nov. 1, told Lillian Springler at Parrot Jungle in Miami JFK to be killed by “Lee, been to Russia, Mexico.” JSM lived in apartment above Mike McLaney’s garage, former Cuban Customs official, who worked at Fountainbleau Hotel on Miami Beach, Florida.

- Martino, John – To his wife, on the morning of the assassination (See: Summers, Vanity Fair, SWHT), also Larry Hancock’s “Someone Would Have Talked.”  Martino had traveled with Dr. Revilo P. Oliver on the John Birch Society Speaker’s tours during 1962 and 1963 and was later murdered near Miami.

- Milteer, Joseph – (RIP Feb. 28, 1974) Alias Samuel Steven Story. See: William “Willie” A. Somerset – Agent 88 – undercover informant for the City of Miami Police Intelligence Department, during taped conversations made at Congress of Freedom meetings with Joseph A. Milteer of the National States Rights Party, the KKK and the Dixie Klan, April 1963 and again in November 1963.

- Lawrence Bevilaqua – Miami, Florida (11/18/1963)  overheard a conversation, entirely in Cuban accented Spanish, about the upcoming  JFK assassination plot in Dallas which occurred at a known CIA safe house adjoining his property which was rented by Bernard Barker of Watergate infamy using his Keyes Realty Corporation to various South Florida Soldiers of Fortune and anti-Castro Cuban exiles.  During the early 1960′s his son, John personally observed people like CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, Gerry Patrick Hemming and even Jack Ruby visiting that CIA safe house.

- Odio, Syliva – See: Fonzi, Gaeton (HSCA; The Last Investigation)/ Russell, Dick (TMWKTM).

- Oxnard, California telephone call – See: Peter Noyes, Legacy of Doubt.

- Paine, Michael – Was talking about political assassination as JFK was being killed.

- Philbrick, Herbert, former FBI agent – See: Jean Hill. Philbrick expressed foreknowledge of the assassination.

- Portuondo, Emilio Luis who wrote for retired Army Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby’s Foreign Intelligence Digest, was overheard by an overseas operator during a phone call she completed discussing the upcoming plans to assassinate JFK in Dallas.

- Rivera, Jose, Dr. (Col. US Army Reserve) – See: Adele Edisen (ARRB). Rivera not only expressed foreknowledge of JFK’s assassination, but also of his son Patrick’s premature death and that LHO would move into the apartment on Magazine Street, New Orleans before LHO allegedly knew.

- Underhill, G. Garrett – See: Turner, William, Ramparts.

You know what?  Oswald killed Corporal Schrand while on guard duty.  Oswald was INSERTED into the plot either as a true patsy or as ONE of the possible shooters,  BECAUSE he was trained as a programmed assassin by the Order of St. John in Russia and then in the Marines while at Atsugi and that would guarantee the knee-jerk reaction attempts at a paranoia induced complete cover-up attempt.

Did he fire the 3 shots using the semi-automatic .306 rifle with an ammo clip handling Manlicher Carcano cartridges made by AMF and that cigarette packer guy whose name I forget right now.  It was made for the Navy Seals by 1962.  Perhaps.  Did he make the kill shots?  Doubtful.  What was the last thing Oswald did in West Berlin before he got on the boat to come back to the U.S.?  He tired to duplicate the efforts of Stashinsky in killing someone like Bandera or Melnyk that’s what and that is how Spas T. Raikin came to meet him at the docks in N.J.  So if you accept all of these facts, the only issue left is whether or not Oswald, in a ManCand trance using a semi-automatic rifle firing Carcano cartridges could be made into a much better shooter than his Marine record showed.  And that my friends is highly probable.  Are you all so smart that you can debunk this entire line of reasoning just because it goes against decades of group think?  I think not.