NEW WORLD ORDER2

The All-Seeing Eye, The President, The Secretary and The Guru
- by Terry Melanson ©, July 2001

“Wallace's reasons for wanting to introduce the Great Seal onto the American currency were based on his belief that America was reaching a turning point in her history and that great spiritual changes were imminent. He believed that the 1930s represented a time when a great spiritual awakening was going to take place which would precede the creation of the one-world state.”
- Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy, p.95

Reverse of the Great Seal: All Seeing EyeIf you live in the United States of America, then from the time you become conscious of money, the Great Seal becomes a part of your psyche – whether you realize it or not. Moreover, since U.S. dollars are, in effect, standard international currency, this Great Seal infiltrates the minds of men the world over – both free and bond.

The centerpiece of this mandala is the All-Seeing Eye – an important symbol within freemasonry and rosicrucian traditions for hundreds of years. So it is not surprising to find pride among occultists who understand the significance of this emblem: “Our beautiful seal is an expression of Freemasonry, an expression of occult ideas.” (Wyckoff, H. S. The Great American Seal. The Mystic Light, the Rosicrucian Magazine, p.56) 1

The first attempts at including the All-Seeing Eye on the seal were not successful. The first die of the Great Seal was cut from brass in 1782. In 1825, 1841, 1877, 1885, and 1902, new dies were cut, but each time the reverse went uncut and unused . . . the Illuminati's plan for the New World Order had not been advanced far enough, yet, to be announced.

The New World Order is an expression that has been used by illuminized Freemasonry since the days of Weishaupt to signify the coming world government. “It is necessary to establish a universal regime over the whole world”, Weishaupt had said. (Writings of the Illuminati, 1780)

During the first part of the 20th century and up to the time the reverse of the seal was first used, a series of victories over the sovereignty of the United States had already been won. Illuminist agents committed to the one-world interests of the Rothschild-Warburg-Rockefeller cartel had accomplished some important stepping stones to this New World Order: Federal Reserve System (1913); League of Nations (1920); Royal Institute of International Affairs, and Council on Foreign Relations (1920-21); and the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The consolidation of power was complete and the reverse side of the seal, which remained largely unknown to the American people for more than 150 years, could now be placed.
The Intervention by the Masonic-Rosicrucian-Illuminati

In 1934, Secretary of Agriculture, soon-to-be Vice-President (1940-44) and 32nd degree freemason Henry Wallace submitted a proposal to the president to mint a coin depicting the seal's obverse and reverse. President Franklin D Roosevelt, also a 32nd degree freemason, liked the idea but opted to instead place it on the dollar bill. According to Henry Wallace, in a letter dated February 6, 1951, “the Latin phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum impressed me as meaning the 'New Deal' of the Ages.”

“Roosevelt as he looked at the colored reproduction of the Seal was first struck with the representation of the 'All-Seeing Eye,' a Masonic representation of Great Architect the Universe. Next he was impressed with the idea that the foundation for the new order of the ages had been laid in 1776 (May 1st, 1776, founding of the Illuminati) but would be completed only under the eye of the Great Architect. Roosevelt like myself was a 32nd degree Mason. He suggested that the Seal be put on the dollar bill rather that a coin.”

Besides being a high ranking freemason and having the distinction of introducing socialism into the American political system, Roosevelt was a member of a secret society called the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystics Shrine (Shriners), attaining the grade of a Knight of Pythias. The Order of Nobles and Mystics claimed to be an offshoot of the Illuminati.

Freemasons, Walter Flemming and William Florence founded an American branch in New York, 1872. Membership in the order was open only to Freemasons who had reached the 32nd degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite or those who've attained the last degree of the York Rite, the thirteenth degree (Knight Templar).

The Order of Nobles and Mystics have origins which date back to the seventh century – apparently founded by a descendent of Mohammed. Author Michael Howard describes the Order's symbols.

Symbol of the Order “The symbol of the Order is a crescent moon, made from the claws of a Bengal tiger, engraved with a pyramid, an urn and a pentagram. The crescent is suspended from a scimitar and in the Order is a representation of the Universal Mother worshipped in ancient times as Isis. The horns of the crescent point downwards because it represents the setting moon of the old faith at the rising of the Sun of the new religion of the brotherhood of humanity.”
- The Occult Conspiracy, p.93

According to Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, Roosevelt's Shriner's have a ritual similar to a satanic ritual called "The Ceremony of the Stifling Air", or better known as "L'air Epais." LaVey says that this rite was originally performed "when entering the sixth degree of the Order of the Knights Templar." Remember that if the Masonic candidate chooses to follow the York Rite, after he completes the 13th degree called the Knight Templar, he can apply to become a Shriner.

LaVey describes the Templars' ritual thus:

“The original Templars' rite of the Fifth degree symbolically guided the candidate through the Devil's Pass in the mountains separating the East from the West (the Yezidi domain). At the fork of the trail the candidate would make an important decision: either to retain his present identity, or strike out on the Left-Hand Path to Shambhala, where he might dwell in Satan's household, having rejected the foibles and hypocrisies of the everyday world.

A striking parallel to this rite is enacted within the mosques of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, an order reserved for thirty-second degree Masons. The Nobles have gracefully removed themselves from any implication of heresy by referring to the place beyond the Devil's Pass as the domain where they might "worship at the shrine of Islam."

Once the celebrant has taken this degree, he embarks upon the Left Hand Path and chooses Hell in place of Heaven.”
- The Satanic Rituals — Companion to the Satanic Bible, p. 21 [PDF Version here]

Pretty powerful stuff for sure, and not what you would expect of the "merry old men" wearing "fez-hats" and tending to burn victims! One part of LaVey's interpretation I find interesting is the choice the candidate makes in following the "Left-Hand Path to Shambhala." 2 In esoteric doctrine the principle city of the underground world is Shambhala.

In this subterranean kingdom presides an all-powerful and All-Seeing ruler – The King of the World. Some have called him Sanat Kumara 3, others, King Satan. This may not be as far fetched as it seems. The Bible clearly states that Satan is the "prince" and "lord" of this world – John 12: 31 & 14: 30, Eph. 6: 12, Luke 4: 6-7, and 2 Cor. 4: 4 – and in fact has dominion over this fallen world. This King of the World, according to Eastern tradition, has a rule and influence which stretches to the surface by means of trusted emissaries who carry out specific tasks and duties – including a secret 8 million who carry out his tasks unbeknownst to us all. 4 As we shall see, one such "emissary" had a considerable influence with Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture.
Wallace's Occult Connections

Many of Henry Wallace's ideas originated with his guru, the Russian mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich. He was an adventurer/occultist in the tradition of Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley and G. I. Gurdjieff. Roerich spent many years travelling through Nepal and Tibet studying with the lamas in the Buddhist monasteries of those countries. Roerich was searching for the lost city of Shambhala. In esoteric circles Shambhala is the home of the Ascended Masters, Secret Chiefs, or the Great White Brotherhood – the hidden hand behind the formation and guidance of Freemasons, the Sufis, the Knights Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society – both Wallace and Roerich were members of the Theosophical Society, this is how Wallace met his Master.

Roerich seems to have been an emissary of sorts for the Great White Brotherhood – even bringing a mysterious stone to guide the League of Nations on behalf of the Masters. According to legend, the 'Chintamani Stone' was believed to be a part of a magical meteorite from a solar system in the Orion constellation. This Chintamani Stone is sent wherever a spiritual mission vital to humanity is set up, and is returned when that mission is completed. 5

A mysterious stone was indeed mentioned by Wallace in one of his typical 'Dear Guru' letters to Roerich: “And I have thought of the admonition 'Await the Stone.' We await the Stone and we welcome you again to this glorious land of destiny.” 6 Not surprisingly, occultists regard Roerich as the guiding hand behind the placement of America's Great Seal and the All-Seeing Eye, and matter-of-factly state that it was at Roerich's insistence that Wallace approach Roosevelt about finally printing the All-Seeing Eye on the dollar bill.

Henry Wallace was well versed in occult knowledge himself. In a letter to Roerich he stated, “the search – whether it be for the lost word of Masonry, or the Holy Chalice, or the potentialities of the age to come – is the one supremely worthwhile objective. All else is karmic duty. But surely everyone is a potential Galahad? So may we strive for the Chalice and the flame above it.” The chalice he refers to, according to Michael Howard, is the Holy Grail, regarded by the Rosicrucians as a feminine symbol for perfection, and 'the age to come' is the dawning of the Aquarian Age. This I agree with, and further, "the age to come" is synonymous with Aleister Crowley's "New Age of Horus" – a Roerich occult contemporary. It seems that Novus Ordo Seclorum and Annuit Coeptis (He has blessed our beginning) has even deeper occult meanings than we're led to believe.
Illuminist Conspiracy?

Well, yes! These three "wise men" – by placing the reverse of the Great Seal on the dollar bill – succeeded in announcing to the world that America is on "the path", and is the world's best hope for the spiritual (occult) evolution of the planet. Considering how deep into the occult both Roosevelt and Wallace were already – and Wallace's connections to Theosophy – they had to of known that the most esteemed Theosophist of her time, Alice Bailey, had already declared that the Aquarian Age had begun in 1932. The whole symbology of the reverse is meant to be a mandala announcing this "New Age of Horus." They could not help but see the significance of this. And giving that their fellow illuminists in the Federal Reserve had now taken control of America's currency, it was a shoo-in.

As for Roerich, he was only doing the Hierarchy's bidding for he was also a channeler of the Ascended Master El Morya – a major avatar in the pantheon of Theosophy. Roerich, after his death, apparently succeeded in joining the Hierarchy, and has now become the occult equivalent of a catholic saint himself – an "Ascended Master." His messages are now channeled by Elizabeth Clare Prophet and one such message was "received", ironically enough, on October 28, 1990 at The Roosevelt Hotel.

“Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries ... By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language. Rejecting man-conceived dialects as inadequate and unworthy to perpetuate divine ideas, the Mysteries thus chose symbolism as a far more ingenious and ideal method of preserving their transcendental knowledge. In a single figure a symbol may both reveal and conceal, for to the wise the subject of the symbol is obvious, while to the ignorant the figure remains inscrutable. Hence, he who seeks to unveil the secret doctrine of antiquity must search for that doctrine not upon the open pages of books which might fall into the hands of the unworthy but in the place where it was originally concealed.”
— Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, p. 20

“These considerations lead us to an interesting topic, the Eye of Mind or the Eye of Horus ... and conveying the idea of the 'All seeing Eye'. The end set before the Egyptian neophyte was illumination, that is to be 'brought to light'. The Religion of Egypt was the Religion of the Light.”
Thomas Milton Stewart, Symbolism of the Gods of the Egyptians and The Light They Throw on Freemasonry, London, England, Baskerville Press, Ltd., 1927, p. 5

“On the reverse of our nation's Great Seal is an unfinished pyramid to represent human society itself, imperfect and incomplete. Above floats the symbol of the esoteric orders, the radiant triangle with its all-seeing eye. ... There is only one possible origin for these symbols, and that is the secret societies which came to this country 150 years before the Revolutionary War. ... There can be no question that the great seal was directly inspired by these orders of the human Quest, and that it set forth the purpose for this nation. ...”
- Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America, pp. 174, 181.

End Notes

1.

The Wyckoff quote was reproduced on page 59 of Robert Hieronimus' America's Secret Destiny: Spiritual Vision & the Foundation of a Nation.

Dr. Robert R. Hieronimus is the world's foremost authority on the reverse of the Great Seal. In October 1981 he received a doctorate for his work on the history and meaning of the Great Seal: An Historical Analysis of the Reverse of the American Great Seal and Its Relationship to the Ideology of Humanistic Psychology.

Much of the material in his PhD dissertation is reproduced in America's Secret Destiny. Having researched a wide array of occult/esoteric literature and studying the Rosicrucian/Freemasonic views of the American forefathers, he comes to the conclusion that the Great Seal is an initiatory mandala, in part, for the purpose of "national and global transformation."
2.

See the Left Hand Path; the historicity and origins of this term for a more thorough treatment of where the term might have originated.
3.

Sanat Kumara was made popular by the channelings of Alice Bailey. The origin stems from Hinduism, where Sanat Kumara is revered as one of the four or seven sons of Brahma.
4.

Many stories about Shambhala and the "King of the World" circulated widely in Theosophical circles around the turn of the 20th century. A great deal of this material is reproduced on the web, as well: In Search of Shambhala, An Excerpt From - Beasts, Men and Gods and Mystery of Shambhala with an account of Nicholas Roerich's involvement.
5.

Victoria LePage, Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la, p.10, Quest Books 1996.

“The Black stone of the Ka'aba of Mecca and that of the Ancient Shrine of Cybele, the goddess mother of the Near East are both believed by some occultists to be pieces of the magical meteorite (called the Chintamani Stone) which is alleged to have come from a solar system in the constellation Orion, probably Sirius...according to Lamaist lore, a fragment of this stone...is sent wherever a spiritual mission vital to humanity is set up, and is returned when that mission is completed. Such a stone was said to be in possession of the failed League of Nations, it's return being entrusted to [Nicholas] Roerich.”

And here: Searching for Shambhala.
6.

The famous "Dear Guru" letters fell into the hands of Wallace's political foes. They were kept secret in 1940 when he ran as Vice President for Roosevelt's third term in office. But in 1948, when Wallace ran for president as candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party, the letters were leaked to the press. See American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace for a thorough study on the controversial, and often perplexing, man.

The Occult Meaning of the All-Seeing Eye

Lieutenant C. A. L. Totten, to Secretary of Treasury Charles J. Folger, on February 10, 1882:

“The All-Seeing Eye is one of the oldest hieroglyphics of the Deity. The triangle also is a cabalistic symbol of the most remote antiquity...

The descent of the mystic eye and triangle in the form of a capstone to this mysterious monument [the Great Pyramid of Gizeh] of all times and nations, is to us as a people most pregnant with significance. The motto, Novus Ordo Seclorum, is a quotation from the 4th Ecologue and was borrowed in turn by Virgil from the mystic Sylbylline records.

The entire quotation is as follows: ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum altered from Magnus Soeclorum Ordo, a mighty order of the ages born anew. Both the prophetic Virgin and Saturnian kingdoms now return. Now a new progeny is let down from the heavens. Favor, chaste Lucina, the boy soon to be born in whom the iron age shall come to an end, and the golden one shall arise again in the whole earth.’”
Chapter 14: Great Cycle, Global Grid And Multidimensional Physics: The Historical Perspective

“...the All-Seeing Eye, ...to the Egyptian initiates was the emblem of Osiris, the Creator.”

“... His [Osiris] power was symbolized by an Eye over a Sceptre. The Sun was termed by the Greeks the Eye of Jupiter, and the Eye of the World; and his is the All-Seeing Eye in our Lodges.”
- Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, pp. 15-16; 472

“Known as the 'Eye of Horus' or 'Utchat Eye', it is associated with both the Egyptian God Horus and his father Osiris.”
- J.C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, p. 20

“Called the 'mal ochio' (evil eye), this object is regarded by all Satanists as the symbol of Lucifer.”
- William J. Schnoebelen, James R. Spencer Whited Sepulchers, p. 20

“The Serpent promised Adam and Eve that their eyes would 'be opened' if they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The key word in this passage is eyes, which in Hebrew can be translated 'knowledge.' Opened can be translated 'broadened.' What the Serpent promised Adam and Eve was that knowledge would be broadened if they ate of the forbidden fruit. But the most foreboding aspect of this scripture emerges from the fact that the Hebrew word for 'eyes' is not plural, but singular. What the Serpent actually told Adam and Eve was that their 'eye' would be broadened by knowledge. The 'eye' that Scripture wants us to consider is not the physical organ of sight, but the eye of the mind or the soul. This singular 'eye' is called the 'third eye' of clairvoyance in the Hindu religion, the eye of Osiris in Egypt, and the All-Seeing Eye in Freemasonry.”
- John Daniel, Scarlet and the Beast: A History of the War Between English and French Freemasonry, Vol. III, pp. 6-7 (Source: Misc Study - The All-Seeing Eye)

“Many modern groups, though not related...claim to be offshoots of the original so-called Mystery Religion. They all carry the same symbols, such as the All-Seeing Eye, and believe in the same so-called Secret Doctrine.

The symbol may represent a god, but it is not the God of the Bible. It is a human eye indicating that man is god.”
- J.R. Church, Guardians of the Grail: And the Men Who Plan to Rule the World, p. 165

“...the phrase so often employed, `the All-Seeing Eye.' This refers to the planetary Logos to see all parts, aspects and phases (in time and space) of his planetary vehicle,...”
- Alice Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age II - Teachings on the New Age - Part IV

Bailey's "planetary Logos" is a satanic trinity, the scheme is as follows,

* Shamballa: Ruler - Sanat (Satan) Kumara
* Hierarchy: Ruler - The [Anti] Christ
* Humanity: Ruler - Lucifer

“The eye of Shiva – the All-Seeing Eye, the eye which directs the will and purposes of Deity.”
- Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - Esoteric Astrology - III - Triangles of Energy - Constellations

“Roerich knew what he was doing as the symbol represents the spiritual future of the United States of America. The 'All-Seeing Eye' signifies the Spiritual Hierarchy of Light, the 'Silent Watchers' over humanity's spiritual development.”
The Secrets Of The Great Pyramid

“It is through the medium of this 'all-seeing eye' that the Adept can at any moment put Himself in touch with His disciples anywhere; that He can communicate with His compeers on the planet, and on the third planet which, with ours, forms a triangle...”
- Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - A Treatise on Cosmic Fire

“...upon the Path of Initiation, the initiate develops his tiny correspondence to the planetary All-Seeing Eye.”
- Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - Discipleship

“One of the four Lipka Lords, Who stand nearest to our planetary Logos, is called 'The Living Serpent,' and His emblem is a serpent of blue with one eye, the form of a ruby, in its head. Students who care to carry this symbology a little further can connect this idea with the 'eye of Shiva' which sees and knows all...”
- Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - A Treatise of Cosmic Fire


The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and The New World Order
- By William Blase

For those who may be confused by the controversies surrounding the "New World Order", a One-World-Government, and American concern over giving the UN more power; those unaware of the issues involved; and those wishing more background, I offer the following.

Originally presented for an Honors Class, "Dilemmas of War and Peace," at New Mexico State University, the paper was ridiculed and characterized by Dr. Yosef Lapid, (an acknowledged and locally quoted "expert" on Terrorism and Middle Eastern affairs) as "paranoid... possibly a symptom of mental illness." You may judge for yourself.

Citing source data is the "scientific method," but does not seem to apply to "Conspiracy Theories." A thousand sources may be quoted, yet will not convince the "skeptics," the "realists." It seems to me the "symptoms of mental illness" are on their side, if they refuse to look at evidence ("There are none so blind as those who WILL not see"); or perhaps something more sinister is at work, such as a knowledge of the truth, that does not want YOU to know.

To be paranoid means to believe in delusions of danger and persecution. If the danger is real, and the evidence credible, then it cannot be delusional. To ignore the evidence, and hope that it CANNOT be true, is more an evidence of mental illness.

The issue involves much more than a difference of philosophy, or political viewpoint. Growing up in the midst of the "Cold War," our generation were taught that those who attempted to abolish our national sovereignty and overthrow our Constitutional government were committing acts of treason. Please judge for yourself if the group discussed is guilty of such.

If one group is effectively in control of national governments and multinational corporations; promotes world government through control of media, foundation grants, and education; and controls and guides the issues of the day; then they control most options available. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the financial powers behind it, have done all these things, and promote the "New World Order", as they have for over seventy years.

The CFR is the promotional arm of the Ruling Elite in the United States of America. Most influential politicians, academics and media personalities are members, and it uses its influence to infiltrate the New World Order into American life. Its' "experts" write scholarly pieces to be used in decision making, the academics expound on the wisdom of a united world, and the media members disseminate the message.

To understand how the most influential people in America came to be members of an organization working purposefully for the overthrow of the Constitution and American sovereignty, we have to go back at least to the early 1900's, though the story begins much earlier (depending on your viewpoint and beliefs).

That a ruling power elite does indeed control the U.S. government behind the scenes has been attested to by many americans in a position to know. Felix Frankfurter, Justice of the Supreme Court (1939-1962), said: "The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." In a letter to an associate dated November 21, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote, "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson."

February 23, 1954, Senator William Jenner warned in a speech: "Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government, a bureaucratic elite which believes our Constitution is outmoded."

Baron M.A. Rothschild wrote, "Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws."

All that is needed to effectively control a government is to have control over the nation's money: a central bank with a monopoly over the supply of money and credit. This had been done in Western Europe, with the creation of privately owned central banks such as the Bank of England.

Georgetown professor Dr. Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton's mentor while at Georgetown) wrote about the goals of the investment bankers who control central banks: "... nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole... controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

The Bank of the United States (1816-36), an early attempt at an American central bank, was abolished by President Andrew Jackson, who believed that it threatened the nation. He wrote: "The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government, the distress it had wantonly produced...are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."

Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution...if the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Does that not describe the situation in America today?

The U.S. managed to do without a central bank until early in this century, when, according to Congressman Charles Lindbergh, Sr., "The Money Trust caused the 1907 panic, and thereby forced Congress to create a National Monetary Commission." Headed by Senator Nelson Aldrich, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Commission recommended creation of a central bank.

Though unconstitutional, as only "The Congress shall have Power...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof..." (Article I, Section 8, U.S. Constitution) the Federal Reserve Act was passed in December 1913; ostensibly to stabilize the economy and prevent further panics, but as Lindberg warned Congress: "This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth...the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust investigation, will be legalized." The Great Depression and numerous recessions later, it is obvious the Federal Reserve produces inflation and federal debt whenever it desires, but not stability.

Congressman Louis McFadden, House Committee on Banking and Currency Chairman (1920-31), stated: "When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government."

Although called "Federal," the Federal Reserve system is privately owned by member banks, makes its own policies, and is not subject to oversight by Congress or the President. As the overseer and supplier of reserves, the Fed gave banks access to public funds, which enhanced their lending capacity.

Peter Kershaw, in "Economic Solutions" lists the ten major shareholders of the Federal Reserve Bank System as: Rothschild: London and Berlin; Lazard Bros: Paris; Israel Seiff: Italy; Kuhn- Loeb Company: Germany; Warburg: Hamburg and Amsterdam; Lehman Bros: New York; Goldman and Sachs: New York; Rockefeller: New York. (That most, if not all of these families just happen to be Jewish, you may judge the significance of yourself). The balance of stock is owned by major commercial member banks.

According to Devvy Kidd, "Why A Bankrupt America?" The Federal Reserve pays the Bureau of Engraving & Printing approximately $23 for each 1,000 notes printed. 10,000 $100 notes (one million dollars) would thus cost the Federal Reserve $230. They then secure a pledge of collateral equal to the face value from the U.S. government. The collateral is our land, labor, and assets... collected by their agents, the IRS. By authorizing the Fed to regulate and create money (and thus inflation), Congress gave private banks power to create profits at will.

As Lindberg put it: "The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only a few years removed." That day came in 1929, with the Stock Market crash and Great Depression.

One of the most important powers given to the Fed was the right to buy and sell government securities, and provide loans to member banks so they might also purchase them. This provided another built-in mechanism for profit to the banks, if government debt was increased. All that was needed was a method to pay off the debt. This was accomplished through the passage of the income tax in 1913.

A national income tax was declared unconstitutional in 1895 by the Supreme Court, so a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress by none other than ...Senator Nelson Aldrich. As presented to the American people it seemed reasonable enough: income tax on only one percent of income under $20,000, with the assurance that it would never increase.

Since it was graduated, the tax would "soak the rich", ...but the rich had other plans, already devising a method of protecting wealth. As described by Gary Allen in his 1976 book "The Rockefeller File," "By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax."

Exchanging ownership for control of wealth, foundations are also a handy means for promoting interests that benefit the wealthy. Millions of foundation dollars have been "donated" to causes such as promoting the use of drugs, while degrading preventive medicine. Since many drugs are made from coal tar derivatives, both oil companies and drug manufacturing concerns (many Rockefeller owned or controlled) are the main beneficiaries.

With the means to loan enormous sums to the government (the Federal Reserve), a method to repay the debt (income tax), and an escape from taxation for the wealthy, (foundations), all that remained was an excuse to borrow money. By some happy "coincidence," in 1914 World War I began, and after American participation national debt rose from $1 billion to $25 billion.

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1913, beating incumbent William Howard Taft, who had vowed to veto legislation establishing a central bank. To divide the Republican vote and elect the relatively unknown Wilson, J.P. Morgan and Co. poured money into the candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive Party.

According to an eyewitness, Wilson was brought to Democratic Party headquarters in 1912 by Bernard Baruch, a wealthy banker. He received an "indoctrination course" from those he met, and in return agreed, if elected: to support the projected Federal Reserve and the income tax, and "listen" to advice in case of war in Europe and on the composition of his cabinet.

Wilson's top advisor during his two terms was a man named Colonel Edward M. House. House's biographer, Charles Seymour, called him the "unseen guardian angel" of the Federal Reserve Act, helping to guide it through Congress. Another biographer wrote that House believed: "...the Constitution, product of eighteenth-century minds...was thoroughly outdated; that the country would be better off if the Constitution could be scrapped and rewritten..." House wrote a book entitled "Philip Dru: Administrator," published anonymously in 1912. The hero, Philip Dru, rules America and introduces radical changes, such as a graduated income tax, a central bank, and a "league of nations."

World War I produced both a large national debt, and huge profits for those who had backed Wilson. Baruch was appointed head of the War Industries Board, where he exercised dictatorial power over the national economy. He and the Rockefellers were reported to have earned over $200 million during the war. Wilson backer Cleveland Dodge sold munitions to the allies, while J.P. Morgan loaned them hundreds of millions, with the protection of U.S. entry into the war.

While profit was certainly a motive, the war was also useful to justify the notion of world government. William Hoar reveals in "Architects of Conspiracy" that during the 1950s, government investigators examining the records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a long- time promoter of globalism, found that several years before the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie trustees were planning to involve the U.S. in a general war, to set the stage for world government.

The main obstacle was that Americans did not want any involvement in European wars. Some kind of incident, such as the explosion of the battleship Main, which provoked the Spanish - American war, would have to be provided as provocation. This occurred when the Lusitania, carrying 128 Americans on board, was sunk by a German submarine, and anti-German sentiment was aroused. When war was declared, U.S. propaganda portrayed all Germans as Huns and fanged serpents, and all Americans opposing the war as traitors.

What was not revealed at the time, however, was that the Lusitania was transporting war munitions to England, making it a legitimate target for the Germans. Even so, they had taken out large ads in the New York papers, asking that Americans not take passage on the ship.

The evidence seems to point to a deliberate plan to have the ship sunk by the Germans. Colin Simpson, author of "The Lusitania," wrote that Winston Churchill, head of the British Admiralty during the war, had ordered a report to predict the political impact if a passenger ship carrying Americans was sunk. German naval codes had been broken by the British, who knew approximately where all U-boats near the British Isles were located.

According to Simpson, Commander Joseph Kenworthy, of British Naval Intelligence, stated: "The Lusitania was deliberately sent at considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting...escorts withdrawn." Thus, even though Wilson had been reelected in 1916 with the slogan "He kept us out of war," America soon found itself fighting a European war. Actually, Colonel House had already negotiated a secret agreement with England, committing the U.S. to the conflict. It seems the American public had little say in the matter.

With the end of the war and the Versailles Treaty, which required severe war reparations from Germany, the way was paved for a leader in Germany such as Hitler. Wilson brought to the Paris Peace Conference his famous "fourteen points," with point fourteen being a proposal for a "general association of nations," which was to be the first step towards the goal of One World Government-the League of Nations.

Wilson's official biographer, Ray Stannard Baker, revealed that the League was not Wilson's idea. "...not a single idea--in the Covenant of the League was original with the President." Colonel House was the author of the Covenant, and Wilson had merely rewritten it to conform to his own phraseology.

The League of Nations was established, but it, and the plan for world government eventually failed because the U.S. Senate would not ratify the Versailles Treaty.

Pat Robertson, in "The New World Order," states that Colonel House, along with other internationalists, realized that America would not join any scheme for world government without a change in public opinion.

After a series of meetings, it was decided that an "Institute of International Affairs", with two branches, in the United States and England, would be formed.

The British branch became known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, with leadership provided by members of the Round Table. Begun in the late 1800's by Cecil Rhodes, the Round Table aimed to federate the English speaking peoples of the world, and bring it under their rule.

The Council on Foreign Relations was incorporated as the American branch in New York on July 29, 1921. Founding members included Colonel House, and "...such potentates of international banking as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Otto Kahn, and Jacob Schiff...the same clique which had engineered the establishment of the Federal Reserve System," according to Gary Allen in the October 1972 issue of "AMERICAN OPINION."

The founding president of the CFR was John W. Davis, J.P. Morgan's personal attorney, while the vice-president was Paul Cravath, also representing the Morgan interests. Professor Carroll Quigley characterized the CFR as "...a front group for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group." Over time Morgan influence was lost to the Rockefellers, who found that one world government fit their philosophy of business well. As John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had said: "Competition is a sin," and global monopoly fit their needs as they grew internationally.

Antony Sutton, a research fellow for the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, wrote of this philosophy: "While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to 'go political' and make society go to work for the monopolists-- under the name of the public good and the public interest."

Frederick C. Howe revealed the strategy of using government in a 1906 book, "Confessions of a Monopolist": "These are the rules of big business...Get a monopoly; let society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics..."

As corporations went international, national monopolies could no longer protect their interests. What was needed was a one world system of government controlled from behind the scenes. This had been the plan since the time of Colonel House, and to implement it, it was necessary to weaken the U.S. politically and economically.

During the 1920's, America enjoyed a decade of prosperity, fueled by the easy availability of credit. Between 1923 and 1929 the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by sixty-two percent. When the stock market crashed, many small investors were ruined, but not "insiders." In March of 1929 Paul Warburg issued a tip the Crash was coming, and the largest investors got out of the market, according to Allen and Abraham in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy."

With their fortunes intact, they were able to buy companies for a fraction of their worth. Shares that had sold for a dollar might now cost a nickel, and the buying power, and wealth, of the rich increased enormously.

Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking Committee declared: "It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence...The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."

Curtis Dall, son-in-law of FDR and a syndicate manager for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm, was on the N.Y. Stock Exchange floor the day of the crash. In "FDR: My Exploited Father-In-Law," he states: "...it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market."

The Crash paved the way for the man Wall Street had groomed for the presidency, FDR. Portrayed as a "man of the little people", the reality was that Roosevelt's family had been involved in New York banking since the eighteenth century.

Frederic Delano, FDR's uncle, served on the original Federal Reserve Board. FDR attended Groton and Harvard, and in the 1920's worked on Wall Street, sitting on the board of directors of eleven different corporations.

Dall wrote of his father-in-law: "...Most of his thoughts, his political 'ammunition,'...were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World Money group. Brilliantly... he exploded that prepared 'ammunition' in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people--and thus paid off and retained his internationalist political support."

Taking America off the gold standard in 1934, FDR opened the way to unrestrained money supply expansion, decades of inflation--and credit revenues for banks. Raising gold prices from $20 an ounce to $35, FDR and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (son of a founding CFR member), gave international bankers huge profits.

FDR's most remembered program, the New Deal, could only be financed through heavy borrowing. In effect, those who had caused the Depression loaned America the money to recover from it. Then, through the National Recovery Administration, proposed by Bernard Baruch in 1930, they were put in charge of regulating the economy. FDR appointed Baruch disciple Hugh Johnson to run the NRA, assisted by CFR member Gerard Swope. With broad powers to regulate wages, prices, and working conditions, it was, as Herbert Hoover wrote in his memoirs: "...pure fascism;...merely a remaking of Mussolini's 'corporate state'..." The Supreme Court eventually ruled the NRA unconstitutional.

During the FDR years, the Council on Foreign Relations captured the political life of the U.S. Besides Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, other CFR members included Secretary of State Edward Stettinus, War Secretary Henry Stimson, and Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles.

Since 1934 almost every United States Secretary of State has been a CFR member; and ALL Secretaries of War or Defense, from Henry L. Stimson through Richard Cheney.

The CIA has been under CFR control almost continuously since its creation, starting with Allen Dulles, founding member of the CFR and brother of Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles had been at the Paris Peace Conference, joined the CFR in 1926, and later became its president.

John Foster Dulles had been one of Woodrow Wilson's young proteges at the Paris Peace Conference. A founding member of the CFR...he was an in-law of the Rockefellers, Chairman of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Board Chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In 1940 FDR defeated internationalist Wendell Willkie, who wrote a book entitled "One World," and later became a CFR member. Congressman Usher Burdick protested at the time on the floor of the House that Willkie was being financed by J.P. Morgan and the New York utility bankers. Polls showed few Republicans favored him, yet the media portrayed him as THE Republican candidate.

Since that time nearly ALL presidential candidates have been CFR members. President Truman, who was not a member, was advised by a group of "wise men," all six of whom were CFR members, according to Gary Allen. In 1952 and 1956, CFR Adlai Stevenson challenged CFR Eisenhower.

In 1960, CFR Kennedy (who was probably killed because he had the courage NOT to go along with all their plans) CFR Nixon. In 1964 the GOP stunned the Establishment by nominating its candidate over Nelson Rockefeller.

Rockefeller and the CFR wing proceeded to picture Barry Goldwater as a dangerous radical. In 1968 CFR Nixon ran against CFR Humphrey. The 1972 "contest" featured CFR Nixon vs. CFR McGovern.

CFR candidates for president include George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Edmund Muskie, John Anderson, and Lloyd Bentsen. In 1976 we had Jimmy Carter, who is a member of the Trilateral Commission, created by David Rockefeller and CFR member Zbigniew Brzezinski with the goal of economic linkage between Japan, Europe, and the United States, and: "...managing the world economy...a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system." We have also had (though his name strangely disappears from the membership list in 1979) CFR director (1977-79) George Bush, and last but not least, CFR member Bill Clinton.

They have all promoted the "New World Order," controlled by the United Nations. The problem is that "...the present United Nations organization is actually the creation of the CFR and is housed on land in Manhattan donated to it by the family of current CFR chairman David Rockefeller," as Pat Robertson describes it.

The original concept for the UN was the outcome of the Informal Agenda Group, formed in 1943 by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. All except Hull were CFR members, and Isaiah Bowman, a founding member of the CFR, originated the idea.

The American delegation to the San Francisco meeting that drafted the charter of the United Nations in 1949 included CFR members Nelson Rockefeller, John Foster Dulles, John McCloy, and CFR members who were communist agents--Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, and the Secretary-General of the conference, Alger Hiss. In all, the Council sent forty-seven of its members in the United States delegation, effectively controlling the outcome.

Since that time the CFR and its friends in the mass media (largely controlled by CFR members such as Katherine Graham of the "Washington Post" and Henry Luce of" Time, Life"), foundations, and political groups have lobbied consistently to grant the United Nations more authority and power. Bush and the Gulf War were but one of the latest calls for a "New World Order."

Admiral Chester Ward, a member of the CFR for over a decade, became one of its harshest critics, revealing its inner workings in a 1975 book, "Kissinger ON THE COUCH." In it he states "The most powerful cliques in these elitist groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and national independence of the United States."

Most members are one-world-government ideologists whose long- term goals were officially summed up in September 1961 State Department Document 7277, adopted by the Nixon Administration: "...elimination of all armed forces and armaments except those needed to maintain internal order within states and to furnish the United Nations with peace forces...by the time it (UN global government) would be so strong no nation could challenge it."

Within the CFR there exists a "much smaller group but more powerful...made up of Wall Street international bankers and their key agents. Primarily, they want the world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in control of the global government ...This CFR faction is headed by the Rockefeller brothers," according to Ward.

What must be remembered is that this is not some lunatic- fringe group...these are members of one of the most powerful private organizations in the world: the people who determine and control American economic, social, political, and military policy. Members' influence and control extends to "leaders in academia, public service, business, and the media," according to the CFR 1993 "Annual Report."

Their founding they describe as: "American Participants in the Paris Peace Conference decided that it was time for more private Americans to become familiar with the increasing responsibilities and obligations of the United States...there was a need for an organization able to provide for the continuous study of U.S. foreign police for the BENEFIT OF ITS MEMBERS (emphasis mine) and a wider audience of interested Americans."

They sponsor hundreds of programs, where members "exchange views with American and foreign officials and policy experts... discuss foreign policy issues...consider international issues of concern to the business community" (Corporate business), and "...affiliated groups of community leaders throughout the United states...meet with decision makers."

The CFR states that it is "host to many views, advocate of none," and it "has no affiliation with the U.S. government." No, no affiliation at all, if you don't count: "A Council member was elected president of the United States...Dozens of other Council colleagues were called to serve in cabinet and sub-cabinet positions," as they describe it in "Foreign Affairs," along with many members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, the Federal Reserve, and many other Federal bureaucrats.

They are not AFFILIATED with government, they ARE the government, in effect.

One re-occurring view was stated in the 50th anniversary issue of "Foreign Affairs," the official publication of the CFR. In an article by Kingman Brewster, Jr. entitled "Reflections on Our National Purpose." Our purpose should be, according to him, to do away with our nationality, to "take some risks in order to invite others to pool their sovereignty with ours..."

These "risks" include disarming to the point where we would be helpless against the "peace-keeping" forces of a global UN government. We should happily surrender our sovereignty to the world government in the interests of the "world community."

Today we have the spectacle of Spc. 4 Michael New, a U.S. soldier in Germany who refuses to wear the uniform of the UN, facing an "administrative discharge." He states rightly that he swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, not the United Nations. Many other Americans have taken that same oath, such as myself, and believe it is our sworn duty still to defend the Constitution, since an oath sworn before God must be fulfilled. (Why else do we swear to tell the truth in our courts, or when taking public office?) Is it a crime these days to actually BELIEVE in God and the oath that was taken?

Meanwhile, others who attempt to destroy the Constitution and our sovereignty are given honors and position...At least they are not hypocrites...only supremely arrogant.

"In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old fashioned assault..." in the opinion of Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State in "Foreign Affairs," April 1974.

James Warburg, son of CFR founder Paul Warburg, and a member of FDR's "brain trust," testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1950, "We shall have world government whether or not you like it--by conquest or consent."

Is this an AMERICAN speaking, or a dangerous lunatic? Who is this "We" who threatens to CONQUER us?

They are a group that actually has the power to do it, and is doing it every day, bit by bit.

CFR Members in the mass media, education, and entertainment push their propaganda of "humanism" and world brotherhood. We should all live in peace under a world government, and forget about such selfish things as nationalities and patriotism. We can solve our own problems. We don't need God, or morals, or values: it's all relative, anyway, right?...Because if we actually had some moral character and values, we might be able to discern that these people are actually EVIL.

The Bible says that the LOVE of money is the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10). These people are evil because they love money and power, and greed drives them to do anything to achieve their goals. They have lost all morality and conscience, and believe such concepts, as well as our Constitution, "outdated".

THAT is insanity--to have more wealth than can be spent, and still it is never enough. They have to control governments, start wars, conspire to rule the world; least the "common people" wake up to how they have gained their wealth, take it away from them, and demand that they pay the price for their crimes.

That is why they constantly pit us one against the other, with "Diversity," Affirmative Action, and other programs,...black against white, men against women, rural against urban, ranchers against environmentalists, and on and on...least we look in their direction.

We The People are held to a much higher standard. If we threaten the President or a public official, we are charged with a crime...yet the One-World-Gang can threaten the Constitution and the liberties of We The People, the sovereign rulers of this nation, and nothing is said or done.

Perhaps they do not fear what Man can do to them... they believe they have arranged everything, and their power and wealth will prevail in this world. However, those among them who have sworn an oath before God to uphold and defend the Constitution: the President, members of Congress, and the military; may find one day that they do indeed have something to fear.

List of CFR Members

Colonel House, the fallen angel, still has relatives controlling the CFR. Karen Elliot House is Chairman of the Membership Committee, and a member of the Nominating Committee, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick. David Rockefeller is now "Honorary Chairman of the Board", after serving as Chairman 1970-1985; and "Director Emeritus," after serving as a Director 1949-1985. Peter G. Peterson is Chairman, Admiral B. R. Inman is Vice Chairman, while Thomas Foley and Jeane Kirkpatrick are Directors serving on the Executive Committee.

These "private citizens" have access to government officials and policy makers as often as they wish, yet the results of their meetings can only be given to other government officials, corporate officers, or law partners. Participants are forbidden to transmit an attributed statement to any public medium, such as newspapers or TV, where there is "risk that it will promptly be widely circulated or published," as the "Annual Report" puts it.

Should not OUR public officials be forbidden to meet in secret with private groups? Public officials should only be allowed to discuss public business and policy in a public forum. The Public...remember US?

There is much more to say about this group and their plans for America. Gary Allen, in "The Rockefeller File," states that they are behind the many regional government plans, which would abolish city, county, and state lines, leaving us at the mercy of federal bureaucrats; and behind the push for "land use" controls. They want "federal control of everything. Since they intend to control the federal government..."

There are also the many allegations of involvement in gun running, drug smuggling, prostitution and sex slaves; and the many mysterious assassinations and "suicides" of witnesses and others who get too close to the truth...but that is another story.
References

* Bo Adelmann, 1986. "The Federal Reserve System." The New American, October 17.
* Gary Allen, 1976. The Rockefeller File. Seal Beach, CA: '76 Press.
* Gary Allen with Larry Abraham, 1972. None Dare Call it Conspiracy. Rossmoor, CA: Concord Press.
* "Congressional Record," December 22, 1913, Vol. 51.
* Phoebe and Kent Courtney, 1962. America's Unelected Rulers, The Council on Foreign Relations. New Orleans: Conservative Society of America.
* Curtis B. Dall, 1970. FDR My Exploited Father-In-Law. Washington D.C.: Action Associates.
* A. Ralph Epperson, 1985. The Unseen Hand. Tucson, AZ: Publius Press.
* F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1950. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
* William P. Hoar, 1984. Architects of Conspiracy. Belmont MA: Western Islands.
* Herbert Hoover, 1952. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, The Great Depression 1929-1941. New York: Macmillan.
* Frederick C. Howe, 1906. Confessions of a Monopolist. Chicago: Public Publishing Co.
* Robert C. Johansen, 1980. Models of World Order, in "Dilemmas of War and Peace."
* Peter Kershaw, 1994. "Economic Solutions."
* Devvy Kidd, 1995. "Why A Bankrupt America?" Colorado: Project Liberty.
* Ferdinand Lundberg, 1938. America's 60 Families. New York: Vanguard.
* Louis T. McFadden, 1934. "The Federal Reserve Corporation, remarks in Congress." Boston: Forum Publication Co.
* James Perloff, 1988. The Shadows of Power. Appleton, WI: Western Islands.
* Carroll Quigley, 1966. Tragedy and Hope. New York: Macmillan.
* Pat Robertson, 1991. The New World Order. Dallas: Word Publishing.
* Charles Seymour, ed., 1926. The Intimate Paper of Colonel House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
* Colin Simpson, 1972. The Lusitania. Boston: Little, Brown.
* Arthur D. Howde Smith, 1940. "Mr House ob5 Texas." New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
* Antony C. Sutton, 1975. Wall Street and FDR. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House.
* George Sylvester Viereck, 1932. The Strangest Friendship in History. New York: Liveright.

This document may be freely distributed or quoted in any medium, provided credit is given to the author and The Courier. Copyright 1995

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The Depopulation Bomb
- By Jim Keith (An excerpt from Jim Keith's Casebook on Alternative 3: UFOs, Secret Societies and World Control)

There is a solution other than what the elite consider excess population. Why not prevent the poor - for the sake of argument, let us venture a conservative 99% of the world's population - from having children altogether, or if that isn't possible, at least vastly slow their birth rates?

"Eugenics" is a term coined in the latter part of the 19th century by Englishmen Francis Galton to describe the "science" of bettering human stock and the elimination of unwanted characteristics... and individuals. Galton proposed societal intervention for the furtherance of "racial quality," maintaining that "Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations" and that "except by sterilization I cannot yet see any way of checking the produce of the unfit who are allowed their liberty and are below the reach of moral control."

A survey of eugenics in action begins with isolated incidents such as the sterilization of the mentally ill by American health officials in the late 1800's and the castration of children at the Pennsylvania Training School for Feebleminded Children in 1889. The movement quickly picked up momentum.

Formerly established as a study at University College in London in 1904, the first laboratory for the study of the subject was constructed by Charles B. Davenport at Cold Springs Harbor on Long Island (which, perhaps significantly, was also the location of the estates of both Dulles brothers, as well as the current headquarters of the Human Genome Organization for DNA mapping). The institute was funded in excess of $11 million by the Harriman and Rockefellers.

Supported in America by the Eastern Establishment, eugenics was nurtured in the hotbeds of Round Table-influenced philosophy, at Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell. The subject was popularized in Germany by Ernst Haeckel, who linked romantic German nature mysticism and the unity of the Volk with clinical bio-policies later instituted by Hitler.

Haeckel believed that there was no unity among the species of mankind, since "the morphological differences between two generally recognized species - for example sheep and goats - are much less important than those... between a Hottentot and a man of the Teutonic race." In the Aryan race Haeckel saw a "symmetry of all parts, and that equal development, which we call the perfect human beauty." He also believed the "wooly-haired" peoples "incapable of true inner culture or of a higher mental development... no wooly-haired nation has ever had an important history."

Haeckel felt the purpose of the nation state was to enforce selective breeding, praising the practices of the Spartans who killed all but "perfectly healthy and strong children" and thus were "continually in excellent strength and vigor."

In 1906 a group of Haeckel's academic followers formed the influential Monist League, agitating for a German government patterned along social Darwinian lines.

By 1907 in America, Indiana passed compulsory sterilization for the mentally ill and other "undesirables," while 475 males received vasectomies at the Indiana State Reformatory.

In 1912 the First International Congress of Eugenics was held in London, including among its directors Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Elliot (President emeritus of Harvard University), and David Starr Jordan (President of Stanford University).

The National Conference on Race Betterment was convened in United States in 1914, while by 1917 fifteen American states had eugenics laws on the books, almost all of them legalizing the sterilization of habitual criminals, epileptics, the insane, and the retarded.

H.H. Laughlin, the Expert Eugenics Agent of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization presented a Model Sterilization Law in 1922. This was to provide the basis for many state eugenics laws, as well as for eugenics law in Nazi Germany.

In 1928 the American Eugenics Society sponsored a contest for essays on the caused of decline in Nordic fertility, while Dr. Robie, at the Third International Congress of Eugenics, called for the sterilization of 14,000,000 Americans with low intelligence scores.

The Nazi Party in Germany passed in 1933 the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity," also known as the "Sterilization Law," written by professor Ernst Rudin, one of the country's leading psychiatrists. "Heredity Health Courts" were formed, and within three years two hundred and twenty-five thousand German "undesirables" had been sterilized.

Hitler's policies have been characterized as "a rather straightforward form of German social Darwinism." Far from being original with him, his policies were expansions upon already-extant political and scientific culture.

By 1939 German policies had evolved to include euthanasia upon asylum inmates while eugenics concepts were implemented to the fullest in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

In 1942, U.S. psychiatrist Foster Kennedy recommended the killing of retarded children. During the three year period between 1941-1943 over 42,000 people were sterilized in America.

After World War II the idea of "eugenics" was tainted in the public by its association with Nazism. The term was discarded and a facelift was performed on its parent study psychiatry, which resulted in the establishment of the World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH). Since then, this group has continued to support electroshock, lobotomization, mind control and other activities already detailed, as well as employing within its ranks many German practitioners who had been happy to further Hitlerian goals during the Second World War.

What this brief survey shows is something the popular press has chosen to ignore: eugenics programs were not the inventions of mad Nazi scientists, but that the political climate of Germany allowed a full implementation of programs part and parcel of international psychiatry and medicine. Eugenics, from its beginning, was encouraged and financed by the rich self-styled "aristocrats" of the day.

Recent programs aimed at abortion and other methods of depopulation can be traced to essentially the same Freemasonic/Round Table/Rothschild-spawned crowd; to the studies of the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, and to the CFR. These groups influenced a change in U.S. policies specifically during 1966-67, when population control was adopted by the State Department as a stated goal.

The recent world depopulation push retains the flavor of eugenics bio-policy of the first half of this century in the statements of advocates such as the Eastern Establishment's Sergeant Shriver, speaking before the Congressional Select Committee on Population in 1978: "...this Committee's interest [is] in improving the quality of life and enhancing the biological product of this society; rather than just controlling or limiting birds."

Jaffe and Dryfoos of the federally-funded Guttmacher Institute have stated that, "With the overall decline in fertility in the United States, concern has shifted from numbers of births to insuring that those children being born have fewer physical, social and economic handicaps."

It is odd that little mention of "the overall decline in fertility" finds its way into Rockefeller-subsidized literature of depopulation activists. Nor was the fact that teenage pregnancy was at its lowest ebb in forty years brought up when federally mandated family planning and sex education in schools was enacted in 1978.

Studies have shown that sex education classes increase early sexual experimentation while doing nothing to reduce adolescent pregnancy. It has also been demonstrated that when such classes are discontinued, as in Utah in 1980, the incidence of teenage pregnancy decreases. Still, officials insist sex classes should extend from "kindergarten throughout a person's educational career." Why? Originators and administrators of the programs candidly admit that their agenda includes depopulation and eugenics.

Lester Kirkendall, a founder of the Sex Information and Education Council, wrote in 1965 that, "sex education is... clearly tied in a socially significant way to family planning and population limitation and policy..." Dr. Jane Hodgson, at the National Abortion Federation conference in 1980, was even more forthright, calling for compulsory abortion for pregnant teenagers.

The methods of sex education programs in public schools vary, but uniformly emphasize the huge expense and drawbacks of having kids, providing summaries of methods of contraception, serialization, and abortion. Students are often taken on tours of birth control clinics, where they meet the staff, fill out patients' forms, and are assured of the confidentiality of services. Children are also recruited as depopulation activists with pitches informing them, as in widely-used text Meeting Yourself Halfway:

“The population problem is very serious and involves every country on this planet. What steps would you encourage to help resolve the problem?

...volunteer to organize birth-control information centers throughout the country;
...join a pro-abortion lobbying group;
...encourage the limitation of two children per family and have the parents sterilized to prevent further births.”

Much of the sex education literature portrays the nuclear family – long a cohesive political and social glue among the populace – as obsolete and statistically insignificant, while the normalcy of homosexuality and bachelorism ("Playboyism") is stressed. Children are encouraged to report in detail on conditions at home, to report parental shortcomings, and to divulge disagreements they have with their parents, opening the door to intervention by "social services."

Davis in Economic Development and Cultural Change says that an effective strategy in lowering the birth rate is to "lessen ... the identity of children with parents, or lessen... the likelihood that this identity will be satisfying," adding that certain trends that might bring population levels down are "very high divorce rates, homosexuality, pornography and free sexual unions..." Davis sees a positive note in "the child welfare services, which have increasingly tended to displace the father as a necessary member of the family, and the health services which have increasingly flouted parental authority with respect to contraception and abortion." This "flouting of parental authority" is a familiar theme in sex education classes, which repeatedly emphasize the child's independence from their parents and their ability to make decisions for themselves.

The message to children, provided by proponents of sex education without the courtesy of having the parents agree upon it, is obvious; the world is awash in excess poor population, and something has to be done about it in a hurry, starting at the nearest abortion clinic.

Educator John Taylor Gatto, voted New York's Top Teacher of 1991, further comments on the mechanisms:

“Social machinery to suppress proliferation of systematic families... has two components: one, a campaign aimed at family-formation before it commences, employing such tactics as encouragement of personal greed (best enjoyed in bachelor style, of course), public pornographic celebrations of the body parts of nubile young woman, effortless divorce, mass adoption, tolerance of sexual ambiguity, and many similar tactics. The second component aims at producing pseudo-families: small households (whether biological or synthetic) without any overriding loyalty to the common family cause. Instead, these are associations of expedience wearing the costume of affection and concern, but always on the lookout for a better deal... During the childhood phase, parents in pseudo-families are made use of by the state to transmit certain values, to maintain and discipline a new serf class composed of their own children, and to report radical cases of deviance to medical, police and re-training authorities... It is a system infused in many places with such black genius in understanding crowd control it is hard not to stand in awe of its unseen architects.”

Target populations for sterilization in the United States bear noting. According to Michael Garrity in Trilateralism, edited by Holly Sklar, American Indian women are being sterilized unbeknownst to them or against their wishes in public health clinics nationwide. Garrity also maintains, "Full blooded Indian woman are the special target of the doctors."

Ruthann Evannoff, in "Reproductive Rights and Occupational Health" in WIN, has said that, "Overall, at least 25 percent of the Native American women of childbearing age have been sterilized, although the total population numbers less than one million. Recent reports estimate that the percentage sterilized in one tribe alone, the Northern Cheyenne, is close to 80 percent."

The secret (now declassified) paper NSSM 200, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests," also known as the Scowcroft Document (authored by the CFR's Brent Scowcroft), gives insight into U.S. government plans for population reduction internationally, linking these plans to goals that have very little to do with alleviating human suffering, and everything to do with the maximization of profit.

Prepared in 1974 for the National Security Council (and remember, this is a government document, although one not likely to be offered for free in late night Public Service Announcements) NSSm 200 proposes means for the reduction of worldwide population by "concentration on key [i.e. Third World] countries," with the stated goal of reduction of population growth rate from an annual 2 percent growth to 1.7 percent.

While this might sound like an altruistic goal proposed by clear-sighted social stewards, intended to reduce suffering in countries with marginal standards of living, the study makes it clear that government interest in depopulation has nothing to do with concern for living standards in developing countries. It is because "The United States has become increasingly dependent on mineral imports from developing countries" and " endemic famine, food riots, and breakdown of social order... are scarcely inducive to systematic exploration for mineral deposits or the long-term investments necessary for their exploration." Note that the breakdown of "social order" referred to consists of the populace revolting against their living conditions.

One of the conclusions of the study is that "mandatory [emphasis added] population control measures" may be "appropriate."

Speaking of depopulation programs currently being implemented in the Third World, former Brazilian health minister Carlos Santana said, "The World Bank, through their reports of its Presidents, has always made its proselytizing for a rigid birth control policy explicit," Santana reported that included in World Bank credit packages and investment in Third World countries is an implicit agenda of depopulation, and questioned why Brazil was targeted for birth reduction, with approximately forty per cent of Brazilian woman having been already sterilized.

What the depopulators omit saying is that in Brazil mast of the depopulation programs are being directed toward the native population, and that they are implementing an alternative program to the pistoleiros hired to attack small landowning families, appropriating the land for the use of large cash-croppers and the international conglomerates that are stripping the country bare.

Depopulation programs run worldwide are directed and funded by major international money interests, including McGeorge Bundy of the CFR, the architect of nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction policy; Warren E. Buffet, the second wealthiest man in the United States; and, ubiquitous when it comes to eugenics funding, the Rockefellers.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America and International Planned Parenthood Federation are Buffett-funded and run a huge abortion and sterilization network worldwide, with one subsidiary, the Brazilian Society for Family Welfare, having over 2,500 outlets in that country.

While, at first glance depopulation programs may seem like a good idea to promote the reduction of mouths-to-feed worldwide, what they ignore are the root causes of overpopulation. High birth rates are the direct result of poor living standards of he areas, and in countries where malnutrition has been reduced and the incidence of child-death lowered, birth rates have also lessened.

The Third World (in particular) is being forcefully relieved of natural resources and exploited for cheap labor, and is in fact no doubt seen by elite landowners and major corporations as only maintaining maximum profitability as long as it is kept in abject poverty.

"The strategy of underdevelopment" is the term used by agriculture economist Harry Cleaver. Rather than offering the people in rich countries such as Brazil, in actuality one of the richest countries in the world, an equitable portion of profits made through the use of their resources, they are manipulated (when not killed outright) and kept at the razor edge between starvation and profitability.

Depopulation organizations propagandize that we are experiencing a crisis of epic proportions; that the world is reaching the point where it can no longer support the number of people living on it. In many instances population may in fact be economically beneficial, and tending to a long-term increase of arable land and per capita (rather than per corporation) income. Also noted is a current usage of approximately three-tenths of one percent of the planet's surface for human habitation, an amount sustainable with no limit to growth on sight.

United Nations and U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that world food production has increased more rapidly than population growth in recent years, while Colin Clark, former director of the Agriculture Economic Institute of Oxford University has stated that farmers could currently support seven times the current population of the Earth, or twenty-one times the current population at Japanese standards of food consumption.

Roger Revelle, former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies estimates that current agricultural resources could provide an adequate diet for eight times the current populace, i.e. forty billion individuals, and has estimated that Africa is capable of feeding ten times its current population. Revelle quotes Dr. David Hopper, another agricultural expert:

"The world's food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the environment. The limitations on abundance are to be found in social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global food resources are there, between Cancer and Capricorn. The successful husbandry of that resource depends on the will and actions of men." Hopper pronounces "world fascism" very politely.

Francis Moore Lappe of the Institute for Food and Development Policy maintains:

"If the cause of hunger is neither scarcity of food, nor scarcity of land, we've come to see that it's a scarcity of democracy. That may sound rather contrived, because in the West we tend to think of democracy as a political concept. But democracy is really a principle of accountability; in other words, those making the decisions must be accountable to those who are affected by them. Once we understand hunger as a scarcity of democracy, what we are saying is that from the village level to the level of international commerce, fewer and fewer people are making decisions, and more and more anti-democratic structures are being entrenched. This is the cause of hunger." And, it should be repeated, the cause of overpopulation.

“[Sterilization could] be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”
- The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, co-founder American Eugenics Society

“The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters ... We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong?

I think we have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in human nature. People simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character was formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea and we have asked individuals to accept it. They have constantly refused and we have all but killed the eugenic movement ... they won't accept the idea that they are in general second rate. We must rely on other motivation. ... it is surely possible to build a system of voluntary unconscious selection. But the reasons advanced must be generally acceptable reasons. Let's stop telling anyone that they have a generally inferior genetic quality, for they will never agree. Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care, and perhaps our proposals will be accepted.”
- From Galton and Mid Century Eugenics by Frederick Osborn, Galton Lecture 1956, in Eugenics Review, vol. 48, 1, 1956

“Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly ... Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.”
- From The Pivot of Civilization quoted in Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), by Elsah Droghin.

Further Reading & Research

* The Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics
* THE MEN BEHIND HITLER: A German warning to the world
* THE SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND OF THE NAZI RACE PURIFICATION PROGRAM, US & German Eugenics, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, Population Control
* Population Control, Nazis, and the U.N: ROCKEFELLER AND MASS MURDER
* The Population Control Agenda
* Human Genome: Hi-Tech Eugenics
* British Psychiatry: From Eugenics to Assassination
* The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans
* Robbing the Cradle: The Rockefellers' Support of Planned Parenthood
* Funding the Eugenics Movement
* Population 'Control', New World Order Style
* THE NEW AMERICAN: Issues in Focus - Population Control
* Malthus Was Wrong; So Were William Vogt and Paul Ehrlich [October 22, 2001]
* In China Bush Must Extricate U.S. From Crimes Against Humanity: Eugenics and Forced Abortion [Feb. 22, 2002]
* Major class action suit filed against Planned Parenthood [April 2, 2002]
* The Remastered Race [April 11, 2002]
* PRI Weekly News Briefing Archive


The Intelligent Student's Guide to the New World Order
- By Erica Carle
What is the New World Order?

The essence of the New World Order (NWO) or world management system is that it is management by social engineers, rather than government based on a written constitution. How you are affected by this management system depends on what the social engineers decide the system should do for you and require of you. The social engineers and system managers think of themselves as scientists applying the scientific method to the control of group behavior. Your behavior and your relationships are regarded as the subject of investigation and control by those who call themselves social scientists. You are among their test animals, and you have no say in, and often no knowledge of, experiments that involve you. If the NWO is totally implemented, your independence, individuality, and freedom will be gone.

There is nothing new about the idea of managing others, or even of controlling the whole world. That has been the goal of social philosophers for thousands of years. However, we need not go back over ancient history. We are concerned primarily with what has been going on in our own generations. This we can understand quite well if we confine ourselves to the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Goals of the New World Order

To begin to understand the New World Order (NWO) you need to forget what you have been told about philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats; left and right; Socialists and Libertarians; business and labor; liberal and conservative; black and white, etc.. The planners of the New World Order know they must use, influence, and cater to all of these groups to accomplish the goals they are seeking, which are:

1. Consolidate everything.
2. Commercialize everything.
3. Classify everything.
4. Claim everything.
5. Control everything.

We might call these goals the five Cs of the New World Order. If it is fully empowered, free speech, personality, personal goals and decisions, individual responsibility, private property, private business, morality, Constitutional government, national sovereignty; and religious freedom can no longer be tolerated. Everyone in every country will be subject to the NWO management system. To quote the French mathematician/philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), one of the most significant early planners of the world management system:

“The most important object of this regenerated polity will be the substitution of Duties for Rights; thus subordinating personal to social considerations. The word Right should be excluded from political language, as the word Cause from the language of philosophy. ” [1]

“The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.” [2]

He also wrote:

“When the system is fully regulated, the effect of this will be to secure greater unity, by diminishing the influence of personal character.” [3]

This means that to the NWO world management system planners you, as an individual, are considered to be without character or personality. Your personal life and personal goals are unimportant to them, unless those goals are consistent with the sociological, economic and religious goals of the New World Order.
Public Schools and The New World Order

To demonstrate how NWO sociological, economic and religious goals are being brought about we can look first at the public schools. Most students and parents think the purpose of public schools is to teach essential and interesting information, vocational and recreational skills, considerate and responsible behavior and an appreciation of our country’s history and Constitution. After your formal education is over, your parents expect that you should be able to take responsibility for your own moral, material, and social well-being, and also the moral, material, and social well-being of any children you might have until they, too, are ready to claim such freedom for themselves.

At one time the goal of those who planned the school curriculum in the local communities seemed to follow the wishes of parents and the needs of students. Now, however, those sociologists who have the power to affect policy in the public schools do not concern themselves with what you need, what your parents want for you, or with respect and support for the United States Constitution. Their primary goals are to CONSOLIDATE policies, COMMERCIALIZE instruction, CLASSIFY individuals, CLAIM jurisdiction, establish CONTROL, and train you to fit obediently into their world management system without hesitation or protest. In 1928, sociologist Ross L. Finney wrote:

“A new world is emerging in which the social structures will be of a different shape, the social resources of a different scope and caliber, than anything that history records. It is a new deal - in fact a different game with different cards; and we who are now alive are privileged to witness its beginning, however blind most of us may be to its implications for ourselves and our posterity. And for a new age, a new school!” [4]

National Council for the Social Studies

An organization called the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), which is an offshoot of the National Education Association and a promoter of the New World Order, has CLAIMED power to determine what you should learn and what you should not learn in geography, history, government, economics, psychology, religion, world politics, etc.. These subjects were CONSOLIDATED decades ago by sociologists so they could present them together under one agenda called Social Studies. The leaders of NCSS now decide what you should be taught, how you should be taught, and how your achievement will be evaluated.

In addition to the National Council for the Social Studies, the various states have state councils for the social studies. Through the efforts of state councils - oftentimes with the aid of the Education Commission of the States - bills are presented to state legislatures to make NCSS’s curriculum standards legal requirements. After these standards are passed in your state, your local school board, your own teachers and your parents have little to say about what you should be expected to learn in these subjects. If you, your school, or community have different standards; if you do not try to live up to NCSS’s standards for the New World Order, your schools can be closed or your community punished by depriving it of federal, foundation and state money.
Grouping People to Control Them

It is interesting to investigate how this takeover was accomplished. Like everything connected to the New World Order and the five Cs, CONTROL is accomplished by influencing groups, and most particularly group leaders. This is because people who are emotionally involved with groups respond to leadership. They also tend to feel CLASS loyalty. For example, when your elected officials CONSOLIDATE into groups and meet with elected officials from other areas, they frequently get carried away by the oratory and comradeship. Although they may not understand the full implications of the ideas the carefully-selected speakers and facilitators promote, the officials are maneuvered into feeling obligated to support what the group supports. By giving their loyalty to these secondary groups, the officials frequently betray the primary loyalty they owe to you and the citizens of the states, cities and counties they are supposed to serve. CONTROL of government officials, educators, congressmen, legislators, businessmen, city councils, school boards, etc. through organizations is part of the NWO plan for substitution of its system for the U.S. Constitution.

Through CONSOLIDATION into national or international ‘blanket’ organizations, one person or a small group of people can make decisions and set goals for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people. They can set goals for you if you do not object. Always remember, whoever sets your goals or presents you with what they call a vision or a mission, CONTROLS your behavior. You had better understand fully any such commitment you are asked to make.
Goal-Setting, Political Management

Setting goals, and designing visions and missions for groups of people is one of the favorite preoccupations of the New World Order philosophers and managers. In education, goal setting and visioning serve to CONSOLIDATE policies so the NWO/NCSS curriculum can be established in schools throughout the country. When you hear someone who uses the phrase, “We must. . .” or variations of it such as, “We need to. . .”, “It is essential that we. . .”, etc, without adding, “if we wish to . . ,” there is a pretty fair chance that person is trying to convince you to give up the idea of independent research and thinking so you will support whatever program or goals he or she might be promoting.

It is unfortunate that few of our congressmen, state, county, and city legislators have been alert enough to detect the behavior management and CONTROL that have been directed toward them. Many of them have been deceived, flattered, coerced, bribed or blackmailed into surrendering their legitimate authority to New World Order decision makers. This, too, was planned. In 1906, sociologist Lester Ward explained how NWO legislation could be achieved:

“It must not be supposed that such legislation can be conducted to any considerable extent in the open sessions of legislative bodies. These will doubtless need to be maintained, and every new law should be finally adopted by a vote of such bodies, but more and more this will become a merely formal way of putting the final sanction of society on decisions that have been carefully worked out in what may be called the sociological laboratory.” [5]

Goals 2000 - Control is the Object

Most of the governors of the United States are members of the National Governors' Association. They have national meetings to CONSOLIDATE their policy decisions. In 1990, a policy was declared to promote the adoption of national educational goals. The Republican Bush Administration had endorsed the idea in 1989. Multinational corporations and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce supported it. Then, in 1994, Congress (Democrats and Republicans) passed and funded the Goals 2000: Educate America Act.

Originally, social studies was not included, but the NCSS saw to it that social studies was annexed to the national agenda. Its leaders appointed a task force to develop CONSOLIDATED curriculum standards. These were later adopted in most states as part of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act. Eight goals were chosen and publicized. The eight educational goals of Goals 2000 were not the important part of this operation. Any goals that sounded good, along with the money promised, could have enticed governors and state legislators to pass enabling legislation in their states. The real goals of Goals 2000 are to CONSOLIDATE leadership over all the states; CLAIM jurisdiction over curriculum to CONTROL what you and other students learn; and eventually to COMMERCIALIZE and CONTROL all educational resources through the use of charter schools and culture vouchers.

It is no surprise to find now that the eight publicized goals have not been reached - and will not be reached by the Year 2000. Does this mean that CONSOLIDATED goal-setting and visioning will be discontinued? On the contrary! To the goal-setters it means merely that the Goals 2000: Educate America should be renamed, America’s Education Goals, and should be extended beyond 2000 without a specific deadline. Even when failure is obvious and promises are not fulfilled, CONTROL, once gained, is never willingly relinquished by the NWO and United Nations regional government promoters.
Failures of Public Schools

In recent decades, public education has been subjected to a great deal of criticism. Because schools and curriculum have been interfered with by those who promote the NWO world management system, students were not learning what their parents, potential employers, and the students themselves, knew they ought to learn. Skill in reading, natural science, English, mathematics, foreign languages were dismally lacking in many high schools, and even college graduates. All kinds of excuses have been brought forward such as:

* The problem is with your parents because they do not take an interest in your schooling
* The problem is with you and other students because you do not work hard enough or take an interest in learning
* The schools are not using the right system of teaching. We need to experiment with new systems
* The problem is not enough money for education. If schools had more money they would produce better results
* The problem is segregation. We need to bus for integration
* Classrooms are overcrowded. We need more teachers
* Public schools should have tax-supported competition. We need charter schools and school vouchers

And so it has gone for decades.
Enemies of Learning

Few of the explainers have revealed the possibility that you are not being properly taught because the NWO world management system does not want you to know too much. In his book, A Sociological Philosophy of Education, published in 1928 by the MacMillan Company, Ross L. Finney, Assistant Professor of Educational Sociology at the University of Minnesota, wrote the following about what should and should not be offered to students:

“...a larger place in the curriculum ought to be given to the new humanities and the fine arts, especially the former; and that correspondingly less time and energy ought to be allotted to mathematics, formal English, and the foreign languages...” [6]

“What we obviously need is a science of society. Since the time of [Auguste] Comte this has been the aspiration of modern scholarship. Instead of blundering and bungling along from one crisis to the next, science might render society really telic, and reduce social phenomena to CONTROL as it has done in the natural world....” (Emphasis mine) [7]

“If leadership by the intelligent is ever to be achieved, followership by the dull and ignorant must somehow be assured. Followership, quite as much as leadership, is, therefore, the crucial problem of the present crisis...” [8]

“The safety of democracy is not to be sought, therefore, in the intellectual independence of the duller masses, but in their Intellectual dependence. Not in what they think, but in what they think they think...” [9]

“The problem of democracy is which specialized sub-group is to function as cerebral cortex. That will depend upon who succeeds in drilling epigrams into the memories of the duller masses. If scientists and educators fail to do it, then selfish deceivers and exploiters will. But think for themselves the duller masses never can.” [10]

Those of us who do not agree with sociologists like Ross L. Finney are CLASSIFIED as selfish deceivers, exploiters, or members of the duller masses. NWO usurpers have nothing but contempt for us and our need to learn. Many parents, teachers, administrators, legislators and state governors, etc. have been taken in by the NWO agenda. There is little chance that your state and school are independent of NWO management system. Therefore, it is important that you begin to recognize enemies of learning even when they have college educations, advanced degrees, university, government and foundation support, and all the preplanned publicity they need to try to impress those of us whom they consider to be selfish deceivers, exploiters or the duller masses.
Goals Statement for Schools

You should understand that those who seek to CONTROL your education in order to limit your access to knowledge are not doing it because they love or respect you, but because they want to CLAIM and CONTROL you. The more you know about their goals and techniques, the easier it becomes to recognize efforts to CONTROL your thoughts. The more you know about history, geography, mathematics, English, science, etc. the more power you have to defend yourself against falsehood, deceit and domination.

By establishing goals, missions, and visions, the NCSS has found a way to limit knowledge in all subjects. I remind you, he who chooses your goals controls your behavior. The social studies goal statement that has been chosen by the National Council for the Social Studies and adopted in similar, and sometimes identical form by the states is:

“...to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”

Problem-Solving and Decision-Making

To most people this sounds good, but please notice that it is all about politics and world CONSOLIDATION. Nothing is mentioned about what is good for you, about giving you the knowledge to make intelligent fact-base personal decisions, about helping you to prepare for a career of your own choice. Nothing is mentioned about what is good for your city, your county, your state, or the United States of America. No - you are treated as a dependent member of the New World Order’s interdependent world. Interdependence means CONTROL by sociology’s New World Order and loss of control over your own destiny.

Curriculum goals, guidelines, and standards for states and local communities are patterned after those of the NCSS and United Nations NWO. In all cases, the curriculum is based on the idea of rational problem-solving and decision-making, and on what the NWO crowd calls interdependence. You are asked to make decisions related to pre-selected social problems based on the limited information available through classroom assignments.

In this regard, it is important to know another behavior control fact. He who states the problem for you controls your thinking. Your thoughts and efforts are directed toward problems which have been selected for you. When you express an opinion about suggested social or personal problems, you accept the NWO agenda and acknowledge an obligation to share your thoughts on the problems with classmates. You can then be CLASSIFIED or grouped according to your public statements.
Limiting Knowledge - Demanding Opinions

Time spent learning facts and skills can be limited when it is taken up listening to and arguing about one another’s uninformed opinions. Also, a special danger is involved in this problem-solving, decision-making type of education. You and your fellow students are encouraged to join groups and act immediately based on the opinions you express in the cIassroom - never taking into consideration that your opinions and decisions may change as you mature and have access to information from other sources.

If you express the opinion that you would like to try drugs or engage in sexual activities; if you say you might steal or become violent; teachers are instructed not to warn you against such behavior or tell you that your decision is wrong or dangerous. That, say the curriculum planners, would be judgmental.
No Right - No Wrong - Rational Conscience

It is assumed that none of the problems or personal dilemmas presented can be prevented or solved by self control and moral behavior. How do curriculum planners justify this omission? Your teachers are told that any statement regarding morality is considered to be an unexamined belief based on authority. The National Council for the Social Studies says decision-making should be what they call rational, rather than being based on authority or conscience. For example, in Wisconsin teachers were advised:

“A child generally comes to school with what R. J. Havighurst calls an authoritarian conscience acquired from his parents through a progression of punishments and rewards. He soon learns that he is not equipped to deal with all the new situations which confront him. Peers and teachers join and sometimes supplant parents in helping him to find solutions which are often in conflict with those offered by his parents. His task, then, is to change from this early authoritarian conscience to a rational one. This requires that he learn a process for resolving to his own satisfaction the conflicts that will inevitably arise whenever change or confrontation with an opposing view makes him question his existing values.” [11]

Decisions Based on Conscience Not Allowed

When you are taught to doubt your own conscience in favor of rational decision-making, many types of destructive, obnoxious, and immoral behavior will no longer be objectionable to you. You learn to find reasons to justify whatever behavior might have emotional appeal. Unbelievable as it may seem, teachers in Wisconsin actually were warned against holding students to traditional high standards:

“Traditionally there was little question that the schools should promote such values as the following:

1. Respect Property.
2. Be respectful of adults.
3. Say please and thank you at appropriate times.
4. Do not use profane language or bad grammar.
5. Be neat and clean.
6. Do not lie or cheat.

Now, however, in some situations these are quite controversial. Many lawsuits and community controversies have focused on the meaning of “ and clean,” for example. Several recent surveys indicate that cheating in school, rather than being unacceptable, has become the norm, and most students feel no guilt about cheating. Standards of profanity are constantly changing and words that one rarely heard used in public a few years ago are now heard a great deal. While many may not like these developments, it is very necessary for teachers to recognize that they are taking place.” [12]

Teachers Are Intimidated By The NWO

Knowing what you now know about the goals of the New World Order, you can understand that the above instruction to teachers could be taken as a veiled threat, better not telling them they had better not criticize the behaviors mentioned. Doing so might make them vulnerable to law suits, or perhaps, discipline by their superiors. Thus, the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, following the guidelines of the NCSS, actually promoted the idea that it is acceptable for you and your fellow students to be thieving, disrespectful, ungrateful, profanity-using, sloppy, and dirty lying cheaters who have no conscience, and therefore no feelings of guilt for such behavior. The United Nations New World Order does not need people of character. It needs only those who are pliable and manageable.
Creating Problems

Problem creation is another unbelievable aspect of NWO education. According to the NCSS, one of the main duties of teachers is to create emotional problems for you:

“Any attempt by a teacher to create a problem without arousing students emotionally can only result in a pseudo-problem. When students are disturbed, upset, perhaps even angry, they are closer to having a problem than is ever the case when teachers make the preservation of objectivity their only concern. A teacher can sometimes create in students a feeling that their beliefs, concepts or values are inadequate in some respect. When students are puzzled over what to believe, they are more likely to have an authentic problem in their possession... [13]

If the student is to become engaged in problem-solving he must be doubtful, uncertain or puzzled concerning something within his experience and have the desire through inquiry to remove the doubt. As long as he is certain of the truth or goodness of a particular idea or action, or as long as he is unconcerned, indifferent about the matter, he is not involved in problem-solving. Hence, the initial task confronting the teacher is that of creating the state of uncertainty or doubt in the mind of the student. . .the teacher must implant the element of doubt. [14]

Strategies Used to Create Problems

Since the presence of the element of doubt or puzzlement is a necessary condition for the initiation of problem-solving activity, let us consider teaching strategies which are likely to evoke such reactions...

* ...The teacher can present the students with a problem within the context of the content.
* ...The teacher can encourage the students to discover a problem within the context of the content.
* ...The teacher can convert the unexamined beliefs of students into problems.
* ...The teacher can point up conflicts within the students’ pattern of beliefs, thus creating problems.
* ...The teacher can point up conflicts within the course content, thus creating problems. [15]

Teaching problem-solving, decision-making, and interdependence may have sounded good to many teachers, school board members, local curriculum coordinators, legislators, parents, and students. However, if they had the opportunity to read the above, and what the NCSS curriculum planners mean when they promote this type of education, all of those affected might be more hesitant before giving their sanction.
Changing Beliefs

Remember, the NWO planners and managers want CONTROL, but they know for certain that they cannot make you go along with their plans if you are aware of their intentions and if you are firmly convinced that to do so would be wrong. That is why so many methods have been devised to help you question or change your mind about what you believe.

If the New World Order is to succeed in reaching its goals, Judaism and Christianity are among the religions which have to be eliminated. People who are guided by the Bible, the Ten Commandments and what the Bible teaches about God, cannot be depended upon to be totally dedicated to the sociological goals of a world management system. They cannot be intimidated into exchanging morals and conscience for sociological goals. This is why the system does not tolerate competition. Its own Positive religion or religion of Humanity must prevail. Sociology’s founder, Auguste Comte, wrote:

“By speaking of Positivism as organic, we imply that it has a social purpose; that purpose being to supersede Theology in the spiritual direction of the human race.” [16]

and,

“Sociology is once for all substituted for Theology as the basis for the religious government of mankind.” [17]

and,

“The last step in this long course of training is now establishing the true form of subjectivity by substitution of Sociology for Theology.” [18]

In 1929, Ross L. Finney was among those working on a new morality for the managed society. He wrote:

“Nor can the new regime be operated with the beliefs of the old regime. . .As for the ideals by which we live, they too must be thought out de novo, and built into an adequate and effective new system of moral education.” [19]

The End of Freedom

The NWO management system’s moral education has nothing to do with freedom or the principles and ideals on which our nation was founded. The late B. F. Skinner, a Harvard University psychologist, put it this way:

“The hypothesis that man is NOT FREE is essential to the application of scientific method to the study of human behavior.” [20]

If you do not want to be a sociologically-controlled and semi-ignorant member of the United Nations New World Order, you need to recognize the importance of knowledge and reject attempts at emotional manipulation and knowledge limitation. The problem-solving and decision-making system of education uses you, plays on your emotions, and tries to alienate you from those who should be closest to you. It creates animosity between you and your classmates; wastes valuable learning time by forcing you to form opinions and listen to the uninformed opinions of your classmates; and discourages intelligent and moral behavior. It turns you against your own country and its Constitution in favor of the United Nations' New World Order management system.
What Can You Do?

Learn to recognize when you are being used, rather than informed. Learn to recognize when you are being led astray. Be like a conscientious researcher and reporter. Do not be afraid to ask probing questions whenever you have doubts about the philosophy behind educational projects, exercises and games, especially if they seem to you to be totally useless or destructive.

If you are to have any hope of keeping the gift of freedom with which you've been blessed, you must know and share the truth. If you have concerns about your education, share them with your parents. Few parents have any idea what goes on in school. It is their responsibility to find out, and your responsibility to help them.

You are not a test animal created to serve the ambition of social scientists and world managers. Do not allow your education to be limited and corrupted as if all you needed was to be trained in obedience to the system of the unConstitutional New World Order.

And remember, if you truly desire it, all knowledge is yours:

“Ask, and it shalt be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shalt be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
- Matthew 7:7,8~

* [1] Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, Vol. 1, LENOX HILL Pub. & Dist. Co.(Burt Franklin), New York, 1973. Published by the Author in July 1851; P.289
* [2] Ibid.; P. 292.
* [3] Ibid., Vol. 2, Published by the Author in May 1852; P.237.
* [4] Ross L. Finney, Ph.D. Asst. Prof. of Educational Sociology, University of Minnesota; A Sociological Philosophy of Education; The Macmillan Company, New York, 1929. P. 110
* [5] Lester F. Ward, Applied Sociology, Ginn & Company, 1906. P.338.
* [6] Ibid. P. 187
* [7] Ibid. P. 280
* [8] Ibid. P. 386
* [9] Ibid. P. 389
* [10] Ibid. P. 397
* [11] Knowledge, Processes & Values in the New Social Studies, WISCONSIN DEPT. OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, Bulletin No. 185, 1968-1970, P. 43.
* [12] Ibid., P.45.
* [13] Problem-Centered Social Studies Instruction; Curriculum Series, Number Fourteen; National Council for the Social Studies, 1971; P.1.
* [14] Ibid, P. 59
* [15] Ibid.
* [16] Auguste Comte; System of Positive Polity, Vol 1, P. 45.
* [17] Ibid.; Vol .1, P. 364.
* [18] Ibid., P.471.
* [19] Ross L. Finney, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Educational Sociology, University of Minnesota; A Sociological Philosophy of Education, The MacMillan Company, 1929. P. 112
* [20] Skinner, B.F.; Science and Human Behavior, The Free Press (Div. MacMillan Co., 1953; P.447.

Reposted at ConspiracyArchive.com with the permission of Erica Carle



The Order of the Skull and Bones: Everything you always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask
- By Kris Millegan (Editor, Conspiracy Theory Research List)
1. The Secret Origins of Skull & Bones

The story begins at Yale, where three threads of American social history -- espionage, drug smuggling and secret societies -- intertwine into one.

Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from trade and returned to England in 1699. Yale became known as quite a philanthropist; upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, he sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent bequests, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718.

A statue of Nathan Hale stands on Old Campus at Yale University. There is a copy of that statue in front of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yet another stands in front of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (where George H.W. Bush ('48) went to prep school and joined a secret society at age twelve).

Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of the "Culper Ring," one of America's first intelligence operations. Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the Revolutionary War. Nathan was the only operative to be ferreted out by the British, and after speaking his famous regrets, he was hanged in 1776. Ever since the founding of the Republic, the relationship between Yale and the "Intelligence Community" has been unique.

In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Russell and Company merged with the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830 and became the primary American opium smuggler. Many of the great American and European fortunes were built on the "China"(opium) trade.

One of Russell and Company's Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins, Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge's son organized the United Fruit company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)

William Huntington Russell ('33), Samuel's cousin, studied in Germany from 1831-32. Germany was a hotbed of new ideas. The "scientific method" was being applied to all forms of human endeavor. Prussia, which blamed the defeat of its forces by Napoleon in 1806 on soldiers only thinking about themselves in the stress of battle, took the principles set forth by John Locke and Jean Rosseau and created a new educational system. Johan Fitche, in his "Address to the German People," declared that the children would be taken over by the State and told what to think and how to think it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took over Fitche's chair at the University Of Berlin in 1817, and was a professor there until his death in 1831. Hegel was the culmination of the German idealistic philosophy school of Immanuel Kant.

To Hegel, our world is a world of reason. The state is Absolute Reason and the citizen can only become free by worship and obedience to the state. Hegel called the state the "march of God in the world" and the "final end". This final end, Hegel said, "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state." Both fascism and communism have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism. Hegelian philosophy was very much in vogue during William Russell's time in Germany.

When Russell returned to Yale in 1832, he formed a senior society with Alphonso Taft ('33). According to information acquired from a break-in to the "tomb" (the Skull and Bones meeting hall) in 1876, "Bones is a chapter of a corps in a German University.... General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college, authority to found a chapter here." So class valedictorian William H. Russell, along with fourteen others, became the founding members of "The Order of Scull and Bones," later changed to "The Order of Skull and Bones".

The secretive Order of Skull and Bones exists only at Yale. Fifteen juniors are "tapped" each year by the seniors to be initiated into next year's group. Some say each initiate is given $15,000 and a grandfather clock. Far from being a campus fun-house, the group is geared more toward the success of its members in the post-collegiate world.

The family names on the Skull and Bones roster roll off the tongue like an elite party list -- Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Harriman, Weyerhaeuser, Pinchot, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Sloane, Stimson, Phelps, Perkins, Pillsbury, Kellogg, Vanderbilt, Bush, Lovett and so on.

William Russell went on to become a general and a state legislator in Connecticut. Alphonso Taft was appointed U.S. Attorney General, Secretary of War (a post many "Bonesmen" have held), Ambassador to Austria, and Ambassador to Russia (another post held by many "Bonesmen"). His son, William Howard Taft ('87), is the only man to be both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
2. Secrets of the "Tomb"

The Order flourished from the very beginning in spite of occasional squalls of controversy. There was dissension from some professors, who didn't like its secrecy and exclusiveness. And there was backlash from students, showing concern about the influence "Bones" was having over Yale finances and the favoritism shown to "Bonesmen."

In October of 1873, Volume 1, Number 1, of The Iconoclast was published in New Haven. It was only published once and was one of very few openly published articles on the Order of Skull and Bones.

From The Iconoclast:

“We speak through a new publication. because the college press is closed to those who dare to openly mention 'Bones'....

Out of every class Skull and Bones takes its men. They have gone out into the world and have become, in many instances, leaders in society. They have obtained control of Yale. Its business is performed by them. Money paid to the college must pass into their hands, and be subject to their will. No doubt they are worthy men in themselves, but the many, whom they looked down upon while in college, cannot so far forget as to give money freely into their hands. Men in Wall Street complain that the college comes straight to them for help, instead of asking each graduate for his share. The reason is found in a remark made by one of Yale's and America's first men: 'Few will give but Bones men and they care far more for their society than they do for the college....'

Year by year the deadly evil is growing. The society was never as obnoxious to the college as it is today, and it is just this ill-feeling that shuts the pockets of non-members. Never before has it shown such arrogance and self-fancied superiority. It grasps the College Press and endeavors to rule it all. It does not deign to show its credentials, but clutches at power with the silence of conscious guilt.

To tell the good which Yale College has done would be well nigh impossible. To tell the good she might do would be yet more difficult. The question, then, is reduced to this -- on the one hand lies a source of incalculable good -- on the other a society guilty of serious and far-reaching crimes. It is Yale College against Skull and Bones!! We ask all men, as a question of right, which should be allowed to live?”

At first, the society held its meetings in hired halls. Then in 1856, the "tomb", a vine-covered, windowless, brown-stone hall was constructed, where to this day the "Bonesmen" hold their "strange, occultish" initiation rites and meet each Thursday and Sunday.

On September 29, 1876, a group calling itself "The Order of File and Claw" broke into the Skull and Bones' holy of holies. In the "tomb" they found lodge-room 324 "fitted up in black velvet, even the walls being covered with the material." Upstairs was lodge-room 322, "the 'sanctum sanctorium' of the temple... furnished in red velvet" with a pentagram on the wall. In the hall are "pictures of the founders of Bones at Yale, and of members of the Society in Germany, when the chapter was established here in 1832." The raiding party found another interesting scene in the parlor next to room 322.

From The Fall Of Skull And Bones:

“On the west wall, hung among other pictures, an old engraving representing an open burial vault, in which, on a stone slab, rest four human skulls, grouped about a fools cap and bells, an open book, several mathematical instruments, a beggar's scrip, and a royal crown. On the arched wall above the vault are the explanatory words, in Roman letters, 'We War Der Thor, Wer Weiser, Wer Bettler Oder, Kaiser?' and below the vault is engraved, in German characters, the sentence; 'Ob Arm, Ob Beich, im Tode gleich.'

The picture is accompanied by a card on which is written, 'From the German Chapter. Presented by D. C. Gilman of D. 50'.”

Daniel Coit Gilman ('52), along with two other "Bonesmen," formed a troika which still influences American life today. Soon after their initiation in Skull and Bones, Daniel Gilman, Timothy Dwight ('49) and Andrew Dickinson White ('53) went to study philosophy in Europe at the University of Berlin. Gilman returned from Europe and incorporated Skull and Bones as Russell Trust, in 1856, with himself as Treasurer and William H. Russell as President. He spent the next fourteen years in New Haven consolidating the order's power.

Gilman was appointed Librarian at Yale in 1858. Through shrewd political maneuvering, he acquired funding for Yale's science departments (Sheffield Scientific School) and was able to get the Morrill Land Bill introduced in Congress, passed and finally signed by President Lincoln, after being vetoed by President Buchanan.

This bill, "donating public-lands for State College for agriculture and sciences", is now known as the Land Grant College Act. Yale was the first school in America to get the federal land scrip and quickly grabbed all of Connecticut's share at the time. Pleased by the acquisitions, Yale made Gilman a Professor of Physical Geography.

Daniel was the first President of the University of California. He also helped found, and was the first president of, John Hopkins.

Gilman was first president of the Carnegie Institution and involved in the founding of the Peabody, Slater and Russell Sage Foundations.

His buddy, Andrew D. White, was the first president of Cornell University (which received all of New York's share of the Land Grant College Act), U.S. Minister to Russia, U.S. Ambassador to Berlin and first president of the American Historical Association. White was also Chairman of the American delegation to the first Hague Conference in 1899, which established an international judiciary.

Timothy Dwight, a professor at Yale Divinity School, was installed as president of Yale in 1886. All presidents since, have been either "Bonesmen" or directly tied to the Order and its interests.

The Daniel/Gilman/White trio was also responsible for the founding of the American Economic Association, the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association. Through their influences on John Dewey and Horace Mann, this trio continues to have an enormous impact on education today.
3. Networks of Power

In his book America's Secret Establishment, Antony Sutton outlined the Order of Skull and Bones' ability to establish vertical and horizontal "chains of influence" that ensured the continuity of their conspiratorial schemes.

The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy links represent the "vertical chain".

W. C. Whitney ('63), who married Flora Payne (of the Standard Oil Payne dynasty), was Secretary of the Navy. His attorney was a man named Elihu Root. Root hired Henry Stimson ('88), out of law school. Stimson took over from Root as Secretary of War in 1911, appointed by fellow Bonesman William Howard Taft. Stimson later became Coolidge's Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, Hoover's Secretary of State, and Secretary of War during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

Hollister Bundy ('09) was Stimson's special assistant and point man in the Pentagon for the Manhattan Project. His two sons, also members of Skull and Bones, were William Bundy ('39) and McGeorge Bundy ('40) -- both very active in governmental and foundation affairs.

The two brothers, from their positions in the CIA, the Department of Defense and the State Department, and as Special Assistants to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, exercised significant impact on the flow of information and intelligence during the Vietnam "War."

William Bundy went on to be editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential quarterly of the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR). McGeorge became president of the Ford Foundation.

Another interesting group of "Bonesmen" is the Harriman/Bush crowd. Averil Harriman ('13), "Elder Statesman" of the Democratic Party, and his brother Roland Harriman ('17) were very active members. In fact, four of Roland's fellow "Bonesmen" from the class of 1917 were directors of Brown Brothers, Harriman, including Prescott Bush ('17), George Bush's dad.

Since the turn of the century, two investment bank firms -- Guaranty Trust and Brown Brothers, Harriman -- were both dominated by members of Skull and Bones. These two firms were heavily involved in the financing of Communism and Hitler's regime.

Bonesman share an affinity for the Hegelian ideas of the historical dialectic, which dictates the use of controlled conflict -- thesis versus anti-thesis -- to create a pre-determined synthesis. A synthesis of their making and design, where the state is absolute and individuals are granted their freedoms based on their obedience to the state -- a New World Order.

Funding and political maneuvering on the part of "Bonesmen" and their allies helped the Bolsheviks prevail in Russia. In defiance of federal laws, the cabal financed industries, established banks and developed oil and mineral deposits in the fledgling USSR

Later, Averil Harriman, as minister to Great Britain in charge of Lend-Lease for Britain and Russia, was responsible for shipping entire factories into Russia. According to some researchers, Harriman also oversaw the transfer of nuclear secrets, plutonium and U. S. dollar printing plates to the USSR

In 1932, the Union Banking Corporation of New York City had enlisted four directors from the ('17) cell and two Nazi bankers associated with Fritz Thyssen, who had been financing Hitler since 1924.

From George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography:

“President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 [11/17/42] seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, Note #4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the 'Thyssen family' of 'Germany and/or Hungary' -- 'nationals ... of a designated enemy country.'

By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corporation were legally 'front men for the Nazis', the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way 'were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed, and instructed by' the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? ...

4. New York Times, December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: 'The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.'

The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian.”

After the war, Prescott went on to become a U. S. Senator from Connecticut and favorite golfing partner of President Eisenhower. Prescott claims responsibility for getting Nixon into politics and takes personal credit for bringing Dick on board as Ike's running mate in 1952.
4. Name Roster of the Secret Establishment

There were so many "Yalies" in the OSS that Yale's drinking tune, the "Whiffenpoof Song", became an "unofficial" song of the OSS. Many in the OSS were "Bonesmen" or belonged to the other Yale senior societies.

Robert Lovett ('18), Harriman's childhood friend, had been tapped into Skull & Bones by Prescott Bush's cell of '17 and was a director at Brown Brothers, Harriman.

Again, from George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography:

“On October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities.... The new agency would 'consult' with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy on November 14, 1945.... Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS).... The CIA was established in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island.”

Gaddis Smith, a history professor at Yale, said, "Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion." And "Bonesman" have been foremost among the "spooks" building the CIA's "haunted house."

F. Trubee Davison ('18) was Director of Personnel at the CIA in the early years. Some of the other "Bonesmen" connected with the intelligence community are:

* Sloane Coffin, Jr. ('49)
* V. Van Dine ('49)
* James Buckley ('44)
* Bill Buckley ('50)
* Hugh Cunnigham ('34)
* Hugh Wilson ('09)
* Reuben Holden ('40)
* Charles R. Walker ('16)
* Yale's 'unofficial' Secretary of War, Robert D. French ('10)
* Archibald MacLiesh ('15)
* Dino Pionzio ('50), CIA Deputy Chief of Station during Allende overthrow
* William and McGeorge Bundy
* Richard A. Moore ('3?)
* Senator David Boren ('63)
* Senator John Kerry ('66)

...and, of course, George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush tapped Coffin, who tapped Buckley.

Some other prominent Bonesmen include:

* Henry Luce ('20), Time-Life
* John Thomas Daniels ('14), founder Archer Daniels Midland
* Gifford Pinchot ('89), President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester
* Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser ('96)
* Harold Stanley ('08), founder of Morgan Stanley, investment banker
* Alfred Cowles ('13), Cowles Communication
* Henry P. Davison ('20), senior partner Morgan Guaranty Trust
* Thomas Cochran ('04) Morgan partner
* Senator John Heinz ('31)
* Pierre Jay ('92), first chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
* George Herbert Walker, Jr. ('27), financier and co-founder of the NY Mets
* Artemus Gates ('18), President of New York Trust Company, Union Pacific, TIME, Boeing Company
* William Draper III (50), the Defense Department, UN and Import-Export Bank
* Dean Witter, Jr.('44), investment banker
* Senator Jonathan Bingham ('36)
* Potter Stewart ('36), Supreme Court Justice
* Senator John Chaffe ('47)
* Harry Payne Whitney ('94), husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt, investment banker
* Russell W. Davenport ('23), editor Fortune Magazine, created Fortune 500 list
* Evan G. Galbraith ('50), Ambassador to France and Managing Director of Morgan Stanley
* Richard Gow ('55), president Zapata Oil
* Amory Howe Bradford ('34), husband of Carol Warburg Rothschild and general manager for the New York Times
* C. E. Lord ('49), Comptroller of the Currency
* Winston Lord ('59), Chairman of CFR, Ambassador to China and assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration

Ever since Nixon re-established America's political relationship with China, many of our ambassadors to that country have been Bonesmen, including George Bush, the first Chief U. S. Liaison Officer to the Peoples Republic of China.
5. China and the Opium Wars

Why all this interest in China? Well, China, among other things, is one of the largest producers and users of opiates in the world.

For a while, in the 1800s, the Yankee Clippers in Connecticut and Massachusetts were the fastest ships on the ocean. Speed was crucial to the opium trade; whoever made the trip from Turkey/India to Macao/Hong Kong/Shanghai first got the most for their goods.

During the Opium Wars, the U.S. chose to stand on the sidelines and cheer for the English and French, knowing that treaty obligations would bring the U.S. a share in the spoils. Russell and Company was at times the only trading house operating in Canton and used the opportunity to developed strong commercial ties and handsome profits.

Powerful national interests were behind the drug trade, because American traders were badly in need of some article the Chinese would buy, since by this time the seal breeding grounds had been nearly wiped out. If the Chinese had not bought opium from Americans, then United States imports of silk, porcelain and tea would have to paid in precious coin, which was in short supply. In 1843, when the Port of Shanghai was opened, Russell and Co. was one of its earliest traders.

In 1903, Yale Divinity School set up a program of schools and hospitals in China. Mao Zedong was among the staff. During the intrigues of China in the 1930s and '40s, American intelligence called upon the resources of "Yale in China", and George Bush's cousin and fellow "Bonesman" Reuben Holden.

After stints as UN Ambassador and Chairman of the Republican National Committee for the beleaguered Richard Nixon, George Bush was sent to look after the "China trade". The Bush family is still very much involved in the economic activities of "Red" China.

Many researchers contend that George Bush has been with CIA since the early 1950s, and that one of his jobs was to consolidate and co-ordinate the worldwide narcotics industry, the largest industry on Earth. Some say that one of the reasons behind the Vietnam "Police Action" was a cover for the consolidation of the "Golden Triangle".
6. The War on Drugs: An "Intellectual Fraud"

Before the Vietnam "War", the Golden Triangle was run by French Intelligence and Corsican mobsters. After the French bailed out and America moved in, the triangle was run by U.S. intelligence, with aid from Sicilian mobsters. This narcotics network is well documented in The Politics of Heroin in S. E. Asia by Alfred McCoy, The Great Heroin Coup by Henrik Kruger and Double-Cross by Sam and Chuck Giancana.

Vice-President George Bush, as Chairman of President Reagan's cabinet-level working group and as Director of the National Narcotics Interdiction System, was the highest U. S. governmental official involved in the "war on drugs".

Frances Mullen, Jr., former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), called Bush's efforts "an intellectual fraud" and "a liability rather than an asset". Soon after these statements, Mullen resigned and the resultant General Accounting Office (GAO) report was buried.

In July, 1985, the suppressed GAO paper reported that there were "no benefits from the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, directed by George Bush. In fact, the overall effect was to encourage supply...."

Monika Jensen-Stevenson, a 60 Minutes producer, quit her job after the CBS news program refused to air the story she had uncovered relating to the covert drug trade. Her book, Kiss The Boys Goodbye, details how our intelligence community used the apparatus of the POW/MIA governmental agencies as a cover for the trafficking of opiates from the Golden Triangle.

President Reagan appointed Reform Party founder and Texas billionaire Ross Perot to the President's Advisory Council on Foreign Intelligence. Reagan made Perot a special presidential investigator, looking into America's POW and MIAs from the Vietnam "War".

Ross took the job to heart and spent considerable time and money in pursuit of the quest. He was given special clearance and access. He asked questions and interviewed everyone he could find.

From Kiss The Boys Goodbye:

“Relations between Bush and Perot had gone downhill ever since the Vice-President had asked Ross Perot how his POW/MIA investigations were going.

'Well, George, I go in looking for prisoners,' said Perot, 'but I spend all my time discovering the government has been moving drugs around the world and is involved in illegal arms deals.... I can't get at the prisoners because of the corruption among our own people.'

This ended Perot's official access to the highly classified files as a one-man presidential investigator. 'I have been instructed to cease and desist,' he had informed the families of missing men early in 1987.”

The wholesale importation of cocaine into the U.S. during "Iran/Contra" is also well documented. George Bush, is known "to be in the loop" with many of the players keeping in contact directly with his office.

Also, there has been much speculation as to the use of the off-shore rigs, pipelines and other assets of Zapata Offshore being used for narcotic trans-shipments.

Narcotics such as cocaine and heroin cannot be manufactured without the precursor chemicals. One of the largest makers of these precursor chemicals is the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis, Indiana. The Quayle family is a large stockholder, and George Bush has been on the Board of Directors. Eli Lilly is also the company that first synthesized LSD for the CIA.
7. George Bush, Skull & Bones and the JFK Assassination

Rodney Stich's book Defrauding America tells of a "deep-cover CIA officer" assigned to a counter-intelligence unit, code-named Pegasus. This unit "had tape-recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy" from a tap on the phone of J. Edgar Hoover. The people on the tapes were "[Nelson] Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, [Lyndon] Johnson of Texas, George Bush and J. Edgar Hoover."

Could George Bush be involved in the JFK assassination?

In 1963, Bush was living in Houston, busily carrying out his duties as president of the Zapata Offshore oil company. He denied the existence of a note sent by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to "Mr. George Bush of the CIA." When news of the note surfaced, the CIA first said they never commented on employment questions, but later relented said yes, a "George Bush" was mentioned in the note, but that it was "another" George Bush, not the man who took office in the White House in 1988.

Some intrepid reporters tracked down the "other" George Bush and discovered that he was just a lowly clerk who had shuffled papers for the CIA for about six months. He never received any interagency messages from anybody at the FBI, let alone the Queen Mary.

It is also worth noting that a CIA code word for Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata, and that two of the support vessels were named Barbara and Houston.

Many say that George Bush was high up on the CIA ladder at the time, running proprietorial vehicles and placed in a position of command, responsible for many of the Cubans recruited into "service" at the time. All through the Iran-Contra affair, Felix Rodriguez, the man who captured and had Che Guevara killed for the CIA, always seemed to call Bush's office first.

From The Realist (Summer, 1991):

“Bush was working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez, recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was Bush's CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the invasion.... A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document places marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and '61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion....

George Bush claims he never worked for the CIA until he was appointed Director by former Warren Commission director and then president Jerry Ford in 1976. Logic suggests that is highly unlikely. Of course, Bush has a company duty to deny being in the CIA. The CIA is a secret organization. No one ever admits to being a member. The truth is that Bush has been a top CIA official since before the 1961 invasion of Cuba, working with Felix Rodriguez. Bush may deny his actual role in the CIA in 1959, but there are records in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that expose Bush's role...”

On the Watergate tapes, June 23, 1972, referred to in the media as the 'smoking gun' conversation, Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, were discussing how to stop the FBI investigation into the CIA Watergate burglary. They were worried that the investigation would expose their connection to 'the Bay of Pigs thing.' Haldeman, in his book The Ends of Power, reveals that Nixon always used code words when talking about the 1963 murder of JFK. Haldeman said Nixon would always refer to the assassination as 'the Bay of Pigs'.

On that transcript we find Nixon discussing the role of George Bush's partner, Robert Mosbacher, as one of the Texas fundraisers for Nixon. On the tapes Nixon keeps referring to the 'Cubans' and the 'Texans.' The 'Texans' were Bush, Mosbacher and Baker. This is another direct link between Bush and evidence linking Nixon and Bush to the Kennedy assassination.
8. Motives for the Conspiracy

So, why would an intelligence agency/secret society want to smuggle drugs and assassinate JFK?

Well, they make a lot of money, and they garner intelligence assets through their participation. There's also the rationale that the world is a seamy and unseemly place, and if you're going to be the 'big boy' on the block, you better know what's going on. And what better way of knowing than by running it yourself? There are also some who theorize that the covert drug trade fits with plans to destabilize American families and society. Through demoralizing and fracturing the body politic, they can impose their will using psychological warfare and the political alchemy of the Hegelian dialectic.

James Shelby Downard's article, Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism, an underground classic, links American historical events with a wild, numerological, grand occult plan "to turn us into cybernetic mystery zombies". The assassination of JFK, this article contends, was the performance of a public occult ritual called The Killing of the King, designed as a mass-trauma, mind-control assault against our U.S. national body-politic.

During Operation Sunrise, Operation Blowback, Operation Paperclip and others, thousands of Nazi scientists, researchers and administrators were brought to the United States after World War II. Many were "smuggled" into the country against direct, written, orders from President Harry S. Truman.

Project Monarch was the resumption of a mind-control project called Marionette Programming, which started in Nazi Germany. The basic component of the Monarch Program is the sophisticated manipulation of the mind, using extreme trauma to induce Multiple Personality Disorder.

Mr. Downward feels that the perpetrators purposefully murdered JFK in such a way as to affect our National identity and cohesiveness -- to fracture America's soul. Even the blatancy of their conspiracy was designed to show "their superiority" and "our futility".

There have been studies that show a correlation between the JFK assassination and the rise in violence in society, distrust of government and other extensions of social ills.
9. The Illuminati: Subverting the Body Politic

Why this attack against our body politic?

In 1785, a bolt of lightning struck a courier en route to Paris from Frankfort-on-the-Main. A tract written by Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, Original Shift in Days of Illuminations, was recovered from the dead messenger, containing the secret society's long-range plan for "The New World Order through world revolution".

The Bavarian Government outlawed the society and in 1787 published the details of The Illuminati conspiracy in The Original Writings of the Order and Sect of the Illuminati.

In Adam Weishaupt's own words:

“By this plan, we shall direct all mankind in this manner. And, by the simplest means, we shall set all in motion and in flames. The occupations must be so allotted and contrived that we may, in secret, influence all political transactions.”

There is disagreement among scholars as to whether or not the Illuminati survived its banishment. Nevertheless, the group had been quite successful in attracting members and had allied itself with the extensive Masonic networks.

The Illuminati was publicly founded May 1, 1776 at the University of Ingolstadt by Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law. It was a very "learned" society; Weishaupt drew the earliest members of his new order from among his students.

On December 5, 1776, students at William and Mary College founded a secret society, Phi Beta Kappa. A second chapter was formed, at Yale, in 1780. The anti-Masonic movement in the United States during the 1820s held groups such as Phi Beta Kappa in a bad light. Because of pressure, the society went public. This is noted by some researchers as the direct cause of the appearance of Yale's Order of Skull and Bones.

In The Cyclopedia Of Fraternities, a genealogical chart of general Greek-Letter college fraternities in the United States, shows Phi Beta Kappa as "the parent of all the fraternal systems in [American] higher education." There is only one "side" lineal descendant: the Yale chapter of 1780. The line then continues to Skull and Bones in 1832, and on through the other "only at Yale" senior societies, Scroll & Key and Wolf's Head.

Phi Beta Kappa is the "first three Greek letters, for 'Philosophia Biou Kubernetes' or 'Love of wisdom, the helmsman of life'." A skull homophone is scull, a quick, gliding boat and part of Skull & Bones first nomenclature.

John Robison, a professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University in Scotland and a member of a Freemason Lodge, said that he was asked to join the Illuminati. After study, he concluded the purposes of the Illuminati were not for him.

In 1798, he published a book called Proofs Of A Conspiracy:

“An association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments and overturning all the existing governments.... the leaders would rule the World with uncontrollable power, while all the rest would be employed as tools of the ambition of their unknown superiors.”

Proofs of A Conspiracy was sent to George Washington. Responding to the sender of the book with a letter, the president said he was aware the Illuminati were in America. He felt that the Illuminati had "diabolical tenets" and that their object was "a separation of the People from their government."

In Proofs Of A Conspiracy, Robison printed the ceremony of initiation of the "Regent degree" in Illuminism. In it "a skeleton is pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a crown and a sword. He is asked 'whether that is the skeleton of a king, nobleman or a beggar.' As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says to him, 'The character of being a man is the only one that is importance'".

This is, essentially, the same as the writing in the Skull & Bones "tomb":

“Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich.”

Which reads:

“Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death.”
10. Skull & Bones = Illuminati?

Is the Order of the Skull & Bones part of the Illuminati?

When a person is initiated into Skull & Bones, they are given a new name, similar to the practice of the Illuminati. And many recorded Illuminati members can be shown to have contact and/or strong influences with many of the professors that taught "Bonesmen" in Berlin.

When a secret society conspires against the sovereignty of a king, they need to organize, raise funds, make their plans operational, and hopefully bring them to fruition.

Could we have in the United States a secret society that has used the "National Security State" as a cover for their nefarious plans?

From George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography:

“That September [1951], Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American military alliance. By now, Brown Brothers, Harriman was everything but commander-in-chief.

A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of covert operations and 'psychological warfare.' Harriman, together with his lawyers and business partners, Allen and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad....

The Harriman security regime created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the PSB [was] Gordon Gray.... Gordon's brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval intelligence officer, known around Washington as the 'founder of operational intelligence.' Gordon Gray became a close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert policy.”

So you have the Whitney/Stimson/Bundy clan and the Harriman/Bush boys wielding a tremendous amount of influence on the political, economic and social affairs of America and the world. Then you have Prescott Bush's buddy Richard Nixon as an activist vice-president. Then, a nation-chilling assassination, some time under LBJ with the Bundy boys keeping things in line, then Nixon as President with "Bonesmen" aides Ray Price ('51) and Richard A. Moore. Some time out for a Trilateralist-Democrat-patsy president, followed by Prescott's son as an activist vice-president under Reagan. Next, we get a Skull and Bones president who declares a "New World Order" while beating up on his business partner, Saddam Hussein.

After twelve years of Republican administrations, Bush passes the reins to his drug smuggling buddy from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who studied at Yale Law School. According to some researchers, Clinton was recruited as a CIA operative while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Could this be the "old Hegelian historical dialectic process"?
11. World History: Plan or Accident?

Will we get another failed Democratic administration? A scandal as disgraceful as Nixon's fall? When Robert P. Johnson (William Barr) told Clinton in a bunker in Arkansas that “you are our fair-haired boy, but you do have competition for the job you seek. We would never put all our eggs in one basket. You and your state have been our greatest asset.... Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you, that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you are number one on our short list for shot at the job you always wanted.

So, you have William Casey -- CIA Director, George Bush's campaign manager and Sovereign Knight of Malta -- speaking through the proxy of George Bush's last Attorney General to George's rival in the 1992 federal elections. Is it all just a show and sham for U.S. hoi polloi?

Perhaps so, if there exists the type of control over the electoral process as told by Mae Brussell and the suppressed book VoteScam, written by Jim and Ken Collier:

“...Your vote and mine may now be a meaningless bit of energy directed by preprogrammed computers-which can be fixed to select certain pre-ordained candidates and leave no footprints or paper trail.”

In short, computers are covertly stealing your vote.

For almost three decades the American vote has been subject to government-sponsored electronic theft.

The vote has been stolen from you by a cartel of federal "national security" bureaucrats, who include higher-ups in the Central Intelligence Agency, political party leaders, Congressmen, co-opted journalists -- and the owners and managers -- of the major Establishment news media, who have decided in concert that how America's votes are counted, by whom they are counted and how the results are verified and delivered to the public is, as one of them put it, 'Not a proper area of inquiry.'

By means of an unofficial private corporation named News Election Service (NES), the Establishment press has actual physical control of the counting and dissemination of the vote, and it refuses to let the public know how it is done.”

Is the American electorate subjected to cyclic propaganda, pre-selected candidates and winners, and psychological warfare to alienate Americans from the institutions established to serve them by the Constitution? Are the Democratic and Republican National Parties used for a Hegelian experiment in controlled conflict?

Pamela Churchill Harriman, Averil's wife, is one of the Democratic Party's biggest fund-raisers. She once gave Bill a job as director of her "PAM PAC" when he was defeated for governor in 1980. Bill paid her back by appointing her as Ambassador to France.

Another Harriman/Bush friend, Eugene Stetson ('34), was an assistant manager for Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers, Harriman's New York office. He organized the H. Smith Richardson Foundation. The foundation, in the late 1950s, participated in the MKULTRA, the CIA's domestic covert psychological warfare operation. The Richardson Foundation helped to finance the testing of psychotropic drugs, including LSD, at Bridgewater Hospital in Massachusetts, the center of some of the most brutal MK-ULTRA experiments.

During the Iran-Contra operations, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation was a "private donors steering committee," working with the National Security Council to co-ordinate the Office of Public Diplomacy. This was an effort to propagandize in favor of and run cover for the Iran-Contra operations, and to coordinate published attacks on opponents of the program.

The H. Smith Richardson Foundation also runs the Center for Creative Leadership at Langley to "train leaders of the CIA," as well as another center near Greensboro, North Carolina, that trains CIA and Secret Service Agents. Almost everyone who achieves the military rank of general also gets this training.

This is just the tip of an iceberg. You also have eugenics and population control, suppressed history and technology, yearly retreats, profitable partnerships with brutal dictators, deals with "terrorists", the involvement of the Knights of Malta, war-mongering and profiteering, mind-control, secret societies for teens, ritual magic and more -- all spinning the dark threads in the web of conspiracy that our spinning blue ball has gotten caught in.

We've got a whole new crop of "Bonesmen" coming up, including George H.W. Bush's son George W. Bush ('68), Governor of Texas.

When Don Schollander ('68), the Olympic gold-medalist and only known Skull and Bones member living in Portland, was contacted by Willamette Week reporter John Schrang regarding his involvement in the Order, he said, "It's really something I can't talk about."

Not wouldn't, but "couldn't".

In wake of Antony Sutton's first ground-breaking exposes of the Order, the Sterling Library at Yale has refused to allow any other researchers access to the Russell Trust papers.

Daniel Gilman, like most Bonesmen, makes no mention of Skull & Bones or the Russell Trust in his memoirs or biographies.

So, are we all just 'fodder" for a secret society with satanic overtones that is attempting to form a one world government with themselves at the helm? Or is the Order of Skull and Bones just a bunch of frat boys from Yale? Wanna bet your future on it?

© Copyright Little Red Hen, 1996

Click here for cited sources and accompanying bibliography



The Origins of the Overclass
- By Steve Kangas

“In 1999, a journalist [Steve Kangas] who had written exposes of Richard Scaife was by all appearances murdered in the Oxford Centre of Pittsburgh, PA - the office complex of the foundation of his subject - Scaife. Richard Mellon Scaife is the heir of the Mellon fortune and a major funder of the Heritage Foundation and other right wing organizations, although, like the Coors family, Scaife also funds abortion and gay rights organizations. Shortly before his death in February 1999, Kangas catalogued the gruesome accomplishments of the CIA and issued a scathing indictment of their paymasters - the very elites who created the CNP!”
- The Council For National Policy

Goerge Bush Sr., former CIA director The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.

The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.

During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent — the highest level of inequality in the 20th century.

How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"

Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite.

By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation’s businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included:

* Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity.
* Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call.
* Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA.
* Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world.

Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government.

Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other.

How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding, top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts (for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations. The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their people.

The CIA’s alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one. Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of the CIA’s history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIA’s history of atrocity first.
The Crimes of the CIA

During World War II, the OSS actively engaged in propaganda, sabotage and countless other dirty tricks. After the war, and even after the CIA was created in 1947, the American intelligence community reverted to harmless information gathering and analysis, thinking that the danger to national security had passed. That changed in 1948 with the emergence of the Cold War. In that year, the CIA recreated its covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination. Its first director was Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities included

“propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

By 1953, the dirty tricks department of the CIA had grown to 7,200 personnel and commanded 74 percent of the CIA’s total budget. The following quotes describe the culture of lawlessness that pervaded the CIA:

Stanley Lovell, a CIA recruiter for "Wild Bill" Donovan: "What I have to do is to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and say to him, 'Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell. Come help me raise it.'" 1

George Hunter White, writing of his CIA escapades: "I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?" 2

A retired CIA agency caseworker with twenty years experience: "I never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what worked."

Blessed with secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, CIA operations became corrupt almost immediately. Using propaganda stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA felt justified in manipulating the public for its own good. The broadcasts were so patently false that for a time it was illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S. This was a classic case of a powerful organization deciding what was best for the people, and then abusing the powers it had helped itself to.

During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans began learning about the agency’s crimes and atrocities. 3 It turns out the CIA has:

* Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other nations;
* Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle.
* Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others.
* Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica and more;
* Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Ziare), the "reign of the colonels" (Greece), and more;
* Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others;
* Helped run the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation and murder;
* Used Michigan State "professors" to train Diem’s secret police in torture;
* Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages;
* Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia;
* Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina;
* Planted false stories in the local media;
* Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political statements and embarrassments that they did not commit;
* Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional law;
* Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War;
* Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaners, Latin American death squad leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants;
* Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide;
* Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations;
* Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia;
* Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg –- other notorious examples include Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and Noriega’s Panama.
* Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers;
* And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. 4 Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."

We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior to 1975, the agency answered only to the President (creating all the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIA’s activities were secret, the President rarely had to worry about public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings, Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives, businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel.
The Business Origins of CIA Crimes

Although many people think that the CIA’s primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomsky correctly points out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didn’t help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary. The reason they overthrew so many democracies is because the people usually voted for policies that multi-national corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment.

So the CIA’s greatest "successes" were usually more pro-corporate than anti-communist. Citing a communist threat, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. But there was no communist threat — the Soviets stood back and watched the coup from afar. What really happened was that Mossadegh threatened to nationalize British and American oil companies in Iran. Consequently, the CIA and MI6 toppled Mossadegh and replaced him with a puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran and his murderous secret police, SAVAK. The reason why the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979 was because the CIA had helped SAVAK torture and murder their people.

Another "success" was the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Again, there was no communist threat. The real threat was to Guatemala’s United Fruit Company, a Rockefeller-owned firm whose stockholders included CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the company, albeit with generous compensation. In response, the CIA initiated a coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed the murderous dictator Castillo Armas. For four decades, CIA-backed dictators would torture and murder hundreds of thousands of leftists, union members and others who would fight for a more equitable distribution of the country’s resources.

Another "success" story was Chile. In 1973, the country’s democratically elected leader, Salvadore Allende, nationalized foreign-owned interests, like Chile’s lucrative copper mines and telephone system. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) offered the CIA $1 million to overthrow Allende — which the CIA allegedly refused — but paid $350,000 to his political opponents. The CIA responded with a coup that murdered Allende and replaced him with a brutal tyrant, General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of leftists, union members and political opponents as economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman installed a "free market" economy. Since then, income inequality has soared higher in Chile than anywhere else in Latin America.

Even when the communist threat was real, the CIA first and foremost took care of the elite. In testimony before Congress in the early 50s, it artificially inflated Soviet military capabilities. A notorious example was the "bomber gap" that later turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Another was "Team B," a group of hawkish CIA analysts who seriously distorted Soviet military data. These scare tactics worked. Congress awarded giant defense contracts to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

And not even the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of American defense contracts have stopped the CIA from serving the elite. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes:

Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been abuzz with talk about using the CIA for economic espionage. Stripped of euphemism, economic espionage simply means that American spies would target foreign companies, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda, and then covertly pass stolen trade secrets and technology to U.S. corporate executives. 5

If this isn’t bad enough, a worse problem arises in that the CIA doesn’t hand over this technology to every American auto-related company, but only the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

In a 1975 interview, Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee summed up his personal observations of the agency:

To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account"…

American multinational corporations have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you also find the CIA… The multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease…

Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big Business has a vested interest in the Cold War. 6

Domestic Recruitment

The CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting life. Between 1948 and 1959, more than 40,000 American individuals and companies acted as sources for the U.S. intelligence community. 7 Let’s look at each area of recruitment, and see how they enabled the CIA to conduct its crimes:
Big Business

The CIA co-opted big business right from the start, beginning with the most famous billionaire of the time: Howard Hughes. Hughes had inherited his father’s million-dollar tool and die company at age 19. Anxious to expand his fortune, he made a conscientious decision "to go where the money is" — namely, government. With a few well-placed bribes, Hughes secured defense contracts to build military planes. The result was the Hughes Aircraft company. By 1940, he had also acquired a controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His government connections and international airline soon caught the attention of the CIA, and the two began a lifelong relationship. Hughes, whom the CIA dubbed "The Stockbroker," became the agency’s largest contractor. Not only did he let the CIA use his business firms as fronts, but he also funded countless CIA operations. Perhaps the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. Hughes’ right-hand security man, Robert Maheu, was a CIA agent who at one time represented the CIA in negotiations with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The CIA’s contacts with big business quickly spread. The agency showed a preference for international companies, public relations firms, media companies, law offices, banks, financiers and stockbrokers. The CIA didn’t limit its activities to recruiting businessmen; sometimes the CIA bought or created entire companies outright. One benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to create a secret source of funds other than from government. With stock portfolios multiplying their profits, it’s impossible now to say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the Iran/Contra scandal.

By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control.
The Media

Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents. People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.

The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today’s publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post’s ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. 8

MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:

* Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)
* William Paley (President, CBS)
* Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)
* Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)
* Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)
* Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)
* Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)
* James Copley (Copley News Services)
* Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)
* C.D. Jackson (Fortune)
* Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)
* ABC
* NBC
* Associated Press
* United Press International
* Reuters
* Hearst Newspapers
* Scripps-Howard
* Newsweek magazine
* Mutual Broadcasting System
* Miami Herald
* Old Saturday Evening Post
* New York Herald-Tribune

Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation’s most right-wing dailies. Its location in the nation’s capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures. Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.

After Philip’s suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post. Seduced by her husband’s world of government and espionage, she expanded her newspaper’s relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated:

“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political agenda behind the Post’s headlines.

Ben Bradlee was the Post’s managing editor during most of the Cold War. He worked in the U.S. Paris embassy from 1951 to 1953, where he followed orders by the CIA station chief to place propaganda in the European press. 9 Most Americans incorrectly believe that Bradlee personifies the liberal slant of the Post, given his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigations. But neither of these two incidents are what they seem. The Post merely published the Pentagon Papers after The New York Times already had, because it wanted to appear competitive. As for Watergate, we’ll examine the CIA’s reasons for wanting to bring down Nixon in a moment. Someone once asked Bradlee: "Does it irk you when The Washington Post is made out to be a bastion of slanted liberal thinkers instead of champion journalists just because of Watergate?" Bradlee responded: "Damn right it does!" 10

It would be impossible to elaborate in this short space even the most important examples of the CIA/media alliance. Sig Mickelson was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda.

The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan’s CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC.

For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media. Here is but one example:

In 1996, The San Jose Mercury News published an investigative report suggesting that the CIA had sold crack in Los Angeles to fund the Contra war in Central America. A month later, three of the CIA’s most important media allies — The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times — immediately leveled their guns at the Mercury report and blasted away in an attempt to discredit it. Who wrote the Post article? Walter Pincus, longtime CIA journalist. The dangers here are obvious.
Academia

By the early 50s, CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale. (A disproportionate number of CIA figures, like George Bush, come from Yale’s "Skull and Crossbones" Society.) CIA recruiters also approached thousands of other professors to work in place at their universities on a part-time, contract basis. Not stopping at recruiting scholars, the agency would go on to create several departments at elite universities, including Harvard's Russian Research Center and the Center for International Studies at MIT.

Although most academics were supportive of the CIA in the 50s, most were unaware of its abuses. In the 60s, academia would become outraged to learn that anti-communist organizations like the National Student Association were actually creations of the CIA. The most audacious CIA front was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that attracted liberal, freethinking artists and intellectuals who nonetheless deplored communism.

By the late 60s and 70s, growing reports of CIA crimes and atrocities had deeply alienated academia. Scholars were further troubled to learn that the CIA had penetrated and disrupted student antiwar groups. Unlike business and the media, academia overwhelmingly denounced the CIA after the Vietnam era. This eventually forced the CIA to turn to new places to find their analysts and scholars. The most important source was the conservative think-tank movement, which it helped to create. More on this later.
The Roman Catholic Church

Although the CIA began as a mostly Protestant organization, Roman Catholics quickly came to dominate the new covert-action wing in 1948. All were staunchly conservative, fiercely anti-communist and socially elite. Just a few of the many Catholic operatives included future CIA directors William Colby, William Casey, and John McCone. Another well-known personality from this period was William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and gadfly host of TV’s Firing Line. Buckley, it turns out, served as a CIA agent in Mexico City, and his experiences there served as fodder for his Blackford Oakes spy novels.

There were several reasons for this influx of Catholic elites. First, Wisner (himself a Wall Street lawyer) had an extensive and glamorous circle of friends to recruit from. Second, Italy was in constant crisis in the 1940s, both during World War II and after. Throughout this troubled period, the American intelligence community’s greatest ally in Italy was the Roman Catholic Church.

The Roman Catholic Church, of course, is one of the most anti-communist organizations in the world. The Marxist doctrine of atheism threatens Catholic theology, and its equality threatens the Church’s strict tradition of hierarchy and authoritarianism. When Hitler invaded Communist Russia, the Vatican openly approved. Jesuit Michael Serafian wrote: "It cannot be denied that [Pope] Pius XII's closest advisors for some time regarded Hitler's armoured divisions as the right hand of God." 11

But Hitler persecuted Catholics as well, and ultimately drove the Church to the Americans. In 1943, the Vatican reached a secret agreement with OSS Chief Donovan — himself a devout Catholic — to let the Holy See become the center of Allied spy operations in Italy. Donovan considered the Church to be one of his prize intelligence assets, given its global power, membership and contacts. He cultivated this alliance by sending America’s most prestigious Catholics to the Vatican to establish rapport and forge an alliance.

After the war, half of Europe lay under Communist control, and the Italian communist party threatened to win the 1948 elections. The prospect of communism ruling over the heart of Catholicism terrified the Vatican. Once again, American intelligence gathered their most prestigious Catholics to strengthen ties with the Vatican. Because this was the first mission of the new covert action division, the American Catholic agents acquired positions of power early on, and would dominate covert operations for the rest of the Cold War.

At a public level, the U.S. government sunk $350 million in social and military aid into Italy to sway the vote. On a secret level, Wisner spent $10 million in black budget funds to steal the elections. This included disseminating propaganda, beating up left-wing politicians, intimidating voters and disrupting leftist parties. The dirty tricks worked — the Communists lost, and the Catholic Americans’ success permanently secured their power within the CIA.
The Knights of Malta 12

The Roman Catholic Church did not forget the American agents who had saved them from both Nazism and Communism. It rewarded them by making them Knights of Malta, or members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM).

SMOM is one of the oldest and most elite religious orders in the Catholic Church. Until recently, it limited its membership to Italians and foreign heads of state. In 1927, however, an exception was made for the United States, given its emerging status as a world power. SMOM opened an American branch, awarding knighthood or damehood to several American Catholic business tycoons. This group was so conservative that one, John Raskob, the Chairman of General Motors, actually became involved in an aborted military plot to remove Franklin Roosevelt from the White House. SMOM has also been embarrassed by knighting or giving awards to countless people who later turned out to be Nazi war criminals. This is the sort of culture that thrives within the leadership of SMOM.

Officially, the Knights of Malta are a global charity organization. But beginning in the 1940s, knighthood was granted to countless CIA agents, and the organization has become a front for intelligence operations. SMOM is ideal for this kind of activity, because it is recognized as the world’s only landless sovereignty, and members enjoy diplomatic immunity. This allows agents and supplies to pass through customs without interference from the host country. Such privileges enabled the Knights of Malta to become a major supplier of "humanitarian aid" to the Contras during their war in the 1980s.

A partial list of the Knights and Dames of Malta reads like a Who’s Who of American Catholicism:

William Casey

CIA Director.
John McCone

CIA Director.
William Colby

CIA Director.
William Donovan

OSS Director. Donovan was given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only been given to a hundred other men in history.
Frank Shakespeare

Director of such propaganda organizations as the U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Also executive vice-president of CBS-TV and vice-chairman of RKO General Inc. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank.
William Simon

Treasury Secretary under President Nixon. In the private sector, he has become one of America’s 400 richest individuals by working in international finance. Today he is the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, a major funder of right-wing think tanks.
William F. Buckley, Jr.

CIA agent, conservative pundit and mass media personality.
James Buckley

William’s brother, head of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
Clare Boothe Luce

The grand dame of the Cold War was also a Dame of Malta. She was a popular playwright and the wife of the publishing tycoon Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine.
Francis X Stankard

CEO of the international division of Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller institution. (Nelson Rockefeller was also a major CIA figure.)
John Farrell

President, U.S. Steel
Lee Iacocca

Chairman, General Motors
William S. Schreyer

Chairman, Merrill Lynch.
Richard R. Shinn

Chairman, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
Joseph Kennedy

Founder of the Kennedy empire.
Baron Hilton

Owner, Hilton Hotel chain.
Patrick J. Frawley Jr.

Heir, Schick razor fortune. Frawley is a famous funder of right-wing Catholic causes, such as the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.
Ralph Abplanalp

Aerosol magnate.
Martin F. Shea

Executive vice president of Morgan Guaranty Trust.
Joseph Brennan

Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York.
J. Peter Grace

President, W.R. Grace Company. He was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists and spies to the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in their service to the CIA.
Thomas Bolan

Of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan, the law firm of Senator McCarthy's deceased aide Roy Cohn.
Bowie Kuhn

Baseball Commissioner
Cardinal John O'Connor

Extreme right-wing leader among American Catholics, and fervent abortion opponent.
Cardinal Francis Spellman

The "American Pope" was at one time the most powerful Catholic in America, an arch-conservative and a rabid anti-communist.
Cardinal Bernard Law

One of the highest-ranking conservatives in the American church.
Alexander Haig

Secretary of State under President Reagan.
Admiral James D. Watkins

Hard-line chief of naval operations under President Reagan.
Jeremy Denton

Senator (R–Al).
Pete Domenici

Senator (R-New Mexico).
Walter J. Hickel

Governor of Alaska and secretary of the interior.

When this group gets together, obviously, the topics are spying, business and politics.

The CIA has also used other religious and charity organizations as fronts. For example, John F. Kennedy -- another anticommunist Roman Catholic who greatly expanded covert operations -- created the U.S. Peace Corps to serve as cover for CIA operatives. The CIA has also made extensive use of missionaries, with the blessings of many right-wing, anticommunist Christian denominations.
But the World Grows Wise…

It was only a matter of time before other nations caught on to these fronts. They learned that when the CIA comes to their countries to commit their crimes and atrocities, they come disguised as American journalists, businessmen, missionaries and charity volunteers. Unfortunately, foreigners are now targeting these professions as hostile. In Lebanon, terrorists held U.S. journalist Terry Anderson hostage for nearly seven years, on the not unreasonable assumption that he was a spy. Whether or not this was true is beside the point. The CIA has put all Americans abroad at risk, whether they are CIA agents or not. In hearings before the Senate in 1996, many organizations urged Congress to stop using their professions as CIA cover. Don Argue of the National Association of Evangelicals testified: "Such use of missionary agents for covert activities by the CIA would be unethical and immoral." 13
From the Cold War to the Class War

As noted above, academia was the first major institution to denounce the crimes of the CIA. Why? One reason is that scholars conduct their own extensive research into world affairs, so naturally they were the first to learn the truth. This is the main reason why protest against the Vietnam War and the CIA erupted first among students on the nation’s campuses. By the end of the Vietnam War, the CIA had suffered a "brain drain" as its academic allies became its most articulate, passionate and eloquent critics.

The social revolutions of the 60s terrified the CIA. James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence and a truly paranoid man, was convinced the Soviets had masterminded the entire antiwar movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared his conviction. The CIA had always spied on student groups throughout the 60s, but in 1968 President Johnson dramatically stepped up the effort with Operation CHAOS. This initially called for 50 CIA agents to go undercover as student radicals, penetrate their antiwar organizations and root out the Russian spies who were causing the rebellion. Tellingly, they never found a single spy. The agents also began a campaign of wire-tapping, mail-opening, burglary, deception, intimidation and disruption against thousands of protesting American civilians.

By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies. 14 When academia learned of this, its outrage grew.

The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first was Watergate.

The CIA’s fingerprints were all over Watergate. First, we should note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." Nixon, for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic issues, infuriating businessmen with statements like "We are all Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist, like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixon’s withdrawal from Vietnam and Détente with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldn’t stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up for Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was fighting at cross-purposes with the CIA and the nation’s elite.

As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixon’s dirty work. Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP. The team consisted of two CIA agents — E. Howard Hunt and James McCord — as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixon’s illegal campaign contributions.

The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of Nixon’s crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to know them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green light again to proceed again with their investigation.

Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIA’s main newspaper in America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nation’s highest secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixon’s activities. Many Watergate researchers consider one of Woodward’s old intelligence contacts to be a prime candidate for Deep Throat. 15

Despite all the facts of CIA involvement, Woodward and Bernstein made virtually no mention of the CIA in their Watergate reporting. Even during Senate hearings on Watergate, the CIA somehow managed to stay out of the spotlight. In 1974, the House would clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate.

The CIA was not as lucky in 1974, when the Senate held hearings on James Jesus Angleton’s illegal surveillance of American citizens. These disclosures resulted in his firing. But that was nothing compared to the 1975 Church Committee. This Senate investigation looked into virtually every type of CIA crime, from assassination to secret war to manipulating the domestic media. The "reforms" that resulted from these hearings were mostly cosmetic, but the details that emerged shattered the CIA’s reputation forever. Interestingly enough, the two Senators who held these hearings — Frank Church and Otis Pike — were both defeated for reelection, despite a 98 percent reelection rate for incumbents.

The CIA wasn’t the only conservative institution that found itself embattled in the early 70s. This was a bad time for conservatives everywhere. America had lost the war in Vietnam. U.S. corporations had to cope with the rise of OPEC. The anti-poverty programs of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society were causing a major redistribution of wealth. And Nixon was making things worse with his own anti-poverty and regulatory programs. Between 1960 and 1973, these efforts cut poverty in half, from 22 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1976, the richest 1 percent had gone from owning 37 percent of America’s wealth to only 22 percent. 16

At a 1973 Conference Board meeting of top American business leaders, executives declared: "We are fighting for our lives," "We are fighting a delaying action," and "If we don’t take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy." 17
The CIA to the rescue

In the mid-1970s, at this historic low point in American conservatism, the CIA began a major campaign to turn corporate fortunes around.

They did this in several ways. First, they helped create numerous foundations to finance their domestic operations. Even before 1973, the CIA had co-opted the most famous ones, like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. But after 1973, they created more. One of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his fortune to fight the "Soviet menace." 18 From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards he began donating millions to fund the New Right.

Scaife's CIA roots are typical of those who head the new conservative foundations. By 1994 the most active were:

* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Carthage Foundation
* Earhart Foundation
* Charles G. Koch
* David H. Koch
* Claude R. Lambe
* Philip M. McKenna
* J.M. Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation
* Henry Salvatori Foundation
* Sarah Scaife Foundation
* Smith Richardson Foundation

Between 1992 and 1994, these foundations gave $210 million to conservative causes. Here is the breakdown of their donations:

* $88.9 million for conservative scholarships;
* $79.2 million to enhance a national infrastructure of think tanks and advocacy groups;
* $16.3 million for alternative media outlets and watchdog groups;
* $10.5 million for conservative pro-market law firms;
* $9.3 million for regional and state think tanks and advocacy groups;
* $5.4 million to "organizations working to transform the nations social views and giving practices of the nation's religious and philanthropic leaders." 19

The political machine they built is broad and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the political fight. It includes right-wing departments and chairs in the nation’s top universities, think tanks, public relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations that pressure Congress (irreverently known as "Astroturf" movements), "Roll-out-the-vote" machines, pollsters, fax networks, lobbyist organizations, economic seminars for the nation’s judges, and more. And because corporations are the richest sector of society, their greater financing overwhelms similar efforts by Democrats.

Besides creating foundations, the CIA helped organize the business community. There have always been special interest groups representing business, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and the CIA has long been involved with them. However, after 1973, a spate of powerful new groups would come into existence, like the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission. These organizations quickly became powerhouses in promoting the business agenda.

Their efforts clearly succeeded. With the 1975 SUN-PAC decision, corporations persuaded government to legalize corporate Political Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our government). By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all campaign contributions to political parties. 20 In two landmark elections — 1980 and 1994 — corporations gave heavily and one-sidedly to Republicans, turning one or both houses of Congress over to the GOP. Democratic incumbents were shocked by the threat of being rolled completely out of power, so they quietly shifted to the right on economic issues, even though they continued a public façade of liberalism. Corporations went ahead and donated to Democratic incumbents in all other elections, but only as long as they abandoned the interests of workers, consumers, minorities and the poor. As expected, the new pro-corporate Congress passed laws favoring the rich: between 1975 and 1992, the amount of national household wealth owned by the richest 1 percent soared from 22 to 42 percent. 21

The CIA also helped create the conservative think tank movement. Prior to the 70s, think tanks spanned the political spectrum, with moderate think tanks receiving three times as much funding as conservative ones. At these early think tanks, scholars typically brainstormed for creative solutions to policy problems. This would all change after the rise of conservative foundations in the early 70s. The Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973, the recipient of $250,000 in seed money from the Coors Foundation. A flood of conservative think tanks followed shortly thereafter, and by 1980 they overwhelmed the scene. The new think tanks turned out to be little more than propaganda mills, rigging studies to "prove" that their corporate sponsors needed tax breaks, deregulation and other favors from government.

Of course, think-tank studies are useless without publicity, and here the CIA proved especially valuable. Using propaganda techniques it had perfected at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA and its allies turned American AM radio into a haven for conservative talk show hosts. Yes — Rush Limbaugh uses the same propaganda techniques that Muscovites once heard from Voice of America. The CIA has also developed countless other media outlets, like Capital Cities (which eventually bought ABC), major PR firms like Hill & Knowlton, and of course, all the Agency’s connections in the national news media. 22

The following is a typical example of how the "New Media" operates. As most political observers know, the Republicans suffer from a "gender gap," in which women prefer Democrats by huge majorities. This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But, curiously enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits began popping up everywhere in the media. Hard-right pundits like Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham, Barbara Olson, Melinda Sidak, Anita Blair and Whitney Adams conditioned us to the idea of the conservative woman. This phenomenon was no accident. It turns out that Richard Mellon Scaife donated $450,000 over three years to the Independent Women's Forum, a booking agency that heavily seeds such female conservative pundits into the media. 23
Conclusion

The most obvious criticism of the New Overclass is that their political machine is undemocratic. Using subversive techniques once aimed at communists, and with all the money they ever need to succeed, the Overclass undemocratically controls our government, our media, and even a growing part of academia. These institutions in turn allow the Overclass to control the supposedly "free" market. It doesn't win all the time, of course — witness Bill Clinton's impeachment trial — but it does score an endless string of other victories elsewhere, all to the detriment of workers, consumers, women, minorities and the poor. We need to fight it with everything we've got.
Endnotes:

* 1 Mind Manipulators, Scheflin and Opton. p.241.
* 2 Captain George White in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.
* 3 All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum’s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997). Information about CIA drug running can be found at The Real Drug Lords and Cocaine Import Agency.
* 4 Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987.
* 5 Robert Dreyfuss, " Company Spies," Mother Jones.
* 6 Philip Agee: The Playboy Interview.
* 7 Lara Shohet, "Intelligence, Academia and Industry," The Final Report of the Snyder Commission, Edward Cheng and Diane C. Snyder, eds., (Princeton University: The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, January 1997). Website: here.
* 8 Conspiracy Nation - Vol. 9 Num. 35.
* 9 Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great and the Washington Post, 2nd ed. (Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987)
* 10 "Forum for Ben Bradlee," Watergate 25.
* 11 Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (London and New York, 1964), pp. 249-250.
* 12 National Catholic Reporter, Jan 89, Mar 89, Apr 89, May 89, "Nazis, the Vatican and the CIA," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986, Number 25.
* 13 Anthony Collings, "Journalists tell Senate they want no CIA ties," CNN, July 18, 1996.
* 14 Morton Halperin, et al, eds., The Lawless State (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 153.
* 15 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA.
* 16 Edward N. Wolff, " How the Pie is Sliced," The American Prospect no. 22 (Summer 1995), pp. 58-64.
* 17 Quoted in Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 44-47.
* 18 Karen Rothmyer, "The Man Behind the Mask," Salon, April 7, 1998.
* 19 Study conducted by National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, July 1997, as reported by the National Education Association.
* 20 Center for Responsive Politics, Washington D.C., 1993.
* 21 Wolff.
* 22 For CIA involvement in Capital Cities/ABC, see Dennis Mazzocco, Networks of Power (Boston: South End Press, 1994). For CIA involvement in the PR industry, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You! (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 49-51,153,157,160-63.
* 23 Jonathan Broder and Murray Waas, [Untitled] Salon, April 20, 1998.


The Road to Heart Mountain? Rumors, FEMA and the Future
© 1998 by Claire Wolfe

In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, sending more than 110,000 people to relocation camps. Most of the internees were U.S. citizens. They were transported from temperate climates to the wind-wracked deserts of California, Arizona and Wyoming. The property they left behind was legally looted by their neighbors. They were shut within barbed-wire enclosures and bare, tar-paper barracks - all for the crime of having Japanese ancestry.

To this day, there are Americans who defend this internal deportation, saying, "It was for their own good," or "They weren’t like us. They were loyal to their own kind." The camps, they say, were necessary.

The question is - Is it about to happen again? Does the U.S. government have plans to round up some other group of citizens and lock them into bitter internment "for the duration" of some future emergency?

The Internet is rife with rumors. The most persistent one says political dissidents will be targeted this time.

Skeptics dismiss the tales as so much conspiracy-mongering, and even some conspiracy buffs warn against pursuing the stories. One said to me, "That way lies madness. If you find out there are camps, no one will believe you. And if there are camps, and you come too close…"

Some rumors do seem preposterous. In the way of urban legends, people who’ve "seen the camps being built with their very own eyes" are usually nameless friends of friends. Other reports might have perfectly innocent explanations. An acquaintance shouted breathlessly down the phone that he’d seen, "Barbed wire! High walls! And guard towers!" being built at Ft. Lewis in Washington state.

Well, yes, I thought. You would see those things being built on a military base, wouldn’t you?

But the reports won’t go away. Even where they’re shaky on specifics, they express an intuitive truth about the federal government’s view of ordinary Americans.

There’s nothing new in that federal opinion.

Shortly after the original internment camps closed, J. Edgar Hoover conceived a plan called "Security Portfolio," which would have enabled the President to declare a national emergency, suspend the Constitution, and put thousands of people into prison with no trials and no habeas corpus rights.

It was the beginning of the Cold War against Americans.

Two years later, Congress approved the Security Act of 1950, which also contained an emergency detention plan. Reportedly, Hoover was furious at the plan’s "mildness," and continued with more Draconian schemes of his own. The Security Act remained in force for more than 20 years. G. Gordon Liddy reminisces openly about the days when his job in the FBI included keeping tabs on potential internees. Once every three months, Liddy checked the whereabouts of the political agitators on his list so the government could round them up reliably if need be.

During the unrest of the 1960s the federal government again made contingency plans for possible mass roundups of "militants."

Now, unrest stirs anew, and we see this - a leaked memo from C. Dean Rhody, Director of Resource Management for the Department of the Army, July 27, 1994:

“Enclosed for your review and comment is the draft Army regulation on civilian inmate labor utilization and establishment of prison camps on Army installations. The draft regulation is the compilation of all policy message [sic], Civilian Inmate Labor Oversight Committee policy decisions, and lessons learned to date. The new regulation will provide the following:

a. Policy for civilian inmate utilization on installations
b. Procedures for preparing requests to establish civilian inmate labor programs on installations
c. Procedures for preparing requests to establish civilian prison camps on installations.”

The draft plan once attached to the memo has never surfaced. But Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas admitted in an interview, "The truth is, yes, you do have these standby provisions… whereby you could, in the name of stopping terrorism… invoke the military and arrest Americans and put them in detention camps."
An agency of control

Whatever agency builds the camps, the rumor mill knows who will operate them: FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA, they say, will become dictator of America in a future "emergency." It will hold absolute power over the infrastructure, productive capacity, and citizenry of the country. Whether FEMA will ever do this is an open question. That it has been granted the (unconstitutional) authority to do so is fact.

FEMA was established entirely by presidential orders - an unconstitutional process itself. Congress offered no advice, consent - or objection. The agency became official when Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12148 in 1979, but the concept behind FEMA flowed from the minds of John F. Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon.

Kennedy signed a series of orders granting the federal government the power to seize a variety of private or local functions in event of emergency.

Nixon consolidated and enlarged these powers in 1969 with EO 11490.

Gerald Ford later signed EO 11921 which, in the words of Dr. Henry Kliemann, political scientist at Boston University, "… was understood by FEMA to mean that one day they would be in charge of the country. As these bureaucrats saw it, FEMA’s real mission was to wait, prepare, and then take over when some ‘situation’ seemed serious enough to turn the United States into a police state."

Once Carter made FEMA official, Ronald Reagan - far from the lovable bumbler he’s pictured in retrospect - gave the agency a distinctly paranoid, military slant by appointing as its head General Louis Guiffrida.

Among other qualifications, Guiffrida had written a paper advocating the declaration of martial law in response to black militancy. His plan could have sent millions of blacks to relocation camps. He also wrote:

“Martial rule comes into existence upon a determination (not a declaration) by the senior military commander that civil government must be replaced because it is no longer functioning, anyway.”

Defining "emergency"

Nevertheless, in the public and media mind, FEMA is simply a helpful - though sometimes slow-moving - service organization. It shows up after earthquakes and floods to rescue stranded puppies. It parcels out money so communities can rebuild.

Maybe. But FEMA isn’t, and never has been, an agency to aid average Americans.

FEMA’s chief - but largely secret - mission has always been "Continuity of Government." Its job is to make sure that federal control continues at all costs. This has led to construction of dozens of secret underground bunkers, capable of sustaining life for the select few allowed into them. It has led to FEMA budgets in which millions are allocated to disaster relief while billions go to unspecified "other purposes." And that’s not to mention the unknown sums in black-budget appropriations the agency receives via the Defense Department.

For many years, FEMA denied the existence of its primary bunker, Mount Weather in West Virginia. Even after admitting it was there, they would never disclose its purpose - even to their ostensible bosses in Congress. At 1975 hearings, retired Air Force General Leslie W. Bray, director of FEMA’s predecessor, the Federal Preparedness Agency, stonewalled a U.S. Senate subcommittee, insisting, "I am not at liberty to describe precisely what is the role and the mission and the capability that we have at Mount Weather, or at any other precise location."

However, it’s an open secret that an entire parallel - and unelected - government is headquartered at Mount Weather, ready to take over the country in an emergency.

Disturbing as this may be to some, most Americans would probably take comfort in the belief that government - any government - would continue in an emergency.

But what is an "emergency"? According to Carter’s order, it is "…any accidental, natural, man-caused, or wartime emergency or threat thereof, which causes or may cause substantial injury or harm to the population or substantial damage to or loss of property."

In other words, an emergency is anything the president or the director of FEMA declares it to be. Because to the professionally paranoid, anything - even civil disagreement - can be a threat.

It’s worth noting that, in the same 1975 hearings at which the Senate failed to learn the purpose of Mount Weather, Senators did learn that:

“….the facility held dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans. [Senator] John Tunney later alleged that the Mount Weather computers can obtain millions of pieces of additional information on the personal lives of American citizens simply by tapping the data stored at any of the other ninety-six Federal Relocation Centers.”

The subcommittee concluded that Mount Weather’s databases 'operate with few, if any, safeguards or guidelines.'”

And that was during the ancient history of computer power!

Bill Clinton has "modernized" FEMA and elevated it to a cabinet-level department. Under his crony-appointee James Lee Witt, FEMA has increasingly insinuated itself into the doings of local governments, pushing them to pass zoning ordinances and even conducting a SWAT-style raid on a county office when agency officials suspected misuse of flood control funds.

These are odd roles for a federal emergency management agency.
But what about those camps?

Clinton also signed Executive Order 12919, which authorizes any FEMA department head "…to employ persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation" in event of emergency.

And where might these FEMA-commanded slaves, and other political internees, work and live? According to Roland C. Eyears:

“[FEMA] operates widely dispersed, newly constructed detention facilities which might be mistaken for hospitals. How curious that such activity has become common at closed military bases. Many include rail spurs in a time when there are no legitimate commodities with the bulk and weight which would justify rail hauling.”

Unfortunately, Eyears offers no proof of his assertion. But the rumors don’t die. There is this, from the Internet:

“At a dinner following a gun show… [in 1994], a friend introduced me to a trucker… ...The trucker said that for several years, he’d been making deliveries to a military base in Montana. According to him, the base was one of those that was supposed to have just been closed. Yet, he said, he’d made several deliveries there in just the previous few months. The only difference, he said, was that prior to the "closing" he’d drive on to the base, be directed to a warehouse a few miles away, and would unload at a loading dock. Now, he said, he was being met at the gate and not allowed to drive onto the base.”

Yes, it’s another "friend of a friend" story. However, it’s no rumor that Congress has on several occasions proposed to convert closed military bases into prison camps. C. Dean Rhody’s memo lends credence to the idea that camps are under construction now.

Have FEMA and its partners in the Defense Department simply done it using some of those black-budget billions?

FEMA bureaucrats may be tempted by the prospect of unlimited power. The standing army, which the founders of the country so passionately warned us against, is casting about for something to do. By profession, both groups have a mindset that envisions danger everywhere.

Propaganda keeps Americans in fear of "terrorism." Anyone who speaks out against government abuse is branded an "extremist," a "hate-monger," even a potential terrorist. The demonization is eerily evocative of what the Jews and Japanese-Americans endured long ago. It could happen.

But the skeptic still asks, "Where’s the proof?"
The Road to Heart Mountain

In December 1997, another Internet memo landed on my desk. It listed two dozen allegedly "verified" sites where FEMA labor camps were being built — right now. One camp, the memo said, was at "Hart [sic] Mountain, northern Wyoming, renovated WWII Japanese-American special internment detention facility..."

We were going to be in that area on a business trip...

So there we were on that January day, my Significant Other and I, our truck bumping over wind-sculpted ice as we followed a local’s instructions to "look for the old smokestack on the bluff."

We leave Highway Alt. 14 and plow uphill on County Road 19. We rise onto the bluff where the camp was built. And the wind continues to howl across - nothing. A fallow beet field. A realm of snow.

To the right, far away, sit four crumbling buildings, all that remain of a city-sized prison. Other structures were sold and hauled away years ago.

To the left, a small forest of plaques lies under heaps of white. We get out and brush snow off the plaques. We find years of testimony to guilt and regret. We find honor for the young men who fought for the country that despised them. We find words of useless repentance etched in stone after stone.

Later, we plod through six inches of untracked snow, across the sagebrush plain, to the derelict buildings. According to a map on one of the plaques, these are part of an old administration complex. They’re rotting, but curiously untouched by vandals. Doors still swing easily and windows hold fragments of glass. The interior walls, though crumbling, are still institutional green. Next to a disused chimney, a hinged box holds a 50-year-old supply of kindling. And Charles looks up and finds, caught under a light fixture, a scrap of wallpaper as bright in this dry climate as it must have been in 1942. Green leaves and red roses.

But there’s nothing here to renovate. And the only new buildings are far away - prosperous farms pr profiting from land the internees made fertile.

There’s certainly no plank-and-barbed-wire concentration camp waiting to receive another group of demonized Americans. No U.N. troops standing guard. No FEMA bureaucrats waiting to implant biochips in incoming prisoners.

There’s nothing human at Heart Mountain. The ghosts themselves have blown away.

Yet, as we turn to begin the long, bleak drive back to Montana, I can’t help but remember that the federal government housed them all in barns - all those tens of thousands of Americans - as it waited for the camps to be hammered together. Troops rounded them up and took them to fairgrounds before the camps were ready. All it requires to turn a fairground into a prison is a few cots, while they wait for something more permanent. All it took to provide the wartime permanence of Heart Mountain was two months of construction.

And we, of course, have something America didn’t have in World War II — dozens of demilitarized military bases scattered all around the country — barracks, barbed wire, checkpoints and all. Waiting.

I feel silly having pursued a chimera down the Wyoming winds. But at the same time, I don’t feel safe. Or free. The camps may no longer stand on the cold deserts of Wyoming or the shimmering deserts of Arizona. But they’re there. In the executive orders. In the plans. In the memos. In the minds of those with a will to control.

It’s a will that has swelled through 50 additional years of unchecked power. A will that will burn children and shoot mothers and say the innocents were to blame for their own destruction. A will that engineers the survival of government while treating free people as resources or enemies.

Next time, I fear, wind and loss won’t be our worst punishments.
For more information on FEMA:

FEMA: The Secret Government, by Harry V. Martin

© 1998 Claire Wolfe. This article may be reprinted for non-commercial purposes, as long as it is reprinted in full with no content changes whatsoever, and is accompanied by this credit line. The article may not be re-titled, edited or excerpted (beyond the limits of the fair use doctrine) without the written permission of the author. For-profit publications will be expected to pay a nominal reprint fee.


The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, by John Marks ©, New York: Times Books, 1979

The following chapter has been reposted from the online version of the book at the Psychedelic Library. Not to be confused with the fictional account that was made into a motion picture, this is the real story; based primarily on 16,000 pages of CIA documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Chapter 8 - Brainwashing

In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party.” It was the first printed use in any language of the term “brainwashing,” which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—“to cleanse the mind”—which had no political meaning in Chinese.

American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter’s ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. Other defendants at Soviet “show trials” had displayed similar symptoms as they recited unbelievable confessions in dull, cliché-ridden monotones. Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter’s new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear. The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who “confessed” to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.

The official American position on prisoner confessions was that they were false and forced. As expressed in an Air Force Headquarters document, “Confessions can be of truthful details. . . . For purposes of this section, ‘confessions’ are considered as being the forced admission to a lie.” But if the military had understandable reasons to gloss over the truth or falsity of the confessions, this still did not address the fact that confessions had been made at all. Nor did it lay to rest the fears of those like Edward Hunter who saw the confessions as proof that the communists now had techniques “to put a man’s mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue, what is right for what is wrong, and come to believe what did not happen actually had happened, until he ultimately becomes a robot for the Communist manipulator.”

By the end of the Korean War, 70 percent of the 7,190 U.S. prisoners held in China had either made confessions or signed petitions calling for an end to the American war effort in Asia. Fifteen percent collaborated fully with the Chinese, and only 5 percent steadfastly resisted. The American performance contrasted poorly with that of the British, Australian, Turkish, and other United Nations prisoners—among whom collaboration was rare, even though studies showed they were treated about as badly as the Americans. Worse, an alarming number of the prisoners stuck by their confessions after returning to the United States. They did not, as expected, recant as soon as they stepped on U.S. soil. Puzzled and dismayed by this wholesale collapse of morale among the POWs, American opinion leaders settled in on Edward Hunter’s explanation: The Chinese had somehow brainwashed our boys.

But how? At the height of the brainwashing furor, conservative spokesmen often seized upon the very mystery of it all to give a religious cast to the political debate. All communists have been, by definition, brainwashed through satanic forces, they argued—thereby making the enemy seem like robots completely devoid of ordinary human feelings and motivation. Liberals favored a more scientific view of the problem. Given the incontrovertible evidence that the Russians and the Chinese could, in a very short time and often under difficult circumstances, alter the basic belief and behavior patterns of both domestic and foreign captives, liberals argued that there must be a technique involved that would yield its secrets under objective investigation.

CIA Director Allen Dulles favored the scientific approach, although he naturally encouraged his propaganda experts to exploit the more emotional interpretations of brainwashing. Dulles and the heads of the other American security agencies became almost frantic in their efforts to find out more about the Soviet and Chinese successes in mind control. Under pressure for answers, Dulles turned to Dr. Harold Wolff, a world-famous neurologist with whom he had developed an intensely personal relationship. Wolff was then treating Dulles’ own son for brain damage suffered from a Korean War head wound. Together they shared the trauma of the younger Dulles’ fits and mental lapses. Wolff, a skinny little doctor with an overpowering personality, became fast friends with the tall, patrician CIA Director. Dulles may have seen brainwashing as an induced form of brain damage or mental illness. In any case, in late 1953, he asked Wolff to conduct an official study of communist brainwashing techniques for the CIA. Wolff, who had become fascinated by the Director’s tales of the clandestine world, eagerly accepted.

Harold Wolff was known primarily as an expert on migraine headaches and pain, but he had served on enough military and intelligence advisory panels that he knew how to pick up Dulles’ mandate and expand on it. He formed a working partnership with Lawrence Hinkle, his colleague at Cornell University Medical College in New York City. Hinkle handled the administrative part of the study and shared in the substance. Before going ahead, the two doctors made sure they had the approval of Cornell’s president, Deane W. Malott and other high university officials who checked with their contacts in Washington to make sure the project did indeed have the great importance that Allen Dulles stated. Hinkle recalls a key White House aide urging Cornell to cooperate. The university administration agreed, and soon Wolff and Hinkle were poring over the Agency’s classified files on brainwashing. CIA officials also helped arrange interviews with former communist interrogators and prisoners alike. “It was done with great secrecy,” recalls Hinkle. “We went through a great deal of hoop-de-do and signed secrecy agreements, which everyone took very seriously.”

The team of Wolff and Hinkle became the chief brainwashing studiers for the U.S. government, although the Air Force and Army ran parallel programs.[23] Their secret report to Allen Dulles, later published in a declassified version, was considered the definitive U.S. Government work on the subject. In fact, if allowances are made for the Cold War rhetoric of the fifties, the Wolff-Hinkle report still remains one of the better accounts of the massive political re-education programs in China and the Soviet Union. It stated flatly that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese had any magical weapons—no drugs, exotic mental ray-guns, or other fanciful machines. Instead, the report pictured communist interrogation methods resting on skillful, if brutal, application of police methods. Its portrait of the Soviet system anticipates, in dry and scholarly form, the work of novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Hinkle and Wolff showed that the Soviet technique rested on the cumulative weight of intense psychological pressure and human weakness, and this thesis alone earned the two Cornell doctors the enmity of the more right-wing CIA officials such as Edward Hunter. Several of his former acquaintances remember that Hunter was fond of saying that the Soviets brainwashed people the way Pavlov had conditioned dogs.

In spite of some dissenters like Hunter, the Wolff-Hinkle model became, with later refinements, the best available description of extreme forms of political indoctrination. According to the general consensus, the Soviets started a new prisoner off by putting him in solitary confinement. A rotating corps of guards watched him constantly, humiliating and demeaning him at every opportunity and making it clear he was totally cut off from all outside support. The guards ordered him to stand for long periods, let him sit, told him exactly the position he could take to lie down, and woke him if he moved in the slightest while sleeping. They banned all outside stimuli—books, conversation, or news of the world.

After four to six weeks of this mind-deadening routine, the prisoner usually found the stress unbearable and broke down. “He weeps, he mutters, and prays aloud in his cell,” wrote Hinkle and Wolff. When the prisoner reached this stage, the interrogation began. Night after night, the guards brought him into a special room to face the interrogator. Far from confronting his captive with specific misdeeds, the interrogator told him that he knew his own crimes—all too well. In the most harrowing Kafkaesque way, the prisoner tried to prove his innocence to he knew not what. Together the interrogator and prisoner reviewed the prisoner’s life in detail. The interrogator seized on any inconsistency—no matter how minute—as further evidence of guilt, and he laughed at the prisoner’s efforts to justify himself. But at least the prisoner was getting a response of some sort. The long weeks of isolation and uncertainty had made him grateful for human contact even grateful that his case was moving toward resolution. True, it moved only as fast as he was willing to incriminate himself, but . . . Gradually, he came to see that he and his interrogator were working toward the same goal of wrapping up his case. In tandem, they ransacked his soul. The interrogator would periodically let up the pressure. He offered a cigarette, had a friendly chat, explained he had a job to do—making it all the more disappointing the next time he had to tell the prisoner that his confession was unsatisfactory.

As the charges against him began to take shape, the prisoner realized that he could end his ordeal only with a full confession. Otherwise the grueling sessions would go on forever. “The regimen of pressure has created an overall discomfort which is well nigh intolerable,” wrote Hinkle and Wolff. “The prisoner invariably feels that ‘something must be done to end this.’ He must find a way out.” A former KGB officer, one of many former interrogators and prisoners interviewed for the CIA study, said that more than 99 percent of all prisoners signed a confession at this stage.

In the Soviet system under Stalin, these confessions were the final step of the interrogation process, and the prisoners usually were shot or sent to a labor camp after sentencing. Today, Russian leaders seem much less insistent on exacting confessions before jailing their foes, but they still use the penal (and mental health) system to remove from the population classes of people hostile to their rule.

The Chinese took on the more ambitious task of re-educating their prisoners. For them, confession was only the beginning. Next, the Chinese authorities moved the prisoner into a group cell where his indoctrination began. From morning to night, he and his fellow prisoners studied Marx and Mao, listened to lectures, and engaged in self-criticism. Since the progress of each member depended on that of his cellmates, the group pounced on the slightest misconduct as an indication of backsliding. Prisoners demonstrated the zeal of their commitment by ferociously attacking deviations. Constant intimacy with people who reviled him pushed the resistant prisoner to the limits of his emotional endurance. Hinkle and Wolff found that “The prisoner must conform to the demands of the group sooner or later.” As the prisoner developed genuine changes of attitude, pressure on him relaxed. His cellmates rewarded him with increasing acceptance and esteem. Their acceptance, in turn, reinforced his commitment to the Party, for he learned that only this commitment allowed him to live successfully in the cell. In many cases, this process produced an exultant sense of mission in the prisoner—a feeling of having finally straightened out his life and come to the truth. To be sure, this experience, which was not so different from religious conversion, did not occur in all cases or always last after the prisoner returned to a social group that did not reinforce it.

From the first preliminary studies of Wolff and Hinkle, the U.S. intelligence community moved toward the conclusion that neither the Chinese nor the Russians made appreciable use of drugs or hypnosis, and they certainly did not possess the brainwashing equivalent of the atomic bomb (as many feared). Most of their techniques were rooted in age-old methods, and CIA brainwashing researchers like psychologist John Gittinger found themselves poring over ancient documents on the Spanish Inquisition. Furthermore, the communists used no psychiatrists or other behavioral scientists to devise their interrogation system. The differences between the Soviet and Chinese systems seemed to grow out of their respective national cultures. The Soviet brainwashing system resembled a heavy-handed cop whose job was to isolate, break, and then subdue all the troublemakers in the neighborhood. The Chinese system was more like thousands of skilled acupuncturists, working on each other and relying on group pressure, ideology, and repetition. To understand further the Soviet or Chinese control systems, one had to plunge into the subtle mysteries of national and individual character.

While CIA researchers looked into those questions, the main thrust of the Agency’s brainwashing studies veered off in a different direction. The logic behind the switch was familiar in the intelligence business. Just because the Soviets and the Chinese had not invented a brainwashing machine, officials reasoned, there was no reason to assume that the task was impossible. If such a machine were even remotely feasible, one had to assume the communists might discover it. And in that case, national security required that the United States invent the machine first. Therefore, the CIA built up its own elaborate brainwashing program, which, like the Soviet and Chinese versions, took its own special twist from our national character. It was a tiny replica of the Manhattan Project, grounded in the conviction that the keys to brainwashing lay in technology. Agency officials hoped to use old-fashioned American know-how to produce shortcuts and scientific breakthroughs. Instead of turning to tough cops, whose methods repelled American sensibilities, or the gurus of mass motivation, whose ideology Americans lacked, the Agency’s brainwashing experts gravitated to people more in the mold of the brilliant—and sometimes mad—scientist, obsessed by the wonders of the brain.

In 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles made a rare public statement on communist brainwashing: “We in the West are somewhat handicapped in getting all the details,” Dulles declared. “There are few survivors, and we have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques.” Even as Dulles spoke, however, CIA officials acting under his orders had begun to find the scientists and the guinea pigs. Some of their experiments would wander so far across the ethical borders of experimental psychiatry (which are hazy in their own right) that Agency officials thought it prudent to have much of the work done outside the United States.

Call her Lauren G. For 19 years, her mind has been blank about her experience. She remembers her husband’s driving her up to the old gray stone mansion that housed the hospital, Allan Memorial Institute, and putting her in the care of its director, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. The next thing she recalls happened three weeks later:

“They gave me a dressing gown. It was way too big, and I was tripping all over it. I was mad. I asked why did I have to go round in this sloppy thing. I could hardly move because I was pretty weak. I remember trying to walk along the hall, and the walls were all slanted. It was then that I said, “Holy Smokes, what a ghastly thing.” I remember running out the door and going up the mountain in my long dressing gown.”

The mountain, named Mont Royal, loomed high above Montreal. She stumbled and staggered as she tried to climb higher and higher. Hospital staff members had no trouble catching her and dragging her back to the Institute. In short order, they shot her full of sedatives, attached electrodes to her temples, and gave her a dose of electroshock. Soon she slept like a baby.

Gradually, over the next few weeks, Lauren G. began to function like a normal person again. She took basket-weaving therapy and played bridge with her fellow patients. The hospital released her, and she returned to her husband in another Canadian city.

Before her mental collapse in 1959, Lauren G. seemed to have everything going for her. A refined, glamorous horsewoman of 30, whom people often said looked like Elizabeth Taylor, she had auditioned for the lead in National Velvet at 13 and married the rich boy next door at 20. But she had never loved her husband and had let her domineering mother push her into his arms. He drank heavily. “I was really unhappy,” she recalls. “I had a horrible marriage, and finally I had a nervous breakdown. It was a combination of my trying to lose weight, sleep loss, and my nerves.”

The family doctor recommended that her husband send her to Dr. Cameron, which seemed like a logical thing to do, considering his wide fame as a psychiatrist. He had headed Allan Memorial since 1943, when the Rockefeller Foundation had donated funds to set up a psychiatric facility at McGill University. With continuing help from the Rockefellers, McGill had built a hospital known far beyond Canada’s borders as innovative and exciting. Cameron was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953, and he became the first president of the World Psychiatric Association. His friends joked that they had run out of honors to give him.

Cameron’s passion lay in the more “objective” forms of therapy, with which he could more easily and swiftly bring about improvements in patients than with the notoriously slow Freudian methods. An impatient man, he dreamed of finding a cure for schizophrenia. No one could tell him he was not on the right track. Cameron’s supporter at the Rockefeller Foundation, Robert Morrison, recorded in his private papers that he found the psychiatrist tense and ill-at-ease, and Morrison ventured that this may account for “his lack of interest and effectiveness in psychotherapy and failure to establish warm personal relations with faculty members, both of which were mentioned repeatedly when I visited Montreal.” Another Rockefeller observer noted that Cameron “appears to suffer from deep insecurity and has a need for power which he nourishes by maintaining an extraordinary aloofness from his associates.”

When Lauren G.’s husband delivered her to Cameron, the psychiatrist told him she would receive some electroshock, a standard treatment at the time. Besides that, states her husband, “Cameron was not very communicative, but I didn’t think she was getting anything out of the ordinary.” The husband had no way of knowing that Cameron would use an unproved experimental technique on his wife—much less that the psychiatrist intended to “depattern” her. Nor did he realize that the CIA was supporting this work with about $19,000 a year in secret funds.

Cameron defined “depatterning” as breaking up existing patterns of behavior, both the normal and the schizophrenic, by means of particularly intensive electroshocks, usually combined with prolonged, drug-induced sleep. Here was a psychiatrist willing—indeed, eager—to wipe the human mind totally clean. Back in 1951, ARTICHOKE’s Morse Allen had likened the process to “creation of a vegetable.” Cameron justified this tabula rasa approach because he had a theory of “differential amnesia,” for which he provided no statistical evidence when he published it. He postulated that after he produced “complete amnesia” in a subject, the person would eventually recover memory of his normal but not his schizophrenic behavior. Thus, Cameron claimed he could generate “differential amnesia.” Creating such a state in which a man who knew too much could be made to forget had long been a prime objective of the ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA programs.

Needless to say, Lauren G. does not recall a thing today about those weeks when Cameron depatterned her. Afterward, unlike over half of the psychiatrist’s depatterning patients, Lauren G. gradually recovered full recall of her life before the treatment, but then, she remembered her mental problems, too.[25] Her husband says she came out of the hospital much improved. She declares the treatment had no effect one way or another on her mental condition, which she believes resulted directly from her miserable marriage. She stopped seeing Cameron after about a month of outpatient electroshock treatments, which she despised. Her relationship with her husband further deteriorated, and two years later she walked out on him. “I just got up on my own hind legs,” she states. “I said the hell with it. I’m going to do what I want and take charge of my own life. I left and started over.” Now divorced and remarried, she feels she has been happy ever since.

Cameron’s depatterning, of which Lauren G. had a comparatively mild version, normally started with 15 to 30 days of “sleep therapy.” As the name implies, the patient slept almost the whole day and night. According to a doctor at the hospital who used to administer what he calls the “sleep cocktail,” a staff member woke up the patient three times a day for medication that consisted of a combination of 100 mg. Thorazine, 100 mg. Nembutal, 100 mg. Seconal, 150 mg. Veronal, and 10 mg. Phenergan. Another staff doctor would also awaken the patient two or sometimes three times daily for electroshock treatments.[26] This doctor and his assistant wheeled a portable machine into the “sleep room” and gave the subject a local anesthetic and muscle relaxant, so as not to cause damage with the convulsions that were to come. After attaching electrodes soaked in saline solution, the attendant held the patient down and the doctor turned on the current. In standard, professional electroshock, doctors gave the subject a single dose of 110 volts, lasting a fraction of a second, once a day or every other day. By contrast, Cameron used a form 20 to 40 times more intense, two or three times daily, with the power turned up to 150 volts. Named the “Page-Russell” method after its British originators, this technique featured an initial one-second shock, which caused a major convulsion, and then five to nine additional shocks in the middle of the primary and follow-on convulsions. Even Drs. Page and Russell limited their treatment to once a day, and they always stopped as soon as their patient showed “pronounced confusion” and became “faulty in habits.” Cameron, however, welcomed this kind of impairment as a sign the treatment was taking effect and plowed ahead through his routine.

The frequent screams of patients that echoed through the hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his associates in their attempts to “depattern” their subjects completely. Other hospital patients report being petrified by the “sleep rooms,” where the treatment took place, and they would usually creep down the opposite side of the hall.

Cameron described this combined sleep-electroshock treatment as lasting between 15 to 30 days, with some subjects staying in up to 65 days (in which case, he reported, he awakened them for three days in the middle). Sometimes, as in the case of Lauren G., patients would try to escape when the sedatives wore thin, and the staff would have to chase after them. “It was a tremendous nursing job just to keep these people going during the treatment,” recalls a doctor intimately familiar with Cameron’s operation. This doctor paints a picture of dazed patients, incapable of taking care of themselves, often groping their way around the hospital and urinating on the floor.

Cameron wrote that his typical depatterning patient—usually a woman—moved through three distinct stages. In the first, the subject lost much of her memory. Yet she still knew where she was, why she was there, and who the people were who treated her. In the second phase, she lost her “space-time image,” but still wanted to remember. In fact, not being able to answer questions like, “Where am I?” and “How did I get here?” caused her considerable anxiety. In the third stage, all that anxiety disappeared. Cameron described the state as “an extremely interesting constriction of the range of recollections which one ordinarily brings in to modify and enrich one’s statements. Hence, what the patient talks about are only his sensations of the moment, and he talks about them almost exclusively in highly concrete terms. His remarks are entirely uninfluenced by previous recollections—nor are they governed in any way by his forward anticipations. He lives in the immediate present. All schizophrenic symptoms have disappeared. There is complete amnesia for all events in his life.”

Lauren G. and 52 other subjects at Allan Memorial received this level of depatterning in 1958 and 1959. Cameron had already developed the technique when the CIA funding started. The Agency sent the psychiatrist research money to take the treatment beyond this point. Agency officials wanted to know if, once Cameron had produced the blank mind, he could then program in new patterns of behavior, as he claimed he could. As early as 1953—the year he headed the American Psychiatric Association—Cameron conceived a technique he called “psychic driving,” by which he would bombard the subject with repeated verbal messages. From tape recordings based on interviews with the patient, he selected emotionally loaded “cue statements”—first negative ones to get rid of unwanted behavior and then positive to condition in desired personality traits. On the negative side, for example, the patient would hear this message as she lay in a stupor:

“Madeleine, you let your mother and father treat you as a child all through your single life. You let your mother check you up sexually after every date you had with a boy. You hadn’t enough determination to tell her to stop it. You never stood up for yourself against your mother or father but would run away from trouble. . . . They used to call you “crying Madeleine.” Now that you have two children, you don’t seem to be able to manage them and keep a good relationship with your husband. You are drifting apart. You don’t go out together. You have not been able to keep him interested sexually.”

Leonard Rubenstein, Cameron’s principal assistant, whose entire salary was paid from CIA-front funds, put the message on a continuous tape loop and played it for 16 hours every day for several weeks. An electronics technician, with no medical or psychological background, Rubenstein, an electrical whiz, designed a giant tape recorder that could play 8 loops for 8 patients at the same time. Cameron had the speakers installed literally under the pillows in the “sleep rooms.” “We made sure they heard it,” says a doctor who worked with Cameron. With some patients, Cameron intensified the negative effect by running wires to their legs and shocking them at the end of the message.

When Cameron thought the negative “psychic driving” had gone far enough, he switched the patient over to 2 to 5 weeks of positive tapes:

“ You mean to get well. To do this you must let your feelings come out. It is all right to express your anger. . . . You want to stop your mother bossing you around. Begin to assert yourself first in little things and soon you will be able to meet her on an equal basis. You will then be free to be a wife and mother just like other women.”

Cameron wrote that psychic driving provided a way to make “direct, controlled changes in personality,” without having to resolve the subject’s conflicts or make her relive past experiences. As far as is known, no present-day psychologist or psychiatrist accepts this view. Dr. Donald Hebb, who headed McGill’s psychology department at the time Cameron was in charge of psychiatry, minces no words when asked specifically about psychic driving: “That was an awful set of ideas Cameron was working with. It called for no intellectual respect. If you actually look at what he was doing and what he wrote, it would make you laugh. If I had a graduate student who talked like that, I’d throw him out.” Warming to his subject, Hebb continues: “Look, Cameron was no good as a researcher. . . . He was eminent because of politics.” Nobody said such things at the time, however. Cameron was a very powerful man.

The Scottish-born psychiatrist, who never lost the burr in his voice, kept searching for ways to perfect depatterning and psychic driving. He held out to the CIA front—the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology—that he could find more rapid and less damaging ways to break down behavior. He sent the Society a proposal that combined his two techniques with sensory deprivation and strong drugs. His smorgasbord approach brought together virtually all possible techniques of mind control, which he tested individually and together. When his Agency grant came through in 1957, Cameron began work on sensory deprivation.

For several years, Agency officials had been interested in the interrogation possibilities of this technique that Hebb himself had pioneered at McGill with Canadian defense and Rockefeller money. It consisted of putting a subject in a sealed environment—a small room or even a large box—and depriving him of all sensory input: eyes covered with goggles, ears either covered with muffs or exposed to a constant, monotonous sound, padding to prevent touching, no smells—with this empty regime interrupted only by meal and bathroom breaks. In 1955 Morse Allen of ARTICHOKE made contact at the National Institutes of Health with Dr. Maitland Baldwin who had done a rather gruesome experiment in which an Army volunteer had stayed in the “box” for 40 hours until he kicked his way out after, in Baldwin’s words, “an hour of crying loudly and sobbing in a most heartrending fashion.” The experiment convinced Baldwin that the isolation technique could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed. Hebb, who unlike Baldwin released his subjects when they wanted, had never left anyone in “the box” for more than six days. Baldwin told Morse Allen that beyond that sensory deprivation would almost certainly cause irreparable damage. Nevertheless, Baldwin agreed that if the Agency could provide the cover and the subjects, he would do, according to Allen’s report, “terminal type” experiments. After numerous meetings inside the CIA on how and where to fund Baldwin, an Agency medical officer finally shot down the project as being “immoral and inhuman,” suggesting that those pushing the experiments might want to “volunteer their heads for use in Dr. Baldwin’s ‘noble’ project.”

With Cameron, Agency officials not only had a doctor willing to perform terminal experiments in sensory deprivation, but one with his own source of subjects. As part of his CIA-funded research, he had a “box” built in the converted stables behind the hospital that housed Leonard Rubenstein and his behavioral laboratory. Undaunted by the limits set in Hebb’s work, Cameron left one woman in for 35 days, although he had so scrambled her mind with his other techniques that one cannot say, as Baldwin predicted to the Agency, if the prolonged deprivation did specific damage. This subject’s name was Mary C., and, try as he might, Cameron could not get through to her. As the aloof psychiatrist wrote in his notes: “Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favorable results were obtained.”[27] Before prescribing this treatment, Cameron had diagnosed the 52-year-old Mary C.: “Conversion reaction in a woman of the involutional age with mental anxiety; hypochondriatic.” In other words, Mary C. was going through menopause.

In his proposal to the CIA front, Cameron also said he would test curare, the South American arrow poison which, when liberally applied, kills by paralyzing internal body functions. In nonlethal doses, curare causes a limited paralysis which blocks but does not stop these functions. According to his papers, some of which wound up in the archives of the American Psychiatric Association, Cameron injected subjects with curare in conjunction with sensory deprivation, presumably to immobilize them further.

Cameron also tested LSD in combination with psychic driving and other techniques. In late 1956 and early 1957, one of his subjects was Val Orlikow, whose husband David has become a member of the Canadian parliament. Suffering from what she calls a “character neurosis that started with postpartum depression,” she entered Allan Memorial as one of Cameron’s personal patients. He soon put her under his version of LSD therapy. One to four times a week, he or another doctor would come into her room and give her a shot of LSD, mixed with either a stimulant or a depressant and then leave her alone with a tape recorder that played excerpts from her last session with him. As far as is known, no other LSD researcher ever subjected his patients to unsupervised trips—certainly not over the course of two months when her hospital records show she was given LSD 14 times. “It was terrifying,” Mrs. Orlikow recalls. “You’re afraid you’ve gone off somewhere and can’t come back.” She was supposed to write down on a pad whatever came into her head while listening to the tapes, but often she became so frightened that she could not write at all. “You become very small,” she says, as her voice quickens and starts to reflect some of her horror. “You’re going to fall off the step, and God, you’re going down into hell because it’s so far, and you are so little. Like Alice, where is the pill that makes you big, and you’re a squirrel, and you can’t get out of the cage, and somebody’s going to kill you.” Then, suddenly, Mrs. Orlikow pulls out of it and lucidly states, “Some very weird things happened.”

Mrs. Orlikow hated the LSD treatment. Several times she told Cameron she would take no more, and the psychiatrist would put his arm around her and ask, “Lassie,” which he called all his women patients, “don’t you want to get well, so you can go home and see your husband?” She remembers feeling guilty about not following the doctor’s orders, and the thought of disappointing Cameron, whom she idolized, crushed her. Finally, after Cameron talked her out of quitting the treatment several times, she had to end it. She left the hospital but stayed under his private care. In 1963 he put her back in the hospital for more intensive psychic driving. “I thought he was God,” she states. “I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. . . . A lot of us were naive. We thought psychiatrists had the answers. Here was the greatest in the world, with all these titles.”

In defense of Cameron, a former associate says the man truly cared about the welfare of his patients. He wanted to make them well. As his former staff psychologist wrote:

“He abhorred the waste of human potential, seen most dramatically in the young people whose minds were distorted by what was then considered to be schizophrenia. He felt equally strongly about the loss of wisdom in the aged through memory malfunction. For him, the end justified the means, and when one is dealing with the waste of human potential, it is easy to adopt this stance.”

Cameron retired abruptly in 1964, for unexplained reasons. His successor, Dr. Robert Cleghorn, made a virtually unprecedented move in the academic world of mutual back-scratching and praise. He commissioned a psychiatrist and a psychologist, unconnected to Cameron, to study his electroshock work. They found that 60 percent of Cameron’s depatterned patients complained they still had amnesia for the period 6 months to 10 years before the therapy.[28] They could find no clinical proof that showed the treatment to be any more or less effective than other approaches. They concluded that “the incidence of physical complications and the anxiety generated in the patient because of real or imagined memory difficulty argue against” future use of the technique.

The study-team members couched their report in densely academic jargon, but one of them speaks more clearly now. He talks bitterly of one of Cameron’s former patients who needs to keep a list of her simplest household chores to remember how to do them. Then he repeats several times how powerful a man Cameron was, how he was “the godfather of Canadian psychiatry.” He continues, “I probably shouldn’t talk about this, but Cameron—for him to do what he did—he was a very schizophrenic guy, who totally detached himself from the human implications of his work . . . God, we talk about concentration camps. I don’t want to make this comparison, but God, you talk about ‘we didn’t know it was happening,’ and it was—right in our back yard.”

Cameron died in 1967, at age 66, while climbing a mountain. The American Journal of Psychiatry published a long and glowing obituary with a full-page picture of his not-unpleasant face.

D. Ewen Cameron did not need the CIA to corrupt him. He clearly had his mind set on doing unorthodox research long before the Agency front started to fund him. With his own hospital and source of subjects, he could have found elsewhere encouragement and money to replace the CIA’s contribution which never exceeded $20,000 a year. However, Agency officials knew exactly what they were paying for. They traveled periodically to Montreal to observe his work, and his proposal was chillingly explicit. In Cameron, they had a doctor, conveniently outside the United States, willing to do terminal experiments in electroshock, sensory deprivation, drug testing, and all of the above combined. By literally wiping the minds of his subjects clean by depatterning and then trying to program in new behavior, Cameron carried the process known as “brainwashing” to its logical extreme.

It cannot be said how many—if any—other Agency brainwashing projects reached the extremes of Cameron’s work. Details are scarce, since many of the principal witnesses have died, will not talk about what went on, or lie about it. In what ways the CIA applied work like Cameron’s is not known. What is known, however, is that the intelligence community, including the CIA, changed the face of the scientific community during the 1950s and early 1960s by its interest in such experiments. Nearly every scientist on the frontiers of brain research found men from the secret agencies looking over his shoulders, impinging on the research. The experience of Dr. John Lilly illustrates how this intrusion came about.

In 1953 Lilly worked at the National Institutes of Health, outside Washington, doing experimental studies in an effort to “map” the body functions controlled from various locations in the brain. He devised a method of pounding up to 600 tiny sections of hypodermic tubing into the skulls of monkeys, through which he could insert electrodes “into the brain to any desired distance and at any desired location from the cortex down to the bottom of the skull,” he later wrote. Using electric stimulation, Lilly discovered precise centers of the monkeys’ brains that caused pain, fear, anxiety, and anger. He also discovered precise, separate parts of the brain that controlled erection, ejaculation, and orgasm in male monkeys. Lilly found that a monkey, given access to a switch operating a correctly planted electrode, would reward himself with nearly continuous orgasms—at least once every 3 minutes—for up to 16 hours a day.

As Lilly refined his brain “maps,” officials of the CIA and other agencies descended upon him with a request for a briefing. Having a phobia against secrecy, Lilly agreed to the briefing only under the condition that it and his work remain unclassified, completely open to outsiders. The intelligence officials submitted to the conditions most reluctantly, since they knew that Lilly’s openness would not only ruin the spy value of anything they learned but could also reveal the identities and the interests of the intelligence officials to enemy agents. They considered Lilly annoying, uncooperative—possibly even suspicious.

Soon Lilly began to have trouble going to meetings and conferences with his colleagues. As part of the cooperation with the intelligence agencies, most of them had agreed to have their projects officially classified as SECRET, which meant that access to the information required a security clearance.[29] Lilly’s security clearance was withdrawn for review, then tangled up and misplaced—all of which he took as pressure to cooperate with the CIA. Lilly, whose imagination needed no stimulation to conjure up pictures of CIA agents on deadly missions with remote-controlled electrodes strategically implanted in their brains, decided to withdraw from that field of research. He says he had decided that the physical intrusion of the electrodes did too much brain damage for him to tolerate.

In 1954 Lilly began trying to isolate the operations of the brain, free of outside stimulation, through sensory deprivation. He worked in an office next to Dr. Maitland Baldwin, who the following year agreed to perform terminal sensory deprivation experiments for ARTICHOKE’s Morse Allen but who never told Lilly he was working in the field. While Baldwin experimented with his sensory-deprivation “box,” Lilly invented a special “tank.” Subjects floated in a tank of body-temperature water wearing a face mask that provided air but cut off sight and sound. Inevitably, intelligence officials swooped down on Lilly again, interested in the use of his tank as an interrogation tool. Could involuntary subjects be placed in the tank and broken down to the point where their belief systems or personalities could be altered?

It was central to Lilly’s ethic that he himself be the first subject of any experiment, and, in the case of the consciousness-exploring tank work, he and one colleague were the only ones. Lilly realized that the intelligence agencies were not interested in sensory deprivation because of its positive benefits, and he finally concluded that it was impossible for him to work at the National Institutes of Health without compromising his principles. He quit in 1958.

Contrary to most people’s intuitive expectations, Lilly found sensory deprivation to be a profoundly integrating experience for himself personally. He considered himself to be a scientist who subjectively explored the far wanderings of the brain. In a series of private experiments, he pushed himself into the complete unknown by injecting pure Sandoz LSD into his thigh before climbing into the sensory-deprivation tank.[30] When the counterculture sprang up, Lilly became something of a cult figure, with his unique approach to scientific inquiry—though he was considered more of an outcast by many in the professional research community.

For most of the outside world, Lilly became famous with the release of the popular film, The Day of the Dolphin, which the filmmakers acknowledged was based on Lilly’s work with dolphins after he left NIH. Actor George C. Scott portrayed a scientist, who, like Lilly, loved dolphins, did pioneering experiments on their intelligence, and tried to find ways to communicate with them. In the movie, Scott became dismayed when the government pounced on his breakthrough in talking to dolphins and turned it immediately to the service of war. In real life, Lilly was similarly dismayed when Navy and CIA scientists trained dolphins for special warfare in the waters off Vietnam.

A few scientists like Lilly made up their minds not to cross certain ethical lines in their experimental work, while others were prepared to go further even than their sponsors from ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. Within the Agency itself, there was only one final question: Will a technique work? CIA officials zealously tracked every lead, sparing no expense to check each angle many times over.

By the time the MKULTRA program ended in 1963, Agency researchers had found no foolproof way to brainwash another person.[32] “All experiments beyond a certain point always failed,” says the MKULTRA veteran, “because the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got amnesiac or catatonic.” Agency officials found through work like Cameron’s that they could create “vegetables,” but such people served no operational use. People could be tortured into saying anything, but no science could guarantee that they would tell the truth.

The impotency of brainwashing techniques left the Agency in a difficult spot when Yuri Nosenko defected to the United States in February 1964. A ranking official of the Soviet KGB, Nosenko brought with him stunning information. He said the Russians had bugged the American embassy in Moscow, which turned out to be true. He named some Russian agents in the West. And he said that he had personally inspected the KGB file of Lee Harvey Oswald, who only a few months earlier had been murdered before he could be brought to trial for the assassination of President Kennedy. Nosenko said he learned that the KGB had had no interest in Oswald.

Was Nosenko telling the truth, or was he a KGB “plant” sent to throw the United States off track about Oswald? Was his information about penetration correct, or was Nosenko himself the penetration? Was he acting in good faith? Were the men within the CIA who believed he was acting in good faith themselves acting in good faith? These and a thousand other questions made up the classical trick deck for spies—each card having “true” on one side and “false” on the other.

Top CIA officials felt a desperate need to resolve the issue of Nosenko’s legitimacy. With numerous Agency counterintelligence operations hanging in the balance, Richard Helms, first as Deputy Director and then as Director, allowed CIA operators to work Nosenko over with the interrogation method in which Helms apparently had the most faith. It turned out to be not any truth serum or electroshock depatterning program or anything else from the Agency’s brainwashing search. Helms had Nosenko put through the tried-and-true Soviet method: isolate the prisoner, deaden his senses, break him. For more than three years—1,277 days, to be exact—Agency officers kept Nosenko in solitary confinement. As if they were using the Hinkle-Wolff study as their instruction manual and the Cardinal Mindszenty case as their success story, the CIA men had guards watch over Nosenko day and night, giving him not a moment of privacy. A light bulb burned continuously in his cell. He was allowed nothing to read—not even the labels on toothpaste boxes. When he tried to distract himself by making a chess set from pieces of lint in his cell, the guards discovered his game and swept the area clean. Nosenko had no window, and he was eventually put in a specially built 12’ X 12’ steel bank vault.

Nosenko broke down. He hallucinated. He talked his head off to his interrogators, who questioned him for 292 days, often while they had him strapped into a lie detector. If he told the truth, they did not believe him. While the Soviets and Chinese had shown that they could make a man admit anything, the CIA interrogators apparently lacked a clear idea of exactly what they wanted Nosenko to confess. When it was all over and Richard Helms ordered Nosenko freed after three and a half years of illegal detention, some key Agency officers still believed he was a KGB plant. Others thought he was on the level. Thus the big questions remained unresolved, and to this day, CIA men—past and present—are bitterly split over who Nosenko really is.

With the Nosenko case, the CIA’s brainwashing programs had come full circle. Spurred by the widespread alarm over communist tactics, Agency officials had investigated the field, started their own projects, and looked to the latest technology to make improvements. After 10 years of research, with some rather gruesome results, CIA officials had come up with no techniques on which they felt they could rely. Thus, when the operational crunch came, they fell back on the basic brutality of the Soviet system.


The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, by John Marks ©, New York: Times Books, 1979

The following chapter has been reposted from the online version of the book at the Psychedelic Library. Not to be confused with the fictional account that was made into a motion picture, this is the real story; based primarily on 16,000 pages of CIA documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Chapter 1 - World War II

On the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland, overlooking the Rhine, lies the worldwide headquarters of the Sandoz drug and chemical empire. There, on the afternoon of April 16, 1943, Dr. Albert Hofmann made an extraordinary discovery—by accident.

At 37, with close-cropped hair and rimless glasses, Hofmann headed the company’s research program to develop marketable drugs out of natural products. He was hard at work in his laboratory that warm April day when a wave of dizziness suddenly overcame him. The strange sensation was not unpleasant, and Hofmann felt almost as though he were drunk.

But he became quite restless. His nerves seemed to run off in different directions. The inebriation was unlike anything he had ever known before. Leaving work early, Hofmann managed a wobbly bicycle-ride home. He lay down and closed his eyes, still unable to shake the dizziness. Now the light of day was disagreeably bright. With the external world shut out, his mind raced along. He experienced what he would later describe as “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness. . . . accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors.”

These visions subsided after a few hours, and Hofmann, ever the inquiring scientist, set out to find what caused them. He presumed he had somehow ingested one of the drugs with which he had been working that day, and his prime suspect was d-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, a substance that he himself had first produced in the same lab five years earlier. As part of his search for a circulation stimulant, Hofmann had been examining derivatives of ergot, a fungus that attacks rye.

Ergot had a mysterious, contradictory reputation. In China and some Arab countries, it was thought to have medicinal powers, but in Europe it was associated with the horrible malady from the Middle Ages called St. Anthony’s Fire, which struck periodically like the plague. The disease turned fingers and toes into blackened stumps and led to madness and death.

Hofmann guessed that he had absorbed some ergot derivative through his skin, perhaps while changing the filter paper in a suction bottle. To test his theory, he spent three days making up a fresh batch of LSD. Cautiously he swallowed 250 micrograms (less than 1/100,000 of an ounce). Hofmann planned to take more gradually through the day to obtain a result, since no known drug had any effect on the human body in such infinitesimal amounts. He had no way of knowing that because of LSD’s potency, he had already taken several times what would later be termed an ordinary dose. Unexpectedly, this first speck of LSD took hold after about 40 minutes, and Hofmann was off on the first self-induced “trip” of modern times.

Hofmann recalls he felt “horrific . . . I was afraid. I feared I was becoming crazy. I had the idea I was out of my body. I thought I had died. I did not know how it would finish. If you know you will come back from this very strange world, only then can you enjoy it.” Of course, Hofmann had no way of knowing that he would return. While he had quickly recovered from his accidental trip three days earlier, he did not know how much LSD had caused it or whether the present dose was more than his body could detoxify. His mind kept veering off into an unknown dimension, but he was unable to appreciate much beyond his own terror.

Less than 200 miles from Hofmann’s laboratory, doctors connected to the S.S. and Gestapo were doing experiments that led to the testing of mescaline (a drug which has many of the mind-changing qualities of LSD) on prisoners at Dachau. Germany’s secret policemen had the notion, completely alien to Hofmann, that they could use drugs like mescaline to bring unwilling people under their control. According to research team member Walter Neff, the goal of the Dachau experiments was “to eliminate the will of the person examined.”

At Dachau, Nazis took the search for scientific knowledge of military value to its most awful extreme. There, in a closely guarded, fenced-off part of the camp, S.S. doctors studied such questions as the amount of time a downed airman could survive in the North Atlantic in February. Information of this sort was considered important to German security, since skilled pilots were in relatively short supply. So, at Heinrich Himmler’s personal order, the doctors at Dachau simply sat by huge tubs of ice water with stopwatches and timed how long it took immersed prisoners to die. In other experiments, under the cover of “aviation medicine,” inmates were crushed to death in high-altitude pressure chambers (to learn how high pilots could safely fly), and prisoners were shot, so that special blood coagulants could be tested on their wounds.

The mescaline tests at Dachau run by Dr. Kurt Plötner were not nearly so lethal as the others in the “aviation” series, but the drug could still cause grave damage, particularly to anyone who already had some degree of mental instability. The danger was increased by the fact that the mescaline was administered covertly by S.S. men who spiked the prisoners’ drinks. Unlike Dr. Hofmann, the subjects had no idea that a drug was causing their extreme disorientation. Many must have feared they had gone stark mad all on their own. Always, the subjects of these experiments were Jews, gypsies, Russians, and other groups on whose lives the Nazis placed little or no value. In no way were any of them true volunteers, although some may have come forward under the delusion that they would receive better treatment.

After the war, Neff told American investigators that the subjects showed a wide variety of reactions. Some became furious; others were melancholy or gay, as if they were drunk. Not surprisingly, “sentiments of hatred and revenge were exposed in every case.” Neff’ noted that the drug caused certain people to reveal their “most intimate secrets.” Still, the Germans were not ready to accept mescaline as a substitute for their more physical methods of interrogation. They went on to try hypnosis in combination with the drug, but they apparently never felt confident that they had found a way to assume command of their victim’s mind.

Even as the S.S. doctors were carrying on their experiments at Dachau, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s wartime intelligence agency, set up a “truth drug” committee under Dr. Winfred Overholser, head of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington. The committee quickly tried and rejected mescaline, several barbiturates, and scopolamine. Then, during the spring of 1943, the committee decided that cannabis indica—or marijuana—showed the most promise, and it started a testing program in cooperation with the Manhattan Project, the TOP SECRET effort to build an atomic bomb. It is not clear why OSS turned to the bomb makers for help, except that, as one former Project official puts it, “Our secret was so great, I guess we were safer than anyone else.” Apparently, top Project leaders, who went to incredible lengths to preserve security, saw no danger in trying out drugs on their personnel.

The Manhattan Project supplied the first dozen test subjects, who were asked to swallow a concentrated, liquid form of marijuana that an American pharmaceutical company furnished in small glass vials. A Project man who was present recalls: “It didn’t work the way we wanted. Apparently the human system would not take it all at once orally. The subjects would lean over and vomit.” What is more, they disclosed no secrets, and one subject wound up in the hospital.

Back to the drawing board went the OSS experts. They decided that the best way to administer the marijuana was inhalation of its fumes. Attempts were made to pour the solution on burning charcoal, and an OSS officer named George White (who had already succeeded in knocking himself out with an overdose of the relatively potent substance) tried out the vapor, without sufficient effect, at St. Elizabeth’s. Finally, the OSS group discovered a delivery system which had been known for years to jazz musicians and other users: the cigarette. OSS documents reported that smoking a mix of tobacco and the marijuana essence brought on a “state of irresponsibility, causing the subject to be loquacious and free in his impartation of information.”

The first field test of these marijuana-laced cigarettes took place on May 27, 1943. The subject was one August Del Gracio, who was described in OSS documents as a “notorious New York gangster.” George White, an Army captain who had come to OSS from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, administered the drug by inviting Del Gracio up to his apartment for a smoke and a chat. White had been talking to Del Gracio earlier about securing the Mafia’s cooperation to keep Axis agents out of the New York waterfront and to prepare the way for the invasion of Sicily.

Del Gracio had already made it clear to White that he personally had taken part in killing informers who had squealed to the Feds. The gangster was as tough as they came, and if he could be induced to talk under the influence of a truth drug, certainly German prisoners could—or so the reasoning went. White plied him with cigarettes until “subject became high and extremely garrulous.” Over the next two hours, Del Gracio told the Federal agent about the ins and outs of the drug trade (revealing information so sensitive that the CIA deleted it from the OSS documents it released 34 years later). At one point in the conversation, after Del Gracio had begun to talk, the gangster told White, “Whatever you do, don’t ever use any of the stuff I’m telling you.” In a subsequent session, White packed the cigarettes with so much marijuana that Del Gracio became unconscious for about an hour. Yet, on the whole the experiment was considered a success in “loosening the subject’s tongue.”

While members of the truth-drug committee never believed that the concentrated marijuana could compel a person to confess his deepest secrets, they authorized White to push ahead with the testing. On the next stage, he and a Manhattan Project counterintelligence man borrowed 15 to 18 thick dossiers from the FBI and went off to try the marijuana on suspected Communist soldiers stationed in military camps outside Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans. According to White’s Manhattan Project sidekick, a Harvard Law graduate and future judge, they worked out a standard interrogation technique:

Before we went in, George and I would buy cigarettes, remove them from the bottom of the pack, use a hypodermic needle to put in the fluid, and leave the cigarettes in a shot glass to dry. Then, we resealed the pack. . . . We sat down with a particular soldier and tried to win his confidence. We would say something like “This is better than being overseas and getting shot at,” and we would try to break them. We started asking questions from their [FBI] folder, and we would let them see that we had the folder on them . . . We had a pitcher of ice water on the table, and we knew the drug had taken effect when they reached for a glass. The stuff actually worked. . . . Everyone but one—and he didn’t smoke—gave us more information than we had before.

The Manhattan Project lawyer remembers this swing through the South with George White as a “good time.” The two men ate in the best restaurants and took in all the sights. “George was quite a guy,” he says. “At the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans after we had interviewed our men, we were lying on the beds when George took out his pistol and shot his initials into the molding that ran along the ceiling. He used his .22 automatic, equipped with a silencer, and he emptied several clips.” Asked if he tried out the truth drug himself, the lawyer says, “Yes. The cigarettes gave you a feeling of walking a couple of feet off the floor. I had a pleasant sensation of well-being. . . . The fellows from my office wouldn’t take a cigarette from me for the rest of the war.”

Since World War II, the United States government, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, has searched secretly for ways to control human behavior. This book is about that search, which had its origins in World War II. The CIA programs were not only an extension of the OSS quest for a truth drug, but they also echoed such events as the Nazi experiments at Dachau and Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD.

By probing the inner reaches of consciousness, Hofmann’s research took him to the very frontiers of knowledge. As never before in history, the warring powers sought ideas from scientists capable of reaching those frontiers—ideas that could make the difference between victory and defeat. While Hofmann himself remained aloof, in the Swiss tradition, other scientists, like Albert Einstein, helped turned the abstractions of the laboratory into incredibly destructive weapons. Jules Verne’s notions of spaceships touching the moon stopped being absurd when Wernher von Braun’s rockets started pounding London. With their creations, the scientists reached beyond the speculations of science fiction. Never before had their discoveries been so breathtaking and so frightening. Albert Hofmann’s work touched upon the fantasies of the mind—accessible, in ancient legends, to witches and wizards who used spells and potions to bring people under their sway. In the early scientific age, the dream of controlling the brain took on a modern form in Mary Shelley’s creation, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. The dream would be updated again during the Cold War era to become the Manchurian Candidate, the assassin whose mind was controlled by a hostile government.[4] Who could say for certain that such a fantasy would not be turned into a reality like Verne’s rocket stories or Einstein’s calculations? And who should be surprised to learn that government agencies—specifically the CIA—would swoop down on Albert Hofmann’s lab in an effort to harness the power over the mind that LSD seemed to hold?

From the Dachau experiments came the cruelty that man was capable of heaping upon his fellows in the name of advancing science and helping his country gain advantage in war. To say that the Dachau experiments are object lessons of how far people can stretch ends to justify means is to belittle by cliché what occurred in the concentration camps. Nothing the CIA ever did in its postwar search for mind-control technology came close to the callous killing of the Nazi “aviation research.” Nevertheless, in their attempts to find ways to manipulate people, Agency officials and their agents crossed many of the same ethical barriers. They experimented with dangerous and unknown techniques on people who had no idea what was happening. They systematically violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects, and, like the Germans, they chose to victimize special groups of people whose existence they considered, out of prejudice and convenience, less worthy than their own. Wherever their extreme experiments went, the CIA sponsors picked for subjects their own equivalents of the Nazis’ Jews and gypsies: mental patients, prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts, and prisoners, often from minority ethnic groups.

In the postwar era, American officials straddled the ethical and the cutthroat approaches to scientific research. After an Allied tribunal had convicted the first echelon of surviving Nazi war criminals—the Görings and Speers—American prosecutors charged the Dachau doctors with “crimes against humanity” at a second Nuremberg trial. None of the German scientists expressed remorse. Most claimed that someone else had carried out the vilest experiments. All said that issues of moral and personal responsibility are moot in state-sponsored research. What is critical, testified Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, is “whether the experiment is important or unimportant.” Asked his attitude toward killing human beings in the course of medical research, Brandt replied, “Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives?” The judges at Nuremberg rejected such defenses and put forth what came to be known as the Nuremberg Code on scientific research.[5] Its main points were simple: Researchers must obtain full voluntary consent from all subjects; experiments should yield fruitful results for the good of society that can be obtained in no other way; researchers should not conduct tests where death or serious injury might occur, “except, perhaps” when the supervising doctors also serve as subjects. The judges—all Americans—sentenced seven of the Germans, including Dr. Brandt, to death by hanging. Nine others received long prison sentences. Thus, the U.S. government put its full moral force behind the idea that there were limits on what scientists could do to human subjects, even when a country’s security was thought to hang in the balance.

The Nuremberg Code has remained official American policy ever since 1946, but, even before the verdicts were in, special U.S. investigating teams were sifting through the experimental records at Dachau for information of military value. The report of one such team found that while part of the data was “inaccurate,” some of the conclusions, if confirmed, would be “an important complement to existing knowledge.” Military authorities sent the records, including a description of the mescaline and hypnosis experiments, back to the United States. None of the German mind-control research was ever made public.

Immediately after the war, large political currents began to shift in the world, as they always do. Allies became enemies and enemies became allies. Other changes were fresh and yet old. In the United States, the new Cold War against communism carried with it a piercing sense of fear and a sweeping sense of mission—at least as far as American leaders were concerned. Out of these feelings and out of that overriding American faith in advancing technology came the CIA’s attempts to tame hostile minds and make spy fantasies real. Experiments went forward and the CIA’s scientists—bitten, sometimes obsessed—kept going back to their laboratories for one last adjustment. Some theories were crushed, while others emerged in unexpected ways that would have a greater impact outside the CIA than in the world of covert operations. Only one aspect remained constant during the quarter-century of active research: The CIA’s interest in controlling the human mind had to remain absolutely secret.

World War II provided more than the grand themes of the CIA’s behavioral programs. It also became the formative life experience of the principal CIA officials, and, indeed, of the CIA itself as an institution. The secret derring-do of the OSS was new to the United States, and the ways of the OSS would grow into the ways of the CIA. OSS leaders would have their counterparts later in the Agency. CIA officials tended to have known the OSS men, to think like them, to copy their methods, and even, in some cases, to be the same people. When Agency officials wanted to launch their massive effort for mind control, for instance, they got out the old OSS documents and went about their goal in many of the same ways the OSS had. OSS leaders enlisted outside scientists; Agency officials also went to the most prestigious ones in academia and industry, soliciting aid for the good of the country. They even approached the same George White who had shot his initials in the hotel ceiling while on OSS assignment.

Years later, White’s escapades with OSS and CIA would carry with them a humor clearly unintended at the time. To those directly involved, influencing human behavior was a deadly serious business, but qualities like bumbling and pure craziness shine through in hindsight. In the CIA’s campaign, some of America’s most distinguished behavioral scientists would stick all kinds of drugs and wires into their experimental subjects—often dismissing the obviously harmful effects with theories reminiscent of the learned nineteenth-century physicians who bled their patients with leeches and belittled the ignorance of anyone who questioned the technique. If the schemes of these scientists to control the mind had met with more success, they would be much less amusing. But so far, at least, the human spirit has apparently kept winning. That—if anything—is the saving grace of the mind-control campaign.

World War II signaled the end of American isolation and innocence, and the United States found it had a huge gap to close, with its enemies and allies alike, in applying underhanded tactics to war. Unlike Britain, which for hundreds of years had used covert operations to hold her empire together, the United States had no tradition of using subversion as a secret instrument of government policy. The Germans, the French, the Russians, and nearly everyone else had long been involved in this game, although no one seemed as good at it as the British.

Clandestine lobbying by British agents in the United States led directly to President Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the organization that became OSS in 1942. This was the first American agency set up to wage secret, unlimited war. Roosevelt placed it under the command of a Wall Street lawyer and World War I military hero, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. A burly, vigorous Republican millionaire with great intellectual curiosity, Donovan started as White House intelligence adviser even before Pearl Harbor, and he had direct access to the President.

Learning at the feet of the British who made available their expertise, if not all their secrets, Donovan put together an organization where nothing had existed before. A Columbia College and Columbia Law graduate himself, he tended to turn to the gentlemanly preserves of the Eastern establishment for recruits. (The initials OSS were said to stand for “Oh So Social.”) Friends—or friends of friends—could be trusted. “Old boys” were the stalwarts of the British secret service, and, as with most other aspects of OSS, the Americans followed suit.

One of Donovan’s new recruits was Richard Helms, a young newspaper executive then best known for having gained an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1936 while working for United Press. Having gone to Le Rosey, the same Swiss prep school as the Shah of Iran, and then on to clubby Williams College Helms moved easily among the young OSS men. He was already more taciturn than the jovial Donovan, but he was equally ambitious and skilled as a judge of character. For Helms, OSS spywork began a lifelong career. He would become the most important sponsor of mind-control research within the CIA, nurturing and promoting it throughout his steady climb to the top position in the Agency.

Like every major wartime official from President Roosevelt down, General Donovan believed that World War II was in large measure a battle of science and organization. The idea was to mobilize science for defense, and the Roosevelt administration set up a costly, intertwining network of research programs to deal with everything from splitting the atom to preventing mental breakdowns in combat. Donovan named Boston industrialist Stanley Lovell to head OSS Research and Development and to be the secret agency’s liaison with the government scientific community.

A Cornell graduate and a self-described “saucepan chemist,” Lovell was a confident energetic man with a particular knack for coming up with offbeat ideas and selling them to others. Like most of his generation, he was an outspoken patriot. He wrote in his diary shortly after Pearl Harbor: “As James Hilton said, ‘Once at war, to reason is treason.’ My job is clear—to do all that is in me to help America.”

General Donovan minced no words in laying out what he expected of Lovell: “I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and Japanese—by our own people—but especially by the underground resistance programs in all the occupied countries. You’ll have to invent them all, Lovell, because you’re going to be my man.” Thus Lovell recalled his marching orders from Donovan, which he instantly received on being introduced to the blustery, hyperactive OSS chief. Lovell had never met anyone with Donovan’s personal magnetism.

Lovell quickly turned to some of the leading lights in the academic and private sectors. A special group—called Division 19—within James Conant’s National Defense Research Committee was set up to produce “miscellaneous weapons” for OSS and British intelligence. Lovell’s strategy, he later wrote, was “to stimulate the Peck’s Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to him, ‘Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here’s a chance to raise merry hell.’”

Dr. George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist who worked on explosives research during the war (and who became science adviser to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy) remembers Stanley Lovell well: “Stan came to us and asked us to develop ways for camouflaging explosives which could be smuggled into enemy countries.” Kistiakowsky and an associate came up with a substance which was dubbed “Aunt Jemima” because it looked and tasted like pancake mix. Says Kistiakowsky: “You could bake bread or other things out of it. I personally took it to a high-level meeting at the War Department and ate cookies in front of all those characters to show them what a wonderful invention it was. All you had to do was attach a powerful detonator, and it exploded with the force of dynamite.” Thus disguised, “Aunt Jemima” could be slipped into occupied lands. It was credited with blowing up at least one major bridge in China.

Lovell encouraged OSS behavioral scientists to find something that would offend Japanese cultural sensibilities. His staff anthropologists reported back that nothing was so shameful to the Japanese soldier as his bowel movements. Lovell then had the chemists work up a skatole compound which duplicated the odor of diarrhea. It was loaded into collapsible tubes, flown to China, and distributed to children in enemy-occupied cities. When a Japanese officer appeared on a crowded street, the kids were encouraged to slip up behind him and squirt the liquid on the seat of his pants. Lovell named the product “Who? Me?” and he credited it with costing the Japanese “face.”

Unlike most weapons, “Who? Me?” was not designed to kill or maim. It was a “harassment substance” designed to lower the morale of individual Japanese. The inspiration came from academicians who tried to make a science of human behavior. During World War II, the behavioral sciences were still very much in their infancy, but OSS—well before most of the outside world—recognized their potential in warfare. Psychology and psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology all seemed to offer insights that could be exploited to manipulate the enemy.

General Donovan himself believed that the techniques of psychoanalysis might be turned on Adolf Hitler to get a better idea of “the things that made him tick,” as Donovan put it. Donovan gave the job of being the Fuhrer’s analyst to Walter Langer, a Cambridge, Massachusetts psychoanalyst whose older brother William had taken leave from a chair of history at Harvard to head OSS Research and Analysis.[6] Langer protested that a study of Hitler based on available data would be highly uncertain and that conventional psychiatric and psychoanalytic methods could not be used without direct access to the patient. Donovan was not the sort to be deterred by such details. He told Langer to go ahead anyway.

With the help of a small research staff, Langer looked through everything he could find on Hitler and interviewed a number of people who had know the German leader. Aware of the severe limitations on his information, but left no choice by General Donovan, Langer plowed ahead and wrote up a final study. It pegged Hitler as a “neurotic psychopath” and proceeded to pick apart the Führer’s psyche. Langer, since retired to Florida, believes he came “pretty close” to describing the real Adolf Hitler. He is particularly proud of his predictions that the Nazi leader would become increasingly disturbed as Germany suffered more and more defeats and that he would commit suicide rather than face capture.

One reason for psychoanalyzing Hitler was to uncover vulnerabilities that could be covertly exploited. Stanley Lovell seized upon one of Langer’s ideas—that Hitler might have feminine tendencies—and got permission from the OSS hierarchy to see if he could push the Führer over the gender line. “The hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano,” Lovell wrote. Lovell used OSS’s agent network to try to slip female sex hormones into Hitler’s food, but nothing apparently came of it. Nor was there ever any payoff to other Lovell schemes to blind Hitler permanently with mustard gas or to use a drug to exacerbate his suspected epilepsy. The main problem in these operations—all of which were tried—was to get Hitler to take the medicine. Failure of the delivery schemes also kept Hitler alive—OSS was simultaneously trying to poison him.

Without question, murdering a man was a decisive way to influence his behavior, and OSS scientists developed an arsenal of chemical and biological poisons that included the incredibly potent botulinus toxin, whose delivery system was a gelatin capsule smaller than the head of a pin. Lovell and his associates also realized there were less drastic ways to manipulate an enemy’s behavior, and they came up with a line of products to cause sickness, itching, baldness, diarrhea, and/or the odor thereof. They had less success finding a drug to compel truthtelling, but it was not for lack of trying.

Chemical and biological substances had been used in wartime long before OSS came on the scene. Both sides had used poison gas in World War I; during the early part of World War II, the Japanese had dropped deadly germs on China and caused epidemics; and throughout the war, the Allies and Axis powers alike had built up chemical and biological warfare (CBW) stockpiles, whose main function turned out, in the end, to be deterring the other side. Military men tended to look on CBW as a way of destroying whole armies and even populations. Like the world’s other secret services, OSS individualized CBW and made it into a way of selectively but secretly embarrassing, disorienting, incapacitating, injuring, or killing an enemy.

As diversified as were Lovell’s scientific duties for OSS, they were narrow in comparison with those of his main counterpart in the CIA’s postwar mind-control program, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb would preside over investigations that ranged from advanced research in amnesia by electroshock to dragnet searches through the jungles of Latin America for toxic leaves and barks. Fully in the tradition of making Hitler moustacheless, Gottlieb’s office would devise a scheme to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out; like Lovell, Gottlieb would personally provide operators with deadly poisons to assassinate foreign leaders like the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and he would be equally at ease discussing possible applications of new research in neurology. On a much greater scale than Lovell’s, Gottlieb would track down every conceivable gimmick that might give one person leverage over another’s mind. Gottlieb would preside over arcane fields from handwriting analysis to stress creation, and he would rise through the Agency along with his bureaucratic patron, Richard Helms.

Early in the war, General Donovan got another idea from the British, whose psychologists and psychiatrists had devised a testing program to predict the performance of military officers. Donovan thought such a program might help OSS sort through the masses of recruits who were being rushed through training. To create an assessment system for Americans, Donovan called in Harvard psychology professor Henry “Harry” Murray. In 1938 Murray had written Explorations of Personality, a notable book which laid out a whole battery of tests that could be used to size up the personalities of individuals. “Spying is attractive to loonies,” states Murray. “Psychopaths, who are people who spend their lives making up stories, revel in the field.” The program’s prime objective, according to Murray, was keeping out the crazies, as well as the “sloths, irritants, bad actors, and free talkers.”

Always in a hurry, Donovan gave Murray and a distinguished group of colleagues only 15 days until the first candidates arrived to be assessed. In the interim, they took over a spacious estate outside Washington as their headquarters. In a series of hurried meetings, they put together an assessment system that combined German and British methods with Murray’s earlier research. It tested a recruit’s ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person’s character by the nature of his clothing.

More than 30 years after the war, Murray remains modest in his claims for the assessment system, saying that it was only an aid in weeding out the “horrors” among OSS candidates. Nevertheless, the secret agency’s leaders believed in its results, and Murray’s system became a fixture in OSS, testing Americans and foreign agents alike. Some of Murray’s young behavioral scientists, like John Gardner,[9] would go on to become prominent in public affairs, and, more importantly, the OSS assessment program would be recognized as a milestone in American psychology. It was the first systematic effort to evaluate an individual’s personality in order to predict his future behavior. After the war, personality assessment would become a new field in itself, and some of Murray’s assistants would go on to establish OSS-like systems at large corporations, starting with AT&T. They also would set up study programs at universities, beginning with the University of California at Berkeley.[10] As would happen repeatedly with the CIA’s mind-control research, OSS was years ahead of public developments in behavioral theory and application.

In the postwar years, Murray would be superseded by a young Oklahoma psychologist John Gittinger, who would rise in the CIA on the strength of his ideas about how to make a hard science out of personality assessment and how to use it to manipulate people. Gittinger would build an office within CIA that refined both Murray’s assessment function and Walter Langer’s indirect analysis of foreign leaders. Gittinger’s methods would become an integral part of everyday Agency operations, and he would become Sid Gottlieb’s protégé.

Stanley Lovell reasoned that a good way to kill Hitler—and the OSS man was always looking for ideas—would be to hypnotically control a German prisoner to hate the Gestapo and the Nazi regime and then to give the subject a hypnotic suggestion to assassinate the Führer. The OSS candidate would be let loose in Germany where he would take the desired action, “being under a compulsion that might not be denied,” as Lovell wrote.

Lovell sought advice on whether this scheme would work from New York psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie and from the famed Menninger brothers, Karl and William. The Menningers reported that the weight of the evidence showed hypnotism to be incapable of making people do anything that they would not otherwise do. Equally negative, Dr. Kubie added that if a German prisoner had a logical reason to kill Hitler or anyone else, he would not need hypnotism to motivate him.

Lovell and his coworkers apparently accepted this skeptical view of hypnosis, as did the overwhelming majority of psychologists and psychiatrists in the country. At the time, hypnosis was considered a fringe activity, and there was little recognition of either its validity or its usefulness for any purpose—let alone covert operations. Yet there were a handful of serious experimenters in the field who believed in its military potential. The most vocal partisan of this view was the head of the Psychology Department at Colgate University, George “Esty” Estabrooks. Since the early 1930s, Estabrooks had periodically ventured out from his sleepy upstate campus to advise the military on applications of hypnotism.

Estabrooks acknowledged that hypnosis did not work on everyone and that only one person in five made a good enough subject to be placed in a deep trance, or state of somnambulism. He believed that only these subjects could be induced to such things against their apparent will as reveal secrets or commit crimes. He had watched respected members of the community make fools of themselves in the hands of stage hypnotists, and he had compelled his own students to reveal fraternity secrets and the details of private love affairs—all of which the subjects presumably did not want to do.

Still his experience was limited. Estabrooks realized that the only certain way to know whether a person would commit a crime like murder under hypnosis was to have the person kill someone. Unwilling to settle the issue on his own by trying the experiment, he felt that government sanction of the process would relieve the hypnotist of personal responsibility. “Any ‘accidents’ that might occur during the experiments will simply be charged to profit and loss,” he wrote, “a very trifling portion of that enormous wastage in human life which is part and parcel of war.”

After Pearl Harbor, Estabrooks offered his ideas to OSS, but they were not accepted by anyone in government willing to carry them to their logical conclusion. He was reduced to writing books about the potential use of hypnotism in warfare. Cassandra-like, he tried to warn America of the perils posed by hypnotic control. His 1945 novel, Death in the Mind, concerned a series of seemingly treasonable acts committed by Allied personnel: an American submarine captain torpedoes one of our own battleships, and the beautiful heroine starts acting in an irrational way which serves the enemy. After a perilous investigation, secret agent Johnny Evans learns that the Germans have been hypnotizing Allied personnel and conditioning them to obey Nazi commands. Evans and his cohorts, shaken by the many ways hypnotism can be used against them, set up elaborate countermeasures and then cannot resist going on the offensive. Objections are heard from the heroine, who by this time has been brutally and rather graphically tortured. She complains that “doing things to people’s minds” is “a loathsome way to fight.” Her qualms are brushed aside by Johnny Evans, her lover and boss. He sets off after the Germans—“to tamper with their minds; Make them traitors; Make them work for us.”

In the aftermath of the war, as the U.S. national security apparatus was being constructed, the leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency would adopt Johnny Evans’ mission—almost in those very words. Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White, and many others would undertake a far-flung and complicated assault on the human mind. In hypnosis and many other fields, scientists even more eager than George Estabrooks would seek CIA approval for the kinds of experiments they would not dare perform on their own. Sometimes the Agency men concurred; on other occasions, they reserved such experiments for themselves. They would tamper with many minds and inevitably cause some to be damaged. In the end, they would minimize and hide their deeds, and they would live to see doubts raised about the health of their own minds.



The Vril Society, the Luminous Lodge and the Realization of the Great Work
- © Terry Melanson 2001

The Vril Society or The Luminous Lodge combined the political ideals of the Order of the Illuminati with Hindu mysticism, Theosophy and the Cabbala. It was the first German nationalist groups to use the symbol of the swastika as an emblem linking Eastern and Western occultism. The Vril Society presented the idea of a subterranean matriarchal, socialist utopia ruled by superior beings who had mastered the mysterious energy called the Vril Force.

"This secret society was founded, literally, on Bulwer Lytton's novel The Coming Race (1871). The book describes a race of men psychically far in advance of our own. They have acquired powers over themselves and over things that made them almost godlike. For the moment they are in hiding. They are said to live in caves in the center of the Earth. Soon they will emerge to reign over us."

While researching their classic book, Morning of the Magicians, authors Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels were given the above account by one of the world's greatest rocket experts, Dr. Willy Ley, who fled Germany in 1933. Dr. Ley said that the Vril Society—which formed shortly before the Nazis came to power—believed they had secret knowledge that would enable them to change their race and become equals of the men hidden in the bowels of the Earth. Methods of concentration, a whole system of internal gymnastics by which they would be transformed.

These methods of concentration were probably based on Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. The Jesuit techniques of concentration and visualization are similar to many occult teachings, especially in shamanic cults and Tibetan Buddhism. The Nazi's revered these Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, which they believed had been handed down from ancient Masters of Atlantis. The occultists of the time knew that Ignatius was a Basque — some claimed that the Basque people were the last remnant of the Atlantean race — and the proper use of these techniques would enable the reactivation of the Vril for the dominance of the Teutonic race over all others.

The Vril Society believed that whoever becomes master of the Vril will be the master of himself, of others around him and of the world. The belief was that the world will change and the "Lords" will emerge from the center of the Earth. Unless we have made an alliance with them and become "Lords" ourselves, we shall find ourselves among the slaves, on the dung-heap that will nourish the roots of the New Cities that will arise.

In The Unknown Hitler, Wulf Schwarzwaller says:

“In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge or the Vril Society. The Lodge's objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration to awaken the forces of "Vril". Haushofer was a student of the Russian magician and metaphysician George Gurdjieff. Both Gurdjieff and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan lodges that possessed the secret of the "Superman." The Lodge included Hitler, Aalfred, Rosenberg, Himmler, Goring and Hitler's subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell. It is also known that Aleister Crowley and Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler. Hitler's unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the "secret" psychological techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan lamas and familiarized him with the Zen teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.”

The Vril Force and the Black Sun

In Lytton's The Coming Race, the subterranean people use the Vril Force to operate and govern the world (a few children armed with vril-powered rods are said capable of exterminating a race of over 22 million threatening barbarians). Served by robots and able to fly on vril-powered wings, the vegetarian Vril-ya are — by their own reckoning — racially and culturally superior to everyone else on Earth, above or below the ground. At one point the narrator concludes (from linguistic evidence) that the Vril-ya are "descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilization of the world."

The Vril Force or Vril Energy was said to be derived from the Black Sun, a big ball of "Prima Materia" which supposedly exists in the center of the Earth, giving light to the Vril-ya and putting out radiation in the form of Vril. The Vril Society believed that Aryans were the actual biological ancestors of the Black Sun.

This force was known to the ancients under many names, and it has been called Chi, Ojas, Vril, Astral Light, Odic Forces and Orgone. In a discussion of the 28th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry—called Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept— Albert Pike said, "There is in nature one most potent force, by means whereof a single man, who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct it, could revolutionize and change the face of the world."

This is the force that the Nazis and their inner occult circle were so desperately trying to unleash upon the world, for which the Vril Society had apparently groomed Hitler. A manifestation of the "Great Work" promulgated by the Adepts of secret societies throughout the ages. The Vril Society latched on to a very old archetype already in the minds of alchemists and magicians, which was only re-interpreted, by Lytton, in light of that age of occult revival and scientific progress.

The idea of mutation and transformation into a higher form of a "god-man" was envisioned, through the Vril-ya, in Buller-Lytton's The Coming Race. Lytton, himself, was an initiate of the Rosicrucians and was well versed in the arcane-esoteric philosophies (and of course the greatest advances in the sciences of his day). "Through his romantic works of fiction he expressed the conviction that there are beings endowed with superhuman powers. These beings will supplant us and bring about a formidable mutation in th elect of the human race."(J. Bergier)

This is where the philosophy turns dangerous. The moment we speak of an elect and "illumined" class which is above the general populace, you inevitably encounter racism and classism — with fascism in due course. "We must beware of this notion of a mutation," Bergier warns. "It crops up again with Hitler, and is not extinct today."

Bergier and Pauwels were writing in 1960, but today this philosophy is, sadly, once again in the forefront of popular culture. The New World Order, so vehemently opposed, is under the direct influence and guidance of the New Age Movement. A hodgepodge of occult doctrines and dangerous socialism, which hides under a cover of "spiritual enlightenment." Theosophy is considered the main foundation, and its founder, Mme. Blavatsky, was a great admirer of Lytton's. In The Occult Conspiracy, the excellent researcher, Michael Howard, writes about the compatibility of the two philosophies:

“Blavatsky had read Bulwer Lytton's novels and was very impressed by their occult content, especially Zanoni and the Last Days of Pompeii. The latter was published in 1834 and dealt with the time between early Christianity and the Mysteries of Isis in Italy in the first century A.D.

Blavatsky's esotericism was virulently anti-Christian...The racial ideas of Madame Blavatsky, concerning root races and the emergence of a spiritually-developed type of human being in the Aquarian Age, were avidly accepted by the nineteenth-century German nationalists who mixed Theosophical occultism with anti-Semitism and the doctrine of the racial supremacy of the Aryan or Indo-European peoples.”

Vril Powered Nazi UFOs?

Nazi UFO drawing Perhaps the most wild claims still circulating about the Vril Society, and its offshoot The Thule Society, is the legends of a secret Nazi UFO program. Presumably the Vril Society established contact with the "Secret Chiefs" or the Vril-ya themselves, and secretly began cooperating with certain German scientists in the late 20's.

As early as 1936 Hitler was sending teams of "Spelunkers" into caves and mines all over Europe searching for the Vril-ya. The Nazi's had also explored Antarctica extensively during the years 1937-38. In search of the fabled hole of the South Pole they apparently had success, like Admiral Byrd, in discovering these entrances. It was here that some say they made contact with the "Unknown Superman" who lived in the fabled "Rainbow City".

"In his controversial presentation UFO Secrets of the Third Reich, Vladimir Terziski draws a connection between alien beings and such German secret societies as the Tempelhoff,the Thule, the Vril, and the Black Sun. Terziski tells of an "alien tutor race" that secretly began cooperating with certain German scientists in the late 1920's in underground bases and began to introduce their concepts of philosophical, cultural, and technological progress." (The Rainbow Conspiracy, p.62)

"With help from extraterrestrial intelligences, Terziski postulates, the Nazis mastered antigravity space flight, established space stations, accomplished time travel,and developed their spacecraft to warp speeds. At the same time the aliens "spread their Mephistophelean ideas" into the wider German population through the Thule and Vril Societies."

"Terziski maintains that antigravity research began in Germany in the 1920's with the first hybrid antigravity circular craft, the RFZ-1, constructed by the Vril Society. In 1942-43 a series of antigravity machines culminated in the giant 350-foot long, cigar-shaped Andromeda space station, which was constructed in old zeppelin hangars near Berlin by E4, the research and development arm of the SS."(ibid p.62, Brad Steiger)

A familiar tune by now for those familiar with UFOlore. Many books have claimed this as well — although none of them seem to agree on one particular scenario. Many photographs have also turned up as would be expected. Some have been exposed as hoaxes while others remain "unknowns". The Allies confiscated every scrap of Nazi documents, and most are still classified to this day. It is well known that the Germans had some out-of-this-world research for the time. Incidentally, the Vril Society's existence was verified in the pilfered records and is in the possession of the British.

If in fact the Vril-Ya do exist and the Nazis did indeed establish contact with this superior race, then we could assume that this antigravity propulsion worked on the principles of Vril force. On the other hand, the Nazis, it has already been established, were driven by occult groups, like the Vril society, whose workings extended into the reaches of just such a force that would lead to the discovery Vril. So whether the tale of the Vril-Ya is for real or not is besides the point. Many have discovered this force independently of Lytton's work. It will continue to be suppressed. And for exactly the reasons that Lytton warned about in his book.



Tombs and Taps: An inside look at Yale's Fraternities, Sororities and Societies
- Yale University Archives

Would you like to associate yourself with prestigious institutions? Are you interested in joining the “old boys’ network” in search of a more rewarding career? Are you looking for close-knit friendships? Of course you are. These desires, however, do not make you special. Indeed, at Yale, they are almost a prerequisite for matriculation.

Yale has presciently developed many avenues for the pursuit of prestige, networks, and friendship. In the early 1700s, the daily roll call on campus was conducted in descending order of the prominence of one’s family. In 1738, students took matters into their own hands, when a group formed a debating society called “Crotonia,” the first known society on campus with selective membership.

Other students soon realized that the Crotonians were on to something, and two additional debating societies, Linonia and Brothers in Unity, sprang up in 1753 and 1768. Linonia and Brothers became the twin towers of student social and intellectual life.

Change, however, was on the horizon. At the College of William and Mary in 1776, eight years after the foundation of Brothers in Unity, a secret honor society named Phi Beta Kappa was founded. Chapters soon spread to other colleges, including Yale in 1780. Membership in Phi Beta Kappa was based upon academic excellence, but at Yale, Linonia and Brothers continued to garner greater interest.

All of this changed in the early 19th century, when nation-wide sentiment rallied against secret societies. In the early 1830’s, student and faculty opposition to secrecy led Yale’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to eliminate secrecy from its proceedings. So, in 1832, a group of members of the Class of 1833, led by Alphonso Taft and future valedictorian William Russell, formed a society nicknamed “The Scull and Bones,” modeled after the old Phi Beta Kappa and set up as a chapter of a German academic society.

Taft and Russell had recognized a central insight into human nature: students are far more captivated by private organizations than public ones and, by extension, secret organizations more than open ones. Naturally, Yale students burned with curiosity about this new society, and climbed over each other to get in. Yale soon enjoyed a proliferation of senior societies, such as Scroll & Key, which was founded after a dispute arose as to whom Bones should tap in 1842. Gradually, the social power of Linonia and Brothers receded, and the debating society system ultimately evolved into the Yale Union (now called the Yale Political Union).

In short order, a system of junior fraternities arose in order to improve one’s chances of being tapped into a senior society. Then followed sophomore societies and even freshman fraternities. These underclassman societies, which usually adopted Greek-letter names, became the basis of the modern American fraternity system.

The junior fraternities-in order of prestige and seniority, Alpha Delta Phi (“A.D.,” 1836), Psi Upsilon (“Psi U.,” 1839), Delta Kappa Epsilon (“Deke,” 1844), Zeta Psi (1889), and Beta Theta Pi (1892)-became the central intersections of Yale’s social scene. Their power and wealth led them to build windowless “tombs” much like those of the senior societies. A Yale man’s career, it was felt, was determined by his social affiliations, and the rituals of bids and taps superseded romantic courtship in emotional importance. After the Civil War, the faculty attempted to ban sophomore societies, but new ones were formed under the guise of debating clubs.

Though the Yale societies were élitist by definition, they were egalitarian in an important way. Unlike the eating clubs at Princeton and the final clubs at Harvard, Yale’s senior societies traditionally placed their greatest emphasis upon achievement in college. A scholarship boy from rural Pennsylvania had a fair shot at senior glory at Yale; at Princeton and Harvard, coming from the right familial and boarding school lineage was of greater importance. (Yale, too, had its eating clubs, but all save Mory’s died out by the 1930s.)

Back in the 19th century, Yale College was split into two parts: the Academical Department, or “Ac,” for liberal arts students, and the Sheffield Scientific School, or “Sheff,” for scientists and engineers. (Then, as now, science majors were second-class citizens on campus but made first-class incomes later in life. The Sterling oil fortune, for example, was derived from geological innovations at the Sheff.)

Sheff students, not wanting to be left out of the society fun, founded their own “final clubs,” so named because they were intended to be one’s final social destination: one was tapped as a freshman or sophomore and committed to that society for the remainder of college. (At Harvard, as noted above, a similar system developed, which remains in existence there today.) The Sheff’s final clubs included the Colony Club (1848) also known as Berzelius, the Cloister (1863) a.k.a. Book & Snake, Franklin Hall (Theta Chi, 1865), St. Anthony Hall (Delta Psi, 1868), York Hall (Chi Phi, 1877), St. Elmo (Delta Phi, 1889), Sachem Hall (Phi Sigma Kappa, 1890), and Vernon Hall (Phi Gamma Delta, 1895).

In the mid-1920s, several of the junior fraternity tombs were demolished in order to construct Sterling Memorial Library. The fraternities then built sparkling new houses (rather than tombs) between York and Park streets. The collection of red-brick Tudor houses became known as “Fraternity Row.“ Prohibition was a great boon to the Row, which became the locus of campus revelry.

The Depression took its toll, however, and the residential college system, instituted in the early 1930s, drastically altered the fortunes of the fraternities. (Indeed, Edward Harkness, a Wolf’s Head alumnus, had endowed the College Plan partly out of disenchantment with the fraternity system.) Residential colleges were themselves luxurious buildings–worlds away from the cramped dormitories of old–and when students were required to join the college meal plan, the fraternities lost their principal revenue stream. In 1933, Book and Snake and Berzelius metamorphosed from Sheff final clubs into senior societies, while the other Sheff clubs sold their halls to Yale. Psi Upsilon, the venerable junior fraternity, renounced its national affiliation and became the Fence Club, while the formerly omnipotent Alpha Delta Phi closed its doors altogether.

After World War II and coeducation, the fraternity system seemed obsolete; only Delta Kappa Epsilon and the Fence Club remained of the old system. George H. W. Bush dc ’48 , a typically, was at home in both Deke, where the jock culture appreciated his baseball prowess, and at the Fence, where his blue-blood Phillipian lineage appealed to their prep culture. In 1973, dke’s tap room on York Street was relinquished to Yale , which converted the building into the Rose Alumni House; a few years later, the Fence Club went defunct. The 1980s saw a resurgence of the campus Greek system; the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21, and fraternity films such as Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds and Porky’s increased the popularity of fraternity life.

In the fall of 1984, Yale’s dining hall workers went on strike; as a result, Freshman Commons was shut down. Freshmen, who felt that they were thereby lacking in social outlets with their classmates, began founding new fraternities and re-establishing old ones. In 1985, Yale’s first sorority, a chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta, was officially constituted.

Today, the Greek scene is thriving, especially among athletes; it is estimated that three-quarters of all fraternity members are on a varsity team. Fraternity and sorority members, by and large, tend to be apolitical, although certain fraternities lean to the right side of the political spectrum. While they often lack the intellectualism of other campus groups, they tend to have the best parties. (The biggest parties on campus, however, tend to be sponsored instead by residential colleges: the Morse-Stiles Casino Night, the Silliman Safety Dance, the Pierson Inferno, and the Timothy Dwight Exotic Erotic.)

Greek life has its critics. Says Nicole Gabona MC ’01, former social chair of Kappa Alpha Theta, “‘Private rapport’ between a female and a fraternity slave becomes the business of not only those two people, but those two people plus sixty clan members. This lack of privacy can cause females to suffer an undeserved feeling of being loose, and this insecurity is only exacerbated when the fraternity males waste their creative minds on thinking up nicknames for women [whom they have become friendly with].”

Indeed, Greek-watchers observe that most Yale women, when they’ve found out what goes on behind their backs within fraternities, stay away from them. The minority who press on often become “groupies,” getting to know many or all of the brothers in detail. Though fraternities encourage the creation of groupies, they privately harbor little respect for them. Many critics charge that fraternities stamp out all individuality and attract insecure students looking for social direction, but the countervailing argument is that fraternities have a strong sense of cohesion which few groups can match. “I wonder,” asks one fraternity frequenter, “whether the fraternal friendships of brothers are based upon alcohol or actual connections of character.”

Though sorority members have provided Nicole Gabona with her “very best friends,” sorority life also has its pitfalls. “There are a lot of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ with sorority life. The ‘pros’ are the people you meet, the social times, the sense of belonging, and the networking with Greek people at other schools. I can meet a Theta at another school and feel an instant bond with her.”

“One thing that typifies sororities as opposed to frats is that girls are very catty. Ergo, sororities are a breeding ground for competitive, judgmental, intrusive gossip sessions. I would say a decent portion of girls in my sorority have had a phobia of food at some point. While this is not the fault of a sorority, I think that they have the potential to make one to look at the superficial, whether it is dress, popularity, or weight. This is not to diss on sororities at all; it is merely to say that you can’t get to the golden center of a stone without having to drill through some of the muck along the way.”

Freshman are able to join, or “rush,” fraternities and sororities in the fall, but our advice is to have some patience; unless you are absolutely certain that you want to join a particular fraternity, you are better off exploring your options.

Senior societies, most of which are now co-ed, are also on the upswing. Tap Day–the eagerly anticipated afternoon in mid-April when juniors learn if they have been selected for senior societies–is no longer the Old Campus circus it was in the 19th century. It used to be that the results of Tap Day were written up on the front page of the New York Times and published in the Yale Banner. Today, societies are secretive about their membership lists. Thanks to this secrecy, left-wingers who have spent their Yale careers attacking the patriarchal capitalist hegemony can discreetly enjoy the benefits of a society without being accused of hypocrisy.

Along with the eight “above-ground” societies, there are rumored to be as many as 20 “underground” societies. The underground societies lack endowments and buildings, and therefore carry little to no prestige. Often underground societies keep no record of their alumni; only other members in a class are known to each other. However, they can be useful outlets for the formation of close friendships.

Our most important piece of advice? Don’t fall into the trap of claiming to despise the society system. Every year, there are countless Yale students who rail against the élitism of the societies. These critics are nearly always hypocrites because, if offered a tap, they would generally take it in a heart-beat. Further, many critics tend to be those who have either been rejected by societies or have no chance of being tapped in the first place.

The society system is not without flaws, but that its critics tend to be motivated more by envy than by thoughtfulness. It goes without saying that one can lead a productive life at Yale without being involved in any of these organizations. Senior societies and Greek letter organizations are extremely time-consuming, so only commit to them if you are convinced that pursuing their activities should be your highest priority.

Here begins Light & Truth’s Guide to Society Life at Yale:

Senior Societies

Among the most significant influences in modern senior society life is the phenomenon of “lines,” whereby a member of a certain team, fraternity, or club will pass his tap down to his favorite junior from the same organization. Not all societies are ruled by this phenomenon, but some are. Yale’s societies also work hard to replicate the diversity of the student body.

The most common element of society life is the biographical session: each week, often during the spring semester, one member of the group will get up and tell his life story, with particular focus on romantic history. In addition, some societies hold debates similar to those of the Political Union parties, along with literary readings. All of the societies followed Bones’ lead in selecting 15 members a year, and in holding their events on Thursday and Sunday evenings. At a certain time of night, after these weekly meetings have adjourned, places like Naples Pizza overflow with society members unwinding.

The Big Two

The Big Two are distinguished by their seriousness of purpose; both groups tend to stay away from the sillier elements of other societies (for example, you will never see a Bones or Keys member walking in a black cloak, howling at the top of his lungs).

Skull & Bones (1832) - 64 High Street

Corporate name: Russell Trust Association
FY 1999 Assets: $4,133,246
FY 1999 Income: $759,061
1991 Value of Tomb: $716,000
Prominent alumni: William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush
Extracurricular profile: Afro-Am House, Dwight Hall, Women’s Center, La Unidad Latina, Whiffenpoofs, Dramat, Football, Crew

Skull & Bones is the oldest, and by far the most prestigious, of the senior societies; The Skulls, a recent film on the society, will only further its notoriety. The other societies are obsessed with discovering its secrets; some societies even have rooms dedicated to Bones memorabilia.

In actuality, Bones is neither as sinister nor as influential as it is made out to be. Traditionally, Bones selects the fifteen juniors at Yale who have most distinguished themselves in extracurricular accomplishment. In recent years, however, outside observers suggest that there has been an increasing emphasis on finding people who have the personal qualities to build strong friendships with one another.

Skull & Bones was one of the last of the societies to admit women and the manner in which this was done led to a serious rift in the society. Bones is the only society with a summer home: a private island getaway on the St. Lawrence River between New York state and Ontario.

Scroll and Key (1844) - 444 College Street

Corporate name: Kingsley Trust Association
FY 1999 Assets: $6,010,084
FY 1999 Income: $236,317
1991 Value of Tomb: $525,000
Prominent alumni: Dean Acheson, Cole Porter, Cornelius Vanderbilt
Extracurricular profile: Afro-Am House, LGBT Co-op, Chinese-American Students Association, Dramat, Hockey, Softball

Scroll and Key was founded when Skull & Bones uncharacteristically tapped most of its delegation from Psi Upsilon rather than Alpha Delta Phi. The neglected A.D.’s proceeded to found their own organization. Scroll and Key is, in monetary terms, the wealthiest of the senior societies, but lives constantly in the shadow of its elder cousin. Traditionally, Keys has drawn its members from the New York Social Register; in recent years, however, they have moved more in the direction of a Bones-style system, with extra weight placed upon extracurricular accomplishment.

The Sheff Societies

The surviving Sheff societies became senior societies when the residential college system was introduced in the ’30s. They therefore have a strong tradition in the sciences. A third Sheff society, St. Anthony Hall, lives on as a final club (see below).

Berzelius (1848) - 78 Trumbull Street

Corporate Name: Colony Foundation
FY 1999 Assets: $1,062,684
1991 Value of Tomb: $517,500

Berzelius, which was once known as the Colony Club, is said to be having serious financial problems; for such an old organization, it has a comparatively small endowment. While it fashioned itself to be the “Bones” of the Sheff societies, with a serious mission and purpose, Berzelius is now known as a “party” society and bears only formal resemblance to Bones and Keys.

Book and Snake (1863) - Grove Street

Corporate Name: Stone Trust Corporation
FY 1999 Assets: $2,474,165
1991 Value of Tomb: $675,000

Book and Snake, a.k.a. the Cloisters, is reputed to harbor a high proportion of athletes and fraternity and sorority members. They are also rumored to hold wild, orgiastic parties.

Et Alia...

The remaining four senior societies lack the prestige of the others, but Yale does not lack for socially ambitious students, and so they always fill their quotas. Some are old and troubled; others are young and promising.

Wolf’s Head (1883) - 214 York Street

Corporate Name: Phelps Association
FY 1999 Assets: $3,504,376
FY 1999 Income: $308, 985
1991 Value of Tomb: $675,000

Wolf’s Head is the third-oldest senior society (the Sheff societies were originally final clubs), and was created when, as one member put it, “a certain limited number were firmly convinced that there had been an appalling miscarriage of justice in their individual omission from the category of the elect”; i.e., Bones and Keys. Wolf’s Head possesses one of the younger buildings of the senior societies, as it moved from its old haunt on Prospect in the early 30s. It is also in the process of beginning an expanded capital campaign, primarily to refurbish its York St. manse.

Elihu (1903) - Elm Street

Corporate Name: Elihu Club, Inc.
FY 1997 Assets: $1,879,353
FY 1997 Income: $249,502

If you receive an invitation to interview with Elihu sometime during your junior year, don’t be flattered. Elihu invites every member of the junior class to participate in its interview process. Elihu has carved out a niche as the most left-wing of Yale’s senior societies; one whiff of that time you went to a College Republicans rally, and you will never hear from Elihu again. Elihu is the only senior society whose building has actual windows one can see through. All of these features make Elihu the most accessible of the senior societies; as a result, it is among the least prestigious.

Manuscript (1952) - Elm Street

Corporate Name: Wrexham Trust
FY 1999 Assets: $520,115
FY 1999 Income: $79,575

Manuscript has the ugliest house of all the societies: a tiny, modernist shack designed by Yale architect King-lui Wu. However, in the case of Manuscript you should not judge a book by its cover. As one of the youngest societies, it will often lose out on the most prominent candidates to older groups, but their selection system limits the cronyism that befalls other societies. It is rumored that their program is more substantial than the average society fare and the quality of the membership speaks highly for their future. Manuscript has an interesting selection system: faculty and alumni are involved in recommending and selecting candidates. This limits the degree to which lines and favoritism control the tapping process.

Mace & Chain - Audubon Street

Mace & Chain was reestablished recently by an old alumnus who longed to see his old society flourish again. It is said that they have substantial financial backing from alumni. Though its mission and policies are not well understood, observers say that Mace & Chain has done a good job of tapping high quality students. Mace & Chain conducts its activities in an apartment on Audubon Street.

Fraternities

Yale fraternities, unlike their sisterly counterparts, do not have an umbrella organization such as an Inter-Fraternity Council to guide their rush activities. As a result, fraternity rush is a free-for-all, with each group holding its own events. In the rush process, the fraternities throw many rush parties in order to convince the freshman that he is at home. At the end of the rush process, all the “rushes” attend the house “smoker.” Each rush must speak to the brothers of the house, trying to convince them to give him a bid. If he earns a bid, the freshman becomes a “pledge.” The pledge then must endure a traditional amount of toil, such as cleaning the house after parties. Many of the fraternities engage in mild hazing, state law notwithstanding. Delta Kappa Epsilon, for example, is famous for “Butthole Week,” in which its new pledges walk around campus, unwashed, performing degrading tasks. Pledge periods vary in length and difficulty among fraternities. The last week of the pledge period is called “Hell Week,” and brothers teach pledges about the virtues of suffering. Pledges then become members in full.

Throughout the year, the fraternities host formal events such as dances. They regularly attend Mory ‘s, though they have acquired a reputation for vandalism there. They also hold tail-gates at all home football games. The popular major among fraternity members is economics, for that curriculum has become progressively easier at Yale over the last few years. As part of the pledge process, many pledges attend economics lectures, collect homework assignments, and compile lecture notes. Fraternity members, according to observers, tend not to have specific career ambitions, so they end up on Wall Street. Yale fraternity members, even those with low grades, can take advantage of their strong network of connections at second-tier investment banks such as Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan, and Chase.

The Old Guard

The Old Guard includes four of the five traditional junior fraternities, which dominated Yale’s social scene and guarded the gates of the senior societies for socially ambitious Yale men. All of these fraternities are now four-year societies which are open to freshmen.

Alpha Delta Phi (1836) - 23-25 Lake Place

A. D. was the oldest of the old junior fraternities, and therefore the most prestigious. Most of the members of Skull and Bones were drawn from its ranks. The modern Alpha Delta Phi, reconstituted in 1992, is heavily populated by lacrosse players, and is known for its annual Funnel Fest party. Its pledges are, among other things, expected to return punts on Old Campus, in the nude.

Delta Kappa Epsilon (1844) - Lake Place

Deke was founded when a group of sophomores were not tapped by the two existing junior fraternities. Deke is the only fraternity which has continuously existed since its original incarnation, and is therefore unmatched from a standpoint of tradition. In mid-century, when Deke and the Fence Club stood alone as the only fraternities on campus, Deke attracted many of Yale’s leading campus figures, many of whom became prominent alumni. Nationally, Deke alumni include four U.S. presidents.

Today, Deke is the bastion of armpit-scratching masculinity; offensive linemen and baseball players are its staples. Deke hosts Tang, the annual inter-college drinking competition, and the Mortician’s Ball at Halloween. Deke owns two houses, both on Lake Place, and is the largest fraternity, both in the number and the weight of its members.

Zeta Psi (1889) - 29 Whalley Avenue

Zeta Psi has a large contingent of basketball and football players; its house, near the intersection of Dixwell and Whalley Avenues, is in the worst location of any fraternity house. Like Alpha Delta Phi, Zeta Psi went into a period of abeyance and was reconstituted in 1990. Their annual parties, the Purple Cow and Buffet Bash, remain popular nonetheless.

Beta Theta Pi (1892) - 36 Lynwood Place

Beta Theta Pi was originally founded as a four-year fraternity, like all fraternities are now, became a junior society in 1906, and later went defunct in the great fraternity wipe-out of the ‘30s. Reconstituted in 1992, Beta has traditionally attracted a large number of swimmers, though this delegation has diminished somewhat in recent years. Beta owns two interconnected houses, making it a popular hangout in the winter months. One fraternity observer describes Beta brothers as “pretty reclusive and cliquish, but good guys.”

The Nouveaux Riches

Though the Nouveaux Riches lack the history of their Old Guard competitors, they have more than made up for this deficiency by attracting wealthy students and by setting up in an attractive location. Both of these societies give the Old Guard a run for its money.

Sigma Alpha Epsilon (1986) - 35 High Street

Though Sigma Alpha Epsilon does not have a long history at Yale, it has arguably become the premier fraternity at Yale. Its house, on High Street, is universally considered to be the most attractive of the Greek organizations. Its members are widely considered to be the most attractive to women as well. (Some Greek-watchers feel, however, that SAE members are excessively aggressive in their pursuit of feminine company.) SAE is often characterized as a group of “rich preppy-boy legacies” and rowers, though those two groups heavily overlap. SAE is also known for its weekly parties held at 1:00 a.m. each Thursday night, parties which were temporarily suspended due to a series of arrests last fall. We here at Light & Truth hope the Man won’t keep them down too long.

Sigma Nu (1985) - 37 High Street

Sigma Nu’s house is adjacent to SAE and the two fraternities often collaborate on social events. Sigma Nu is heavily populated by members of non-jock but preppy sports like golf, soccer, and tennis.

And the Rest...

The Middle Class fraternities lack the élite social cachet of the other groups, but they each contribute something unique to the fraternity system. They are quintessential niche organizations: carrying high appeal for certain segments of the Yale community but garnering less college-wide interest.

Sigma Chi (1984) - 33 Lynwood Place

Sigma Chi was the first fraternity to be constituted as part of the major fraternity revival of the mid-80s. Sigma Chi was originally founded as a social arm of the Tory Party of the Political Union, but as the tp dwindled in size, the Tory influence was eventually replaced with that of the Progressive Party. Sigma Chi is perhaps the least athletics-oriented of the fraternities. Sigma Chi is also known for the cultural and ethnic diversity of its members.

Lambda Upsilon Lambda (1991)

Also known as “La Unidad Latina,” Lambda Upsilon Lambda is a Latino-oriented fraternity. It is best known for its bizarre pledging ritual.

Sororities

Sorority rush at Yale is organized by the Pan-Hellenic Council, which consists of the three campus sororities. (A fourth sorority, Jewish-oriented Alpha Epsilon Phi, has virtually folded.) Rush events are held jointly by the three sororities, and each sorority is limited to 40 members in order to ensure that none of them go under.

Pan-Hellenic rules prohibit sororities from recruiting students outside of the official process, and from bad-mouthing their competitors. By and large, the sororities are good about hewing to these rules, allowing the rushing process to be much more collegial than it is elsewhere.

Kappa Alpha Theta (1985) - High Street

Kappa Alpha Theta’s first chapter- in 1870, the nation’s first sorority was formed when a group of militant feminists entered previously all-male Indiana Asbury University (now Depauw University) and were not allowed to join a fraternity. Theta was also the first sorority at Yale, and is generally considered to be the most prestigious and the most blonde.

Theta is also seen as the most social of the sororities; they are the most likely to be seen at nightclubs or throwing parties. Theta has acquired a reputation, fairly or not, for “excessive friendliness;” an entry in the Yale Herald’s loutish Valentine‘s Day issue thanked Theta “ from the men of Yale for being so easy. “Kappa Alpha Theta is the only sorority with an actual house on High Street and is credited with the most polished recruiting operation of the sororities.

Kappa Kappa Gamma (1987)

The members of Kappa are diverse in background and interests; this can be a strength and a weakness, for Kappa lacks the strong culture and cohesiveness that the others sororities possess. Kappa has, in past years, struggled to maintain a viable size; the Pan-Hellenic Council’s rule restricting each sorority to 40 members has helped Kappa by limiting the growth of its rivals.

Prestige-wise, Kappa remains in the second tier, behind Kappa Alpha Theta and Pi Beta Phi. Male Greek-watchers seem to view Kappa sisters as generally less attractive than their Theta and Pi Phi counterparts. Kappa has an apartment in the Kelly House at Crown and Temple Streets.

Pi Beta Phi (1989) - 228 College Street

Pi Beta Phi vies with Kappa Alpha Theta for the title of most attractive sorority. Though Pi Phi is a highly social group, it is seen as less social than Theta. Like Theta, Pi Phi has a strong internal culture and is often successful at recruiting the students it is looking for. Their apartment, though in the best location of the three (above Caffé Adulis on College Street), is used only for private parties. Pi Phi is reputed to have a higher concentration of athletes than the other sororities.

Other Societies

St. Anthony Hall (1869) - College Street

Similarly to Elihu, St. Anthony Hall invites the entire sophomore class to rush for membership. St. Anthony, the club’s patron saint, was a third-century Egyptian who founded the tradition of Christian monasticism. St. A’s, alone among the old Sheff societies, has retained the traditional “final club” structure. St. A’s is therefore part (co-ed) fraternity, partly a debating society, and partly a secret society. Students who join St. A’s are required to turn down taps from senior societies and bids from fraternities.

At some point, the Yale chapter of St. A’s revoked its affiliation with the national Delta Psi / St. Anthony Hall organization; its present relationship with the national organization is nebulous. The Yale chapter of St. A’s, at one time, was reputed to possess a certain kind of élan. Observed The Official Preppy Handbook in 1981, “[St. A’s] appeals to the ‘cool element’ of Preppies at Yale; this means Preppies who don’t iron their shirts. It isn’t rowdy: parties there conform to the intellectual self-image Yalies hold dear.” Today, however, the club is stocked with eccentric types whose connection to a third-century monk is puzzling at best.

Elizabethan Club (1911) - College Street

FY 1999 Assets: $1,836,574
FY 1999 Income: $212,806

The Elizabethan Club, modeled after the Century Association of New York City, is in theory a gathering place for Yale’s student and faculty literati. Like the top senior societies, the Lizzie has a million-dollar endowment, along with a priceless collection of rare first editions of Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and others. William F. Buckley, Jr. dc ’50 is among the Lizzie’s most famous members; Cole Porter was rejected from the club, leading him to write a satirical song about “the most exclusive club in College.” (The Lizzie later reversed its decision.)

As with a traditional gentlemen’s club, the Lizzie has an admissions committee; to become a member, one must be proposed and seconded by current club members. The Lizzie is highly selective; it rejects a significant number of its applicants. Candidacies can also fall victim to internal politics and grudge matches. Freshmen are not eligible for membership; thereafter, 15 members of each class may be selected.

Tea is served every afternoon during the academic year, but non-members are only allowed in the club from Thursday to Sunday. Dues are $10 for life, which means that a lot of undergraduates who get into the Club never have to make a serious commitment to it. As a result, the Lizzie suffers from a lack of undergraduate vibrancy. Graduate students and faculty members play a significant role at the Lizzie, however, and often make up for undergraduate delinquents.