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NOTE 1
"Because of the power inherent in hair, great precautions were taken in primitive societies in the selection of a barber, in appointing an auspicious time for cutting, and in the disposal of the remains," says Benjamin Walker's The Encyclopedia of the Occult, the Esoteric, and the Supernatural (Scarborough Books, 1980).
"Special days were set apart for the purpose and spells and incantations recited. Because hair could be used for many magical operations directed against the owner, care had to be taken that it should not fall into the hands of sorcerers. The hair was therefore buried in a secret place...." (p. 111) A hardback version of this book is called Man and the Beast Within (Stein and Day, 1977).
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NOTE 2
Acording to Peter Batty's The House of Krupp (Stein and Day, 1967): "Despite the efforts to break up the coal and steel empires into smaller units, most of them have in fact come together again. The one victory the Allied 'de-cartelisers' can point to is that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the notorious giant steel cartel that dominated the Ruhr before the war, has not been re-formed. But even that is only a hollow victory, for the Thyssen Group, welded in 1963 out of just two segments of it, is today far bigger than the old VS ever was. Similarly with I.G. Farben, the mammoth chemical concern, which was split into three by the Allied 'trust-busters' -- now each of the three offshoots is larger than its former parent!" (p. 280)
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NOTE 3
In their book, Coup d'état In America, Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman (Third Press, Joseph Okpaku Publishing Company, New York, 1975) describe an interview with Seymour Weitzman, an eye-witness to John Kennedy's shooting who ran into the parking lot behind the grassy knoll after the shots were fired.
"In April 1975 Michael Canfield visited Weitzman in a home for aged veterans.... Weitzman said he encountered a Secret Service agent in the parking lot who produced credentials and told him everything was under control. He described the man as being of medium height, dark hair and wearing a light windbreaker. Canfield showed him a photo of Sturgis and Barker. He immediately stated, 'Yes, that's him,' pointing to Bernard Barker."
Bernard Barker, of course, attained notoriety in 1972 as one of the Watergate gate break-in gang under Hunt's direction. Coup d'etat In America also contains reprints of the "tramp photos" of three suspects taken into custody by the Dallas police and then released mysteriously without record of arrest. These appear very much to resemble pictures of E. Howard Hunt and another Watergate burglar, Frank Sturgis, dressed in tramp clothing and walking across Dealey Plaza in police custody in the company of a third individual who could have easily been mistaken at a distance for Oswald and may have been used for that purpose, perhaps as sixth floor gunman.
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NOTE 4
In the Illuminatus!Trilogy, (Dell Books, 1975) a series of farcical novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson that presents an essentially romantic view of the assassins, but seems to be drawn from inside knowledge about conspiracy politics, the hero named Hagbard Celine argues: "Civilization is privilege -- or Private Law.... And we all know where Private Law comes from... out of the barrel of a gun, in the words of a gentleman whose bluntness you would appreciate."
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NOTE 5
Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, (Random House, 1957) had made a lasting impression on me when I read it in the shipping-out barracks in Japan and on board ship on my way back to the States. Her arguments for laissez-faire economics, delivered by her characters in long philosophical speeches, convinced me that global prosperity absolutely required unrestricted production for profit.
That view represented quite a jump from the vaguely Marxist position I had acquired serving overseas in the Marines, just previous to that, as a result of my experience of the conditions in nations supposedly under U.S. protection, namely in the Philippines and Taiwan, combined with the shock of the U-2 scandal -- but not deeply grounded in reasoned economic analysis.
My intense hatred -- I cannot honestly call it anything else -- for John F. Kennedy was largely based upon the startling similarities between New Frontier economic policies and those propounded by Wesley Mouch, the antagonist in Atlas Shrugged whose actions in government office destroy the American economy.
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NOTE 6
According to Peter Viereck in Metapolitics: Roots of the Nazi Mind: "Rosenberg reserves much of his most ferocious hate for the Jesuits and the Catholic hierarchy. Therefore his outline for the New Order consciously imitates Jesuit techniques and the Roman hierarchy."
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NOTE 7
E. Howard Hunt writes in Undercover that he once received a cable signed jointly by Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes summoning him to headquarters:
"Bissell had succeeded Frank Wisner as chief of the Clandestine Services, and after hospitalization brought on by overwork Wisner had been assigned to the relatively relaxed post of London chief of station. As a special aide to Allen Dulles, sissell had created the concept of the U-2 aircraft, then managed that successful program. I had held several perfunctionary meetings with Bissell during consultation periods in Washington and a lengthier one during a Latin American chiefs of station conference in Lima, Peru.
"As principal assistant to Bissell, Tracy Barnes told me, I was needed for a new project, much like the one on which I had worked for him in overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz. My job, Tracy told me, would be essentially the same as my earlier one -- chief of political action for a project recommended by the National Security Council and just approved by President Eisenhower: to assist Cuban exiles in overthrowing Castro. Representative Cuban leaders were grouping in Florida and New York, and my responsibility would be to organize them into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would, once Castro was disposed of, form a provisional government in Cuba...."
Such an assignment might have given Hunt the opportunity to experiment with unusual forms of government.
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NOTE 8
In 1975 I received a press release from Robert Anton Wilson stating that Pope Paul had been granting audiences to a spirit medium named Matthew Manning, who claimed to have placed him in communication with the souls of a number of Catholic saints.
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NOTE 9
Vincent Bugliosi reported in Helter-Skelter, written in collaboration with Curt Gentry (W.W. Norton & Company, 1974): "The Process, also known as the Church of the Final Judgement, was a very strange cult. Led by one Robert DeGrimston, t/n Robert Moore -- who, like Manson, was an ex-Scientologist -its members worshipped both Satan and Christ." (p. 244)
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NOTE 10
Says Ed Sanders in The Family: "Once this writer was in Los Angeles posing as a New York pornography dealer with Andy Warhol out-takes for sale. There was an opportunity at that time to purchase seven hours of assorted erotic films including Manson porn collected during the pre-trial investigations. But the price was $250,000. Then there was a note which was written to a reporter by a person named Chuck, a friend of Gary Hinman, claiming possession of films of 'Malibu and San Francisco ax murders.'
"Later it turned out that a Los Angeles dope dealer allegedly sold a film depicting the ritual murder of a woman to a famous New York artist whose name will not be mentioned here." (p. 228)
Sanders not only links the Manson Family with the making of snuff films, but finds reason to think The Process Church was involved with them in such activities.
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NOTE 11
If Brother-in-law did borrow a wire recorder from Guy Banister that day, it is an important clue in the assassination, and also serves as further indication that he may have actually been E. Howard Hunt.
Guy Banister was Director of Division Five of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the anti-Communist department. In those days we now know he was working closely with Hunt and the DoubleCheck Corporation of Miami, a Central Intelligence Agency front working with Cuban exiles.
Brother-in-law never mentioned Banister by name to me, though he repeatedly reminded me of the function of Division Five of the F.B.I. However, I was already acquainted with Banister. For the woman who was finally hired to type the last draft of The Idle Warriors manuscript, Joyce Talley, introduced me to her literature professor at Louisiana State University in New Orleans -- a gentleman named Martin McCullough -- who in turn introduced me one evening in the Bourbon House to Guy Banister, calling him simply "a friend." This occurred during the summer of 1961 after I was working full time at American Photocopy Equipment Company and no longer had sufficient time of my own to put the finishing touches on the draft of the novel.
Both Martin McCullough and Guy Banister were chiefly interested in my book, and in reading sample chapters of it, on what was probably a pretext that Joyce Talley's praise had aroused their interest.
Banister's office first came to public attention in the summer of 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald was to use that address on the Fair-Play-for-Cuba leaflets he distributed on Canal Street. Unfortunately, since I was out of town at the time, I did not learn about this event until after the assassination.
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NOTE 12
In retrospect, though, it seems to me that Brother-in-law probably accomplished his purpose. In his possession was very possibly a recording of our conversation, useful for inflaming Catholics against me whenever so doing suited his purpose -- as it may have five or six years later when Jim Garrison first tried to recruit me as a witness against Clay Shaw, only to suddenly become suspicious of me in a way that admitted to no effective reply.
Such a recording, together with my handwritten quotes of the Nazi Propaganda Minister discussing the desirability of eradicating the Catholics, once the "Jewish problem" had been solved, would have served not simply to alienate Garrison, but also to give people like Jessica's father fits of holy rage. That would have been a perfect means for throwing a monkey wrench into a probe being conducted in a heavily Roman Catholic city about predominantly Roman Catholic Cuban exiles.
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NOTE 13
"The real story on 'flying saucers' is finally coming to light," asserted the 7 April 1950 U.S. News & World Report, and I mentioned to Brother-in-law having read in the early fifties an article to the same effect in Reader's Digest. "What the saucers are, how they operate, and how they have been tested in U.S. all can be told in detail at this time," continues the U.S. News piece confidently.
"That story, without violating present security regulations, points to these basic conclusions by engineers competent to appraise reports of reliable observers:
"Flying saucers, seen by hundreds of competent observers over most parts of U.S., are accepted as real. Evidence is that they are aircraft of a revolutionary type, a combination of helicopter and fast jet plane. They conform to well-known principles of aerodynamics. An early model of these saucers was built by U.S. engineers in 1942, achieved more than 100 successful test flights. That project was taken over by Navy in wartime. Much more advanced models are now being built. Just where present saucers are being built is indicated by evidence now available.
"In more detail, the story pieced together from non-secret testimony of responsible U.S. scientists, private observers and military officials is this:
"Early models of the flying saucer, pictured on this page and the next, were built by U.S. Government engineers of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Similar flying-saucer projects were begun in Germany and Italy at the same time, in 1942." (p. 13)
Another article ascribing flying saucers to the U.S. Air Force appears in an early Fifties back issue of Reader's Digest, in addition to the article mentioned above.
But searching the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for the years since those pieces appeared, one looks in vain for any contribution to flying saucer lore that attributes such a mundane origin. Conspicuous, in fact, for their absence are any speculations that flying saucers might be government aircraft of any type.
In recent years the mass media, not known for paying much attention normally to the notions of cranks, has given enormous publicity to the dubious idea that U.F.O.'s have existed since prehistoric times and even that the Garden of Eden may have been populated by a couple of space cadets from other planets.
Books about flying saucers are the same way, although in one that soundly debunks the so-called archaeological evidence for cavemen from outer space there appears a photograph of a U.S. Government flying saucer as well as the following sentence: "During April 1950, radio reporter Henry J. Taylor claimed that flying saucers were highly secret American inventions, and for a short time a satisfactory explanation seemed to be available." But no mention is made of why such a thesis was only viable for "a short time" in Morris Goran's The Modern Myth: Ancient Astronauts and UFOs (A.S. Barnes & Co., 1978).
A thinking student of this popular media flying saucer literature cannot help but wonder if the invisible hand of very stringent intelligence community censorship did not muffle free debate at some point in the early fifties.
Thereafter, providing the motivations of the censors were sufficiently strong, as they appear to have been, any other crime, such as an assassination, could be assured of a powerful cover-up if only its perpetrators could somehow involve it inextricably with truthful data about flying saucers.
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NOTE 14
In Appointment in Dallas (Hugh McDonald Publishing, 1975) by Hugh C. McDonald as told to Geoffrey Bocca, on page 165, a mysterious CIA-KGB hit man known in the book as "Saul" and allegedly one of the John Kennedy assassins describes Oswald's behavior during an interval when "Saul" claims to have been tailing Lee in Mexico City during the summer of 1963:
"He was always alone at mealtime, and he talked audibly to himself, all the time. His snatches of conversation were not rational. He seemed obsessed with 'Marina' -- I know now, of course, that that was his Russian wife -- and kept saying the words 'shining hero,' and giggling to himself."
Had Oswald by this time discovered that there was an eavesdropping device concealed on his person, it is possible that his chatter was more rational than might be supposed, particularly if he was using the same type of intelligence community cant that might also explain seemingly nonsensical passages in Sirhan Sirhan's journal. While such a hypothesis may seem far-fetched at first glance, it is not at all inconsistent with the things Brother-in-law said to me about possible uses of electronic surveillance.
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NOTE 15
Upon reading Omar V. Garrison's Tantra, a book of Tibetan sexual yoga, I discovered that such an effect is produced in victims of Tantric black magic. According to the Avon paperback, The Occult Reich, Hitler often seemed to visitors and associates to function as a human energy vacuum -- with a parasitical vigor that just sapped every room of its energy when the little man strode in. Every now and then I continue to meet an individual who has this effect on me, independent of any personality traits, and I have talked to others who .have at one time or another felt the same awful drain of energy in the presence of a mysteriously enervating individual.
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NOTE 16
In Undercover, E. Howard Hunt mentions that many of the uniformed officers working with him at one time had been in private life attorneys. "Among those I came to know," he writes, "were Navy Lieutenant James Donovan, who was later to defend GRU Colonel Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy, and who was instrumental in exchanging him for U-2 pilot Gary Powers." Hunt also discusses the U-2 project in his book, mentioning those involved in its development, etc.
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NOTE 17
Writes E. Howard Hunt in Undercover, "Then to my welcome surprise I was summoned to the office of C. Tracy Barnes, a wartime associate of Allen Dulles, Wall Street lawyer and brother-in-law of Joe Bryan. Barnes swore me to special secrecy and revealed that the National Security Council under Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon had ordered the overthrow of Guatemala's Communist regime. If I accepted the proposed assignment, Barnes told me, it would be as head of the project's propaganda and political action staff, and he added that naturally no clandestine project had higher priority than this."
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NOTE 18
According to Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and the Cowboy War, "It was in reality such 'hard-nosed liberals' as the CIA's Tracy Barnes and Edward Lansdale (for whom Ellsberg worked in Vietnam) and Kennedy's chief military advisor Maxwell Taylor who advocated clandestine war, or Special Forces warfare, as an alternative to conventional military and diplomatic options and thus got the U.S. involved untenably in Cuba and Vietnam."
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NOTE 19
"At headquarters I paid protocolary calls on Allen Dulles and General Cabell, Frank Wisner," at this point in Undercover, Hunt inserts a footnote ("A diminutive personal assistant to Frank Wisner was known as the Ozard of Wiz.") continuing with, "and his principal assistant, Tracy Barnes. Freed from the parochialism of OSO, Dick Helms was now chief of operations for the entire Clandestine Services. In each other we discerned kindred spirits and formed a friendship which, though sporadic, due to my extended absences abroad, continued until the summer of 1972, when my name was first mentioned in connection with Watergate."
Since then, in recent years, I have learned that twitting Tracy Barnes about his stature is a favorite C.I.A. pastime, as also is resistance to "parochial," or Jesuit, influences, which tend to dominate the intelligence community, often by indirect means. Hunt's wife, Dorothy, for example, was Catholic, and therefore the statement about his relation to Helms may contain some subtle allusions.
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NOTE 20
In 1964, living in Shirlington, Virginia, and corresponding with Greg Hill, I suggested that our satirical religion, the Discordian Society, which Greg and I had originated in California before going to New Orleans, needed a dogma -- or, as we called it, a catma.
Brother-in-law's comment was in the back of my mind when I therefore determined that it should be the Law of Fives: Everything happens in fives -- or can in some other way be connected with the number five. Slim Brooks was our fourth convert to the Discordian Society and, as might be anticipated, Brother-in-law was the fifth person to join that facetious cult devoted to the Greek goddess of confusion, Eris -- known to the Romans as Discordia.
Although I was soon to forget Brother-in-law's reminder, I remained fascinated with the "law" it inspired, as with the Discordian Society in general, most particularly because of its rapid growth in membership. For in the late sixties and early seventies both Greg and I began encountering all manner of people calling themselves Discordians, including that other man whose weird ideas about Nazis seemed to so much resemble those of Brother-in-law, Stan Jamison, whose Discordian name was Coman-Ra.
How Coman-Ra entered the loosely knit Discordian network of friends and acquaintances I'm unaware, but I recall that I first began receiving mailings from him in about 1970. These ranged from instructions about how to grow bean sprouts to racist right-wing hate literature that both Greg and I thought was rather alarming. Not until 1975 did Co-man Ra intimate to me that he knew something about the John Kennedy assassination.
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NOTE 21
When I encountered that information in William Torbitt's unpublished manuscript, Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, it seemed to stimulate my memory, but I have never been certain of that much.
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NOTE 22
According to The House of Krupp by Peter Batty, in February of 1956 Alfried Krupp "made an extensive tour of the Far and Middle East, dropping in to talk to business-heads in such capitals as Cairo, Bangkok, Delhi and Karachi. He was in fact the first major German industrialist to set foot in the area since the war. At the outset the trip was described as 'a serious attempt' to counter the Soviets' economic offensive in the underdeveloped countries of Africa and Asia, but on his return, discovering the Russians were now interested in buying from him, he changed his tune and hastened to deny that he was waging 'a private crusade against Communism' -- to the chagrin of many American diplomats whose blue-eyed boy he had recently become.... Within a few months he was off again to Canada -- though... Canadians were not so ecstatic at having a convicted war criminal in their midst and showed their discontent by staging demonstrations everywhere he went in their country. Alfried's reason for going there was his participation along with Cyrus Eatton, Khruschev's famous capitalist friend from Cleveland, Ohio," in a conference. (p. 254)
Significantly enough, it is noted elsewhere in the book that it was John J. McCloy, who was later to serve on the Warren Commission, and who has also been linked to Morgan banking interests, who rescued the Krupp fortune after the Nuremberg trials: "He had also to many people's surprise decided to cancel the order confiscating Krupp's properties -- it had not been expected that he would go quite that far. McCloy's justification for his generosity was that no other war criminal had been punished in this way: 'Confiscation of personal (sic) property does not belong to the practices of our legal system and in general is in contradiction of the American conception of justice. I am not able, on the basis of the evidence against the accused Krupp, to find any degree of personal guilt which would put him above all the others sentenced by the Nuremberg courts.'" Batty goes on to say on the same pages, 233 and 234, "Later, when challenged by a number of eminent Americans to explain himself further, McCloy described his decision to release Krupp as the most 'wearing' he had ever had to make. But to his eternal shame, in my opinion at least, he also endeavored to play down the charges of slave-labor brought against Alfried at Nuremberg."
We also learn from The House of Krupp that "Alfried's first major Russian order came in 1957, after he had exhibited at the Leipzig East German Trade Fair the previous March -- an action which at the time shocked many West Germans." (pp. 257258) It was a contract worth just over four million pounds for chemical works and three synthetic fibre plants "which ironically he was making under license from an American firm. This quickly led to closer and warmer relations between Moscow and Essen. Indeed when Mikoyan, the Russian Trade Minister, visited West Germany in 1958 he went out of his way to talk to Alfried's general manager, assuring him that 'the products of Krupp have an excellent reputation among our people.' A few weeks after this remark of Mikoyan, Khruschev, then Russia's Prime Minister, declared in a speech to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow that 'the Soviet Union has in the past entertained good relations with the Essen firm of Krupp.'
"Later that same year, a group of Krupp senior officials headed by their general manager were feted in Moscow; Mikoyan called them 'the first swallows of commerce from the western world.' The Russians were evidently very eager to do business with Alfried's men, but negotiations broke down on credit terms -- though rumor had it that the real reason was that Alfried had been hobbled at the last moment by the Americans.
"Khruschev himself took a hand in the next stage of the wooing when, at the Leipzig Trade Fair in the following March, that is March of 1959, he made the East German press drop their usual denunciations of Krupps as warmongers, and of Alfried in particular as a convicted war criminal. Moreover, he visited the Krupp stand at the Fair and drank a toast to the firm out of a Krupp stainless steel tumbler filled with French Cognac, expressing regret that the head of the House was not there in person, but sending Alfried his good wishes all the same. Today, Alfried's name no longer appears on the Soviet list of war criminals and until quite recently the House of Krupp maintained a permanent office in Moscow: perhaps the two most remarkable, and at the same time the two most paradoxical, facts in the whole post-war rise of firm and family."
Possibly it was such maneuvering by Moscow that caused Mao Tsetung to denounce Khrushchev's policy of "peaceful co-existence" with the West as political revisionism -- not, as many Americans were led to believe, any tolerance by the Russians for American democracy, or any particular hostility by the Chinese toward peaceful relations with the U.S.
But the most disturbing question plaguing me is why, with a record like that as American High Commissioner in Germany, was the Honorable John J. McCloy later appointed to the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy?
In light of such data, one can only conclude that Brother-in-law was not deceived in believing there was a conspiracy on behalf of the Krupps in the highest levels of the U.S. Government and that it was responsible during the war for sparing their armament factories from Allied bombing.
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NOTE 23
Something else he said about Hollywood is vague in my memory now -- but it concerned the importance of not remaining in a political condition, having to do with pagan secret societies, that would be called "Hollywood."
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