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NOTE 24
My hypothetical interpretation of the remark about C.I.A. employees is as follows:
Assuming Brother-in-law was a high-level C.I.A. operative, he or someone he knew -- possibly Richard Nixon in his Vice Presidential capacity as director of planning the invasion of Cuba -- discovered that agency officers routinely okayed project proposals handed them by trusted underlings without first bothering to read them. Thereupon the person making this discovery invented the rationalization for taking advantage of such behavior, that it should be punished, in order to create his own virtual government within the U.S. security apparatus.
Confirmation for this possibility comes from these statements in the following article reprinted in the March, 1974, issue of The Yipster Times from either The Los Angeles Star or The Boston Real Paper:
"A number of top secret and politically dynamite documents link President Nixon to a plot to kill former President John F. Kennedy, according to private researcher Sherman Skolnick of Chicago. Skolnick referred to one of the documents during a five-hour radio talk show broadcast October 15 over WLS Radio Station in Chicago.
"Skolnick, speaking in the early morning hours on WLS Radio talk show Point-Counterpoint, said the documents were among those being used by E. Howard Hunt and his wife Dorothy to blackmail President Richard Nixon. Skolnick said Mrs. Hunt was carrying the documents with her on United Airlines flight 553 when it crashed last December killing Mrs. Hunt, CBS Newswoman Michele Clark and forty-three others. Skolnick has charged the jet was sabotaged.
"One of the documents the Hunts were using to blackmail the President, according to Skolnick, is a top secret National Security Council memorandum bearing the signature of then President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The memorandum is dated November 22, 1960, just weeks after Kennedy was elected President and while Eisenhower was filling out his term as the nation's chief executive.
"The memorandum says, according to Skolnick, that in the opinion of the Eisenhower National Security Council John F. Kennedy's ascendancy to the office of the Presidency was not in the best interests of the country. 'The Eisenhower National Security Council took it upon themselves,' Skolnick said, 'to declare Kennedy a threat to the national security.'
"The private researcher said the NSC document recommends 'in so many words' that JFK be dealt with so he could not hold the office of the Presidency. The memorandum, according to Skolnick, 'recommends that Kennedy be murdered.'...
"In November of 1960, the date of the top secret memorandum, Richard Nixon was Vice President of the United States and thus a member of the NSC. If the NSC document is authentic, as Skolnick says it is, then Nixon was one of those who recommended that Kennedy be murdered."
Further insight as to how such a thing is conceivable is provided in The Secret Team (Prentice-Hall, 1973) by Fletcher Prouty, as he explains how the automatic okay process was facilitated: "Once the CIA had become involved in a series of clandestine operations, it then would make a practice of going back to the NSC... and ostentatiously brief the next operation as a series. As they hoped, after awhile the important and very busy members of the NSC or of the NSC subcommittee would plead other duties and designate someone else to act for them at the meetings. This diluted the control mechanism appreciably. Further, the CIA saw to it that men who would always go along with them were the designated alternates." (p. 108)
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NOTE 25
The National Security Council is empowered by law to direct C.I.A. actions, but was gradually lulled into approving actions initiated within the C.I.A., instead. After that it was easy for empire builders within the C.I.A. to turn both the upper levels of the agency and the National Security Council into a rubber stamp operation for their policies.
With Nixon and Hunt working together in anti-Castro activities, and in light of allegations that Hunt was in a position during Watergate to blackmail Nixon, it is probable both men were among the perpetrators of such ruses. Once any proposal such as the John Kennedy death warrant -- and who knows what else? -- was written up, perhaps all that remained necessary was to place it in the "IN" basket on the desk of a bureaucrat who routinely okayed all projects.
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NOTE 26
Among notes that vanished mysteriously about the time of one of Slim's visits were some about an idea I had been playing with since my Marine Corps days, for building a secret society of assassins to kill foreign dictators.
They featured a diagram shaped like a Maltese cross. At the center was the leader, who would then appoint one assistant in each of four areas: administration, intelligence, operations and logistics -- the organizational divisions of Marine Corps activity.
Each assistant would then appoint followers whose identity would remain unknown to the leader, as would his to them. Every follower was to recruit two more followers and so on, in descending levels of authority, creating four pyramidal wings.
In the service I had once gone so far as to appoint another Marine, Raul Gayon, my chief of intelligence. Shortly thereafter, though, we quarreled and stopped speaking to one another.
I remember clearly that my suddenly missing notes were in pencil. I don't recall how thoroughly they explained the diagram. I think they were probably rather scant, with just enough information to convey the general notion and no more.
Vanishing at about the same time were jottings about a publishing business I was thinking of establishing, called Thor Thunderpress. Slim had said Thor was the Norse god of thunder; his name consisted of the first four letters of my last name. I don't believe he further mentioned to me that the symbol of Thor's hammer was the swastika, nor that Hitler took that insignia from the Finnish Air Force.
In fact, I think Brother-in-law told me the swastika was favored by Hitler because it was the symbol used by the Aryans in conquering pre-Vedic India.
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NOTE 27
That article probably appeared in The National Observer, to which I subscribed. Although he didn't say so, Karl Hess was obviously an admirer of Ayn Rand. As publisher and editor of that publication, he always took the proper Objectivist position in relation to every issue.
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NOTE 28
Mixing government and business, Rand says, is a form of fascist-socialism. Whether the businessmen or the government bureaucrats wind up ruling the economy, either way you've got one group of men running everything. I considered Roger Blough and those others to be great, persecuted heroes, and it appeared to me that the Kennedy brothers double-crossed them. Besides that, I found the Anti-Trust Laws to be vague and irrational.
At that time, I believed that only unregulated, unrestricted production would ever be able to feed everyone in the world -- like the starving people in the Intramuros sector of Manila, the City of Walls, as they call that bombed-out slum. That was why I became a Marxist, temporarily, before I read Atlas Shrugged, because of the sight of starving people. It's one thing to read or hear about something like that and quite another to actually witness it.
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NOTE 29
Also, he mentioned various civil organizations. He said that they were involved in politics much more than the public suspected, and that in the future they were going to become yet more involved. Among them, I think he included both the Elks and Eagles.
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NOTE 30
In his book, Conspiracy (McGraw-Hill, 1980) Anthony Summers writes: "FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was one day to wonder aloud to the Warren Commission about the rumored existence of 'an espionage training school outside of Minsk.' In fact, the CIA had been told there was a spy school in Minsk as long ago as 1947, and information since the Kennedy assassination has confirmed the existence of a training school with one-way windows protected by a high wall. This establishment was located close to the Minsk Foreign Language Institute, and in one set of his notes Oswald seems to have gone out of his way to obscure the fact that he had been to the language school...."
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NOTE 31
A complete account of the fascist plot exposed by General Smedley Butler is to be found in Jules Archer's The Plot to Seize the White House (Hawthorn Books, New York). On page 213 Archer quotes John J. McCormack, who probed Butler's charges in 1934: "'There is no doubt that General Butler was telling the truth.... We believed his testimony one hundred percent. He was a great, patriotic American in every respect.'"
Details of the plot and excerpts from General Smedley Darlington Butler's testimony are also included in A Man in His Time by John L. Spivak and in 1000 Americans by George Seldes, as well as Facts and Fascism by Seldes.
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NOTE 32
An examination of the strategy used by Nixon at the Watergate Plumbers seems to indicate precisely such thinking dictated many of their decisions: possession of the White House seemed more vital to them than any illusion of fair elections, any pretense of Presidential honesty or the least shred of respect for the Constitution.
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NOTE 33
According to personal correspondence to Stan Jamison from a man named Crabb of the Borderland Research Foundation in Vista, California: "An ex-Marine here in Vista told me that he personally saw operational Flying Saucers at Edwards Air Force base in California in 1967 when he was on temporary duty there. So the Air Force has anti-gravity machines and a radical, cheap, universally available, nonpolluting source of power which would solve all our pollution problems, and make obsolete the oil industry; so anti-gravity will never be made available for public use as long as the oil majors control policy here in the U.S."
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NOTE 34
I was to hear from a friend, Cid Norris, in Atlanta in 1975 that there was in the sixties at Georgia Tech a professor of nuclear physics named Tom Miethe. Moreover, he was known to frequent the Catacombs Coffee House at the corner of 14th and Peachtree.
During that time period, a man identifying himself as a runaway C.I.A. agent, bleeding from gunshot wounds, arrived at the Catacombs without warning and left what he claimed were tapes pertaining to a JFK assassination conspiracy with David Braden, proprietor of the Catacombs.
No sooner had this alleged C.I.A. maverick departed, in great haste, than there arrived a detachment of suited men with badges who, according to the tale told by Ms. Norris, thoroughly searched the premises. "It was weird," she told me, "because they said they were looking for an escaped fugitive, but they were looking under mattresses and in drawers -- like what they really wanted was the tapes."
David Braden is thought by Cid Norris to have contacted Art Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison about the mysterious information contained in the tapes. Not long afterwards, Braden told Norris he had been warned to leave town, and not long after, he did.
As for Tom Miethe, who wasn't present the night of the incident, he is alleged to have also departed from Atlanta, suddenly and mysteriously, with no word about where he was going -- after designing a car engine that did not use gasoline.
Most of what Cid Norris told me was confirmed independently by another Atlanta woman, Anita Teel, who claims to have lived with Miethe for a time. Ms. Teel claims Miethe spoke at least one foreign language, was addicted to collecting guns and binoculars and displayed an impressive ability to pull strings with a phone call to this or that anonymous contact.
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NOTE 35
Techniques involving the use of high-frequency sound waves exist, and are used within the intelligence community, to produce thoughts from the outside in the mind of an unsuspecting victim. According to a news report based on data released under the Freedom of Information Act, the C.I.A. once induced a Soviet agent to leap out a window to his own death by this means. It occurs to me that the same method could be used to produce an illusion of telepathic communication.
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NOTE 36
In 1978 I found a more complete version of this theory in an Avon paperback called The Occult Reich.
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NOTE 37
This particular statement would have been made in or after the spring of 1963, although I'm not certain it was included in the discussion of Tom Miethe.
At this point a sense of chronology eludes me. I recall, though, linking it to a book I read in April of 1963, Psychotherapy East and West,in which the Latin term, meta, was explained in connection with a discussion of the meta-Freudians.
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NOTE 38
"Another input into the mind of Manson was provided by a religious cult, The Fountain of the World, located West of the Spahn Ranch in Box Canyon near the Santa Susanna fire department. He was very impressed with the Fountain and spent a lot of time visiting it.
"...The Fountain was formed by a holy man named Krishna Venta who died by violence. The family grooved with the violent history of the Fountain. The religious retreat occupied subterranean chambers and caves wherein they did their thing. As the cult progressed, dissension ensued and parties unknown blew up the founder, Krishna Venta, and nine of his followers -- with forty pieces of dynamite placed in the catacombs. This occurred in 12-10-58, whereafter the Fountain struggled onward and was still thriving when Manson discovered it," according to Ed Sanders on pages 110-111 of The Family.
As I remember it now and told it to Brother-in-law then, Krishna Venta had been blown away by the very men who died with him, whose wives he had been making it with. An eerie tape recording explaining their motives was headlined in the newspapers as "voices from the dead" -- a gift to history the assassins had been kind enough to contribute before destroying themselves and their Messiah.
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NOTE 39
Mentioned in Buckley's Up From Liberalism in connection with an attempt to officially "muzzle" General Smedley Butler, the incident is also reported in Jules Archer's The Plot to Seize the White House. General Butler invoked the wrath of Herbert Hoover some years previous to his effort to expose a ruling class conspiracy against Roosevelt by repeating a story told him by a reporter in which Mussolini's chauffeur-driven car ran over a small child without stopping afterwards.
Page 116 of Jules Archer's book says: "...The wire services carried journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt's revelation that he had been the one who had told Butler the true story about Mussolini. He corrected a few details. After running down the child, Vanderbilt said, Mussolini had observed the journalist looking back in horror and had patted his knee reassuringly, saying, 'Never look back, Mr. Vanderbilt -- always look ahead in life.'"
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NOTE 40
In the aftermath of Watergate, when Martha Mitchell died of cancer of the bone marrow, I recalled Brother-in-law's words here. Of everyone involved in that scandal, she was by far the most talkative. A book called World Without Cancer, circulated by the John Birch Society, claims there is a Rockefeller-Farben conspiracy that disposes of its enemies by means of artificially giving them cancer. Jack Ruby, Clay Shaw and Werner Von Braun were among persons allegedly connected to the John Kennedy murder plot who died of cancer. David Ferrie, one of Jim Garrison's suspects, was known to have at one time experimented extensively with inducing cancer in laboratory rats.
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NOTE 41
"At the end of 1961," writes E. Howard Hunt in Undercover, "Dulles was forced to 'retire,' and Richard Bissell followed. He was succeeded, not by Tracy Barnes, but by Richard Helms, untainted by the Bay of Pigs.
"After a considerable bureaucratic struggle Barnes established the Domestic Operations Division and appointed me its chief of covert action. The new division accepted both personnel and projects unwanted elsewhere within CIA, and those covert-action projects that came to me were almost entirely concerned with publishing and publications. We subsidized 'significant' books, for example, The New Class, by Milovan Djilas, one of a number of Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., titles so supported; ran a couple of news services -- one based in Washington's National Press Building -- even subsidizing the printing and distribution of a well-known series of travel books. The work was not particularly demanding, and at the end of the day, I still had sufficient energy to write fiction at home."
As a former Marine buddy of Lee Harvey Oswald, writing a novel based on a man who may have gone to Russia at C.I.A. instigation, I would have been within the field of Hunt's official attention at that time. I find it hard to believe that he would not at least have known about me, if he was not, as I'm inclined to suspect, traveling to New Orleans on an occasional weekend and giving me his personal attention, using the name of a man he wanted to implicate in the J.F.K. assassination plot: Gary Kirstein.
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NOTE 42
"Sweeney then developed delusions: he believed that the CIA had implanted a radio receiver in his teeth, so he pried out some dental work; he believed electrodes had been implanted in his brain, so he tried to find a surgeon to remove them. He also had auditory hallucinations, believing he was picking up messages from outer space," writes E. Fuller Torrey in his article, "The Sweeney-Lowenstein Madness," appearing in the October 1980 issue of Psychology Today.
Like Congressman Lowenstein's assassin, Timothy Leary has been claiming somewhat more respectably that he receives messages from interstellar aliens, which he calls "Starseed signals." That Sweeney could not settle on one theory to account for what he experienced does not prove it was delusory, only that he was more obviously confused perhaps than Leary about the sources of his oppression.
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NOTE 43
I could agree in good conscience with Brother-in-law, though, that the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials had been a farce. That was an opinion I had acquired from reading the story of Senator Taft in John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. "That was something that amounted in practice to ex post facto law, and our Constitution is supposed to protect against things like that. I think it was Goering who, according to something someone told me, stood up during those proceedings and said something like, 'Why don't you call off this farce? You won and we lost. Why do you pretend you now need a legal excuse to kill us?'"
Because of similar Constitutional technicalities, such as States' Rights, I often found myself uncomfortably in agreement with Southern racists, although I found it handy enough to stress in my discussions with Brother-in-law that such agreement existed.
I was determined to oppose Communism; nevertheless, I found vociferous nationalism and enthusiastic militarism to be nothing less than frightening -- not because I feared war -- I didn't -- but because I feared anything that I could identify as systematic mindlessness.
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NOTE 44
Today that whole area is an industrial park; the site of Brother-in-law's cottage is a concrete parking lot.
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NOTE 45
Peter Batty's book, The House of Krupp, informs us on page 253 that "...Luce too was to be a good friend of Krupp's, for in August 1957, on the occasion of Alfried's fiftieth birthday, a largely complementary cover-story entitled "The House That Krupp Built" appeared in Time magazine. Time's proprietor was also believed to be instrumental in Alfried's getting a visa to attend a conference for statesmen and international businessmen, and which his magazine was sponsoring in San Francisco that same autumn, at which Alfried had been invited to speak on 'The Partnership Approach.' Strictly speaking Alfried should have been denied a visa, since he was after all a convicted war criminal and such people were beyond the pale so far as the United States immigration laws were concerned. To the New York Herald Tribune, the whole ploy was 'one of the slickest advertising promotional schemes yet devised.' Nor did it escape the attention of certain senators, many of whom began to get angry. Alfried in the end preferred not to go -- and his visa application has never been renewed."
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NOTE 46
Late in 1961, after Ola and I had not seen one another for months, she sought me out to invite me to attend a Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at the municipal auditorium. Mayor Victor Schiro obtained a restraining order at the last minute barring King from using the building.
So we ventured nervously into the adjoining park and stood with a flock of Negroes singing spirituals, under direction of a young white C.O.R.E. activist who appeared to me both paternalistic and condescending.
"The only thing that we done wrong," they sang, "was let segregation stay so long.... Standing like a tree by the river, we shall not be moved...."
Rednecks in hot rods roared past us on the nearby road, gunning their engines. How vulnerable we were to a casually tossed bomb.
"There he is," someone shouted, pointing to a car pulling up at the other end of the park. "There he is! That's him!" We continued our singing as we ran together through low-hanging clouds of foggy mist and gathered near the fountain, where Martin Luther King now stood in silence, grinning courageously, as a spokesman explained that Doctor King would deliver his speech at such-and-such a Baptist church.
Neither Ola nor I -- nor her mother, who was with us -- wanted to go to the church, so we drove to a drug store near the Garden District for coffee.
There Ola and I got into an argument about States' Rights versus Federal Civil Rights -- about whether there could be a conflict between human rights and property rights. "Property rights are human rights," I insisted, echoing Ayn Rand, "because only humans own property."
To me it seemed that Ola was implying that because of this belief, I was a racist, and I grew more and more angry.
"Racism," I insisted, "is the most irrational form of collectivism there is. I think a Negro who owns a restaurant is entitled to refuse service to anyone for any reason, no matter how irrational, just like a white property owner. Property rights are absolute."
"But white people own most of the property," she lamented.
"In fact, but not in law," I retorted. "Negroes possess the same right to own property as whites."
"But what good does that do if they can't afford--"
"Listen to me very carefully," I interrupted, speaking slowly, with evident annoyance, "and maybe then you will understand."
"Come on, Mother," she said, rising to her feet. "Let's go."
They walked out on me. I took the bus home, feeling alone and misunderstood. I longed so much to belong to the Civil Rights Movement. Through the French Quarter passed many groovy young intellectuals and college students who were active in it. If only my Objectivist principles didn't confine me to the sidelines as a critic, instead!
"The only thing that we done wrong," I sang to myself in the cold, lonely night, "was let socialism stay so long."
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NOTE 47
"Gazing about Los Angeles," writes Ed Sanders on page 69 of The Family, "it is possible to discern at least three death-trip groups that have provided powerful sleazo inputs into Manson and the family. It is significant that there exists in Los Angeles occult groups that specialize in creating zombie-like followers. These are groups that have degrees of trust and discipleship, that use pain and fear and drugs to promote instant obedience.
"These three groups are:
"1. The Process Church of the Final Judgment, an English organization dedicated to gore, weirdness and End of the World slaughter. The Process, as they are known, was active in Los Angeles in 1968, when Manson abandoned flowers, and in the summer of 1969 -- when murder reigned.
"2. The Solar Lodge of the Ordo Temple Orientis, a looney-tune magical cult specializing in blood-drinking, sado-sodo sex magic and hatred of blacks. The Solar Lodge of the O.T.O. was run by one Jean Brayton, a vicious middle-aged devotee of pain who attracted a crowd of groveling worshipers.
"3. An obscure occult group of forty or so which we shall here call Kirke Order of Dog Blood."
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NOTE 48
Information on page 42 of The U-2 Affair by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross (Random House, 1962) indicates that Edwin H. Land, head of the Polaroid Corporation and developer of the Polaroid camera, was an active member of the Science Advisory Committee, established by the White House in developing the U-2 concept with Richard Bissell of the Central Intelligence Agency.
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NOTE 49
There was one bureaucracy in the C.I.A., mentioned by E. Howard Hunt in Undercover, that would have been excellently equipped to perform all the tasks Brother-in-law had in mind.
"...The then CIA director was Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, whom I had met during one of the admiral's inspection trips to Vienna. He was Frank Wisner's nominal superior, but lacked Frank Wisner's political power base, which included such men as John J. McCoy, Averell Harriman, William Draper, Secretary of Defense Forrestal, and Secretary of State Marshall. At headquarters, alongside the reflecting pool, OPC established functional staffs for Paramilitary Operations, Political and Psychological Warfare and Economic Warfare.
"The Political and Psychological Warfare staff, to which I was assigned, was headed by Joseph Bryan III, Navy veteran and writer. To assist him he had brought in Finis Farr; Gates Lloyd' Philadelphia investment banker; Lewis 'Pinky' Thompson, a New York and New Jersey financier and a man of many parts; and Carlton Alsop, late a motion-picture producer and once a well-known Hollywood agent. All except Alsop and myself were Princeton alumni.
"Artist-illustrator Hugh Troy joined Bryan's staff and formed a highly competent group of political cartoonists and polemicists."
By the time of my talks with Brother-in-law, Frank Wisner had passed away. But it is safe to assume the Political and Psychological Warfare staff remained active.
Curiously, in addition, I had many times mentioned Hugh Troy to Brother-in-law, for his entertaining exploits as a prankster were recounted in a book I'd read called The Compleat Practical Joker.
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NOTE 50
More recently I have decided that the individual in question was a country and western singer named Glen, who happened to be a friend of Millie Fletcher, another of my friends. Glen was from Texas and at that time was making preparations to return.
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