NOTES


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).

BACK


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)

BACK


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.

BACK


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."

BACK


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.

BACK


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."

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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)

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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."

BACK


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."

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK




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."

BACK




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)

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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...."

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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."

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


NOTE 36

In 1978 I found a more complete version of this theory in an Avon paperback called The Occult Reich.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.'"

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


NOTE 44

Today that whole area is an industrial park; the site of Brother-in-law's cottage is a concrete parking lot.

BACK


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."

BACK


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."

BACK


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."

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


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.

BACK


CONFESSION TO CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE JFK
SONDRALONDON DOTCOM
Runcible Tales | Paintings | Couture | Autographs | About | Contact