In my previous post on The Cult of Intelligence, I speculated that Aleister Crowley’s cult in Cefalù, the “Abbey of Thelema”, had research goals similar to those of MK ULTRA.

I’ve since read more about the “Abbey” and was shocked to find that not only did Crowley’s cult anticipate the more sensational MK ULTRA research, but Crowley employed sophisticated “social influence” techniques which I wrote about in The Banality of Mind Control. Crowley’s cult drew from Freud’s theories and attacked the family just like the Sullivanian cult would do nearly forty years later. Crowley’s Cefalù experiment was the forerunner to much American-lead mind control research during the twentieth century.

This matters, readers, because while Crowley probably did have some genuine interest in the occult, he was always an intelligence agent first and foremost. Crowley viewed the world through an ‘intelligence’ lens– and did so since 1913 at least, when he wrote this on a visit to Russia:

Though little agitation was apparent in the general atmosphere of the Fair [at Nizhny Novgorod] the shrewd, astute, subtle, linx-eyed, past master, analytical, psychic, eerie, hard-bitten Secret Service Chief could nose there was a certain discontent with the regime. [From Crowley’s notes to his poem The Fun of the Fair.]

Everything that Crowley touched was open to being used by Britain’s intelligence services. This seriously undermines the religious sincerity of the occult work Crowley undertook, and leads me to wonder why Anglo-American spooks were promoting Crowley’s brand of the occult in their home territory.

Not only were Anglo-American spooks promoting ‘Crowleyesque’ occult ideas; this promotion was sustained over the course of nearly seventy years and spread to the USA by way of NYC. From his base in NYC, British/Canadian spy William Stephenson set up what became America’s ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ in the early Forties; in the 1950s the CIA’s MK ULTRA project dutifully jumped in where Crowley’s ‘mind control’ work had run out of money.

How close was Crowley to William Stephenson’s NYC spy machine? Crowley earned his American spy-boots in New York City during WWI. He worked to discredit anti-war and anti-British sentiments by pretending to be a rabid, pro-German, pro-Irish Nationalist pundit. Biographer Richard Spence believes Crowley played a role in the sinking of the Lusitania, which was used to pull America into WWI. Crowley had mastered Stephenson’s bag of tricks when ‘Intrepid’ was still a boy in school.

I suggest, readers, that the genesis of organizations like the OSS and CIA lies in the careers of Aleister Crowley and like-minded men. Seeing as the entire world is, in one way or another, suffering from the consequences of these mens’ choices, I believe it’s worth our time to reexamine what Crowley was doing.

In this post I’ll put forward that Crowley’s mind-control tactics were drawn from the “system of control” first devised by Adam Weishaupt. Crowley paired Weishaupt’s system with Edward Kelley’s tactics for exploiting the power of belief. I’ll then look at how Crowley’s tactics at Cefalù tally with Philip Zimbardo’s observations on “social influence”, as well as Amy Siskind’s and Daniel Shaw’s observations from their time in cults.

While Crowley had a shockingly sophisticated understanding of mind-control techniques, he hadn’t quite figured out who were the best targets for recruitment– Crowley had a lot of disillusioned followers, and by the time of his death only Jack Parson’s Los Angeles chapter was still on good terms with “The Beast”.

Finding the right target is important. My suspicion is that a large part of the MK ULTRA project aimed at identifying good targets for control, or encouraging the formation of more good targets. That’s where Crowley struggled, and I’ll be looking at the work of John W. Gittinger and his Personality Assessment System in the future.

Right now, let’s get on with Crowley and what he learned from the abortive ‘Illuminati’.

Throughout history, many intelligence professionals have been interested in the occult; by ‘occult’ I mean practicing magic and employing ‘secret knowledge’ to bring about their own will. I believe that the reason for this dual-interest is because both the occult and espionage are about establishing “systems of control”, they’re a natural pairing.

I wrote about “systems of control” while exploring Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s work on mind control. As a quick reminder, here’s how Zimbardo defines that phrase:

The behavior of large numbers of people must be managed efficiently. For this reason, persuaders develop “systems of control” that rely on basic rules and roles of socialization and that impart a sense of belonging. When interaction among people is restricted to interchange between their social roles, however, it becomes easier for ethical, moral, and human concerns to take a back seat. [From On Resisting Social Influence, with Susan Andersen]

Running an intelligence agency requires controlling large numbers of people; people who may not always feel it’s in their interest to cooperate with their intel handlers. Cults, secret societies and criminal organizations all face this same organizational problem– it’s not enough to collect information, a leader must have reliable minions to act on the information. The intelligence community’s ‘cooperation’ problem has been around a long time.

One way to get around this problem is to recruit people who are predisposed to identify with authority or who are naïve about the world and their own interests. Another way around is to collect ‘dirt’ on one’s followers, so that they can be blackmailed into obedience if necessary. Bearing this in mind, I’m going to provide a quote from Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones, which deals with the papal suppression of the Jesuits (1773) and the founding of the Illuminati:

The significance of the Illuminati lay not in its political effectiveness (it existed a little more than eight years), but rather in its method of internal organization. In borrowing freely from both the Jesuits and the Freemasons, Weishaupt created an extremely subtle system of control based on manipulation of the passions. Borrowing the idea of examination of conscience from the Jesuits and sacramental confession from the Catholic Church to which the Jesuits belonged, Weishaupt created a system of “Seelenspionage” that would allow him to control his adepts without their knowing that they were being controlled…

Weishaupt had not just issued a manifesto calling for revolution, he had created a system of control that would create disciplined cells which would do the bidding of their revolutionary masters often, it seemed, without the slightest inkling that they were being ordered to do so…

Weishaupt took the idea of examination of conscience and sacramental confession from the Jesuits and, after purging them of their religious elements, turned them into a system of intelligence gathering, spying, and informing, in which members were trained to spy on each other and inform their superiors. Weishaupt introduced what he called the Quibus Licet notebooks, in which the adept was encouraged to bare his soul for the inspection of his superiors…

Weishaupt created a technique of what came to be called “Seelenspionage,”or spying on the soul, whereby the superiors in the Illuminati could get access to the adept’s soul by close analysis of the seemingly random gestures, expressions, or words that betrayed the adept’s true feelings.

As part of the systematization of this semiotics, Weishaupt, not unlike Alfred Kinsey 150 years later, developed a chart and a code to document the psychic histories of the various members of the Illuminist cells. In his book on the Illuminati, van Duelman reprints the case history of Franz Xaver Zwack of Regensburg. In it we see a combination of the Kinsey sexual history, the Stasi file and credit rating all rolled up into one document whose purpose is control.

I was struck by the similarity between Weishaupt’s methods and the potential of the PRISM dragnet spying program; or government programs like the ‘Insider Threat Initiative‘. It seems that “systems of control” haven’t changed much since 1777. According to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666, Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, one of the first mystics Crowley studied was a protegé of Adam Weishaupt’s, Karl von Eckartshausen.

The Illuminati was an Enlightenment organization and therefore lacked an important element: the certainty and totality of God. After a few years Weishaupt began to quarrel with his aristocratic co-founder and the organization splintered. Later students of ‘mind-control’ recognized that Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ could be strengthened by exploiting the power of belief and investing the cult’s leadership with supernatural powers. Dr. John Dee’s occult writing was a natural place to look for inspiration; early in his career Crowley made a point of copying Dr. Dee’s writings during one of his trips to Oxford University.

Dr. John Dee (1527-1609) was part of Queen Elizabeth I’s espionage network; he was a mathematician and is credited with smuggling crucial navigation instruments out of Belgium which helped Her Majesty’s Navy remedy their ‘technology gap’. As he got older, he became more interested in Kabbalah and ‘controlling spirits’ through magical means. Dee came under the influence of a fraudster and confidence artist named Edward Kelley, who claimed to be able to talk to spirits and raise the dead.

The later half of Dee’s life was something of a tragi-comedy, as he loaned his library, his wife and his fortune to Kelley in exchange for Kelley’s cooperation in ‘talking with angels’ and uncovering magical secrets (and power). The product of this slow fleecing was a book titled Monas Hieroglyphica which is interpreted as a guide to Enochian Magic– invoking and controlling spirits.

Aleister Crowley saw the potential of fusing Weishaupt’s system and Kelley’s ‘Enochian Magic'; Crowley put this hybrid cult in the service of Britannia’s spooks at Cefalù.

Crowley’s Cefalù psyop was one that any student of cult dynamics would recognize: he established a system of control by encouraging isolating behavior and unhealthy power-worship. The ‘Abbey of Thelema’ appears to be his largest mind-control undertaking and his longest sustained media assault. It was also his most cynical abuse of his followers: Crowley began by recruiting two young, working-class, single mothers (Leah Hirsig and Nina Shumway) for his ‘sex magick’ and then used them to garner publicity through prurient media stories about orgies and bestiality.

The best reference I’ve found for details on the Cefalù cult is in the sympathetic biography of Crowley by Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. The following quotes come from this book and  show which control tactics ‘The Beast’ learned from Adam Weishaupt, as identified by E. Michael Jones.

She [Leah Hirsig] persuaded Crowley to review Shumway’s [Nina Shumway] magical diaries for the period. (All members of the Abbey kept such accounts to chart their spiritual progress.) Upon doing so, Crowley was “utterly appalled at the horrors of the human heart. I never dreamed such things were possible. I am physically sick– it is the greatest shock of my life. I had this mess in my own circle. It poisoned my work; it murdered my children.”

How Shumway’s alleged depravity ran against Crowley’s teaching is difficult for me to determine.

What about Weishaupt’s compromising  “sexual histories”? One of the chief purposes of the ‘Thelemic Abbey’ at Cefalù was to encourage acolytes to engage in compromising sexual acts; the more lewd the better– better for ‘magick’, of course! Crowley’s personal homosexual proclivities were very useful to that end; he offered himself to at least one male acolyte as a painted, cheap, old “New Orleans” hooker. (See the wall painting below!) The acolyte wasn’t interested.

You can’t talk about Aleister Crowley without talking about sex. Sex is useful to manipulators only if it can be diverted down the right channels. I’ll remind readers of Siskind’s observations on how sex was used by the Sullivanians:

The developement of my sexuality and my sense of myself as a sexual being was deeply affected by my experiences with Ralph Klein [a Sullivanian leader]. His voyeuristic comments and attitude impacted me in the sense that I believe I acted in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise. My early experimentation with sexual activity may or may not have taken place without his input, but I don’t think that my objectification of myself would have been the same. I was taught to distance my sexual feelings from my other emotions. Thankfully, I wasn’t always able to achieve this separation; but at certain points in my life I did have sexual encounters that were fairly impersonal. In the Sullivan Institute community, for anyone to become deeply emotionally involved with one person was considered dangerous.

Sex is useful for isolation if it can be divorced from its role in creating family. (Amy Siskind was also discouraged from having children by her Sullivanian manipulators.) Promoting promiscuous sex (sex that will never build strong relational bonds) or sex that will never result in offspring, is a great way of misguiding people’s natural tendency toward forming family groups and ensuring Nature will never pull the follower away from the cult.

Crowley’s particular take on using sex for isolation was perverting it towards power-worship by making it just another magical tool for self-aggrandizement. Crowley was interested in heterosexual sex and sodomy toward this end. You can read a sympathetic account of Crowley’s “sex magick” here:

Rejecting the prudish hypocrisy of the Victorian Christian world in which he was raised, Crowley identified sex as the most powerful force in life and the supreme source of magical power. Taking an apparent delight in outraging the British society of his time, Crowley made explicit use of the most “deviant” sexual acts — such as masturbation and homosexuality — as central components in his magical practice. At the same time, Crowley was also one of the first Western authors to taken an interest in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of Tantra… One need now only browse the shelves of any Barnes and Noble bookstore or surf the endlessly proliferating web-sites on the Internet to discover the secrets of Tantra, Sex Magick and Tarot, practice Tantra without Tears or even engage in Wicca for Lovers. [From Unleashing the Beast by Keith Urban]

The excerpt above comes from an essay which ends with this question:

Thus, one might well argue that we are now living in a kind of “post-orgy world,” after all the great social and sexual revolutions have broken every imaginable taboo. Yet this has left us in a strange “undefined state,” in which we are left questioning our very being. As Jean Baudrillard observes, “The orgy is over, liberation is over…After a culture based on prohibition…this is a culture based on the questioning of one’s own definition: ‘Am I sexed? What sex am I?’…Liberation has left everyone in an undefined state…This is why there’s so much love-making.” [121] After all, as Crowley seems to have asked himself in the end, what is there left to do after every forbidden desire has been indulged and every taboo transgressed?

I’ll answer Urban by reminding him that Crowley’s initial followers were single mothers who struggled to make ends meet. After the orgy comes old age and children– after the orgy comes vulnerability– and the desire for protection from the powerful, at any price. Crowley understood vulnerability before he even got started in Sicily; he knew that single, vulnerable, mothers would make reliable followers. There would be no point burdening himself with other mens’ children if Crowley didn’t understand how to exploit single mothers’ vulnerability.

Crowley’s Cefalù cult had anti-family ideology based on Freud’s theories which the Sullivanians would copy almost forty years later:

Crowley gave Hansi [Hirsig’s boy] and Howard [Shumway’s child]– whom he nicknamed “Dionysus” and “Hermes”– their first lessons in rock climbing. As they were mere toddlers, the ascents he chose must have been mercifully short. But the attitude Crowley displayed here was typical. Under his Thelemic creed, children were to be raised with full freedom to explore their talents and interests. Parents– especially mothers– were to refrain from fussing and over-protecting. The absence of hovering care, Crowley believed, could reduce the impact of the Freudian Oedipal complex, the remnants of which Crowley abhorred in himself.

Freedom from “fussing and over-protecting” can have different interpretations, so let me elucidate: little Hansi and Howard’s freedom from hovering parental care was ensured by Crowley, Hirsig and Shumway’s raging drug addictions. Conditions were so bad for the boys that when Hirsig’s sister came to rescue Hansi, she was given immediate custody on the grounds that the Abbey– a remarkably dirty place per Crowley’s orders– was unfit for children. At the time that Hirsig lost custody of Hansi, she was in Paris with Crowley on one of his many missions there.

Crowley understood how to isolate by attacking the family, immediate and extended, as early as 1907 when he tried to make a disciple of the Earl of Tankerville. The Tankerville incident occurred well before Cefalù, but it shows the depth of Crowley’s understanding:

For all his nervousness and vices, Tankerville was devoted to his family– a trait Crowley viewed as a sentimental encumbrance from which his student required extraction…

The Earl’s wife remained a persistent distraction, as were the children. It was essential that they [Crowley and the Earl] make a Great Retirement together. Crowley decided upon Morocco, by way of Paris, Marseilles, and Gibraltar. “I was of course in paradise,” Crowley wrote, “to be once more among Mohammedans, with their manliness, straightforwardness, subtlety and self-respect!” The trip was, plainly, a fulfillment of Crowley’s own desires, with the further hope that Tankerville, once forced into unfamiliar and rigorous conditions, would cast aside his Anglo-Saxon fears and prejudices. This was Crowley’s standard prescription for spiritual transformation… [From Lawrence Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt]

In the Middle East and North Africa, homosexuality is not exactly encouraged but they do turn a blind eye to it, so the appeal for Crowley is clear. If you’ve ever noticed how expatriates’ behavior can come unhinged in an alien culture, you’ll understand why Crowley would wish to take his aristocratic quarry there. The Earl was not a good choice for indoctrination and quickly saw through Crowley in Morocco.

If Crowley could convince a target to join the Abbey, then life for them in Cefalù was highly regimented– just as life was for the Sullivanians, Siddha Yoga followers and for people in many other cults:

The training time frame would be just over three months. There would be an initial three days during which one was treaded graciously as a guest with an orientation on Abbey life. After this, one was either to leave or set to work. If the latter choice was made, there would be a day of silence, followed by three days of instruction, and then the taking of a solemn Magical Oath to pursue the Great Work pursuant to the teachings of Crowley’s A:.A:.. The remaining weeks were devoted principally to the study of Crowley’s writings, as well as careful yogic and magical practice (all to be carefully recorded in a diary, which was to be left available for others at the Abbey to read, so that all could learn from each other’s work) and manual labor essential to abbey functions… As for recreation, the Thelemites frequently shocked the Cefalù natives by their preference for nude bathing.

Regimented lifestyles are part of what Zimbardo termed “Basic Training in Compliance”. Crowley established a greeting ritual which everybody at the Abbey had to use: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” followed by “Love is the law, love under will”. If you didn’t use this greeting, you were evicted from the building. :)

Crowley also exploited what Zimbardo identified as “saturation and detachment”: Acolytes at the Abbey were not allowed to read beyond Crowley’s teachings, if they were, they were punished. Crowley painted a special room with pornographic scenes that he wanted his followers to immerse themselves in and become desensitized to– more on that later. In a nutshell: Crowleyesque weirdness had to become the new ‘normal’ for Thelema devotees.

Much like Daniel Shaw’s experience with his guru at Siddha Yoga, Crowley was fond of shaming his followers with emotional, verbal and sexual abuse, which included making them eat goat dung for its ‘enlightening’ effect.

Crowley was a great believer in pushing his students to the limit through means including intensive verbal abuse: The more difficult the training, the more a student would gain– if he was worthy… [Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt]

Crowley’s experiment at Cefalù showed remarkably sophisticated mind-control tactics, especially considering he implemented them forty years before the Sullivanians or MK ULTRA; and sixty years before Zimbardo wrote about resisting social influence. However, Cefalù was always a control experiment, and an exercise in manipulating the British and American media, it was never a real spiritual movement. Cefalù was about controlling large groups of people.

To prove this point, I put it to readers that Crowley wrote a tourist brochure about his pornographic bedroom murals in the Abbey’s ‘Chamber of Nightmares’ as soon as the paintings were finished– before an innocent ‘spiritual explorer’ could have been sure that his painting ‘therapy’ even worked and before the Abbey had attracted anyone besides Crowley and his two concubines:

The brochure raptly assured potential visitors– from whom Crowley hoped to draw new disciples– that the purpose of the Chambre “is to pass students of the Sacred Wisdom through the ordeal of contemplating every possible phantom which can assail the soul. Candidates for this initiation are prepared by a certain secret process before spending the night in this room; the effect is that the figures on the walls seem actually to become alive, to bewilder and obsess the spirit that has dared to confront their malignity.” This secret process may have involved one or more drugs. Opium, ether, cocaine, heroin, laudanum, hashish, and anhalonium were in constant supply at the Abbey, and Crowley administered them to himself in the Chambre on an almost nightly basis. The brochure described, in the third person, the self-purgation that Crowley pursued in the Abbey:

“Those who have come successfully through the trial say that they have become immunized from all possible infection by those ideas of evil which interfere between the soul and its divine Self. Having been forced to fathom the Abysses of Horror, to confront the most ghastly possibilities of Hell, they have attained permanent mastery of their minds. The process is similar to that of “Psycho-analysis”; it releases the subject from fear of Reality and the phantasms and neuroses thereby caused, by externalizing and thus disarming the spectres that line in ambush for the Soul of Man.” [From Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt]

This is an example of one of Crawley’s “nightmare” paintings at the Abbey:

Perhaps Crowley’s methods inspired the “Hyper-Realistic Training TM” gurus at Strategic Operations Inc, too!

As I mentioned before, Crowley struggled to attract ‘tourists’, and by the end of his life his only followers were in Los Angeles– the followers he had the least personal contact with. (Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist with high-level intelligence connections, was head of the Los Angeles Thelema chapter for a while.) Despite this failure, Crowley never lost his friends in dark places.

Crowley’s system of control was of interest to British military intel agent Capt. M.E. Townshend, one of many British spooks to have dealings with ‘The Beast’. Later in Crowley’s career he would establish a printing press with Major Robert Thynne and Major J. C.S. Mac Allen, called the Mandrake Press, which was designed to publicise Crowley’s ideas. Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin can’t get his head around why the two Majors were interested in Crowley’s occult writing.(!)

Richard Spence, author of Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult opines that Crowley’s ‘real’ reason for being in Sicily was to spy on French and Italian naval movements at the behest of intel officer Everard Fielding, who I first mentioned in my post about “Hellish Nell“. Spence doesn’t attempt to explain Crowley’s relentless media courtship, which is only to be expected, as Spence (a Washington D.C. favorite) avoids investigating the parts of Crowley’s life which smell like occult-related psychological operations against the British public.

There are many people today who want to believe that Aleister Crowley was something more than an agent provocateur and an exploitative cult leader in His Majesty’s Service. They want to believe Crowley’s philosophizing has some merit beyond control, much like any cult member runs from the pain of disillusionment. I suggest that these desperate Crowley-believers have as much hope of finding spiritual enlightenment in the declassified MK ULTRA papers.

Throughout Crowley’s career (probably 1897 to his death), he used the cover of a magician or mystic during missions for British Intelligence– this fact doesn’t appear to cause contention. However, believers seem to assume that at some point the ‘cover’ transformed into a true religious quest and that Crowley’s courting the press– especially around his cult in Sicily– was something other than a psyop aimed at the Anglo-American public.

I encourage readers to consider the possibility that Crowley’s Cefalù experiment was conducted with the British public in mind; that Crowley’s scandalous media forays in the U.K. were no less ‘spooky’ than his scandalous media forays in NYC.

Nina Hamnett, a sort of ‘Roaring Twenties’ version of Tilda Swinton, was an acquaintance of Crowley and wrote this article for about him in 1934. Celebrities and similar scandals would ‘plague’ the Abbey during its short life in the early 1920s. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Even though the exploitative nature of Crowley’s undertakings has been well known since the 1930s, Crowley’s legacy was repackaged and marketed in the 1960s by cultural icons like Lucifer Rising creator Kenneth Anger, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Even today outfits like the BBC and the History Channel push Crowley, despite the fact that Emperor Aleister has no clothes. Is it possible that someone is still trying to mess with our heads?

Original 2011 cover of Wormwood Star, by Spencer Kansa.

In May of this year a revised edition of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron was released. This is a fascinating book because Marjorie Cameron was the wife, and probably the ‘handler’, of Jack Parsons. Parsons was Aleister Crowley’s chief L.A.- based acolyte; the L.A. Thelema lodge was the last to keep sending money to Crowley, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin. Jack Parsons had high-level military clearances and access to valuable jet-propulsion research: he was an intelligence prize.

Spencer Kansa’s book is the only biography of Marjorie Cameron I could find, though– on the surface– it’s unclear why Kansa should have any expertise on Cameron. Kansa’s research style is not professional, he’s sloppy about sourcing information. Kansa’s only qualifications appear to be extensive publishing contacts in the music industry (an industry with more than its fair share of Crowley promoters); and his interviews with “William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles and Herbert Huncke”. (Readers will remember that Allen Ginsberg gave Politics of Heroin writer Alfred McCoy a box of CIA TIME-Life notes on Vietnam’s heroin trade which became the basis for McCoy’s book, a book that protected CIA chief William Colby.)

Kansa’s ‘spookage’ doesn’t stop with Ginsberg.Wormwood Star is published by an outfit named ‘Mandrake Press’ in Oxford, which sounds like a homage to the ‘Mandrake Press’ Crowley set up with the mysterious British military figures Major Robert Thynne and Major J. C.S. Mac Allen.

Kansa’s connections are a two-edged sword for Crowley/Cameron fans: on the surface he should have no credibility as a biographer, but to my way of seeing the world, Kansa is likely to have an inside track because of his extraordinary access to ‘spooky’ characters. So if you’re willing to give Kansa’s information sources the benefit of the doubt, as I am, the next question is “Does Kansa write honestly?”

No, I don’t believe that Kansa writes honestly. Everything about this book is sympathetic to Crowley, Parsons, Cameron and Cameron’s promoter Kenneth Anger; everything about Wormwood Star preserves the cult of personality surrounding these people. Kansa doesn’t even try to incorporate Richard Spence’s research on Crowley’s intelligence connections, research that has been widely available for almost 15 years. Neither does Kansa examine Kenneth Anger’s ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ connections,  even though the congress has been a known CIA front for over a decade. Kansa’s neglect is easily explained by his resume, particularly because of the people Kansa was given access to interview.

Having said that, Wormwood Star provides a startling array of facts which, when they are extracted from Kansa’s sugar-coating, suggest that Cameron was an intelligence operative in American service, and possibly in the service of the U.K. and Israel too. Jack Parson’s trouble with security clearances and espionage investigations– trouble which eventually cost him his job– has its roots in actions taken by Cameron, his wife. Ultimately it was Cameron who organized the attempted release of sensitive jet propulsion information to the Israelis; it was Cameron’s weird trip to Switzerland which garnered spook attention; it was Cameron’s strange lefty friends and domineering personality which worried the FBI.

So who was Marjorie Cameron? She came from a small town in Iowa; she had a stable, if somewhat puritanical, family; and she was liked and respected by her classmates despite her ‘artistic’ nature. However, Marjorie was not well-adjusted and from as young as 14 years old she would sneak out at night for casual sexual encounters. Throughout her life Marjorie seemed unemotional about sex; something which would come in handy when WWII broke out and she became a spook for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

The JCS consists of military leaders who the US president appoints to advise him; in Cameron’s case that president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who cooperated with William Stephenson’s ‘irregular’ spy network, the British Security Coordination (BSC) to get rid of his critics.

According to Kansa, Cameron was the only woman working in a team of cartographers for the JCS. She was also given a posting at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, where William Alanson White’s successor, Winfred Overholser, was now in charge. Overholser was a collaborator with the CIA’s MK ULTRA project, and prior to that he worked with mind-control drugs for Roosevelt’s OSS during WWII.

At some point, the JCS realized that Cameron could be useful entrapping men with “pro-German” sympathies in Washington D.C.; it’s unclear if any of her missions produced useful intelligence. I’ll remind readers that the BSC was busy organizing ‘dirty tricks’ like honey-traps in D.C. at the same time, one such honey-trap was author Roald Dahl .)

After prostituting herself for the JCS, Cameron was given a job with Hollywood filmmakers creating war propaganda films in cooperation with the “Hollywood Navy”. If you want to know more about war-film propaganda and what would become the CIA’s MK ULTRA project, see my post on Carl Hovland and race riots.

According to Kansa, while making movies Cameron made friends with “strong union people who began to educate Marjorie about the military and the wider political ramifications of what was going on during the war”. I’ll remind readers that Roald Dahl got his introduction to the Roosevelts through Hollywood director Gabriel Pascal; Tinseltown in the 1940s seems to have well-established, and very elite, espionage connections. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising given William Stephenson’s investments in the movie business.

Thank you, Wormwood Star.

Not all of Cameron’s movie work was glamorous: she was given the job of washing GI uniforms that had been stripped from dead soldiers so that they could be used as costumes. At this time Cameron heard her brother had been injured in combat and she went AWOL to visit him, for which she was court martialed.

One might think that an AWOL/court martial would end Cameron’s association with the military. Quite the contrary, it opened up a new vista in her life. Suddenly, her father and brother both got jobs in California with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a highly sensitive military contractor, and Cameron was given an honorable discharge. Kansa states that Cameron never understood why she was given this discharge after the court martial.

I believe I do understand, readers, because not long after moving with her family to California, she shacked up with the JPL’s founder Jack Parsons. Parsons was a Thelema devotee and, according to Parsons, he had been corresponding with Crowley about a ‘magickal’ working with a new friend named L. Ron Hubbard. This working would invoke a special ‘sex-magick’ partner for Parson. (Parson’s first marriage was ‘untraditional’ and headed for divorce.) Perhaps Crowley made a phone call to colleagues in Washington after hearing about Parsons new Naval Intelligence friend?

Cameron says she was introduced to Jack Parsons by a friend from the Navy. Either way, Cameron, the Roosevelt honey-trap spook, appeared in the life of her dad’s new boss as miraculously as her dad’s new job appeared at JPL. Could a paramour with a dishonorable discharge have caused problems for Parsons’ high-level security clearances? I suspect so: an honorable discharge paved the way for Cameron’s placement.

Parsons met L. Ron Hubbard, a Naval Intelligence veteran a few months before Cameron came into Parsons’ life. As I’ve stated before, Parsons befriended Hubbard and took Hubbard into his magickal workings.Who was L. Ron Hubbard?

In the 1930s, prior to an obscure career for the Office of Naval Intelligence, L. Ron Hubbard was a student at George Washington University, where the Church of Scientology tells us his mentors were Dr. Fred August Moss and my old buddy, William Alanson White. White’s political beliefs inspired  the Sullivanian cult. According to information provided by Hubbard’s critic Caroline Letkeman, here’s a 1952 transcript of Hubbard explaining his relationship to White in the 1930s, when White was still superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s’ hospital (where Cameron had been posted in the early 1940s).

Parsons introduced Hubbard to Crowley via a letter, but Crowley seems to have taken an immediate dislike to Hubbard. (Competition?) Crowley’s disapproval didn’t stop Parsons from going into business with L. Ron. In retrospect Parsons and Hubbard’s company, Allied Enterprises, seems to have been a way for Hubbard to fleece Parson, who’d grown rich on military contracts.

L. Ron Hubbard would go on to found what is now called Scientology, an organization with uneasy links to US intelligence. (I suspect, readers, that Scientology is the psy-op ‘that got away’.)

According to Kansa, Cameron didn’t take Parsons’ ‘magick’ seriously until after his death, however, she did take on an important communication role between Parsons and Crowley. In 1947 it was Cameron who left for Paris on a GI Bill scholarship, with the dual mission of contacting Crowley on behalf of Parsons to explain his involvement with L. Ron Hubbard. (Crowley died before she could see him.) During this trip Cameron thought she was being spied on by NYT correspondent Arthur Krock: “Cameron began to wonder if the Pulitzer Prize winning bureau chief was tailing her for the government, suspicious of why the wife of an important rocket scientist was journeying alone to Europe.”

Cameron did not use the GI Bill money to study art, but instead “seemingly on a whim” went to Switzerland, land of spooks. Her time in Bern was not pleasant, as she saw secret service agents around every corner. Guilty conscience? When Cameron got home, she found her husband under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Commission, ostensibly because of his Communist friends back in the 1930s. (The ghost of James Angleton walks again.) Parsons was eventually cleared, got his security clearances back, and took a new job with Hughes Aircraft Company. But all was not well…

Cameron’s and Parsons’ marriage was ‘untraditional’ like Parsons’ first one; but now Parsons began to get jealous– he often didn’t know where Cameron was or who she was with. Cameron decided to travel to an artists’ commune in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which Kansa says was favored by US veterans of WWII. (I suspect that a large contingent of these “veterans” were OSSers– what other veterans didn’t have to work after the war?!) Cameron was bitter over the HUAC investigation into her husband; she had been vocal in her criticism of American hypocrisy since WWII, but now she began to make noises about emigrating to places where there was less injustice… like Mexico, or Israel.

Back home, Parsons fretted that his new boss, Hughes, was also spying on him. Parsons nervously began looking for a job in Israel, Cameron’s chosen land. Herbert T. Rosenfeld seems to have strung Parsons along with this: first asking for a proposal for a Chemical factory which went nowhere for Parsons, then asking the American to knock out a rough-draft for a jet propulsion development program. Cameron, now back in the US, did the leg-work putting together this second proposal; it was Cameron who gave the typist classified documents to prepare for the Israelis in late 1950. The typist alerted the FBI, who investigated Parsons again. This is what one FBI agent had to say about Parsons and Cameron:

Subject [Jack Parsons] seems very much in love with his wife but she is not at all affectionate and does not seem to return his affection. She is the dominating personality of the two and controls the activities and thinking of subject to a very considerable degree. It is the opinion if subject were to have been in any way willfully involved in any activities of an international espionage nature, it would probably have to be at the instigation of his wife.

The fallout from the Israeli job search (which never came through) made it impossible for Parsons to get a job Stateside and for a while he pumped gas to support himself and his wife. Needless to say, he’d come a long way from the jet-setting playboy.

 While Cameron was pushing her husband to emigrate to the Holy Land, things were developing at the CIA. In 1951, a few months after Parson’s Israeli FUBAR was discovered, the CIA created ‘the Israeli desk’ for James Angleton, which meant Angleton, a counterintelligence man, got first access to Shin Bet’s information on the Soviets– this would be an important tool for dealing with the CIA’s Soviet Division, which Angleton suspected had been captured by the Russians. I think it’s interesting that in the months following Cameron’s/Parsons’ near-leak, one of the nation’s top rocket scientists was shut down and our ally Israel’s hopes were dashed.

Why might US allies have been treated so harshly? In Richard Bennett’s 2013 book Espionage: Spies and Secrets, Bennett writes this about Angleton:

Angleton began his career in espionage in the wartime OSS. During his time in Italy both before and after the end of the war, Angleton developed a deep relationship with the with the leaders of the Jewish underground, who later became senior officers in Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Because of these ties, he entered the CIA with the clear understanding that he would head the Israeli desk.

I had heard that Angleton got into bed with the Mafia in Italy, but I had no idea that Mossad had roots in the post-war Italian mess– and a bloody mess it was, with communist partisans taking revenge on anyone they didn’t like while the Americans looked on. How does Richard Bennett know this about the Israeli desk? It’s hard to say because he doesn’t source that particular information, but Bennett’s work is ‘respected’ enough to be referenced in the CIA’s “The Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf“, so we can speculate.

Things never got better for Jack Parsons: by 1952 the case against him was dropped due to lack of evidence, but the struggle had ruined his career and his security clearances were never restored. He eked out a living making explosives for Hollywood movies. Cameron never gave up her dream of living in Israel, and convinced Parsons to move to Mexico before taking another crack at the Middle East. Before any of this could come to pass, Parsons died in a freak accident at his home laboratory. When Cameron heard of his death, she exclaimed: “Who will take care of me now? I don’t know how to make a living.”

The apparent insensitivity of that remark might be excused on grounds of something like shock; but her next move shows what a cold fish Cameron really was. Parsons’ mother committed suicide immediately on hearing of her son’s death (they were unusually dependent on each other), and when Cameron found out, her first concern was to remove three lbs of pot she’d stashed at her mother-in-law’s house to avoid it being confiscated by police. Don’t worry, Cameron got the pot out.

Right after Parsons’ funeral Cameron left for Mexico where she had a rendezvous with a mysterious British couple, Nancie and Bill Patterson, who were representatives of another U.K.-based cult called the ‘White Eagle Lodge’. ‘White Eagle Lodge’ had been founded by a spiritualist duo, a medium and her husband much like ‘Hellish Nell’s’ team, which cashed in on channeling the ghost of famous spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle. The Pattersons helped Cameron conduct one of Crowley’s ‘blood rituals’ and after two months Cameron returned to the USA, a fervent believer in Thelema and amongst the first Americans to experience UFO phenomenon, says Kansa.

Embracing Thelema did little to curb Cameron’s drug addiction or alleviate her money worries. In the face of shrinking options, she professed that she really was the incarnate spirit of Babylon that her late husband and Crowley had dreamed about. She began trying to beget a “moonchild” through liaisons between herself, her small band of white witch-followers and willing black musician “wands”. Cameron was desperately trying to prove her place as a high priestess of Thelema and drum up a living in the process; Crowley’s heir Karl Germer would have none of it. (I’m reminded of Peter Wright’s observation that the intelligence business is a great user of people.) Cameron sunk into penury.

Instead of letting Cameron in on the Thelema business proper, Cameron was made an initiate of the Silver Star, which was a way of putting her under Crowley’s faithful Cefalù desciple Jane Wolfe’s control– the idea being to keep Cameron’s madness from sinking the Thelema ship. It sort of worked, but Cameron continued to court the media with stunts like sending her ‘witches’ over to service Bob Hope sexually (which they did, according to Kansa). For my international readers, Bob Hope was an American entertainer famous for his ‘USO Shows’, or entertaining active-duty soldiers.

Out of money and out of friends, in 1953 Cameron drifted into the orbit of a Hollywood ‘maker’, eccentric and homosexual named Samson de Brier, whose home was like a dingy, art nouveau museum, stuffed with wannabe starlets of both sexes. One of these starlets was Kenneth Anger, who would later reinvent Crowley’s system of control for the 1960s audience, using Cameron as the face of his endeavour.

During the early 1950s, at the beginning of the CIA’s ‘Congress For Cultural Freedom’, Anger was busy making a name for himself in Europe by plying CIA-funded artists such as Jean Cocteau with homoerotic films. But by 1953, Anger was back in the States, flush with his dead mama’s money, flush with a ‘belief’ in Thelema, and looking for a muse like Cameron. Anger would cast Cameron and her witches in the campy film he made with de Brier, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a sort of culturally confused homage to Crowley. Anger would spent the following years promoting Cameron as the new face of Thelema throughout the US and Europe, which didn’t sit well with what remained of Crowley’s European followers like Karl Germer.

Anger’s Thelema take-over bid included high-profile media escapades using his contacts in the film scene, art world and especially the commercial music industry– the industry from which Spencer Kansa draws his connections.

Cameron’s, and Thelema’s, usefulness to the Western 1960s cultural revolutions deserve their own post, as does Cameron’s relation to the founding of Scientology and then her struggle against it. (Scientology is far more profitable than Thelema ever was.) I’ll conclude this summary of Kansa’s book by pointing out that Scientology’s stronghold is in Hollywood and that the BBC takes special interest in Scientology. Thelema’s most modern incarnation first prospered through the British music industry, and is still promoted by high-profile musicians today. Any comment, Langley, MI6?

Rap artist ‘Jay-Z’ promoting Aleister Crowley’s system of control.

P.S. Long-time readers may notice several shocking similaries between Marjorie Cameron’s life and that of William Donovan’s secretary and T.V. chef Julia Child. I encourage interested readers to check out my double-review of Julia’s autobiography and The Haunted Wood.

John Gittinger, the CIA’s personality profiling guru. Thanks, yikibook.com.

One of the weirder chapters in John Marks’ The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: the CIA and Mind Control is chapter ten, which deals with John Gittinger’s Personality Assessment System, or ‘PAS’ for short. Gittinger was a maverick psychologist who the CIA paid to identify the typical vulnerabilities of different personality types, for example, personalities that are prone to excessive guilt or anxiety.

The purpose behind Gittinger’s profiling was to provide a guide for how best to manipulate different sorts of people. Philip Zimbardo explores the way personal vulnerabilities are used for manipulation in his paper about ‘systems of control’ titled On Resisting Social Influences.

Readers will remember that a cornerstone to Adam Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ was cataloguing the compromising secrets and psychological vulnerabilities of his followers. The PAS is the CIA’s ‘sciency’ attempt at categorizing psychological vulnerabilities for more efficient exploitation– formulating Weishaupt’s system for mass-production.

The PAS is promoted by a dedicated organization, the Personality Assessment System Foundation; if you’re interested in reading more about how the PAS score is put together, the foundation provides some documentation here. Surprisingly little of this documentation was written by John Gittinger himself– according to Marks, Gittinger was the only person who completely understood the PAS and the CIA was never able to fully codify Gittinger’s system. This is how Marshall Heyman and  PAS Foundation summarize the PAS’s usefulness:

Its primary value lies in the fact that it readily lends itself to use as a tool for the prediction of behavior.

The general idea is that once the CIA has used the PAS to ‘get inside your head’, they’re able to anticipate how you’ll react to things. To ‘get inside your head’, the agency needs “observable behavior and/or psychological test data”. Much of Gittinger’s assessment relies on how the subject interacts with other people, which harkens back to Sullivan’s work developing Freud’s assertions about human psychology.

Readers will remember that one difficulty Crowley had setting up his ‘systems of control’ was identifying appropriate targets for recruitment: he would waste time, money and energy trying to convert people who were not psychologically receptive, Crowley’s attempt on the Earl of Tankerville is one good example. I interpret the PAS as the CIA’s attempt at patching this weak point in Crowley’s ‘system’.

I stress the word ‘attempt’, because while Gittinger’s system boasts a wide array of different personality classifications (64 basic ones!), there doesn’t appear to be much data to validate these classifications. I don’t want to give the impression that the CIA has found a magical key to categorizing people through the PAS. Just because much of the PAS was/is classified, doesn’t mean it works well. The PAS’s ‘secret’ nature only signifies that 1) the CIA spent a lot of money developing it and that 2) at some time important people within the CIA thought the PAS might work.

I find reading Gittinger’s description of his 64 basic personality classifications a bit like reading a horoscope, or a manual on how to cold-read for fortune-tellers: I could find aspects of myself in almost all of the 64 classifications. What I mean is that any classification given to describe you, or to describe people who you know well, will always appear to be insightful.

Here’s my simple description of Gittinger’s PAS rating: everybody’s personality lies naturally somewhere along three continua, [1] Internalized (i) / Externalized (e), [2] Regulated (r) / Flexible (f), [3] Role Uniform (u) / Role Adaptive (a). However, parenting and the environment can make people deviate from their ‘natural’ setting, for example, introverted people can become tension-filled extroverts, which Gittinger describes by making the switch from ‘i’ to ‘e*’. Any person’s PAS score will be a series of three letters modified by stars, e.g. ‘i*fa*’. Each combination is supposed to mean something different, an ‘iru’ is not the same as an ‘e*f*a*’ because of  differences between how the two people were brought up.

There is very little difference between how Gittinger describes many of the classifications, and no empirical evidence (that I could find) showing that these groups result from the conditions and motivations which Gittinger assigns to them. Coming at this system from a statistical/science background myself, it all looks very theoretical…

… And very political. Gittinger goes out on a limb to assign political orientations to different personality types. Adolf Hitler and John Calvin were ‘i*fa*’, highly “artistic” personalities. Gittinger also states that this same ‘i*fa*’ pattern allows “the most effective emotional relationships”. Gittinger believed that the ‘ifa’ or “artistic” personality types were optimal for American culture circa 1973. This is how Heyman describes the ‘ifa’ personality family:

- IFA, or self-centered, sensitive and socially active; an ‘artistic’ style

On the other hand, Gittinger says young communists and socialists tend to be ‘e*fa’, which Heyman describes as a ‘theatrical’ personality style. Gittinger opines:

Many young socialists and young communists come from this cluster; as they grow older, however, they lose much of their enthusiasm and dedication and devote more time to their individual interests.

I dare say Winston Churchill would agree. :)

Gittinger had no problem inserting his personal beliefs into the personality definitions either, he asserts this about the ‘i*fu’ personality:

The i*fu cluster includes people who live almost entirely on recalling and reliving their past lives as well as well-organized and well-ordered historians, who can reconstruct the past lives from minimal cues. Many biologists, bacteriologists, naturalists, and archaeologists are also found in this cluster.

Emphasis is my own. For readers who are less familiar with American culture, ‘past life regression’ therapy is supposed to deal with traumatic events in previous lives to make a patient happier in their current life. This idea was popularized by Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society in the 1870s; the idea gained even more traction in the 1950s amongst certain (unscrupulous?) mental health professionals.

In fact, Gittinger was something of a frustrated hippie. ‘if*u*’ personality types get a bad rap from the PAS ‘genius':

Drug addiction is common among members of this cluster because the if*u* needs artificial help to expand his fantasy productivity.

I discourage all readers from seeking a chemical creative fix! :)

I’m laughing as I write this, but it really isn’t funny, because the overarching premise of Gittinger’s analysis is to look for ways to manipulate and use people based on their weaknesses. Even if Gittinger was a poor scientist with confused ideas, what he produced was useful enough for somebody at the CIA to continue funding his long career. Irrespective of how effective the PAS really is, the system is evidence that the CIA wanted to know how to use people on an industrial scale. That’s really ugly, especially for an organization with a cult-like nature.

Gittinger’s assessments are preoccupied with identifying some of the same characteristics as those Amy Siskind noticed about people who are attracted to cults: religiosity (‘e*r*’ varieties, ‘if*’ varieties, ‘e*fa’ ,’e*f*u*’, ‘i*fa*’, ‘i*f*u’) and insecure competitiveness (‘era*’, ‘er*a*’, ‘e*ra’, ‘e*ra*’, ‘ef*a*’, ‘i*f*a*’, ‘i*f*u’). Gittinger also picks up (everywhere!) on the control tactics Zimbardo identified: Gittinger notes if personalities are prone to anxiety, self-doubt,  guilt or over-reliance on authority figures. He also theorizes about how different PAS classifications may be sexually vulnerable. My take-home is that Gittinger had a sophisticated understanding of ‘systems of control’ like Aleister Crowley did.

There’s something else ugly about Gittinger’s work: when you read through his descriptions of variations on the eight basic PAS personality groups, you’ll notice that a large number of variations relate to behaviors that are considered ‘pathological’ by mental health professionals. An awful lot of the ‘era’ classification are described as “psychopathic” or “sociopathic”. (What’s the difference? I suggest this explanation from Robert Hare). ‘ira’ and ‘iru’ personalities are “schizoid” or “autistic” and often become “schizophrenic”. ‘e*r*a’, ‘e*ru’, ‘e*fu’,  types tend to alcoholism or drug abuse; ‘ir*a’, ‘i*ra’, ‘ir*a*’, ‘ir*u*’, ‘ir*u’, ‘if*a’, ‘i*fa’, ‘e*r*a’ tend towards “narcissism“.

Regular readers know that I believe the behavioral patterns which used to be called ‘narcissism’ are useful for exploitative organizations. Fully 8 out of 64 personality types in the PAS are identified by Gittinger as ‘narcissistic’ or potentially narcissistic– that’s 13% of available classifications! (Narcissists are estimated to be only about 1% of the total population.) Why was the CIA so interested in identifying narcissism?

(In fact, there may be more ‘narcissistic’ personality types than just those eight, because definitions of ‘narcissism’ have changed over time. Gittinger describes other ‘pathological’ traits which sound like ‘narcissism’ in PAS classifications but which Gittinger doesn’t call ‘narcissistic’.)

All in all, Gittinger spends a lot of time ferreting out how to manipulate people who *are likely* to be suffering from mental illness or character dysfunction. Is it CIA policy to leach off the mentally ill and emotionally crippled?

In answer to that question, John Marks’ writing may be helpful. His chapter on Gittinger, a Navy man, is complimentary. To Marks, Gittinger represents the CIA blazing a new trail in the sciences. How was Gittinger useful? According to Marks:

Gittinger’s strange ideas seemed to work.With uncanny accuracy, he could look at nothing more than a subject’s Wechsler numbers [results from a standard 11-question IQ test], pinpoint his weaknesses, and show how to turn him into an Agency spy.

Marks (Bill Colby’s pet writer) stresses that the PAS system was used to evaluate how to manipulate ‘assets’, ie. people working with the CIA but not official employees of the CIA. However, Marks includes this footnote:

While Agency officials might also have used the PAS to select the right case officer to deal the the E [Externalizer] agent– one who would be able to sustain the agent’s need for a close relationship over a long period of time– they almost never used the system  with this degree of precision. An Agency office outside the TSS did keep Wechslers and other test scores on file for most case officers, but the Clandestine Services management was not willing to turn over the selection of American personnel to the psychologists.

The emphasis is my own. Did the CIA use PAS tests to identify case officers (or other employees) with personality characteristics that suggest reliability like narcissism? I strongly suspect that they did.

It’s ethically bankrupt and a social tragedy that a government agency would use the mentally ill for nefarious ends, like dragnet spying on American citizens; or extrajudicial drone killings; or torture. In the case of the CIA though, the story takes another twisted turn, because one of Gittinger’s CIA colleagues was David Saunders, who also worked at a company called Educational Testing Service, or ‘ETS’, as it’s known to millions of highschool students worldwide.

‘ETS’ prepares the College Board exams, such as the SATs (“Scholastic Assessment Test”, formerly “Scholastic Aptitude Tests”) that are necessary for admission into most of the USA’s top universities. Most students who wish to better themselves at an institution of higher education will take one of these ‘assessment’ tests, designed in part by Gittinger’s partner at the CIA. Educators ought to be feeling nauseous right about now, because it’s likely that *somewhere* every student has a record that is amenable to PAS testing; a record which is probably held by a CIA data storage company with an ETS contract.

I say that with some degree of confidence, because I have more than my fair share of experience working with ETS’s products. College Board tests are not good aptitude tests; they’ve admitted this themselves. Companies like The Princeton Review butter their bread on the fact that you can study for the SATs and improve your ‘aptitude’ score significantly– that shouldn’t be possible on a true aptitude test. Whats more, ‘learning to score higher’ on the ‘verbal’ test sections in particular is about learning to conform your interpretations and opinions with those of ETS test designers. So what is ETS really measuring? Is it mass, white-collar PAS profiling? Picking out people who channel their thinking to mimic that of authority figures?

Two years ago, suggesting that SAT scores might be used for PAS-type profiling would sound quite alarming. In light of what we now know about the NSA and the deviousness of the US ‘intelligence community’, I think that responsible universities and colleges ought to strongly discourage standardized testing of this nature. After all, as John Marks tells us, Gittinger would look for PAS data wherever he could get it.

Gloria Steinem and friend not credited, from Maria Shriver’s article at www.interviewmagazine.com. (Maria Shriver as in Arnie.) Photograph by Mikael Jansson.

I’ve taken to skimming the glossary of William Egan Colby’s autobiography, Honorable Men, for names which I wouldn’t expect to be there. As a final brief post before Christmas, I give you Colby’s words on “Gloria Steinem”, the eighty-year-old feminist extraordinaire and stepmom to actor Christian Bale.

Probably the CIA’s greatest impact during this period [early 1950s] was in the field of international front organizations. The Soviets had spawned dozens of international political fronts to influence and control labor, student, women’s, journalists’, cultural, lawyers’, and veterans’ groups throughout the world. To counter this effort CIA called back from OSS days or recruited new liberal activists like Tom Braden, Cord Meyer and a host of others, and put them to work organizing rival front groups. To operate in the international filed these men needed Americans fully qualified to speak for the various constituencies. In labor there was no question; the AFL-CIO was, if anything, ahead of the government in identifying the danger posed by the Soviet threat to free labor and in building an international movement of free labor unionists in opposition to the government- and party- controlled officers of the Communist countries. Over the years CIA never provided financial help to the AFL-CIO; the shoe was on the other foot as the movement did indeed watch carefully what was happening with foreign labor movements, and had plenty of access to the White House if something displeased them.

But in other fields, the Americans were disorganized or did not have the resources and capability for conducting a worldwide contest with the Soviet front groups. Thus, CIA found American leaders who could organize such movements, wanted to contest the false Soviet-founded fronts claiming the field, and saw no problem in receiving assistance for that work from a variety of anonymous donors and foundations serving as covers for the CIA. Gloria Steinem has been wrongly accused of being a CIA tool in her work with movements of this type. As she has replied, the CIA only helped her and others go to foreign political conferences, where she presented the kind of independent, spontaneous positions and image that is truly representative of America’s freedom. This kind of support constituted CIA’s “operation” in a number of fields, from the National Student Association to the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and it met and defeated the Communists with their own organizational tactics, different in that ours espoused and incorporated freedom as its key.

I’d often wondered where Francis Stonor Saunders got the idea to study CIA involvement in non-communist left groups; she published her book on this topic The Cultural Cold War in 2000. Colby told her, and anyone else who was listening, everything they needed to know back in 1978.  Have a very merry!

Just a little more liberal Hollywood and the CIA. ;) Thanks, imagecollect.com

PS. If you’d like to learn more about the old OSS liberal activists Colby et alia “called back”, check out my post on the bitter Julia Child, and her strange husband Paul.

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page outside Boleskine House in 1971. Boleskine is now a pleasant family home with no reported supernatural activity. Thanks, LePoint.fr.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Aleister Crowley and his ‘system of control’. In that post I mentioned how Crowley biographer Richard Spence avoids discussing parts of Crowley’s life that smell like psychological operations against the British public. (Spence is a favorite at Washington D.C.’s  ‘International Spy Museum’, a propaganda-stuffed tourist trap.) I’m going to elaborate on my observation with a review of a 2000 BBC documentary titled The Other Loch Ness Monster.

I’ll remind readers that the BBC was birthed from the same mother as America’s CIA: the fortune and contacts of international businessman and Churchill crony William Stephenson. I’ve written about the BBC and Stephenson’s efforts to undermine democracy in The Empire is Listening. As you can imagine, I’ve little good to say about this Crowley documentary.

The Other Loch Ness Monster is a highly sensationalized look at Crowley’s time in Boleskine House, a family home he bought on the banks of Loch Ness. The legend is that Crowley bought the home in order to conduct an Abramelin magic ritual in private, however from day one everyone– locals included– knew Crowley intended to ‘summon demons’ at Boleskine. Richard Spence stands out as a biographer of Crowley because he never examines Boleskine in his intel-savvy book Secret Agent 666, Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult– in fact, Spence barely mentions Boleskine even though the home was a huge part of Crowley’s religious facade.

Why not examine the Boleskine mythos, Prof. Spence? You provide an array of interesting information on Crowley’s cult mentor at the time, arms-dealer and Abramelin magic scholar Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Why not talk about what Crowley was doing when Mathers called him to Paris in 1899, just prior to Crowley selling Mathers out to the British Government? After all, Crowley’s doings at Boleskine are crowd-pleasers (and book-sellers); they offer supportive context for the spy work you say Crowley was doing in NYC during WWI; and they’re also what the music biz promoted so heavily during the Sexual Revolution.Why not talk about Boleskine, Professor?

I believe that The Other Loch Ness Monster answers my question to Richard Spence. The showmanship surrounding Boleskine house happened a couple of years after Crowley began studying the ‘systems of control’ devised by Adam Weishaupt and Edward Kelley. Boleskine, and its Kabbalistic demons, was an exercise in encouraging superstition. Systems of control like Crowley’s exploit superstition, as philosopher David Hume recognized in his essay Of Superstition and Enthusiasm. The BBC’s continued promotion of Crowley’s Boleskine stunt, and Spence’s reluctance to talk about the stunt, are evidence that the same control tactic which Hume recognized is employed today.

The famous 1766 portrait of Hume by Allan Ramsay. This was painted one year before Hume was made Undersecretary of State (British Empire), during which time he was given access to “all the secrets of the kingdom, and indeed, of Europe, Asia, Africa and America“. Hume was not just an ‘ivory tower’ philosopher.

Hume wrote his essay in 1742 as part of a larger work titled Essays Moral, Political and Literary. Here’s what he has to say about superstition and power-worship:

As superstition is a considerable ingredient in almost all religions, even the most fanatical; there being nothing but philosophy able entirely to conquer these unaccountable terrors; hence it proceeds, that in almost every sect of religion there are priests to be found: But the stronger mixture there is of superstition, the higher is the authority of the priesthood…

My third observation on this head is, that superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it. As superstition groans under the dominion of priests, and enthusiasm is destructive of all ecclesiastical power, this sufficiently accounts for the present observation.

(Readers should not assume that Hume is a friend to “enthusiasm” from these excerpts– he felt that the bad effects of “enthusiasm” were shorter-lived than those of “superstition”. I encourage everyone to read the full essay, it’s short.)

Recognizing superstition for what it is– softening the masses up for domination by authority figures– ties together some interesting threads in our current zeitgeist. ‘Encouraging superstition’ may provide a reason why American television is full of ‘ghost shows’ (some openly government-endorsed!); alien nonsense; and other mindless, sensational programming. The value of superstition for control may also explain Western leaders’ strange love affair with Islam.

Hume elaborates on his ideas about control by explaining how superstition can prey on personal vulnerabilities aggravated by stress:

As superstition is founded on fear, sorrow, and a depression of spirits, it represents the man to himself in such despicable colours, that he appears unworthy, in his own eyes, of approaching the divine presence, and naturally has recourse to any other person, whose sanctity of life, or, perhaps, impudence and cunning, have made him be supposed more favoured by the Divinity. To him the superstitious entrust their devotions: To his care they recommend their prayers, petitions, and sacrifices: And by his means, they hope to render their addresses acceptable to their incensed Deity. Hence the origin of PRIESTS, who may justly be regarded as invention of a timorous and abject superstition, which, ever diffident of itself, dares not offer up its own devotions, but ignorantly thinks to recommend itself to the Divinity, by the mediation of his supposed friends and servants.

Crowley wished to set up himself, or more accurately set up his masters, as such priests through Thelema. Sensational documentaries like The Other Loch Ness Monster also work to this end by encouraging superstition.

Crowley’s spectacle at Boleskine had at least two goals. Firstly, Crowley was infiltrating a prominent secret society/cult called ‘The Golden Dawn’, which was headed by MacGregor Mathers, who was Crowley’s mentor at the time. Mathers was translating The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage in 1899 (it was published in 1900), so Crowley’s attempt at conducting the Abramelin ritual was probably designed ingratiate himself with the Golden Dawn’s leader. Secondly, the rite gave Crowley an opportunity to establish himself as a ‘magickal’ authority in the eyes the British public. Crowley seems to have done everything possible to draw attention to his work while in Boleskine, including complaining to the police about the lack of local prostitutes (according to Kenneth Anger/Esquire’s Mick Brown).

The ‘Abramelin’ rite was supposed to conjure demons which Crowley would ‘convert to the light’ over the course of several months using the force of his personality. The ghost-story around Boleskine hinges on Crowley conjuring these demons but never fully converting them. One hundred years later the BBC is still promoting this ghost story and strains itself to weave Crowley’s antics into ‘Loch Ness Monster’ sightings.

The BBC strains itself. If you’ve got 29 minutes to waste, I encourage you to watch The Other Loch Ness Monster– it’s a textbook example of propaganda promoting superstition.

The writer/director duo responsible for this documentary, Charles Preece and Garry S. Grant, interviewed a number of Crowley’s ‘true believers’, including the U.K. head of the O.T.O. John Bonner and Crowley promoter Kenneth Anger, neither of whom provide intelligent criticism of Crowley’s stunt but instead feed the myths surrounding Boleskine. (The O.T.O., or ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’ was founded by German spy Theodor Reuss, who Crowley– depending how you look at it– either went into business with OR whose O.T.O. organization Crowley infiltrated.)

The thrust of The Other Loch Ness Monster is to portray Crowley as a misunderstood visionary who battled dark forces to bring humanity a “charter of universal freedom”. Sounds vaguely American, doesn’t it? Needless to say, there’s no examination of Crowley’s blatant hypocrisy nor mention made of the people he chewed up and spat out over the course of his career.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the documentary is how it treats Crowley’s relationship to MacGregor Mathers. Mathers was an arms dealer who supported revolutionary movements across Europe– revolutions which went counter to the British Empire’s interests. Many wealthy people in Mathers’ circle of occult contacts shared his revolutionary politics. According to Spence, the British government tasked Crowley with disrupting Mather’s revolutionary network inside the ‘Golden Dawn’ cult, which the Crowley did. Crowley was effective because he was able to win Mathers’ confidence, as Charles Peerce writes:

In his diary Crowley wrote: “As far as I was concerned, Mathers was my only link to the secret chiefs to whom I was pledged. I wrote to him, offering to place myself and my fortune unreservedly at his disposal. If that meant giving up the Abramelian operation for the present, alright.”

Half way through Crowley’s self-aggrandizing ritual at Boleskine, Mathers contacted Crowley asking The Beast to come to Paris to help him. (Paris would be the center of much of Crowley’s intelligence work.) For some reason, Mathers was in trouble– Crowley’s promoters rarely explain what type of trouble Mathers might have been in. Spence says that on July 15th 1899 a yacht carrying one of Mathers’ arms shipments destined for Spain was apprehended by the French with Aleister Crowley onboard. One month later, Crowley was still a free man: he bought Boleskine and moved in that November to begin the Abramelin ritual. Shortly thereafter Mathers called Crowley back to Paris; Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin says Crowley left for France on January 15th 1900 to ‘help’ Mathers deal with infighting amongst Golden Dawn leadership. By the end of 1900, both Crowley and Mathers had been expelled from the order, i.e. Mathers lost his power-base.

I believe that Crowley knew leaving for Paris would help his primary mission to take down Mathers. Crowley decided to travel south even though leaving the Abramelin ritual half way meant letting his priest-mask slip.

This is how Kenneth Anger, who made a hostile takeover bid for Thelema in the 1960s and 70s, describes what went on between Crowley and Mathers in 1899:

His [Crowley’s] master at the time, in the Golden Dawn, was in hot water over something and pleaded with Crowley to help bail him out. So Crowley dropped the ceremony, which was– you’re not supposed to do this. Once you begin something you’re supposed to follow through.”

I’ll point out that if Crowley was honest in his religious quest, then by breaking the Abramelin ritual he put ‘converting the forces of darkness to good’ on hold so he could help a buddy in Paris. Does that sound like a reasonable decision?

Kenneth Anger continues:

Interrupting a magic ceremony is a great thing. He [Crowley] later realized that he should not have gone to Paris, that he should have let his so-called master, whose name is Mathers, fall in his own shit, because, uh, finally he [Crowley] realized that he [Mathers] was a false master.

Anger smooths over Crowley’s awkward 1911 smearing of his one-time friend Mathers as a ‘Jacobite conspirator against the British Empire’ by claiming Crowley realized that Mathers was a “false master”. It’s unclear to me whether Crowley spent significant time at Boleskine after his Abramelin stunt was interrupted; Crowley sold the home in 1913. (Kenneth Anger lived in Boleskine for a period during the 1950s, shortly after meeting Marjorie Cameron back in the USA.)

Crowley’s unfinished ritual left Boleskine open as a dangerous portal to the spirit world, the BBC claims. The documentary goes on to suggest that this spirit portal explains many modern Loch Ness Monster sightings and is why bad luck dogged subsequent owners of Boleskine, such as the Russian-born actor George Sanders, who lost a livestock business based on the Boleskine property; and yet another Army Major, Edward Grant, who committed suicide in the house in 1960.

(1960 was well into Anger’s campaign to promote Crowley and Marjorie Cameron to cultural revolutionaries. Readers interested in MK ULTRA will remember Army Dr. Frank Olson committed suicide under the influence of LSD surreptitiously administered by the CIA in 1953.)

In fact, there’s something a little off about the suicide of Major Grant.  Charles Preece and Garry S. Grant interviewed Major Grant’s housekeeper, Anna MacLaren, who in the documentary rather dispassionately relates the story of finding the Major’s dog chewing on a fragment of the Major’s head. (He had shot himself.) Before she realised the bone was part of her employer’s skull, Ms MacLaren had found it strange that the dog had a treat at all, because the Major and his wife had a “huge refrigerator with nothing in it”. I wonder how much time Major Grant and his wife spent at Boleskine before he dramatically decided to shoot himself in Crowley’s old ritual-bedroom?

In the decade following Major Grant’s ‘picturesque’ suicide, Crowley’s legacy was given phenomenal media exposure. In 1967 The Beast was featured on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover and starting in 1968 Crowley was promoted by The Rolling Stones’ antics with Kenneth Anger. The Beatles and Stones were just a start– Aleister Crowley would make rounds through the Music Biz: Crowley was plugged by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page (also with Anger’s help), David Bowie, Sting (who revealed his Thelemic faith in CIA-banked Penthouse magazine), Ozzy Osbourne and more recently Jay-Z.

I’m not the only one to have noticed the music industry’s love for intelligence agent Aleister Crowley. Charles Preece writes: “Crowley seemed to have a special appeal to musicians, who saw themselves as the social rebels of rock.” However, Preece’s 29 minute documentary only gives a superficial examination of Crowley’s promotion in the “counter-culture”, mostly through flattering snippets of (then young) musicians Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Jimmy Page.

Anger’s promotion of Crowley via London’s music industry deserves a closer look. In the late 1960s Kenneth Anger gained access to popular British entertainers through his art-dealer friend Robert Fraser. Fraser was an Eton boy and son of a knighted banker; prior to his art career he had been working in the USA. (Doing what?) Fraser’s connections put Anger in touch with two of the most successfully marketed bands of all time, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

In the case of the Rolling Stones, the ‘evil’ version of the Beatles, Anger’s appeal was fostered by “witch” girlfriends: Marianne Faithfull for Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg for Keith Richards. (I encourage readers to read up on Marjorie Cameron and her ‘witches’ in California.) These women weren’t ordinary groupies; they had staying power and influence with the ‘lead men’.

I could write a lot about Anger’s involvement with the Stones and his film about Crowley’s ‘rebirth’, Lucifer Rising. Right now, I’ll just give a taster: Anger and his agent Marianne Faithfull.

Marianne Faithfull is a gal with intelligence connections. Her dad was a spook for the British who collaborated with Marianne’s mother’s family, a mixed Jewish/Austrian family, who lived (freely) in Berlin during WWII and helped socialist partisans during the war. Marianne’s mother was a dancer during the Weimar period; TheGeneologist.co.uk describes her career with a reference to the movie ‘Cabaret’.

Faithfull seems to have been Anger’s access to Mick Jagger, much like Marjorie Cameron became the link between her husband Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley. In 1967 it was Anger who gave Faithfull a freshly-translated copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which is supposed to have inspired the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. (I can hear the intel gears cranking: “We’ve got Mirra working on a potentially subversive Russian novel about the Devil. How can we use this in our ongoing Cold War operations? Somebody call Anger.” :) )

The irony of all this is that The Master and Margarita is damning of irresponsible spooks like Anger, Faithfull and especially Crowley. I encourage anyone interested to check out my posts Is the Devil a German?, Blitz Witch and Henry Wondergood. I’m told by readers that these posts changed the way they view the modern ‘American Empire’ and the Russian Revolution.

The final section of The Other Loch Ness Monster features interviews with Jimmy Page’s “old school friend” Malcolm Dent who looked after Boleskine for the musician until Page sold the home in the early 1990s. Dent and his friend, photographer Dougie Corrance, provide more lurid stories about the lingering effects of Crowley’s ‘magick’ and the ghostly encounters they had around Page’s Scottish home.

The Other Loch Ness Monster does not discuss Faithfull’s background; Anger’s background; nor Jimmy Page’s eventual disillusionment with Crowley. The documentary doesn’t provide anything like a critical analysis of the music industry’s role promoting Aleister Crowley from the 1960s-present. Instead, The Other Loch Ness Monster ends by taking a side-swipe at the current owners of Boleskine, who don’t wish to talk to the media or cooperate with the BBC’s superstition crusade. Through clever editing, director Garry Grant suggests to the audience that the current owner’s unwillingness is due to a misguided belief that ignoring ‘the problem’ will make Crowley’s demons go away. Charles Preece and Garry Grant even go so far as film one man with a heavy brogue declaring that he would never buy Boleskine, should it come on the market again… which ought to help keep future Scottish psy-ops within budget. ;)

“A lot of kids had dads in the war. But how many kids had their mom in the war? Especially as a member of the OSS and as a spy?”

It recently came to my attention that Ron Jeremy, the famous porn star, comes from an ‘Office of Strategic Services’ (OSS) family. The OSS was president Franklin Roosevelt’s secret spy network, which he used to undermine his political opponents.

Ron Jeremy talks about his mother in an interview promoting his porn documentary, ‘Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy’, which was directed by Scott J. Gill. (If that link ever dies, email me adotnolen@gmx.) Perhaps even more interesting than learning Jeremy’s mom was a spook, is that Gill edited out every mention of Ma Jeremy’s spook work from ‘Porn Star’ proper– the director only left snippets about Ma in the credits. Why might this editing have occurred? Let’s start from the beginning.

Roosevelt set up the OSS to assist a British spy ring run by William Stephenson, whose purpose was to undermine Americans whose political beliefs ran contrary to British interests or Roosevelt’s aims.

In other words, the OSS was Roosevelt’s way of partnering with foreign spies against the people who he represented as president.

The OSS organization was supposed to remain ‘deniable’, and did until the 1960s. According to Stephenson, the only reason that old OSS’ers (who were then working at the CIA) decided to talk publicly about the OSS was that Kim Philby’s defection to the USSR threatened to blow the lid on OSS schemes anyway. (See Stephenson’s autobiography A Man Called Intrepid.) Talking about the OSS might have been the first time that the CIA ‘took control’ by preempting classified leakage.

So what was the mother of Ron Jeremy– a porn start and porn industry promoter– doing for this band of traitors? Here’s the answer in Ron Jeremy’s own words:

R [Ron Jeremy]: About my parents in the war. I couldn’t believe that my mother being in the OSS, which became the CIA in the late-Forties, was cut from the movie. She was a lieutenant, a decoder, and a cryptographer. Because she spoke fluent German and French they put her right into the army. They gave her high-rank, incase she was ever captured. She fought the Germans, and my dad fought the Japanese. And what kills me is that was a credit. (laughs) It’s in the movie as a credit. I said, “Scott, what are you thinking? You had pictures of her in her lieutenant uniform; you’ve got my dad talking about her. What are you fucking doing?” He said he had no place to put it. And I said, “That’s my mom, you fucking idiot.”

I don’t follow Ron Jeremy’s career, but when I have heard him talk, he’s never struck me as the sharpest tool in the shed. However, even Ron can see that editing out a bombshell revelation like ‘The Most Famous Porn Star’s Momma was a Spook’ isn’t good entertainment tradecraft. I propose, readers, that not talking about momma might be good tradecraft of another sort.

The CIA, the daughter organization to the OSS, has some very unsavory relations with the pornography industry. This will come as no surprise to my readers in the former USSR and particularly East Germany, where older people will remember that ‘opening up to the USA’ also meant ‘opening up to pornography’.

The CIA has direct links to the Playboy Empire, as well as Penthouse magazine. In the 1991 incarnation of Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin, he recounts how a 1973 IRS investigation lead to uncovering Hugh Hefner’s and Bob Guccione’s patronage of CIA bank ‘Castle Bank and Trust of Nassau’. ‘Castle Bank’ was so heavily intertwined with CIA operations that the Agency quashed the IRS investigation on “national security” grounds. Hefner’s and Guccione’s CIA connections were then quietly ignored.

Why is the CIA interested in promoting pornography in the USA and in other places? Could it be that spreading pornography has something to do with spreading control? I’ve covered part of this topic already in The People vs Bob Guccione. Pornography is a useful political tool: way back in 1795 the Marquis de Sade recognized that pornography was a good way of diverting men’s excess energy, something that was “indispensable to the mechanics of republican government”.

De Sade wasn’t content with heterosexual pornography either:

It has been said the intention of these legislators was, by dulling the passion men experienced for a naked girl, to render more active the one men sometimes experience for their own sex. These sages caused to be shown that for which they wanted there to be disgust, and to be hidden what they thought inclined to inspire sweeter desires; in either case, did they not strive after the objective we have just mentioned? One sees that they sensed the need of immorality in republican matters.

Why does de Sade think that revolutionary legislators would want to promote homosexuality? (Homosexuality is what’s important to him, not lesbianism, even though de Sade was no stranger to lesbianism in his writing.) Historically, people interested in social control have had a marked interest in homosexuality and promiscuousness (multiple, short-term sexual partners).

I’ll remind readers that the CIA in particular is eager to hire from the LGBT community. The LGBT community is already overrepresented in the US military, and therefore is probably overrepresented in the intelligence community as well. I haven’t found a good explanation for this overrepresentation, however, it may be worth noting that John Gittinger’s work for the CIA shows that the Agency is interested in identifying sexual weaknesses in ‘persons of interest’ which can be exploited. These ‘persons of interest’ include the CIA’s own regular officers/ employees.

What makes something a ‘sexual weaknesses’? LGBT activists have cast doubt on homosexuality’s usefulness as a blackmail tool; I agree with these observers, there have been too many famous LGBT spies through history to suggest that homosexuality would sink a spy’s career. I doubt that the ‘Lavender Scare’ in Washington D.C. was about a mindless desire to persecute the LGBT community, either. I suspect that the ‘Lavender Scare’ was motivated by a realization that the Soviets– or other actors– were using a psychological tool that US counterintelligence wasn’t wise to.

What might this psychological tool have been? According to Gittinger’s personality assessment work– which spanned the ‘Lavender Scare’ during the 1950s-60s– the CIA was interested in identifying self-centered sexual activity like promiscuity and masturbation, rather than homosexuality on its own. Gittinger’s work suggests that the intelligence community was only interested in homosexuality in as far as homosexuality is related to promiscuity.

In fact, Gittinger’s personality assessments make very little mention of homosexuality at all; Gittinger wanted to know whether the person under assessment related to their sexual partner, or if sexual energy was spent on “autoerotic” and “autosexual” behavior. As an example, here’s Gittinger’s description of an ‘e*fa’ personality:

He will react very much against autosexualilty by becoming extremely active in heterosexual relationships in spite of the fact that he is not inclined to become involved, in the reciprocal sense, of efa or the i*fa, with his partners.

And here’s Gittinger on an ‘iru':

Unlike the e*ru, however, the iru is not active or aggressive in taking material things or in any interpersonal sexual activity. While the e*ru may rape with little awareness of the object– he may be guilty of sexual assault of an aged woman or necrophilia– the iru is more prone to compulsive masturbation.

My point is that the CIA isn’t bent on shaming queers or cross-dressers. The CIA is interested in anyone who shows a tendency towards self-centered sexual behavior, which encompasses promiscuity and ‘autoerotic’ activity. Why? Because promiscuity and autoerotic behavior are isolating. Both of these forms of sexual behavior make it harder for the sufferer to form strong, lasting relationships with other people– including the strongest relationships of all, that of family.

Promiscuous people are vulnerable people, it’s harder for them to develop and maintain the protective influences of family. The leaders of the Sullivanian cult understood this and that’s why they encouraged people who they wanted to control, like Amy Siskind, toward promiscuity. Plenty of powerful people have recognized that promiscuity leads to vulnerability and that vulnerability opens people up for control, I encourage interested readers to check out my post on Aleister Crowley’s System of Control.

How does promiscuity isolate people? Promiscuity discourages mature attitudes to sex; it keeps a person from developing balanced, healthy attitudes toward themselves and other people. Promiscuous sex is a “me, me, me” activity, it’s about searching for something that makes ‘me’ feel good. (Or what one thinks will make one feel good.) Promiscuous sex is more like masturbation than sex, which brings me back to porn…

Using pornography and promiscuous sex have something in common: the other person, the person in the picture, isn’t really important– they’re just objects which aid sexual gratification. Objectification of people is unhealthy in any situation, but pornography is particularly destructive if using it becomes compulsive so that intimacy with a real partner becomes difficult– ‘porn addiction’ is a problem, just like addiction to gambling is a problem. I suggest that it’s particularly problematic for young men– who are just developing self-control, critical thinking and attitudes towards sex– to be exposed to exploitative sexual material that objectifies sexual partners.

What about Gill’s documentary on Jeremy, does Gill address pornography’s usefulness for control? No, it doesn’t. In Jeremy’s own words:

The main thing about it is that it [Porn Star] put a nice face on the world of porn. The John Holmes documentary didn’t put a very good face on the business. But this did. One critic from Film Threat made a really nice comment, saying that after seeing those, you didn’t want to watch porn; you felt guilty. Then you watch Ron, and you enjoy seeing a porn film. And I had no real skeletons in the closet, other than the porn. I knew I had no history of drugs, abuse, beating people up. You know? Just a nice, Jewish boy from Queens; so I figured what the hell.

“Just a nice Jewish boy from Queens”. Ron Jeremy is more than that, readers, as he explains a few minutes later in the same interview:

R [Ron Jeremy]: It’s [his mom’s spook connections] what puts me in common with George Bush, Jr. Both of our parents were in the OSS/CIA. And, I went to high school with the head of the CIA, George Tenet. There’s a big article about that in the Queens Tribune; about how we both went to Cardozo High School. We were in the same class. So, anyway. In the DVD, if you watch the extra scenes, in one of those scenes my dad does talk about my mom and the war. So that’s a little different. When people first see the DVD they say, “Why weren’t these extras in the movie?” Everyone has said that about those ten extras. “Deleted scenes? What the fuck was he thinking?”

Most people reading this post will remember that W sold a few wars using rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy”. Ron Jeremy, and his industry cohorts, sell pornography using rhetoric like “freedom of speech”, “love” and “liberation”. Western history and philosophical tradition show us that pornography is about repression and control.

Daniel Shaw on exploitative leaders: “when taking, they are understood to actually be giving.” (IJCS Vol. 5 2014) Movie Poster from ‘The People Vs. Larry Flynt’, a film equating pornography with freedom of expression.

I doubt Ron Jeremy is aware of his place in the system. Another highlight from his interview with Tastes Like Chicken:

I had a cousin who died in a war. He got shot, so they gave him the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor. I showed it to Scott, but he didn’t use it in the film. That’s a great story on its own. That’s a whole documentary in itself. And I had another cousin who had to change his religion to become a lieutenant. He was Jewish, but you had to be Christian to become a lieutenant. He died as a hero under the cross. The relatives exhumed the body, switched him back to a Jew, and buried him under a star. So a lot of that stuff didn’t make it in there.

Jeremy’s opinion about his cousin’s religious persecution is interesting, seeing as when he aired this grievance, Jeremy was just about to tell us that his Jewish mother was made a lieutenant. (Is there more to that story, Ron?) Jeremy never opines– in this interview– on why a “fat, short, hairy bastard” was able to make a career in pornography.

Scott J Gill edited out Jeremy’s family history because drawing attention to Jeremy’s spook connections gets uncomfortably close to the intelligence community’s role in the porn business. Talking about Ma Jeremy is likely to raise questions such as “Why are spook-sorts involved in porn?” and “Is porn some type of soft-power tool?”

Scott J Gill, and the folks backing his career, really don’t want people like you and I asking those questions. Take home: Buy porn and help support your buddies in Washington D.C.!

Thank you, Time.com.

For the last few days I’ve been reading Bill Landis‘ biography of Kenneth Anger; the book purports itself to be an unauthorized biography and apparently Anger ‘lawyered up’ when he heard Landis was pursuing the project. Needless to say, the book was published to critical acclaim in 1995 and is largely complimentary of Anger. This Buffalo News review is splashed across the book’s back cover:

 “As good a biography as we’re likely to get of an artist who cherishes the mystery he as created of his life.”

If that sounds a little tepid to you, Buffalo News had good reason. While Landis clearly made an effort to interview Anger’s family and not-so-enthused acquaintances like Bruce Byron, there is surprisingly little context given to Anger’s story. Bill Landis was an Air Force brat who in the 1980s left Wall Street to become a porn star under the pseudonym ‘Bobby Spector‘. In the 1990s Landis ‘went respectable’ by documenting the sleazy underbelly of NYC’s film scene in publications like The Village Voice, as well as hosting exploitation film screenings across the United States.

The uncomfortable fact is that during the period 1947-1968, Kenneth Anger was everywhere the CIA was. In the early fifties, Anger courted the CIA-funded Jean Cocteau in Paris while Cocteau frontlined for the CIA’s ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’. In the mid Fifties, Anger investigated/promoted Crowley’s Cefalù sex cult with Alfred Kinsey, just as the CIA was reviving Crowley’s ‘system of control’ research through MK ULTRA. In the mid-to-late 1960s, Anger pushed LSD use and exploited San Fransisco’s demimonde just like MK ULTRA’s George White had for his spy research.

It’s not hard to notice the overlap between Anger’s work and the CIA’s; I leave it to readers to surmise why Landis failed to do so. MK ULTRA and the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ are both well-document CIA  programs: the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was known to be a CIA front since at least 1978 when CIA head William Colby outed the congress along with Gloria Steinem in his autobiography. The MK ULTRA/LSD connection in San Fransisco has been widely recognized since 1979, when John Marks published his iconic book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

In this post, I’m going to add the historical context to Anger’s early career in Europe, New York City and San Fransisco; the context that Bill Landis should have included in his– otherwise– reasonably good book on Anger. This context covers two aspects to Anger’s career: 1) his ‘rise’ to the European film scene in the early 1950s and 2) Anger’s association with Kinsey and how both Kinsey and Anger’s work paralleled George White’s LSD/prostitution work for the CIA.

Ken Anger and ‘Operation Congress’

Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer) first ‘got noticed’ as an underground film creator with his homoerotic short ‘Fireworks’ (1947), in which an Anger-like character turns tricks, then finally gets beat up/raped by a bunch of burly sailors. ‘Fireworks’ is widely recognized as the film which opened up gay pornography to a more main-stream audience. You can watch it on Youtube if you want to.

What interests me about Anger’s film was that it caught the eye of Amos Vogel (born Vogelbaum), a NYC transplant by way of Israel, whose family left Austria after the Anschluss. [Correction, Vogel wanted to go to Israel, but stayed in NYC instead.– a.nolen] In October 1947, one month after the CIA was founded, Vogel founded Cinema 16, an ‘underground’ film distribution network. Vogel contacted Anger about ‘Fireworks’, according to Landis, and ‘Fireworks’ was among the first films promoted by Cinema 16.

‘Catching the eye of Cinema 16′ appears to have launched Anger’s career: it sent him to Europe; got him a Ford Foundation grant; and gave him street cred in San Fransisco during the later 1960s. Cinema 16 also gave him important contacts– in 1962, while living in NYC, Anger was housed by an old friend from Cinema 16, Marie Menken, who was then working for CIA-front TIME magazine “in the cable room taking communications from overseas”, says Landis. More on her later.

Cinema 16 played ‘Fireworks’ publicly for the first time in 1948 at the Los Angeles Coronet Theater; the film got favorable reviews from Lewis Jacobs in Hollywood Quarterly. Cinema 16 and Hollywood Quarterly seem to have had a symbiotic relationship: HQ ran a gushing introductory piece on Cinema 16 written by Cinema 16’s founder Amos Vogel.

Amos Vogel, Anger’s ticket to intelligence work.

Hollywood Quarterly (1945-1957) was financed by UCLA and featured the writing Theodor Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School which, like Vogel’s family, left Europe when the political winds turned against them. Academics from the Frankfurt School would go on to work at the OSS and later receive CIA largess. (See Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture By Chris Robé.) Hollywood Quarterly was amenable to reinventing itself to fit the CIA’s anti-Stalin leftist politics and purged itself of communist-smelling contributors in 1951. (See Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal by Saverio Giovacchini.)

What was Hollywood Quaretly’s mission? The University of California Press says this about its publication:

Writing Just After the end of World War II, the editors of the Hollywood Quarterly posed the following question: “What part will the motion picture and the radio play in the consolidation of the victory, in the creation of new patterns of world culture and understanding?”

None of the information I’ve presented above proves that Hollywood Quarterly or Cinema 16 were CIA fronts, it only proves that they acted like CIA fronts. Unfortunately for the legacy of Kenneth Anger, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was a CIA operation beyond question, and Cinema 16 propelled Anger onto Congress-frontman Jean Cocteau’s lap.

In 1948 Cocteau hosted the Festival of Damned Film in Biarritz, France. Fresh from his Cinema 16 success, Anger sent Cocteau a copy of ‘Fireworks’, which Cocteau adored and gave his ‘Poetic Film Prize’ at the festival. Cocteau’s enthusiasm eventually lead Anger to move to Paris in 1950.

Jean Cocteau was a practical man. When Paris was under German occupation, he cooperated with the Germans. When Paris was under American occupation, he cooperated with the Americans. In her book on the Congress of Cultural Freedom (The Cultural Cold War, 2000), Francis Stonor Saunders details Jean Cocteau’s work for the CIA promoting the anti-Stalinist left across Europe.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom, or ‘Operation Congress’ as Saunders calls it, really started in NYC in 1949, with a meeting of anti-Stalinist leftists at– of course– the luscious Waldorf Astoria hotel. The CIA’s operatives were setting up the Congress during 1950– when Anger moved to Paris– and by early 1951, the Congress announced that Jean Cocteau would be among its keynote speakers at its first festival in April 1952. Music from Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was also on the CIA’s playbill.

Kenneth Anger’s antics with his supporter Jean Cocteau spanned the period 1950- Fall 1953. Anger hung out with Cocteau while Cocteau was negotiating with CIA representatives. During this time, Cocteau and Anger would scandalize Parisian audiences with a production of Igor Stravinsky’s/Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Oedipus Rex– the production was scandalous because Cocteau dared show his face so soon after collaborating with the Nazis. Judging from a few clues in Landis’s biography, Anger’s antics with Cocteau/Stravinsky presaged the CIA’s antics with Cocteau/Stravinsky by a couple of months.

The ever-entertaining Jean Cocteau.

Anger spent two periods in Paris, 1950-mid 53 and late 1955-58, but his artistry failed to impress the more established French cultural scene both times. By 1958 biographer Landis says Anger’s reputation in France was on “tenuous ground” because he was “a gauche American with a reputation for pop iconography”. Many Americans who worked with the CIA’s heavy-handed Congress eventually drew ire from the French, as Saunders documents in the chapter titled ‘Cette Fête Américaine’:

Diane Josselson [wife of a prominent Congress organizer Michael] remembered the Paris of this time as brimful with anti-Americanism, a “Yanqui Go Home” mentality everywhere: “The people one met weren’t really like that, but they did have an idea that the typical American was gross.” Many Americans were irked by this ungenerous response to their largess. “I could get quite distressed at Europeans if I allowed myself to,” confessed C.D. Jackson.

I ask readers to remember the name C.D. Jackson.

During Anger’s second Paris stay in 1958 he entered his Hollywood-shot film starring Thelema-promoter Marjorie Cameron, ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’, into the film competition hosted by the World’s Fair in Brussels– a venue where Soviet and American artistic offerings went head-to-head. Anger’s ‘Pleasure Dome’ lost because, Landis says, the Soviets had stacked the judges. Anger’s friend from Cinema 16 and the CIA-funded TIME magazine, Marie Menken, also attended the ‘stacked’ film competition in Brussels.

Why was the lady who handled TIME magazine’s international cables at a film festival? Because her superior at TIME, C.D. Jackson, was also a Congress for Cultural Freedom organizer.  Anger’s performance at the Worlds’ Fair had important culture-war implications. Here’s what Saunders has to say about C.D. Jackson at TIME:

In the early 1950s, one man alone did more than any other to set the agenda for American cultural warfare. As president of the National Committee for a Free Europe, and later, special adviser to Eisenhower on psychological warfare, C.D. Jackson was one of the most influential covert strategists in America… Graduating from Princeton in 1924, ‘C.D.’ joined the family firm and travelled extensively in Europe, cultivating contacts which would provide a valuable resource during later years. In 1931 he joined Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire as an advertising executive. During the war, he was one of America’s leading psychological warfare specialists, serving as deputy chief for the Office of War Information Overseas, North Africa and Middle East, and then deputy chief of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD)  of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which was under Eisenhower’s command.)

After the war, C.D. returned to Time-Life Inc. where he became vice-president of Time. He was an early activist in Allen Dulles’s New York crowd, one of the Park Avenue Cowboys. Then, in 1951, he was invited to take part in a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services. This led to a job as an ‘outside’ director of the CIA covert operations via The Truth Campaign and the National Committee for a Free Europe…

When C.D. Jackson wasn’t doing all that, he found time to be on the board of the United Negro College Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of New York!

Psychological warfare expert Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson.

My point is, readers, that Ken Anger had some surprisingly well-placed friends and a knack for knowing what the CIA is interested in, then inserting himself in the middle of it. It’s almost as though Ken Anger was an Agency asset himself…

Going to San Fransisco?

I’ve covered a period in Anger’s life stretching between 1947-1958 in the first half of this post. For the next half we need to return to 1947 when Dr. Alfred Kinsey contacted Anger wanting to buy a copy of ‘Fireworks’ for his ‘sexual history’ collection. Kinsey would become a father-figure to Anger.

I first referenced Kinsey in my post about Aleister Crowley’s System of Control, in which I quoted E. Michael Jones on Adam Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ for his organization ‘The Illuminati':

As part of the systematization of this semiotics, Weishaupt, not unlike Alfred Kinsey 150 years later, developed a chart and a code to document the psychic histories of the various members of the Illuminist cells. In his book on the Illuminati, van Duelman reprints the case history of Franz Xaver Zwack of Regensburg. In it we see a combination of the Kinsey sexual history, the Stasi file and credit rating all rolled up into one document whose purpose is control.

Alfred Kinsey was a spiritual father to Anger; they shared an interest in Aleister Crowley, but Kinsey thought Crowley was a fraud– according to Landis, Kinsey was only interested in getting his hands on Crowley’s sex diaries for his ‘sex history’ collection, which provided the impetus for Anger’s and Kinsey’s pilgrimage to Cefalù in 1955. (Did Kinsey think the diaries were still there?!) After Kinsey’s death in 1956, Anger would describe himself as an archivist, “a volunteer working for the Kinsey Institute”. Anger’s affiliation with the Institute would certainly help him in 1965, when San Fransisco police picked him up on suspicion that he had made a snuff film, according to Landis: “The Kinsey Institute shielded him, classifying him as a freelance gatherer of sex films.”

Kinsey’s methods for growing his ‘sex history’ collection were strikingly similar to MK ULTRA agent George White’s methods for growing his sex and drug knowledge: working with local police to exploit the demimonde.

George White was an old OSS man who worked in the New York Police Department Narcotics division; he’d wanted to join the CIA prior to 1952 but powerful enemies, including J Edgar Hoover, had stymied his career. When Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s ‘Technical Services Staff’ (TSS) division, approached White in 1952 White agreed to help the CIA test drugs on unwitting, marginalised people who White knew from his drug work in NYC. This is how an anonymous TSS source describes White’s test subjects to John Marks: “He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs.”

George White. Thank you, sfweekly.com.

In May 1953, around the time Anger left Paris and returned to Hollywood to make ‘Pleasure Dome’, White set up the first Greenwich Village (NYC) drug-test den for the CIA. Prostitutes would lure men to the dens, drug them with substances including LSD and then CIA guys would observe through one-way mirrors and recording devices.

Unwitting drug-tests went so well for the CIA that in early 1955 Gottlieb transferred White to San Fransisco where he set up a new ‘safehouse’ for the same purposes. According to Marks, White decorated the den with tastes oddly reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s: “he went out and bought items that gave the place the air of the brothel it was to become: Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can-can dancer and photos of manacled women in black stockings.”

The purpose of the San Fransisco safehouse was not limited to unwitting drug-testing. Marks says: “TSS officials wanted to find out everything they could about how to apply sex to spying, and the prostitute project became a general learning and then training ground for CIA carnal operations… At first, nobody really knew how to use them [prostitutes]. How do you train them? How do you work them? How do you take a woman who is willing to use her body to get money out of a guy to get things which are much more important, like state secrets?”

Brace yourselves, readers, because this is where our old friend John Gittinger comes in. According to Marks:

The San Fransisco safehouse specialized in prostitutes. “But this was before The Hite Report and before any hooker had written a book,” recalls a TSS man, “so first we had to go out and learn about their world. In the beginning, we didn’t know what a john was or what a pimp did.” Sid Gottlieb decided to send his top staff psychologist, John Gittinger, to San Fransisco to probe the demimonde.

George White supplied the prostitutes for the study, although White, in turn , delegated much of the pimping function to one of his assistants, Ira ‘Ike’ Feldman.

While Gittinger was doing his personality assessments from behind a one-way mirror, CIA agents were learning other things, according to another one of Marks’ anonymous MK ULTRA sources:

We didn’t know in those days about hidden sadism and all that sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. We began to understand that when people wanted sex, it wasn’t just what we had thought of– you know, the missionary position…

In 1955 while White was ‘learning about sex’ in San Fransisco, Anger was touring Europe’s pick-up hot-spots with Kinsey looking for ‘sex histories’ for the old man’s collection.

Whoever Marks’ anonymous sources are, they were being disingenuous in the excerpt above, because as early as 1947 Alfred Kinsey’s sex ‘studies’ had brought deviant sexual behavior to the attention of the reading public, mainly via press coverage in CIA-backed TIME magazine. Marks’ MK ULTRA men seem suspiciously innocent; probably because Marks wanted to avoid using the name ‘Kinsey’.

Because of George White’s CIA connections, he could ‘learn about sex and how to use it for spying’ with the help of the San Fransisco Police department, as Marks elaborates:

As the chief Federal narcotics agent in San Fransisco, White was in a position to reward or punish a prostitute. He set up a system whereby he and Feldman provided Gittinger with all the hookers the psychologist wanted. White paid off the women with a fixed number of “chits”. For each chit, White owed one favor. “So the next time the girl was arrested with a john,” says an MK ULTRA veteran, “she would give the cop George White’s phone number. The police all knew White and cooperated with him without asking questions.”

Gittinger wasn’t the only scientist to use the CIA’s den for ‘scientific’ purposes: Dr. James Hamilton of Stanford Medical School (another old OSS man) used the den for “studies connected to unwitting drug experiments and deviant sexual practices,” according to Marks. Could other academics have been involved, I wonder?

Eventually more CIA drug-testing dens were set up: one near San Fransisco in Marin County, and in 1961 a third was set up in New York (the first den there was closed when White moved to California). The ‘new’ NYC den was managed by another OSS veteran, Charles Siragusa.

What I’d like readers to take home is that over the period 1953-1963, we know that the CIA was abusing vulnerable people of the ‘demimonde’ to collect sex histories, sex statistics and do LSD testing.What was Alfred Kinsey doing during this period? Pretty much the same thing as White.

Staring in 1947, the same year the CIA was founded, Kinsey set up his Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at the University of Indiana, from which Kinsey would base his operation until his death in 1956. 1947 was also the year Kinsey met Anger; Kinsey approached Anger about buying a copy of ‘Fireworks’ for his ‘sexual history’ collection. (Note, Kinsey knew about ‘Fireworks’ before its first public showing by Cinema 16 in 1948!)

Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, one year after setting up his institute, and then published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953– the year George White and John Gittinger began tracking ‘human sexuality’ in New York; and also the year Hugh Hefner set up Playboy, which was eventually revealed to be banked by the CIA. Wikipedia, the storm-drain of popular opinion, says this about Kinsey’s work during 1947-56: “His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.” and “The Kinsey Reports, which led to a storm of controversy, are regarded by many as a precursor to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.”

How did Kinsey gather the “sexual histories” necessary to write his famous reports? Pretty much the same way White’s CIA buddies got them. This is what Anger’s biographer, Bill Landis writes:

Kinsey’s powers of persuasion were enormous, rivaling any cult leader. Beginning in the 1940s, despite rampant sexual repression and the suppression of pornography in American society, he could persuade straight, middle-class people to speak about their sexual practices and perversions…

Armed with financing from both Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey’s work with sexual outlaws was thorough… The Times Square hustlers’ grapevine would spread the line that a guy in a hotel just wanted to listen, ask a few questions, then you could leave. The street people knew Kinsey wasn’t a cop after he had built up a reputation in the area…

The three ordinary Midwesterners calling themselves scientists worked in seedy hotel rooms in Times Square (and many other red-light districts in the United States) measuring the exact dimensions of a male hustler’s genitals, even if it meant paying him a little extra. This would happen after the loosening-up period, in which the interviewee described in detail his sex life. Not surprisingly, Kinsey was often hassled for this research by law enforcement officials. After he was taken, irate, to the station house, he would call someone at Indiana University who would confirm his position, releasing him from this latest hot water.

While the ‘University of Indiana’ acted for Kinsey much like the CIA worked for White’s henchman, Kinsey’s relationship with police forces across the country was far from antagonistic according to Landis:

Anger was overwhelmed by Prok’s [Alfred Kinsey’s] collection of more than five thousand stag films. “Through the years Kinsey built up contacts,” Anger explains. “Let’s say a police department in Memphis confiscates a blue film. Instead of throwing out the films, they’d ship them to Prok. He had some that were from 1910.”

Anger says that Kinsey cast a seriously wide net with law enforcement– a net at least as wide as White’s. In my opinion, it would be hard for Kinsey to establish such extensive contacts without the help of some seriously organized friends. Could Alfred Kinsey’s research have had any use to the CIA? Landis says this:

Prok’s [Alfred Kinsey’s] data provided him with a certain power. Pomeroy stated that Kinsey “like secrets, that their possession gave him a sense of power…. [His subjects] included political, social, and business leaders of the first rank, and with his intimate knowledge of their lives [he] could have figuratively blown up the U.S. Socially and politically.”

Kinsey’s ‘groundbreaking’ sex investigations landed him on the cover of CIA-front TIME magazine in 1953, though he’d got plenty of exposure from this outlet on the release of his first report in 1948.

My point is that Kinsey’s work would have been enormously interesting to the CIA– and lo and behold, when Anger failed to tread water in Paris, the homoerotic filmmaker next turned up at the side of a well-know sexologist who was busy ‘challenging’ the sexual mores of the nation by claiming around half of men are homosexual in some way. Kinsey and Anger just happened to share an interest in Aleister Crowley and decided to travel to Cefalù together… so that they could shoot a documentary for the BBC!

Yes, you read that correctly. The BBC had Kinsey and Anger make a documentary about Aleister Crowley’s ‘Thelema Abbey’ in 1955, which was mysteriously lost after its initial broadcast. Here’s what Landis says:

An extraordinary photograph of Kinsey with Anger at Thelema Abbey ran in Picture Post magazine, the British equivalent to Life. [of TIME-Life fame– a.nolen]. The often-seen photo of a bald, scowling Crowley hangs on a wall, and Prok’s arms are outstretched, Christ-like, as he eyes the photo… Anger hovers submissively before his two fathers, Kinsey and Crowley, impishly holding a lantern…

Thelema Abbey, a half-hour sound film, was made of this event and shown on British TV, sponsored by Picture Post. Anger takes credit for this work in his filmography, though he claims that when he went to Picture Post to pick up his print, the magazine had closed and the films was lost forever.

As I first described in The Empire is Listening, the BBC was birthed from the same mother as the CIA, namely the fortune and contacts of William Stephenson. How odd that the BBC wanted to make a documentary featuring a man whose ‘sexual histories’ would have been of extreme interest to the CIA… and again, Anger is in the middle of it all!

A young Ken Anger shows off his favorite tatoo. Thank you fromthebarrelhouse.com.

Kinsey died in 1956, but Anger was just getting started. Even though Paris and the Brussels World’s Fair didn’t work out, Anger still found helpers back home. In 1961 Anger bunked with Marjorie Cameron in Los Angeles, then in 1962 he moved back to NYC to stay with Marie Menken. In 1963 Cinema 16 closed down, pinching off Anger’s funds. Miraculously, the Ford Foundation decided to give him a $10,000 grant just in time, which Anger used to move to San Fransisco in 1963– from then it seems Anger’s money troubles were over.

Regular readers know that the MK ULTRA program was largely wound up by 1963, but the LSD plague it helped unleash was just getting started. This is how Bill Landis describes Anger’s work during the San Fransisco period, 1963-68:

He had been a spectacular scenemaker on several levels– prominent occultist, LSD proselytizer, sexual libertine, vanguard filmmaker.

During this time Anger made some of his most infamous friends: occultist Anton LaVey (born Howard Stanton Levey) and Manson family associate/murderer Bobby Beausoleil. Landis writes:

Both Anger and LaVey existed in a fringe sexploitation area. Anger’s films had become adult house fare. LaVey was familiar with fifties-style Betty Page dominance /submission mentality, and he appeared in nudie spreads for second-string men’s mags…

Devil worship at this point in the sixties was an excuse for exhibitionist behavior and kinky sex.

In San Fransisco, Anger came into his own as a promoter of isolating sex and Aleister Crowley’s system of control. In 1967 Anger’s antics and films were plugged by Newsweek, The New York Times and Playboy magazine.

Anger’s work is important, because by the late 1960s the well-connected  Sullivanian cult, and the CIA’s personality profiler John Gittinger, had realised that isolating sex is a great tool for controlling people. America’s intelligence community had embraced the ‘system of control’ that Crowley formulated fifty years before, and Anger was promoting it through hippie fandom.

By 1968 Landis says things were coming “unglued” for Anger in San Fransisco; his buddies Beausoleil and LaVey had contacts with the Manson family which may have become uncomfortable for Anger. Whatever Anger’s reasons for leaving were, he left San Fransisco in 1968 and moved to London, where he was immediately plugged into U.K. music industry royalty.

I’m not going to talk about Anger’s interaction with the Rolling Stones here; except to say that Landis was cynical about Anger’s post 1968-work in London. He described it this way:

He [Anger] made a pilgrimage to England, Crowley’s homeland. It was as much a business trip as a spiritual adventure. Like his idol, Anger was about to take up the obscure occupation of fixing heads.

The mod London of 1968 held a plethora of potential investors for Anger who were in desperate need of having their heads fixed. Wealthy, troubled, addicted rock stars and jaded billionaire socialites with their heads into hard drugs and mysticism wielded a huge influence over their peers, but their personal problems, fueled by intense lives consumed by work, left them vulnerable to a higher power.

Landis adds:

Anger was an expert in the effects of certain drugs on different personalities…

Whatever the particulars were of his intake, Anger possessed a tremendous understanding of the myriad ways heroin, speed, cocaine and hallucinogens, and the various combinations thereof, can connect with various individuals. London was a head’s paradise, fertile ground for an alchemist.

Wasn’t this knowledge exactly what the drug-related parts of MK ULTRA were after?

I believe the information I’ve presented in this post strongly suggests that Kenneth Anger is a CIA asset and probably has been since his ‘discovery’ in 1947, the year the CIA was born. Anger’s probable work for the intelligence community casts his ideology and body of work in a very dark light, the same light that his mentor Aleister Crowley is now viewed in. Far from being a ‘bringer of light’, Kenneth Anger serves a very earthly ‘system of control’.

Ken Anger in 2013. No portraits in that attic. Thank you, theguardian.com.

A few weeks ago, my husband alerted me to an interesting documentary about the 1911 theft of the ‘Mona Lisa’ from Paris’s Louvre Museum by Italian immigrant Pietro ‘Vincenzo’ Peruggia. This 2012 documentary is titled The Missing Piece: The Truth About the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa.

At first, I loved this documentary. The director, Joe Medeiros, had done his homework: Medeiros travelled to Italy to interview the daughter of the thief, Celestina Peruggia, and actually employed a team of researchers and translators to scour Italian and French archives for information on the case.

What impressed me even more was that Medeiros showed sensitivity to Celestina’s feelings about her father: he seemed genuinely concerned that his research may prove her dad’s motivation was not patriotism, as the 80-year-old Celestina passionately claimed. Was Medeiros a documentary maker who went out of his way not to be exploitative?

However, as the documentary progressed, I noticed that Medeiros brushed over two important details which ran contrary to his argument that ‘Vincenzo’ Peruggia, a simple-minded house painter with a criminal record, was a lone thief. First of all, Medeiros seems remarkably naive about the art world circa 1911; he brushes over the very serious criminality of theft-suspect Guillaume Apollinaire and his shady business partner, art dealer Paul Guillaume. Medeiros also downplays the significance of Peruggia being given an audience with another preeminent art dealer of that time, Sir Joseph Duveen (First Baron Duveen). Peruggia tried to sell the Mona Lisa to Duveen during this meeting in London which happened shortly before Peruggia turned in the painting in Florence, Italy. Were these ‘downplays’ the innocent mistakes of a documentarian who doesn’t understand the art market?

I wanted to give Medeiros the benefit of the doubt, but on watching the documentary for a second time, my conclusion is that Medeiros is not the folksy, nice-guy he initially comes across as. He presents his viewers with a false choice: either accept his thesis that Peruggia was a lone villain, or you’re a fool who believes sensationalist, poorly-researched stories like the ones William Randolph Hearst published in his newspapers. Whoa.

It’s remarkable that a work-a-day Italian guy from Philly would start throwing stones at William Randolph Hearst, because by doing so Medeiros involved himself in a fight that is both before his time and out of his league. Here’s the nut: William Randolph Hearst was an art collector in competition with men like J. P. Morgan and Alfred Barnes. (Remember the name Alfred Barnes, readers.) Hearst was also in political opposition to these men, as Jennet Conant remarks in her book The Irregulars, only Hearst publications declined to join the FDR/British Security Coordination propaganda campaign designed to smear Americans who opposed British or Roosevelt interests.

William Randolph Hearst, J.P. Morgan, Alfred Barnes and a small group of other American mega-millionaires all bought their art from a small band of European dealers, preeminent among this band were Joseph Duveen and Paul Guillaume. Alfred Barnes and Paul Guillaume were particularly close, to the consternation of other European art dealers. This is how Christine Biederman describes Duveen and Guillaume for the Dallas Observer:

“The honors started rolling in [for Paul Guillaume]: Thus the former tire dealer and man who helped remove much of France’s cultural heritage to America received the Legion d’Honneur and was appointed to prestigious posts, including the Conseil Superieur des Beaux-Arts. But for the French Revolution, he would, like his crooked British contemporary Joseph Duveen, undoubtedly have been knighted by the King.”

(Biederman’s article on Paul Guillaume, his creepy wife and her legal battle with the Louvre is exceptional and is the best I’ve found on this topic.)

Paul Guillaume’s business associate was Guillaume Apollinaire who, when the Mona Lisa was stolen, had already established a history of selling art stolen from the Louvre, not all of which he had returned when the famous portrait was stolen. Medeiros’ strident claim that one lone Italian guy stole the Mona Lisa smells off to anyone familiar with the art market during this period. Why would a film-maker take such an incredible stance?

Researching the theft of the Mona Lisa is a dangerous hobby, readers, because in doing so you’re liable to blow the lid off shady dealings which built a famous art collection that is now controlled by The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s benefactors. You’re liable to put the provenance of this collection into question, which may expose the Philly museum and its partners to massive lawsuits, lawsuits which may even impact the ongoing lawsuit between the French government and the heirs to Paul Guillaume’s estate.

You guessed it, readers. Medeiros’ documentary was funded, indirectly, by the ‘education wing’ of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who along with other Philly cultural leaders and their partners in Philadelphia’s local government, were shamed in 2009 by another documentary, The Art of the Steal, because they collaborated to dishonestly wrest control of Alfred Barnes’ art collection. Barnes had purchased much of his collection from Apollinaire’s business partner Paul Guillaume.

A real art-lover would never be so arrogant as to say “It’s my way or you’re an idiot” about a crime like the theft of ‘La Gioconda’. I propose that a ‘third way’ is possible, a ‘third way’ which Medeiros is desperate to distract his viewers from. Peruggia may have been hired to steal the poorly-guarded painting because of his temporary access to the Louvre’s collections. Peruggia may have been hired to steal the painting for a rich collector who never intended to exhibit the painting again– or at least not show it to anyone who would recognize the painting/ dare to tell authorities!

Rich American art collectors often did illegal things to grow their collections; even the Boston benefactress Isabella Stewart Gardner boasted of duping Italian export officials to outfit her museum. (This unsavory, but widespread, practice was criticized in Henry James’ The Golden Bowl.) Ironically, Gardner’s museum was brazenly looted in 1990– a crime which was never solved and is a sore spot for the FBI, considering their cooperation with Whitey Bulger and suspected organized crime ties to the theft. So if, in the future, scholars recognize that Paul Guillaume was a fencer of stolen goods as well as a preeminent art dealer, no one ought to be surprised.

Such a revelation could put the provenance of works Guillaume sold to Americans into question. Given recent international legal precedents established by the return of art stolen during Nazi occupation, you can see why the Philadelphia Museum of Art might want to put any rumors like ‘Vincenzo Peruggia didn’t act alone’ neatly to bed. If Guillaume’s name is associated with a high-profile theft, what other ghosts may rise? What stars of Philly’s newly acquired Barnes Collection might face legal action from Europe?

There’s also an ‘intelligence community’ angle to this story. Guillaume Apollinaire was not just any old art promoter and journalist. He was given special access to France’s National Library to catalogue its restricted pornography collection ‘L’Enfer'; the catalogue was completed before his death in 1918. This is huge, readers, because Apollinaire’s research opened up the writing of the Marquis de Sade to social control researchers like Aleister Crowley and his handlers at British Intelligence. Apollinaire is how U.K. spooks learned of Revolutionary France’s methods for social control.

Apollinaire’s spookiness doesn’t end there. Apollinaire’s wingman, Pablo Picasso, an outspoken Communist, was useful to Soviet agitprop campaigns yet became a multi-millionaire thanks to the Western art market. The CIA would latch on to another Apollinaire-friend named Jean Cocteau during their anti-Stalin leftist ‘culture war’ during the 1950s and 60s: The Congress for Cultural Freedom. (You can read about Cocteau and Kenneth Anger’s connection with the Congress in my post Ken Anger in Context.) In 1953, just as the Congress and MK ULTRA got going, the first English translation of de Sade was made by American literary golden-boy Austryn Wainhouse. Wainhouse worked in Paris in the early 1950s just like Kenneth Anger, and also like Kenneth Anger at that time, Wainhouse was interested in bringing pornographic novel The Story of O to English-speaking audiences. Amy S. Wyngaard, Syracuse University professor of French, says this about Wainhouse:

“Mr. Wainhouse’s work in fiction and translation was at the cutting edge at a pivotal moment in American literary history.  The archive is of particular importance in illuminating the processes behind Mr. Wainhouse’s translations of de Sade’s works, which transformed the face of publishing and literary studies in the 1960s.”

So you see, Apollinaire was ahead of the curve on topics which were useful to social controllers.

What I’m trying to express is that while Joe Medeiros appears to do his homework, he’s very selective in what he chooses to share. For instance, Medeiros tries to dismiss French investigators’ interest in Picasso and Apollinaire as xenophobia and classism by including this snippet from art historian Pierre Paix, who talks about Apollinaire’s arrest after the Mona Lisa heist:

“We see a poet, but the police see a foreigner and they are convinced that Apollinaire is part of an international gang that stole the Mona Lisa. And Picasso is defending himself saying that he has nothing to do with the case. In order to settle it they had to give the stolen sculptures back to the Louvre, which they did.”

Stupid French cops, right? Not so fast–what “stolen sculptures”?!

Here’s the context that Medeiros left out. Picasso was in possession of two Roman statues stolen from the Louvre in 1907, he used them as models for his 1907 painting ”Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon”– was the great artist thumbing his nose at French authorities? Picasso didn’t return the stolen figures to the Louvre until 1911, four years later, to secure the release of Apollinaire who the police were questioning about the Mona Lisa.

‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’– originally titled ‘The Brothel of Avignon’.  The Roman figures inspired the faces on the right. What message was Picasso sending?

This is how art historian Robert Shattuck describes Picasso and Apollinaire’s criminality:

In August of 1911, however, disaster struck Apollinaire’s flourishing career… One of Apollinaire’s acquaintances from poorer days, who had worked briefly as his secretary, an itinerant Belgian named Géry Pieret, had twice stolen small statuettes from the Louvre out of pure bravado. He sold the first lot to Picasso and left some with Apollinaire.

Shortly after Pieret’s second escapade, the theft of the Mona Lisa, on August 21, made sensational headlines all over the world. Pieret proceeded to sell one of the stolen statuettes to the Paris-Journal, which used it for publicity purposes to taunt Louvre officials about the laxness of precautions against theft. Apollinaire and Picasso, both of them suddenly terrified of arrest and deportation as undesirable foreigners, packed Pieret out of Paris, debated throwing the remaining statuettes into the Seine, and finally turned all the goods over to the Paris-Journal for anonymous restitution. In reality, Pieret was innocent of the Mona Lisa theft. Nevertheless, the Sûreté uncovered Apollinaire’s name, searched his apartment, cluttered with all kinds of statues and paintings, and arrested him on September 7th…

But imprisonment was by no means the worst blow. During the hearings Apollinaire listened in astonishment while Picasso, under questioning, denied having any part in the affair and finally even denied knowing his friend. [ From The Banquet Years, Robert Shattuck 1955)

TIME magazine (the CIA front) has an even less flattering account of Apollinaire’s/Picasso’s role in the Louvre thefts, according to this 2009 article by Richard Lacayo:

“Soon the man showed up at the newspaper’s offices with a small statue, one of several that he claimed to have stolen four years earlier from the Louvre. The anonymous thief turned out to be a bisexual con man named Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret. He had once served as “secretary,” and perhaps other roles, for Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and art-world polemicist who was Picasso’s constant supporter in the public skirmishes over modern art in the French press. Before long, Pieret had implicated Apollinaire in the thefts. When police arrested Apollinaire, he admitted under pressure that Pieret had sold the pilfered works to none other than Picasso. Thinking they had found their way into a crime ring that might be behind the Mona Lisa case, the cops then dragged Picasso before a magistrate for questioning.

Picasso, who at 29 had just begun the transition from bohemia to the haute bourgeoisie, was terrified. He was a foreigner in France; any serious trouble with the law could get him deported. And this could have gotten serious, because the accusation was true. Four years earlier, he had bought from Pieret two of the pilfered sculptures, Roman-era Iberian heads whose thick features and wide eyes he would introduce into the great painting he was then just about to embark upon, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Though he would deny it in court, he almost certainly knew at the time that both heads were lifted from the Louvre. He may even have pushed Pieret to take them in the first place. But prosecutors couldn’t build a case that either Picasso or Apollinaire had stolen the heads, much less the Mona Lisa, and both of them went free.”

(Richard Lacayo also appears in Medeiros’ documentary; in his interview he appears to support Medeiros’ thesis about Peruggia being a ‘lone thief’.)

So much for poor immigrant victims of law enforcement bigotry. But what about Medeiros’ other big ‘downplay': Peruggia’s meeting with art-world-Goliath Joe Duveen?

Medeiros interviews one art crime expert from the FBI, Robert Wittam. (The FBI doesn’t have a great track record with finding stolen art, as the Isabella Stewart Duncan museum knows well.) You’d think that FBI Agent Wittam would have explained to Medeiros that the hardest part about stealing famous artwork is selling it later, but if the agent did explain this, Medeiros edited it out of the film. As it stands, Medeiros fails to recognize the importance of Peruggia’s meeting with Duveen, especially as the meeting was confirmed by a third party, Duveen’s nephew.

Peruggia tried to sell the Mona Lisa to Duveen by making a trip to London and engaging an audience with the lofty art-dealer. Peruggia, on his own, would have about as much chance of getting an audience with Duveen as I would have of getting one with the late Jean Paul Getty.

Art historian Peter Wraight credits Duveen with setting up the modern art market: manipulating scarcity to raise and sustain prices, mostly as a hedge against inflation and currency manipulation for very wealthy people. (See Wraight’s fantastic 1974 book The Art Game Again!.) Duveen is supposed to have opined that “Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money.” Whether he said this or not, the quip aptly describes Duveen’s business practices.

The art market caters to the very rich, and attracts the very unscrupulous– it’s no coincidence that items looted from Iraq’s national museum turn up in London. Fans of Roald Dahl will know that after he became disillusioned with spy-work, the 25-year-old writer made money in the murky world of art dealing:

He [Roald Dahl] still had some of his inheritance invested in the stock market and art was in his blood. It had fascinated him since childhood, while his wartime relationship with Millicent Rogers had begun to open his eyes to the way the art market worked… At twenty-five, Roald had been able to access the GBP 5,000 in his trust fund… he purchased two other Matthew Smiths, some watercolors by Smiths’s great friend Jacob Epstein and a small portfolio of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists… He gave one Epstein to Millicent Rogers and sold another at a good profit… “Each time I sold a short story,” he later wrote, “I would buy a picture… In those days, fine pictures were inexpensive. Many paintings that today could be acquired only by millionaires decorated my walls for brief periods in the late forties– Matisses, enormous Fauve Rouaults, Soutines, Cezanne watercolours, Bonnards, Boudins, a Renoir, a Sisley, a Degas seascape  and God knows what else.” [From Storyteller by Donald Sturrock]

Dahl, the BSC boy, was in the right place at the right time to cash in on the post-war art boom, which Robert Wraight put at the feet of Joe Duveen and viewed with such disdain. (Quite rightly, imho.)

My point is, Duveen– who died in 1939– was a connected player. Peruggia was a no-name house painter from an Italian backwater; Duveen’s nephew describes Peruggia as a “seedy-looking foreigner”– not the typical Duveen fare. As anybody with an ounce of street-smarts knows, the audience with Duveen was arranged for Peruggia when the initial buyer for ‘La Gioconda’ fell through.

Who was that initial buyer? We’ll probably never know because both Paul Guillaume and Guillaume Apollinaire are dead– but the French police suspected that it was a rich American, and the behavior of rich American art collectors supports such suspicions. Duveen doesn’t appear to have alerted the British police to the fact that a “seedy foreigner” tried to sell him the Mona Lisa.

Sir Joe Duveen with lady friends. Duveen was also involved in selling Vermeers which turned out not to be Vermeers…

There are other clues that Peruggia was acting as part of a team– he used a false name during the period in which he stole the Mona Lisa- ‘Vincenzo’ Peruggia. After serving a brief jail time for the theft, Peruggia returned with his wife to Paris under his real name Pietro, got a job doing something and spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he was buried in a high-demand cemetery.

While his fellow Italians back home in Dumenza are ashamed of Peruggia, Peruggia himself showed no self-consciousness. Pietro made a point of taking his wife to the Louvre on his return to France and bragged: “The shingles on this building will rot, but my name will remain famous.” Narcissism, anyone?!

Why would Joe Medeiros make this dishonest film? To answer that, I look to who funded the project:

1) The Greater Philadelphia Film Office was the fiscal sponsor for Medeiros’ film. This is how the Film Office describes itself:

GPFO, first established in 1985 as a part of Philadelphia city government, continues to reside within city offices. In 1992, we became a regional economic development agency, incorporating as the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, a Pennsylvania non profit corporation, in July, 2000.

The GPFO are part of the same cabal who benefited from moving the Barnes Collection to Philly’s ‘museum mile’ against the wishes of Alfred Barnes.

2) Medeiros’ grandparents Angelo and Jessie Mestichelli provided funding, as did Tom and Anne Caramancio, who I couldn’t find anything about.

3) The Pacific Pioneer Fund, which is an organization that funds ‘independent’ documentaries gave Medeiros $5,000; the PPF gets its money from the estate of San Fransisco lawyer Peter Sloss. The Independent magazine describes the board of the PPF:

“Who makes up the staff of the Pacific Pioneer Fund?

Peter Sloss, president; Nancy Sloss, vice president; Hillary Sloss, Dan Geller and Ellen Bruno, board members. Half of us are filmmakers. Ellen and Dan are past grantees whom we’ve had as filmmaker consultants for individual panels and really liked their sound judgment so we invited them to the Board.

What does the Sloss family’s philanthropic footprint look like? According to Peter Sloss’s obituary in ‘JWeekly.com’:

“Sloss devoted himself to the local Jewish community in multiple ways, serving with the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, the Osher Marin JCC, Mount Zion Hospital and the JCL, among others.”

Apart from his Jewish causes, Sloss also served on the board of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

4) The film’s largest (and first) funder has a philanthropic footprint which is very similar to the Sloss Family’s, but is based out of the Philadelphia area. The Daniel B and Florence E Green Family Foundation gave Medeiros $26,000.

The Green Family Foundation has given some money to the Philadelphia Theater Company, but most of their charitable work seems to be for specifically Jewish projects through the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia is associated with The Honickman Foundation, which overseas a large part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s public education program:

The Education Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, co-chaired by Lynne Honickman and Marta Adelson, was convened to advance education within the Museum and the Greater Philadelphia region.

Of course, Lynne Honickman and Marta Adelson are trustees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as leading employees of the Honickman Foundation. The Honickman family money seems to come, at least in part, from Pepsi Cola & National Brand Beverages, LTD and Canada Dry Delaware Valley Bottling Company.

(L-R)Harold Honickman, Jon Bon Jovi, Lynne Honickman and Leigh Middleton attend the “Coming HOME” 20th anniversary gala for Project H.O.M.E. at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown on September 23, 2009 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Green Family Foundation’s big charitable endeavour was for Federation Housing Inc– you need a password to read who sits on their board. Thank you, zimbio.com.

I dare say that getting the Greens to fund Medeiros was a nice way for the Philly Art Museum to get their message out while hiding their involvement in the documentary. (The Greens don’t seem to have funded any documentaries before Medeiros’.)

So you see, a certain group of people who benefit from burying the unsavory history of the Barnes Collection have *likely* teamed up to spare the reputation of Paul Guillaume, the art dealer who made the Barnes Collection possible, by blaming one of the most high-profile art thefts ever solely on a simple Italian peasant.

Matthew Stone’s 2010 portrait of Kenneth Anger, an homage to Anger’s role in 1960s London. Thank you, matthewstone.co.uk.

In this post I’m going to detail how Kenneth Anger implemented Aleister Crowley’s system of control in ‘swinging’ London. In order to do this, we’ll need to look at what The Rolling Stones, Anger’s most sparkling quarry, were doing just prior to Anger’s arrival.

I wrote about filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s probable ties to the CIA through his cult and pornography work in my post Ken Anger in Context. In that post I stopped the narrative at 1968, just short of Anger’s association with Stones frontmen: the ‘Glimmer Twins’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Anger’s association with Jagger and Keith, as well as with other notable figures in their milieu, bears all the hallmarks of an exploitative religious cult. I’m not the first person to notice this, Anger’s biographer Bill Landis is quite open about Anger’s Crowleyesque crusade through moneyed London:

He [Kenneth Anger] made a pilgrimage to England, Crowley’s homeland. It was as much a business trip as a spiritual adventure. Like his idol, Anger was about to take up the obscure occupation of fixing heads…

Anger loved the attention. It was clear to him that these people wanted to believe he was capable of magick. [Landis, Anger]

I don’t think that Anger’s role as a cult leader should come as a surprise; he had studied Crowley since the late 1940s. Anger had also been exposed to Alfred Kinsey’s scepticism about Crowley, as well as the sexologist’s obsession with sex and power. Anger understood Crowley’s system of control and by 1968 *somebody* decided to plug Anger into London’s music/trust-fund crowd through art dealer and former military officer Robert Fraser.

Fraser had served in the King’s African Rifles during its suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.[1] Britain’s success in quashing the revolt is largely credited to ‘pioneering’ use of psychological warfare: using complete control of information services to spread disinformation and surreptitiously break insurgents’ resolve.

The KAR used control of the media to influence the Kenyan public against the Mau Mau rebels; this fact will be important when I talk about The Times’ and The News of the World’s coverage of the Rolling Stones’ staged drug-bust in 1967. Fraser’s  African adventure set him up well to move amongst London’s privileged class of rich ‘revolutionaries’.

Robert Fraser during his glory days in the Swinging Sixties… right after the Mau Mau operation.

This is how ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez, who talks about the Rolling Stones in his autobiography, describes Robert Fraser:

He was a charming man, and he began to build a large circle of friends among the rock stars who were fast becoming a kind of aristocracy. They trusted his advice when he talked about fine art investments for their new wealth, and they found his combination of culture and hip vitality enormously stimulating.

If readers are interested in what the post-war art market in London was like– a very profitable market for well-connected spooks like Roald Dahl– I recommend my post Steal the Mona Lisa? and Robert Wraight’s classic book The Art Game Again! Fresh from the KAF, Fraser was in an excellent position to capitalize on the art boom.

Robert Fraser is crucial to Anger’s story because it was Fraser who introduced Anger to the Stones; just as Fraser introduced Paul McCartney to the Beatles; and Japanese banking heiress Yoko Ono to John Lennon. Fraser was at the heart of the epic Beatles/Rolling Stones marketing battle in the late Sixties and was instrumental in making the political furor around the Stones happen.

Fraser is also the guy who introduced ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez to the musicians. Sanchez was a London mafia figure with ties to the infamous Albert Dimes. Sanchez tells us that after Fraser suddenly appeared on London’s art scene, he also suddenly appeared in the middle of London’s crime world. Fraser sought out Sanchez for his underworld connections in a way that reminds me of James Angleton’s work with “Lucky” Luciano.

Tony Sanchez is mischaracterized as  ‘drug dealer to the Rolling Stones'; he was a fixer for Robert Fraser. Sanchez’s autobiography focuses on his relationship with Fraser, Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull– the mobster is grossly sycophantic to these three people, they formed the ‘core’ of his team.

Sanchez would use his mafia connections to fix problems for Fraser like his crushing gambling debts; where to find drugs for Fraser’s friends (Fraser introduced Brian Jones and Keith Richards to cocaine); and police trouble related to the Stones’ staged drug-bust in 1967.

I say ‘staged’ because that’s exactly what the bust was: a character called “King” from California, who Richards had met one year before in New York City, appeared at a Stones party one evening and equipped them with an illegal drug called “White Lightening”, amongst other narcotics. (I remind readers that George White’s San Fransisco drug-test den reached its heyday ten years prior.) “King” vanished just before the police raided the Stones’ residence and found a small amount of drugs. The police had acted on a tip from editors at The News of the World, a tip which just happened to coincide perfectly with ‘King’s’ deliveries. Sanchez describes ‘King’ as a “James Bond” with “a whole collection of different passports in different names and with different nationalities on them”.[2] In Tony Bramwell’s 2006 biography (published four years before Sanchez’s!) he identifies ‘King’ as David ‘Acid King’ Schneiderman, a.k.a. David Snyderman a.k.a Dave Jove, one of the late Harold Ramis’s set and another Crowley devotee. The Daily Mail says Snyderman was on an MI5/FBI mission to destroy the Stones and that Snyderman had “encyclopaedic knowledge of all the newest strains of LSD, combined with an almost magical ability to procure them”.

In classic, self-absorbed superstar style, Sanchez credits the trap to “someone right at the top” who thought “the Stones are becoming too powerful”. The police raid made the Stones, rather than destroyed them.

The News of the World and The Times coverage of this bust took the form of a delicious journalistic battle between the papers which propelled the Stones to martyr status. Instead of calling the ridiculous spectacle for what it was, the papers took opposing sides (Hegelian Dialectic) which on balance framed the Stones as young rebels fighting for progress and freedom.

Who handed the Stones this gorgeous publicity prize? The Carr family still owned The News of the World in 1967; The Times was owned by the intelligence-heavy Astor family. The squabbling and plotting between these two papers made the Rolling Stones into a riot-inducing force in Britain, then globally. For Fraser, The Rolling Stones’ drug-bust was the Mau Mau uprising played backwards.

The iconic photograph of Fraser handcuffed to Jagger prior to their trial for drug possession, which Sanchez says catapulted the Stones to “martyrs” and “heroes”.

The Rolling Stones made lemonade out of White-Lightening-Lemons, and in reality they owe a huge debt to “King” and whoever sent him. Once that media escapade had settled, America would float over another gift: headline-grabber Kenneth Anger.

Fraser introduced the Stones to Anger in 1968 on the heels of that serendipitous drug-bust; the next thing London ‘turned on to’ was Kenneth Anger’s take-two on Aleister Crowley’s Cefalù cult.

Bill Landis’ biography Anger and Tony Sanchez’s autobiography Up and Down with the Rolling Stones are both useful for fleshing out what Anger’s system of control looked like in practice. Guess what? Anger’s control tactics were a lot like Crowley’s.

The Stones’ lifestyle already provided the promiscuous sex– isolating sex– facilitated by their ‘open’ relationships with girlfriends. Anger achieved intellectual isolation, or what Philip Zimbardo terms ‘saturation and detachment’ by enlisting girlfriends Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull to influence Jagger and Richards:

Richards was saddled with his paranoiac drug addict girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg. Anger played on her uncertain place in the Stones contingent and her coke-induced phobias. Pallenberg ould be pretty dominant but could also be on the next plane out ant any minute, just a bad memory of excess herself. She needed Anger and his help. [Landis, Anger]

I had hoped that Sanchez’s biography would shed light on how Richards became “saddled” with Pallenberg, but instead he writes, “no one ever seemed to know quite where she [Anita Pallenberg] came from or who she was”. We do know that Pallenberg was of Italian-German descent; an actress (her film with Brian Jones was Germany’s 1967 entry to the Cannes Film Festival); and had worked in something called ‘The Living Theater‘ which featured works by Congress of Cultural Freedom kid Jean Cocteau, and was founded in 1947 in NYC just like Cinema 16.

Anita Pallenberg. Thanks, kzok.cbslocal.com.

Pallenberg’s relationship with the first Stone, Brian Jones, could be described as narcissistic, it was certainly unhealthy. According to Sanchez:

As a couple Brian and Anita exuded an almost surrealistic aura; they began to look, dress and think so much alike that they became one a single presence in silk and satin…

Sometimes Brian and Anita’s arrogance was frightening. Those who displeased them would be banished from the flat and shunned immediately by any friends who wished to avoid offence to their highnesses.

Jones was a violent womanizer with six illegitimate children by six different women; his refusal to pay child support was a favorite joke between him and Anita. Anita was also preoccupied with Nazi fantasies, she encouraged Jones to buy a car that had once belonged to a Nazi official and even send pictures of himself in Nazi regalia to the British press. Sanchez says this about the photo incident:

The incident was symptomatic of the fact that Anita and the courtiers were cocooning Brian from the real world. Together they went ever further for their kicks: their sexual activities were extraordinary, and they took up astrology and magic. Eventually they were given some acid by one of their sycophants, and Brian and Anita tripped together for the first time. That moment marked the peak of Brian’s brief life and the start of his personality disintegration.

Could Anita Pallenberg have been working as some type of ‘handler’ who helped guide Jones’, and then Keith Richard’s, provocative antics? Could her mysterious appearance have been motivated by somebody in Langley recognizing that her PAS profile made her a good handler for Jones, and then for Richards? (For more on matching handlers to assets, see Marks’ Manchurian Candidate.) Whatever Pallenberg really is, she and Jones introduced LSD to the rest of their set, after they had been given hits by an anonymous “sycophant”.

When Jones ruined himself on drugs, Pallenberg swapped him for a more promising band member, Keith Richards. This partner-swap was encouraged by Marianne Faithfull “for reasons of her own” Sanchez says. Readers will remember that Sullivanian cult leaders would only sanction personal relationships inside the cult that had been approved by them, they felt deep interpersonal bonds were “dangerous”. Pallenberg quickly latched on to Kenneth Anger as soon as Fraser brought him into the Stones’ circle.

I’ve mentioned in a previous post that Marianne Faithfull comes from an intelligence family: her father was a British spook in wartime Berlin, where her mother’s half-Jewish family lived freely during WWII helping socialist partisans. Her mother was a cabaret dancer in Weimar Germany.

Marianne Faithfull, still living the nightmare. Thank you, dailymail.co.uk.

No one really knows why Marianne Faithfull decided to leave her husband (John Dunbar, who owned Indica Gallery which Fraser used to host parties) and throw her lot in with the Stones, but Sanchez speculates:

Though she felt most relaxed and at ease among academics and aristocrats, Marianne gained a vicarious thrill from mixing with the coarse, clever, energetic young men who played the new no-compromise, high-energy music that was clearly changing the world.

My take-home is that Faithfull’s reasons for hanging with the Stones were ones which she chose not to be honest about– or perhaps was only vaguely aware of herself. Like Pallenberg, Faithfull latched onto Ken Anger when Fraser offered him, though according to Anger biographer Landis, Faithfull had regrets later:

In her 1995 autobiography, Marianne Faithfull intimates that Anger was not as wonderful as she once believed, going as far as to call him inept as a magus and filmmaker. She felt her drug addictions made her a pawn for him.

In contrast, Anger describes Faithfull as one of the only six women he ever loved and that they worked well together while shooting ‘Lucifer Rising’.

With Faithfull and Pallenberg firmly in his camp, Anger built up his image as Crowley’s ‘magickal’ heir by performing miracles, e.g.  attending a party at Indica Gallery via the astral plane (the punch was spiked) and weird witchy rituals on the lawn outside Jagger’s estate. (Remember Zimbardo’s mind-control tactic: cause confusion with nonsensical actions justified by arcane explanations which are delivered with confidence.) If somebody did something Anger didn’t like, he would put a magickal ‘curse’ on them and consequently believers ran scared of offending Kenneth. The legend of these ‘magickal’ workings and curses was then embellished by Anger’s buddies in the press.

Drugs were a huge part of Anger’s act, his work in San Fransisco in tandem with the CIA’s MK ULTRA program was crucial for building his knowledge, as Landis says: “Anger was an expert in the effects of certain drugs on different personalities.” Crowley had used drugs to isolate and confuse his followers at Cefalù. Also like Crowley, Anger was big on shaming followers, a mind control tactic that Philip Zimbardo describes as ‘increasing self-consciousness’ in the victim: Anger once sent Fraser a razor blade as a cure for his stuttering.

What I find most interesting about Anger’s system of control in London was how he encouraged unhealthy power worship. Crowley did this by promising power through Enochian magic and trying to attract well-connected people to his cult. This is how Landis describes Anger’s attempt at doing the same thing:

As he had done as a young man in Hollywood, Anger played social butterfly through the art gallery scene. He hooked into a seriously moneyed, exclusive, cocaine- and herion-addicted social circle through Robert Frazier [Landis’ consistent misspelling of ‘Fraser’] and his Indica Gallery in the fashionable Mayfair district…

Although he was dealing with a much more sophisticated crowd, Anger was using the same casting technique he had employed to find Bruce Byron and Bobby Beausoleil, blatantly appealing to narcissism. He provided the opportunity to live out their god/goddess power trip fantasies. Anger convinced the rock stars that only they had the special elemental quality to incarnate the occult deities they would portray [in Anger’s films].

Regular readers know I believe that narcissism, a type of character dysfunction, is useful to exploitative organizations. I believe that narcissism is exploited by unscrupulous leaders in the ‘intelligence community’ because narcissistic people are unusually vulnerable to control; they’re very reliable in serving whoever they look up to. If you’re interested in reading more about why I believe this, please see my posts Great Users of People and The Cult of Intelligence.

In his biography of Anger, Bill Landis recognizes how the narcissism of Anger’s followers opened them up to being manipulated by Anger. Cult-researcher Daniel Shaw, in his essay about Traumatic Narcissists in cults, also recognizes that narcissistic qualities in cult followers make them vulnerable to exploitative cult leaders. (Shaw’s essay is part of the International Journal of Cultic Studies vol 5, 2014.) The source of this vulnerability seems to be narcissists’ untempered desire to be seen as special and valued by authority figures, though nobody really knows for sure what motivates this behavior.

Anger was careful with who he targeted for recruitment, as Landis writes:

Wealthy, troubled, addicted rock stars and jaded billionaire socialites with their heads into hard drugs and mysticism wielded a huge influence over their peers, but their personal problems, fueled by intense lives consumed by work, left them vulnerable to a higher power.

Amy Siskind, another cult researcher who has written about isolating sex and cults, identified “religiosity” and unhealthy competitiveness as characteristics of people vulnerable to cults; Daniel Shaw says traumatic family lives also play a role. (Both from IJCS vol 5 2014). It’s interesting to note that Jagger has a superstitious streak; Faithfull and longtime Anger-funder J. Paul Getty, Jr (son of the art collector) both had very troubled relationships with their parents. I’ll speculate that Anger attached himself to certain figures in London’s ‘swinging’ scene because they showed personality profiles which CIA psychologist John Gittinger would recognize as exploitable.

(On the subject of money, in The Cultural Cold War Francis Stonor Saunders says that the CIA preferred to fund their operations through third parties, particularly wealthy philanthropists– just like J. Paul Getty Jr.! John Marks incidentally recognizes the same funding tactic in Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Getty would continue to fund Anger well after the filmmaker’s star in London had faded.)

J. Paul Getty Jr and his wife Talitha, who would die of a heroin overdose. Talitha was related to painter Augustus John through her mother, and ran in the same crowd as Ian Fleming.

As with any cult-leader, Anger became unbearably demanding and because of this Mick Jagger eventually dumped Anger and Marianne Faithfull. This is what Landis says about Anger’s ever-increasing demands, demands which would probably remind Daniel Shaw of his time in Siddha Yoga:

When Jagger arrived back in London, Anger kept his headaches pounding. Anger sought bigger and bigger pieces of him. Time. Money. Attention. Anger was becoming a control freak pest. Since he was such a control freak himself, Jagger never let things go as far as Anger wanted. He started politely backing away, but Anger kept his talons aimed at Richards and Pallenberg.

What saved Jagger from Anger’s vampirism? Family ties– specifically, a *more traditional* married relationship eventually saved Mick Jagger, and later Jimmy Page, from Anger’s grasp.

Bianca had apparently been instrumental in banishing Anger from the Jagger camp: “I didn’t dig Mick’s marriage to Bianca.” [says Anger] Faithfull, whom Anger was still friends with, “had a hard life when she was with Mick. He is a very sophisticated sadist.” [Anger, Landis]

Likewise, Charlotte Page saved her husband from Anger’s leaching:

In October 1976 Anger went to the Page abode in London. Page’s wife, Charlotte, argued with him, called the cops, and booted him out of the house. Though the door was bolted the following day, by week’s end Anger was collecting his belongings…

Anger now began mouthing off about Page and Jagger anywhere to anyone, calling them creeps, losers, junkies, and, the ultimate spiritual insult, spent forces. [Anger, Landis]

I think I’ve made it clear that Kenneth Anger was playing the same game in London circa 1969 as Crowley played in Cefalù circa 1920. Anger employed all the ‘mind control’ tactics I described in Aleister Crowley’s System of Control, The Banality of Mind Control, The Other Loch Ness Monster and Gittinger’s Personality Assessment System.

Kenneth Anger is an intelligence asset who was plugged into a ‘culture war’ operation that the British were already running, but that Kenneth was useful for.

My foray into cult research still leaves me with one question: Is Kenneth Anger a narcissist– like the cult leaders Daniel Shaw describes and like the typical intelligence operatives described by Peter Wright and Philippe de Vosjoli? I think that the answer is ‘yes’ he is, just like his idol Crowley.

This is what Richard Spence, a historian with ties to the ‘intelligence community’, says about the character of Aleister Crowley in Secret Agent 666:

If not the monster some have described, Crowley certainly was capable of immense emotional and physical cruelty. Real flashes of insight illuminate his writings, but if he developed anything to an art, it was selfishness. Aleister Crowley would indeed have been fascinating to meet, but, as others have noted, I would be reluctant to leave my children or my money in his hands.

It might seem that someone so obsessively self-centered and disdainful of common decency as Aleister Crowley would make a poor spy. On the contrary, those very qualities helped to qualify him for the job.

Those are strong words coming from anybody, but especially from Prof. Spence. Does Anger show the same traits as Crowley?

Landis describes two bitter motivations in Anger’s life: his frustrated career as a Hollywood actor and a frustrated career as a mainstream filmmaker. To hear Anger tell it, no one ever gives him the adulation he’s due– even from the time of his childhood. Anger, as his older brother describes, chose the stage-name ‘Anger’ because he was angry. It never seems to occur to Anger that his filmmaking is solipsistic and doesn’t cater to public tastes, so is therefore unlikely to earn him mainstream success. All the attention Anger got from the BBC (and it has been a lot of attention throughout his career!), attention from MOMA, and the Whiney Museum, and The British Film Institute, and PBS came despite his obscurity and some would say despite his mediocrity… but whatever Anger gets, it’s never enough.

Anger was never able to keep friends for long either; his friendships characteristically end with a fight; Anger banishing the ‘guilty’ party; and then smearing them in the press. By the 1980s Anger went to prostitutes for sex and was no longer in touch with his large family in California.

Like somatic narcissists, Anger hasn’t been able to grow old gracefully. As the years went by, he made a great effort to always be seen with desireable young men. On top of that, Anger has a tendency to push his bad feelings about himself onto people who offend him, take this slur against contemporary pornographic filmmaker Fred Halsted, for example:

He will have to go through those same changes like John Rechy of City of Night, because it’s terrible how– well, I was never a narcissist and it’s very hard for those who are hardcore narcissists to see that they go into a bar and people’s heads no longer turn. So that’s why I just wait. ” Anger chuckled. “No, I don’t dislike Fred.”

It’s easy for me to paint men like Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger as the bad guys, and they certainly have made the world a worse place, but in fairness they are just two of many confused– or even sick– people who were/are exploited by the ‘intelligence community’, as documented by the work of John Gittinger. IMHO, Anger would be better off if somebody in 1947 had scooped him up, like the father-figure in ‘Fireworks’, and taken the angry, confused man away from the spooks at Cinema 16.

[1] I couldn’t find exact dates for Fraser’s KAF adventures; the Mau Mau rebellion spanned 1952-60. In his autobiography Life, Keith Richard says this about Fraser:

Captain Fraser, who’d had a commission in the Kings’ African Rifles, the strong arm of colonial authority in East Africa, was posted in Uganda, where Idi Amin was his sergeant.

Idi Amin, the notorious Ugandan dictator, served with the KAF in Uganda and Kenya, where he fought the Mau Mau for the British.

[2] This detail about ‘King’ is interesting, because the CIA department responsible for issuing false identification and bogus foreign passports was disproportionately smeared by Colby’s 1974 ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, ostensibly because that department failed to keep track of the false documents they issued. Read all about it here.

Colby was setting himself up as a drug-lord in 1967 and by 1974 Colby clearly had a score to settle with the CIA false-passport people: could sloppy drug dealers with a stash of fake id’s like ‘King’ have had something to do with Colby’s vindictiveness?

A bust of Brian Jones in his native Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

In this post I’m going to highlight some unsavory history about the founding of The Rolling Stones. As many people already suspect, this band was almost certainly a creation of the Anglo-American ‘intelligence community’. I believe that The Rolling Stones were created in response to the failure of earlier ‘non-communist left’ undertakings such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which by 1962 had been ‘outed’. Our story begins in the Cotswold hills…

In 1942 a boy was born in Cheltenham, England to a well-off musical family. The boy was named Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones. The Jones’ hailed from Wales but moved to the small spa town to further Brian’s father’s career as an aeronautical engineer.

Cheltenham is famous for its literary festival, race track and being home to the disgraced British spying organ ‘GCHQ’ which, these days, does the NSA’s dirty work. GCHQ moved to Cheltenham in 1951, about nine years after the Jones’ moved there. How might an aeronautical engineer have been employed in Cheltenham circa 1942?

The Brits are cagey about defense industry information, but Cheltenham was home to at least two crucial Royal Air Force contractors: the Dowty Group which started in the 1930s and was famous for its work on the Concord jet; and Smiths Industries which produced instruments crucial to RAF Bomber Command. These factories were important enough to have attracted German bombers in December 1940. Both firms are now owned by General Electric. More likely than not, Brian Jones’ dad was building aeronautic equipment for the war effort and then rode the Cold War armaments boom to retirement.

Cheltenham has more going for it than just RAF contractors and spooks, however. Cheltenham is a very desirable retirement location for military brass and moneyed foreign service types, and has been for a while. Cheltenham is the home of an elite, well-connected defense community which makes what happened to Brian Jones even more interesting.

From the age of 16 onward, Brian Jones had a habit of impregnating very young girls and then eschewing all personal responsibility for the resulting babies. (He would have six illegitimate children this way.) Brian Jones’ reputation in Cheltenham was so bad that when the local Arts college heard about it, they withdrew a scholarship which had been awarded to Jones. My point is that Brian disgraced himself publicly and repeatedly in front of the grandfathers of Britain’s intelligence establishment.

That’s not to say everything about Brian’s rep was bad: people knew his dad moonlighted as a church organist and that Brian was musically gifted. In fact, the heights from which Brian fell probably increased his disgrace. Jones was clearly a young man with an unusual psychological profile, he may even have been described as ‘narcissistic‘.

“Hello, Monty. I think we’ve found our boy.”

By 1962 Brian had established himself as a cad and blues musician in Cheltenham, and it wasn’t long before he was invited to play as a guest with Alexis Korner’s “Blues Incorporated” band in London. Korner was a U.K. transplant by way of Paris, Switzerland, and North Africa; his cosmopolitan parents moved to London in 1940, just in time for the war effort. Alexis Korner has been dubbed ‘a father of British Blues’.

During Jones’ guest appearance with Blues Incorporated, Brian was introduced to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards by Korner, who took special interest in Jagger and Richards even though at that time neither had played music outside their parents’ living rooms. As a recap, Korner brought in a troubled guitar player all the way from Cheltenham for a short-term gig where he could meet two teenagers with no professional musical experience. A ‘father of British Blues’ must have a lot of free time!

This is what rock historian Seth Rogovoy writes about Korner in Forward magazine:

Like many early British rock bands, The Rolling Stones started out playing American blues. Most of the members of the Stones served their apprenticeship in Blues Incorporated, a band led by blues guitarist Alexis Korner, who was born in Paris to an Austrian Jewish father and a Turkish-Greek mother. Stones founding guitarist Brian Jones, drummer Charlie Watts, and keyboardist Ian Stewart all played with Blues Incorporated, and vocalist Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards jammed with the group on a number of occasions, before the five joined forces and formed The Rolling Stones.

Alexis Korner by Chris Walter.

In fact, Korner’s influence went well beyond the Stones and as Rolling Stone magazine states, Korner “virtually gave birth to an entire generation of superstars and cult heroes” which included Rod Stewart, John Mayall and Jimmy Page (as in Aleister Crowley). A sort of Frank Zappa for the Brits, Korner helped launch Led Zeppelin and Cream. Not long after introducing all the Stones, Korner embarked on a television career with ITV, the television channel launched by the British government in 1955 to ‘compete’ with their BBC. (Government competes with government?!) The Rolling Stones would take up gigs that Blues Incorporated cancelled due to Korner’s budding broadcasting career– a career which made him a brahmin of the British music scene.

Yet, rock’n’roll sensations are not formed on human resources alone…

In mid-1963 a promoter named Andrew Loog Oldham read about The Rolling Stones in a newspaper and jockeyed to become their manager– so goes the story. Oldham was the illegitimate son of Celia Oldham and American Andrew Loog, a member of the 332nd Bombardier Squadron who was shot down before he ever saw his son. Celia, to whom “image was everything“, was kept by a married man who funded her lifestyle– I have yet to pin down who this sugar-daddy was. As one might expect, Andrew grew up to be a very angry young man who is often described with references to the Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. (In a fit of rage Oldham once pointed a starting pistol at the head of his father in law.)

Andrew’s mom must have latched on to a well-connected man, because according to Rockhall.com, “While still in his teens, Oldham was featured in the fashion pages of both The London Evening Standard and The Daily Mail.”

Andrew Loog Oldham when he was still useful.

Andrew flitted between a few high-profile jobs: he was a personal assistant to fashion icon Mary Quant, and then became a protegé of music industry tycoons Brian Epstein AND murderer Phil Spector. Before he even hit twenty, Oldham had serious pull in the publishing world: “In January 1963, at 19, he started doing PR for the Beatles, and within a few weeks had scored the coup of getting the Fab Four into Vogue.” This is how Seth Rogovoy describes Andrew Loog Oldham’s contribution to the Stones:

Building on the lessons he learned as a protégé of Brian Epstein — the Jewish owner of a record store in Liverpool, who turned that city’s most popular bar band into the international sensation known as The Beatles — Andrew Loog Oldham, also Jewish, soon took over management of The Rolling Stones, reshaped their image, and steered them toward a broader musical palette.

For one, he turned them into the anti-Beatles, giving them a more “dangerous” and rebellious image — longer and unkempt hair, and an overt sense of sexuality and violence. Oldham enlisted the services of photographer Gered Mankowitz — the son of English Jewish screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz — who was responsible for the band’s early album covers and publicity shots. Mankowitz was as responsible as Oldham was for creating the Stones’s bad-boy image, and he was the official tour photographer on the band’s first United States tour in 1965.

Oldham also encouraged The Rolling Stones to cover a wider range of songs than the Chicago blues that they originally favored.

This ‘style change’ is credited as the beginning of conflicts which would eventually drive Brian Jones from the band (after a huge monetary payoff). Jones was found dead in his pool not long after being dropped and no Stone had time for his funeral– but I get ahead of myself.

Andrew Loog Oldham also managed Marianne Faithfull, who would become a staple of the cult around Mick Jagger. Oldham’s contacts worked well for him: “By the age of 21 he was married to Sheila Klein, daughter of a Hampstead psychoanalyst, had a son and a dog named Genius, owned a £40,000 house, many cars and was officially a millionaire.”

Oldham’s management style was heavy on buzz, but light on organization as he admits himself. He also had an odd habit of buying advertizing space for other, supposedly unrelated, promoters:

While piloting the good ship Immediate [Oldham’s firm] and producing Stones hits such as “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Paint It Black,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Lady Jane,” and “Ruby Tuesday,” the ever idiosyncratic Oldham messed with people’s minds by taking out ads for records he had nothing to do with. These were records he simply liked, including the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreaming.”

Andrew Oldham was not the type of person to do favors for anyone; he describes himself as an exploiter. What sort of connection might Oldham have with The Mamas and The Papas, a rock band belonging to the infamous ‘Laurel Canyon’ set in California?

For readers new to California’s music scene, the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles was home to a striking number of famous music groups, including The Doors, The Mamas and The Papas, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Love and the enigmatic icon Frank Zappa. Laurel Canyon also attracted a different brand of freak, such as the Manson Family, who were tight with the hippie music crowd.

Map showing Laurel Canyon in relation to Hollywood, Mulholland Drive and other famous Los Angeles sites.

Andrew Loog Oldham’s run with the Stones ended because of the staged drug-bust I documented in my previous post, though it’s unclear whether Andrew was actually present at the raid. According to Rockhall.com:

Oldham’s empire collapsed nearly as quickly as it developed. In early 1967, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were all busted on drug charges. Afraid of being arrested himself, Oldham decamped to California, where he helped Lou Adler and John Phillips with Monterey Pop, suggesting they book Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who. Meanwhile, the Stones felt abandoned by Oldham, while Allen Klein found them lawyers and stood by their side in court. By September 1967, Oldham was no longer managing the group. Immediate Records continued for another couple of years, but the company was unable to transfer the label’s U.K. success to North America and was bankrupt by 1970.

It seems odd to me that the Stones’ media man would run to California just as the Stones’ biggest media bonanza exploded onto the public’s consciousness: the squabbling between The News of the World and The Times over this drug-bust made the Stones. On top of that, Oldham’s behavior suggests that he had ties to David ‘Acid King’ Snyderman, the drug-dealer with a kaleidoscope of passports who came from California with his “White Lightening”. By running to California, Oldham ran to the source of the ‘problem’.

In order to escape the British police Oldham ran to the up-and-coming music scene in California, the homeland of at least one band whose records Oldham had mysteriously taken out ads for. Why would a British subject think he was safe from a U.K. drug charge in California? During better days, Oldham had paid good money to promote Laurel Canyon superstars The Mamas and The Papas for no clear reason; perhaps Oldham ran to Cali because he had friends amongst the strange community surrounding Laurel Canyon’s local military outpost: Lookout Mountain Air Force Station– a military installation with “soundstages, screening rooms, film-processing labs and even an animation department“. [Lookout Mountain Station was founded in 1947, the same year as– yawn– the CIA. Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe, and Ronald Reagan also worked for the film studios there but why is still classified. If you’re interested in Disney’s manipulation at the hands of FDR, check out Walt and El Grupo.]

Los Angeles was not unknown in Oldham’s circles: Alexis Korner crony John Mayall found professional succour in Laurel Canyon; and we now know that Marianne Faithfull’s old flame Jean de Breteuil sold Jim Morrison the dope that killed him. London rockers and Laurel Canyon navy brats clearly ran in the same circles. Could there have been some sort of organizational connection between the new music scene in London and the just-developing music scene in California?

Whatever connections existed between these two cultural phenomenon, Oldham wasn’t able to sell Californians his remaining UK contacts– namely his former partner Pete Meaden’s client The Who. The teat seems to have been pulled from the wunderkind’s mouth in California: Oldham’s company went bankrupt and he spent the next few years battling drug addictions and obscurity. Great Users of People. Oldham now lives in Bogotá, Columbia with a different wife and writes a new autobiography every few years.

Andrew Loog Oldham. Thank you, examiner.com.

When Oldham went on the lam, management of the Rolling Stones was taken up by someone called Allen Klein:

In 1966, Oldham turned over management of the Rolling Stones to a Jewish accountant from New York named Allen Klein. Klein scored the group a monumentally profitable record deal when their contract with Decca Records came due for renegotiation. The deal was much more lucrative than the one Brian Epstein had negotiated for the Beatles, and after Epstein died in 1967, the Beatles turned to Klein in the hopes that he could do for them what he had done for the Stones.

Once their original springboards Brian Jones and Andrew Loog Oldham had been discarded, The Rolling Stones’ star continued to rise. Mick Jagger decided that he should get into politics, as Tony Sanchez writes:

Mick’s fascination with power, coupled with his conventional middle class upbringing, led him inevitably to conventional politics, and for many years, he harboured a deep and secret ambition to become a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party.

He [Mick Jagger] was actively encouraged by Tom Driberg, the MP for Barking, in Essex, who later became Lord Bradwell. Like many homosexuals, Driberg found Jagger attractive, but he also recognised in him the charisma necessary for success in politics…

The two [Jagger and Driberg] were introduced by the American poet Allen Ginsberg, who was a mutual friend.”

Ginsberg introduced the two men in 1969, about the time that Kenneth Anger was pumping his cult through Pallenberg and Faithfull. Readers will remember that Allen Ginsberg was the guy who handed Alfred McCoy a box of TIME/CIA notes on East Asian drug trafficking which became The Politics of Heroin, a dishonest book which obscures William Egan Colby’s role in the drug trade. (Ginsberg tipped off McCoy around 1973, a few years after he introduced drug-promoter Jagger to Driberg.)

Allen Ginsberg: pedophile and CIA errand boy.

A couple of months ago I wrote about Eleanor Roosevelt’s political conditioning by Louis Howe in Eleanor and ISIS. Driberg seems to have played ‘Louis Howe’ to Jagger’s ‘Eleanor':

When Mick and Marianne moved to their big house in Cheyne Walk, they often entertained Driberg and had long talks about England’s rotten Government. Jagger professed to be an anarchist, but Driberg said that anarchy was no solution; it was an ideal that wouldn’t be practical for centuries. Driberg wanted Jagger to join the Labour Party and become a left-wing activists who would grab the party and shake it by the neck…

But Jagger knew that he would have to give up his career on the off chance that he might have a talent for politics. He seemed afraid to take the risk, and realistically, he knew perfectly well that despite his following among the young, he’d alienated the majority of voters.

Although he continued to talk to Driberg about politics in the abstract, he always found an excuse for not actually joining the Labour Party and standing for his local council.

I doubt that Driberg a.k.a Lord Bradwell wanted Jagger to join the Labour Party, he was astute enough to know that Jagger would never fly. What I think is more likely is that Driberg wanted to tweak Jagger’s nutball politics to better fit the ‘non-communist left’ agenda that was so popular at the CIA and MI6. (In 1966 even The New York Times began to talk about the CIA’s connection to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, so the operation was well and truly lost. By 1969 the ‘intelligence community’ would have been well into setting up new mouthpieces.)

If you’d like to learn more about the CIA’s ‘non-communist left’ agenda, I suggest going straight to the horse’s mouth, and reading what CIA head William Egan Colby had to say about what his old OSS buddies were doing in Europe.

Did Jagger and the Stones’ politics fit a ‘non-communist left agenda’? Yes, according to information Sanchez provides:

Everywhere the Stones went they were searched, raided and intimidated with a zeal that prompted Keith to comment: “They seem to think we’re working for Che Guevara.”

Jagger called a press conference to reveal to reporters in Paris that he was on the Customs’ International Red List.

“Of course there is a list, ” he said. “And of course they are after me…”

However, when the Rolling Stones came to play their first concert “behind the Iron Curtain” in Warsaw, they refused to play for the children of Communist Party members out of contempt for their parents, which of course lead to a riot.

Frankly, I’m getting a little sick of writing about the Stones and adjacent personalities, because they’re obviously tools of the ‘intelligence community’ and therefore have never had anything genuine to say. As someone who was born far too late to feel any connection to 1960s culture, these people are curious, hypocritical relics– yet they are constantly paraded in the mainstream media as innovators and idols. Clearly it’s time for some real iconoclasm.

Sir Michael Philip Jagger in drag, circa 1996, photographed by Anton Corbijn.

Winston Churchill at canvas.

There are few twentieth century leaders who are more lionized than Winston Churchill. He has come to epitomize everything that is stalwart and excellent about Britain, a sort of Superman of ‘the Greatest Generation’. The truth is something different. I’ve had Winston’s name pop up more than once in my reading about the music business, art world, cult studies and the drug trade. I think the time is right to peel back the Bulldog’s facade– this post is a whirlwind tour of Churchill’s doings that don’t pass the smell test.

Winston Churchill was half-American and his political career was kicked off by American money– Vanderbilt money, to be exact. (Churchills had been politically active for some time, but their fortunes, and therefore influence, were waning before the Vanderbilts came into the picture.) The Vanderbilt family got its start through government contracts supporting the War of 1812, but by the time they had caught the Churchills’ attention they had their fingers in many pies, the most notorious of which was their exploitation of the railways: the Vanderbilts benefited from a sweet deal with the Federal Government which gifted public land as an incentive for railway development– huge tracts of the Continental US were given away in this manner. The Vanderbilts personify crony capitalism and government corruption.

This nouveau riche American family enters the Churchill dynasty via the arranged marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the heiress, to the Duke of Marlborough, Winston’s cousin. Their marriage was orchestrated by Consuelo’s mother Alva Vanderbilt and her lover Oliver Belmont, son of Lord Rothschild’s New York agent. This is how Consuelo’s biographer Amanda Mackenzie Stuart explains Alva Vanderbilt’s motivation for the marriage of her daughter, which was first envisioned on a trip to British India with her husband, lover Belmont, and Consuelo in tow:

The illusionists of the British Raj found a most appreciative audience in Alva, though even she was startled by the size of the Government House guest suite and the ‘ten native servants who were assigned… in beautiful royal liveries of red embroidered in gold to serve us’. What impressed her most, however, was the quasi-imperial role of both Lansdownes [Lord and Lady Lansdowne, Viceroy of India]…

There was no life in the shadows or sunlight by proxy for a Vicereine of India; and just as she had once pictured the Vanderbilts as Medicis, Alva could now visualise her daughter’s future [married to Lady Lansdowne’s nephew, Duke of Marlborough]. From Consuelo & Alva Vanderbilt by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

Despite her modern, white-washed image as a feminist icon, Alva Belmont was nothing but a controlling, materialistic, selfish user. How ironic that TIME magazine’s Clare Boothe Luce, the black-ops happy congresswoman, was promoted by a patroness who had day-dreams of British Rajdom…

Alva Belmont, seated second from right, lives her dream of oriental splendor at the opening of her tea house in 1914. Thank you mrmhadams.typepad.com

Alva Vanderbilt would divorce her husband and become Alva Belmont, patroness of Mrs. Pankhurst and Clare Boothe Luce, who I’ve written about in connection to Roald Dahl’s spy work in war-time Washington D.C. The Vanderbilts, and Alva, were never shy about betraying their fellow Americans; the spirit of representative government has never flowed strongly with them.

Winston was young when Consuelo’s doomed marriage took place, but the grasping, twisted quality of his immediate family would mold his psyche. There’s something corrupting about being the ‘poor relations’ of fabulously wealthy people, as Eleanor Roosevelt is testament to, and this corruption didn’t miss Winston.

Perhaps the earliest indication of Winston’s venality was his success in the art world, or I should say, ‘Charles Morin’s’ success in the art world. Winston Churchill, leader of the free world, was an art forger.

In 1921 Churchill exhibited several of his paintings signed with the name ‘Charles Morin’ at the Galerie Druet in Paris. Charles Morin was a reasonably well-known painter who died two years before, in 1919. The art showing in question, where Churchill sold six of his knock-offs, was organized by art critic Charles Montag, who Churchill had met during the Great War. At the time of the forgery, Churchill was already Secretary of State and fishing for more control over Palestine and Mesopotamia too.

Charles Montag is described this way by David Coombs at The Churchill Centre:

Although he is little regarded today, Montag was a friend and regular painting companion of Churchill until his death in 1956. Born in Switzerland in 1880, he must have been as energetic as he was charming, and amazingly well-connected with Impressionist painters, including Monet and Renoir, as well as Post- Impressionists like Bonnard and Matisse. He turned these talents to good account as an exhibition organizer and adviser to art collectors.

Montag was a savvy businessman in the vein of Joe Duveen, Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume: during WWII Montag worked with the Nazis to help them buy French art at bargain-basement prices. When Montag got caught and arrested at the end of the war, Churchill intervened to protect him. Douglas Cooper was responsible for apprehending Montag; Cooper was one of about 350 Allied agents called ‘monuments men’ tasked with tracking down loot. Apart from being a ‘monuments man’, Cooper was a squadron leader for Royal Air Force Intelligence and an independently wealthy Cubist art collector (conflict of interest?!). This is Cooper’s story according to the ‘Monuments Men Foundation‘, an American organization which promotes the Allied role in repatriating art displaced during WWII:

Cooper spent the month of February 1945 in Switzerland as a representative of the MFAA [Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives] and the French Recuperation Commission, interrogating various dealers and collectors who worked with the Nazis, including Theodore Fischer of the Fischer Gallery, who conducted the infamous sale of “degenerate” artworks in 1939. ⁹ According to John Richardson, Cooper also ordered the arrest of the Swiss dealer Charles Montag, who had been involved in the liquidation of the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, however, he was mysteriously released by higher authority.¹⁰ Undeterred, Cooper arrested him again, only to have his authority usurped once more by Winston Churchill, who came to the aid of Montag, his old friend and drawing instructor.¹¹

9. Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 416.

10., 11. Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 35-36.

During WWII, Churchill’s art world criminality became a joke at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, and it caused FDR some discomfort when Winnie’s nature came to light. Of course, die-hard fans of Winston refuse to see Churchill’s actions for what they are, and they often ignore Montag’s dealings with the Nazis entirely. I think that Churchill’s actions, and the company he kept, are windows to his character. It gets worse.

Churchill comes from a line of conspirators. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a founder of the Primrose League, which was the first secret society that British intelligence agent Aleister Crowley joined. The Primrose League was Crowley’s ticket to spy-work, according to Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666:

Another positive early influence was Aunt Annie’s, the second wife of his uncle, Jonathan Crowley. In some ways she was his mother-substitute. Annie was well-educated and active in the Primrose League. Named for Disraeli’s [Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister] favorite flower, the League was an auxiliary of the then dominant Conservative Party, which Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, helped found.

The Primrose League may have facilitated Crowley’s introduction to clandestine work. Modeled on the Orange Order, the secretive fraternal hard core of Irish Protestantism, the Primrose League broke ground by admitting women (like Aunt Annie), and acted like the popular front of “Tory Democracy”. It also constituted a kind of secret society within the Conservative Party, an early form of political action committee that, e.g., spied on perceived enemies of Toryism. Despite his associations with the extremes of Left and Right, Crowley maintained that he always was a Tory at heart, and that may have been as true a statement about his political persuasion as he ever made. The Primrose League could have used a young man of such versatility and conviction– e.g., by using young Crowley’s interest in Celtic revivalism and dissident Jacobitism to monitor their adherents.

Through Aunt Annie’s efforts, Crowley claimed, he gained the patronage of two Primrose League luminaries, Charles Thomson Ritchie (later 1st Baron Ritchie) and Robert Gascoyne Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury. Cecil was not only Grand Master of the League, but also reigned as prime minister for most of 1885-1902. Ritchie was Salisbury’s loyal cabinet member and a former Secretary of the Admiralty. In 1895, Ritchie became the new member of Parliament for Croydon, home to Annie and Jonathan Crowley and Crowley Ale’s main brewery.  As a well-heeled and active supporter of Ritchie’s campaign, Annie Crowley could command his attention and, through him, solicit the help of Salisbury, who was always looking for young “men of ability.” This supports Aleister’s claim that he entered Cambridge in the autumn of 1895 with the help of Lord Salisbury and was earmarked by him for a career in the Diplomatic Service.

The League was set up to be a type of fifth column in support of the interests of its leaders, and to that end the secret society would promote the careers of its members.

Primrose League Bling: sparkler for ‘outstanding contributions’. Thank you, thehigginsbedfordcollections.blogspot.com

If you’ve read my blog over the last two years, you’ll know that I have  contempt for Winston Churchill’s spooky co-conspirator William Stephenson. Stephenson was a Canadian business magnate who got into the intelligence business as a way to attack his German economic competitors and drum up war business. As H. Montgomery Hyde details in The Quiet Canadian:

It was his connection with the Pressed Steel Company that first led Stephenson into the field of secret intelligence. In the course of the business trips which he made to Germany at this period in order to buy steel, he soon discovered that practically the whole of the German steel production had been turned over to the manufacture of armaments and munitions, although Germany had been expressly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles to maintain any armed forces. Unfortunately this state of affairs was not appreciated in Britain… Almost alone among parliamentary back benchers, for he was in the political wilderness during these critical years, Winston Churchill harped unceasingly on what he knew to be going on in the new Reich of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers.

Historian Thomas E. Mahl is much less impressed by Stephenson’s intelligence work, in Desperate Deception:

The Intelligence gathered by Stephenson and others was erroneous, and it led to policies that might have proved disastrous had not the United States come into the war. They reported prior to the war that the German economy was being fully mobilized for war, and in September 1939, that the German economy was strained to its limits– producing at a rate that was unsustainable. This analysis was totally wrong.

The “others” who Mahl refers to are Stephenson’s network of industrial spies– other businessmen like himself. Judging by Stephenson’s business contacts as listed by Hyde, these “others” controlled firms in Canada and the USA as well as firms throughout the British Empire. I don’t find these contacts surprising, given Churchill’s American family connections. What I find particularly gross is how Churchill superimposed this informal network of self-serving businessmen on top of Britain’s intelligence services once he came to power in 1940. According to historian Ron Cynewulf Robbins Britain’s intel pros resented this imposition too:

…Churchill launched Stephenson on his spymaster career by appointing him to head the British Security Co-ordination Service in New York before the United States had entered the Second World War…

It cannot be overlooked that there was mutual antipathy between Sir Stewart Menzies, head of British intelligence, and Stephenson. Churchill gave Stephenson the New York appointment over the objections of Menzies.

Prior to Stephenson’s appointment, Menzies had kept Stephenson’s ‘intelligence’ contributions at arm’s length– Stephenson was allowed to be an uncompensated informer who gave his information to one of Menzies’ subordinates, and this only after pressure was applied by City businessman/MP Ralph Glyn (later Lord Glyn). Prior to Churchill’s war appointments, he didn’t have the pull to get his private spies ‘plugged into’ national defense.[1] However, Churchill used (or was used by!) his industry buddies as early as 1936 to promote their war agenda, as Hyde writes:

Not being in Government, Churchill had no access to official information, so he decided to pursue various private lines of inquiry in order to obtain facts and figures in support of his arguments. Among them, indeed perhaps the most significant, were those provided by Stephenson through access he managed surreptitiously to obtain to the balance sheets of the steel firms of the Ruhr.

To add insult to injury, Stephenson became ‘British Intelligence’ in the USA, representing not only MI-6 (foreign intelligence); but also MI-5 (internal security); the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department and the Political Warfare Executive (which used the Foreign Office as a cover); the British Office of Naval Intelligence; the mysterious Security Executive; Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and finally the ‘dirty tricks’ department, the Special Operations Executive. All of these appointments came under Stephenson’s role as the head of the British Security Coordination in NYC. Stephenson, the businessman, took over Britain’s most sensitive intelligence spheres wholesale.

Stewart and Pamela Menzies in 1932. Thank you, spartacus-educational.com

Of course, once ensconced in New York City, Stephenson would show equal disdain for American government, and collaborate with the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and President Roosevelt to undermine the State Department and sidestep Congress:

Stephenson first arrived in the United States on April 2, 1940 ostensibly on an official mission for the Ministry of Supply. It was on this trip, even before Churchill’s May 10th, 1940 ascension to prime minister that the meeting took place which set the early close working relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and British Intelligence.

This meeting between Stephenson and J. Edgar Hoover had been smoothed over by a mutual friend, the boxer Gene Tunney: “I had known Sir William for several years. He wanted to make… contact with J. Edgar Hoover… [but] he did not want to make an official approach through well-placed English or American friends; he wanted to do so quietly and with no fanfare.”

Mahl explains Stephenson’s orders for stateside espionage with a quote from Ernest Cuneo, who readers will remember from my post on the assassination of Gen. Patton:

The influence of British Security Coordination in America to involved the United States in WWII and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the Ernest Cuneo papers in the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British Intelligence created Donovan’s CIO/OSS. “If the charge against Ellis is true,” wrote Cuneo,”… it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”

“If my buddy Ellis was a spy, that’d mean the CIA was run by Soviets. Can’t happen.”

Following on, Mahl writes:

Not only were the British the primary force in the conception and creation of the COI, which later became the OSS and whose pieces were finally reconstructed into the CIA, but a British officer, Dick Ellis, then ran the organization. This was done in deepest secrecy, because as Winston Churchill’s personal assistant, Major Desmond Morton wrote, “It is of course essential that this fact not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”

Anti-war sentiment was a potent political force in the USA in 1940, and democratic processes would have scuppered FDR’s war plans, had they been allowed to work. It has never been conclusively decided whether Dick Ellis was a Soviet spy, though Richard Trahair’s Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage says that Ellis probably was a Soviet agent, and may have been for 30 years. Personally, I’m not surprised by Ellis, because thanks to the Venona decrypts and books like The Haunted Wood, we know that the OSS was riddled with Soviet agents. Of course, all of this is disastrous news for anybody at the CIA who doesn’t like Russians; if you’re interested in reading more about how Churchill-backed Soviet infiltration has undermined American counterintelligence efforts, check out my post Jesus, Jimmy. I think that this ‘Soviet infiltration’ is best understood as ‘infiltration’ by people who had also backed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

The final stink wafting around Winston Churchill is a drug and cult related one. Mortimer Planno, the man who converted Bob Marley to Rastafarianism and who became the musician’s manager and political advisor, told journalist Hélène Lee that Winston Churchill had ultimate control over the drug market in Jamaica. Lee writes in The First Rasta:

He [Mortimer Planno] begins by confirming my doubts concerning the ganja trade. In the 1930s, he says, ganja was not yet illegal. The British even advised Guyana, with its big international debt, to plant and repay. But in 1953 Winston Churchill (who had been reelected prime minister in 1951) decided to put an end to the ganja trade. Norman Manley, Planno says, called him into his office and told him, “Morty, you must tell your half-Indian brothers to quit the ganja business.”

Norman Manley is one of the two cousins who ruled Jamaica for decades after the British demurred (the other was Alexander Bustemante); notice that Bob Marley’s handler Planno is on a first-name basis with Manley.

Mortimer Planno, thank you snipview.com.

Of course, it’s possible that Mortimer Planno is lying. However, there is circumstantial evidence which suggests that Planno is telling the truth, because the largest ganja supplier at that time, Leonard Percival Howell, was probably a tool of British intelligence:

First, Bob Marley’s guru Leonard Percival Howell– the first ‘Rasta’– ran a cult from his ganja plantation based on a system of control very similar to the one Crowley pioneered at Cefalù. Like Crowley, Howell exploited single mothers; encouraged drug use amongst his followers; and played to followers’ narcissism by promising them power. What was different about Howell’s system was that instead of promoting sex magic, he focused on Black supremacy: Howell’s target demographic (initially) was in Kingston’s poor Black ghettos, not the idle rich of London. Howell promised his Rastafarian followers that they would be God’s chosen people, that they would rule the world and be better than White people.[2] (If you’re interested in what Howell taught, check out The Promise Key, the ‘bible’ of musician Bob Marley’s guru Leonard P. Howell. This is a book that makes modern proponents of Rastafarianism very nervous.)

Second, Lenoard Howell’s early life is ‘spooky’. Howell came from a military family in Jamaica; he returned home from NYC in 1916 and joined the British West Indian Regiment but never saw combat– no one knows exactly what he did in service nor where he did it. By the end of the war Howell was in New York City just like Aleister Crowley, our ‘Primrose League’ buddy. Readers will remember that during WWI, Crowley carried out his ridiculous ‘pro-German’ and ‘pro-Irish Nationalist’ antics in NYC, which were British intelligence operations designed to undermine support for these groups. (See Secret Agent 666 by Richard Spence.)

No one knows much about what Leonard Percival Howell did for the six years immediately after the war either, besides working for an US Army transport ship based out of NYC. By 1924 Howell had plugged into a group of people who gave him the fundamental ideas of Rastafarianism and by 1932 he’d returned to Jamaica full of religious zeal. (In the mean time Howell’s strict Anglican father, Charles Theophilus Howell, had become Justice of the Peace on behalf of the British in his local district– portends of Jim Morrison?!)

Third, Leonard Howell had contact with at least one Communist agent working out of London (PROFINTERN agent George Padmore), so Howell was in the right crowd to be recruited for British Intelligence.

Finally, Howell’s huge plantation had a regular working relationships with local law enforcement and British-backed politicians. Ganja sales funded political violence on the island– politically useful violence– which makes it all the more interesting that Churchill allegedly waited until 1953 to ‘crack down’.

Leonard Percival Howell

Hélène Lee doesn’t explore why in 1953 Churchill would suddenly decide to enforce the 1913 law outlawing ganja; a decision that would ultimately result in the destruction of Leonard Percival Howell’s Rastafarian cult at his Pinnacle Plantation in Jamaica. (More accurately, the plantation still belonged to Albert Chang, because although it’s likely that Howell paid Chang for the land, Chang never transferred the deed.)

What Lee does say is that the 1953/54 crack-down disrupted an international system which had previously been controlled by local Jamaican drug-lords. The crack-down didn’t stop the drug trade, but could very easily have changed who benefited from it: the Jamaican ganja trade in the U.K. continued swiftly, coming to an ugly head in the early Sixties with the Profumo affair– a highly publicised scandal which ended Conservative  rule.

It’s a tragedy for Jamaica that the drug trade, and the resulting political violence, wasn’t stopped– and stopped well before 1953. It’s a tragedy for the USA (and the world) that Winston et alia destroyed rule of law at the Federal level. It’s a tragedy for Britain that they lost an empire and almost 400,000 men for Winston’s economic ambitions.

I think this post shows that creatures like Churchill and his patrons don’t care about justice; they don’t care about law; and they don’t care about anyone other than themselves. I look forward to the day when Brits quit referring to Winston as “the great Briton”, and start using a more appropriate epithet, like “that American bastard”, or even better, “that globalist”.

[1] If you’re interested in knowing more about what it was like to be one of Churchill’s spies, I suggest reading my post Great Users of People, where I provide an excerpt from Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, in which Wright reminisces on the sad fate of Klop Ustinov.

[2] British intelligence was interested in exploiting anti-White prejudices, as shown by the report drawn up by George Orwell for Britain’s Information Research Department in 1949, in which he names people he suspects of being communist agents. Orwell made particular note of the “anti-white” prejudices of George Padmore and Paul Robeson, according to Francis Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War, which seethes with hatred for Orwell. George Orwell had strong communist sympathies himself, but became disillusioned with its Russian-side promoters. (George Orwell’s ideological shift may have easily inspired the CIA’s anti-Stalin, then ‘non-communist’, left crusade.)

For Rolling Stones fans, Orwell’s suspected communist agent list included the name of Tom Driberg, a.k.a Lord Bardwell, who was Mick Jagger’s political handler for a time. Next to Driberg’s name, Saunders says Orwell wrote “‘Homosexual’, ‘Commonly thought to be an underground member’, and ‘English Jew’.” Needless to say, Orwell’s list was not a ‘black list’, and many of the people he named went on to enjoy spectacular careers. Their success shouldn’t be surprising considering the CIA’s post-WWII promotion of the ‘non-Communist’ (read: not-Russian-controlled) left.

International mafioso Meyer Lansky.

A few days ago I received my copy of Andrew Loog Oldham’s first autobiography, Stoned, so I’m now in a position to reveal who his mother’s long-term boyfriend was: Alec Morris. Morris was married throughout his relationship with Loog Oldham’s mother Celia; he funded her lifestyle in London.

As a recap, Andrew Loog Oldham was an early manager for The Rolling Stones. Oldham left the band after their 1967 staged drug bust, which you can read about in Rolling Through the Intelligence Community.

Alec Morris is important because it was probably his connections that hooked the teenaged Andrew Loog Oldham up with a series of high-profile jobs which culminated in Andrew managing The Rolling Stones in his early twenties. These glamorous jobs included: personal assistant to fashion designer Mary Quant; protegé to Beatles magician Brian Epstein; and protegé to music-biz-murderer Phil Spector. As I mentioned in Rolling Through the Intelligence Community, Oldham was an angry young man and prior to the Stones, he didn’t stay with any of these positions for very  long.

So who was Alec Morris? To hear Andrew Loog Oldham tell it, Morris was a well-to-do furniture maker from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ who switched to producing munitions boxes during WWII and ended up driving a Rolls Royce. (You can read Oldham’s take on Alec Morris’ personal background here, it’s the usual schlock about hard-scrabble street smarts.) After the war, Morris’s well-capitalized family furniture business, ‘Made by Morris’, branched out into investment banking: ‘Alec Morris Investments Ltd’. The new investment company was incorporated on May 4th in 1954 and registered at Devonshire House, near Regent’s Park in London. That’s a swanky address.

Morris’s fantastic business success happened at a time when most of Britain was malnourished and struggling to say warm. How’d Alec do it?

Andrew Loog Oldham offers one oblique clue: in 1915 Alec Morris “smuggled himself aboard” a troop transport ship destined for New York City, where for a few years Morris taught dance classes alongside George Raft, the mafia figure. What Andrew Loog Oldham fails to mention is that George Raft wasn’t just any up-and-coming mafioso– Raft was a friend of Bugsy Siegel and Hollywood heavyweight Johnny Rosselli; Raft became a partner in the Mafia-run Las Vegas casino The Sands; and then a front man (perhaps even a bit more) for OSS mobster Meyer Lansky’s gambling operations in Cuba and London. In the 1910s Alec Morris’s twinkle-toed buddy Raft was ‘on the make’.

How’d Morris get plugged into Raft and his ilk? It’s common knowledge that furniture-making is excellent training for success in the performing arts. Therefore, it’s only natural that a stowaway like Alec Morris should find himself giving dance lessons next to George Raft, who was earning quite a name for himself on Broadway, according to his TMC.com profile:

Raft worked as a “paid dancer” (a male escort for female patrons) in several clubs, including the Roseland Ballroom, where his dancing shoes were on display at the time of his death in 1980. He was the partner of Elsie Pilcer on the Keith and Orpheum vaudeville circuits, and was on the bill with the famous nightclub hostess Texas Guinan at her club, the El Fey speakeasy, where Fred Astaire and George Gershwin would come to watch him dance. Astaire recalled going there “several times to see George dance. He was a sensation in those days…the main attraction…George did the fastest and most exciting Charleston I ever saw. I thought he was an extraordinary dancer.”

Of course, I’m kidding. It’s far more likely that Alec Morris’s family had mafia connections which young Alec was able to exploit by ingratiating himself with New York mob figures over several years– just like George Raft had done. Who might these mob figures be?

In Gus Russo’s book the The Outfit, he writes this about George Raft and his long-time friend Bugsy Siegel:

By 1936, the thirty-year-old [Bugsy] Siegel himself became a marked man…Instead of boarding the New York to Chicago underground railroad like [Al] Capone, Siegel was ordered to Los Angeles by his superiors, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky… Soon after his arrival, Siegel hooked up with another transplanted Brooklyn pal who had already scored in Hollywood, actor George Raft… With the well-placed Raft and di Frasso as his connections, a starstruck Siegel soon met celebrities like Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper and many others. Through Johnny Rosselli [another of Raft’s friends– a.nolen] Siegel met studio barons like Harry Cohn and Louis Mayer, and the thug Willie Bioff.

George Raft’s, and by extension Alec Morris’s, connections in the post-WWII American mob and intelligence community really couldn’t get any better: Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Johnny Rosselli… this post is shaping up like a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Sadly, Andrew Loog Oldham’s story is real life. I’m going to look at Morris’s contacts through the lens of Raft’s career, because the Mafia works on a basis of ‘who you know’.

After Raft had made his contacts dancing in NYC, he found himself well-placed for a Hollywood career: mobsters from New York like Harry Cohn and mobsters from Chicago like Johnny Rosselli had Hollywood under their thumb, as Gus Russo writes:

Johnny Rosselli became the movie honchos’ bookmaker and personal adviser… As bookie to the studio heads, Johnny would glean information vital to the Outfit’s [Chicago mob’s] movieland aspirations. By either threatening to expose hidden skeletons or to call their vigorish, Rosselli was able to acquire silent partnerships for the Outfit in many Hollywood careers. It is believed that in this way the hoods “sponsored” actors such as George Raft, Chico Marx, Jimmy Durante, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe.

Readers will remember that Marilyn Monroe was one of the few actors we know of who had a secret contract with the movie studio at Lookout Mountain Air Force Station, in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon neighborhood.

Johnny Rosselli was also a CIA collaborator, as Russo writes:

It seems that some senior CIA officers who had met Johnny Rosselli at a Maheu clambake the previous spring and were so taken with the Outfit’s emissary that, when word come to the Agency that Castro was to be removed, the officers immediately thought of “Uncle Johnny.” It is not known if Rosselli had spoken to the CIA boys at the clambake as he had to actor George Raft a year earlier in a Los Angeles bar. When Raft had mentioned that he had just returned from Cuba, where Castro was threatening to take over, Rosselli had bragged, “You give me a couple of guys with machine guns, we could go down there and take over the who island.”

Later, Rosselli gave details of the CIA’s attempt on the life of Fidel Castro to Jack Anderson, a Mormon journalist and a veteran war correspondent who served with US forces during WWII. (Jack Anderson was also the protegé of Drew Pearson, a journalist who worked for Ernest Cuneo and the British Security Coordination, William Stephenson’s British spy ring and a close ally of the OSS. [1]) According to Colby’s self-serving 1974 ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, the CIA spied on Anderson after he published Rosselli’s information about the planned Castro assassination– i.e. Colby made Anderson look good.

After WWII, when Raft’s Hollywood career as a mafioso character actor dried up, he went into business with the real Mafia in Las Vegas by investing in The Sands casino with Meyer Lansky, Fred Astaire and Frank Costello.

Popular entertainers outside George Raft’s Las Vegas casino, The Sands.

Somehow, Raft lost his ownership stake in The Sands (Russo says Raft had a gambling addiction), but Raft continued to work as a front man for Lansky’s business in Cuba. When Castro shut down the Cuban casino, Raft became the front man for Meyer Lansky’s and Angelo Bruno’s ‘Colony Sports Club’, a gambling den in London, where Raft befriended local underworld figures the Kray brothers. (The Krays were contemporaries of Albert Dimes, the British mafioso of Italian extraction who patronized ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez, the Rolling Stones groupie/Robert Frasier’s underworld fixer.)

Dino Cellini outside George Raft and Meyer Lansky’s London gambling den, The Colony Sports Club. The Colony’s rise and fall had a strange synchronicity with Andrew Loog Oldham’s career.

At this point I’d like to draw a parallel between the careers of George Raft and Andrew Loog Oldham. In 1959, Castro pulled Lansky’s (and Raft’s!) Cuban gambling ticket, prompting the mobster to look for somewhere else to set up casinos. Lansky chose London– Raft’s old friend Alec Morris’s haunt– and set up shop there in the early 1960s with The Colony Sports Club, amongst other establishments. Andrew Loog Oldham began his string of fantastic, high-profile jobs in the early 1960s too– the most fabulous of which was managing the Stones, which started in 1963.

In 1967– sometime before March 2nd– the lucrative London gambling scene fell apart for Lansky and Raft: in a deft move by British authorities, Raft was denied reentry into the U.K. due to his unsavory business connections. When British authorities pulled Raft’s immigration ticket, the Colony Sports Club shut down, i.e. it didn’t just get a new front man. (For more information on this, see Colin Fry’s The Krays.) It seems that U.K. authorities knew just how to pull the rug out from under the American mobsters.

February 1967 was also the end of Andrew Loog Oldham’s career in Britain, and the end of the golden period of his career overall. In early February a strange American with multiple passports visited the Rolling Stones while the band partied at their rural Redlands mansion, according to Rolling with the Stones by Bill Wyman. This American dropped off some new drugs from California, then disappeared just before local police raided the Stones and made them media martyrs. According to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Andrew Loog Oldham fled Britain, just like the mysterious American, in order to avoid police charges in relation to the drugs:

Oldham’s empire collapsed nearly as quickly as it developed. In early 1967, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were all busted on drug charges. Afraid of being arrested himself, Oldham decamped to California, where he helped Lou Adler and John Phillips with Monterey Pop, suggesting they book Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who. Meanwhile, the Stones felt abandoned by Oldham, while Allen Klein found them lawyers and stood by their side in court. By September 1967, Oldham was no longer managing the group.

Andrew Loog Oldham’s phenomenal teenage success in London’s music scene, and his inexplicable pull with magazines like Vogue, dried up at the same time as the money stream from George Raft’s gambling business. I believe it’s *more than likely* Andrew Loog Oldham’s initial success, and his “father-figure” Alec Morris’s success, is rooted in the same muck as George Raft’s career.

A painfully young Andrew Loog Oldham sits between Keith Richards and Brian Jones. Thank you, dailymail.co.uk/ Getty Images.

Why would the Stones’ handlers lose a cute trick like Andrew? Well, according to Bill Wyman, Andrew’s management skills were not of the caliber needed by the band, whose success was ever-increasing. I think that there is probably another angle here: The Rolling Stones were formed in 1962– the same year that the MI6/CIA ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was ‘outed’ by Soviet-backed press. By 1967 it was probably clear that the Stones were shaping up to be a valuable mouthpiece in the ‘cultural Cold War’– they were useful promoting non-Communist left politics. Perhaps the time was right to drop no-longer-necessary liabilities, like low-rent mafia connections. Intel pros might have been fine with mobsters financing a seedling operation with a 1-in-100 chance of success, but the Stones were beyond that in 1967. Perhaps the Redlands drug bust was useful for more than just its media fallout, perhaps it helped the Stones’ handlers protect their investment and ‘clean house’.

I’ve written a lot about George Raft’s mafia connections so far, but I haven’t said much about the intelligence angle surrounding Raft. In The Outfit, Gus Russo describes how Raft was a close friend of Bugsy Siegel, who in turn reported to Meyer Lansky and Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Lansky and Luciano worked for the OSS during WWII:

 [Mario] Brod had been a liaison between the Central Intelligence Agency and the New York crime bosses since World War II, when the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had kicked off the U.S. government’s long, mutually beneficial relationship with the underworld. The partnership had its known origins in 1942, when the OSS enlisted Meyer Lansky and the imprisoned Charles “Lucky” Luciano in its effort to deter wartime sabotage in the New York harbor. The government also utilized Luciano’s Italian contacts to gain intelligence in anticipation of the invasion of Sicily. For his efforts, detailed in Rodney Campbell’s book The Luciano Project, Lucky Luciano was allowed to leave prison in exchange for permanent exile in Italy. At the time, Brod was an OSS captain in Italy under future CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.

James Angleton used Luciano’s mob connections to help OSS’ers wrest control of Italy. (A bit like how Robert Fraser used ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez in London.) To better explain this OSS/Mafia partnership, we need to look at what, exactly, James Angleton was doing for FDR/Churchill’s spying outfit in Italy.

The British trained Angleton for his OSS counterintelligence work in Italy. Angleton trained in London– and there befriended Soviet double agent Kim Philby– prior to being transferred to Rome 1944. While in Rome, Angleton participated in the Italian equivalent of ‘de-nazification’, where anyone who supported Mussolini or criticized American involvement in WWII was purged from positions of influence. (See Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior). At the same time, Angleton made connections with people who would eventually form Israel’s Mossad. In Richard Bennett’s 2013 book Espionage: Spies and Secrets, Bennett writes this about Angleton:

Angleton began his career in espionage in the wartime OSS. During his time in Italy both before and after the end of the war, Angleton developed a deep relationship with the leaders of the Jewish underground, who later became senior officers in Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Because of these ties, he entered the CIA with the clear understanding that he would head the Israeli desk.

In 1951, the year Celia Oldham introduced her boyfriend Morris to her son Andrew, Angleton was given control of the Israeli Desk, the CIA’s formal information-sharing arrangement with the new Middle Eastern state.

‘Jimmy Jesus’ Angleton, the disgraced, mocked CIA counterintelligence chief, who was ignored by his superiors and ‘went crazy’ some time during the twenty years he ran his department, was given the Israeli desk soon after he was hired. Angleton doesn’t appear to have fought with other power-brokers for this gem– it was simply created then handed to Angleton, who had been groomed by the British for this position via Italian contacts. This is how Tom Mangold describes Angleton’s prize:

In early 1951, Angleton received a new important assignment: the so-called Israeli Account. He was the first head of the CIA’s newly created Israeli Desk, or Special Operations Group, as it was then officially known. Angleton served as the CIA’s exclusive liaison with Israeli intelligence. One might have expected his unit to be part of the Middle East division. But it stayed under Angleton’s tight, zealous command for the next twenty years– to the utter fury of the division’s separate Arab desks.

Angleton’s ties with the Israelis gave him considerable prestige within the CIA and later added significantly to his expanding counterintelligence empire.

Owning the Israeli desk was odd for a counterintelligence pro, because regional intelligence gathering at the CIA was usually done by a separate division, e.g. ‘The Soviet Division’. Could there have been a special counterintelligence angle to the CIA’s relationship with Mossad? Israeli overtures to lure one-time Communist sympathiser, Crowley devotee and jet propulsion scientist Jack Parson to the Promised Land had just been scuppered when the CIA set up the Israeli desk for Angleton.

I’ve established in previous posts (Who was Winston Churchill?, Haunted Wood, Did Colby Help the KGB?) that CIA leadership wasn’t adverse to communism ideologically, nor were they adverse working with the Soviets under the right circumstances. Was there something special about the Mossad connections– connections which provided an alternative source of information on the USSR from that provided by the CIA’s in-house Soviet Division– which led *somebody* to want counterintelligence stooge Angleton to have first crack at the information the Israelis provided? Angleton may have been the first line of defense between the intelligence community’s Anglo-American ‘pink’ fifth column (old OSS’ers, Abe Lincoln Brigade, ‘milk of FDR’ types etc.) and the Russian Soviets. Was Jimmy Jesus’s exclusive Israeli information pipeline designed as a way for old OSS’ers to protect themselves from now uncontrollable Russian agents who might try to cannibalize FDR networks? Might they have found it safer to use foreign intelligence to do unpopular things, like taking down ‘fellow-travellers’ by having Mossad feed Angleton information? If the WMD fiasco has taught us anything, it is that the ‘intelligence community’ likes to blame foreigners when something blows up in their collective face.

What we know for certain is that Angleton’s Italian/Israeli connections were set up under the watchful eyes of the British. This makes Alec Morris’ furniture/investment banking all the more interesting, because Andrew Loog Oldham tells us that Morris made at least one business trip to Italy in 1948– the year Angleton was officially hired by the CIA as the top aide to the director of the Office of Special Operations.

Pat Clayton [Alec Morris’ biological child]: My dad was flying back from a buying trip in Italy in 1948, when he nearly died and became a hero in the national newspapers: he rescued an air-hostess by jumping with her from the plane, forty feet off the ground, just before it crashed. They were the only survivors. [from Stoned, by Andrew Loog Oldham]

Pat Clayton doesn’t say who hit the ground first, but that Morris would be forever haunted by the screams of the dying on board that plane– the plane only he, and the woman he grabbed saved next to him, had time to jump out of.

Out of all of the countries across the globe, our British furniture-and-investment-banking magnate Alec Morris, with his Angleton-associated mob connections, toddled off to Italy, Angleton’s Mossad feeder-pool, where he jumped from a crashing plane… how quaint.

At the end of the day, what Andrew Loog Oldham hints at about Alec Morris’ Mafia connections tells us something veteran intelligence observers knew already: after 1939 Anglo-American spooks got deeply into bed with organized crime. What is interesting about Andrew Loog Oldham’s case is that it’s a British example of international organized crime’s ties to the music industry and the Anglo-American ‘intelligence community’ at quite a high level.

It wouldn’t be right to end this post without recognizing that, to some extent, Andrew Loog Oldham is also a victim. His mother was an extremely selfish woman to whom money was everything: during the war she’d shacked up with a doctor who’d got rich doing illegal abortions, but when his business dried up she switched to Morris. (It’s unclear to me where her brief relationship with Loog Oldham’s father fit into all this.) One of Andrew’s childhood friends, who otherwise liked Celia, described her as having “a private agenda, which Andy didn’t even know about”. Much like Ken Anger, Celia Oldham broke off contact with every member of her family after each one had displeased her in some way; she was threatening towards Andrew when he asked about his relatives. Worst of all, Celia would only show approval of her son if her sugar-daddy Morris approved of him, as Loog Oldham writes:

 The year 1963 was a very good one, and a very fast one. Late 62 through April 63 had me busy, secure and content with my lot . I hoped my mother had noticed, and told Alec as much. Alec’s approval was just as important to me, since if he thought I was doing okay, my mother would go along with him.

Celia’s behavior towards her son shows how narcissistic people are very easy to control: they’ll put their desire for approval from ‘authority figures’ ahead of everything else, even their own children. See Great Users of People and The Cult of Intelligence.

Celia was emotionally abusive towards Andrew; Andrew’s youthful anger was justified. It’s hard to grow up around selfish users and not learn to mimic their poisonous behavior. If I’m right about Alec Morris’s mafia/intel involvement, then Morris was just as bad as his squeeze: he put Andrew in harm’s way when he involved the teenager with his ‘work buddies’– particularly the psychotic Phil Spector. I can’t find any evidence that Alec Morris treated his biological children with such callous indifference. (Though that doesn’t mean he didn’t.) Either way, Morris’ ‘guidance’ didn’t do much for Andrew Loog Oldham in the long run, because now he’s camped out in Bogotá, reliving the glory days through multiple autobiographies.

I’ll wind this up with a final question: Why does Andrew Loog Oldham talk about Morris’s mafia connections at all? I suspect Loog Oldham knows as much or more than I do about the mob world Morris inhabited. Andrew Loog Oldham probably considers Morris’s connection with George Raft to be glamorous, which would tally perfectly with how he says Celia brought him up. It’s hard to be ethical when you don’t know what ethical looks like.

[1] Jack Anderson inherited Drew Pearson’s ‘Washington Merry Go Round’ column, from WashingtonMerryGoRound.com:

Founded by Drew Pearson, “Washington Merry-Go-Round” began as a syndicated column in 1932. The provocative and often controversial column broke the story of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton and the soldier he slapped in 1943. Pearson later brought about the downfall of Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, an ideological foe, and he denounced the witch-hunt agenda of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc.

The slapping story was false. Regular readers know what I suspect about Jack Anderson: managed opposition in the vein of Sy Hersh, probably working for the old, pink, OSS’ers at the CIA like William Colby.

Pedophile Roman Polanski with Hugh Hefner and ‘Playmates’. Polanski’s career was promoted by Cinema 16 like Kenneth Anger’s.

When I was doing research for my last post, I came across this snippet about the Playboy Club in Gus Russo’s The Outfit– Hugh Hefner’s “key club” opened on February 29th, 1960:

The Second City [Chicago] bosses wasted little time in sinking their claws in Hefner’s new “key club” venture…

Outfit [Chicago Mob] bosses were bestowed exclusive Number One Keys, which allowed them to date the otherwise off-limits “bunnies” and drink on a free tab. Slot king, and Humphreys crony, Eddie Vogel, dated “Bunny Mother” Peg Strak, who later became Roma’s executive secretary when Roma was promoted to operations manager of Playboy Clubs International, Inc., which oversaw the empire of sixty-three thousand international key holders. Although Hefner himself has never been tainted by his club’s unavoidable contact with the Outfit, it is interesting to note that in 1977, when he fought a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Universal Studios, Hefner employed the services of Sidney Korshak. For a $50,000 fee, Korshak attempted in vain to settle the case with the studio, which was run by his old friend Lew Wasserman.

By 1973, the Playboy Empire was even more thoroughly entrenched in the mafia. In Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin (1991), he mentions how Hefner’s name came up during an IRS investigation into a CIA front bank:

In 1973 agents of the Internal Revenue Service were able to photograph the Castle Bank’s customer list while a bank executive dined in a posh Key Biscayne restaurant with a woman described as an IRS “informant”. Reviewing the purloined documents, IRS investigators found that the 308 Castle Bank customers on the list had moved $250 million to foreign numbered accounts. Depositors included Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, Penthouse magazine publisher Robert Guccione, and some major organized crime figures– Morris Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, and Samuel A. Tucker. Elated by the find, investigators formed Project Haven to make “the single biggest tax-evasion strike in IRS history.” Suddenly, the IRS announced that it was dropping the investigation because of “legal problems.” According to a later investigation by the Wall Street Journal, “pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency… caused the Justice Department to drop what could have been the biggest tax evasion case of all time.” The CIA invoked “national security” since it was using the Castle Bank “for the funding of clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert intelligence operations directed at countries in Latin American and the Far East.”

The troika of mobsters listed above were originally from the East Coast but got in on Las Vegas’s gambling scene early. Morris ‘Moe’ Dalitz went into business with Meyer Lanksy to build the iconic Las Vegas Stardust casino; both Lansky and Dalitz had interests in Cuban casinos.

Classy joint.

If you’ve read my previous post on The Rolling Stones and Meyer Lansky, you’ll notice that Hugh Hefner banks with mobsters who share business interests with the CIA’s mafia partners. These CIA and mafioso criminals started their cooperation in the early 1940s, when the OSS teamed with Meyer Lanksy and ‘Lucky’ Luciano to take over Italy. In 1973, the IRS stumbled onto the fact that Hugh Hefner ate at the same table as Mario Brod (CIA), Jimmy Rosselli (Mob), James Angleton (CIA), George Raft (Mob)… and probably the Rolling Stones’ young manager Andrew Loog Oldham.

Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Enterprises, like the other fronts which banked with Castle Bank & Trust of Nassau, is a CIA-sponsored business concern. Hugh Hefner is a CIA asset.

If the IRS’s discoveries and the mob connections are not enough to convince readers of Hugh Hefner’s patronage, I ask them to consider 1) when and how the Playboy Empire was founded 2) the nature of what Hefner does and 3) the company Hefner keeps.

Hugh Hefner In Context

Hugh Hefner is in a position to have compromising information on important people; it goes without saying that the ‘intelligence community’ is interested in collecting compromising information. In fact, it would be *remarkable* for someone in Hefner’s position not to have a working relationship with the CIA. It’s quite natural therefore that Hefner started his business the same year that the CIA began to use sex for *domestic* intelligence work on a large scale.

The Playboy Empire started in 1953 as a vehicle to publish pornography (its first spread featured Marilyn Monroe, that girl with a secret contract at Lookout Mountain Air Force Station).  Also in 1953, CIA agent George White opened his first NYC prostitution-cum-doping den as part of the MK ULTRA program. A short time later White moved his operation to San Fransisco and his new (bugged) apartment became a training ground for CIA “carnal” operations.

What were these “carnal” operations like? In John Marks’ book Search for the Manchurian Candidate the author quotes nameless CIA agents on how they learned to use sex to get information;  Marks says that CIA tactics exploited more than just the “missionary position”. CIA personality profiler John Gittinger, who was interested in self-centered sex for mass control purposes, was also part of George White’s San Fransisco operation.

Gittinger was interested in identifying tendencies toward self-centered sexual behavior, which includes masturbation and promiscuity, as part of his formula for controlling different personality types. The use of pornography for social control has been known since antiquity, but interest in it resurfaced again from American quarters in the 1950s. Playboy Enterprises bases its reputation on promiscuity and its business on masturbation aids.

Playboy Mansion in Chicago– set up before the club!

Seven years after the CIA began learning how to videotape men with prostitutes, Hugh Hefner set up his first Playboy Mansion– that place with all the bedrooms where ‘successful’ bunnies participate in ritualized orgies. Note that the first Playboy Mansion manifested in Chicago, the original power base of  CIA-Castro-assassination point man Johnny Rosselli. The Chicago Playboy Mansion was set up before Hefner opened his “key club”; it seems that bringing those special bedrooms online was more important than the commercial end of Playboy Enterprises. Perhaps Bill Cosby, the guy with nonconformist politics, understands why?

Who Do Bunnies Do?

In the first excerpt above Gus Russo states that sixty-three thousand “keyholders” paid for access to the Playboy Club– a bar where they could watch suggestively dressed women. These men were sent secret decoder rings Playboy logo key chains, which they would flash at the ‘door bunnies’ for admission. These 63,000 “keyholders” were not allowed to touch the talent, however if patrons carried a “Number One Key”, they were. This is how ex-bunny Jan Marly Reesman describes the system to The Telegraph:

We were forbidden to date key-holders (club members), unless they were number-one key-holders, which meant they were celebrities or management. Then it was fine.

Patricia Cronin Marcello, in her book Gloria Steinem: A Biography, goes a little further explaining “Number One Keyholders”:

Number One Keyholders, who were corporation presidents, celebrities, important members of the press and other VIPs were afforded very special treatment. Not only were these men pampered inside the club, but also bunnies were permitted to give them their last names, to date them, and even to use the facilities of the club when in a Number One’s company.

Readers will remember that Gloria Steinem herself was a CIA asset. Her 1963 ‘exposé’ of the NYC Playboy Club was not hard-hitting journalism: the article was a self-flattering puff-piece. Steinem’s biggest gripe was that bunnies didn’t make as much money as they’d been led to believe. (You may find Steinem’s article to be a twisted sort of recommendation for the club, it seems that some of the aforementioned mobsters certainly did: a huge ad for the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas– Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky’s joint– graces the SECOND installment of Steinem’s article, which appeared one month after the first.) Steinem’s Playboy ‘exposé’ ignored the real story: why only foreign, linguist ‘bunnies’ were allowed to work in the VIP dinner lounges. Steinem also let a full list of “Number One Keyholders” slip through her fingers. Why?

Who were these “Number One Keyholders”? More than a few Civil Rights VIP’s hit Hefner’s Chicago mansion, including Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom are known to have compromised themselves sexually. Steinem lobs stones at her journalistic competitors by naming other ‘dateable’ VIPs: Dorothy Kilgallen, Gwen Harrison, Maggie Daly, Hy Gardner, Frank Farrell and “television men” from Chicago and Miami, but emphatically not television men from New York!  According to bunny Barbara Haigh, “I met all the stars – Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, John Wayne. Omar Sharif asked me to go out with him after work but I only had my civvies with me in the bunny room so turned him down…” You’ll remember Jack Nicholson, the character actor, because Roman Polanski used Jack’s house to drug and rape a 13 year-old girl in 1977– not unlike what Bill Cosby has recently been accused of doing in the Playboy Mansion!

The CIA probably collected useful sexual information on “Outfit Bosses” through Hefner and his partners like A. C. Spectorsky, who seems to have been be the brains behind Hefner’s magazine [1]. I’m sure that the Agency would never go into business without establishing dominance in the relationship.

According to ex-bunny Dr. Polly Matzinger, the VIPs which the Playboy Club attracted would have in turn been attractive to the CIA:

Every night the club was filled with movers and shakers. Listening to the conversations in there was fascinating. All of my friends were students, and we talked about everything we wanted to do when we ran the world.

But at night I was listening to the conversations of the people who really did run the world. Working at the club was an education.

It seems that Playboy bunnies were recruited based not only on their measurements, but on their ability to charm visiting foreign men of means, Dr. Polly continues:

I’ll never forget the questions on the application form: ‘What do you consider yourself an expert in?'; ‘What languages do you speak and at what level?’ The irony was that, in a world that wanted all women to be Betty Crocker, it was the Playboy club that wanted women who could speak to men as equals. [Which is why Dr. Polly was in a rabbit suit- a.nolen]

I quickly became a ‘pool bunny’, probably because I was educated and fluent in a few languages. Whereas regular bunnies are meant to facilitate conversation rather than talk themselves, pool bunnies – employed to play pool with club members – were meant to talk.

You had to know how to handle men and how to treat drunk people in a kind and subtle way.

From Gretchen Edgren’s history of the Playboy Club: “Playmate-Bunny Lynn Karrol, Miss December 1961, a spare-time aviatrix and sky-diving buff, elevates both herself and the decor at the New York Club.” When ‘great users of people’ are taking, they’re seen to be giving.

As gross as these Playboy Clubs were/are, I suspect that the real muck is shoveled in the Mansions. Ex-bunnies speak of a special orgy room, “The Grotto”, for high-profile Los Angeles Playboy Mansion guests where women are available 24-7. This is how Melanie Myers describes Hefner’s basement:

Myers said she often went to the Playboy Mansion with [Paige] Young and says the model often entered the infamous Playboy grotto, where orgies were said to prevail.

‘If you got invited to the Playboy Mansion and you didn’t go in to the grotto, your days were numbered, you’d get kicked.

‘I went two, three times to the mansion but got kicked because I wouldn’t enter the grotto.

‘One of the nights, I was up there with Paige, she was in the grotto that night.

‘When you’re in the grotto, this dingy, cave like place, it’s a sex free-for-all.

‘There were a lot of celebrities up there, celebrity men and young pretty girls.’

The emphasis is my own. These ‘grotto’ celebrities included the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers musician Dave Navarro, but I suspect that a tour of Hefner’s basement is a right of passage for many American entertainers, i.e. people who are given microphones and need to be reliable.

It seems that bunnies make a point of doing people who are exceptionally valuable to exploit.

Hugh Hefner’s Political Friends

Finally, I’d like to draw readers’ attention to something which I stumbled onto a few days ago: In 1965 Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle approached Hefner to fund his glossy, expensive, ‘radical left’ magazine.

High production values to attract mainstream readers.

This is huge, and ultimately very ugly for Warren Hinckle, because much of his publication’s prestige rests on its being ‘persecuted’ by Angleton-types at the CIA. Mark Ames gives a *very establishment* summary of what was supposed to have gone down with Rampart’s ‘persecution’ in his article NSA Whistleblowers For Dummies Part II. I think the world is a little more complicated than Ames sees it.

Ramparts magazine started life as the baby of Edward Keating, a champion of angry Catholic, leftist politics and a fan of Hugh Hefner’s office decor (see Hinckle’s autobiography). However, Warren Hinckle, Dougald Stermer and Robert Scheer ended up taking over Ramparts and replacing the ‘Catholic’ bent with something they describe as ‘New Left’– the troika managed to wrest control of Ramparts by drumming up funders, one of which was Singer Sewing Machine heir Dick Russell.

Hinckle refrains from telling his readers if these funders ultimately included Hefner, though during their initial ‘pitch’ to Hefner, Hinckle and his cronies ended up staying at the mansion for a few days where they hobnobbed with ‘bunnies’, went skinny-dipping and ate oysters by the dozen. Although Scheer missed one meeting with Hef’s ‘head bunny’, Hinckle hints that approaching Hefner was successful, because he describes their approach after other successful attempts to woo millionaires who shared Hefner’s politics:

We began by infiltrating SNCC fund-raising parties at the homes of rich Westchester Jews. We pretended to be boosting the cause but kept looking over people’s shoulders to see the size of the checks they were writing.

I found there was left-wing gold rooted in pineapples, sewing machines, mattresses, zippers, plywood, soybeans, off-shore oil, General Motors and Hollywood– to name some pink fortunes– and we were soon deep into the concentric circles and interlocking directorates of the rich liberal-left. It was a very peculiar zoo.

(The ‘SNCC’ Hinckle refers to was probably the ‘Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee‘, which was led for a time by Stokely Carmichael, who became a leader of the Black Panthers– an African-American ‘hate group’– and a far-left martyr after 1971, when the FBI experienced leakage much like the CIA would do thanks to William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’.)

Why would Hinckle be coy about confirming or denying money from Hefner? Hinckle wrote his autobiography in 1974, when the IRS investigation into Castle Bank and Hefner’s CIA connection was still fresh news.

Warren Hinckle in 2006 courtesy of Wikipedia.

I’ll remind readers that, according to Francis Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War, liberal millionaires were the CIA’s favorite front for non-communist left funding. (Does it get any more non-communist left than Playboy Enterprises?!) Hinckle offers a candid explanation of why he needed so many millionaires to realize Ramparts:

Ramparts was itself a contradiction in its own terms– a big-money, left-wing, professional publishing operation… The left has never been accustomed to, let alone comfortable, operating in the crass commercial manner Ramparts represented…

The experiment I tried with Ramparts was an attempt to break out of the circulation boundaries and audience of fellow basket-weavers of the traditional liberal-left press… But an even more radical change from process color was the paper’s approach to the truth, which, on the left, had been practically synonymous with the correct “line”. I barred such theoretical essays from Ramparts and substituted old-fashioned muckraking journalism with its bias on the left but reporting facts… Ramparts developed a branch of new journalism that interpolated social and political critiques with trendy you-were-there stylisms.

Rampart’s tactics were the same as those used by the CIA and USAID with Zunzuneo in Cuba: report news and ‘fun’ entertainment items with an anti-Havana bias. Hinckle’s popular approach also smells like the ‘viral’ garbage which my old buddy Benny Johnson used to produce. Needless to say, Hinckle got the money he needed to make this expensive splash for as long as his magazine was useful: 1962 through August 1975, five months before Colby retired from the CIA.

Ramparts was useful for Colby, especially in taking down enemies like counterintelligence chief James Angleton. According to Ames, Ramparts’ ‘outing’ of Michigan State University’s role supporting the corrupt government in South Vietnam provided impetus for CIA programs like MH CHAOS:

The CIA was now on record committing serious crimes, violating its original 1947 charter that barred the CIA from operating on US soil or spying on US citizens. These and other crimes it would go on to commit would define the CIA’s and other officials’ pushback against whistleblowers and transparency in the coming years. In the meantime, the CIA went full-bore, digging into “Ramparts”’ and Hinckle’s financial records — looking for foreign, Communist sources. The CIA “urged” the FBI to investigate “Ramparts” and its editors as “a subversive unit.”…

Richard Ober was assigned to head up a new top-secret CIA domestic spying program code-named MH-CHAOS (“MH” for “worldwide operations” and “CHAOS” for “chaos”). Ober and 10 CIA officers set up a secret office in a secured underground vault in the basement of the CIA headquarters — protecting the operation from fellow CIA colleagues as well as outsiders. Intelligence reports on domestic political dissidents generated by this illegal program were shared with LBJ in his last year in power, and more vigorously with Nixon’s White House. Two presidents were active participants in a criminal program spying on and subverting political dissent. With MH-CHAOS, that program massively expanded. Two top CIA officials — counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, and deputy director Thomas Karamessines, a dirty tricks expert who oversaw the campaign to overthrow Chilean President Allende — ordered Ober’s team to spy on and subvert the huge underground left-wing antiwar press that now dominated youth and campus culture.

Of course, Colby leaked MH CHAOS in 1974 as part of the Family Jewels; these leaks were designed to take out his rivals at the Agency. Ames may be giving Ramparts too much credit above, but the magazine was active in the strange outpouring of CIA leaks which began around 1966.

I’ll remind readers that CIA director William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks were never honest leaks, they were carefully tailored to serve Colby’s political agenda and personal goals. The public didn’t get to see these ‘Family Jewels’ documents until 2007– so don’t hold your breath for Snowden’s.

My point in sharing this information on Ramparts is to show that everything about that magazine smelled like CIA managed opposition: from the magazine’s method of funding; to its glitzy ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’-style marketing; to its message, which mimicked Bill Colby’s ‘milk of FDR’ thinking. Naturally, CIA head William Colby’s actions left Ramparts smelling like roses– even forty years later guys like Mark Ames are still woozy on the perfume. After the magazine’s dissolution, Ramparts editors went on to start operations like Mother Jones and David Obst’s incubator Rolling Stone. (David Obst was a close working ally of Sy Hersh and CIA director Colby.)

Hugh Hefner’s business dealings overlap with the CIA’s dealings and those of the CIA’s mafia buddies. Hugh Hefner’s porn empire is perfectly in tune with the CIA’s desire to collect compromising sexual information on useful people. Hugh Hefner is a go-to ‘pink’ millionaire for CIA-smelling managed opposition outfits like Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts. Let’s not forget that the OSS and CIA were set up by ‘pink’ millionaires, too.

Take home: A ‘Number One Key’ at the Playboy Empire is a booby prize!

Movers ‘n’ Shakers: He’s got just the room for you.

[1] A. C. Spectorsky will be the subject of upcoming posts, in the meantime, here’s a snippet from his TIME magazine obituary which someone kindly provided at askville.amazon.com:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878492,00.html
*********
Died. A.C. Spectorsky, 61, author and editor who created the more serious half of Playboy’s split personality; of a stroke; on St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner’s tastes run to fried chicken, cool jazz and Los Angeles weekends; Auguste Comte Spectorsky preferred Continental cuisine, Mozart and Caribbean sailing. When “Spec” joined “Hef’s” three-year-old enterprise in 1956, it was a slick girlie magazine in search of some intellectual balance for the bare flesh. Spectorsky provided it by attracting contributions from top fiction writers and journalists. In the process he helped drive the magazine’s monthly circulation from nearly 800,000 to 6,500,000. Among his own books were The Book of the Sea (1954) and The Exurbanites (1955).

A. C. Spectorsky probably sourced British Security Coordination agent Roald Dahl’s work for the 1966 edition of Playboy. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Note that J. Paul Getty is on the cover too– Getty was a regular Playboy contributor and his money ultimately financed Ken Anger’s career.

A small announcement: I’ve created a handful of pages containing ‘primary source’ material over the last few years. These pages include document images from William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, as well as MK ULTRA images that were released to me through an FOIA request. You can find them all through the ‘Primary Sources‘ page in the main menu at the bottom of the screen.

January 1945: David Sarnoff, of RCA, receiving his brigadier general’s star from Major General Harry C. Ingles, chief signal officer of the US Army. Thank you, Wikipedia.

I’m concerned about the narrow range of opinion presented on US-inspired T.V. programming, on university campuses and in literature. I remember being a kid in the eighties and hearing pundits sound off on this narrowness after The Closing of the American Mind was published– I know I’m neither cutting-edge nor alone in my concern.

I attribute this narrowness, at least in part, to the mobilization of our culture during WWII and the Cold War. An awful lot of money poured into academia, publishing and the arts so that ‘creators’ would promote a unified front to fight against 1) National Socialist ideas and then 2) Russian elites.

The first time that this massive operation was ‘outed’– that I’m aware of– was in the February 1962 edition of the World Marxist Review by a mysterious author who used the pen name ‘Ernst Henri’. I’ve provided a full text of Henri’s article, including images of the original journal, here.

Everybody needs to read this article, because even though *it appears* to be written in the service of Russian-funded communism, the article is truthful about how our culture was mobilized through the exploitation of ‘philanthropic’ foundations like the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation to name a few. Anyone who currently makes their living by jockeying for or spending grant money will be shocked by how little has changed.

Ernst Henri wrote about this abuse of the philanthropic system four years before it was safe for The New York Times to do so. The information contained in the article would have been available from public sources, but it would have been very time-consuming and costly to collect without having somebody on the ‘inside’ of the operation providing data. While the article beats the drum about reactionary anti-communists in Washington, it is careful never to mention that the message Washington promoted was also a left-wing message– you could read this whole article under the misapprehension that the Rockefellers were conservatives!

Henri’s article is of particular interest to me, because the gold-standard exposé of the Congress for Cultural Freedom written by Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, doesn’t mention this 1962 article or Henri. I do not believe that Saunders was unaware of Henri’s writing, because the article reads like a synopsis of her book. The next question is: Why didn’t Saunders– a British author– acknowledge Henri’s writing?

I think the answer lies in Henri’s connection to Aleister Crowley and Tom Driberg, which I’ll be writing about soon. In the meantime, here are some choice snippets from ‘Ernst Henri':

At the head of these international anti-communist organizations are bourgeois politicians, diplomats, intelligence agents, writers, “philosophers” and clergymen. Each is known to be in some way associated with the State Department, U.S. Intelligence and with one or another government or private agency in the United States. On closer scrutiny, however, the leading core of each turns out to be one of the same group: the American tycoons and their lieutenants.

The deviousness of “American tycoons and their lieutenants” is one point where ‘Ernst Henri’, Leonid Andreyev and Mikhail Bulgakov would see eye-to-eye.

I’d like to draw readers attention to the business interests of these “tycoons” as Henry describes them; their business interests bear an eerie similarity to those of the millionaires who Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle hit up for money:

The CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom) leaders strike a sanctimonious pose of moral righteousness, but the fat salaries they draw come from the sale of automobiles, tanks and oil…

Buchman claimed that one such meeting, held in Brazil, was attended by 400 “leading industrialists and businessmen” including representatives of Ford, Mitsui, General Electric, etc…

The “Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League” in Saigon is subsidized by … the Giannini, Kaiser and Hearst groups…

This division also coordinates its activities with the Mellon group, the United Fruit Company, the Guggenheims and other monopolies that have been plundering the natural wealth of Latin America for decades…

The American Heritage Fund … board includes, or at one time included, representatives of the Ford and Rockefeller concerns; Paramount, the big cinema firm; General Electric and also the two reactionary trade union leaders– Meany and Reuther.

The American Heritage Fund was set up by David Sarnoff, who readers will remember from my posts on the origins of dragnet spying: The Empire is Listening, The Fabulous Marconi and Marconi Lives!

Henri says this about intelligence asset/radio magnate Sarnoff:

Another big “philanthropic” organization in the United States which engages in international anti-communism is the “American Heritage Foundation,” one of the organizers of the “Crusade for Freedom.” Its sponsor, David Sarnoff, is the author of a whole “program of political offensive against world communism,” news of which leaked out in the press in 1955.

One of the anti-communist measures Sarnoff proposed was the formation of special armed gangs to engineer putsches and subversion in the socialist and newly-independent countries. He urged that these elements should be well organized and financed, and used to the maximum. In all probability the events in Guatemala in 1954, in Hungary in 1956 and in Cuba in 1961 were attempts to carry out the schemes of the anti-communist strategists.

The American Heritage Fund is an advertising agency set up by the monopolies for the purpose of financing publicity for the bourgeois parties, influencing voters during election campaigns, etc. … Sarnoff acts as the spokesman of these circles when he calls for an offensive against communism and democracy through terror, military coups and “psychological warfare.”

Wouldn’t it be something if the father of American television was also the father of  ‘color revolutions’? Sarnoff’s company, RCA, had Marconi, General Electric and US Navy backing.

I encourage everyone to read Ernst Henri’s article.

Anita Pallenberg courtesy of Italian Vogue.

While researching A. C. Spectorsky’s work for the Playboy Empire, I stumbled across this tidbit about The Living Theatre, the only known employer of Anita Pallenberg before she shacked up with Brian Jones, according to author Tony Sanchez in his autobiography Up and Down with the Rolling Stones.

In a nutshell, The Living Theatre received funding from a CIA front, a ‘philanthropic foundation’ called the Farfield Foundation. It seems that the only thing we know about Anita’s working past is that it was paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency. In Frances Stonor Saunders’ words:

It was now reasoned that if the Farfield Foundation were to disburse funds to American– as well as international– projects, then the CIA’s interest, thus sandwiched, would become less conspicuous. ‘The Farfield was engaged in other activities because it needed to cover for the foundation, in case anyone enquired what it was doing,’ explained Diana Josselson. The Farfield report for the period 1 January 1960 to 31 December 1963 lists some of the hundreds of grants made for that period. Recipients included the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Modern Language Association, the Dancers’ Workshop, the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, Italy (contributions towards general expenses and the participation of American students, and for the expenses of the poet Ted Hughes), the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theater Arts, the Living Theater of New York, the New York Pro Musica, the Association of Literary Magazines of America, Partisan Review (‘a grant for expenses’), and the International Institute in Madrid (a grant to preserve the personal libraries of Lorca Ortega and Fernando Almalgro). — from The Cultural Cold War.

As I mentioned in my post Ken Anger’s System of Control, the Living Theatre was founded in NYC like Cinema 16, which launched Ken Anger’s intelligence career. Both the Living Theater and Cinema 16 started in 1947… the same year as the Farfield’s ultimate sponsor, the CIA was founded.

If you’re interested in The Rolling Stones and Kenneth Anger’s connection to the ‘intelligence community’, please see my posts:

Ken Anger in Context

Aleister Crowley’s System of Control

Ken Anger’s System of Control

Rolling Through the Intelligence Community

The Rolling Stones and Meyer Lansky?

Anita Pallenberg, along with psychological warfare operative Robert Fraser, helped Kenneth Anger start his London-based cult which centered around Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Both Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, who comes from an intelligence family, cooperated with Ken Anger’s mission to establish his Thelema-based cult, which was a reincarnation of British intelligence agent Aleister Crowley’s cult at Cefalù, Italy in the early 1920s.

But what was the ‘Living Theatre’? According to ArthurMag.com, which sells a documentary about the Living Theatre, this is how Keith Richards, Anita’s second Rolling Stone boyfriend, describes the organization:

From Keith Richards’ Life, page 221:

“Anita [Pallenberg] and I went to Rome that spring and summer [1967], between the bust and the trials, where Anita played in Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, directed by Jane’s husband Roger Vadim. Anita’s Roman world centered around the Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which had been around for years but was coming into its own in this period of activism and street demos. The Living Theatre was particularly insane, hard-core, its players often getting arrested on indecency charges—they had a play [“Paradise Now”] in which they recited lists of social taboos at the audience, for which they usually got a night in the slammer. Their main actor, a handsome black man named Rufus Collins, was a friend of Robert Fraser, and they were a part of the Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga connection. And so it all went round in a little avant-garde elite, as often as not drawn together by a taste for drugs, of which the LT was a center. And drugs were not copious in those days. The Living Theatre was intense, but it had glamour. There were all those beautiful people attached, like Donyale Luna, who was the first famous black model in America, and Nico and all those girls who were hovering around. Donyale Luna was with one of the guys from the theater. Talk about a tiger, a leopard, one of the most sinuous chicks I’ve ever seen. Not that I tried or anything. She obviously had her own agenda. And all backlit by the beauty of Rome, which gave it an added intensity…”

In the 1950s Robert Fraser served in the Kings’ African Rifles, part of the British military. Fraser took part in suppressing the Mau Mau Rebellion– a Kenyan rebellion against British colonial rule. In the 1960s, however, Fraser busied himself with artists who ‘challenged the color barrier’– hypocrisy or just a new mission?

It seems that Robert Fraser, the imperialist-propagandist-turned-swinging-rock-groupie, was tight with Warhol too. I find this particularly interesting, because Kenneth Anger was envious of Andy Warhol’s success– so much so that Anger threw paint on what he thought was Warhol’s front door. (Or so Bill Landis says in his biography of Anger.) Nothing like professional jealousy…

It’s going to get even uglier for the hypocritical culture barons of the 1950s, 1960s and 70s, readers… watch this space.

In the meantime, here’s CIA asset Hugh Hefner’s Playboy cover featuring The Living Theatre– August in the Summer of Love. Buhahahhaha.

Greetings first-time a.nolen readers! If you are unaware of the IRS evidence suggesting that Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Empire are CIA assets, please see my post Do You Have A Key to the Playboy Mansion? Enjoy!

I started writing this post expecting to find that the literary brain behind Playboy magazine, Auguste Comte Spectorsky, had a few intelligence ties to William Stephenson’s publishing network in New York City during WWII. Instead, I stumbled onto ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom 2.0′.

The operation which Spectorsky ran for Hugh Hefner was/is a more sophisticated version of the ‘non-communist left’ crusade that CIA agents Melvin Lasky and Michael Josselson ran across the globe during the Cold War. Why was a more sophisticated strategy necessary?

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was fatally flawed in that it was obviously not organic to any of the regions where it metastasized: after WWII loud Americans suddenly appeared with gobs of money for any ‘intellectual’ who would present anti-Russian, leftist views. The game was obvious and anyone worthy of the appellation ‘intellectual’ would have known that US intelligence was behind it– after all, the US and Russia were the only countries left standing.

The CCF was never very successful and I suspect that the CIA realized well before Ernst Henry exposed the CCF in 1962 that appealing to intellect would not sell their message; the CIA’s best chance would be to wrap their politics in sex. Hence the weird, Orwellian hybrid of ‘sexual liberation’ and sexual exploitation that is The Playboy Empire.

Hefner’s magazine mimicked part of the CCF’s political message in as far as it promoted non-communist left ideas, however, Playboy dropped the Christian and more conservative political elements which the CCF included. Hefner never tried to be anything but American, so the message wasn’t burdened with the inherent fakeness of Americans posing as Spaniards, Indians or French, etc. Instead of selling the CIA through testimonials from already-famous intellectuals, Hefner sold the CIA through T&A, consumerism, and a mirage called ‘the Playboy lifestyle’.

Here’s where things really get interesting, because Playboy had to take up the core CCF message without allying itself with the CCF. Many authors who were promoted by the CCF also appeared on Playboy covers, but so did many Western intellectuals who made names for themselves by bashing the CCF. In fact, the first authors and politicians featured on Playboy covers were those championed by CCF critics like Allen Ginsberg and John Kenneth Galbraith. Playboy was self-conscious in its promotion of these ‘dissident’ intellectuals, as if to scream “We’re not CCF!” while promoting the core of the CCF message.

As I researched who Playboy promoted month by month from 1959-1976, I consistently recognized names from Frances Stonor Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War; names she celebrated as critics of the ugly Americans’ CIA operation. Saunders’ prejudices matter, because her work is considered the gold standard CCF exposé. The men Saunders plugged as ‘intellectually honest critics of the CIA’s agenda’ where the same ones that CIA-backed Playboy chose to promote in the face of the CCF’s implosion. Saunder’s heroes promoted the CIA’s leftist agenda in Playboy, but stripped it of the more moderate, conservative elements– elements that the older CCF had included.

This forced me to reevaluate Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War: in writing it she cut off an arm to save the CIA’s body. She protected CIA assets like Allen Ginsberg at the expense of CIA assets like T.S. Eliot. That’s why she’s still breathing, folks. The only question I have left about Saunders is why her book had to come out in 2000– I’m not going to dig into that question now, though I suspect the answer has something to do with Bill Colby floating face down in the Wicomico River circa 1996. (Colby told us in his autobiography that the CIA’s ‘non-communist’ left putsch was largely staffed by his old OSS friends.)

I’ve thrown my theory at you, so now I’m going to explain how I’ve come to this conclusion. First, I’ll provide what little background I have on A. C. Spectorsky, because his personality is interesting with respect to The Cult of Intelligence. Then I will present the results of my statistical analysis of Playboy covers between 1959-76, highlighting the mind-boggling number of known intelligence operatives who wrote for the publication. Next week I’m going to drill out Playboy’s ‘culture war’ politics– politics which mesh ominously with MK ULTRA operations that I’ve written about in the past.

Who was A. C. Spectorsky?

When I read in Warren Hinckle’s autobiography that he’d been given an introduction to Hugh Hefner by A. C. Spectorsky in a bid to fund Ramparts, I knew that I would have to learn more about the Playboy gatekeeper.

Auguste Comte Spectorsky is not an easy man to track down. Most of what I could find comes from Playboy contributor Steven Watts’ book Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. In July 1956, Watts says Hefner hired Spectorsky to be his “second in command” at the magazine, though Hinckle’s recollections show that Spectorsky had control of more than just the publication. Prior to July ’56 Playboy had already published one of Spectorsky’s stories under a pseudonym. This is how Watts says Hefner decided to hire ‘Spec':

The publisher [Hefner] had decided that someone carrying credentials with the East Coast Establishment would help Playboy to gain increased respectability… Equally important, he [Spectorsky] was content to remain in the background and support Hefner as a public symbol of the magazine. “I think Hef, the young sparkplug and head of the whole operation, is the guy who should be kept in the foreground,” he [Spectorsky] wrote in a staff memo.

How magnanimous of new-hire Spectorsky to affirm Hefner as the front man! Besides deciding what would go into Playboy– like how and where products would be placed– Spectorsky’s job included introducing Hefner to “important authors, publishers and agents”.

Spectorsky was born in Paris in 1910 to Russian émigré parents– that’s prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, but during the time when the Czar’s enemies (political undesirables) were sometimes driven to Western Europe for succor. For example, Trotsky was in Vienna at this time and Lenin was in Switzerland; from these places the future dictators drummed up support for what would become the Bolshevik Revolution.

I don’t know that Spectorsky’s parents were ‘political undesirables’, but when WWI began they fled Paris for New York City, where they were quickly absorbed into the more comfortable echelons of society. (Just like Trotsky had been.) After graduating in Physics and Math from NYU, A. C. Spectorsky’s first job was with the editorial staff of The New Yorker magazine.

Improbable doors never stopped opening for the young Auguste Comte: Spectorsky worked as Literary Editor for the Chicago Sun for six years “during the 1940s” before returning to NYC as “a writer and editor in movies, television and journalism”.

The literary world Spectorsky swam in was stuffed with ‘pinko millionaires’ and their henchmen. I’ll remind readers that every publishing concern except Hearst’s got behind FDR’s campaign to drag the USA into WWII to fight for the British, and that British master-spy William Stephenson’s media power-base was in NYC. (See Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars.)

To work in television, however, Spectorsky would have needed additional patronage; patronage that likely came from the circle around David Sarnoff, the military-media-mogul and ‘father of American television’. Sarnoff was versed in intelligence matters thanks to his war-time propaganda work and was an admirer of Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who championed the use of propaganda to subvert democracy. David Sarnoff is also credited with devising the American foreign policy tactic of ‘gang rioting’ to facilitate regime change. (By the mid Sixties the CIA was exploring how to incite rioting in American ‘inner cities’ via the MK ULTRA subproject 102 and the work of Muzafer Sherif.)

In short, A. C. Spectorsky had friends in all the right places and was close to those ‘pinko millionaires’ who have done so much to undermine civil society. Spectorsky’s literary career was built on flattering those millionaires: his most famous book, The Exurbanites, is a cloying homage to NYC’s intelligentsia:

The exurbanite is a displaced New Yorker. He has moved from the city to the country. So indeed have hundreds of thousands of Americans, especially since the second World War; but for the exurbanite the case is different; for him the change is an exile. He will never quite completely permit himself to be absorbed into his new surroundings; he will never acclimate… spiritually he will always been urban, an irreconcilable whose step… is still the steadiest when it returns to the familiar crowded cross-walks  of Madison Avenue.

Of course, literature is how you look at it and Spectorsky may be mocking the ‘East Coast Establishment’ in his book, but having lived that life myself, I believe it’s more likely that Spectorsky is regurgitating the provincial attitudes (and fears) which were lampooned on this New Yorker cover in 1976:

We don’t know how Spectorsky was chosen to be the brains behind Playboy, but it happened, and he soon transferred his unfettered desire for approval away from the New York Literary Establishment to his new power-figure, Hugh Hefner. This is how Watts describes the relationship between these two men, it may remind readers of how cult followers identify with authority figures:

Nevertheless, he [Spectorsky] yearned for his boss’ [Hefner’s] approval. “He had a very strange relationship with Hefner,” Spectorsky’s wife reported. “Almost father-son, but the wrong way round. I don’t know why he had this tremendous need to please Hefner but he did.”

Spectorsky describes his own relationship with his boss this way: “To hate him as much as I’ve hated him, you really have to love him.”

Hefner, on the other hand, didn’t even bother to express condolences to Spectorsky when A.C.’s daughter died. Spectorsky put up with his narcissistic ‘boss’ because of a deep-seated insecurity about his worth as a writer, says Watts. Spectorsky’s opinion of his own talents was higher than anything literary he achieved in life; he tried to compensate for this with a flashy yacht and a luxurious lifestyle.

What Politics did Spectorsky Promote in Playboy?

Having given you a picture of Playboy’s literary gatekeeper Spectorsky, I’ll now go on to what type of ideas he chose to promote in Hefner’s mag. I’ve spent the last few days tabulating who and what was featured on every Playboy cover between 1959-1976. That’s 216 covers and about 140 authors total.

As I stated in the beginning of this post, there was a lot of cross-pollination between Playboy and the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the 1959-76 period, (the number in [brackets] is how many times the author was featured on a Playboy cover): Tennessee Williams [4], Bertrand Russell [3] (see University of Chicago CCF archives), as well as Alberto Moravia [5], Leslie Fielder [3], Norman Thomas [1], Vladimir Nabokov [14], Arthur Koestler [1], William Benton [2], William F. Buckley Jr. [6] and William Saroyan [6] (see Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War). Vladimir Nabokov was the cousin of CCF General Secretary Nicholas Nabokov.

Typically, if Spectorsky decided to feature an author on Playboy’s cover, they were featured twice, so a number of the CCF writers listed above were given extra-special promotion. However, intellectuals who made a name for themselves by criticizing the CCF were also promoted heavily: Allen Ginsberg [2], Gore Vidal [2], Graham Greene [4], Jean Paul Satre [2], John Kenneth Galbraith [3], Kenneth Tynan [5], Murray Kempton [2], Norman Mailer [7] and John La Carre [1]. The director Stanley Kubrick [2], another of Saunders’ beloved ‘Cold War ethos’ critics, was also promoted.

In The Cultural Cold War Saunders makes a particular effort to emphasize how the writers listed above, particularly Ginsberg [2], Tynan [5] and Mailer [7], ‘stood up’ to the CIA’s perversion of the intellectual sphere.

For instance, here’s a quote from Saunders’ book, p. 216:

It [Quest, the CCF publication in India] probably didn’t deserve J. K. Galbraith’s sneer that ‘it broke new ground in ponderous, unfocused illiteracy’. Certainly Prime Minister Nehru didn’t like it, as he always distrusted the Congress as an ‘American front’. (The Cultural Cold War, p 216)

J. K. Galbraith was promoted by Hefner and Jawaharlal Nehru was the first head of state to be featured on a Playboy cover; Nehru’s issue was October 1962. (The outspokenly anti-CCF Prime Minister appeared eight months after Ernst Henri outed the Congress for Cultural Freedom!) Regular readers will remember that Frances Stonor Saunders makes no mention of Henri’s article in her book, but she almost certainly knew about it.

The only other foreign heads of state to make a Playboy cover during this period were Fidel Castro (Exclusive Interview!) and Mao Tse Tung (His Poetry!)– Playboy played an influential role in introducing these communist leaders’ ideas to the American public. (Castro was promoted by Allen Ginsberg and fellow playboy contributor Leroi Jones [1].)

The CIA agent’s hymn to Castro. Thank you, GinsbergBlog.

Saunders never gets tired of plugging Ginsberg and the ‘Beat’ poets as antidotes to the CIA’s cultural meddling:

With the rise of the New Left [think Ramparts magazine –a.nolen] and the Beats, the cultural outlaws who had existed on the margins of American society now entered the mainstream, bringing with them a contempt for what William Burroughs called a ‘sniveling, mealy-mouthed tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists and union officials… Alan Ginsberg, who in his 1956 lament Howl had mourned the wasted years– ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’– now advocated the joys of open homosexuality and hallucinogenic ‘Peyote solitudes’. Munching LSD, singing the body electric, reading poetry in the nude, navigating the world through a mist of benzedrine and dope, the Beats reclaimed Walt Whitman from stiffs like Norman Pearson Holmes [Literary scholar, J. J. Angleton’s sponsor with British intelligence –a.nolen], and sanctified him as the original hippy. They were scruffy rebels who sought to return chaos to order, in contrast to the obsession with formulae which characterized magazines like Encounter [CIA funded non-communist left magazine –a.nolen]. (p. 361)

The ‘Beat Generation’ writers were the second non-pornography cover feature for Playboy (June 1959); the first was Jazz, which the CIA had been using as a culture war tool since the early 50s. Playboy was a consistent proponent of Jazz throughout the Cold War; it later championed ‘pop’ music too.

Playboy’s ‘dissident’ stance against traditional morality was the same stance that ‘Saunders-approved’ authors like Norman Mailer [7] took against the Congress for Cultural Freedom:

With equal conviction, Norman Mailer argued that America’s war in Vietnam was ‘the culmination to a long sequence of events which had begun in some unrecorded fashion toward the end of World War II. A consensus of the most powerful middle-aged and elderly WASPs in America– statesmen, corporation executives, generals, admirals, newspaper editors, and legislators– had pledged an intellectual troth: they had sworn with a faith worthy of medieval knights that Communism was the deadly foe of Christian culture. (p.371)

The typical Playboy contributor looks a lot more like Norman Mailer than a middle-aged, American WASP. So who were the typical Playboy contributors?

Authors were first promoted on Playboy’s cover regularly in Jan 1959: the first fifteen included three British intelligence agents P. G. Wodehouse, Roald Dahl, Robert Graves, plus one more likely British intel agent John Collier. (Collier’s career so closely resembles Dahl’s that it would be extraordinary if Stephenson hadn’t recruited him.) Let’s be conservative and say 20% of the first authors were British intel.

Open American intelligence operatives are the next most numerous: Richard Gehman and Marion Hargove both wrote allied propaganda for the military during WWII. Alberto Moravia’s journalistic career in Italy flourished under James Angleton’s propaganda regime; Moravia also participated in the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. 20% of these Playboy cover writers come from US intelligence.

Recap: 40% of A. C. Spectorsky’s first 15 authors who were promoted on Playboy’s cover were British or American intelligence agents/assets.

The next largest group are the probable American intelligence assets; I say probable because of their association with US agent Allen Ginsberg, who gave CIA notes on the heroin trade in Vietnam to Alfred McCoy so that McCoy could write The Politics of Heroin; and introduced Mick Jagger to his political handler, Tom Driberg, a British intelligence agent. These ‘friends of Ginsberg’ are 1) Jack Kerouac; who was discharged from the Marines after ten days’ service and mysteriously avoided prosecution for his role in the murder of David Kammerer and 2) Herbert Gold who would eventually occupy CIA asset Vladimir Nabokov’s chair at Cornell. That’s another 13% who had probable intel ties.

Finally, Ben Hecht had intelligence connections of a different type. In the US, he was a big proponent of racial integration, but in Israel he supported Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary group which ethnically cleansed chunks of Palestine for the Jewish state. (According to Judith Rice of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, the ‘American League for a Free Palestine’, a cover for Irgun stateside, cooperated with the NAACP to end segregation. Did the NAACP know what their Jewish partners were doing to Palestinians?) Charles Beaumont, another ‘first’ Playboy contributor, was one of Hecht’s working colleagues. Conservatively, Let’s tag on another 7%.

At the very least, between 47%-60% of contributors who were among the first 15 writers featured on Playboy’s cover had intelligence connections. I wonder why Spectorsky’s talent pool contained so many spooks? This sampling of writers is quite representative of Playboy contributors over the 1959-66 period, who were drawn from the intelligence community in shocking numbers.

Things really get interesting when we look at all-time contributors. I’ve broken the list up into pre-1966 contributors and 1967-76 contributors because 1966 was the year the New York Times was told to out the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Top 20 Playboy Contributors 1959-66.

Ian Fleming, the British master spy, is easily Playboy’s most promoted author ever– covers in 1965 were rarely without him and his literary achievement, the spook-fairy-princess ‘James Bond’, originally debuted on Playboy pages. (Why would a CIA organ want to promote Bond’s lifestyle in a magazine that encourages the objectification of sexual partners? See John Gittinger’s Personality Assessment System, The Cult of Intelligence and Great Users of People.)

I’ve mentioned most of the names on that list before; we all know that Ernest Hemingway was a CIA/OSS/KGB spy. J. P. Getty, a running contributor on money matters, ultimately funded CIA agent Kenneth Anger’s career. Robert Raurk was a poor man’s version of Hemingway, who covered the Mau Mau Rebellion (which Rolling Stones groupie Robert Fraser helped suppress via propaganda) for the CIA front TIME magazine (Feb. 16th 1953). Nat Hentoff is a pro-Israel ‘social justice’ activist who covered Jazz for major East Coast media outlets during the period in which the CIA used Jazz as a Culture War tool. (Hentoff now fights anti-semitism from the CATO Institute.)

Shepherd Mead was a vice president of the advertising firm Benton & Bowles. Benton & Bowles rose to fame on the coat-tails of the Radio industry in the USA, an industry that has always had deep ties to the intelligence community. Benton, the company’s founder, shared David Sarnoff and Edward Bernays’ vision that communications should be used to reeducate the public. Jean Shepherd was also a radio personality, making a smooth transition into media from serving in the US Army Signal Corps during WWII.

Gerald Kersh was a British-born WWII propagandist; Budd Schulberg was in the OSS (he arrested photographer Leni Riefenstahl so that US heavies could interrogate her).

The ‘science fiction’ faction of Playboy contributors is fascinating: Ray Bradbury was a regular at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), whose leading lights included Jack Parsons, the top-secret Jet propulsion scientist and Aleister Crowley (UK Intel) devotee; as well as Karl Germer’s successor to the intelligence-heavy O.T.O. Grady McMurty; and L. Ron Hubbard. (See Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter). The LASFS had a weird military bent too, as lasfsinc.info describes:

At the same time, with World War II in progress and most SF [science fiction] fans over 18 in the Armed Services, the LASFS took on the atmosphere of a fannish USO. Los Angeles was a major embarkation center for soldiers and sailors shipping out into the Pacific, and LASFS members were always ready to stop fighting long enough to greet and play host to fans in uniform passing through L.A. to the front.

Other science fiction/horror contributors include Ray Russell (a contributor to the CIA’s Paris Review), and the previously mentioned Charles Beaumont. Roald Dahl, besides being a UK intel operative, was also gifted in writing the macabre which he infused with his anger toward women and his anti-German prejudices. (See Storyteller, by Donald Sturrock.)

Ken Purdy was a personal friend of Spectorsky’s who shot himself in the early Seventies; I couldn’t find anything about “William Iversen”, who doesn’t seem to have written beyond Playboy, but he did take on a strong anti-marriage stance in Hefner’s rag.

Let’s consider the next ‘era’ 1967 to 1976, the year William Colby’s tenure at the CIA ended.

Top 20 Playboy Contributors 1967-76.

Both Len Deighton (famous for spy fiction) and Arthur C. Clarke were in the RAF during WWII, Deighton was an RAF Special Investigations Unit photographer and Clarke worked on sensitive, cutting edge radar technology. Clarke became a well-known a science fiction author and championed LGBT issues from his adopted Sri Lanka, where he was given a type of knighthood. Dan Greenberg worked with Kenneth Tynan on Oh! Calcutta! and was famous for writing How To Be A Jewish Mother; Kenneth Tynan was a favorite CCF ‘dissenter’. According to Saunders, Tynan lampooned the CCF on the BBC TV Show That Was The Week That Was several months after Ernst Henri outed the CIA operation in 1962, i.e. Tynan and the BBC slammed the CCF around the same time Playboy featured anti-CCF Nehru.

Evan Hunter is interesting because he was an executive editor for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency which was founded in NYC in 1946. Scott Meredith’s first client was British intel agent P.G. Wodehouse, who had to run to the USA after making suspect radio broadcasts from Berlin during WWII; MI5 quickly cleared Wodehouse of any wrongdoing, but the general public was not so forgiving and considered him a traitor. Scott Meredith also represented Playboy mega-contributors Norman Mailer and Arthur C. Clarke.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. supported Frank Platt, a CIA agent and Farfield Foundation director, for president of the PEN organization even after the CIA’s congress (and Frank Platt!) had been thoroughly outed (See Saunder’s Cultural Cold War).  William F Buckley Jr was a CIA agent who worked under E. Howard Hunt. Irwin Shaw was the type of writer who the CIA’s Paris Review likes to promote. (Salon did a piece on the PR’s CIA connection in 2012– a.nolen is now taking bets on when Glenn Greenwald’s Salon will be outed as an Agency front.)

Woody Allen is the famous director and darling of Hollywood, who has recently been accused by the daughter of his one-time wife Mia Farrow of molesting her as a child. Isaac Bashevis Singer, another Paris Review (CIA) favorite, wrote about counter-culture and politics from an Orthodox Jewish perspective. John Cheever is the archetypical ‘WASP hypocrite’ writer and poster-child for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Alan Watts, whose book I quoted from earlier about Spectorsky, was defrocked minister and an LSD proponent.

That’s a lot of names. Probably enough for one post. I’ve put up a list of Playboy contributors 1959-76 and how many cover promos they had, so you can see for yourself how the CIA ranked your favorite Mid-Century author! (This list is only comprehensive for writers who were featured more than once, a handful of remaining single-shot promos are coming soon.)

Next week there will be something for everyone:

• I’ll tie Playboy politics into the larger CIA agenda during the 1950s, 60s and 70s– the agenda we know in part because of William Colby’s leaks.
• We’ll also see how Frances Stonor Saunders ties into the Angleton/Colby squabble that did so much to shape American intelligence.
• More on Ramparts and what got Gawker contributor Adrian Chen fired!

The ‘Sad’ Issue, March 1964.

I wrote last week about how Playboy’s literary gatekeeper, A. C. Spectorsky, stuffed Hefner’s magazine full of writing from intelligence agents and assets, and how the message presented was a more militant, radical incarnation of the anti-Russian leftist message presented by the CIA’s lame-duck Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Playboy’s pages featured a lot of writing from both CCF contributors and detractors– all working towards the same goals, of course.

What where those goals? Last week, I promised readers a comprehensive list covering James Angleton’s fight with William Colby and Adrian Chen’s firing from Gawker amongst other things– the post kept growing until I knew I had to break it into two parts.

In this post I’m going to look at Playboy’s stance on foreign relations and the civil rights movement as far as the publication’s covers between 1959-76 can tell us. In order to understand the significance of Playboy’s political stance, readers must be aware of the IRS’s 1973 investigation which showed that Hugh Hefner banked with other CIA front operations at the CIA-controlled Castle Bank and Trust of Nassau. Hugh Hefner is a CIA asset, therefore his politics reflect the CIA leaders’– “Floor Seven’s”– politics. Playboy espoused the politics which the CIA wanted America to espouse.

Let’s start with the big picture: Spectorsky liked to focus on women from specific regions as pornography ‘specials’. The details from the shoot would set a mood, presumably to influence how readers were supposed to feel about each region. Predictably, the most featured country was Russia (3/64, 12/70 and 6/76); the most touted cities were Hollywood (8/59, 10/60, 2/61) and New York (9/60, 2/61, 9/62). Runners up were Israel (4/74, 4/70), Las Vegas (3/60, 12/73), Miami (9/61, 10/65). As far as non-porn features go, Playboy tended to focus on regions where something political was happening, like Algeria in 7/71 when Timothy Leary was courting Eldridge Cleaver there, or Egypt in 4/74 right after Israel withdrew its troops from the Suez Canal. A complete list of which country was featured when is available here; it shows Spectorsky’s ‘geographic homunculus’.

American Germany in ’64: “All better now!”

I’ve written a good deal about Hugh Hefner’s ties to organized crime and the CIA, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Playboy covered the Mafia [8 separate covers]; gambling [5 covers]; and the ‘intelligence community’ [11 covers] extensively. The topics Spectorsky was interested in included Big Brother Surveillance (1/67); Israel’s ‘secret executioners’ (8/76); Code breakers (12/75); National Defense (3/75, 10/70, 3/72) and Hit Men (4/73). That’s not counting any of the ‘James Bond’ propaganda, if Bond was added ‘intelligence community’ covers would number over 20 and be the third the most promoted Playboy topic that I’ve identified.

Naturally, the magazine was used to advertize various Playboy watering holes as they came online and product placement was a big part of Spectorsky’s job: the magazine featured regular men’s fashion segments and product reviews of high-end consumer items like yachts and sports cars, as well as more humble luxuries like home stereo equipment, home movie equipment and bikinis. Spectorsky, along with J. P. Getty, pushed stock market investing for the masses on three separate Playboy covers. (Portends of Jim Cramer?)

Hefner’s mafia connections stretched into Hollywood, so naturally Hollywood directors got a lot of ‘airtime': Woody Allen tops the charts at nine cover appearances, followed by both Stanley Kubrick [2] and Roman Polanski [2]. The most promoted Hollywood movies were James Bond 007 flicks [two covers]; Cleopatra (with Liz Taylor) [2]; followed by Funny Girl (Barbara Streisand), Macbeth and Valley of the Dolls, which each got one.

In The Outfit, author Gus Russo speculates that a number of Hollywood acting careers– like George Raft’s and Marilyn Monroe’s– were sponsored by the Mafia. These stars were Playboy’s most featured between ’59-’76: Ursula Andress [6 covers]; Kim Novak [4 covers]; Marilyn Monroe [3]; Linda Lovelace [3]; Sean Connery [3]; Liz Taylor [3]; Peter Sellers [3]; Frank Sinatra [2]; Richard Burton [2]; Mame von Doren [2]; Peter O’Toole [2]; Sophia Loren [2]; Jayne Mansfield [2]; and Marlon Brando [2]. Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory were featured three times each too, but I’ll talk about them more later. A full list of actors (excluding comedians) is available here, and includes Peter and Jane Fonda, Peter Ustinov (Klop’s boy), Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine.

Peter Ustinov, British intel agent Klop Ustinov’s son, gets his own “harem pictorial” in Playboy while sharing a cover with Martin Luther King Jr! Harem and MLK– was that Spectorsky’s sick joke?!

This is where things get really ugly readers, because during the period 1959-76 Playboy had at least one cover on almost every topic covered by the MK ULTRA releases from the CIA, which were given to John Marks starting in 1974 and concluded after a ‘legal battle’ in ’76. (The public didn’t know much about what ‘MK ULTRA’ was before 1979.)

Playboy’s prescience about the CIA’s MK ULTRA releases were both comprehensive and sustained: over 30 different covers featured scientific and social engineering topics which were part of the dozens of research subprojects that made up what we know of MK ULTRA. Reading through my Playboy notes is like reading through the CIA’s index of those thousands documents they gave to Marks. For example, Playboy covers featured: Surveillance (1/67); Physiology and Psychology of Sleep (11/59); Hypnosis (2/61); Alpha Waves (low-level yet wakeful brain activity associated with hypnosis) (12/72); ESP (4/71); Psychoanalysis (10/69); Personality Control (11/68); LSD (10/66); drug addiction (11/60); Hallucinogens (11/63); Campus politics (9/71, 9/70, 4/70); voter manipulation (11/72, 11/68).

Having spent a lot of time with the MK ULTRA documentation and with Playboy covers, I’m shocked at how prescient Spectorsky was about CIA abuses. Incredible, truly incredible. :)

In all seriousness, this ‘issue overlap’ says two things: 1) Spectorsky was plugged into the crowd of people who were carrying out this research for the CIA and 2) Colby and his successors were very careful to release MK ULTRA information that had already been compromised in some way. I speculate that ‘Team Colby’ thought along these lines: “Marks’ book on MK ULTRA abuses will only come as a surprise to the little people who haven’t been paying attention and who don’t matter anyway.” As I wrote in The Banality of Mind Control, we know very little about what the MK ULTRA program studied.

November 1963 featured Aldous Huxley on hallucinogenic drugs.

There’s one big MK ULTRA topic that I’ve left out of that list: Subproject 102, the ‘gang rioting’ subproject. I’ve left it out because it’s wrapped up in the most interesting Playboy ‘political causes’ of all: Black Nationalism and Racial Integration.

In 1958, and continuing for a few years, the CIA funded the work of sociologist Muzafer Sherif, who documented the political hot-buttons of “inner city youths”, youths who his henchman found roaming urban streets. Sherif, a native of Turkey, wanted to know what these boys’ aspirations were; what they considered being ‘rich'; how they related to the “dominant features of American life”; and what they’d do to gang members who “squealed”. Sherif was known for his work on how to ‘tailor messages to’ (read ‘manipulate’) different groups of people. Of course, it was inner city youth rioting which destroyed swaths of urban America in the 1960s; undermined Black communities economically; and made ‘White Flight’ a matter of personal safety. This rioting was the ugly side of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1960s America, when you talk about ‘inner city youth’ and gangs, you’re talking about Black youth and gangs for the most part. The CIA wanted to know how to manipulate young Black people. This is where Hugh Hefner comes in with his naked (mostly White) ladies; his stance on ‘racial integration'; and his militant Black Nationalist political pundits.

April 1963: the “Girls of Africa” tribute. Notice Anything? Playboy only featured one Black cover girl during the ’59-’76 period (Oct. 1971).

Hefner’s, and more importantly, Spectorsky’s use of ‘civil rights’/black nationalist authors is cynical, but very considered. The ‘happy face’ story of integration and the Playboy Empire goes something like this, as told by Gloria Hendry, who left the NAACP to become a ‘chocolate bunny’ at the NYC Playboy Club:

The environment in the club was incredible. I had never seen such a cross-section of race and cultures; it was just awesome.

The management protected the girls, but I did experience racism on a couple of occasions, sadly, once when my father was in the club…

I reported the incident and the room director went straight over and cancelled the man’s membership. But I was sorry my father had to witness that.

Working at the club gave me so much confidence. I came from a background obsessed with inferiority and race but there my colour was glorified. I was able to lose my complex and gain confidence. Without that I would never have gone on to do so well in my acting career. I owe that place a lot.

On top of this type of PR, Hefner has made a big song and dance about ‘buying back’ the franchise of at least one Playboy Club where discrimination took place. I’ll point out that it would be difficult to collect sexual information on men like Bill Cosby if they weren’t given full access to the key clubs and bunnies. Hefner’s stance on ‘racial equality’ is very self-serving.

But Playboy’s interest in racial integration was more complicated– and more sinister– than providing half-naked Black girls to serve drinks. Racial integration and Black Nationalism are the two most publicized issues in Playboy that I’ve identified: over 30 covers were devoted to these issues or to activists who promoted these issues either directly or as a corollary to their sports, music, political or comedy careers.

Although very few Black fiction writers were featured on Playboy covers overall, Spectorsky did promote prominent Black authors/celebrities in the ‘civil rights’ movement– particularly those involved in the ‘Selma’ protests which have recently been reinterpreted by Oprah Winfrey. Beginning in 1962, one year after the anti-segregation ‘Freedom Rides‘ began, Spectorsky showed a marked interest in forming public attitudes towards civil rights events: specifically, Spectorsky chose to promote racial integration as the answer to the USA’s race problems while simultaneously showcasing militant Black Nationalism. Another Orwellian Playboy combination!

Spectorsky’s first foray into race politics– read about Nat Hentoff in A.C. Spectorsky and the CCF 2.0.

Spectorsky chose to promote these civil rights activists: James Baldwin [3], James Farmer [2], Martin Luther King Jr [1], Jessie Jackson [1]; and these Black Nationalists: Dick Gregory [3], Jim Brown[1], Bill Cosby [3], Cassius Clay/Mohammad Ali [5]; as well as the twisted, violent Eldridge Cleaver [3] and Leroi Jones [1]. (O.J. Simpson [1] was featured in ’76– did the great and good know his psych profile?) Readers will note that Malcolm X’s name did not appear on Playboy covers between Jan. 1959- Dec. ’76.

Playboy was promoting two agendas at the same time: that of forced integration and militant Black Nationalism– neither of which have served Black nor White communities well. Why would the CIA-backed Playboy magazine promote this dual agenda? The answer becomes clear when you consider the spokespersons’ backgrounds:

Playboy’s November 1969 cover trumpets Jesse Jackson as the “GREAT BLACK HOPE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE”– no other Black activist was so lauded by Spectorsky. (Mick Jagger is featured on the same cover, incidentally. :) ) Jesse Jackson is an intriguing character in the civil rights movement: he caused a lot of friction in Martin Luther King’s ‘Southern Christian Leadership Conference’ organization because of his– dare I say it– narcissistic behavior. Jackson was eventually expelled from the SCLC and started his own movement, which promoted rights for homosexuals and further divided Black civil rights activists. A cynical person might see Jackson as an agent provocateur– certainly my generation knows him as someone who gets rich by inflaming racial tensions. Jesse Jackson is the person credited with bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to one of Hefner’s ‘parties’ in his Chicago mansion; parties which gave celebrities plenty of opportunity for indiscretion– right, Cosby?

Playboy’s political stance became increasingly aggressive in 1969; the cover pornography also began to be more explicit.

James Baldwin was a Black, homosexual, socialist who was involved with MLK’s work, however MLK chose to distance himself from supporting LGBT struggles, even though his movement contained a large number of homosexual people. Besides being an LGBT activist and Playboy contributor, James Baldwin covered MLK’s work at the insistence of the CIA’s Partisan Review and his efforts won him a cover on the CIA’s TIME magazine.

Martin Luther King Jr. is so well established in the hagiography of American politics that he hardly needs an introduction, however his career follows the same path as many of the CIA’s non-communist left pundits and that worries me. For example, he attended Highlander Folk School in 1949, a political ‘school’ which Eleanor Roosevelt supported. Eleanor Roosevelt’s politics were guided by Louis Howe, whose communism ran as deep as any pinko millionaire’s. (See My Exploited Father in Law, by Curtis Dall.) By 1953 however, King was touting the CIA’s ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ line, and saying non-communist-lefty things like “cold atheism wrapped in the garments of materialism, communism provides no place for God or Christ’’. King’s political shift, and the timing of his shift, lands him squarely in an ugly crowd.

My second concern with Dr. King is that no sincere practitioner of non-violence would be violent towards women, as MLK Jr. was by admission of his friend Ralph David Abernathy (see Abernathy’s autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, p. 436). I don’t see why a sincere proponent of Christianity and human dignity would frequent an establishment which exploits women like the Playboy mansion, nor allow himself to be promoted by such a publication. Could it be that MLK’s motivations were different to what we were taught in school? Could his non-communist left preaching have something to do with his CIA-backed promotion in Playboy?

James Farmer was supported by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who founded the CIA’s forerunner, the OSS, along with his British spy friends. Farmer was tapped to lead the Congress on Racial Equality, which spearheaded integration initiatives, such as the Freedom Rides. Farmer also worked closely with the NAACP during the NAACP’s partnership with the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun to end segregation in the USA (the partnership was in place by 1946). Back in Palestine, Irgun was blowing up municipal buildings and wiping out Palestinian villages for the state of Israel. According to CORE-online.org:

In the late 1940’s, before giving CORE his full attention, he [James Farmer] was also a program director for the N.A.A.C.P. and wrote radio and television scripts as well as magazine articles on race relations for Crisis, Fellowship, World Frontier and the Hadassah News.

Hadassah is a Zionist women’s organization, so Farmer knew with whom he and the NAACP were working. In 1998 Clinton gave James Farmer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

If you care to read about Bill Cosby [3] and his wife Camille’s hypocrisy, please see my post The Unfortunate Mr. Cosby. Dick Gregory [3] is another Black comedian whose trademark jokes make fun of White Southerners in a manner very flattering to men like A. C. Spectorsky. Gregory presents politics which are militant yet simple-minded: he purports to see the world literally in ‘black vs. white’. These days he spends a lot of time at venues like the Alex Jones Show and NPR criticizing the CIA, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Hugh Hefner, who launched Gregory’s career, is a CIA asset. Interestingly, Gregory’s ‘conspiracy theorist’ musings with Alex Jones haven’t landed him in hot water like Cosby.

Jim Brown and Cassius Clay/Mohammad Ali are/were sports personalities who were used by Playboy to promote militant Black Nationalism and racial integration. In my personal opinion, these two at least are/were genuinely concerned about their people. Recently, Jim Brown has been courageous enough to admit focusing on integration was counterproductive; I hope that one day he’ll also  admit how he was used by men like Spectorsky and recognize the damage forced integration did to both Black and White communities.

Finally, Eldridge Cleaver [3] and Leroi Jones [1] were two seriously twisted, and seriously conflicted extremists. In the mid 1950s, Cleaver claims to have raped a number of White woman as payback for White “domination”. By the late 1950s Cleaver was in jail for assault and began contributing to Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts magazine, a leftist ‘anti-CCF’ rag which Hinckle hints had Hugh Hefner’s funding in his autobiography. Whether Hefner funded Ramparts or not, Cleaver made his first appearance on the front of Playboy in 1960. After being released from jail in 1966 Cleaver joined the Black Panther hate group as a propaganda minister, but his violence eventually necessitated fleeing to Algeria where he ran a sort of Black Panther ‘government in exile’. Playboy covered Tim Leary’s 1971 scamper to Cleaver’s Algerian base in an attempt to escape a Stateside drug sentence. (Leary claims that the Black Panthers held him hostage for a while before he could flee to Switzerland and live with an arms dealer who had a taste for “young girls”.) Cleaver was later kicked out of Algeria; he eventually returned to the USA where he became a Mormon Republican. Unstable?

Timothy Leary’s scurry to Algeria makes the July 1971 Playboy cover.

Leroi Jones’ career can be summed up in this quote from Fifty Modern and Contemporary Dramatists by Maggie Gale:

Initially under the influence of the poets of the Beat generation such as Allen Ginsburg, a trip to Cuba in 1960 was decisive in turning Jones into a politically committed, race-conscious artist. But it was his play Dutchman, which opened Off-Broadway in 1964 and won him an Obie for the best American play of the year, that made him famous and a major American literary figure in his own right. Leaving Greenwich Village and his white wife, Jones moved to Harlem and then to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey and embarked on the black cultural nationalist phase of his career, for which he is still chiefly known. In the course of the 1960s, Amiri Baraka, as he renamed himself in 1967, and directed a string of short, shocking plays– including The Slave (1964), Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965), A Black Mass (1965), Great Goodness of Life (1967) and Madheart (1967)– that attacked ‘whiteness’ in all its aspects and advocated the violent destruction of the white race in America. In the course of the 1970s Baraka’s political militancy took a new turn, from cultural nationalism to a version of Marxism-Leninism. He continued to write, teach, organize and make plays, although none of them with the power of his drama of the earlier period.

Most of the Black Playboy contributors in the list above took part in the protests at Selma, or other civil rights demonstrations for which Martin Luther King Jr. has become the public face. Playboy featured many not-Black proponents of these happenings too: Joan Baez [1 cover] who provided eye-candy at protests while singing songs written by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones; as well as regular Playboy contributors Calvin Trillin [3] who got his start working for the CIA’s TIME magazine and David Halberstam [3] whose journalistic career began ‘on the ground’ in Vietnam covering what William Colby was doing for The New York Times (See The Secret Team by L. Fletcher Prouty).

Other supporters of racial integration who Playboy featured between ’62-’72 were mega-contributor Ben Hecht [9], that Irgun guy; Allen Dulles’ friend Norman Thomas [1] who when he wasn’t heading up the American Socialist Party, was heading up the CIA’s American Committee for Cultural Freedom and assisting CIA operations in South America (see Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War); Attorney General Ramsey Clark [2] who pushed the integration agenda heavily; Rep. George McGovern [2] who nurtured Jesse Jackson’s career at the 1972 Democratic National Convention; Joe Namath [1] the pro-integration football personality; and William Kunstler [1] the hypocritical ACLU lawyer who only represents left-wing terrorists like the Black Panthers and The Weatherman.

I’d like to point out here that Playboy ran a cover on Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley in March 1971 titled “A Revealing Portrait of Mayor Daley”. In November 1969, Playboy had picked out Jesse Jackson as the “GREAT BLACK HOPE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE”; Playboy featured George McGovern in January 1970 and August of 1971.

Daley had checkered dealings with civil rights leaders, particularly Jesse Jackson, because he managed to prevent large-scale rioting in Chicago by using police-heavy tactics. Not long after Daley’s “revealing” Playboy appearance, George McGovern pulled off a coup at the Illinois primary for the 1972 Democratic National Convention by dodging Daley’s political machine in Chicago and instituting Jesse Jackson as part of an alternative delegation. Playboy’s prescience on shadowy Illinois political maneuverings with regard to their ‘golden boy’ Jesse Jackson are remarkable. Of course, Jackson has shown himself to be among the most corrupt politicians Chicago has to offer, which is no mean feat.

I believe that the CIA had an agenda with regard to the Civil Rights Movement and I find it odd that so many civil rights leaders were willing to hitch their wagon to an outfit like Playboy. Hefner’s business practices stand in conflict to the stated goals of the the Civil Rights Movement, which I’ve been told was about mutual respect.

On that note, I’d like to draw readers’ attention back to the “chocolate” Playboy bunny Gloria Hendry, who feels that she “owes” Playboy Enterprises for letting her dress up as a rabbit and serve drinks to so many different types of men. Could Gloria’s exploitation ever have served racial harmony? I put it to readers that encouraging different races to intermingle whilst exploiting each others’ women is not the best way to foster mutual respect. Gloria Hendry’s father must have brimmed with joy to see his daughter ogled by drunk White guys. The reverse is also true: no normal White guy would be enthused to see somebody like Bill Cosby drool over an attractive White woman. This isn’t just an American Black/White issue– this is true for any group of people anywhere in the world, and the CIA knows that. Readers will remember that Bill Cosby’s attitudes towards White men and women are not progressive, despite the comedian’s long, close relationship with Hefner and his ‘integrated’ key club.

Bunny work is poisonous from the female perspective too: prostitutes don’t often come away with genuinely warm feelings towards their punters. Imagine if your most regular interaction with another race was one where the men stared at your breasts and threw out tips if you flirted convincingly? Nothing about the Playboy Empire is designed to foster interracial respect in the real world.

Bearing these truths in mind, Spectorsky’s strange political pairing seems a little less strange: Provide political aggravation, then promote (in this case, one-sided!) extremist politics that mesh nicely with the CIA’s ‘gang profiling’ work. After all, two groups of people quarreling with each other are much more easy to control.

Anita Pallenberg’s 1962 photograph for Playboy magazine; she was 18 years old.

One of the fun things about blogging is how much I learn from readers.  Last week ‘Nathan’ at beatles.ru clued me into some fascinating information about Anita Pallenberg: she was featured in the February 1962 Playboy photo spread “Girls of Rome”.

As ‘Nathan’ points out, Pallenberg is one of the few women in this feature who are fully clothed, in fact, Pallenberg’s attire is dowdy– she stands out for that reason. The “Girls of Rome” shoot endows her with a certain mystery, especially considering many of the other women look rather tough.

A lot was going on in early 1962: that March, a few weeks after Anita’s Playboy spread was published, her future ‘boyfriend’ Brian Jones hitch-hiked to London to catch the first ever performance of Alexis Korner’s ‘Blues Incorporated’ band, according to Bill Wyman in Rolling with the Stones. Twenty-one days later the Rolling Stones were formed.

Korner’s new band, Blues Incorporated, was extraordinary in a number of ways: he was risking *somebody’s* money by performing ‘Rhythm and Blues’ to a largely uninitiated London audience– and more than just one night’s takings were at stake. Blues Incorporated was designed to be an ambassador band for a series of new R&B clubs– the investor(s) for these clubs remain unknown, but we do know that European Jazz circuits had been colonized by the ‘intelligence community’ since the early 1950s.

The story goes that Brian Jones asked Alexis Korner if he could play with Blues Incorporated after the show on the band’s opening night. Naturally, Korner immediately agreed to let the unknown newbie play with his cutting-edge team as part of their second performance ever, with a franchise of watering-holes at stake. Brian Jones first appeared with Blues Incorporated on March 24th 1962.

On April 7th 1962– that’s two weeks later– Korner introduced Jones to two young men who had very little musical experience: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. POOF! The Rolling Stones were born. If you’d like to know more, please see my post, Rolling Through the Intelligence Community. (By July of 1962 Alexis Korner had ditched Blues Incorporated for a lifetime broadcasting gig at the BBC. Mission Accomplished!)

I believe Pallenberg’s strange ‘placement’ in Hefner’s magazine and Korner’s creation of The Rolling Stones were pieces of a larger cultural offensive that was being put into place circa 1962. Somebody in Rome was building what spooks call a ‘legend’ around Anita, the rest of us might call it “window dressing” or a “back story”. Pallenberg may not have been earmarked as a ‘handler’ for Brian Jones from day one of her Agency career, but her Playboy shoot suggests that Anita Pallenberg was always slated for counter-culture psy-ops work in Europe.

If you’re new to my blog, please have a look at my posts Anita Pallenberg and the CIA, which explains how Anita’s work for The Living Theatre was funded by the CIA as part of the Agency’s anti-Russian leftist crusade.  Also, please read Do You Have a Key to the Playboy Mansion, which details the 1973 IRS investigation that showed Hugh Hefner and Playboy Enterprises to be CIA assets.

Anita Pallenberg was in Rome by February 1962. As far as I can tell, her only known employer, the Living Theatre, wasn’t in Rome until 1963 when they had their building in NYC seized by the IRS for failure to pay taxes. This means that in 1962 either Pallenberg was with a ‘satellite’ of the troupe in Rome; or she was being groomed by the CIA in Rome before the theater arrived.

The Living Theatre received funding from a CIA “philanthropic institution” named the Farfield Foundation. The Farfield Foundation was one of the bogus cultural foundations that backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom which Ernst Henri outed that same February in the World Marxist Review. Frances Stonor Saunders identifies the Farfield Foundation as specifically a CIA front in her book The Cultural Cold War.

Why did the Living Theatre choose Rome? Well, James Jesus Angleton had set up Rome as a post-WWII American propaganda hub. According to Hugh Wilford in his book The Mighty Wurlitzer, by 1948 Angleton was heading up black propaganda in Italy for the CIA. The propaganda was anti-communist: Angleton’s staff would ‘place’ newspaper articles and other literature with the compliant Italian press. Paul Cushing Child, Julia Child’s creepy husband, did similar propaganda work in Germany and France after WWII.

Readers may remember from my last post that between ’59-’76 Playboy featured a number of Italian directors and journalists whose careers flourished in Italy after the war. Federico Fellini [2 Playboy covers] was plugged in Pallenberg’s “Girls of Rome” spread, but his name didn’t make the cover of that particular issue. In fact, Italy’s film industry was plugged on Playboy’s cover more than any other continental country’s.

Federico Fellini

What was Anita Pallenberg doing in Rome with The Living Theatre? Much like Playboy, the Living Theatre promoted both playwrights who were sponsored by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (Jean Cocteau)[1] and those whose work the CCF was openly hostile to, like Bertolt Brecht. Where Playboy was a ‘well-heeled’ anti-Russian leftist rag, The Living Theatre aimed to pull the ‘anarchist’ left out of Rooskie clutches. Also like Playboy, the Living Theatre promoted a type of sexually-charged racial integration, according to Keith Richards’ description of the troupe. The Living Theatre was about exposing taboos and cast members were frequently arrested for indecent exposure. As one would expect, the CIA’s politics were consistent between their Living Theater and Playboy operations.

This bizarre footage comes from a performance of the Living Theatre’s most famous work, ‘Paradise Now’ (not work safe!):

The Living Theatre troupe starred the handsome Black lead Rufus Collins, surrounded by a bevy of beauties like Anita Pallenberg and Nico (from their video above, it seems that these women were mostly White, much like the Playboy Bunnies). The throng also included the first Black super model, Donyale Luna, who Keith Richards particularly admired. Long and short, The Living Theatre’s ‘racial integration’ political agenda was put forward just like Playboy’s and was equally cynical. Spectorsky even featured The Living Theater on the August 1969 Playboy cover.

Donyale Luna on the cover of her friend Andy Warhol’s magazine. As long as she was useful Luna was embraced by American media establishment leaders, such as the CIA’s TIME magazine. By 1979 however, her star had faded and she died of a heroin overdose at 33.

I encourage readers to check out my statistical analysis of Playboy’s promotion of racial integration and Black nationalism over the ’62-’76 period; the CIA had a very definite agenda with regard to this Orwellian political pairing. These politics would pop up again later in Pallenberg’s life through her link to Rastafarianism. In 1972 Pallenberg took up with Leonard Percival Howell’s Black supremacist cult in Jamaica, where she had conspicuous liaisons with Howell’s followers which helped promote the Rasta cause. Pallenberg became involved in Winston Churchill’s Jamaican drug trade through the Rastas and ended up being repeatedly raped in jail. See Tony Sanchez’s Up and Down with the Rolling Stones.) [2]

I’d like to come back to Pallenberg’s Playboy spread now, because it’s an artifact documenting CIA operations through pornography in Western Europe. I’ve included images of the entire spread here. The first thing to strike me was that many of the women featured weren’t Italian– seven out of twenty-four were foreign. Two of these young immigrants were from Germany (three if you count half-German, half-Italian Anita); one was from France; one was a Brit; one was Syrian; and finally I suspect “Tanya Berryl” was either American or from the Commonwealth. Two out of the three who fully exposed themselves were foreigners.

All of these European women would have been born around WWII, most would have been children displaced and impoverished by that war. They were also among the first generation of German and Italian children to be exposed to whatever psychological experiments and social conditioning the CIA decided to implement.

I’m going to make a prediction now: in the future, there will be an exposé of MK ULTRA-like CIA abuses against vulnerable people in the defeated Axis countries. These defeated peoples had little protection from their American occupiers and post-war Europe would have been an excellent place for unfettered research into ‘mind control’ and other forms of social conditioning.

I think it’s very probable that the CIA and its asset, Playboy Enterprises, scoured Europe for vulnerable young people who could be used as propaganda tools– maybe they did this scouring through scouts in positions like that of The Living Theatre’s founder Judith Malina. I believe it’s unreasonable to assume that MK ULTRA-type research was limited to US military personnel, American prisoners, American prostitutes or the inmates of American mental institutions. The scary reality is that ‘displaced persons’ in Europe would have been ‘safe’ guinea pigs. Maybe that’s why eighteen year old Anita had a lifeless expression; maybe that’s why we know so little about her background.

Pallenberg’s Living Theatre coworkers were as ‘international’ as the women in Playboy’s “Girls of Rome” spread. The founders of the Living Theatre were Judith Malina, who was “German-born” yet okay’d for CIA-funding, and Julian Beck, a New York City based painter.  Malina and Beck scouted some of their talent from Europe, though they were based out of NYC until the IRS took their building in 1963. This is how livingtheare.org describes the situation:

The difficulty of operating a unique, experimental enterprise within a cultural establishment ill-equipped to accept it led to the closing by the authorities of all The Living Theatre’s New York venues…

In the mid-1960′s, the company began a new life as a nomadic touring ensemble. In Europe, they evolved into a collective, living and working together toward the creation of a new form of nonfictional acting based on the actor’s political and physical commitment to using the theater as a medium for furthering social change. The landmark achievements of this period include Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Antigone, Frankenstein and Paradise Now.

In 1999, the Living Theatre began to get funding from the European Union, though my understanding is that the troupe is now defunct, despite Malina’s wealth and its more recent patronage from Yoko Ono and Al Pacino, who have no problem carrying on the CIA’s traditions.

Pallenberg’s “Girls of Rome” ‘photo essay’ is accompanied by three pages of text. The nameless author provides tips for sex tourists and offers an oblique explanation for why so many foreign women are included in the shoot: native Roman women are conservative and difficult to sleep with.

Lamentably, males who may be entertaining the intriguing notion of sowing a few oats are barking up the wrong libido. For despite her temperament, coquettishness, eye-popping fuselage and sensuous propensities, the average Italian girl, even in worldly Rome, is characterized by an equally passionate devotion to the spirit…

In effect, then, the family fortress is virtually impregnable to any but those in search of permanent liaisons.

How “lamentable”.

The author goes on to explain that help is at hand for Playboy readers. The transient population of foreigners, or poor Italians from the south, offer more fertile ground for sex tourism. Playboy gives a comprehensive guide for foreign punters on where to find these women for prostitution, and how much one should pay once one finds them.

Spectorsky didn’t print the name of the author who wrote the accompanying text (they sound like an American who was based out of Rome); I’ll let this bashful Playboy contributor tell you about Roman “streetwalkers” in their own words:

Some [sex tourists] surrender to the city’s well-quipped infantry of approachable streetwalkers. But many more prefer to fraternize with golden hordes of foreign girls– once a commodity borne to Rome by its plundering legions– who now pour into the Eternal City of their own eager accord from Scandinavia, France, Germany, England, America even from the Near and Far East…

Perched on the lower rung of Rome’s economic ladder are a group of girls who have known few of the social or scholastic advantages enjoyed (and in some cases ignored) by the daughters of well- or even modestly heeled families…

Imported and indigenous, several thousands of these girls also drift across the social barrier into an age-old vocation pioneered under the arches of ancient Rome. Evicted in 1958 from the pillowed and mirrored comfort of numerous bordellos, the city’s flourishing strumpet population– even larger, some estimate, than that of pleasure-orientated Paris or London– energetically espouses the tenets of individual enterprise in the maze of side streets surrounding the tourist-thronged Via Veneto. Most, in the time-honored tradition of the trade, offer their familiar wares for prices ranging from $5 to $30, according to the nature and duration of the services required…

So the CIA skips hand in hand with the pimps of Spectorsky’s ‘Eternal City’. I can only speculate on why the CIA thought ‘placing’ Anita in this way was useful to them: perhaps a girlfriend who was featured in an eleven-page ad for sex tourism was an enticing prospect for a young, narcissistic philanderer from the Cotswolds. Perhaps the typical CIA agent thinks Hugh Hefner’s approval makes a woman more desirable; perhaps they need to see that other men want a woman to know that she is attractive… attractive like a pole dancer in Hawaii?! I’ll leave that profiling to John Gittinger.

[1] Readers will remember Jean Cocteau as Kenneth Anger’s Congress for Cultural Freedom connection. Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull were instrumental in helping Ken Anger establish his reincarnation of Aleister Crowley’s Cefalù cult around the Rolling Stones.

[2] For a piecemeal account of this incident, see Tony Sanchez’s book Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, p. 305. Anita was released from jail corruptly: Richards bribed the Jamaican police through ‘Count X’ and another unnamed business man, who it turns out had alerted the police as to when they could find Anita with a lot of drugs. This shadowy Count and the ‘businessman’ were on civil terms and had engagements in London which probably had something to do with the ganja trade, please see Who was Winston Churchill? Before this ‘businessman’ helped rid Jamaica of Anita and her bad-for-business publicity stunts, the Rollings Stones had “business dealings” with him, says Sanchez.

Playboy’s editorial board in 1970: (L-R) BACK Robie Macauley, Nat Lehrman, Richard M. Koff, Murray Fisher, Arthur Kretchmer. FRONT Sheldon Wax, Auguste Comte Spectorsky, Jack Kessie. Thank you, Wikipedia.

In Part I of this series I showed how A.C. Spectorsky, Playboy’s link with the “East Coast Establishment”, showcased an inordinate number of intelligence community writers on the magazine’s cover. To give an idea of how just many spooks Spectorsky featured between ’59-’76:  30% of cover-featured contributors had strong intelligence connections and their work represents about 35% of featured stories. [A]

Last time I also looked at Playboy’s weird, Orwellian promotion of racial integration alongside Black nationalism. I’m going to build on this ‘strange bedfellows’ theme today with ‘Billionaires and Communists'; as well as ‘Literary Brahmins and Pulp Publishers’.

Billionaires and Communists

Playboy magazine worships wealth; the ‘playboy lifestyle’ is one of endless, unrelenting consumption. Spectorsky’s biographer Steven Watts speculates that Spectorsky fixated on luxuries was a way of distracting himself from his failed writing career– I think that view is too simplistic. Playboy featured an impressive number of mega-wealthy writers alongside a solid coterie of self-consciously communist ones; what unites these groups is their participation in the ‘intelligence community’.

Who were Playboy’s favorite multimillionaires? J. P. Getty [22 Playboy covers!], the Anglophile oil magnate and antiquities collector, had a special relationship with Spectorsky and contributed on money matters with articles titled “Big Business Booby Traps”, “You Can Make A Million Today” and “How I Made My First Billion”. Needless to say, I don’t put much store by Getty’s financial advice; he’s interesting to me because he (ultimately) funded Kenneth Anger’s ‘Thelema’ cult with the Rolling Stones.

Other Playboy rich-kids are no less interesting: Bennet Cerf [2] was a founder of Random House publishing, one of the largest concerns in an industry known for its cooperation with the OSS and CIA. (See The Irregulars, by Jennet Conant for a start.) Howard Hughes [3] was the Hollywood-and-Aerospace mogul who partnered with the CIA — he was the Agency’s ‘cover billionaire’ for the 1972 ‘Glomar Explorer’ escapade.

Howard Hughes. In 1946, Hughes had an accident testing a reconnaissance plane. After his medical treatment he showed a drastic personality change: Hughes became an eccentric recluse, wore tissue boxes for shoes and only peed into bottles. His business interests were eventually taken over by a group of Mormons.

William Benton [2 covers] was a senator and founder of the radio-heavy advertizing agency Benton & Bowles. He created ‘The Voice of America’ which is a radio news organization and a blatant US propaganda machine. Benton was also a UNESCO ambassador and “the first to propose the motion for expulsion of Joseph McCarthy from the U.S. Senate in 1951”.

Benton’s extensive media holdings provided springboards for other Playboy contributors. Shepherd Mead [4] was Benton’s employee at Benton & Bowles: Mead served as vice president of the ad agency, but found fame and fortune by writing books such as How to succeed in business without really trying; the dastard’s guide to fame and fortune.

Benton & Bowles’ influence, and therefore William Benton’s influence, spread from advertizing into the entertainment business. B&B invented and dominated the “radio soap opera” as a vehicle for placing products. B&B spun the concept out to television with ‘As The World Turns’, a serious money-earner which the firm ran for Proctor & Gamble on CBS.

Many Playboy heavyweights came from CBS in one form or another: Jean Shepherd [12 covers], who is known for his coverage of Playboy contributor Martin Luther King Jr.’s [1] ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, had a nightly radio show on CBS; Robert L. Green [2 covers], Playboy’s fashion director, child psychologist and Washington D.C. public relations guru, had his own CBS radio show; Steve Allen [2], who got his start in radio during WWII, had is own CBS television show; John Crosby [2] who was part of the Army News Service during WWII, also had a CBS t.v. show; Charles Beaumont [4], an early Playboy contributor, wrote for CBS’s The Twilight Zone; Larry Siegel [3] is known for CBS’s The Carol Burnett Show (though this came after his Playboy work); Max Shulman [1]  is known for his CBS TV character ‘Dobie Gillis’; and finally, spooky Los Angeles Science Fiction Society guru Ray Bradbury [13] reached audiences through the CBS Television Workshop in the early 1950s.

For readers unaccustomed to American acronyms, ‘CBS’ stands for ‘Columbia Broadcasting System’ which was founded as a radio broadcaster in New York City in 1927; its television arm was added in 1941. CBS is privately owned– the majority owner is Sumner Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein)– but in practice CBS, along with ABC and NBC, is roughly analogous to Britain’s BBC. The US radio industry has always had close ties to the British and American militaries.

I’m not quite done with William Benton: besides his ad interests, Benton owned Encyclopedia Britannica and had a working relationship with CIA chief Allen Dulles; documents released by the Agency show that Benton allowed the CIA to write chunks of the reference series. EB’s high-ranking employee Mortimer Alder [2 Playboy covers] put together the corporation’s ‘Great Books’ line.

So it seems that being featured in Playboy was something of a ‘perk’ for William Benton’s employees and writers from Benton’s partner CBS.

Swirling around the fabulous wealth represented in Spectorsky’s stables was a radical communist contingent: this shouldn’t be surprising, because Communism, particularly Bolshevism, has always had well-heeled Western backing. Allen Ginsberg [2 covers], the pedophile CIA operative, was a supporter of Fidel Castro [1 cover] (Castro’s father was an international ‘labor broker’ who cruelly exploited imported Haitian workers, as well as native Cuban ones!). Also among Playboy’s ‘communists’ was the conflicted Black supremacist Leroi Jones [1], whose publishing company featured Ginsberg’s and Jack Kerouac’s [3] writing. Jed Birmingham, a William S Burroughs [1 cover] aficionado, writes this about Leroi Jones:

I was especially struck by [Leroi] Jones’ work as an editor. It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur. This does not include his founding of Totem Press and that press’s publications with Cornith Books. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.

It seems that Playboy’s second-favorite Black supremacist was well-connected in NYC literary circles!

Other writers in Ginsberg’s circle– though not necessarily as radical as Ginsberg– were Terry Southern [3], who I’ll talk about more in connection with the CIA’s Paris Review; Jerry Yulsman [2] an Army photographer who wrote ‘adult novels'; Dan Wakefield [4] the civil rights reporter who made a name for himself by gushing over ‘All My Children‘, a soap opera of the ilk Benton & Bowles devised; Herbert Gold [13] the Fulbright scholar who took over CIA asset Vladimir Nabokov’s chair at Cornell University; and Alan Harrington [3], the writer known for being a friend of Timothy Leary.

The international wing of Playboy’s post-WWII commies is held up by Evgeny Yevtushenko [3], a cautious Soviet poet who was on the safe side of every thaw; and Germaine Greer [3] a Marxist woman’s lib’er who is still with us.

I’ll remind readers that in his autobiography Colby credited his old OSS friends with the CIA’s ‘anti-communist’ (read anti-Kremlin) offensive; those old OSS’er were disproportionately represented fighting for the communists during the Spanish Civil War. Naturally, Playboy’s communist ties are more ‘old school’ than just post-WWII newbies like Ginsberg. Marquis Childs [2] was an FDR crony and a WWII propagandist; Justice William O. Douglas [2] was one of FDR’s supreme court appointees; Leslie Fiedler [3] was a Trotskyite communist and a WWII intelligence agent who translated Japanese cyphers; Nelson Algren (born Nelson Algren Abraham) [2] was a communist until he decided he liked fellow-traveler Ernest Hemingway [5] and the Paris Review better; Norman Thomas [1] was a CIA asset and the president of the American Socialist Party; Kingsley Amis [2] was a spoiled communist academic until he realized that the money was elsewhere; Pietro di Donato [1] was an Italian scribe with communist sympathies; Frederic Morton [3] (born Fritz Mandelbaum) changed his name to fit in with the NYC labor movement; and my personal favorite, Bernard Wolfe [2] who was Trotsky’s personal secretary (some say bodyguard) in Mexico until Trotsky’s assassination; Wolfe then joined the US Merchant Marines and was appointed as a “military correspondent by a number of science magazines” during WWII. Why not?!

When not wiping the nose of one of history’s worst mass-murderers, nor writing WWII propaganda for the US military, Wolfe indulged his passion for hypnosis (1949). Later, he found Playboy.

The dizzying list of names and histories above feels quite natural to me, because of what I know about how the Bolshevik revolution was funded and implemented, thanks to the writing Mikhail Bulgakov, Leonid Andreyev and others. To someone unaware of communist revolutionaries’ support from the American and British establishments, the pairing of millionaires and communists may seem incongruent– for more information, I recommend my posts Is the Devil a German? and A Death in Finland. In the meantime, more strange bedfellows…

Literary Brahmins and Pulp Publishers

‘Incongruent’ may also describe Spectorsky’s policy of hiring writers from ‘high-end’ outfits like the CIA’s TIME or the CIA’s Paris Review, as well as low-end magazine mills such as the Magazine Management Company.

I doubt TIME, the CIA’s ‘cosmopolitan’ news and culture mouthpiece, needs an introduction, but the Paris Review is a little less well know. The PR was founded in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton as part of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. When PR was thoroughly discredited as an independent cultural organ in 2000, its life-long editor Plimpton did not resign, but stayed in situ until he died in 2008– it didn’t seem to bother anybody in America’s literary establishment that this flagship publication was CIA, which ought to tell us all something.

A large number of Playboy contributors wrote for/were profiled by PR, including ‘beat writer’ Jack Kerouac and Leslie Fiedler who debuted his ‘Huck Finn and Jim are Gay‘ theory on PR pages. But PR’s closest tie is to Playboy’s Terry Southern [3], who had a particularly tight relationship to the Paris Review. Southern’s work was published in PR’s first issue and many thereafter; PR’s new editor, Lorin Stein, even named a month after Terry. (Stein took over after Plimpton died.)

Lorin Stein, the guy who took over the Paris Review after founder George Plimpton finally died. But he’s not CIA.

So much for the ‘highbrow’ side of Playboy; I don’t find it surprising that one CIA media outfit would recycle talent from other, loud, CIA outfits. However, Magazine Management Company is a different creature– it didn’t court publicity at all. Some of its own employees, like Marvel comics editor Roy Thomas, didn’t even know it existed until well into their tenure. No one seems to know when, exactly, the company was founded either, but Magazine Management was in business by 1947 and employed two Playboy contributors Mario Puzo [2 covers] of ‘The Godfather’ fame, and Bruce Jay Friedman [5]. Both of these men worked for the US Air Force before their writing careers: Friedman served under an officer who became a ‘counter-culture’ guru, and Puzo was a ‘public relations officer’ in Germany. Naturally, Magazine Management was based out of New York City.

Magazine Management company output in the 1970s.

Magazine Management churned out men’s science fantasy mags, pornography, and was the parent company to Marvel comics. Its founder, Martin Goodman, was the son of Lithuanian immigrants who explains his success with the usual rags-to-riches spiel. Whatever the real story is, Goodman owned several publishing concerns by the 1930s;  these concerns had multiple names at the same time (eventually there were 56 shell companies!) making them difficult to track even to industry insiders– clearly Goodman wanted to hide something. From what I can tell, ‘the Goodman group’ was at the heart of the pulp fiction industry. Which brings me on to… George Orwell.

I wrote about Orwell’s distaste for American pulp fiction way back in 2012. Here’s the pertinent quote from Orwell’s collection of essays All Art is Propaganda, Orwell is describing American pulp fiction magazines during WWII:

Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are written for devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it ought to be emphasized that on its level the moral code of the English boys’ papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty are never held up to admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the American gangster story. The huge sale of the Yank Mags in England shows that there is a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem able to produce it. When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how promptly “anti-Fascism” was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story, “When Hell Came to America,” in which the agents of a “blood-maddened European dictator” are trying to conquer the U.S.A. with death rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces mid-air, others in which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc. etc.

It seems that somebody in the 1940s New York pulp fiction market was working to gin up a particularly nasty type of anti-German propaganda in service of the war effort. As I said, nobody knows when, exactly, Magazine Management got started, but after WWII they provided a good home for ex-Air Force men and later contributed to Playboy’s writers.

Magazine Management Company’s Captain America saves buddy strapped to Japanese bomb.

According to Roy Thomas, Goodman would follow DC Comics president Jack Liebowitz’s lead with comic book ideas; any competition between the firms was not on an ideological plane. I’ll remind readers that Goodman’s competitors, DC Comics, weren’t averse to wartime (or peacetime!) propaganda: their Superman character fought every WWII dictator save the other man of steel, Stalin.

DC comics was founded by an international-jet-setting Army Major named Malcolm Wheeler-Nichols, a friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Guess What? Wheeler-Nichols was an intelligence officer with the Army, tasked with gathering “intelligence in the shifting alliances between Cossacks, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Bolsheviks”. Wheeler-Nichols also served in Mexico under General John Pershing alongside another jet-setter: James Jesus Angleton’s father.

DC Comics’ Man of Steel has Hitler on his right, Emperor Hirohito on his left, as he straddles the globe.

Wheeler-Nichols’ Army career did not end well. Wheeler-Nichols’ family claims that his Army superiors tried to assassinate the comic genius because he treated his African-American soldiers so well… I think it’s more likely that Wheeler-Nichols’ ‘camaraderie’ problems stemmed from his open letter to President Harding criticizing the Army administration (“Prussianism”, favoritism and inefficiency were among his gripes), an offense which would land any officer a court-martial. Wheeler-Nichols was convicted and discharged; he then went into the comic business.

So Playboy’s low-class Magazine Management connection actually gave them an ‘in’ on privileged intel circles!

I think that’s enough for this week. Next week I’ll treat readers to Timothy Leary’s self-incriminating explanation of how the CIA implements the Hegelian Dialectic. Leary’s insights shed light on Francis Stonor Saunder’s CIA connection and Gawker’s firing of Adrian Chen. See you then!

[A] This is a conceptually tricky statistic, because in my mind, being featured by Playboy in itself shows that a writer was an asset of the Agency. My estimations are based on what I know about Cold War operations beyond Playboy and who has openly admitted to, or shown beyond reasonable doubt to have worked for some sort of espionage outfit. This necessitates some subjective decisions on my part– very few intelligence agents are conclusively ‘outed’ by their employers like Ernest Hemingway has been. These estimates are the best I can make given what I know now.

Timothy Leary’s mug shot prior to his jail break and flight to Algeria.

About a year ago I came across an article titled “Timothy Leary and the CIA” by Walter H. Bowart, who wrote a book about MK ULTRA one year before John Marks did, but did so with Marks’ help. Bowart’s book, Operation Mind Control (1978), was based on personal accounts of brainwashing from people Bowart found through classified advertisements in Rolling Stone and Soldier of Fortune magazines. (Rolling Stone was the home of CIA chief William Colby’s pet literary agent David Obst.)

In “Timothy Leary and the CIA” Bowart describes an interview he conducted with Leary in prison after Leary’s stunt in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver, which Playboy covered in ’71. I’ll point out that not just anybody can get access to prisoners like Leary; especially if that ‘anybody’ writes things which the US government doesn’t like. Here’s the pertinent part of Bowart’s reported interview, taken from “mindcontrolforums.com” as archived by the Wayback Machine:

“Have you ever knowingly worked for the CIA?” I [W.H. Bowart] asked.

“If I were working for the CIA,” he [Timothy Leary] said, ” I would have ten people working making a living exposing me. If I were the CIA, I’d own New Republic. I’d own The New Masses. I’d own Rolling Stone. I’d have 50 groups of people exposing the CIA…” “Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?” I asked. Without hesitating Leary said, “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people…

Of course, Bowart could be lying, Leary could be lying. I can’t speak to either man’s motivation, however, what Leary described is a well-known political manipulation strategy. The ‘Hegelian Dialectic’ strategy, which I last wrote about with regard to Benny Johnson, necessitates controlling all ‘sides’ of an argument– that means controlling all sources of information. When presented with a carefully chosen array of information, a rational person will be compelled to draw the desired conclusion while still believing they are forming their own opinion, which is the gold standard for behavior conditioning. The Hegelian Dialectic doesn’t work if, say, there’s only one news agency: there has to be a CNBC, a FOX, a CNN, etc. There has to be the appearance of diversity.

I can’t know if Leary was lying in the quote above, but I can do a thought experiment like the one Poul Henning-Kamp did for the intelligence community’s involvement in open-source software, which allowed him to predict HEARTBLEED. Would the CIA, an organization which barters in information, benefit from implementing the Hegelian Dialect in American media? Of course they would. What’s more, we know that the Agency did this in Europe during the Cold War… which brings me back to Playboy.

The only reason I was able to put Playboy’s selection of featured writers into context was because I had read a book called The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders. Saunders introduced me to the 1960s culture-industry names which popped up so many times on Playboy covers; her book is the ‘gold standard’ exposé of the CIA’s anti-Kremlin leftist crusade in Europe after WWII.

Who is Frances Stonor Saunders? She’s the daughter of a disinherited British noblewoman and commoner Donald Robin Slomnicki Saunders; she’s a BBC radio host; and was arts editor at The New Statesman, a British magazine known for its one-time mindless support of Stalin and for being used by the KGB as late as 1994 to place “anti-American” propaganda. That’s the story.

As a person, Frances Stonor Saunders bears extreme bitterness: her writing seethes with hatred for the German people; conservatives; and all fellow lefties whose opinions don’t match her own. There are very few people for whom Frances doesn’t have contempt. However, in The Cultural Cold War Frances shows an uncharacteristic, child-like admiration for Ramparts magazine, as well as the ‘Beat writers’ including Allen Ginsberg; theater wild-child Kenneth Tynan; Norman Mailer; Indian politician Jawaharlal Nehru; John Kenneth Galbraith; and director Stanley Kubrick. These chosen people are the world’s hope in the face of blundering CIA aggression, according to Frances. In her own words:

With the rise of the New Left and the Beats, the cultural outlaws who had existed on the margins of American society now entered the mainstream, bringing with them a contempt for what William Burroughs called a ‘sniveling, mealy-mouthed tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists and union officials… Alan Ginsberg, who in his 1956 lament Howl had mourned the wasted years– ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’– now advocated the joys of open homosexuality and hallucinogenic ‘Peyote solitudes’. Munching LSD, singing the body electric, reading poetry in the nude, navigating the world through a mist of benzedrine and dope, the Beats reclaimed Walt Whitman from stiffs like Norman Pearson Holmes, and sanctified him as the original hippy. They were scruffy rebels who sought to return chaos to order, in contrast to the obsession with formulae which characterized magazines like Encounter [CIA funded ‘non-communist left’ magazine –a.nolen]. (p. 361)

And…

It [Quest, the CCF publication in India] probably didn’t deserve J. K. Galbraith’s sneer that ‘it broke new ground in ponderous, unfocused illiteracy’. Certainly Prime Minister Nehru didn’t like it, as he always distrusted the Congress as an ‘American front’. (The Cultural Cold War, p 216)

Of course, readers will remember all those names from my analysis of Playboy’s featured authors: Spectorsky and the CCF 2.0, Part I, Part II. All Saunder’s ‘heroes’ were lauded by the CIA’s Playboy outfit, too.

Saunders agrees with the CIA on more than just Beat writers. She places the blame for CIA excesses at the feet of James Angleton and his ‘crew’ through well-chosen quotes from Allen Ginsberg’s writing:

Allen Ginsberg even fantasized that T.S. Eliot was part of a literary conspiracy mounted by his, Eliot’s, friend James Jesus Angleton. In a 1978 sketch called ‘T.S. Eliot Entered My Dreams’, Ginsberg imagined that ‘On the fantail of a boat to Europe, Eliot was reclining… “And yourself, “ I [Ginsberg] said, “What do you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA. After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend?”

In Saunder’s quote, Ginsberg goes on to opine: “The subsidization of magazines like Encounter which held Eliotic style as a touchstone of sophistication and competence… failed to create an alternative free vital decentralized individualistic culture. Instead, we had the worst of Capitalist Imperialism”. (p 249)

By ‘Eliotic’ Saunders means ‘in the style of T.S. Eliot’. Saunders presents Ginsberg’s imaginings as though they contain fact; she goes on to support Ginsberg’s assertions by making assertions of her own: a James-Angleton-CIA-literary-conspiracy caused Ezra Pound to be awarded the Bollinger Prize. (You can read her theory in The Cultural Cold War.)

What Saunders fails to mention is that both Eliot and Pound lead their field before the OSS was a twinkle in Stephenson’s eye. Despite modern judgments about their politics, these men were stars of the last literary generation not deeply captured by the intelligence community. What’s important about Saunders’ stance on Eliot and Pound is that she knows it’s a ‘safe’ stance to take: bashing them is not going to anger her patrons. Who are Saunders’ patrons?

It may strike readers as odd that Saunders, who spent years researching how the CIA co-opted the post-WWII literary community, would put so much naive trust in the Beat writers, who were promoted by outfits like The Paris Review which Saunders herself identified as a CIA front. Experience would suggest prudence and caution when dealing with the ‘Beats’, yet the thought that Allen Ginsberg might be just corrupt as CIA literary golden-boy Peter Matthiessen never flutters across Saunders’ consciousness.

It may also seem stupid that Saunders would blame the CIA’s counterintelligence chief for ‘anti-communist left’ abuses that clearly originate from something like the CIA’s “Special Communications Programs” division. I mean really, Frances, James Jesus Angleton only had 24 hours in his day and by the time the CCF got rolling he had other things to worry about.

I say Saunders’ position ‘seems stupid’, because of course Frances Stonor Saunders is following a well-trodden CIA path when she blames Agency excesses on Angleton: every official ‘exposer’ does this, from John Marks to Tom Mangold. James Angleton’s legacy is the black hole that CIA propagandists throw their garbage into. Bill Colby started that practice in the ’70s.

In writing The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders protected the legacy of CIA assets like Allen Ginsberg at the expense of CIA assets like T. S. Eliot. Frances Stonor Saunders promoted the same ‘intellectuals’ as Playboy promoted 40 years before in response to the obvious failure of the Congress For Cultural Freedom. Why would a pornography rag care about obscure ‘Beat’ writing? Why would an American pornography rag feature an Indian politician like Jawaharlal Nehru at all– but especially as Playboy’s first ever featured politician? See A.C. Spectorsky and CCF 2.o.

It’s almost as if somebody at the CIA called Frances up and said: “Franny, here’s a list of men who Spectorsky promoted in order to deal with the CCF setback. Write a history of the CCF that justifies Spectorsky’s strategy in hindsight. Can you do that, Franny?”

Now we have The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.

Frances Stonor Saunders’ intellectual dishonesty puts her in ugly company; it also casts a shadow over her favored leftist publication: Ramparts magazine. But that shadow is just one of many. Ramparts magazine founder Warren Hinckle went to Hugh Hefner, the Playboy front man, for funding. (See Hinckle’s autobiography.) Playboy followed Ramparts’ lead when they published the work of Black supremacist Eldridge Cleaver; both magazines published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Paris Review crony Terry Southern, amongst others. Playboy and Ramparts traveled a very similar path… which means that Ramparts traveled a similar path to a CIA front.

Now back to Timothy Leary’s suggestion about the CIA “owning” magazines like Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone prides itself on breaking news stories which are damaging to the US government and ‘intelligence community’. Rolling Stone magazine is an off-shoot of Ramparts: it was founded by two of Warren Hinckle’s employees when Ramparts folded. Rolling Stone’s founders were Jann Wenner and his patron (perhaps better described as ‘handler’) Ralph Gleason, who prior to becoming a Jazz critic, worked for the Office of War Information during WWII. (The ‘intelligence community used Jazz as a cultural weapon abroad.) Ramparts was also the vehicle David Horowitz and Peter Collier used to place Perry Fellwock’s ‘anti-NSA’ leaks in 1972. Ramparts and Rolling Stone have a lineage.

Jann Wenner cofounded Rolling Stone, you can read about his background in this JewishCurrents.org article. Like Gawker’s Nick Denton, Wenner displays extremely narcissistic characteristics: superficially charming; ruthlessly exploitative of employees; with the emotional maturity of a two-year old, according to Salon’s David Weir. Also like Denton, and many media-oriented intelligence professionals, Wenner is homosexual.

There’s a ‘lineage’ between the magazines which are used to leak sensitive intelligence information. Adrian Chen tripped over that lineage when he tried to equate Edward Snowden with Perry Fellwock in Nick Denton’s online publication Gawker.com.

Gawker’s coverage of the ‘Snowden Saga’ was designed to encourage apathy in readers: Denton tried to accomplish this by exploiting side-shows, as well as through Adrian Chen’s dismissive coverage of the leaks.

What do I mean by ‘exploiting sideshows’? Denton’s ‘Snowden Saga’ editorial policy was to marginalize concern over the NSA leaks by associating that concern with ‘lunatic fringe’ pundits and their unnewsworthy antics.  Denton employed his own Hegelian Dialect to attempt this marginalization, for example, he covered an obscure squabble between a spooky, pro-NSA Naval War College professor and a nameless blogger, who sparred over the prof’s violation of the Hatch Act by lobbying for the NSA: “unhinged spook” + “small-government wingnut” = “only crazies are concerned about Snowden issues”.

It may interest readers to know that the two protagonists from above took very different paths: the mysterious, nameless “wingnut” stopped blogging (xxtwitterwarcommittee.wordpress) and disappeared shortly before “spook” was fired from his teaching job for personal indiscretions;  “spook” now writes about evil Russian and Iranian espionage in Ukraine via The Kyiv Post, Jed Sunden’s former rag, which is funded by reality t.v. freak Mohammad Zahoor.

Zhanna Kobylinska implements The Kyiv Post’s version of the American propaganda outfit Zunzuneo. She also does PR for a well-connected cult in Kiev.

Denton’s second, more subtle, strategy was to assign Adrian Chen to the ‘Snowden Saga': Chen took the establishment line of promoting Tor, while dismissing Snowden as a misguided idealist, and dismissing privacy fears as overblown. Chen shot himself in the foot with his magnum opus, a lengthy investigative piece that compared Snowden to Perry Fellwock, the first NSA whistleblower, who now thinks he was used and regrets his actions.

In the 1970s Perry Fellwock leaked his NSA information to two Ramparts journalists, David Horowitz and Peter Collier. Adrian Chen got fired because he suggested that David Horowitz was an intelligence agent, and that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras were too. Chen didn’t know what anolen.com readers know about the CIA’s ties to Playboy, and the ugly shadow they cast over Ramparts. Chen came very close to writing about the stuff I’ve been writing about for almost a year now, and that cost Chen his job because his editor, Nick Denton, is likely part of the ‘intelligence community’ too. (The pro-outsourcing wing of the ‘intelligence community’ was *best* served by Denton’s editorial policy; the public interest was not served well at all.)

Where is Adrian Chen now? Currently Adrian is a managing editor for The New Inquiry in NYC; I have no idea how he’s supporting himself.

There has been an interesting development with Chen’s old overseer at Gawker.com, John Cook. Soon after Chen was fired, Cook also left Gawker for a position as “Editor in Chief” at billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s The Intercept, which also employs Glenn Greenwald. In a weird twist, Cook quickly left The Intercept and returned to Gawker.com, which is known for notoriously low pay. Cook’s new Gawker title is “Executive Editor for Investigations”– so Denton must have forgiven Cook for letting Adrian’s Fellwock piece print.

Was Cook promoted to his level of incompetence at The Intercept, or did something else sour the beer? Your answer is as good as mine.

I’m going to wind this up by harkening back to Timothy Leary’s observation: “If I were the CIA, I’d own New Republic. I’d own The New Masses. I’d own Rolling Stone. I’d have 50 groups of people exposing the CIA…””

There has been a diverse list of publications mentioned in this post: Ramparts, Playboy, The New Statesman, Rolling Stone, The Intercept, Gawker.com, The Kyiv Post. Regular readers know that I’ve criticized most of these titles over the last few years. If Leary’s right, then I’ve just been criticizing the same thing all along.

I guess the USSR didn’t lose. ;)