Sinister Forces blog

Katie Holmes:  Gavin thinks some sinister force has taken over the Cradle Bay meatheads.

James Marsden:  A sinister force?

Katie Holmes: You know, evil. Nowhere to turn, no one to trust, altogether ooky.

--  from Disturbing Behavior (1998)

The TNT Network aired this otherwise forgettable film on Saturday morning.  Bleary-eyed,  I had just finished drinking what passed for coffee to jump start my frayed nervous system after a series of late nights spent researching another book, approving some text for the Spanish language edition of Unholy Alliance (coming out this summer), and compiling data on bureaucratic iniquity (a full time job, that).  Mindlessly, I turned on the mind-control device – I mean, the television –  to see if I could, once again, defeat its nefarious designs on my neuro-circuitry and what do I see?  A weird credits reel at the beginning of a film I had never heard of (I was out of the country when it opened in a handful of theaters to lukewarm reception), and the barely-legible title, Disturbing Behavior.   The credits were easily the best part of the film.  Except, you know, for that bit about the “sinister force” … and the Addams Family reference …

In this teensploitation offering, James Marsden plays Steve, a newcomer to the Washington State village of Cradle Bay.   His family has relocated there from Chicago after the suicide of Steve’s brother by self-inflicted gunshot wound.  The town of Cradle Bay seems bucolic enough until Steve’s first day at high school during which he meets Katie Holmes, looking like a dazed Gothess of seventeen-going-on-forty.  He also meets a gang of short-haired, neatly-groomed, blue-jacketed teens who form a kind of elitist clique at the school.  Stepford Sons and Daughters, basically.  Robotized teens who have been programmed by a guidance counselor via surgical implants and Clockwork Orange-style visual aids, beamed into their eyes with mad-doctor-like glee.

James and Katie must find a way to save themselves and the town – especially the other teens – from this horrible menace.  The town is all in favor of the “Blue Ribbons” as the Stepford Students call themselves, because it has meant a gross reduction in drunk driving, graffiti, angst, suicidal depression, heavy metal, pot-smoking, Star Trek allusions, and other forms of vandalism and creative disorder. 

Katie Holmes won an MTV Award for Best Breakout Performance in 1999 for this film.  (I keep wondering what she broke out of.)  Here she portrays an alienated teenaged girl, referred to as a trailer-park “slut” by other teens, who is eventually abducted by the Blue Ribbons so they can transform her into one of them, only to be rescued at the last moment by the Marsden character.  The only ones doing drugs in this film are the misfits, the ones targeted by the Blue Ribbons for either harrasment or treatment, and who wind up the heroes of the piece.  The Blue Ribbons themselves are, like Scientologists, drug-free.  They are fully-functioning, productive members of society who spend their free time in a yogurt shop.  They are marrying up, going to ivy league colleges, and moving out into the world to carry their Blue Ribbon message of “Go Forward” and “Be the Ball”.  The only one raising any alarm over this is the film’s token conspiracy theorist, “Gavin” (played by Nick Stahl, easily the best performance in this film), a teen who has witnessed murder at the hands of the Blue Ribbons:  murder that was covered up by the police.  He is eventually captured by the Ribbons and transformed into a viable member of society. 

Better living through surgery.

So, what did Katie Holmes learn from this story?

Nothing, apparently.  Since then she has gone over to the Dark Side and become one of the Blue Ribbons herself.  (Strangely, one of the identification symbols worn by the Blue Ribbons is a small, woven wool blue bracelet reminiscent of the Kabbalah Center’s red thread.)  One of the problems with the mind-control system developed by the school’s guidance counselor is a defect in managing conflicting hormone levels.  At times of arousal, the Blue Ribbon students could become violent and harm themselves or others.  Imagine two Blue Ribbon students having children.  In fact, imagine them attempting to conceive … the first scene of the film involves one of these “transformed” youth murdering a girl who was performing fellatio on him.  He had to kill her before he lost his precious bodily fluids (an accidental homage to Dr Strangelove?). 

I’m sure that Katie now interprets the film as an attack on the psychiatry establishment, except that the transformations experienced by the subjects were not caused by drugs – the anathema of Tom Cruise and his fellow robots – but by a surgical implant and the playing of a custom-made film that intersperses slogans (like “Go Forward”) with scenes of family values, school spirit, and the like.   Think A Clockwork Orange meets Conspiracy Theory, and you get the idea.  Scientology is not against the idea of mind-control; it is, after all, what their system is based upon.  Instead, they are competitors with psychiatry, aiming for the same goals but using different methods. They began with Hubbard’s understanding of ritual magic as a system and technology for achieving psychological unity – what Jung called individuation – and they went from there to devise a never-ending system of degrees that has as its eventual “revelation” tales of alien visitations.  I mean, what good is a degree system that eventually … stops?  You have to keep adding more and more degrees to bilk the programmed members of more and more money, and this Scientology has done.

How much of this does Katie Holmes actually know?  Does she know about the rituals in the desert with Jack Parsons?  About Hubbard’s bigamy?  His mental disorders (as revealed in his declassified military records)?  His constant whining (as revealed in declassified letters written by Hubbard to various individuals and agencies)?  The well-documented history of Scientology’s attack protocol on those who defect from them, disagree with them, or debunk their system – a la the concerted efforts of the Blue Ribbons to attack anyone who disagrees with them or who does not conform to their standards and values?  Ms Holmes has the background to understand the danger she is in, from having acted in a film that so clearly depicts the problem.

 So I guess the question is:  Where is James Marsden, now that we need him?

It’s a German neologism from the twentieth century: weltanschauungskrieg, or “world-view warfare”.  It’s what we English-speaking people refer to as “psychological warfare”, but the German is much more apt because it implies a “clash of civilizations” more than merely psyching someone out. 

And that’s what’s happening now.

I’ve been silent for a long time (again) due to many factors, among them preparations for the upcoming third – and final – volume of Sinister Forces.  This one is subtitled “The Manson Secret” and boasts a foreword by Paul Krassner.  This volume gives the show away, and ties together the various maddening threads of the previous two volumes.  Once you’ve read Volume Three, you can go back and re-read the first two volumes with a greater, and hopefully deeper, understanding.  It is a difficult theme, no question, because it calls into doubt our entire “world-view” concerning American history, the separation of Church and State (ha!), and the underlying campaign of psychological warfare that has been visited upon us by the very people we used to trust. 

Another factor has been the unexpected death of a close friend of mine, Judith McNally, to whom the third volume of Sinister Forces is dedicated.  I’d known Judith for more than 35 years, and her passing was a shock to all of us who knew her.  A former editor of Filmmakers Newsletter – who interviewed such luminaries as actor-director John Cassavetes, among others – she went on to greater glory as the personal assistant, researcher, and factotum for a famous American author, in which capacity she was notorious among the Manhattan publishing world.  She also briefly worked for Praeger Publishing, a company that has since been exposed as a CIA front; a revelation she considered amusing.  Considering that I worked for the Bendix Corporation (which trained troops in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and functioned as a CIA front for many years all over the world) as well as a certain Israeli banking firm – both companies which have been identified by the LaRouche people as tentacles of the world-wide British Intelligence-Jewish-Masonic-Satanic conspiracy, or something – we pretty much had the Illuminati nailed between the two of us.  Now I’ve got to control the world by myself.  It’s a dirty job, but … well, you know.

Another factor is the ongoing investigation of Colonia Dignidad.  I was privileged in the past few months to have been in contact with the family of Boris Weisfeiler, the American math professor who went missing in the Andes Mountains in 1985 after being taken to the Colony by Chilean security forces while he was on an innocent hike in the forest.  Eyewitness testimony reveals that he was tortured and killed at the Colony, reason unknown.  Due to a general physical similarity between Weisfeiler and myself, it is a possibility that he was initially mistaken for me: a possibility that now is being considered by the Chilean judge in charge of the case.  A cache of documents has been uncovered at the Colony, including dossiers on their “enemies”, but these documents are not being made public at this time … and may never be.  There may very well be evidence in those documents of American complicity in the torture and interrogation of Chilean political prisoners in the immediate aftermath of the Pinochet coup of September 11, 1973, hence the backpedaling by Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice on this issue. 

Yet another factor is the news.  How can I compete?  The National Security Agency has built a database of every phone call ever made in the United States in the last few years.  The man who oversaw that program is President Bush’s nominee for head of the CIA to replace Porter Goss.  There is an investigation underway of Porter Goss’s hires at CIA, since some of them seem to be implicated in all sorts of unsavory practices.  The Watergate Hotel has re-entered the picture, replete with poker-and-prostitute parties.  Hmmm … let me see.  Domestic spying, an unpopular war, a President who claims he is above the law of the land, and the Watergate Hotel.  Does anyone remember Richard Nixon? 

And now … The DaVinci Code. 

To my mind, a poorly-written cut-and-paste job that hobbled together all the best bits of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.  For those of us who have already been down that road, there was no suspense or surprise in Dan Brown’s book:  we knew the secret from the first page.  I confess I stopped reading after the first few chapters.  Truth, after all, is not only stranger than fiction it is a good deal more entertaining.  It’s the fallout from this movie that interests me, however.

There has been a rash of documentaries on the History Channel in the past week or so that detail some of the controversies surrounding the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, Opus Dei, and all the other heavy furniture of The DaVinci Code.   The programs were rather misleading; one had to watch all of them to understand how.  Interviews with Freemasons and Masonic historians would have us believe that there is no worldwide conspiracy of Masons;  fair enough.  They portray the Masonic Society as essentially a charitable organization with no hidden agenda.  Okay.  Then, they proudly discuss the history of the American Revolution and how the Freemasons were an essential element in the inspiration and success of that venture;  how Masonic lodges throughout the Colonies were a vital factor in bringing together the various factions of North and South in a concerted effort against the British;  how European Freemasons such as Lafayette and Pulaski were enlisted into the fight; etc. etc.   The dichotomy between the above two positions makes my head hurt.  It’s as if the Masons of today are saying, “Okay, we were a worldwide conspiracy then, but not now.” 

Actually, what is at stake here is something else, something far deeper which none of the documentaries dared to address.  The Freemasons who helped to found this nation included men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and even Paul Revere.  Their ideal – their dream – was to create a nation that owed no allegiance to kings or bishops but which was organized along scientific and rational lines (hence the separation of Church and State in our Constitution).  Ultimate authority in the new country would be reason and compromise – the rule of law and not of personalities.  They fought a revolution for these ideals and we have been fighting to preserve these ideals ever since. 

What we have now, however, is a spiritual and political crisis in this country.  We are being told that one religion takes precedence over all others and that Christianity – in particular a form of Evangelical Christianity – should determine the character and the laws of the land.  The current situation would make the Founding Fathers spin like grieving gyroscopes in their graves. 

What’s an American to do? 

Do we throw our support behind the Freemasonic ideal, or behind a questionable form of Christian conservatism?  Are these our only choices?

Are we truly witnessing a power struggle between the Christian Right and the secret society of Freemasonry … the latter which seems positively glorious by comparison? 

The central theme of The DaVinci Code is the purported marriage between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and the idea that they had a child and that this child and its offspring represent a bloodline that exists today.  The Catholic Church, and other Christian groups and Church historians, insist that there is no evidence that such a liaison ever occurred, and therefore ridicule and castigate the book and the film as blasphemous, at worst, or simply bad scholarship at best.  In all the interviews I’ve seen or read on this subject, no one asks the Church apologists what seems to me to be the ultimate question:

What evidence exists that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected a few days later?

You can’t have it both ways, ladies and gentlemen.  You can’t insist on hard evidence that Jesus and Mary had a child, but refuse to face the fact that there is no hard evidence for the core belief of your Church:  that Jesus rose from the dead.

It is said the Knights Templar denied the resurrection of Christ and that this may have happened as a result of their sojourn in the Muslim lands.  They either found evidence which proved this to their satisfaction during their habitation of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem … or they heard this from Islamic scholars … or they made contact with certain Gnostic and other heretical groups in the Middle East.  Whatever the reason, they were eventually destroyed by both Church and State and this alleged blasphemy was given as one count of the indictment.  The Freemasons are said to be descended, at least spiritually, from the Knights Templar and, indeed, there is a Templar degree in modern Freemasonry.

Did the Masonic insistence on a society of enlightened individuals who chose science over religion originate in the confrontation with the pagan impossibility of a dead and resurrected God? 

Is the conflict taking place in our own country today – and around the world, between Muslims and Jews, Muslims and Christians –  a reflection of this same conflict, a conflict between belief in the Resurrection and belief that it simply didn’t happen? 

Does the furor over The DaVinci Code mask a deeper, unspoken and unspeakable, conflict between oppposing spiritual forces at work in the world?  If so, must we take sides?

If so, which side to take?

Any … takers?

Well … maybe the subway stop just before the Abyss.  The one where the exit gate is locked and the turnstiles don’t work and the lights dangle from exposed wiring that have been chewed upon by rats.

I have been silent these last six weeks or so due to a whole host of issues – working writers tend to become swamped in outlandish minutiae that have nothing to do with their actual work – but that doesn’t mean my third eye was closed to the bizarre activities of the sinister forces in our immediate environment.

Here’s just a few, culled from the mainstream press:

Item:  On February 10, a woman was arrested for carrying a human head on her way back from Haiti to Fort Lauderdale.  The head still had hair, teeth and … skin.  Myrlene Severe said that the head was to be used in a ritual to ward off evil spirits and, as such, was part of her religion, voodoun.   Ms Severe is Haitian-born, and a permanent resident of the US.  I could make a joke about the lengths people will go to in order to get a little head, but I won’t.  This is a family site.

Item:  On February 21, it was reported that Jeffrey Bronfman – a member of the Bronfman Canadian whiskey dynasty – was the head of the American chapter of a Brazilian church – O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal – that uses a hallucinogenic tea as an integral part of their rites.  The US Supreme Court upheld the right of that church to drink the tea (known as hoasca, which contains DMT). The church has 130 members in the United States, in the western New Mexico area.  Noting the increasing popularity of absinthe in the US, one wonders if the church is a Bronfman test site for a new beverage. 

Item:  On the same day, it was reported that Dena Schlosser – a 37-year-old woman and mother in McKinney, Texas – had heard the voice of God tell her to amputate the arms of her 10-month-old daughter.  During her trial it was revealed that she was found in her home (in 2004) covered in blood, and with the arms of her daughter already amputated, and with a deep wound in her own arm as she attempted to similarly amputate herself … but using her own arms, a physical impossibility that had not occurred to her, evidently.  She was pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.   One wonders why it’s always God who tells these people to commit hideous acts, and not Satan or Beelzebub?  I submit that had Ms Schlosser been a member of the Bronfman sect – abovementioned – she would have spent that same afternoon in the pleasant, drug-induced bliss of hoasca and never would have committed this sickening crime.

Item:  The following day it was reported that a 7-year-old girl in Dhanbad, eastern Bihar state in India, had wed a dog in order to ward off the evil eye.  The marriage ceremony took the requisite three days and followed all the normal rites the Santhal tribe follows  for any wedding.  Makes one wonder if the Process Church and the Son of Sam cult had something similar in mind with all those German shepherds? 

Item:  On February 23, it was reported that a young Jewish man – Ilan Halimi – was found tortured, handcuffed, and naked near railroad tracks in a region south of Paris on February 13.  He was pronounced DOA upon arrival at the hospital.  It was revealed that the crime was perpetrated by a gang composed of Muslims living in France.  The ringleader was arrested on a fugitive warrant in the Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa.

Item:  Two days later, thirty members of the National Socialist Movement – a neo-Nazi organization – wearing uniforms replete with swastika armbands, marched through a black neighborhood in Orlando, Florida.  The group, based in Minneapolis, had also marched through Toledo, Ohio in October, causing a riot and the burning of businesses.  In Orlando, though, the police made a dozen arrests or more after the group inflamed the residents with signs saying “White People Unite”.  SWAT teams were called out to maintain order. 

Item:  On March 2,  the US Senate approved the renewal of the Patriot Act.  No comment.

Item:  On March 5, it was reported that the records and, in some cases, the actual existence of literally thousands of US federal cases are kept secret.   In most cases, the secrecy is only temporary until an indictment is returned or a witness testifies, but since 9/11 the number of secret cases has increased dramatically. 

Item:  On the same day, it was reported that a Hindu shrine to Mohandas Ghandi in New Delhi had to be purified after a visit by President Bush and the specially-trained sniffer dogs that accompany him.  This one’s too easy, so … no comment.

Item:  On March 11, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice congratulated Michelle Bachelet: Chile’s new President and that country’s first woman President.  What was revealing was Rice’s comment that “I think it’s good to remember that it’s now been almost 20 years that the United States has been a friend and supporter of Chilean democracy.”  When asked about US support for Chilean ex-President and military dictator Augusto Pinochet, Rice replied, “I think that the past is now behind us.”

This is a very revealing exchange. In the first place, she states that the US has been a friend and supporter of Chilean democracy for only 20 years, i.e., since 1986?  It is recognized that the US government – under the Nixon/Kissinger regime – destabilized the Chilean democracy under the democratically-elected President Salvador Allende in 1973.  On September 11, 1973 to be exact.  So, does Rice’s comment mean that we supported Chilean fascism from 1973 to 1986, and then Chilean democracy from 1986 to the present?  Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked that the military coup against Allende was “not part of American history that we’re proud of”, thus admitting the American role in the overthrow of one of South America’s oldest democracies.  As more bodies – and more documents – are uncovered at Colonia Dignidad, perhaps we will learn even more about this “past” that is “now behind us”?

Item: On the same day, Alexander Haig – the man who gave us the phrase “sinister forces” in relation to the 18-1/2 minute Oval Office tape gap – said that, in Iraq,  US military leaders are repeating the mistakes made in Vietnam.  No comment.

Item:  On the same day, Ram Bahadur Banjan – a 15-year-old boy believed to be the reincarnation of Gautama Siddartha (the Buddha) – went missing in Nepal.  Oops.

Item:  The same week saw the famous “DaVinci Code Trial” in London, as the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail sue Dan Brown over the use of their material in his novel.   I am probably alone in this country in thinking that The DaVinci Code was much weaker than Brown’s Angels and Demons, but in any case while I applaud Baigent and Leigh for suing the ass off Brown who did a cut-and-paste job with Code, I don’t hold out high hopes for their success in this trial.

Item:  March 13.  Seventeen statues of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet were discovered at a site in Luxor, at the temple of Amenhotep III.  Here, kitty, kitty …

Item:  March 15.  Sirhan Sirhan was denied parole for the 13^th time since his conviction in 1968 for the assassination of Senator Robert F.  Kennedy.  You can read more about Sirhan Sirhan and the occult connections between the Palestinian immigrant and mind control/hypnosis in Sinister Forces: The Nine.   And am I the only one who thinks that Sirhan Sirhan is looking a lot like actor Tony Shalhoub? 

Finally, on March 17 – St Patrick’s Day – singer Isaac Hayes has announced he’s leaving the cast of the popular cartoon series “South Park” over religious differences.  See, “South Park” has begun making fun of Scientology and Tom Cruise and Mr Hayes is, well, Clear.  He had no problem, though, when the series made fun of Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, etc.  But whatever you do, don’t make fun of L. Ron Hubbard.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Earlier on this blog I mentioned the fact that my publisher -- Trine Day -- was being sued by the Special Forces Association over a book -- Expendable Elite -- that dared to tell the truth about special ops in Vietnam in the mid-1960s.  The Special Forces Association has deep pockets, and their attack on Trine Day and Kris Millegan (the owner of Trine Day) as well as on Lt Col Martin (the author of Expendable Elite) was, in my view, clearly designed to bankrupt the company. 

The court case began on Halloween last year, in the town where 33rd degree Freemasonry was born in the United States:  Charleston, South Carolina.  The first trial ended in a mistrial.  It was revisited in January of this year and ended -- on Candlemas, another pagan holiday -- with a verdict of "Not Guilty".   The jury was out two hours, just about long enough for them to have lunch and fill out the forms.

There was never any question about the righteousness of Expendable Elite or the bravery of Trine Day for publishing a book no one else would.  I know, as the author of Sinister Forces, that these days it takes bravery to "speak truth to power".  I congratulate Kris Millegan, Col Martin, and Trine Day for their important victory in the American courts.  This case has received virtually no coverage in the mainstream media, even though it is about the First Amendment, government secrecy, covert ops, and all the panoply of 21st century American political angst.  Had it been Random House that was being sued, we would have been watching the case live on Court TV.   But who could take the chance of covering a trial involving the publisher of such tomes as "Fleshing Out Skull & Bones"  or "America's Secret Establishment"? 

So, you have to really dig around to read the truth, boys and girls.  Freedom is something we have to win every day in our lives;  the defenders of our country are not only the soldiers on the battlefield (or the spies in our embassies) but you, and me, and publishers like Kris Millegan.

Thank you all for your continued support.

Okay, I tried to restrain myself, but …

Pat Robertson.  Again.  (sigh)   It’s almost too easy.

Now, according to the televangelist and founder of the 700 Club,  the illness of Ariel Sharon is God’s punishment because the Prime Minister of Israel had the temerity to agree to give back some of the land that had been originally taken from the Palestinians.  Even the White House had to distance itself from this latest pronouncement. 

Isn’t it interesting to see how we blame God for what happens to our enemies, but consider what happens to our friends as natural disasters?  When the hurricanes hit the United States last year and did such devastating damage, the Arab press considered it God’s punishment for the invasion of Iraq.  When the earthquakes hit Pakistan, or the tsunami hit Indonesia, it was a different story.  Both Pakistan and Indonesia welcomed foreign aid, even if it came from the Great Satan.  God is the first victim of religious fanaticism, it seems. 

And Pat Robertson’s case is no exception.  He, and the other members of the Christian Coalition who “support” Israel only do so because they have their own agenda that has nothing to do with defending the Israeli state forever.  They believe that, in order for the Messiah to come, the Third Temple must be built.  That can only be done if the Muslims are removed from Israeli soil and the Dome of the Rock dismantled and the Temple rebuilt in its place.  The Christians of Pat Robertson’s denomination only want Israel defended long enough to ensure that this agenda is satisfied.   Any accommodation with Palestine, therefore, only prolongs the agony.  It is a cynical manipulation of religious and national sentiments, and we can expect no less from a man who has cynically supported vicious military dictators in the Third World for decades.

I don’t want to get into a heated debate over the Israel-Palestine issue, if only because everyone seems to have their own moral positions firmly in place and there is no real way to discuss this without jumping the couch.  We can talk about the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot agreement, Theodore Hertzl, Partition, the Irgun, the Haganah, Deir Yassin, the King David Hotel, the refugee camps, and on into the night without getting anywhere. 

Instead, let’s look at the situation from a purely pragmatic, realpolitik, point of view. 

The Palestinians were the pawns in a game being played by the superpowers in the 20^th century.  The Soviets used the plight of the Palestinians as means of attacking the West.  The Arab nations used the Palestinians as a means of castigating Israel and the West and each other.  Yet, neither the Soviets nor the Arab nations really wanted to do anything about the Palestinians.  They were robot warriors in the Cold War:  crazed terrorists/freedom fighters (depending on your point of view) who could be sent to do something spectacular and bloody to shift world opinion one way or another.  They were pawns.  And still are.

Had the Arab nations really wanted to do something for the Palestinians,  they would have.  They had the cash.  They had the armies.  But they couldn’t get their act together.  They used the Palestinians against each other and against the West.  Lacking the courage or the will for a direct confrontation with Israel, they used Palestinian refugees as a kind of buffer to keep up the pressure on Israel without actually being guilty of attacking the Jewish state themselves.  Implausible deniability, we might call it. 

And, from the side lines, they had the support of all those Nazis who became military and security advisors to the governments of Egypt, Syria, and other Arab states,  and who exacerbated the already simmering anti-Zionist sympathies of these governments and their peoples.

We can’t complain, really. We did the same thing with the Cubans in Miami.

The Cubans are our Palestinians.  Refugees who came to America during and after the Castro revolution of 1959, they became the largest immigrant population in Florida, eventually rising to prominence in government and business circles to the extent that they exert an uncomfortable control over virtually every aspect of cultural life in the southern part of the state.  They want their homeland liberated, and the US government keeps assuring them they will do what they can to free Cuba from the grip of Castroism.

Sort of.

In my discussions with Cubans in Florida and Puerto Rico, I have pointed out that the US government does not really care about liberating Cuba.  The Democrats have no real reason to see Cuba liberated.  Ever since the Kennedy administration was viewed by anti-Castro Cubans as a disaster for their agenda, the Democrats can no longer count on Cuban-American support.  The Republicans have no real reason to see Cuba liberated, because they count on the Cuban vote to swing Florida’s elections.  By continually assuring the Cubans that they despise Castro as much as they do and promising that they will do whatever they can to bring Castro down, they are shoo-ins for every election in the state that matters.

Should the Cubans return to a free Cuba, the Republicans would have lost the only platform that makes sense in Florida.  Otherwise, they would have liberated Cuba long ago.

I mean, Republican administrations have sent armies into Panama, Grenada, and Kuwait without blinking an eye.  They overthrew the Allende regime in Chile.  They gave secret support to the Contras in Nicaragua.  What about Cuba? 

But the anti-Castro Cubans don’t see it.  They don’t want to admit that they have been manipulated and used by the GOP since the Nixon administration.

And the Palestinians don’t want to admit that they have been used and manipulated by the members of the so-called Arab League. 

Now we have Hollywood getting into the fray.  With Spielberg’s latest offering, Munich, and with a German filmmaker insisting that President Kennedy was killed by a plot hatched by Castro’s security service, and with the important achievement of Good Night and Good Luck, we are being pulled back into the Cold War and forced to re-evaluate our own history and its implications for the present day.  Whether or not you agree with the history as being taught by these filmmakers, the questions they raise are serious and deserve some sort of response.  Many historians were angry at Oliver Stone’s JFK, but it cannot be denied that the film was responsible for opening up the debate on the Kennedy assassination … and for opening up thousands of classified documents on the event, some of which made their way into Sinister Forces. 

What we are experiencing is a phenomenon that is as ancient as Hamlet.  Remember how the Danish prince uses a theatrical troupe to tell the true story of his father’s assassination.  I submit that these days we are more likely to hear the truth – or at least the right questions – from filmmakers than from our political or religious leaders.

The play’s the thing.

For those of you who were waiting for volume two of Sinister Forces -- A Warm Gun --  please be advised that it is now available directly from us, or from your local bookstore, amazon, barnes and noble, unknowncountry.com, and in the library at Langley.  Volume three (the final volume, entitled The Manson Secret) is now in preparation and ties the entire series together. 

I want to thank everyone who has been supporting Trine Day,  the publisher, and myself by logging on, leaving comments and questions, reading (and buying!) the books, and generally creating the kind of buzz that we need.  As we go into 2006, the continuing saga that is American history promises to get stranger, spookier ... and more dangerous.  The point of view set forth in the Sinister Forces trilogy is unusual and controversial, but as events unfold I am certain you will see how the Sinister Forces explanation may be the only viable way of looking at what has happened, and is happening, to our country and to the world in general.

Sinister Forces talks about the place where psychology, physics, politics and history meet; you won't hear of that from anyone else, anywhere else.  Further, it offers a scientific explanation for some of the most perplexing and traumatic events of the last 50 years, bringing the occult, psychological warfare, brainwashing, assassinations, and serial murder together and looking at these phenomena in a completely new light.

Consider Sinister Forces the non-fiction version of the Wilson and Shea classic, Illuminatus!  They're both trilogies, they both talk about the same subject matter, and they both raise consciousness merely by being read.  I guess the only difference is: mine has footnotes.

The best of the "holiday" season to everyone and better luck next year!

No, I don't mean 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  (sorry for the Catskills' humor)

I mean what we just heard this evening.  I was going to show the comparisons between George Bush's petulant address defending his actions in going to war, and staying at war, in Iraq with a speech made by Richard Nixon on November 3, 1969 ... and then discovered that someone had beaten me to it.

No one less than Jerry Springer, if you can believe that.  He pre-empted me with a comparison between that speech and earlier Bush pronouncements, and this can be viewed at http://www.geocities.com/whammerjammer33/nixonspeech1969.html

Good night, and God help America.

Okay.  I don't want to say I told you so, but ...

On the heels of the MSNBC revelation that the Pentagon was (and is) spying on Americans who have the audacity to exercise their free speech ... in church ... against the Iraq War, the New York Times (not to be outdone) has published today a new set of revelations that show the Bush administration authorized the use of illegal wiretaps and other surveillance measures on American citizens since at least 2002, on the pretext of the "war on terror". 

That means we are right back in 1968.  The Red Squads.  The Nixon enemies' list.  Government infiltration of political parties, anti-war groups, and the surveillance of private citizens who had the poor judgement to sign a petition or show up at a peace rally. 

We didn't like it then, when we were in the midst of the Cold War, Vietnam, and anti-Communist hysteria.  Why should we accept it now?  What is the real difference between Communist cells operating secretly in the American heartland and terrorist cells doing the same thing, forty years later?  Why was it wrong then, but okay now?  When it was revealed that Nixon had authorized all sorts of illegal wiretaps, domestic intelligence activities and other illegal surveillance of American citizens, he was only a few steps away from impeachment. 

Remember that he prolonged an unpopular war ("peace is at hand" ...remember that one?  or how about "peace with honor"?); he used the threat of worldwide communist conspiracy as a rationale;  he never could answer a straight question with a straight answer; and he spied on Americans he didn't like, meaning anyone that opposed his policies.  He saw his struggle against the godless Communists as a life-and-death cosmic battle between good and evil ... and today our own current President (a kind of Tibetan reincarnated Nixon lama) frames his struggle with god-ridden terrorism the same way, and uses the cosmic scope of his imagination as an excuse to trample on our civil liberties.

At least the Senate is beginning to understand that there is something wrong with all of this.  Maybe they're listening to someone.  McCain got his anti-torture measure through (as if we, as Americans, needed such a thing as a LAW forbidding "cruel and inhuman punishment" of prisoners!), and now, today, the Senate rejected the extension of the Patriot Act as-is.

The struggle isn't over yet, not over the Patriot Act, or torture, or the use of our intelligence services to spy on us.  But, as Nixon used to say, maybe "there's light at the end of the tunnel".   Let's just hope it isn't the headlamp of an oncoming train.

            Some of you may have been wondering at my long silence of late.  Some of that was due to Hurricane Wilma and the general disruption of everyday life that took place in the aftermath.  Some of it was due to a busy schedule of seminars, radio interviews, and the like.

            But some of it was due to the fact that every time I sat down to write something for the blog, another weird event would take place that would take my breath away.

            The Scooter Libby indictment was one;  a new spate of  9/11 groups and events designed to raise consciousness about the unanswered questions about that event was another;  the Iraqi elections (considered “satanic” by Al-Qaeda) … the Prime Minister of Iran casting doubt on the Holocaust … the tanking of the President’s popularity polls … Chris Matthews on Hardball demanding an answer from administration loyalists to the question of Bush’s credibility, or lack of it, in the face of new information concerning war planning, torture, etc etc and getting no response … and giving up on getting a response … it’s all been rather too much for a sensitive soul like your correspondent.

            And then, today.  (sigh)  Revelations concerning the Pentagon’s spying on Americans.  In America.  A 400 page document obtained by MSNBC showing how the Department of Defense spied on … on Quakers … and considered them a “threat” because a small Meeting in Lake Worth, Florida had considered a peaceful protest against the Iraq war.

            Ladies and gentlemen, I was one of those who said, at the beginning of our invasion of Iraq, that we were getting involved in another Vietnam.   At the time, even the opponents of the war were not going that far.  And yet, here we are.  A war that doesn’t end.  30,000 dead Iraqis by the President’s own estimate.  More than 2,000 dead American soldiers (who are being shipped home like baggage, by the way, minus the dignity of a military escort or burial).  A fight against “insurgents” or “terrorists” or whatever you want to call them in an alien land where you can’t tell the combatants from the civilians.  And an orchestrated series of elections.  All that sounds very familiar.  Throw in domestic spying by our intelligence agencies, including the Pentagon, and it’s déjà vu all over again.

            Can you say “Patriot Act”?   Can you say “Homeland Security”?  How much money was – and is – being spent on spying on Americans in their own homes, their own libraries, their own churches, and on the Internet, maybe even on sites like this one … and how much is being spent on providing a modicum of military honor for the soldiers who have fallen and are being shipped home like so many suitcases?  Where are our priorities?

            Have you seen Syriana?  There is an interesting scene in which the George Clooney character – based on a real-life CIA spy – goes into Beirut to arrange an assassination.  Before he does so, he has to obtain the approval of Hezbollah, an Islamic political party and military group in charge of a large section of the city that gained prominence due to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the presence of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. 

The word “hezbollah” means “Party of God”. 

            And this is what it has all come down to, in the end.  Our God against theirs.  Christianity (or some perverse, perverted form of it) against Islam (or some perverse, perverted form of it).  We are all fighting for God.  We are all convinced of the righteousness of our actions, of our point of view, of the necessity of taking extreme measures to defend our respective ways of life.  Why is that?

            Because we can’t bear – we can’t bear – to think that our wars and our deaths and our killings are for some other reason, some reason too horrible to contemplate.  Oil.   Money.   Water.   Food.  We can’t bear the idea that our religious sympathies are being manipulated by the callous, the greedy, the cynical. 

We can’t bear the thought that we have all, somehow, become Palestinians.

 In Unholy Alliance, I quoted a statement by Adolf Hitler who said, “Mind my words, Bormann, I am going to become very religious.”  This is the kind of cynicism that has overtaken our world.  The atheists have a point, of course, and their point of view should be honored.  But the cynical manipulation of religious ideas in the service of politicians, generals, and spin doctors goes far beyond anything the atheists ever dreamed. 

            Like it or not, we have all become members of the Party of God.          

These are some gnomic utterances from the center of the storm.

Hurricane Wilma has come and but not yet gone, like the Ides of March, and caught us squarely in the jaw. We are without electric power, with water that must be boiled, with stores and gas stations that are closed. When night falls, here in South Florida, it's like my memories of the rainforest in Southeast Asia: hidden dangers lurk everywhere, below you and above you, and all around you as you tred warily from broken tree limb to lump of brush and debris, hearing things move and not knowing if they're squirrels, raccoons, small birds building nests in downed trees... or snakes, alligators, armadillos, or creepy crawly humans.

People here thank God that we have been spared the flooding of Katrina, and that we have received dry and cool weather in the days since Wilma which means we can survive without air-conditioning. People prayed to God that Wilma would pass them by, or that Wilma would not destroy their homes, their cars, their lives.

That would be considered funny by the Gnostics, who believed that all matter including most especially Nature was not the creation of God but of the Demi-urge, a kind of demon who wanted humanity to fall down and worship it. There is a hint of this Gnostic belief in the New Testament, wherein the Devil is considered the "Prince of this world". I submit that neither the hurricane nor the calm weather was the responsibility of the God of the New or Old Testament, but equally the dubious gifts of an impersonal Satan.

A man standing outside the ruined Broward County Courthouse in downtown Fort Lauderdale, looking up at the broken glass and shattered walls, could only say one thing to describe the carnage: "It looks like Oklahoma City," referring to the bombing of the Federal Building in that city by Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators. An act of terrorism.

As I mention in book Two of Sinister Forces, a Malaysian politician and Islamic fundamentalist, Nik Aziz, once remarked "God is a terrorist".

In Malaysia, the people who are charged with arranging the weather are the indigenous shamans, the bomoh, who are hired to ensure that only sunny weather attends important religious or political events. We could use a few, I guess, except that Malaysia is where Islamic terrorists go on vacation. It's where the 9/11 planning took place, in an apartment in Kuala Lumpur not far from where I once lived. It's Malaysians who are charged with causing the Bali bombings.

Maybe God is a terrorist, after all.

I find myself agreeing, if somewhat uncomfortably, with that assessment, and it reminds me of something else I wrote, long ago:

God is the only safe thing to be.

On a battery-powered television, I watched BBC News interviewing a spokesman for the Heritage Foundation. It was about the Iraqi elections. The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank (probably an oxymoron) that is heavily sponsored by people like Richard Mellon Scaife (again, see book two of Sinister Forces) who went on the warpath against Clinton and his cronies. The spokesman declared that we should begin to pull out of Iraq and let the Iraqis deal with the terrorism in their country. After all, he said, Northern Ireland has lived with terrorism for years; so has Israel, and terrorism is endemic in Colombia. I blinked my eyes in astonishment. I thought , after the WMD scenario, and after the Al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein scenario, that we were really in Iraq to fight the war on terrorism. Now, it seems, they've moved the goal posts again.

Maybe God is a terrorist, and the neo-cons have just spoken with Him.

But then, there was the World Series.

My father, grandfather, and other deceased relatives on that side of the family must have finally embraced in an ecstasy of delirium, wherever they were. The White Sox have finally won the World Series after eighty-eight years! I remember many summers spent in Gary, Indiana as a child when the adults would huddle around the television or transistor radios, cans of Hamm's or Pabst Blue Ribbon in their fists, hot dogs on the grill, bottles of Coke for the kids, as the Sox played game after game in a losing battle. These were die-hard fans, these first and second generation immigrants from Slovakia; men who worked the steel mills or who went on to college and became bankers and administrators. The Catholic Church, the White Sox, and Eisenhower, roughly in that order of importance.

They would have cheered with glee to see that impossible catch by Ruben as he grabbed the ball and fell into the spectators, as an umpire turned and, with clenched fist jabbed into the air like a Black Panther, declared the catch good, the out secure. I watched that umpire and thought, why don't we have umpires instead of Supreme Court Justices? They are fair, impartial, pay attention only to the rules of the game without fear or favor, and anyway they already have black suits.

What would have been the outcome of the 2000 election, had umpires been in charge? As George Bush senior watched in dismay from the stands as his beloved Texas team lost the fourth game in a row to the Chicago team, I thought back to the Florida vote and the hanging chad. Texas would have lost that game, too, if we had umpires instead of judges.

But, maybe not.

One of the stains on White Sox history is their famous thrown game in the Series back before my father was born. They deliberately lost the game so that the other side could win, because -- as they say-- the "fix was in".

Nothing an umpire can do about that.

And so it goes.

When I get real power and a real connection, I will be back answering your questions and commenting on the situation in general. Until then, our prayers are with Trine Day Publishing in their historic fight against the sinister Special Forces Association, a court case that begins on Halloween, in Charleston, South Carolina -- the sight of the Mother Lodge of the World of the Masonic Society. Show your support with a donation to their legal defense fund or just buy a book.

Or show up at the courthouse in Charleston and raise some consciousness in support of the First Amendment.

We're not terrorists, after all. We're just God's children.

I’ve been writing and talking about Nazism and neo-Nazism for some years now, but it’s not a “hot button” topic so it’s rarely addressed in the mainstream media.  I was also one of the first to talk about the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism – back when the Berlin Wall came down and everyone spoke of the end of the Cold War and the redundancy of our defence establishment.  I don’t want to sound like a Cassandra, warning everyone of imminent doom, but there are connections between neo-Nazism and the violent wing of Islamic fundamentalism that are disturbing and about which our anti-terrorism experts never speak.

The nightmare of last Saturday’s riots in Toledo, Ohio over a planned march by members of the National Socialist Movement (a neo-Nazi party) is evidence that racial tensions in our country are reaching another boiling point (especially after the perceived racism in the slow response to Hurricane Katrina’s victims in New Orleans) and that the neo-Nazi element in our country is quick to exploit this tension to advance their own cause.

That this has uncomfortable ramifications for our own national security apparatus I hope to make clear in what follows.

On November 8, 2001 Swiss authorities raided the home of Albert Ahmed Huber in a Berne suburb.  Huber was a former journalist and well-known neo-Nazi whose Berne home was adorned with pictures of Hitler and Himmler.  The authorities raided his home because of his ties to Al-Qaeda and the events of September 11, 2001.  A self-proclaimed link between Nazism and Islam, Huber has been an outspoken supporter of Islamic terrorism, and videotapes of his speeches are available at sympathetic mosques throughout the world.

Huber sees his goals as a Nazi and those of Al-Qaeda as being essentially the same:  the eradication of the Jewish race and their removal from positions of power within European and American governments.  While Hitler himself would have been only contemptuous of the Arabs as untermenschen – sub-humans – the new fascist underground sees instead an important new alliance in the radical and violent acts of Al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic groups. 

This is nothing new, and goes back to the days of the Third Reich, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem forged links with the Nazi Party in the 1930s, and indeed lived in Berlin as a guest of the Fuehrer until the end of the war.  After the war, he returned to the Middle East along with many former SS officers who attained important status within the intelligence and military apparatus of the emerging Arab dictatorships.

This is an element of Arab – and, consequently, Islamic – history that many would have us ignore or forget.  It is one of the reasons why Islamic leaders have such a hard time coming out publicly against acts of terror perpetrated by their co-religionists.  The Nazi presence in the Middle East has certainly evaporated a great deal since the war, but there are still war criminals living in the Middle East and their influence over the secret police in Syria, Egypt and other countries cannot be discounted.  The link between the “official” Nazis of the Third Reich and the neo-Nazi movement of today is strong;  in the early days of the neo-Nazi movement, funds were routinely distributed by Skorzeny and other trustees of Nazi treasure to promising neo-Nazi organizations in America, South America, Europe, and beyond.  Now that their identification with such extremists as the thugs of Al-Qaeda is known, they have certainly become a fifth column within the United States.

Perhaps we should not mention here the close cooperation that once existed between the Bush family (and other prominent Republicans) and the Nazis before and during World War II.  Such an ad hominem reference is presumably beneath us.  After all, we can argue, both Presidents Bush have invaded Iraq and bombed that country as well as Afghanistan.  Thus, one may presume that they are now ardent supporters of the State of Israel and definitely anti-Nazi.  But what if the real intention is merely to suppress uncontrollable ideologues like Osama bin-Laden in favor of the “stability” of repressive Arab regimes, such as those in Saudi Arabia?  Bin-Laden is more of an immediate threat to the Saudis than he is to European and American governments.  Remove bin-Laden and you have given the Royal Family breathing room.  Remove Saddam Hussein, and you have done the same thing. 

But, we may also argue, President Bush is a religious man, a born-again Christian with strong ties to the Christian ummah.  Yet, Saudi Arabia remains highest on the list of foreign governments that suppress religious freedom including most especially Christian religious freedom.  And what does the Christian Right really want with Israel?   They support the modern State of Israel because they interpret their own Bible as requiring that Israel exist so that the Third Temple can be built and the Messiah return.

In other words, the State of Israel is only a means to an end for the Christian Right.  It is a machine to jump-start the End of Days.  If I were an Israeli, I don’t think I would be very comfortable with the lavish attention given to my country by Christians who still view Jews as Christ-Killers, and who want the Messiah to come once and for all and remove the unbelievers from the earth. 

But then, I could be wrong.

Well, he talks, anyway.

For those of you who are curious as to who Peter Levenda is or what he looks like, now is your chance.  On the History Channel series, Decoding the Past, the installment titled Nazi Prophecies includes an interview with me as well as with other notables in the field such as Prof. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke whose The Occult Roots of Nazism is an important contribution to the field. 

This show will air at 9 pm Eastern on the History Channel on Monday, October 10, and  will be rebroadcast a few hours later at 1 am Eastern on October 11. 

And don’t forget that I will also be talking to George Noory on Coast-to-Coast AM on Thursday night, October 13, from 11 pm to 2 am Pacific time.  There will be a phone-in for questions, so if you have anything to ask me about Unholy Alliance or Sinister Forces, this is an excellent opportunity.

It’s a media-heavy week next week for fans of Sinister Forces,  Unholy Alliance, and the secret currents that run beneath the surface of our waking reality.  See you then!

It is a common question:  why go after all those Nazis from World War II?  They must be a hundred years old by now, if they are still alive.  Who benefits?

I’ve been asked that question, and I know that others who have written about the Nazis and who hunt Nazis are frequently asked the same. 

Perhaps the life of Simon Wiesenthal can give us some answers.

At the age of 96, the man who single-handedly created the popular image of the  indefatigable Nazi hunter has died in Vienna.  There are a few people around the world who are, today, breathing a sigh of relief;  others who are celebrating the death of their nemesis, the man who has kept them on their toes and on the run for decades.  But for most of us, today is a day to remember not only the Holocaust but the sixty-year career of a man who survived the death camps only to turn around and go after the perpetrators. 

If Simon Wiesenthal could keep up that struggle until the age of 96, you can be sure that Nazi war criminals who escaped justice in 1945 continued to struggle to evade his net for the same length of time, until they themselves died of old age or were brought to justice.

Wiesenthal’s greatest contribution, however, may very well be his success at keeping the story of the Holocaust alive.  He did so in a way that many of us can appreciate: with intelligence, careful study and evaluation, and discretion.  Wiesenthal was a kind of conspiracy theorist, looking for hidden enemies in government, business, and culture around the world;  these enemies existed, of course, and were not the product of speculation or imagination, and he performed this function in a manner we should emulate.  He did not tar everyone with the same brush.  Even when confronted by the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, he stopped short of declaring the Austrian Prime Minister a war criminal (although he did call for his resignation), because the evidence just wasn’t there.  Wiesenthal was only interested in apprehending the real perpetrators of the Holocaust:  the sadistic butchers and fiends who populate the nightmares of the survivors.  The Eichmanns, the Barbies, the Mengeles.

It was the fictional story of Josef Mengele – Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil – that brought Wiesenthal tremendous fame around the world.  He was portrayed by Laurence Olivier, not a bad choice.  Wiesenthal’s character also made an appearance in the film version of The Odessa File, a well-done and thoughtful interpretation of the Frederick Forsythe novel that starred a youthful Jon Voigt (for those of you too young to remember, Voigt is the father of Angelina Jolie).   Wiesenthal, in short, became iconic in the popular culture and he used that popularity to further his cause.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center was the first place I called after my return from Chile and its notorious Colonia Dignidad.  I received courteous responses from them, but they were as cautious as their namesake and founder when it came to the presence of actual Nazi war criminals at the Colony.  They were aware of Colonia Dignidad, of course, and I had the impression that they were monitoring the situation in some manner, but their brief was more to the purpose of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive at a time when it’s very existence was being questioned by the revisionists, a more important goal to be sure than hunting down a renegade war criminal lost in the mountains of Chile.  There was a moment when I felt a little like the young man in the opening sequences of The Boys From Brazil, who is taking photographs of Mengele in Paraguay and phoning Wiesenthal to tell him what he has found.  The Weisenthal character was necessarily skeptical and told the young man to forget about it and go home. 

Skepticism in the service of research and investigation is a tremendous tool.  It saves one endless time going after wild geese, meaningless data, dead ends.  For those of us involved in the darker areas of historical research – sometimes confused with speculative history or even with conspiracy theorism – skepticism is a necessity.  It keeps us sane.  And may even keep us alive.

But imagination is skepticism’s left hand.  Without it, we wouldn’t even be involved in looking behind the curtain, in revealing the deeper politics behind world events.  Imagination gives us the ability to conceive of other patterns, other connections between events, and renders us invulnerable to the cover story, the accepted version of events, the spin. 

Unfortunately, Simon Wiesenthal did not need an active imagination.  He had experienced the sinister forces of history first-hand, in the death camps that took over eighty of his own relatives’ lives and nearly took his own.  It is my sincere hope that today Simon Wiesenthal – who stirred the imaginations of so many others, including my own – is now reunited with his wife (who died in 2003), with the family he lost in the Holocaust, and with the six million others he fought to have remembered … and that they have enclosed him in an embrace of welcome, and of congratulations for a life well-lived and for his priceless contribution to the world. 

“Similarly, as with CRISMAN, I think that in the course of the memo the periodic necessary references to the OLD CHURCHES have half answered the question.  Applying to this subject the available models, I suggest that the most likely rational conclusion is that here, again – except with more particularity – we have a clandestine substructure developed to serve the intelligence community’s concept of national security.

            A bizarre structure, to be sure, but its very strangeness … makes it all the more safe from possible investigators who are looking for spies wearing trenchcoats and carrying, like so many James Bonds, gold cigarette cases.  The churches – like all churches – are virtually free from official inquiry by virtue of the Constitution, not to mention American custom.  The “ministers” and “ bishops” can accumulate money (religious fund raising) without serious inquiry as to the sources.  They are free from the 9 to 5 routine expected of normal, patriotic Americans, free to operate in relative seclusion from the expected social involvements, free to engage in obscure crusades or missions and free to travel extensively … as assignments may dictate.  And where, as may be the case in some instances, there may actually be a home structure for the particular church, one would have the most natural of safe houses.”

                                                -- Handwritten memo from New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison to Jonathan Blackmer of the House Subcommittee on Assassinations, dated July 18, 1977 regarding Thomas E. Beckham.

     The story of Jack Martin is almost as strange as that of his old friend and fellow clergyman, David Ferrie.  With Jack, we are in the same twilight world we are with Ferrie and Oswald.  In fact, “Jack Martin” is not even his real name.

     Jack S. Martin was born in Phoenix, Arizona on July 1, 1915, but his name at the time was Edward Stewart Suggs.  Like Carl Stanley, he eventually developed an arrest record and had served in the US Army during World War II.   He became a back-alley abortionist in Houston, Texas after the war and had to flee the state when one of “Dr Suggs’s” patients died as a result of his medical incompetence.  The resulting murder charge was later dismissed, however, and Suggs eventually wound up in New Orleans (about 1954) where he became John Stewart Martin, Sr. or, simply, Jack Martin or Jack S. Martin. 

Jack Martin is a pretty common name, so perhaps we should not be surprised to see a Special Agent Jack S. Martin appearing on Project Blue Book documents dating back to 1949, years before Edward Suggs changed his name (as far as we know).  This particular Jack S. Martin was in California at the same time as our Ed Suggs, but was working for the OSI, or Office of Special Investigations, a department of the US Air Force.  This is shown by OSI documents from October 1949 in which S/A Jack S. Martin was investigating UFO sightings in northern California by an Edward W. Gurband, a Roy Oliver Neely, and a Reverend Curtis Daniels that had taken place on August 1, 1949 in the San Francisco area.  Our Jack S. Martin, however, is not known to have changed his name that early and, besides, there is no evidence at all that he ever worked for the Air Force.  However, just to be devil’s advocate for a moment, there was no US Air Force during World War II; it was known as the Army Air Corps then, so it is possible – just barely possible – that Suggs/Martin did work for the Army Air Corps as an enlisted man or even as military police, but I have been unable to find Suggs’ military record to confirm or deny this possibility.  I just leave it here as an unresolved issue. It would be amusing (if not a little unnerving) to discover that both Guy Banister and Jack Martin were investigating UFOs for the government at the same time, though! 

Getting back to Suggs, however, we find that he was passing himself off as variously an FBI agent or a CIA agent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the Kennedy assassination.  An alcoholic, he wound up in a mental ward at New Orleans’ Charity Hospital in January of 1957, with “sociopathic personality disorder, antisocial type”.  All during this time he was married to the long-suffering Paula Martin and even had a child, but he was unable to hold down a job for any length of time.

This is a familiar pattern in the Kennedy assassination case.  Lee Harvey Oswald had the same track record as a married man with children, unable to hold down a job, and who had been under psychiatric observation (at least, in the Soviet Union).  If we are to believe the record, both men had delusions of grandeur and could be considered antisocial sociopaths.  And, of course, both had military service and both wound up in New Orleans at the same time, working out of Guy Banister’s Camp Street office.  Oswald, however, was not an alcoholic nor was he one of Carl Stanley’s bishops. 

As another aside, both Ferrie and Martin were involved in unorthodox medical practices and experimentation.  Ferrie’s obsession with curing cancer is well-known and documented, as well as his practice of hypnosis, and Martin had an on-again, off-again fascination with various forms of medicine, homeopathy, chiropracty, hypnosis, and the like. 

In 1960, Martin was interviewed by the FBI on charges that he was impersonating an FBI agent.  Martin seemed to have offered the Feds a deal in which he would reveal that one Carl J. Stanley of Kentucky was running an illegal operation by furnishing false ordination certificates and other worthless paper.  The FBI interviewed Stanley himself, and came away with the opinion that both Stanley and Martin were fruitcakes.

There it would have ended had it not been for the events in Dallas of November, 1963 and a series of bizarre phone calls that took place between Stanley and the FBI, and  Martin and the FBI in the hours after the Kennedy assassination.

Sometimes things are just as they seem, even in conspiracy studies.  After all, the world is full of drunks, sociopaths, unemployed and unemployable men with delusions of grandeur who await the next big break … or the next big bender.  There are men who claim to be agents of the FBI or the CIA who have never even seen one up close.  And there are men who defame the character of other men in revenge for imagined wrongs, who then recant their stories in embarrassment when confronted by authority.

This is probably a fair characterization of the conspiracy cases against David Ferrie and Jack Martin.  After all, it is entirely possible that neither man had anything at all to do with the assassination or had anything to offer by way of relevant information or evidence.  The book by Daniel Hopsicker – Barry and the Boys – does provide additional evidence on the role of David Ferrie and the anti-Castro underground, however, as well as of his presumed ties to US intelligence agencies, most of it in the form of personal interviews with law enforcement personnel and others who knew Ferrie in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and for that reason alone is quite important. 

And then there’s Jack Martin. 

Jack is portrayed as a hopeless drunk and, indeed, most of the investigators out of Jim Garrison’s office confirm that view.  Martin is usually cited as the person who started the entire Garrison investigation rolling by calling the DA’s attention to David Ferrie as a suspect in the assassination.  An examination of Martin’s initial statement to the FBI on November 25, 1963, however, reveals that Martin’s information on Ferrie was surprisingly accurate.

He mentioned that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol  squadron and that the two men knew each other, a claim that was contested for years before photographs surfaced showing Oswald and Ferrie together during a CAP outing.  In fact, Martin told the FBI that he saw photos of Oswald and Ferrie together at Ferrie’s apartment.  He also told investigators that Ferrie had a stock of weapons at his apartment, which was also true.

Further, he had details of Ferrie’s problems with the law in the matter of “crimes against nature” with young boys, and of his penchant for hypnotism.  He said that Ferrie had been “educated in a seminary”, which is also true.

In fact, there is probably nothing in that initial report that is wrong. 

In the second interview, dated November 27, 1963, Martin insisted that he never said he heard Ferrie say he was going to kill Kennedy.  He honestly reported that much of what he knew about Ferrie came from information he obtained from third parties, and that was pretty much the end of it.  The only salient points of the two interviews was the information that Ferrie and Oswald knew each other.  Later, to District Attorney Jim Garrison, Martin would suggest that Ferrie had hypnotized Oswald to commit the assassination, but that was not presented as a fact but only as conjecture.           

Martin, however, was not the only one contacting the FBI concerning the possible relationship of David Ferrie to the assassination.  Stanley himself had told the FBI that he suspected Martin and Ferrie of involvement.  It was a case of rats turning against each other.  But why?  Why the Kennedy assassination?

Most critics of the JFK conspiracy theories attack the New Orleans episode as so much smoke.  They feel that Jim Garrison’s case had no validity, no credibility.  That Ferrie, Martin, Banister, and the rest were all colorful characters but they had nothing to do with the assassination.  That Oswald never really visited the Camp Street office of Guy Banister.  That he never met any of the individuals with whom he is usually associated: Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, or Guy Banister himself.

But my approach to this case has been somewhat different.  I’m not trying to prove anything.  I only want to point out the incredible number of coincidences that multiply around this event and to suggest that there is an underlying cause whose very nature escapes us even as it is ubiquitous throughout history, our own personal histories as well as our national one. 

Ferrie, Martin and Stanley were turning on each other with reckless abandon in the days after the assassination.  It could be said to originate from Jack Martin’s statements to investigators that Ferrie was somehow involved with Oswald, but that’s not nearly the whole case.  Something transpired to make everyone nervous.  One can pore over the documents and exhibits of the Warren Commission Report for years and not find a similar set of circumstances, where a gang of strange persons turns on each other and squeals to the authorities about their friends’ involvement with the assassination.  It’s unique.

In New Orleans, if we believe that Oswald was involved in some way with Banister, he was surrounded by anti-Castro Cubans, gun-runners, and wandering bishops.  In Dallas, he is surrounded by Russian émigrés and oil men.  The Dallas clique that includes George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine is every bit as strange as the New Orleans “cathedral” at Camp Street.  (It’s not for nothing that Louisiana is divided into parishes instead of counties.)   We had men with CIA connections in New Orleans around Oswald, and now in Dallas we have more of the same.  How many readers of this blog know that many CIA agents? 

DeMohrenschildt himself was involved with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, a known center for anti-Communist and specifically anti-Soviet activity and espionage.  Yet another Orthodox church in the vicinity of Oswald.

And was Jack Martin really investigating “phony” churches on behalf of the US government?  Or was he trying to call someone’s attention to something?  Jack Martin remained a bishop with the American Orthodox Catholic Church to the end of his days, even going so far as to bring in another Banister associate, the corpulent attorney and unapologetic racist Thomas Jude Baumler, to the Orthodox fold, consecrating Baumler a bishop in August of 1974, nearly eleven years after the Kennedy assassination and seven years after the beginning of the Garrison investigation and the death of both Stanley and Ferrie. 

From personal correspondence with an individual involved with this affair, I learned that Baumler had already been ordained a priest by Stanley years before; in other words, prior to Stanley’s death in March, 1967.  Baumler’s status in New Orleans society was assured; he came from an old family and was associated with one of the famous Mardi Gras “crewes”.   In addition, according to my informant, Baumler was also a Mason and belonged to the same lodge – the Etoile Polair Lodge of the French Grand Orient – as Mafia don Carlos Marcello,  the man for whom David Ferrie was working on the day of the assassination.

My informant goes on to insist that Martin could be relied upon to furnish FBI files on “future applicants for Holy Orders”, a strange capability for a hopeless drunk.  It is widely rumored that Martin had a source at FBI headquarters in New Orleans who provided him these files, but he also made it known that he was an investigator for the District Attorney’s office – something of which the DA was presumably not aware!  Yet he had an income of some kind, for he was known to travel extensively throughout the United States for years on one errand or another involving the bishops, a true “wanderer”. 

What was Baumler’s interest in Carl Stanley and the American Orthodox Catholic Church?  Why was it attractive to become consecrated the Bishop of Baton Rouge-New Orleans in this miniscule, obscure church as late as 1974?   Soon after his consecration, he went on to consecrate another bishop,  this time William Francis Forbes, in October of 1974.  And it was Baumler, after all, who told J. Gary Shaw in 1981 that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for Guy Banister.  He even told Jim Garrison investigator Harold Weisberg in 1969 that he personally met the elusive Oswald himself.

One of the other bishops of the American Orthodox Catholic Church – Homer Ferdinand Roebke, an associate and colleague of Carl Stanley – consecrated one Forest Ernest Barber on March 7, 1965, less than five months after the Forbes consecration.  As I am informed by investigator David Guyatt, Barber was a member of the Augustan Society (an “International Genealogical, Historical, Heraldic and Chivalric Society” with some interesting associations) as well as of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta, a far-right organization and secret society that numbered among its initiates such intelligence notables as the rabid right-winger Major General Charles A. Willoughby (the former Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach and member of General MacArthur’s intelligence staff during World War II) as well as Colonel Philip J Corso, a man with a long background in intelligence dating from the war who was the author of The Day After Roswell, a controversial memoire of his experiences in the aftermath of the UFO crash in New Mexico. 

Truly, the Guy Banister office at Camp Street in New Orleans could properly be considered a “cathedral” for wandering bishops.  And a clearinghouse for spies.

To be continued.

One of the many separate tragedies accompanying the disastrous hurricane strike on New Orleans is the possible loss of some of the more important landmarks and archival material concerning the life and times of Lee Harvey Oswald in that city, including those of Guy Banister, Jack Martin, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Thomas Beckham, Jim Garrison, and others.  The New Orleans episode is rife with conspiracy and coincidence, and provides an important – if somewhat neglected – clue to the secret history of our country.  The clue is to be found in the New Orleans office of private detective Guy Banister, for seventeen years an FBI SAC (Special Agent in Charge),  who ran what seemed to be a clearing house for anti-Castro Cubans and a cover address for Lee Harvey Oswald.

As mentioned in the first part of this series – “The Bishop and the Boys, Part One” – there is a strange underworld milieu surrounding the activity of Oswald in that New Orleans period.  This is the mysterious world of the wandering bishops.  At one time, there were as many as four “bishops” functioning from Guy Banister’s Camp Street office, and these included virtually all of his investigators, from David Ferrie and Jack Martin to Thomas Beckham and the lawyer Thomas Jude Baumler.   Beckham was a bishop with the Universal Life Church, along with his friend Fred Lee Crisman (the man who was involved with the seminal UFO event of the 20^th century, the Maury Island affair) and with Raymond Broshears, yet another minister of the Universal Life Church and later with one of the Orthodox sects with lines to Stanley, and who became a well-known gay activist in San Francisco later on.  (Broshears would claim, probably falsely, to have lived with David Ferrie in New Orleans;  however, it seems certain that he was at least an acquaintance of Ferrie.)  In addition,  Ferrie, Martin, Beckham, Broshears  and Baumler all shared the same apostolic succession: that of Bishop Earl Anglin James in Canada (about whom more later) and of Bishop Carl Stanley of the American Orthodox Catholic Church. 

(In the interest of full disclosure, let the reader know that the author was also a minister of the Universal Life Church as a high school student in the Bronx in 1966, as were maybe thousands of other people at the time, attracted by the ads in the back of magazines promising ordination and membership in the Church for a five dollar donation.  Oddly enough, his minister’s card was stolen from the wallet in his gym locker one day by perpetrators unknown!)

Carl Stanley had an arrest record, a “rap sheet”, as long as your proverbial arm.    Born in Revere, Massachusetts on May 13, 1902, he was first arrested in in Los Angeles on November 22, 1927 for Grand Theft Auto.  (Another coinidence.  Stanley was first arrested precisely 36 years to the day before the Kennedy assassination.)   Following that there were a number of other arrests for violating postal laws by sending obscene material through the mails, and then on May 22, 1939 for assault and battery.  He spent a total of 14 months in prison for various offences, as far as I can determine.

On January 11, 1941, however, and for reasons known only to him, Stanley enlisted in the Canadian Army for the duration of World War Two, being discharged on June 20, 1945 and becoming a Canadian citizen on August 5, 1946.  He could not stay out of trouble in Canada, however, finding himself arrested once again this time in Ontario in 1947, receiving a six months’ suspended sentence for theft.

Then, in April of 1950, Stanley attempted to enter the United States via Miami, Florida and deportation proceedings began against him.  He did not have a US passport or an immigrant’s visa.  Since he was a naturalized Canadian citizen – even though he was born in the United States – and lied about his citizenship, the US government decided to deport him.  Deportation procedures took a lot of time, but he was eventually deported on February 28, 1954, only to re-enter (illegally) in April of that year.  However, he was married – to an American citizen – and consideration was given to allowing him to remain in the United States as the spouse of an American.  His criminal record, however, was a problem.  According to an INS letter dated October 29, 1965, he had convictions for “larceny, robbery, adultery, assault and battery, receiving stolen property, burglary, sending obscene letters through the mail, nonsupport of family and drunk and disorderly conduct”.   The INS, however, took pity on Stanley because of his age (he was 63 in 1965) and they did not contemplate deporting him at that time.

He would be dead in less than two years.

From 1964 to his death, he was a bishop of the newly-formed American Orthodox Catholic Church, having been consecrated by Bishop Earl Anglin James of Canada among others.  He, along with Bishops Robert Zeigler, Colin Guthrie, and Homer Roebke, formed the AOCC in the Denver, Colorado area.  A photograph in the author’s possession shows the four men dressed in Roman Catholic-style bishop’s regalia.  According to my informant, that was all they could afford at the time. 

In the same year, Walter Propheta was in New York City forming the East Coast version of the AOCC.  In 1967, Propheta was involved with J. Edgar Hoover who evidently installed him as the “primate” of the American Orthodox Catholic Church at a dinner in Manhattan.  (This tie between Propheta and the FBI was known to the author from Propheta’s own admission to him in 1968.)  Once installed, he advised the other bishops that they had to present their credentials to him to be approved as part of the new AOCC.  While the other bishops refused, Stanley eagerly raced to New York City.  One wonders what “credentials” this convicted felon offered to Propheta and the FBI, for a month later he was dead ... a few weeks after the controversial death of his bishop, David Ferrie.

Ferrie had been introduced to Stanley by Jack Martin, an investigator with Guy Banister’s detective agency in New Orleans.  Martin has been portrayed as a hopeless drunk in Oliver Stone’s film of the assassination, and has been given short-shrift in other studies of the New Orleans connection.  Martin himself ratted out Banister, Stanley and Ferrie to the FBI after the assassination when it became clear that District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating the case.  We should not take this all at face value, however, for Martin – even though he pretended to be investigating Carl Stanley – remained a bishop of the American Orthodox Catholic Church for many years after the assassination and until the day he died, even participating in the consecration of Thomas Jude Baumler – a self-admitted fascist and attorney who also worked briefly as an investigator for Guy Banister and as a New Orleans politician in his own right – as late as 1974. 

Martin first attempted to have David Ferrie consecrated by another bishop on the East Coast,  but the bishop felt that there was something “unholy” about Ferrie, and he declined.  Ferrie then went on to Stanley where he was more successful.  This occurs in the three year period before the Kennedy assassination.

Then something strange happened. 

Immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy in November of 1963, Stanley himself alerted authorities that he thought David Ferrie and Jack Martin were involved.  This was what prompted the entire investigation into both Ferrie and the wandering bishops that became the crux (no Latin puns intended) of the Garrison investigation.  Why would Stanley have done this?  Spite is one possibility, for if Martin’s statements to the authorities are true – and that’s a big “if” – then Stanley had reason to go after Martin since Martin was “investigating” him. 

The timeline is suggestive for several reasons.  In the first place, the American Orthodox Catholic Church (at least, the version we are discussing) had not yet been created.  That would happen less than a year later.  Stanley at the time was bishop of something called the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, as well as of the Byzantine Primitive Catholic Church, Old Catholic Church in North America.  (He was joined in both of these operations by one Cyril T. Omarra, about whom the author can discover nothing so far.)  Martin claimed to have been investigating Stanley “for several private clients” during the period 1959-1966, and had ordination and consecration certificates from Stanley’s various churches dating from as early as 1960.  Yet, Martin was an eager and active participant in the American Orthodox Catholic Church until his death, hardly the position of someone who held a dim view of the organization.  Was his politicking against Stanley (and Ferrie) of a piece with what Propheta was doing in New York?  Or was there a deeper motive involved, an attempt to divert attention away from someone or something? 

That Martin and Stanley had a falling out in 1963 is certain;  Stanley’s report to the FBI that year that Martin and Ferrie were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President is proof positive of bad blood between them.  What doesn’t make much sense is the fact that Martin was a close associate of the other bishops who, together with Stanley, formed the AOCC in 1964, after Stanley dropped the dime on Martin and Ferrie.  The whole affair would begin to look like an inspired disinformation operation if it weren’t for the fact that the central characters are so … odd.

Carl Stanley met with Propheta in New York City in early February, 1967 according to information provided to the author by another bishop.  David Ferrie died in his New Orleans apartment on February 22, 1967.  Ferrie’s associate, Eladio del Valle (an anti-Castro Cuban) was murdered in a parking lot in Miami on the same day.  The following day –  Feb 23, 1967 – Carl Stanley met with the FBI according to an FBI teletype dated March 9, 1967.  (Was this on orders or advice by Bishop Propheta, the FBI-installed "Primate"?)  According to the available documentation, he used that opportunity to further slander David Ferrie and Jack Martin.  Ferrie, of course, had died just the day before.  Clay Shaw was arrested on March 1, 1967.   Carl Stanley then died of an apparent heart attack on March 8, 1967 in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Ferrie himself was a key witness in the Garrison case against Shaw, and his death was a blow to the investigation and to the trial itself.  But Garrison would never have known of Ferrie and his possible involvement in an assassination conspiracy had it not been for Carl Stanley who alerted the FBI concerning Ferrie and Jack Martin’s alleged conspiracy in November of 1963.  Thus, the other potential witness and whistle-blower – Carl Stanley – was also dead, fourteen days after Ferrie’s own demise.  That left Jack Martin – Bishop John Chrysostom Martin – as the only other living witness to the Stanley/Ferrie nexus. 

Jack Martin was in the hospital the night of the assassination, having been pistol-whipped by his boss, Guy Banister, a man who had so many bishops working for him he might as well have been the Pope.  (One wonders if Martin’s hospital admission and the police report of his beating by Banister was a last-minute attempt to establish an alibi, since we have Ferrie racing to an ice-skating rink in Texas from New Orleans that same night in what may have been an  attempt to establish his.)  Banister was an ex-FBI agent of many years’ experience, and one of the first SACs to investigate the West Coast UFOs of 1947.  The bishops still living who knew Martin and who have been contacted by the author all agree on one point:  that Martin was an excellent source for FBI files on potential candidates for the priesthood for years after the assassination.  Leaving aside for the moment why wandering bishops need FBI files on potential priests, and why they would suspect the existence of those files in the first place, let us examine the Jack Martin story in a little more detail since it seems we never really knew him at all.

To Be Continued